PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Daily Beast
August 17, 2018
By Michael Daly
The monsignor who gambled and traveled on the Archdiocese’s dime remained behind bars as a grand jury reported on the crimes of his peers who preyed on children.
Rape and molest trusting young boys for half a century, but do not touch the Catholic Church’s money.
Therein lies the lesson offered in Pennsylvania by Father Francis Rogers and Monsignor William Dombrow.
Rogers’ decades of depredations were detailed in a grand jury report on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia made public in 2005, and which was finally followed this week by a similar grand jury report on six other dioceses in Pennsylvania.
“The Grand Jury will never be able to determine how many boys Father Francis P. Rogers raped and sexually abused in his more than 50 years as a priest,” noted the earlier report on sexual assault committed by an unholy host of priests. “Nor, probably, will we or anyone else be able to calculate the number of boys the Archdiocese could have saved from sexual abuse had it investigated potential victims rather than protecting itself from scandal and shielding this sexually abusive priest. We have learned of at least three victims who we believe would not have been abused had the Archdiocese taken decisive action when it learned of Fr. Rogers’ “familiarity” with boys. We find that the Archdiocese received a litany of verifiable reports beginning shortly after Fr. Rogers’ 1946 ordination and continuing for decades about his serious misconduct with, and abuse of, boys. ‘
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