MILWAUKEE (WI)
Salon
BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
Someday, we may reach the point where there are no more horrific sexual abuses within the Catholic Church to be uncovered, when there will be nothing left to say about the conspiracy of silence and the longstanding policy of protecting child molesters. Today is not that day. Already this week, on two continents, new revelations about how Catholic officials protected abusers and its own financial interests have revealed more about the depth and malevolence of the church’s self-interest.
As Reuters reports, 6,000 pages of court documents — spanning eight decades of cases — released Monday in Milwaukee “showed in great detail” the ways in which the archdiocese routinely reassigned priests accused of sex abuse to new parishes — while cleverly protecting millions of dollars of church funds from lawsuits. Included in the documents are requests from Archbishop Timothy Dolan to the Vatican to transfer $57 million to a trust fund to protect it from, in his words, “any legal claim and liability.” The transfer was approved a month later. On Monday, Dolan insisted that his request has been misinterpreted, saying the transfer was a “perpetual care fund.” The documents also show that Dolan did take action to notify the Vatican of abuses by Reverend John O’Brien – and that it took six years for the man to be stripped of his priesthood. The AP reports that to date the diocese has already spent “$30.5m on litigation, therapy and assistance for victims and other costs related to clergy sex abuse.”
But Dolan’s shabby track record isn’t all the newly released records reveal. They show the personnel files for 42 of the 45 priests “with verified abuse claims against them,” including one who is under police investigation now. The records also show how the diocese moved one priest, Raymond Adamsky, to eleven parishes over 22 after the first time a family accused him of abusing their daughter. And they show how the diocese routinely laicized priests accused of sex abuse, removing them of their duties but still providing them with benefits and sometimes substantial payments. Milwaukee’s current Archbishop Jerome Listecki has said that the documents reveal that “22 priests were reassigned to parish work after allegations of abuse,” and that “eight of them abused again.”
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