UNITED STATES
Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Jan 2, 2014
To its credit, the archdiocese of Philadelphia responded to a Pennsylvania appeals court’s overturning of the criminal conviction of Msgr. William Lynn last week with the statement: “We recognize that today’s news is especially difficult for survivors and their families. We profoundly regret their pain.”
Whether their pain will be alleviated by yesterday’s news that the archdiocese has helped post Lynn’s $250,000 bail may be doubted. But at least Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput didn’t follow the lead of the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue in acclaiming the man who managed sexual abuse cases for the archdiocese for many years and denouncing those who wanted to hold him accountable.
“The guilty parties that worked overtime to convict an innocent man—they include attorneys, judges, newspapers, professional “victims’ groups,” activists, TV talking heads—have been disgraced,” Donohue wrote. “Msgr. Lynn spent 18 months in prison because of dishonest people who harbor an anti-Catholic agenda. We expect he will soon be released. God bless him.”
To understand what innocence means in this context, It is important to understand the basis for the appeals court’s action. The statute under which Lynn was convicted applied to ”a parent, guardian or other person supervising the welfare of a child under 18 years of age” — and the court disagreed with the prosecution’s theory, accepted by the trial judge, that Lynn had supervisory responsibility for the welfare of the child abused by Rev. Edward V. Avery. Yet it made sufficiently clear that the conviction would have stood had Lynn been charged under the statute as it was revised in 2007, extending responsibility explicitly to ”a person that employs or supervises such a person”:
Constrained by our standard of review, we cannot dispute that the Commonwealth presented more than adequate evidence to sufficiently demonstrate that Appellant the prioritized the Archdiocese’s reputation over the safety of potential victims of sexually abusive priests and, by inference, that the same prioritization dominated Appellant’s handling of Avery…
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