PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Daily Times
Published: Monday, July 09, 2012
It probably would be a fair statement to say that in the last 10 years, there hasn’t been much love lost between the Philadelphia District Attorney and officials in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
In 2003, after the clerical sexual abuse scandal broke nationwide as a result of the 2002 child molestation conviction of a Boston priest, then-Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham launched a grand jury investigation.
Two years later her grand jury report revealed that 63 priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia allegedly abused children as far back as the 1940s. Forty-three of them had ties to Delaware County. None could be criminally charged because the state’s statute of limitations, which has since been expanded, had expired.
The report documented repeated transfers of suspected pedophile priests from one parish to another, giving them access to more, unsuspecting children. The grand jury members noted that much of the abuse occurred under the watch of Cardinal John Krol while he headed the archdiocese from 1961 to 1988 and his successor, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who they maintained used his legal expertise to further bury the abuse and shield the archdiocese from lawsuits. Bevilacqua, a civil and canon law attorney who was Philadelphia’s archbishop from 1988 to 2003, told the grand jury he did not turn suspected child abusers over to police simply because Pennsylvania law did not require him to.
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