PITTSBURGH (PA)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
October 6, 2018
By Peter Smith
In its original response to an Aug. 14 Pennsylvania grand jury report, the Diocese of Pittsburgh erroneously said it withdrew an abusive priest’s authorization to do ministry at least six years before it actually did so.
The diocese has acknowledged the error and it says it’s correcting the record.
The diocese originally claimed that on Jan. 30, 1996, it sent a letter informing the Diocese of San Diego, where the Rev. Ernest Paone would be doing ministry, that he “did not possess the faculties of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.” Faculties are a priest’s authorization from his home diocese to do ministry there or elsewhere.
But the letter actually said, “Father Ernest Paone does possess the faculties of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.”
The diocese revised not just the date but its entire characterization of the case. It originally said it “acted repeatedly to keep Paone from active ministry wherever he was located” beginning in 1994, when it was alerted to allegations against him.
Now, the website of the diocesan newspaper, the Pittsburgh Catholic, acknowledges Paone retained faculties to do ministry until 2002 — a “decision that would not be made today” but that reflected “the difficulties of trying to remove a priest from ministry against his will in an era before Church law had provisions to help bishops do so.”
The grand jury accused more than 90 Pittsburgh priests of abuse over seven decades.
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