Opinion-Our view: Trust, transparency paramount in church sex abuse fallout

GOErie
August 07, 2018

http://www.goerie.com/opinion/20180807/our-view-trust-transparency-paramount-in-church-sex-abuse-fallout

Retired Erie Catholic Bishop Donald W. Trautman was right to step away from the secret legal battle to alter the contents of a sweeping clergy sexual abuse grand jury report before its public release.

From court records and what Trautman told reporter Ed Palattella, we now know that Trautman objected at least to a handful of damning statements in the report made generally about Pennsylvania bishops. We understand.

He wanted those claims to be asserted with more precision, making clear, for example, that he specifically did not cover up for or enable offenders and endanger children. State Attorney General Josh Shapiro agreed to a series of stipulations indicating that some general characterizations of bishops’ appalling conduct were not specifically directed at Trautman.

We are glad to hear it. But that is not to say we have any illusions that reading the report, covering the handling of clergy child sex abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses, including the Erie diocese, will be an affirming experience when it is finally released as early as Wednesday.

Erie Catholic Bishop Lawrence Persico, in keeping with the humble, rightly focused leadership he has consistently shown amid this overdue reckoning, has told us it won’t. Persico said the report contains explicit, shocking details and described the anger and hostility he witnessed in the grand jurors who were forced to weigh for two years testimony about the church’s handling of child sexual abuse at the hands of its ministers.

He has let us know also that his own conduct in the Erie diocese and in the Greensburg diocese, where he previously served, is scrutinized. And he has further helped ease the blow by taking the unprecedented step of releasing in advance of the report’s release the names of clergy and laity credibly accused of abuse or other misconduct with minors.

Persico’s principled, unstinting commitment to transparency rises to the level of the extreme pastoral challenge this crisis poses, and that is the need to focus above all else on restoring trust. Trust is the foundation of any authentic relationship and is the human capacity most assaulted and damaged when those with power and a duty to care for others violate it through sexual abuse. For clergy, it is an especially deadly sin because of the power the abuse has to pervert a child’s understanding of self, church and God.

No one should be falsely accused — tangentially, technically, by implication or otherwise. Trautman’s willingness to expediently resolve his legal concerns with stipulations now clears the way to restore focus where it belongs — the truth of the victims told in a complete, unredacted report, at least as it applies to the Erie diocese.