PENNSYLVANIA
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
March 1, 2016
By Peter Smith / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
ALTOONA, Pa. Hundreds of children were molested, raped and destined to lasting psychological trauma by at least 50 priests and others associated with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown across half a century, a state grand jury has found in denouncing coverups orchestrated by two bishops and enabled by the law enforcement officials they controlled.
The conspiracy amounted to “soul murder,” said the report by the 37th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, released today nearly two years after the grand jury was impaneled.
At a press conference here this morning, Attorney General Kathleen Kane said that horrendous acts of abuse were committed by priests, and called it a ”day of reckoning.”
The report said no one could be charged for the crimes it detailed, either because they happened too long ago under the statute of limitations for such prosecutions, a time limit that the report recommends be extended, or because of witness trauma.
“These findings are both staggering and sobering,” said the report. “Over many years hundreds of children have fallen victim to child predators wrapped in the authority and integrity of an honorable faith. As wolves disguised as the shepherds themselves these men stole the innocence of children by sexually preying upon the most innocent and vulnerable…. ”
The two previous bishops leading the diocese James Hogan, who served from 1966 to 1986 and died in 2005, and Joseph Adamec, who served from 1987 to 2011 and is now retired “took actions that further endangered children as they placed their desire to avoid public scandal over the wellbeing of innocent children,” the report said. “Priests were returned to ministry with full knowledge they were child predators.”
The Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown issued a statement responding to the report, noting that it had “cooperated fully with authorities throughout the investigation, and will continue to do so as part of our commitment to the safety of all children.”
“This is a painful and difficult time in our Diocesan Church,” said the Most Rev. Mark L. Bartchak, Bishop of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown. “I deeply regret any harm that has come to children, and I urge the faithful to join me in praying for all victims of abuse.”
The report includes extensive testimony from a key aide to Bishop Hogan, Monsignor Philip Saylor, who said a Blair County president judge, sheriff and other law-enforcement officers deferred to the diocese to let it handle investigations of abusive priests, rather than prosecuting them. And Monsignor Saylor said a mayor of Johnstown sent candidates for police and fire chief to him for interviews, and he would tell the mayor whom to pick. “That happened in Johnstown and Altoona,” he said.
The grand jury report quoted former Altoona Police Chief Peter Starr as crediting his own appointment to such arrangements and saying that the “politicians of Blair County were afraid of Monsignor Saylor” given his role as editor of the diocesan newspaper.
With such influence, “Hogan saw no obligation of faith or law to the children of his parishioners,” the grand jury report said.
The report added that even a diocesan review board, impaneled amid growing public outrage over sexual abuse by priests, often turned into a travesty, with investigations focusing not on the accused but on those reporting abuse by priests. In one case, the review board sought gynecological records of a survivor, the report said.
And in another case, a top diocesan official suggested to an abuse victim, himself now a priest, that he could be excommunicated for suing the church before the official admitted he was reading from an expired canon in church law and that this couldn’t happen. But, the priest said, he felt he was being threatened with hell to intimidate him.
The report excoriated Bishop Adamec for the diocese’s 1992 statement regarding the dismissal of a lawsuit involving the Rev. Francis Luddy, whom the diocese knew molested, sodomized and performed oral sex on at least 10 children.
The diocese called the lawsuit “frivolous” even while Adamec knew “with certainty that Francis Luddy had admitted to molesting the very children for whom the bishop bore the most responsibility.”
The report added: “The grand jury notes that the chilling impact of such a victory lap on the victims of child abuse throughout the diocese is incalculable.”
The grand jury investigation began with a referral by the Cambria County district attorney’s office to the state Office of the Attorney General regarding alleged abuse at Bishop McCort Catholic High School in Johnstown.
The grand jury probe expanded into a sweeping look at abuse dating as far back as the 1940s. A dramatic highlight of the investigation came in August 2015 when investigators executed a search warrant at diocesan offices in Altoona and seized 115,000 documents, many from filing cabinets and safes where the most sensitive church documents were kept.
Reports of many of the alleged abusers have appeared in various media over the past two decades, with the grand jury singling out extensive investigations by Johnstown’s Tribune-Democrat in 2002 and 2003.
Ms. Kane also cited “heroic” whistleblower George Foster, a layman who exposed Altoona-Johnstown priest abuse, during the press conference.
That was in the wake of Boston Globe investigations, recently dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight,” into the shocking levels of abuse and coverup in the Archdiocese of Boston. That investigation led to revelations of similar coverups worldwide and to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas mandating on June 14, 2002 the removal of any priest from ministry who committed even a single act of abuse.
Yet the ink was barely dry on that new policy when Bishop Adamec met with the victim of a Rev. Martin Cingle, who had groped the genitals of the then-15-year-old boy while sleeping next to the boy on a trip he had taken him on. Bishop Adamec then met with Father Cingle, who denied remembering such an event, then sent the priest for what the grand jury said was a travesty of a psychological review. With the review inconclusive, Adamec returned the priest to ministry, where he remained until Cingle admitted to the grand jury under threat of a perjury charge that he had molested the boy.
After that, Deputy Attorney General Daniel Dye wrote to current Bishop Bartchak, who agreed to his request to remove Father Cingle immediately from ministry.
And although the Dallas scandal mandated the creation of review boards, the grand jury report noted that as late as 2005, the Altoona-Johnstown diocese was hiring private investigators to look for ways to undercut the credibility of an alleged accuser.
Ms. Kane called for the abolition of statute of limitations on child sexual abuse for criminal and civil cases, one of the recommendations from the grand jury.
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