PENNSYLVANIA
Go Erie
Pat Howard
814-870-1721
September 18, 2016
ERIE, Pa. — Fifteen years after The Boston Globe’s reporting first exposed its horrors and this newspaper did its best to keep faith with those preyed upon here, I figured the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal was past its power to shock.
Then I sat down last spring with a big sheaf of paper in a binder clip and made myself read every word. The grand jury report on the crimes and cover-ups in the Catholic Diocese of Altoona/Johnstown brought back that familiar, stomach-turning mix of sorrow and rage.
Even in the stilted, metronomic language of court documents, the overweening power and self-regard of the church hierarchy is palpable in those pages. So is the theft of innocence and peace from hundreds of children who were violated under the cover of an institution whose stewards cared more about stature and scandal than the serial abuse of children.
The crimes documented in that report are now largely beyond the reach of the law — shielded by passing time, the statute of limitations and in some cases the deaths of the predators and their protectors. With criminal prosecution impossible in most cases, public exposure — the plain, ugly truth — is the closest thing to justice available.
The grand jury’s report helped to galvanize an effort in the state Legislature to allow some victims to reach back through the years and sue in civil court. It passed overwhelmingly in the House before a Senate committee — in the face of aggressive opposition by the church’s lobbying arm and its hierarchy, including Erie Bishop Lawrence T. Persico — in June stripped the bill of its retroactive provisions.
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