BREMERTON (WA)
Kitsap Sun
August 24, 2018
By Ed Palm
The Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal is back in the news — this time, bigger and more troubling than ever. On August 14, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court released the results of a two-year grand jury investigation revealing what the Washington Post has labeled a “criminal conspiracy” to cover up the abuse of “at least 1,000 victims” by “some 300 priests” in “six of the state’s eight dioceses.”
As a Catholic-school survivor, I’ve had more than a passing interest in this controversy and have even advanced my theory about why this has been happening (“The risk in the old Catholic ‘calls,’” March 13, 2016). More about that anon. My immediate concern is how this latest report hits home, geographically and personally.
Within a few days of Pennsylvania’s blockbuster report, all of us who had graduated from the Salesianum School for Boys in Wilmington, Delaware, received an email from Brendan Kennealey, the school’s current president. Kennealey revealed that two of the priests named in the Pennsylvania report were members of the religious order that had established and still oversees Salesianum, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales (OSFS), and that they had taught at the school. In the interest of full disclosure, Kennealey acknowledged that 12 oblates had been named in 34 lawsuits brought by 39 victims against the school and the Oblates. In 2011, the victims and the order reached a global settlement to the tune of $24.8 million.
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