PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Washington Post
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 22, 2005; Page A03
After a three-year investigation, a grand jury in Philadelphia reported yesterday that two leading figures in the U.S. Roman Catholic hierarchy, Cardinals John Krol and Anthony Bevilacqua, deliberately concealed the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by at least 63 priests in that city from 1967 to 2002.
The grand jury also found that the Philadelphia Archdiocese kept 10 accused child molesters in active ministry even after June 2002, when all the U.S. bishops promised in Dallas to remove any priest who had ever faced a credible allegation of abuse. Two accused priests are still in ministry in Philadelphia, prosecutors said.
The scathing, 418-page report vents the grand jury's frustration that it was unable to indict anybody. It says there is clear evidence in church files that Krol, who died in 1996, and Bevilacqua, who retired two years ago, "enabled and excused" abuse by transferring accused priests from parish to parish without warning parishioners or informing police.
Among the priests they protected, the grand jury said, was one who raped an 11-year-old girl and then took her in for an abortion, and another who groped a teenage girl while she lay immobilized in traction in a hospital bed after a car accident.