BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun
August 24, 2018
By Jean Marbella
The Pennsylvania grand jury report on child sex abuse in the Catholic Church implicated the former archbishop of Baltimore for covering up the abuse. It’s not the first time the city has dealt with scandals within the Catholic Church. Here’s a timeline of major incidents:
June 1995: John Merzbacher, a former teacher, is convicted of rape and child sex abuse of a student at Catholic Community Middle School in Locust Point in the 1970s. More than 100 other charges of 13 other former students were dropped after a judge sentenced Merzbacher to four consecutive life terms.
April 2002: A man tells the Archdiocese that he had been sexually abused by a former priest, Michael Spillane, in 1968. Spillane had admitted in 1992 that he had abused six boys, and had been stripped of his priestly faculties. A victim who had reported his abuse to the Archdiocese in 1991 told The Sun he had been an altar boy at a church in Ellicott City when Spillane began abusing him, and it continued when the priest became pastor of a church in Crofton.
September 2002: As multiple dioceses dealt with revelations of clergy sex abuse in their churches and schools, Cardinal William H. Keeler releases a list of dozens of priests and brothers who have been accused of sexual abuse over the years. He also discloses that the archdiocese had paid settlements to eight victims totaling $4.1 million in the past 20 years. (The church has since paid out even more.)
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.