PENNSYLVANIA
GoErie
The Erie diocese is among several in Pennsylvania under investigation by a statewide grand jury related to what the diocese in a statement termed “past and present allegations of sexual abuse of children in the diocese.”
It was the Catholic Diocese of Erie’s equivalent of a legal ad, published to note the dispatching of an unpleasant piece of church business.
The notice, in the March 5 issue of the diocese’s Faith Life newspaper, opened with a declarative sentence that set a welcome and overdue precedent. It passed along word that a priest had gotten a pink slip from the pope.
“On Nov. 8, 2016,” it read, “Samuel Barton Slocum, formerly a priest of the Diocese of Erie, was dismissed from the clerical state by the Holy Father, Pope Francis.”
The notice doesn’t detail Slocum’s transgressions. But something is known about him because he faced what so many other priests eluded under the cover of the hierarchy — a criminal case and conventional justice.
He wasn’t accused of sexual abuse, but rather of continuing inappropriate contact with a 15-year-old boy even after the boy’s mother told him to stop. Slocum, who had been pastor of a parish south of Bradford, was convicted in 2012 and sentenced by a McKean County judge to two years of probation. He never returned to active ministry.
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