SEATTLE (WA)
KUOW-FM [Seattle WA]
July 12, 2024
By Gustavo Sagrero Álvarez
On Friday, officials at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., and in Rome received a letter from Seattle area survivors of child sexual abuse and their advocates. They’re asking top officials to investigate leadership at the Archdiocese of Seattle for allegedly failing to comply with the Washington State Attorney General’s investigation into the sexual abuse allegations against its clergy members.
The letter follows a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Bob Ferguson in May, an effort to compel the Seattle Archdiocese to turn over documents related to those sexual abuse allegations.
“The Church has more information than is shared with the public,” Ferguson said at a press conference about the lawsuit. “It has released names, but has not released its files on these abusive priests. No one has read files. The purpose of our investigation is to uncover whether the Church has misused charitable trust funds to cover up systemic sexual abuse and shield abuse of priests.”
The letter sent to the Catholic Church’s top brass on Friday was signed by members of the Catholic Accountability Project, a consortium of advocates for victims of clergy sexual abuse. At a press conference Thursday, advocates said they want full transparency from Church leadership.
“We want to know our stories, we need to know our stories,” said 84-year-old Mary Dispenza, a survivor of abuse in California.
“I grew up in the Diocese of Los Angeles, and they ultimately did the right thing,” she continued. “They have freed the stories. And it made a difference to me just as a survivor to see my stories and also to understand the cover ups of the Church. It’s given me the energy I bring today, to fight for this to happen.”
This week, the Catholic Accountability Project handed off to the Attorney General’s Office thousands of whistleblower documents connected to statewide clergy sexual abuse allegations. Those documents, advocates say, are the kind of files Church leaders across the state have failed to turn over to the Attorney General’s Office.
In a statement previously provided to KUOW, Seattle Archdiocese Archbishop Paul Etienne acknowledged similar abuse investigations in other states, but said Ferguson doesn’t have the jurisdiction to subpoena Church documents because of religious exemptions in state charitable-trust law. He said it would be up to a judge to order the release of the documents.
“Because of this clear religious exemption, we simply cannot comply. Doing so puts First Amendment rights and the foundational concept of separation of church and state at risk,” Etienne wrote. “This does not just impact the Archdiocese of Seattle — it impacts all the Catholic dioceses in the state, all other religious institutions in the state and the protection of constitutional rights of every citizen.”
In 2019, the Seattle Archdiocese implemented its own accountability measure meant to hold clergy participating in and covering up child sexual abuse. That procedure, the Archdiocese said, is meant to align with Catholic Church canon law, and involves a third-party complaint intake process.
81-year-old Reverend James Connell, a retired Catholic priest from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, helped pen the letter sent to the Vatican Friday. He said the Seattle Archdiocese is getting in the way of justice for survivors by not cooperating with the subpoena.
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“I am very much concerned that the church has been [putting this off for] so many years, so long, so long, so long, and this doesn’t get resolved,” Connell said.
In the worst case scenario, he said, Vatican politics, bureaucracy, and secrecy could get in the way of advocates’ request for an administrative investigation.
“The issue needs to be really focused in the civil courts, not the church court. And obstruction of justice is the issue,” he said.
A hearing over Ferguson’s lawsuit against the Seattle Archdiocese is scheduled for Friday afternoon in the King County Superior Court.