General Assembly needs to act this year for the sake of child victims of sexual abuse

LancasterOnline
January 06, 2019

https://bit.ly/2TzsEZ7

Attorney General Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania speaks at a news conference in the state Capitol late Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018, after the state Senate fails to pass legislation related to a landmark grand jury report accusing hundreds of Roman Catholic priests of sexually abusing children over decades. Shapiro is flanked by lawmakers and victims of child sexual abuse.

An Associated Press review found that over “the past four months, Roman Catholic dioceses across the U.S. have released the names of more than 1,000 priests and others accused of sexually abusing children in an unprecedented public reckoning spurred at least in part by a shocking grand jury investigation in Pennsylvania.” Nearly 50 dioceses and religious orders “have publicly identified child-molesting priests in the wake of the Pennsylvania report issued in mid-August, and 55 more have announced plans to do the same over the next few months, the AP found.” That represents more than half of the nation’s 187 dioceses.

The grand jury report on child sexual abuse in Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania has had a powerful impact across the United States.

It’s a bit ironic then — and very sad — that we continue to wait for our own General Assembly to act in a meaningful way on the grand jury’s recommendations.

The report was seismic, revealing that 301 “predator priests” in six of the state’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses had abused more than 1,000 children over seven decades.

It triggered a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, and more than 1,450 calls to the state clergy abuse hotline.

And beyond Pennsylvania, as the AP found, “nearly 20 local, state or federal investigations, either criminal or civil, have been launched since the release of the grand jury findings. Those investigations could lead to more names and more damning accusations, as well as fines against dioceses and court-ordered safety measures.”

“People saw what happened in these parishes in Pennsylvania and said, ‘That happened in my parish too.’ They could see the immediate connection, and they are demanding the same accounting,” Tim Lennon, national president of the board of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, told the AP.

If only the same urgency had been felt across the chambers of the Pennsylvania House and Senate.

In February 2017, the state Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 261, which would have eliminated the criminal statute of limitations in child sexual abuse cases and given future victims until age 50 to press civil claims against their abusers.

The House — led by Rep. Mark Rozzi, of Berks County, who was raped at age 13 by a Catholic priest — passed an amended version of the bill in September 2018. The Rozzi amendment provided older victims of child sexual abuse— who never had the chance to press civil claims — with a two-year window in which to seek justice in civil court.

Efforts to pass the amended bill in the Senate failed, as lawmakers dithered, argued and ultimately ran out the clock. An admirable plea by state Sen. Ryan Aument, of Landisville, to refrain from adjourning the legislative session before a remedy for victims could be found went unheeded.

So now, as the law still stands, a victim of child sexual abuse has only until his or her 30th birthday to press a civil claim. As we’ve noted repeatedly, this is not nearly enough time, given that it takes years, even decades, for victims to make sense of what happened to them as children.

Child sexual abuse victims in their 30s and older are covered by an old civil statute of limitations that is even narrower than the current one. They had only two years after they turned 18 to press a civil claim.

The grand jury called for a limited retroactive window to help these victims. Even as the church itself was spurred to move in the wake of the grand jury report, the General Assembly failed to fulfill this recommendation.

The 2019-20 legislative session began last week. Lawmakers now have another chance to accomplish what they couldn’t in 2018.

New House Majority Leader — and Lancaster County’s own — Bryan Cutler told the LNP Editorial Board last month that he has concerns about the constitutionality of allowing older survivors to retroactively seek justice in civil court.

We believe the constitutionality question should be left to the courts. But Cutler maintained that to “give (victims) false hope and then have it pulled away because of a legitimate constitutional concern potentially is as much of a disservice as doing nothing.”

We encourage Cutler to discuss his concerns with Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the commonwealth’s top law enforcement official, who champions a retroactive provision.

We also urge Cutler to bring his usual open-mindedness to the matter.

Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, however, shows no willingness to keep an open mind.

Scarnati told Capitolwire last month that if “the same bill comes from the House to the Senate” this session, “it’s certainly not going to get traction here.”

Last session, Scarnati was only willing to offer victims a window in which to sue the individuals who had abused them — but not the institutions that had put the abusers in their path.

He also lauded the Catholic Church’s own plan for victim compensation funds, which may offer survivors monetary awards, but likely won’t require church officials who covered up sexual abuse to hand over records or to testify.

By transferring abusive priests from one parish to another, and then hiding records of abuse in secret archives, the Catholic Church did terrible harm to vulnerable children. While it should, of course, be encouraged to help remedy that harm, it cannot be allowed to dictate all the terms of that remedy.

Shapiro agrees. He told the AP that he doesn’t believe church officials are capable of policing themselves. “They need outside forces, ideally law enforcement, to hold them accountable,” he said.

We appreciate that Pope Francis said in his Christmas address that the church “will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case” again. We also appreciate that he directed abusers to “hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice” — in other words, to surrender to civilian law enforcement.

And we hope that some tangible good comes out of the Vatican’s summit next month on the church’s child abuse crisis.

Worryingly, however, the Vatican ordered the U.S. bishops in November to halt — in advance of the summit — their planned vote on solutions to the crisis. At the pope’s direction, the American bishops now are attending a weeklong retreat near Chicago to pray about and reflect on the crisis.

In a letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was released Thursday, Francis acknowledged that the church’s credibility “has been seriously undercut and diminished” by the “sins and crimes” of child sexual abuse, but “even more by the efforts made to conceal or deny them.”

The pontiff laid out his vision for how the church’s credibility might be regained. And we truly wish church officials well as they embark on the path set out for them by the pope.

But in the secular world, there are Pennsylvania victims of the church who are owed justice. And they look to the General Assembly for help in getting it. The Legislature’s own credibility hinges on its response.