Website Publishes Claims against Phila. Priests

By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Philadelphia Inquirer
January 22, 2013

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20130122_Character_witnesses_testify_in_priest_abuse_trial.html

A watchdog group that runs an online clearinghouse of clergy-sex abuse allegations on Tuesday began publishing the first of 5,700 pages of documents about past claims against Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests.

The group, BishopAccountability.org, culled the documents from evidence introduced at last year's landmark child-endangerment trial of Msgr. William J. Lynn.

The records include confidential church memos, emails, psychological evaluations and correspondence among archdiocese officials, accusers and more than 20 priests who served in area parishes over the past half-century.

The allegations are not new - all were aired in two grand jury reports or at Lynn's trial - and the accused priests they mention are either dead, defrocked or removed from ministry. But the website offers the first unfiltered public look at details of those claims, and of documents locked for years in what the archdiocese called its Secret Archives.

Many were drafted by Lynn and approved by Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, or their predecessors, and chronicle what church officials knew and did after a priest was first accused of abusing a minor.

Terence McKiernan, the president of BishopAccountability, said the records add a new layer of public understanding to the grand jury investigations and prosecution of Philadelphia-area priests that he said were unlike any in the country.

"The grand juries were based on the documents, did groundbreaking investigative work, stressed the importance of [statute of limitations] reform, and ultimately achieved the first true accountability, with the Lynn conviction," McKiernan said. The records, he said, reveal "the bedrock of the process."

A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had no comment on the publication of the documents, nor did District Attorney Seth Williams' office, which gathered them over a decade.

The first batch posted - about 200 records - focus on the archdiocese's handling of Edward Avery, a former priest whose case became a pillar of the prosecution against Lynn.

Jurors found that Lynn, who investigated misconduct by priests and recommended their assignments to Bevilacqua, endangered children by letting Avery remain in public ministry in the 1990s despite concluding he had previously molested a teen.

The documents include memos in which Lynn recounts advising Avery to stay "low-key" after being reassigned to a Northeast Philadelphia parish, as well as a letter the mother of one of Avery's accusers wrote to Lynn in 2002, more than a year before church officials finally removed him.

"If he is anywhere near children, you have a problem," she wrote.

Avery pleaded guilty last year to sexually assaulting a Northeast Philadelphia altar boy in the late 1990s. He drew headlines again last week when, during the child-sex abuse trial of another priest, Avery recanted his guilty plea.

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Since its 2004 inception in the wake of Boston church scandal, BishopAccountability.org has posted thousands of searchable pages based on civil and criminal records and news reports about investigations into individuals, religious orders and archdioceses.

Readers across the country - and occasionally the world - have used documents from the website to expose accused priests. Last summer, Widener University administrators confronted a Franciscan priest who was working there as a dean after a tipster alerted the school to a decade-old allegation in a filing on BishopAccountability.org.

The dean, Michael Ledoux, resigned.

"We definitely hear stories," McKiernan said. "We're sure that we don't hear them all."

The group continues to log the abuse claims because most dioceses do not, he said.

"We're about to write to the Catholic bishops and urge them to write their own lists," McKiernan said. "I honestly don't really get why they don't."

The Philadelphia Archdiocese is one of about two dozen that had pledged transparency and created a website to identify priests who had been accused of abuse. But even that website has not been updated to reflect the removal last summer of a priest over a credible child-abuse allegation.