Survivors group wants Missouri to do more to investigate Catholic church

KANSAS CITY (MO)
Fox 4 News

Sept. 17, 2019

By Stephanie Graflage

A survivors group wants Missouri to do more to investigate claims of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests says an attorney general’s investigation into the problem is incomplete.

After about a year-long inquiry into sexual abuse allegations, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt on Friday said his office found 163 priests with credible accusations against them.

Schmitt has referred 12 priests for prosecution by county attorneys.

But SNAP believes this represents only the tip of the iceberg, because only one of the 400 victims in the group was interviewed as part of the state’s probe.

“We are on par, if not greater than Pennsylvania, because we are smaller,” said Rebecca Randles, an attorney who represents Catholic Church sex abuse survivors. “Yet I know of over 200 priests. When you put together the number of priests who have served in the state of Missouri with he number that even the attorney general has found, you are finding that about 10 percent of priests in Missouri are abusive. Every other state has found 3 to 6 percent. So we are talking about a big problem in state of Missouri.”

SNAP wants Missouri to enact new laws that would give the attorney general power to subpoena church records and convene a grand jury to investigate childhood sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic Church.

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.