RIVERHEAD (NY)
Riverhead News Review
February 21, 2019
By Steve Wick
The gigantic scandal that is the Roman Catholic Church continues to grow worse, with new revelations of criminal behavior and the sexual abuse of children. With each new disclosure, the church itself looks more and more like a criminal cabal partly inhabited by pedophiles whose behavior was covered up and filed away, hidden from the public.
The latest report involves two women now in their 60s who say they were sexually abused as children by former Diocese of Rockville Centre Bishop John McGann. They were about 11 at the time of the alleged abuse, when McGann was a monsignor and auxiliary bishop. One of them said she was also abused by another priest in the diocese at age 5. The parents of these girls were devout Catholics who believed priests and bishops were in a special class by themselves and were to be revered. Little did they know the truth.
McGann is the once-esteemed bishop whose name adorned the Catholic high school in Riverhead, which was shuttered by the current bishop of the diocese — whose name appears in a grand jury report published last year about abuse by priests in Pennsylvania and the bishops who knew about it.
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