UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Joshua J. McElwee | Apr. 1, 2014
WASHINGTON The yearly audit of U.S. Catholic dioceses’ compliance with national measures to report and prevent clergy sexual abuse found a decline in the number of reported cases of abuse from July 2012 to June 2013 but also cited concerns about the limited scope of the auditors’ abilities.
Of particular concern are four dioceses that would not allow any audits to take place and the fact that “most” dioceses do not allow or conduct audits of parishes or schools, where most reporting of abuse is thought to occur, the auditors write.
During the finding period — July 1, 2012, through June 30, 2013 — 857 survivors of clergy sexual abuse reported 936 allegations of abuse in 191 dioceses, the audit reports, a decline from the 921 survivors who reported abuse in the previous audit period.
In the recent report, 472 allegations were deemed by the audit “unable to be proven”; 223 had an investigation ongoing; 136 were deemed “substantiated”; 78 “unsubstantiated”; and 27 had not yet been investigated. Abuse allegations were dated from the 1920s to the present.
The yearly audit for abuse reporting was released Friday by the U.S. bishops’ conference. It includes reports on the matter from the national firm conducting the audits, the bishops’ Secretariat for Child and Youth Protection, and the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), an institute at Georgetown University that conducts annual surveys of the dioceses separate from the audit.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.