PENNSYLVANIA
Bucks County Courier Times
Posted: Monday, March 21, 2016
By REP. THOMAS P. MURT
First, it was Penn State, then it was the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Now, just when you think that scandals involving the sexual abuse of children can’t get any worse, we learn about yet another one.
After a prolonged and extensive investigation, law enforcement professionals have uncovered literally mounds of evidence of countless cases of child sexual abuse and a multi-year cover-up by Roman Catholic Church officials.
In Western Pennsylvania, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown has been found to have knowingly protected priests who were known child molesters. The diocese, through church connections and pathetic public officials, protected the child-molesting priests from law enforcement and prosecution.
Perhaps the worst crime they committed is never taking subsequent action to protect children from these child-molesting priests. When a priest was found to have sexually abused a child, the normal protocol was to simply move the priest to another parish, offer a cash payment to the family and/or to send the child-molesting priest on retreat, only to have him returned to ministry in the future.
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