BALTIMORE (MD)
Washington Post
April 5, 2023
By Michelle Boorstein and Fredrick Kunkle
Attorney General Anthony Brown said his office is also investigating two more dioceses, including the Archdiocese of Washington
Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) released a report Wednesday detailing decades of alleged sex abuse by clergy within the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
The investigation found that over 600 young people — from preschoolers to young adults — suffered sexual abuse and “physical torture” by more than 150 clergy members from the mid-1940s to 2002. The attorney general’s office had previewed some of its findings in a November court filing, but the report itself brought them to life in visceral and horrifying detail. “Tests of torture” that involved chaining and whipping teenagers. Two sisters abused as grade-schoolers “hundreds of times” by one priest. A deacon who admitted to molesting more than 100 minors over three decades. Clergy who preyed on children they met recovering at hospitals.
“Today in Maryland certainly is a day of reckoning and accountability,” Brown told reporters after meeting for about an hour with abuse survivors. He praised them for coming forward and their efforts to identify their abusers and hold them accountable, saying he hoped their example would lead others to come forward in similar circumstances.
Terry McKiernan of Bishop Accountability said the report’s most important contribution is the accounts of abuse by 33 clergy who were not known beforehand and are not on the archdiocese’s list of accused. But there were other clergy who have been publicly accused of abuse or possessing child abuse material who are not in the report.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” survivor Teresa Lancaster said. “There’s many, many more victims. I talk to them every day. There’s a lot more out there suffering.”
Here is what you need to know:
What is in the report?
The 456-page report, which spanned two attorneys general, was compiled through grand jury subpoenas over four years. It was based on hundreds of thousands of documents, including personnel records, medical and psychological treatment records, transfer orders and official church policies. The attorney general’s office also set up a hotline for people to report abuse. More than 300 people contacted the office, Brown said.
The bulk of the report is “abuser narratives” that detail allegations of abuse and how priests, archdiocese officials and others covered up or mishandled the allegations. What emerges are common patterns and storylines of angry and anguished parents reporting abuse to no avail; abusers being moved or sent to treatment and then reoffending; church authorities not reporting abuse to law enforcement; and the devastating effects on victims.
A judge ordered the attorney general’s office to redact the names of those not known to be deceased and who had not been listed as accused by the archdiocese or otherwise publicly identified.
In one case, Father Frederick Duke, who served in parishes in Baltimore and Catonsville, among others, admitted to the church that he had abused 26 boys between 1949 and 1961, including rape. In preparation for an interview with one of his victims in 1988, the archdiocese’s notes say “do not talk about any other children,” “we will deny any liability,” “we will not say that the church did not know,” “maybe we could say that we have nothing in our files,” “if a lawyer is present, express surprise,” and “no history, nothing in files.”
The archdiocese sent many accused priests for psychological counseling, often making such treatment a condition of their continued spiritual work. But it rarely appears to have changed any abusers’ behavior. The archdiocese placed Father Maurice J. Blackwell of Baltimore on administrative leave in 1993 after an accusation of abuse and asked him to get treatment at a “church-run facility” in Connecticut. But Blackwell denied the abuse to a psychiatrist, who cleared him to return to ministry. Five years later, a man reported that Blackwell had raped and otherwise abused him for more than a decade, and a flood of other victims followed. Blackwell was removed from the priesthood in 2004. Many other abusers were simply encouraged to leave the priesthood voluntarily. Hardly any faced criminal prosecution.
“While each of those stories is unique together, they reveal themes and behaviors typical of adults who abuse children and those who enable that abuse by concealing it,” Brown told reporters. “What was consistent throughout the stories was the absolute authority and power these abusive priests and the church leadership held over survivors, their families and their communities.”
Many of the victims were altar servers, choir singers or students. The report describes the toll the abuse took on them. One woman, who said Father Carl Anthony Fisher molested her at St. Veronica’s Church in Baltimore, attempted suicide at age 14 after her mother sought to bring her back to the parish, the report said. Another Baltimore victim, who reported that Father Joseph Davies repeatedly raped him as an altar boy in the 1950s, attempted suicide in high school. In one case, a man alleged in 2004 that Father Steven Girard had molested and later raped him a decade earlier, starting when he was in third grade in Lansdowne, Md. The man met with the archdiocese, whose records note that he was in “obvious psychotic pain” and had made three suicide attempts. He died by suicide a year later.
What the Archdiocese of Baltimore has said about the report
The Archdiocese of Baltimore did not oppose the release of the report and provided hundreds of thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents. It has also acknowledged that it paid part of the legal fees of 16 people who were part of a group that succeeded last fall in persuading a judge to seal the proceedings around the report’s release and to redact some of the names in it. And it has lobbied against a bill that would remove the statute of limitations on civil suits for past abuse.
Archbishop William Lori said in a statement Wednesday that “the detailed accounts of abuse are shocking and soul searing. It is difficult for most to imagine that such evil acts could have actually occurred. For victim-survivors everywhere, they know the hard truth: These evil acts did occur.”
The archdiocese “is not the same organization it was when, as the report documents, cases of abuse peaked during the 1960s and 1970s,” he went on. “Make no mistake, however: today’s strong record of protection and transparency does not excuse past failings that have led to the lasting spiritual, psychological and emotional harm victim-survivors have endured.”
Why these reports still matter
The Maryland report is the latest in two decades of efforts by civil authorities around the country to chronicle the specifics of Catholic clergy sex abuse cases. There have been 19 reports, according to Bishop Accountability, the Catholic research and advocacy group.
A key turning point came around 2018, when then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) released a comprehensive report documenting abuses within Catholic churches across the state. It inspired other attorneys general to investigate and energized the movement for statute of limitations reform, McKiernan of Bishop Accountability said.
However, almost all the abuse cases date back several decades, and experts and prosecutors acknowledge that the era of regular church coverups is in the past. Few priests or bishops have ever been prosecuted or otherwise held accountable for abusing or mishandling abusers and victims. One exception is former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 after abuse allegations surfaced. He is now facing criminal charges in Massachusetts that he sexually assaulted a teenager in 1974.
Brown said his office is also investigating the Diocese of Wilmington, Del., and the Archdiocese of Washington. Robert Krebs, a spokesman for the Diocese of Wilmington, said the diocese has cooperated fully since it received a subpoena four years ago. The Archdiocese of Washington did not immediately respond to messages left seeking comment.
For survivors, the day is both celebratory and painful
Survivors welcomed the official documenting of their physical and spiritual abuse, saying it provides essential accountability of decades-old cases that could only have been disclosed through the power of the state. But they criticized the redactions.
The report lists the names of 156 abusers, but 10 are blacked out. And names of church officials who knew of allegations and did nothing or helped cover them up were also redacted. They are identified only as officials A, B, C, D and E.
In mid-March, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Robert Taylor Jr. ordered changes to the original report to protect some people who were never charged with a crime or publicly accused before. Portions of the report were rewritten to permanently remove the names and identifying circumstances of 60 people.
The names and titles of an additional 37 people were redacted for now so that they could be notified and given an opportunity to read the unredacted report and argue whether they should be permanently redacted. Those people, in general, were “accused of abuse, hiding abuse, enabling abuse, assisting in the coverup of abuse, or protecting abusers from the consequences of their actions,” according to a court document.
At a future hearing, Taylor will decide whether to release the unredacted version including their names.
McKiernan noted that the Pennsylvania report was “very lightly redacted; persons named in the report were invited to respond, and their responses were included in the report.”
“Because secrecy is one of the main causes of the Catholic abuse crisis,” he said, “transparency — to the extent the law and the courts permit — is the most beneficial approach.”
What happens next
The Maryland report did not identify any abusers who are currently serving in the clergy. Many of the alleged abusers are deceased.
In approving the release of the report, Taylor wrote last month that “the only form of justice that may now be available is a public reckoning.”
As in other states, the investigation in Maryland has galvanized support for overhauling the statutes of limitations on civil lawsuits for past abuse.
Maryland lawmakers on Wednesday hastened bipartisan passage of a bill to allow all child sex abuse victims to sue the institutions they allege harbored their attackers, removing a barrier that for decades prevented many people who came to terms with abuse in adulthood to seek civil justice. Similar legislation has failed annually since 2019, but the pending archdiocese report helped propel its passage this year over the objections from the Catholic Church’s lobbyists.
Lobbyists for the archdiocese objected to an “unconstitutional provision to open an unlimited retroactive window” for civil lawsuits, according to written testimony that also said, “While there is clearly no financial compensation that can ever rectify the harm done to a survivor of sexual abuse, the devastating impact that the retroactive window provision will potentially have by exposing public and private institutions — and the communities they serve — to unsubstantiated claims of abuse, cannot be ignored.”
Survivor Jean Hargadon Wehner recalled Wednesday how charges against Joseph Maskell, who the report said sexually abused at least 39 victims, went nowhere because of the statute of limitations even though he was in his 50s when the allegations came to light. “So instead of going ahead with this, they got rid of it,” she said. “That man walked free.” Maskell died in 2001.
In urging his colleagues to suspend rules to immediately pass the bill Thursday, Sen. William C. Smith (D-Montgomery) said that “it’s not about the archdiocese, but access to justice.”
The Senate’s vote sends the bill to Gov. Wes Moore (D) for his promised signature.
Kurt Rupprecht, a survivor, broke into loud sobs when he received a text that the statute of limitations bill passed as he was sitting at a cafe with David Lorenz, a leader of the Maryland chapter of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. The waiter, who was bringing their food, asked if everything was okay.
“He’s all right,” Lorenz told the waiter. “He’s just emotional, good emotional.”
Ryan Bacic, Tara Bahrampour, Erin Cox, Marisa Iati and Katie Shepherd contributed to this report.