HARRISBURG (PA)
News-Sentinel
August 16, 2018
By Kevin Leininger
On Oct. 14, 2002, I reported Michelle Bennett’s claim that the Rev. William Ehrman had sexually molested her repeatedly in the rectory of New Haven’s St. John the Baptist Church more than 50 years earlier when she was in the fourth grade. Less than one month later, then-Bishop John D’arcy attended mass and informed the congregation an investigation affirmed the credibility of Bennett’s story.
“Christ said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life,’ ” D’Arcy said. “The church is a place of truth, and you have a right to hear the truth.”
“Catholic” (with a small “c”) means “universal,” but there is a world of difference between the response by D’Arcy — who supposedly had been exiled to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend for blowing the whistle of pedophile priests in Boston — and the Roman Catholic Church’s corrupt response to abuse by six dioceses in Pennsylvania as outlined in a scathing new grand jury report.
The Pittsburgh-based investigation identified more than 1,000 victims of alleged sexual abuse, rape, impregnation, coerced abortion and other crimes against church and state, committed by 301 priests and lay teachers, and abuse of the trustingly innocent by the supposedly godly only begins to reflect the unimaginable human cost. As Bennett told me in 2002, “Catholic girls did as they were told. I accepted blame for what happened because priests were ‘God’s people’ and could do no wrong. Therefore, I was bad.”
But there will and should be an institutional cost for the actions and inactions by church leaders detailed in the 900-page document. According to the grand jury, the church leaders used euphemisms to conceal the truth (“Never say ‘rape,’ say ‘inappropriate contact’ “), assigned untrained clergy members to conduct investigations, concealed the real reasons for the transfer of abusive priests, often failed to notify authorities of abuse claims, and much more.
“The main thing was not to help children but to avoid ‘scandal,’ ” the grand jury concluded. “That is not our word, but theirs; it appears over and over again in the documents we recovered.”
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