Watchdog group releases new Fact Sheet on Cardinal Sean O'Malley March 13, 2013 Watchdog group releases new Fact Sheet on Cardinal Sean O'Malley In Rome press conference, co-director will urge O’Malley to set the record straight Cardinal is concealing names of 161 accused priests in Boston Concealment in another diocese also – the secrecy endangers children O’Malley “clears” accused priests too often and against the evidence Cardinal settles with victims cheaply and inequitably WHO and WHAT: Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of the international watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, which is based in the Boston archdiocese, will hold a press conference in Rome.  She will call on her own archbishop, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who is considered a leading contender in the conclave, to set the record straight about his handling of the abuse crisis in Boston and elsewhere.  She will analyze his record and present the organization’s new Fact Sheet:              Six Ways Cardinal O'Malley Has Mishandled the Crisis of Clergy Sexual Abuse WHEN: TODAY, Wednesday, March 13 at 1:30 p.m. WHERE: Orange Hotel, 86 Via Crescenzio 00193, Roma (39) 06 6868969 "Cardinal O'Malley has perfected a dangerous formula," Ms. Doyle said before the press conference. "He has made beautiful apologies while continuing to hide information that would protect children and help survivors heal." The organization’s archive is worldwide in scope, but the Boston-based researchers have tracked their own archdiocese and the archbishop's actions with particular care. They have the advantage of long familiarity with their 40,000-page archive of Boston archdiocesan files on abuse cases.  The researchers have called on the cardinal repeatedly to release a list of accused clerics, as more than 25 other US bishops have done.  The list that Cardinal O’Malley finally released in August 2011 left out many names.  Survivors were revictimized as a result, and children were endangered. Last week, the watchdog group sent the cardinal a letter of thanks for stating that some bishops should be disciplined in the abuse crisis. Ms. Doyle agrees with the cardinal that a uniform policy on sexual abuse is needed to prevent harmful improvising.  “But Cardinal O’Malley must take his own advice,” she said.  “The concealment of credibly accused priests, and the ‘clearing’ of priests in questionable circumstances, must be remedied in Boston, and these practices must not be adopted by the Vatican as policy for other bishops and superiors of religious orders.” As a religious order priest who is also a cardinal archbishop, O’Malley should set the highest standard for mutual transparency between religious orders and the dioceses where those priests are working.  Instead, O’Malley has failed even to include religious order priests, brothers, and nuns in his list of credibly accused Boston clerics.  “O’Malley must be more transparent in Boston,” said Ms. Doyle, “and should he become pope, he must insist on greater transparency from dioceses and religious orders everywhere.” Cardinal O’Malley has been touted as papabile in part because of the resolution he has brought to sexual abuse cases in the Boston archdiocese and in the Fall River MA diocese, where terrible abuse cases surfaced in the early 1990s.  However, the settlements that O’Malley concluded were much less generous and equitable than many large settlements in the U.S.  In Fall River after the Porter settlement, O’Malley concealed for nearly a decade the identities of other accused priests. Ms. Doyle will discuss these issues in detail, and their implications for O’Malley’s possible elevation to the papacy. The Fact Sheet summarizing her critique will be available on the homepage of BishopAccountability.org at the time of the press conference. Contacts Anne Barrett Doyle, Co-Director, BishopAccountability.org, barrett.doyle@comcast.net 001 781 439 5208, or 001 (39) 781 439 5208 Lieve Halsberghe, Analyst, BishopAccountability.org, lievehalsberghe@hotmail.com (32) 475 910 918 Hotel Rome Fiumicino, Hilton Garden Inn, Viale Liegi 62, Rome 00198 (39) 06 845441, fax (39) 06 8555171 About BishopAccountability.org Founded in 2003, BishopAccountability.org is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, and documents the crisis of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It offers an online collection of more than 100,000 pages of church records, legal documents, and media reports. Its hardcopy archive is approaching one million pages.  The mission of the organization is to give the public convenient access to information pertaining to the abuse crisis in the U.S. and worldwide. An independent non-profit corporation, BishopAccountability.org is an archive and a data center. It is not a victims' advocacy group or a reform group.

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