PITTSBURGH (PA)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
January 2, 2013
The Rev. Bartley Sorensen claimed at sentencing today that he meant to be caught with child pornography, and didn’t realize then that collecting such images was a crime.
U.S. District Judge Alan N. Bloch showed him just how big of an oversight that was, sentencing him to eight years and one month in prison.
Sorensen, 63, who was assigned to St. John Fisher Parish in Churchill several weeks before a parish secretary walked in and saw images on his computer screen, said he “decided not to get rid of what was on the computer” as the employee climbed the stairs to his office. “I knew that my sin had to be known. What I did not know is that it was also a crime.”
Judge Bloch said the priest had “been viewing images of sexually abused children for the last 10 years of his life,” and had a collection of some 5,000 files on 100 computer disks. He said that although Sorensen never touched a child inappropriately, collecting such images is “just as harmful and dangerous to children as if he had been abusing them himself.
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