Harrisburg Diocese Releases Names of Priests Accused of Child Sex Abuse

By Steve Esack
Morning Call
August 1, 2018

http://www.mcall.com/news/nationworld/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pennsylvania-harrisburg-bishop-priest-sex-abuse-20180801-story.html

Harrisburg Diocese Bishop Ronald Gainer on Wednesday made public the names of 71 priests and other Catholic officials accused of child sex abuse.

The Allentown Diocese plans to soon follow suit.

Gainer stressed that Harrisburg’s list represents only accusations — by making the names public, the diocese is not claiming anyone to be guilty.

The list includes 37 priests, three deacons, six seminarians, nine clergy of other dioceses and 16 from other Catholic religious orders. It excludes cases the diocese found unsubstantiated and does not provide an estimated number of abuse victims.

Gainer made the announcement, accompanied by apologies to victims, at a news conference at the Harrisburg diocese headquarters.

The apologies, Gainer said, are for the pain victims suffered and for the lax way church officials, including himself, treated their claims documented in diocesan files since 1947.

“I apologize to the survivors of child sex abuse, to the Catholic faithful and to the general public for the abuses that took place and for those church officials who failed,” Gainer said.

Gainer’s announcement came amid a heated court and public relations battle over a massive statewide grand jury report examining decades of child sex abuse claims and cover-ups in six Catholic dioceses: Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton, Erie, Greensburg and Pittsburgh. The report, written after a two-year investigation by the state attorney general’s office, is hung up in legal wranglings before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. A redacted version of the report is expected to be released by Aug. 14.

“The Diocese of Allentown plans to post a list of credibly accused priests on its website on the day the grand jury report is released,” spokesman Matt Kerr said.

Allentown’s list, Kerr added, will be posted regardless of whether the court publishes a redacted or full version of the grand jury report.

Joe Grace, a spokesman for state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, pointed out Wednesday that the Harrisburg Diocese released its names after mounting public pressure and after trying to prevent the public from seeing the grand jury report.

“It is long past due for the Diocese of Harrisburg to make public the names of predator priests within the Catholic Church,” Grace said in a statement. “Their proclamations today only come after intense public pressure and in the face of the imminent release of the grand jury report exposing decades of child abuse and cover up.”

But during the news conference, Matthew Haverstick, the Harrisburg Diocese lawyer, said the diocese planned to release the names in summer 2016 but held off after receiving a grand jury subpoena. He said the diocese’s list of names is different than the list in the grand jury report. Citing the ongoing legal challenges, Haverstick declined further comment on the different lists.

“This process has been labor intensive,” he said of the diocese’s list. “We’ve been working on it for months to curate and compile the list. It’s a review of all historical records, paper and electronic, that we could find. So we believe it’s a fairly complete list.”

The list does not say when or where any of the the alleged abuses occurred — or when the reports were made to church or government authorities.

At least one of the names on Harrisburg’s list is a former Allentown Diocese priest: Monsignor Bernard Flanagan. It says Flanagan, while an Allentown priest, was a chaperone on an unsanctioned international trip involving students from Bishop McDevitt High School, which is part of the Harrisburg Diocese. The list does not accuse Flanagan of misconduct on that unspecified trip. It says he was named because of allegations he faced in Allentown.

In 2010, the Allentown Diocese publicly dismissed Flanagan following a recommendation from its internal sexual misconduct review board. The board determined credible allegations had been made that Flanagan sexually abused a minor while serving at Reading Central Catholic High School in the 1980s.

Also Wednesday, Gainer waived all confidentiality agreements his diocese imposed on victims in the past as part of legal settlement agreements, allowing them to discuss their experiences if they want.

Gainer also said the names of accused priests and bishops who protected them will be removed from buildings and other locations. Bishop McDevitt High School won’t change its name because Bishop Philip R. McDevitt was leader (1916-1935) before the time frame covered by the grand jury investigation, Gainer said.

The Rev. Lawrence Persico, the bishop of the Erie Diocese, in April became the first head of the six dioceses under investigation to release names of clergy accused of sexual misconduct against minors.

Born in Pottsville, Gainer, 70, is a canon lawyer, and served in the early 2000s as judicial vicar and secretary for Catholic life and evangelization for the Allentown Diocese. Before that, he was pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Whitehall Township. In late 2002, Gainer was named bishop of Lexington, Ky. He took over the Harrisburg Diocese in 2014.

Two years later, the attorney general’s office released a grand jury report detailing decades of child sex abuse allegations and cover-ups orchestrated by church leaders and government officials in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese. Following the release of that report, state prosecutors started a probe of six more dioceses. The Philadelphia Archdiocese was excluded from the state probe because city prosecutors did their own grand jury investigations in prior years.

On Tuesday, the Rev. John T. Sweeney, a priest with the Diocese of Greensburg, pleaded guilty to indecent assault on a minor under 14. His guilty plea in Westmoreland County Court was the first clergy-related conviction stemming from the latest grand jury investigation, which began in 2016.

On Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered the redacted release of the grand jury’s report to partially settle legal challenges. That order, written by Chief Justice Thomas Saylor, notes the report will identify more than 300 “predator priests.”

Saylor’s order, however, prevented the attorney general’s office and the grand jury supervising judge from identifying those priests by name, at least, until the high court settles some of the priests’ legal claims that the report inaccurately and unfairly tarnishes their reputations. They say the secret grand jury process did not afford them their due process rights to defend themselves.

Those individual legal challenges come as the dioceses’ leaders, including Allentown Bishop Alfred Schlert, have publicly called for the release of the report in news releases and letters to their parishioners.

The bishops’ public stances, however, did not stop Shapiro from contacting their boss: Pope Francis, who has publicly apologized for the church’s history of child sex abuse.

On July 25, Shapiro sent a letter to the Vatican, asking Francis to order the priests to drop their legal claims and insinuating that at least “two leaders of the Catholic church in Pennsylvania” are orchestrating the legal challenges to “silence the victims and avoid accountability.”

A lawyer for several of the priests blasted Shapiro’s letter as “inappropriate,” according to published reports.

Gainer plans to issue his own letter to parishioners at weekend Masses. It will be inserted into church bulletins.

“While we seek forgiveness in the name of our diocese, we continue in our sincere request that survivors come forward so that their situations can be addressed,” Gainer said Wednesday. “We take seriously both my and the diocese’s obligation to prevent such abuse from occurring, to foster healing, and to be transparent.”

Contact: steve.esack@mcall.com