Local sex abuse survivors frustrated by lack of 'action steps' as Pope Francis ends Vatican summit

By Ashley Murray
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
February 24, 2019

https://bit.ly/2Xn1wPK

The day before a meeting of bishops convened Thursday in Rome to discuss clergy sex abuse, Jim VanSickle made his way to the front of Pope Francis’ weekly address and handed a letter to an aide.

“I wrote on it in Italian that I was a survivor of [clergy] sexual abuse in Pennsylvania,” Mr. VanSickle, 55, said Sunday from Rome. “Only time will tell if he actually reads it, or it finds its way to a garbage can.”

The Coraopolis, Pa., resident shared a collective disappointment with other survivors as Pope Francis concluded the four-day summit with “a lot of rhetoric” rather than concrete actions.

“Even though they’re now talking about [clergy abuse] as crimes, they’re not talking about changing internal procedures,” John Faluszczak, a former priest in the Diocese of Erie and a clergy abuse survivor who also was in Rome, said. “That’s kind of concerning.”

The meeting called more than 100 top Roman Catholic bishops from around the world Thursday through Sunday for the unprecedented summit.

Pope Francis ended Sunday Mass with a speech where he called “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors.”

“Consecrated persons, chosen by God to guide souls to salvation, let themselves be dominated by their human frailty or sickness and thus become tools of Satan,” he said. “In abuse, we see the hand of the evil that does not spare even the innocence of children.”

Mr. VanSickle and Mr. Faluszczak, 49, of Buffalo, N.Y., said they had hoped for an “action plan.”

The Vatican could have addressed the issue by saying, “‘These are the steps we’re going to take for transparency, for responsibility, for accountability,’” Mr. VanSickle said. “I guess [the summit] was about getting everybody on the same page. But these problems aren’t new. Even just going back to Boston in 2002, I think they've had enough time to discuss it, and the steps are fairly obvious.”

Both men were interviewed during Pennsylvania’s 40th grand jury investigation, which reported in August 2018 that more than 300 priests raped and abused more than 1,000 children in 54 of the commonwealth’s 67 counties.

Mr. VanSickle testified that former Diocese of Erie priest David Poulson abused him while he was a student at Brad­ford Cen­tral Chris­tian High School in Bradford, Pa.

Poulson is one of two priests who have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced following the grand jury report. Poulson was sentenced for abusing two other boys between the ages of 8 and 18.

Mr. Faluszczak also told the grand jury about being abused by a priest from the Erie Diocese as a teenager.

Mr. Faluszczak said he left the priesthood “for my own health” after his allegations were not taken seriously.

“It makes me sick, literally, to be part of that culture,” he said.

Neither man has left the faith.

“I don’t want Catholics to walk away,” Mr. VanSickle said.

But if steps aren’t taken — including lifting Vatican secrecy and supporting the extending of statute of limitations for survivors — then that’s what Catholics might do, the men said.

“Even if the church were to implement zero tolerance worldwide, I think people in pews are so disgusted that they’re going to impose their own zero tolerance with their contributions and even with their feet,” Mr. Faluszczak said.

Effects rippled locally after the grand jury report, in which 99 Pittsburgh priests were named.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who was bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh before being appointed archbishop of the Diocese of Washington, D.C., in 2006 and then elevated as a cardinal in 2010, resigned in October 2018 after the grand jury report challenged his reputation on implementing a zero-tolerance policy in Pittsburgh even before it became a U.S.-wide policy.

Questions also arose regarding what Cardinal Wuerl knew about the abuse of minors and adult seminarians by his Washington predecessor, Theodore McCarrick, now a defrocked cardinal.

The Diocese of Pittsburgh has since set up a fund to compensate victims of clergy abuse.

Meanwhile, a number of lawsuits against Pennsylvania Roman Catholic dioceses, including Pittsburgh’s, are currently in the state’s court system.

In its response to the grand jury report, the Pittsburgh Diocese acknowledged the devastating history of abuse but noted that almost all of the documented assaults happened more than 30 years ago and that it has steadily improved its policies under Bishops Wuerl and David Zubik.

In one of Pittsburgh’s neighboring dioceses, the second priest to be sentenced as a result of the grand jury report was John T. Sweeney, a former Greensburg Diocese priest who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy in the early 1990s.

Mr. VanSickle and Mr. Faluszczak said they hope the summit’s end is not the end of the Vatican’s work on the issue.

“There may be more news coming out even though it’s over,” Mr. Faluszczak said. “We may see some marching orders tomorrow.”