BALTIMORE (MD)
CBS News [Baltimore, MD]
September 26, 2023
By Paul Gessler
The unredacted report detailing child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore was released to the public Tuesday by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office.
Eight more names in the report were made public. The Attorney General’s Office hinted more will be published after an appeals process.
The report does not yet name five top church officials who investigators say helped enable and cover up abuse.
A Baltimore judge last month ordered that redactions be lifted for all but three of the names blacked out from a report on the history of sex abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
You can read the report here.
“People in the pews will now see that, in fact, these guys were as complicit in these crimes as the abusers,” said David Lorenz, Director of the Maryland Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
The Maryland Attorney General released the 456-page investigation that details 158 clergy, teachers, seminarians and deacons within the Archdiocese of Baltimore who allegedly assaulted more than 600 children going back to the 1940s.
When the report was initially released in April, the names of 10 alleged abusers who had not been publicly accused of child abuse were redacted.
Also redacted were the names of five ranking officials of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office said those five officials “had extensive participation in the Archdiocese’s handling of abuser clergy and reports of child abuse.”
“The court’s order enables my office to continue to lift the veil of secrecy over decades of horrifying abuse suffered by the survivors,” Attorney General Brown said in a statement last month.
The names of two dozen individuals identified by name, who were not accused of child sexual abuse, were also redacted in the April report.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Robert K. Taylor said the Attorney General’s Office may release a copy of the report with the redactions lifted after Sept. 26.
The Attorney General’s Office says the report is not a finding of guilt. “The fact that a person is named in the Report, or that a person’s name was redacted, does not necessarily mean that they are accused of a crime,” the OAG’s statement said.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore made a statement following the release of the unredacted report:
“Since the start of the investigation by the Maryland Office of Attorney General into child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and throughout the entirety of the ensuing legal process, the Archdiocese offered its full cooperation and support. At the same time, we believed that those named in the report had a right to be heard as a fundamental matter of fairness.
The Archdiocese has not opposed the release of the Attorney General’s report, just as it has continued its long-standing policy of publishing credible allegations of child sexual abuse involving its personnel. No one credibly accused of harming a child is in Catholic ministry today. The Church’s longtime zero-tolerance policy continues to forever bar from all ministry anyone who would harm a child.”
-Archdiocese of Baltimore