Grand jury report on child sexual abuse in Pennsylvania Catholic churches ought to be released without redactions

LANCASTER (PA)
Lancaster Online

September 4, 2018

The LNP Editorial Board

https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/editorials/grand-jury-report-on-child-sexual-abuse-in-pennsylvania-catholic/article_89b9f4f2-ad7e-11e8-9e5b-1730a796bb29.html

The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last week that the grand jurors who investigated child sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania Roman Catholic dioceses want to see their full and unredacted report released to the public. The 20 grand jury members unanimously lodged “their objections to any attempts to ‘censor, alter, redact or amend’ the document,” those newspapers reported. Their two-year investigation revealed that 301 “predator priests” had sexually abused more than 1,000 children over seven decades in the dioceses of Harrisburg (which includes the parishes in Lancaster County), Greensburg, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Scranton and Erie.

This plea from the grand jurors who spent two harrowing years investigating child sexual abuse in six of eight Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses should be heeded.

In their court filing, as explained by the Inquirer and Post-Gazette, the jurors said they “examined an ‘overwhelming amount of evidence’ of abuse, including internal church documents that had been kept secret. They wrote that they solicited and received written or in-person testimony from bishops from all of the six dioceses. And, they said, they heard from victims — most of whom testified they had notified their pastors, bishops or dioceses about the abuse.”

Wrote the grand jury: “We listened as they poured out their hearts telling of the agony and torment they endured since being victimized. They had waited so long to be heard; they deserve to be heard and validated.”

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro also argues that the full, unredacted report should be made public. We think it should be, too.

There has been far too much secrecy already, as the grand jury report made plain.

We thank the grand jurors first of all for dedicating so much time to what must have been an excruciating assignment. Listening to so much anguish — so much “agony and torment” — had to be life-altering. How could it not?

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