DES MOINES (IA)
Des Moines Register
August 16, 2018
By Shelby Fleig
Des Moines Bishop Richard Pates on Thursday called the child sex abuse by hundreds of Pennsylvania priests, detailed in a 900-page report made public this week, a “great moral failure.”
“There is no way that we can justify this, neither on the behalf of those who have committed the abuse among young people, nor the failure of our leadership in trying to protect them,” he said.
Pates joined the Vatican in publicly condemning the report’s findings of systematic abuse.
“We showed no care for the little ones,” wrote Pope Francis in a letter Monday, almost a week after the report was released. “We abandoned them.”
The product of a two-year grand jury investigation ordered by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, the report is one of the most comprehensive looks into such abuse by the Catholic church in history. In the report, at least 300 priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses are accused of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1940s.
The report also says the Catholic Church engaged in a “systematic cover-up’’ by moving abusive priests from one parish to another.
Ten other state-level investigations — all on the East Coast — have documented similar abuse by clergy since 2002, according to BishopAccountability.org. Some victims’ advocates are calling for attorneys general across the country to launch their own investigations.
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