UNITED STATES
The Detroit News
By Deb Price / The Detroit News
Difficult as it is, looking squarely at what happened to the Catholic children of Philadelphia is the only place to start:
• At age 11, one girl began being raped by her priest. He impregnated her, took her for an abortion, then continued abusing her until she was 17. He had at least 16 victims.
• After waking up drunk in his priest's bed, one boy realized the priest was sexually assaulting him while three other priests fondled themselves.
• A 12-year-old boy was told that his mother had given the priest permission to repeatedly rape him.
In 418 unflinching pages, a Philadelphia grand jury reported Sept. 21 on the three-year investigation that enabled it to identify 63 sexual predators in the Catholic priesthood who abused hundreds of children, robbing them of "their innocence, their virginity, their security and their faith."
But those 63 horribly sick men weren't the only ones to blame. The church's hierarchy, including two cardinals, made sure the cops were never called, the investigation concluded. "Sexually abusive priests," the grand jury says, "were either left quietly in place or 'recycled' to unsuspecting new parishes -- vastly expanding the number of children who were abused."