SPOKANE (WA)
The Spokesman- Review
November 11, 2018
By Chad Sokol
Light streamed into Bishop Thomas Daly’s office one recent afternoon as he spoke, in sometimes blunt terms, about the widening scandal of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the United States.
“It’s a moral crisis,” Daly said. “We have degenerate behavior, hypocrisy and now cover-up. My thought is, ‘How much more can the people of God put up with?’ ”
As the leader of the Spokane diocese since 2015, Daly has the final say on some investigations into abuse by clergy. He talked to The Spokesman-Review in late October following a wave of headlines about sexual abuse in all ranks of the Roman Catholic Church.
It began anew in June, when allegations emerged that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., had sexually abused minors and adult seminarians over the course of decades. Pope Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation in July. And then in August, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office released a grand jury report finding that church leaders had covered up the abuse of more than 1,000 people over a 70-year period, prompting investigations in several other states.
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