PENNSYLVANIA
Daily Free Press
March 2, 2016
A grand jury report released Tuesday detailed two bishops’ cover-up of a Pennsylvania sex abuse scandal involving more than 50 priests sexually abusing hundreds of minors over the course of 40 years, The Guardian reported.
One bishop involved in the scandal, Joseph Adamec, threatened abuse victims with excommunication and created a “payout” chart detailing how much the church would have to pay victims to settle their claims, The Guardian reported. The amounts ranged from $10,000 for victims of groping to as much as $175,000 for victims of sexual intercourse.
The grand jury said it was “concerned the purge of predators is taking too long,” according to a statement reported by The Guardian. The grand jury also found “the police and civil authorities would often defer to the diocese” when accusations of abuse would come up.
The clergy involved in the sexual abuse cases cannot be taken to court, either because they are dead or because enough time has passed to have the statute of limitations go into effect.
Cases of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have surfaced frequently in the past few years, especially in the wake of “Spotlight,” the Academy Award-winning film about the Boston Globe Spotlight Team’s investigation into the Boston Archdiocese’s cover-up of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. The movie documented the lengths to which the investigative team had to go to bring the truth about the scandal to light.
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