PENNSYLVANIA
York Daily Record
Editorial
A list of accused priests reported by YDR might represent just the steeple of a massive cathedral of child exploitation.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane was on trial this week, defending herself against charges she says were trumped up by the old boys’ network in our state’s judicial system. So she might have been too distracted to read YDR’s story about priests accused of sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, which includes York County.
But someone in her office must look into questions YDR’s report raises about how forthcoming and proactive the diocese (a different sort of old boys’ network) has been with priest abuse cases in our region.
Someone with subpoena power.
Reporter Brandie Kessler identified 15 priests with ties to the Harrisburg diocese who’d been accused of sexually abusing children – including a priest who served in Dallastown.
In response to the reporting, the diocese grudgingly acknowledged those cases, even issuing a statement to parishioners (printed in at least one local church bulletin) warning them that the YDR story would include previously reported abuse cases but also some that “had a lower profile.”
A lower profile.
In other words, cases that had been essentially buried in the church’s massive bureaucracy – publicly unacknowledged, unaccounted for, possibly unatoned for.
If we’ve learned anything from priest abuse scandals in other regions, not to mention the Jerry Sandusky case, it’s that where there is smoke there is fire. And burying that fire doesn’t douse the flame. It eventually becomes a raging inferno.
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