Opinion: Reckoning looms in Erie Catholic Diocese

By Pat Howard
Erie Times News [goerie.com]
March 25, 2018

http://www.goerie.com/opinion/20180325/pat-howard-reckoning-looms-in-erie-catholic-diocese

It’s a rare movie about journalism that doesn’t make me roll my eyes and/or shout at the television.

But “Spotlight,” the Best Picture-winning account of the Boston Globe’s heroic reporting on the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal in that city, gets it mostly right. For me it also carries a personal resonance.

A Jew newly arrived from Miami might seem like an odd fit for that story in a Brahmin town. But Marty Baron was perfect for the job at hand.

He looked at the signs with eyes not clouded by local preconceptions, experiences and relationships. He sensed the moral rot beneath the Archdiocese of Boston’s gilded facade, and did what the best newspaper editors do — didn’t back off an inch.

That’s a daunting prospect in a city like Boston. It was dramatized in the movie in the Globe publisher’s wide-eyed response when his new editor tells him he wants to go to court to unseal documents in a priest’s abuse case: “You want to sue the Catholic Church?”

“We’re just filing a motion, but yes,” Baron answers.

It was world-changing journalism in Boston. It was also an example in Erie and many other places where journalists watching from afar asked a simple question. What about here?

I was part of a team that spent a few years trying to answer it. As in Boston, it went forward in tandem with an editor and publisher who had the stomach for the unpleasantness and who had our backs.

It was contentious business, met with resistance and resentment by then-Bishop Donald W. Trautman. But one by one we outed a number of predator priests and gave belated voice and witness to some of their victims.

It wasn’t just the hierarchy who objected to our work. I still remember the parting shot of a woman who called to bitterly complain about a headline that linked an abusive priest to Cathedral Prep: “Enjoy your time in hell.”

Rewatching “Spotlight” on cable a couple of times recently brought those days back. As did last week’s announcement that after well more than a decade, current Bishop Lawrence Persico and the Catholic Diocese of Erie would supplement our body of work.

On Tuesday, the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo released the names of 42 priests, 24 of whom are dead, who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors. On Wednesday, the Erie diocese issued a statement saying that Persico, who became bishop in 2012, would do the same here in the coming weeks.

That plan extends Persico’s policy of proactively releasing information in current cases. And it promises the fullest accounting yet of the criminals who hid behind the collar in the 13-county Erie diocese.

I don’t know why Persico has decided to name the priests and chose this timing. So far he isn’t saying.

It might have something to do with the statewide investigative grand jury that’s been digging into the diocese’s darkest secrets since 2016. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office sometime this year is expected to release the grand jury’s report, and it, too, is expected to name names.

If it follows the course of a similar investigation of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, more than the identities of abusive priests will come to light. The grand jury in that case two years ago issued a stomach-turning 147-page report that also delved into how that diocese’s hierarchy enabled and covered up for the predators in its ranks.

Those implicated included two former bishops. One of them had died and the other took the Fifth.

The most recent accounting of the scale of the scandal in the Erie diocese comes from data it released in 2004. The diocese said then that a total of 20 priests had been credibly accused of sexually abusing a total of 38 minors in the diocese from 1950 to 2002.

Persico’s naming of names presumably will act as a reality check on those numbers. It’s also possible that more victims have or will come forward.

And if the grand jury report follows the Altoona-Johnstown model, it will also offer a window into how most of them remained priests and escaped justice. Into who covered for monsters and how.

Subpoenas can reach where newspaper reporters can’t. And the fullest possible accounting of how children were violated by and exposed to predators is as close to justice as most victims will likely get.

They have that coming. So do the men, or memories of men, who used the cover of God to prey on or put in harm’s way innocents whose bodies and souls were entrusted to their care.