Pa. clergy sexual abuse survivors voice anger, disappointment over Vatican conference

By Charles Thompson
Patriot Ledger
February 26, 2019

https://bit.ly/2NyP5vK

From left, sex abuse survivors Pedro Salinas, Francoise Devoiz, Pietro Zanardi and Peter Isley leave at the end of their meeting with organizers of the summit on preventing sexual abuse at the Vatican, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019. A dozen survivors of clergy sexual abuse, including Pennsylvania native Shaun Dougherty, met with organizers of Pope Francis' landmark summit on preventing abuse and protecting children. Photo by Gregorio Borgia

Shaun Daugherty has now taken his three-year public crusade for justice for clergy sex abuse victims just about everywhere.

And it’s led him to a stark conclusion: For now, the local battles over state laws are as important as anything that the Roman Catholic Church is attempting to do on a global scale.

“Everybody had better protect their kids, because the Roman Catholic Church is way too big to police themselves, and they’re not even interested in doing that at this point,” Daugherty said he has concluded upon his return from Rome, where he participated in the church’s global meeting on the protection of minors.

Daugherty, a New York restaurateur who was abused by a priest in his native Johnstown in the 1980s, was one of 12 sex abuse victims from around the world invited to meet with the organizers of the conference.

It was, Daugherty said, a respectful though not reverential give-and-take with luminaries including Archbishop Charles Scicluna, often described as the Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago. (Pope Francis did not attend this session.)

While he appreciated the chance to make a direct case to top church leaders, Daugherty found what he viewed as the lack of concrete action at the conference appalling.

“They’re still researching. They’re still talking," Daugherty said he has concluded. “It’s gut-wrenching to me. I’d say it was funny if it wasn’t so disgusting.”

Rather than issuing edicts to change church law himself, most observers have said, the pope used the meeting to try to encourage still-skeptical bishops around the world to take stronger action against abusive priests and to hold themselves accountable for protecting the faithful in their dioceses.

At the close of the conference the Vatican did announce coming steps including: a toughening up of child-protection laws within the Vatican’s boundaries; creation of a “very brief” handbook for bishops to understand their duties when it comes to abuse cases; and establishment of task forces of experts and canon lawyers to assist church leaders in countries with less experience in the issue and fewer resources.

But with concrete action, for the time being, left in the hands of the bishops around the world, many major victim advocacy groups left Rome feeling that the meeting fell far short of the mark.

And that it fell far short of the strong, swift papal edicts that they had hoped to see.

As leaders of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests put it Monday:

"No bishop who had been involved in covering-up or minimizing allegations was fired. No directive was handed down to order bishops to turn over their secret abuse files to police. No punishment was agreed upon nor system put in place for disciplining those bishops who continue to cover-up abuse cases in the future.

"In other words, no child was made safer and no survivor was helped during this summit.

“And so, in many ways, not only was the summit everything that survivors expected it would be, but is also an affirmation that we are right to lay our hopes for change at the feet of secular officials, not those in the church.”

Pennsylvanians who travelled to Rome to become part of an ad hoc survivor’s army had another concern: That there was far too little attention paid to the issue of seeing that adult survivors still have a means of pursuing justice.

That has been a huge issue here in the wake of last summer’s release of a historic accounting by Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office of records of sexual abuses by more than 1,000 priests across Pennsylvania.

State Rep. Mark Rozzi, the Berks County lawmaker leading that fight in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, conceded that encouraging a stronger response to child sex abuse globally is important, especially in Third World countries where the church is growing and criminal and civil justice systems may not be so robust.

“I feel like they’ve turned the dial a little bit in terms of protecting kids... and that’s going to benefit a lot of other Catholics around the world,” said Rozzi, who has also gone public with his own history of molestation at the hands of a predator priest.

But the conference achieved too little for survivors who are still dealing with the traumas of their past abuses, in his view.

“If you want victims to heal, then you have to stand united with us and not undermine us," Rozzi said. “We wanted the Pope to come out and say: 'Stand down. Stop blocking legislative efforts’ to expand victims rights. I think they again failed miserably in telling their leaders to just, back off.”

While Daugherty met with the conference leaders, and Rozzi pressed the twin issues of opening broader avenues to justice and ridding the church hierarchy of leaders who aided and abetted the cover-up culture with notables like the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Callista Gingrich, a third Pennsylvanian took another approach.

Jim VanSickle, an Erie native who was abused as a teenager by his then-English teacher and chess coach, the Rev. David Poulson, told Philly.com that he obtained tickets to Pope Francis’ weekly public audience last Wednesday, on the eve of the conference. VanSickle took a five-page, handwritten letter.

Led into the basilica that day, VanSickle reached the railing just as the pope was walking past. They made eye contact, and VanSickle pressed his letter into the hands of one of Francis’ bodyguards.

It was the closest any of the Pennsylvanians would come to delivering their message directly to the Pope.

“Hopefully, he’ll read it,” VanSickle told the news outlet last Friday. “I don’t know, maybe they throw that kind of stuff in the trash can.”

For the moment, however, the conference’s outcome has convinced the Pennsylvanians that their most important battle right now is the one they are already fully-engaged in: Seeking a two-year window for any child sex abuse victim to pursue a civil suit against their abusers and the entities that employed them.

Supporters of a broad, retroactive window say it’s an important avenue for all now-adult victims who, for whatever reason, were not able to act on childhood abuses before statutory deadlines to bring civil cases expired - the existing limit is the victim’s 30th birthday.

There is also a public safety benefit, the advocates say, because lawsuits can expose sexual predators - from all walks of life - who have thus far largely escaped all punishment and are therefore unknown to their neighbors.

Opponents have offered retroactive windows that would apply to perpetrators directly, but have resisted applying such an opening to employers or institutions.

But with the vast majority of predatory priests identified by several grand jury investigations statewide already dead, victims advocates argue that barring suits against church officials or dioceses would in reality create few new opportunities for victims.

That’s the battle that’s expected to play out in Harrisburg again this year, even as Roman Catholic dioceses around the state have launched their own victim compensation funds.

“We have to win in the state Senate,” where the majority Republicans have backed the more limited retroactivity provision to this point, Daugherty said. “That’s all there is to it.”