UNITED STATES
Verdict Justia
August 16, 2018
By Marci A. Hamilton
Attorney General Josh Shapiro issued an extraordinary grand jury report detailing sexual abuse going back 70 years in six Roman Catholic dioceses in the state of Pennsylvania. The report itself is nearly 900 pages while the responses appended add another 450 pages. Here it is. Pennsylvania now has the distinction of having every Catholic diocese subjected to a grand jury investigative report: Philadelphia, then Johnstown/Altoona, and now the rest of them. This monumental achievement fills in more details of arrogant and thoughtless bishops, craven pedophile priests, and a system that rewards the secrecy that endangers children. While we have seen this before, it’s still shocking to read just how impervious this institution has been to the suffering of little children.
It is curious that in the United States, the clergy sex abuse studies are only at the state level while other countries like Australia and Ireland have conducted studies sponsored by the national government. I posit that it is excessive timidity on the part of our elected representatives afraid of their shadows if they publicly criticize a religious organization—even for crimes against children. Thus, Members of Congress and the Presidents have been MIA when it comes to clergy sex abuse. They couldn’t wait to pass legislation to address the abuse of Olympic athletes, which happened this year not long after the Larry Nassar scandal broke, but there has yet to be a single hearing or even a speech by a national leader addressing let alone condemning the systemic sexual abuse of thousands of children across the United States.
The theme of the report buttresses what we have learned across the globe in the last 20 years: the Catholic hierarchy has callously covered up the criminal behavior of its in-house pedophile priests, endangering children in the process. And the facts are locked away in secret archives. We need to pause for a moment to reflect on the existence of these “secret archives.” When the bishops make the specious argument that they should not be liable for old claims because, as they love to say, “memories fade and witnesses disappear,” remember that their own files have the facts pristinely preserved—and utterly unavailable to the victims without the aid of the courts.
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