NEW YORK (NY)
VICE
September 12 2018
By Alex Norcia
“I think we’re going to look back on this as a Martin Luther moment, where someone’s nailing the theses to the door.”
Last week, in the wake of a grand jury report that concluded at least 300 priests had preyed on some 1,000 children across Pennsylvania since the 1940s, attorneys general in New York and New Jersey announced investigations into Catholic Church sexual abuse. Missouri, Nebraska, and Illinois have launched state-level probes as well—and more are likely to follow. New York went so far as to issue civil subpoenas in all eight of its dioceses—New Jersey has created a special criminal task force to look into seven—calling for the production of internal Church documents that relate to the handling of abuse cases. The dioceses, for their part, have pledged transparency in working with investigators.
The wave of official scrutiny comes on the heels of what can only be described as a disastrously scandal-ridden summer for the Catholic Church. In addition to the outrageous findings in Pennsylvania, Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, was removed from the ministry and resigned from the College of Cardinals after being accused of sexually abusing a teenager, other minors, and adult seminarians. Pope Francis has yet to officially weigh in on the saga, but has been rocked by accusations from a rival archbishop who claimed the pontiff knew of McCarrick’s behavior and went so far as to demand he resign from the papacy.
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