UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Important news in the ongoing (and now international) battle to hold the leaders of the Catholic church accountable for covering up child sexual abuse by priests: yesterday, a jury in Philadelphia found Father Charles Engelhardt and Bernard Shero guilty on multiple charges in a case involving the sexual assault of a 10-year-old altar boy. Joseph A. Slobdozian summarizes the story at the Philly.com website (and see also Jon Hurdle at the New York Times). The victim, “Billy Doe,” reports that he was serially raped by Engelhardt, his parish priest, and Shero, principal of his Catholic school, when he was in fifth and sixth grade.
As Brian Roewe writes for National Catholic Reporter, a former priest, Edward Avery, was also accused of raping “Billy Doe,” and pled guilty, but has now denied that he knew the victim. Roewe states,
The 2011 investigation [which issued in a grand jury report conducted by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office] revealed the story of “Billy Doe,” the now-24-year-old man who accused Engelhardt, Shero and Avery of serially raping and abusing him. The report presents a picture where the three men passed Billy among one another. The young man, who has battled a drug addiction since his teens, took the stand for several hours during the trial.
Just as this news breaks from Philadelphia, Alex Gibney’s hard-hitting documentary on the story of Father Lawrence Murphy and his abuse of boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin is preparing to premier on HBO.* The documentary, “Mea Maxima Culpa,” will air next Monday, 4 February, on HBO at 9 P.M. ET. A press release I received yesterday about the documentary notes its significance as an exposé showing that the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse cases reaches the very highest levels of the Catholic church:
From the row houses of Milwaukee through the bare ruined choirs of Ireland’s churches, all the way to the highest office of the Vatican, it was an international and systematic conspiracy to silence victims of sexual abuse.
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