PENNSYLVANIA
Catholic Philly
By Matthew Gambino • Posted November 21, 2016
In a letter sent to all parishes of the Philadelphia Archdiocese, Archbishop Charles Chaput renewed attention on a Pennsylvania bill that he said would endanger many of the parishes, schools and charities of the state’s 3.2 million Catholics.
The letter was to be read at all Masses on the weekend of Nov. 19-20. (See a pdf of the letter in English and in Spanish.)
It outlined the provisions of House Bill 1947, which addresses provisions to protect children from sexual abuse.
“Unfortunately,” Archbishop Chaput wrote, “it also contained damaging language that would have allowed retroactive civil suits to be filed against religious and private institutions, while protecting public entities from the same kind of lawsuits for exactly the same kinds of sexual abuse.”
The bill passed overwhelmingly in the state House last spring. The Senate voted 49-0 for an amended version of the bill that removed the provision on retroactivity, “largely because of its incompatibility with our state constitution,” the archbishop wrote.
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