PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Religion News Service
David Gibson | Dec 27, 2013
(RNS) This week’s court decision that freed a senior cleric in Philadelphia who had been jailed for shielding an abusive priest was a symbolic setback for victims’ advocates but one with a substantial, and discouraging, message for their cause: None of the churchmen implicated in cover-ups during the worst decades of abuse will likely ever face charges.
The June 2012 conviction of Monsignor William Lynn was seen as a landmark verdict because until then no one in the upper levels of the Catholic Church had ever faced a trial or been found guilty for shielding molesters.
Lynn, who oversaw clergy and fielded abuse complaints for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2004, was sentenced to three to six years on one count of child endangerment. After serving 18 months in prison, Lynn was expected to be released from prison soon.
During the past few decades, a number of abusers have been convicted, and many defrocked. But public outrage was largely directed against the bishops and senior church officials like Lynn who, as the appeals court noted in its ruling on Thursday (Dec. 26), “prioritized the archdiocese’s reputation over the safety of potential victims of sexually abusive priests.”
But the appeals ruling also said that Lynn’s behavior, while outrageous to much of the Catholic faithful and the wider public, did not violate the child welfare law in place at the time of the abuse. …
Nicholas Cafardi, a canon and civil lawyer at the Duquesne Law School in Pittsburgh and former head of the Catholic bishops’ national review board on clergy abuse, said Francis must broaden the mandate of the commission to include his brother bishops.
“We have to insist that there be repercussions for any bishop who would re-assign or cover-up for a sexually abusive priest,” Cafardi wrote in an email. “The church will never have closure on this issue unless the larger problem of hierarchical complicity is dealt with.”
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