PHILADELPHIA (PA)
The Inquirer
August 13, 2018
By Peter Smith & Liz Navratil
For two years, the 23 members of the grand jury investigating Catholic dioceses heard devastating stories of sexual abuse from victims.
They heard from perpetrators. And they heard testimony and saw documents of how bishops often failed to protect children, even putting them in harm’s way from known abusers.
Then in April, in one of the last sessions of their two-year term in downtown Pittsburgh, they heard from a bishop directly. And they were angry.
“When you sit there for two years listening to victims and also to abusers … that is very difficult on the jurors,” Erie Bishop Lawrence Persico said Friday.
He said it was important for him to face the truth, both for the sake of the victims and the sake of the church. “There are two victims, the victims who are actually sexually abused, but there are also victims in the people of God,” he said. “Everything they believed in, it makes it so difficult for them. Because if you can’t trust your bishops and priests, who can you trust? And we certainly haven’t lived up to that trust.”
The state Supreme Court has set a Tuesday deadline for the release, in redacted form, of the grand jury’s long-anticipated report. It delves into seven decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups in six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania.
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.