BATON ROUGE (LA)
The Advocate
August 19, 2018
By Lea Skene
Less than a week after news of the latest Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, leaders of the Baton Rouge Diocese addressed what they described as “a spiritual crisis in our church.”
A Pennsylvania grand jury report released Tuesday — referencing more than 300 “predator priests” and more than 1,000 child victims within that state alone — found that church leaders covered up several decades of sexual abuse, often adhering to a series of common practices that reads “like a playbook for concealing the truth.”
“Our shame is intensified by the sometimes failure of church leadership to hold abusers accountable,” Bishop Emeritus Robert Muench said during Sunday morning Mass at St. Joseph Cathedral in downtown Baton Rouge. “These recent news reports have revealed a mishandling of reported allegations (and) a covering up of sinful actions. … Understandably there are concerns about how prolific such abuses have been throughout the (Catholic) Church throughout the years.”
Muench quoted Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who pointed to “the failure of episcopal leadership” that left “scores of beloved children of God … to face an abuse of power alone.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.