Diocese Must Accept Its Share of Blame

Gallup Independent
May 2, 2015

http://gallupindependent.com/

Bishops who served in the Diocese of Gallup have a long history of keeping secrets from its members and the public.

Bernard T. Espelage, who served from 1940 to 1969, and Jerome J. Hastrich, who served from 1969 to 1990, both allowed priests who served in other dioceses and who had been disciplined or had been sent to centers specializing in treating priests accused of child molestation to be transferred to the Gallup Diocese. None of this was reported to the members of the congregation that they were assigned to serve and many have now been named as committing the same crimes in this diocese.

Donald Edmond Pelotte, who served from 1990 to 2008, kept many priest sex abuse cases secret as he did aspects of his personal life that became public during his last couple of years of his administration.

James Sean Wall, the current bishop, promised members of the diocese and the public when he was appointed in 2009 that he would be more open about allegations of misconduct by priests. Within months of that promise, however, the diocese once again began keeping these matters under wraps.

Given the position of the bishops of this diocese on the subject of priest sexual abuse, we shouldn’t have been surprised when the diocese’s insurance company, Catholic Mutual, filed a complaint in a federal bankruptcy court recently charging the diocese with failure to provide them information about sex abuse cases in this diocese. The prevailing attitude seems to continue to be to sweep these kinds of cases under the rug in the hopes that they are never made public.

We have learned to expect this type of behavior from diocese leaders which is why we have used every source we have been able to find to bring these cases out in the open.

We have found a lot of them but we also believe that there are others that the diocese has managed to keep secret.

And we were especially shocked to find out from recent filings in the diocese’s bankruptcy case that there are allegations of an incident of sexual abuse that occurred just last summer.

This hasn’t been made public and we can’t help but wonder if the diocese has violated laws that require diocese officials to make these kinds of allegations known to law enforcement authorities.

Since the diocese is still keeping these kinds of things secret, we can’t help but wonder if there have been more current cases that are being swept under the rug. Is the diocese continuing to turn its back on the safety of the children it has pledged to protect?

Another aspect of the diocese’s internal affairs has been made public in light of the recent bankruptcy filings and that is how much money the church is spending in legal fees dealing with the recent sexual abuse cases filed by a number of sex abuse victims.

The diocese is facing spending millions of dollars to defend these lawsuits but the interesting thing is that it that there is a good possibility that it will spend even more in legal fees in connection with those cases.

It would seem to us that the diocese would have been better off both financially and morally if it treated these suits as a chance to show how serious it takes these kinds of charges and how it wants to be open and fair to those who it failed to protect in the past.

Sadly, this is not happening and what we continue to see is a diocese that refuses to accept its share of blame for allowing this to occur.

In this space only does the opinion of the Gallup Independent Editorial Board appear.