JOHNSTOWN (PA)
Tribune Democrat
August 13, 2019
By Nicole C. Brambila
The 2018 grand jury identified 301 priests who had sexually assaulted and abused hundreds of children over the past several decades. As large as that number is, the true scope is much higher.
Last year’s grand jury report has been the largest in scale, covering six of the state’s eight dioceses — including the ones based in Greensburg and Pittsburgh — and identifying 1,000 victims. But it was just the latest in a string of Pennsylvania investigations dating back 15 years.
Following the explosive investigation of the Boston Archdiocese, former Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham sat a grand jury in 2003 that produced two reports on priest sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Her successor, Seth Williams, followed up with his own grand jury report in 2011.
In 2016, former state Attorney General Kathleen Kane uncovered hundreds of child sex abuse cases in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, naming roughly 50 abusers.
Each of the reports identified a systemic cover-up of priests who sexually abused children.
Since the 2018 investigation, Pennsylvania’s dioceses and religious orders — including the Jesuits and the Benedictines at Saint Vincent Archabbey in Unity — have released their own lists. Catholic dioceses across the U.S. also have followed suit with lists of publicly accused clergy and lay people.
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