ALASKA
Anchorage Press
It’s easy and tempting to say nice things about someone after he or she passes away. In the case of just-deceased Alaska Catholic Archbishop Francis Hurley, however, we hope Catholic officials are careful about overdoing it. Praising him, we in the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) fear, rubs even more salt into the already-deep and often still-fresh wounds of hundreds of Alaskans who were sexually abused by priests during Hurley’s tenure, and thousands of parishioners who were betrayed by decisions Hurley made.
While Hurley surely accomplished much good during his career, frankly, his track record on protecting kids from predators was very poor. Evidence clearly shows that he repeatedly put children in harm’s way. In 2002, when US bishops—under extreme public pressure—finally adopted a nationwide abuse policy, Hurley argued against it. And just five years ago, he advocated returning some child-molesting clerics to ministry and relaxing the church’s already poorly-enforced “zero tolerance” policy.
Consider Fr. Timothy Crowley. He’s a priest who was removed from his Michigan parish when his church supervisors deemed him “credibly accused” of molesting a boy for eight years in the 1980s. (The Lansing diocese paid the victim $200,000.) But two years later, with little or no warning to parents, parishioners or the public, Hurley welcomed him to Alaska, housed him at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Turnagain, and gave him a job as a spokesperson for the Archdiocese.
Or consider Archbishop Robert Sanchez. He’s the former Archbishop of Santa Fe who was accused of having sexual intercourse with at least 11 women, some of them teenagers. According to BishopAccountability.org, an independent archive of the church’s abuse crisis, Sanchez “also had extensive knowledge of the sexual abuse by priests and rarely did anything to punish or remove them.”
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