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How Much Did the Vatican Know about Abusive Pa. Priests? What the Grand Jury Report Could Show

By Ivey DeJesus
Penn Live
August 3, 2018

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2018/08/did_pope_francis_know_about_ab.html

Patterns of cover-up and criminality by pedophile priests and their supervisors have been documented in scores of Catholic dioceses worldwide.

Now, ahead of a long-awaited grand jury report into clergy sex abuse across Pennsylvania, a major question remains: Is the 900-page report likely to contain new information about the scope of the problem pervading the church?

Most definitely yes, say some expert observers.

"The shock and surprise of what is revealed is never new, unfortunately," said Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who represented hundreds of victims in lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Boston. "Is Rome going to be connected to this in any way shape or form, other than defrock papers, which speak to Rome's role?"

In the Catholic Church, the defrocking of a priest is authorized by the pope.

Garabedian's analysis is particularly intriguing considering the state of affairs across the church. Pope Francis is dealing with predatory priests and complicit bishops in Chile and the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, a prominent Vatican diplomat and former archbishop of Washington, D.C. McCarrick has been credibly accused of child sex crimes.

The looming question for Garabedian ahead of Pennsylvania's report focuses on the possibility that it could provide a substantive connection between the Vatican and the way abusive priests were handled across six Pennsylvania diocese.

The scope could include senior officials, such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican commission that reviews complaints of clergy sex abuse across the 1.2 billion-strong church.

"What did the Congregation know outside the defrockment proceedings, which tell us a lot," Garabedian asked. "It puts Rome on notice that a priest is a pedophile. Why didn't they act to protect children once they received defrockment notices?"

PennLive has in the past week made several attempts to speak to Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Nuncio. The Nuncio is the Vatican's ambassador to this country. Pierre's office said he is traveling abroad.

In July, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office led the investigation, sent a letter to Pope Francis, asking him for help in releasing the report. Shapiro asked the pontiff to encourage church officials here to stop trying to stall the report. Joe Grace, a spokesman for Shapiro's office, on Thursday confirmed that the attorney general had not yet heard back from the Vatican.

According to court documents, the report will name more than 300 priests as having committed crimes against children.

On Wednesday, Bishop Ronald Gainer released the names of 71 priests accused of molesting children in the Harrisburg Diocese. In a bold step, Gainer is also scrapping the legacy of his predecessors, with orders to remove the names of all men serving as bishops since 1947 from any diocesan property.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ordered the Commonwealth to release the report to the public as early as next week, and no later than Aug. 14.

Until then, Shapiro is prohibited from revealing its contents. Harrisburg diocese spokesman Mike Barley said Gainer, who has viewed the sealed report, is also not permitted to discuss it or how far it delves into how the church hierarchy handled sexual abuse accusations against clergy.

Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks predatory priests, noted, "There is some mobility among the hierarchy between these dioceses."

"Take Harrisburg Bishop [Ronald] Gainer, who started in Allentown. His predecessor started in Philly. [Nicholas] Dattilo began as a Pittsburgh priest. Each of these men who've run each diocese has his own career track that to some extent took them through other diocese."

"Gainer has acknowledged that Harrisburg bishops had problems. We are going to learn a lot about how they handle these cases, but also learn perhaps even what problems sitting bishops had elsewhere. Even if the grand jury report is not drawing a connection among dioceses.

The investigation into the church in Philadelphia documented many transfers of predatory priests across diocesan lines.

"I'm interested in the transfer policy," McKiernan said. "We know from Philadelphia that Camden was a favorite place to send priests offenders. I wonder if we will see a lot of mobility of offenders within these six diocese. I think some of that is bound to come out, even if it's not their emphasis."

Lynne Abraham, the former Philadelphia district attorney who led the benchmark investigation into the city's archdiocese, predicts that the report will provide a deeper, wider and longer scope of abuse than originally expected.

Abraham's investigators went as far back as two cardinals - John Krol and Anthony Bevilacqua.

"We could have gone back farther to [Cardinal Dennis] Dougherty but the volume of cases we would have discovered, plus the cases we already had, plus the inordinate amount of time it takes to do an investigation with the grand jury only sitting two days a week, is daunting and impossible," she said. "Besides, everyone was dead in those cases and spending time on cases of such a long ago time might have engendered just a yawn."

She suspects that the Harrisburg diocese list of 71 priests accused of abuse may be longer than the one that Shapiro is preparing to release.

"This is a very sick church which may only recover when it comes clean of its sordid past from top to bottom," Abraham said. "When I say top to bottom I mean all the way to the top, as there are so many high-ranking officials who not only lied and covered abuse stories up but also engaged in them too."

If the adage about hindsight is true, then at the very least Shapiro should be able to glean what has worked in the past and what has not.

McKiernan singles out Abraham's investigation into Philadelphia and work by New Hampshire prosecutors in the early 2000s, after the Boston scandal made headlines, that uncovered similar abuses in that state's Catholic Church.

The New Hampshire report was an 8,000-page packet that included church documents dated with each case on a priest.

"That was an exemplary report," McKiernan said. "I gotta believe Shapiro is aware of it. That's one advantage. Shapiro now has all this history to look at. He is in a position to be aware of best practices."

McKiernan said 47 of the 71 names released Wednesday by Gainer were new to him. They were not names included in the database of predatory priests maintained by BishopAccountability.org. Gainer stressed that the list he released represents names of clergy historically accused -- and not necessarily credibly accused.

Abraham assessed the toll of another censure on the Catholic Church:

"Even though the church has lasted 2,000 years it is possible that if things keep going the way they are, the church may suffer blows from which they may not be able to recover," she said.

 

 

 

 

 




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