ALLENTOWN (PA)
The Morning Call
August 14, 2018
By Emily Opilo and Tim Darragh
A scathing grand jury report released Tuesday reveals accusations of sexual abuse against 301 priests, whose actions went unchecked for decades in dioceses across Pennsylvania, including Allentown.
Instead of reporting pedophiles, dioceses routinely shuffled them from parish to parish, enabling them to prey upon new victims, the document shows. The statewide grand jury spent two years on what may be the most exhaustive investigation of the church taken on by a state. It covered allegations in the Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton dioceses, which collectively minister to more than 1.7 million Catholics.
The 23 members of the grand jury took testimony from dozens of witnesses. But it was in the church’s own files — more than half a million pages of internal diocesan documents in “secret archives” — that the grand jury found the names of more than a thousand children who were victimized.
“We believe that the real number — of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward — is in the thousands,” the report noted.
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