HARRISBURG (PA)
The Huffington Post
August 16, 2018
By Angelina Chapin
The church has a history of handling child abuse allegations internally ― which protects priests and endangers children.
One of the most damning findings from the recent grand jury investigation into widespread child sex abuse in Pennsylvania Catholic Church dioceses is how leaders covered up the misconduct. “It’s like a playbook for concealing the truth,” wrote the grand jury in its report, outlining seven tactics that church officials followed, such as using euphemisms for rape, shuffling predatory priests among dioceses and conducting bogus internal investigations.
While advocates said the Pennsylvania report is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind for any one state, bombshell reports of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church are hardly new. From the time The Boston Globe published a 2002 exposé on clergy sexual abuse, there have been many high-profile incidents, including an Australian cardinal charged with child sex offenses in 2017 and more recently, an investigation into rampant sex abuse in Chile’s Catholic Church.
Experts told HuffPost that sexual abuse continues in large part because the church ignores laws enacted to protect kids from harm. In particular, they said clergy regularly violate mandatory reporting laws, which require certain groups to inform child protective services or the police about suspected child abuse. But changing the church’s deeply rooted culture of silence and trust into one that holds itself accountable to law enforcement is a big task.
Sherryll Kraizer, the founder and director of the Coalition for Children, said the Catholic Church protects “pedophile priests” instead of children. “It’s a culture that they are struggling with giving up,” she said. “The law is clear, and the criminality is clear, and the sin is clear.”
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.