ALLENTOWN (PA)
Morning Call
September 1, 2018
By Tim Darragh
As he began a blistering presentation of a grand jury report into decades of child sex abuse by priests in Pennsylvania earlier this month, Attorney General Josh Shapiro singled out two groups — the Catholic Church hierarchy and law enforcement — for sometimes working in tandem to keep the accusations from the public.
“The abuse scarred every diocese,” he said. “The cover-up was sophisticated. The church protected the institution at all costs.”
But the findings, identifying 301 predator priests, also showed a “failure of law enforcement,” Shapiro said.
The investigation found that while the church leadership was consistently involved in protecting offenders, it sometimes had assistance from police or district attorneys who looked the other way.
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