Church lobbying efforts inappropriate

SUNBURY (PA)
Daily Item

June 15, 2019

The U.S. Catholic Bishops establishing their own hotline for reporting sexual abuse allegations within the Church and the Church in Pennsylvania spending millions of dollars in legislative lobbying efforts relating to legal rights for abuse victims are both inappropriate, especially in the face of evidence that more than 1,000 children were molested by hundreds of predator Roman Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses.

U.S. Catholic Bishops on Wednesday voted to establish a hotline for reporting allegations that church leaders are involved in abuse or covering up for priests. Hotline operators would relay allegations to regional supervisory bishops, according to The Associated Press.

“I’ve been completely unsatisfied with their response,” said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who presented the landmark clergy abuse case to a grand jury last year.

“Their big idea was to set up a hotline coming back to the church, that’s covering up the cover-up,” he said during an interview this week with CNHI newspapers, including The Daily Item.

Shapiro also blasted church funding for efforts to sway state legislation relating to the time limits victims have to bring lawsuits against alleged abusers. New York and New Jersey, among other states, have passed laws creating avenues for adult victims of child sex abuse to file lawsuits even if the statute of limitations in their cases have expired.

Those reforms have stalled in the Pennsylvania Legislature over opposition from the insurance industry and lobbyists for the Catholic church.

“What I find unconscionable is that the bishops are lobbying to stop these reforms from passing,” Shapiro said. “They’ve spent millions of dollars of parishioners’ money to lobby lawmakers to have less accountability and less protections for victims.”qr0tronceefg

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