PENNSYLVANIA
Whispers in the Loggia
All of 36 hours after the breaking of abuse and coverup in Boston won the Oscar for Best Picture – and as the Vatican’s all-powerful CFO, Cardinal George Pell, testifies from Rome to a national inquiry probing the church’s response in his native Australia – Catholicism’s long, horrid road of scandal has erupted anew in the US, in a development likely to invite fresh scrutiny across the map.
In a blistering 147-page report released this morning, a two-year long Pennsylvania grand jury detailed a sweeping investigation of allegations and neglect over four decades in the diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, which covers eight counties in the state’s central-southern tier. Among other findings, the panel disclosed evidence of the abuse of “hundreds” of minors by “at least 50 priests” during the cited period, alleging that, even into recent times, multiple clerics with known allegations remained in some form of public ministry for years after the Dallas Charter’s zero-tolerance provisions became church law – including one as recently as October 2015 – while the largely rural, 95,000-member diocese’s previous two bishops “wrote their legacy in the tears of children” over years of willingness to squelch public knowledge or consequences on the reported crimes.
Citing the deaths of alleged abusers, expired statutes of limitations on the living and instances of “deeply traumatized victims being unable to testify in a court of law,” no charges could be filed, but Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane stressed that the investigation remains ongoing. Even now, however, today’s filing asserts that “the grand jury is concerned the purge of predators is taking too long,” likewise seeing fit to blast the diocese’s “Allegation Review Board” – normally known as a “Lay Review Board,” the diocesan body mandated by the Charter – as ineffective, terming its mandate only “as real as any bishop may want it to be” and adding that the group’s practices reflect a mission of “fact-finding for litigation, not a victim-service function.” (Emphasis original.)
Built upon a catalogue of the allegations against 34 diocesan priests – a trove collected from testimony and a 2015 state raid of the diocese’s personnel files – beyond the graphic accounts of assaults committed by men the report repeatedly terms “monsters,” the grand jury depicts the late Bishop James Hogan (who led the diocese from 1966-86) and his now-retired successor, Bishop Joseph Adamec (1986-2010), as brazenly driven to avert civil accountability when reports of clerical misconduct would arise.
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