PENNSYLVANIA
Daily Times
One week ago, “Spotlight” captured the Academy Award for Best Picture, detailing the gritty investigative journalism at the Boston Globe that blew the roof off the rampant problem of the sexual abuse of children by priests in the Boston Archdiocese.
In a sad bit of irony, just two days later Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane was shining another “spotlight” on the same problem, this time much closer to home.
In a horrifying 147-page grand jury report, Kane laid out the sordid details behind decades of predator priests who preyed on children in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese.
The saga was hauntingly familiar, especially here in the Philadelphia region, and not just because of the Oscar-winning film.
The grand jury report into the depravity in Altoona mimicked the findings of a grand jury report issued a decade ago detailing similar issues in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.
The Altoona report cites dozens of priests abusing hundreds of innocent children over a period of nearly a half-century. Even more damning, once again the grand jury found the leaders of the archdiocese seeming more concerned with their reputation and that of the church, as opposed to the kids who were routinely being molested.
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