FriendlyAtheist.Patheos.com (blog)
March 6, 2020
By Hemant Mehta
According to a damning new report from ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle, dozens of priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse found new homes in foreign countries where it would be much harder for local authorities to find them. The Catholic Church facilitated or looked the other way in many of those cases.
It’s just incredible work from journalists Katie Zavadski, Topher Sanders, and Nicole Hensley.
ProPublica and the Chronicle analyzed lists published by 52 U.S. dioceses — encompassing the top 30 in terms of the number of credibly accused living clergy and those located in states along the U.S.-Mexico border. Reporters found 51 clergy who after allegations of abuse in the U.S. were able to work as priests or religious brothers in a host of countries, from Ireland to Nigeria to the Philippines. At least 40 had worked in U.S. states along the southern border, including 11 in Texas. No country was a more common destination than Mexico, where at least 21 credibly accused clergy found refuge.
As recently as Wednesday, one of the priests in question told reporters that his time with a 15-year-old boy — a boy he allegedly got drunk before groping and raping him — was “screwed up, but whatever happened was consensual.”
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