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	Bevilacqua Accused of Shielding Abusers By Craig Smith Pittsburgh Tribune-review February 12, 2011 http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_722586.html Former Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who was Pittsburgh's bishop from 1983 to 1987, and four others are accused of crimes stemming from a two-year grand jury investigation into sex-abuse complaints in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Two Roman Catholic priests, a former priest and a Catholic school teacher are charged with raping young boys. Bevilacqua is accused of transferring problem priests to new parishes without warning anyone of prior sex-abuse complaints. Bevilacqua, 87, became archbishop of Philadelphia in 1988 and retired in July 2003, serving as apostolic administrator until his successor's installation that October. Bevilacqua's lawyer told investigators that the prelate suffers from cancer and dementia. "Bottom line — one of the things that this shows is that while church officials have claimed they cleaned things up, that's not the case," said Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. The organization urged Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali to "err on the side of protecting innocent kids and vulnerable adults" and suspend priests with credible allegations lodged against them. Rigali vowed to take the grand jury report and its suggestions for reforms seriously. He said there are "no archdiocesan priests in ministry today who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them." A lay Catholic group, BishopAccountability.org, praised District Attorney Seth Williams' decision to pursue church leaders, saying, "To date, not one bishop or church official has spent a single day in jail for enabling crimes against children." The grand jury investigation is the second such inquiry in the city. In a rare if not unprecedented move, the grand jury Thursday charged Monsignor William Lynn with endangering children in his role as secretary for clergy under Bevilacqua. Lynn, 60, had a duty to protect children in the five-county archdiocese and refer priests with known sexual problems for rehabilitation or prosecution, Williams said. "He instead lied to parishioners and went out of his way to reassign priests without telling pastors or principals that they were pedophiles," Williams said. Lynn's lawyer said the two endangerment counts, which carry a maximum 14-year prison term, should not apply because Lynn did not have children under his care. "We certainly don't concede for a moment that he knew he was putting children at risk," attorney Tom Bergstrom said. American dioceses paid hundreds of millions of dollars to abuse victims to settle civil lawsuits in recent years, but criminal charges are uncommon. A small number of accused clergy have been prosecuted and convicted since 2002, when the clergy sex-abuse crisis erupted in Boston, but no bishop or church administrator has gone to trial for failure to protect children from accused priests. A scathing 2005 grand jury report found church officials ignored credible accusations against 63 priests in the Philadelphia archdiocese over several decades. Frustrated prosecutors concluded then they could not file criminal charges because the statute of limitations on the crimes had expired. Pennsylvania later revised laws to give child sex-assault victims more time to report abuse. The current case, referred by the archdiocese, involves two victims: one of them a boy allegedly abused by two priests and his sixth-grade teacher at St. Jerome Parish, starting when he was a 10-year-old altar boy in 1998. The Rev. Charles Engelhardt, now 64, and the Rev. Edward Avery, now 68, raped the boy in the church sacristy after Mass, the grand jury report charged. Engelhardt allegedly gave the boy wine and showed him pornography. He told Avery about the encounter, prompting Avery to demand that the boy perform a striptease after Mass, followed by oral and anal sex, the report stated. Bernard Shero, 48, the boy's sixth-grade teacher the next year, raped him during a ride home from school, then made him walk home, the report stated. Avery had been on the church's radar since 1992, when a 29-year-old medical student told the archdiocese that the priest had abused him in the 1970s and 1980s. Avery went through six months of sex-offender treatment, although his parish was told that he took leave for unspecified "health" reasons, the report stated. Though the center recommended keeping him away from vulnerable minors, Lynn recommended him for a parish position with an elementary school, authorities said. Bevilacqua agreed but sent him instead to a different parish, St. Jerome. Soon after Rigali succeeded Bevilacqua, he deemed the medical student's abuse claims credible. He removed Avery from his priestly duties in December 2003. According to the grand jury report, Bevilacqua could not be charged at the time because there was no evidence linking him to the alleged cover-up of the assaults
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