UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
Willliam D. Lindsey
Barbara Blaine of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests has released a press statement about the story of Legionary of Christ priest Thomas Williams about which I blogged yesterday. As she notes, Phillip Pullella of Reuters is now reporting that top Vatican officials and top Legionary of Christ officials have known about Thomas Williams’s reported transgressions for quite some time now, but have kept silent about them.
An excerpt from SNAP’s powerful and right-on-target statement about this situation:
And it’s important to remember that the Legion
–has a long, sordid history of secrecy about clergy sex crimes and misdeeds, and
— claims a recent “investigation” found that seven Legion priests are accused of molesting kids.
(We strongly suspect that’s a lie. We believe it’s very likely that most of these allegations were reported directly to Legion officials, not discovered through some “investigation.” And we suspect that, like with Fr. Williams, top Legion staffers have known for months or years about many of these accusations but have kept them hidden.)
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.