An Open Letter

June 15, 2006

Dear Readers,

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new BishopAccountability.org homepage, designed by Chad Tempest of Tempest Creative, and a new version of our accused priest database. I would like to tell you about these new materials and about how we will be building on them in coming weeks and months.

But first, my colleagues and I want to thank the survivors and other supporters whose generosity has made this Web site possible. They have given us financial help, and they have also given us advice, insight, and documents – precious gifts!

I would like to mention four benefactors in particular. Don and Ann Green of DeWitt, Iowa, made a generous donation that allowed us to redesign the homepage. Don and Ann have supported us in other ways as well. Sylvia Demarest of Dallas donated her database of accused priests and the 250,000-page archive that supports it. This gift has been of inestimable value in our effort to document the crisis. Dr. Leon Podles, a Catholic scholar and philanthropist, has supported our work very generously since 2004. Through the Crossland Foundation, Dr. Podles and his family have made it possible for us to work aggressively on the BishopAccountability.org archive. Dr. Podles has also served on our board, and in that capacity has consistently encouraged us to focus on a single goal – to document in a fair and even-handed way a crisis that has devastated the lives of victims and their loved ones. Dr. Podles estimates that over a million people have been directly and severely harmed by sexually abusive priests and the bishops who manage them.

The "beta-test" versions of our new homepage and database are the first fruits of improvements that we have made in three areas:

• Data collection – We have a team working every day on collecting and posting news articles and legal filings on the crisis. We are also deepening our network of document sources.
• Efficient posting – We have hired an experienced part-time database manager whose sole task is to link the expanding priest database with information acquired daily, and to add new priests as accusations become known. As a result, the priest database is now being updated in real time, and is fast becoming the index to a huge online library of news stories, documents, and assignment records.
• User-friendly design – As our online collection grows, we have begun to present it in a way that helps both the occasional reader and the professional researcher to navigate a vast ocean of data. The homepage offers important documents and articles up-front, without tedious clicking through menus. Our Google search device permits readers to search the largest online collection of materials on the crisis. Guided by the suggestions of our readers, we will continue to make improvements of this kind.

In the next year, we will concentrate our efforts on four interrelated projects. We will further enhance the priest database, so that it offers up-to-date online documentation on every accused priest. We will greatly expand our assignment record project, which has already gathered the career histories of hundreds of priests. Our goal is to document the career of every accused priest and to identify the bishops responsible for every transfer of an accused priest. We will create sets of Web pages for every U.S. diocese, listing the accused priests in that diocese and describing the major issues. We will continue to gather documents and archives on the crisis, and we will post them more aggressively.

We will also be sending our Monitor newsletter to interested readers every week, instead of sending it occasionally. The newsletter will help you stay current on developments in the crisis, and it will also help you gauge how we are meeting our goals.

In the coming weeks, we will be posting thousands of pages of additional documents and articles on the Los Angeles archdiocese and the Orange diocese.

Please write to us with suggestions for improving the new homepage, database, and other features.

Thanks and best wishes,

Terence McKiernan
Co-Director
BishopAccountability.org