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BishopAccountability.org
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1. Our website hosted 1.5 million unique visitors — a 15% jump from 2013!
2. Our website grew to an astounding 300,000 pages of documents, articles, and reports. We maintain the world’s largest archive of abuse documents outside the Holy See.
3. Our Database of Accused Priests grew by 178 names. It now provides information on more than 4,000 accused bishops, priests, nuns, and brothers.
4. The Boston Globe’s recent front-page investigative report (at right) and editorial about past cover-up by Robert J. Geisinger, S.J., the Pope’s new prosecutor of abuse cases, was made possible in part by research and documents we shared with the Globe.
5. We produced the first comprehensive analysis of how the pope handled abuse when he was an Argentine archbishop. In July, it was cited in the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and the Wall St. Journal.
6. To launch our global database initiative, we published the first database of accused priests in Argentina, the Pope’s home country, in both English and Spanish. In the course of our research, we came to know Argentine victims, including four who unsuccessfully had sought the Pope’s help. We introduced them to each other, and together they wrote a letter to Pope Francis, asking for a meeting.
7. We sent Homeland Security documents we had obtained about a Pennsylvania priest alleged to have sexually molested boys at a Honduras orphanage. Homeland Security investigated, and the priest, Father Joseph Maurizio (at right), was indicted.
8. We caused Pope Francis to remove a bishop (at right below). The Pope’s unusual move came in response to the media uproar caused by our revelation in March that an abusive priest banned from the Scranton diocese had been made second in command of a diocese in Paraguay. Within six months, Pope Francis had removed not only the priest, but the bishop in Paraguay who had hired him.
9. Our authoritative data on church bankruptcies, settlements with victims, and numbers of accused priests were cited by the New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, Associated Press, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets.
10. We answered individual queries from dozens of survivors. “You are the blessing I’ve been praying for since I finally had the nerve to start speaking up last year,” a survivor wrote to us in October.
Our 2015 Projects Will Include
Completing assignment histories for all 170 accused Jesuits in our database. For the first time, it will be possible to understand the full impact of abuse in the largest religious order. See a sample Jesuit assignment history.
Posting Philadelphia priest files. We will post thousands of pages of Philadelphia files in time for the September 2015 visit of Pope Francis. See the first of the Philadelphia files.
Posting list of accused priests in the Philippines. We will post the first public list of accused priests who have worked in the Philippines in time for Pope Francis’s visit there in January. See a document about one of the priests in the new database.
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.