PENNSYLVANIA
Reuters
HARRISBURG, PA. | BY DAVID DEKOK
Hundreds of children in western Pennsylvania were sexually assaulted by about 50 Roman Catholic priests over four decades while bishops covered up their actions, according to a state grand jury report released on Tuesday.
The report found that former Altoona-Johnstown Diocese Bishop James Hogan, who died in 2005, and his successor, Joseph Adamec, who retired in 2011, worked to cover pedophile priests’ tracks and that some local law enforcement agencies also avoided investigating abuse allegations, said state Attorney General Kathleen Kane.
“The heinous crimes these children endured are absolutely unconscionable,” Kane told reporters in unveiling the report, based on a two-year investigation. “These predators desecrated a sacred trust and preyed upon their victims in the very places where they should have felt most safe.”
Revelations that some priests had habitually sexually abused children and that bishops had systematically covered up those crimes burst onto the world stage in 2002 when the Boston Globe reported widespread abuse in the Boston Archdiocese.
That report, which won a Pulitzer Prize and was the subject of last year’s Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight,” set off a global wave of investigations that found similar patterns at dioceses around the world. They led to hefty lawsuits and seriously undermined the church’s moral authority.
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