VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Patriot-News - PennLive [Mechanicsburg PA]
April 21, 2025
By Ivey DeJesus
In 2018, Pennsylvania became the epicenter of the Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis with the release of a statewide grand jury report detailing decades-old concealment of the systemic abuse of hundreds of minors at the hands of more than 300 priests.
Scores of survivors of abuse across Pennsylvania looked to Pope Francis, widely considered a church reformist, to bring about transformative and substantive change in the church that could lead to healing and closure for the many broken adults who had suffered at the hands of priests.
For many survivors of clergy sex abuse that day never came.
Pope Francis, 88, died Monday morning, the Vatican announced, after battling multiple health issues that led to his hospitalization for five weeks earlier this year.
On Sunday, the pontiff, despite doctors’ orders, made an Easter Sunday appearance on St. Peter’s Square in the popemobile, after a private meeting with Vice President JD Vance.
Amid worldwide expressions of grief, some survivors of clergy sex abuse in Pennsylvania are reflecting on the pontiff’s passing, saying that he ultimately did no better than his predecessors in assuaging their pain or trauma.
Survivors say Francis failed to aggressively go after criminal clerics; and he failed to enact a universal zero-tolerance law for abuse and cover-up. Instead, he shielded clerics and their records, and failed to institute the kinds of church procedures that would prevent abuse like theirs from ever happening again in the Catholic Church.
“It’s a missed opportunity,” said Shaun Dougherty, a survivor of clergy sex abuse. “We had the Vatican summit in 2019 where Pope Francis called every bishop and cardinal from around the world together. Pope Francis called the sexual assaults and the rapes that occurred to all the survivors around the world crimes. But his missed opportunity and his failure as pope when it comes to child sex abuse is that he called it a crime, but he didn’t bother to make it a crime.”
In the wake of the revelations detailed in the 2018 grand jury report led by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Dougherty emerged as one of the faces of survivors who leveraged their horrific story in the pursuit of state law reform.
As a boy, Dougherty had been molested for three years by his priest from the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese. His story was part of the 2016 grand jury report into child sexual abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese. The second youngest of nine kids, Dougherty was 10 and a fifth-grader at St. Clement School when he met Father George Koharchik in 1980.
Koharchik, his basketball coach and religion teacher, groomed Dougherty and eventually sexually assaulted him.
Years after enduring the pain, the trauma, substance abuse, and even a suicide attempt, Dougherty became an outspoken advocate for clergy sex abuse survivors in Pennsylvania.
Within months after the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, Francis summoned all bishops and episcopal conferences to Rome where he addressed the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
The Vatican drafted a law making it a crime in the Roman Catholic Church to sexually assault and rape children, but survivors and critics fault the church for never enacting it globally nor giving it teeth.
“There was a huge opportunity for the church to rid its walls of these monsters, and he just didn’t do it,” Dougherty said. “The law was presented. It was never enacted. It was never considered. It was never brought up.”
Meanwhile, Francis continued to manage and lead a church in turmoil. Thousands of faithful members lost their trust in the church. Many walked away and never returned.
Among them is Art Baselice for whom Francis did little to ease his profound and enduring trauma.
“He brought absolutely nothing,” said Baselice, whose son Arthur killed himself in 2006 after years of enduring sexual abuse at the hands of a priest in Philadelphia. “All he did was add another layer of misery and distress to our ongoing struggle to find peace. There is no peace. I keep hearing them claim they want to witness God’s healing. Me, too. Where is it?”
Baselice for years has been a committed advocate for survivors of clergy sex abuse, traveling dozens of times to the Capitol with his wife Elaine to attend rallies, and urge lawmakers to reform the statute of limitations. In 2012, he met with then-Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput.
Each time, though, he felt he walked away empty-handed, ever jaded by what, he said, is a secretive and powerful Catholic Church that globally and in Pennsylvania wields powerful influence over lawmakers, impeding legal changes that would prosecute predator priests.
“What does the church really want to do?” Baselice said. “Do they want to admit the truth? Is it in their best interest to say, look, yeah, we know we’ve enabled and protected them, but we’re not going to do that anymore. Are they going to do that? No.”
His son, Arthur, once a straight-A student, developed a heroin addiction after years of sexual abuse at the hands of priest Charles Newman, former president of Archbishop Ryan, the largest Roman Catholic high school in Philadelphia.
Newman was sentenced to prison in 2009 for stealing nearly $1 million from his religious order. Arthur killed himself in 2006.
“I got his ashes,” Baselice said. “I light a candle on his ashes every day. I wear a bracelet with his ashes in it. But, you know, I can’t go anywhere without seeing him.”
Baselice lost his son during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, who is widely regarded as having been ineffective at handling the global cleric sex abuse crisis. The passing of Francis feels like a deja vu.
“To me, when one pope dies, another one takes his place,” he said. “It’s nothing more than a minor tour. What do I do? How do I handle this? What am I supposed to do? Pray for the pope?”
Francis, formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, inherited a church in global crisis and the expectation that he would reform it and refurbish it. When he was installed as leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church in 2013, the estimated 1.4 billion-strong church was already beset by the clergy sex abuse crisis.
In 2002, the Boston Globe published a stunning investigation into widespread clerical abuse of hundreds of children in the country’s largest Catholic diocese. The months-long investigation catapulted the crisis into the global sphere.
By the time Francis became head of the church, Catholics worldwide were demanding accountability, transparency and reform, something his predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Benedict, had failed to deliver.
During his historic visit to the U.S. in 2015, Francis received a raucous reception in Philadelphia, drawing adoring crowds that exceeded a million. Francis had already minted his legacy of compassion, humility and mercy, particularly toward the poor and the marginalized. He commanded the affection and admiration of the majority of Catholics.
Francis did not turn a blind eye to clergy sex abuse, but his effectiveness at dealing with it and bringing about change in the secretive and hierarchical church is a matter of perspective.
Throughout his papacy, Francis issued new laws and guidance to church leaders, including in 2014, when he established the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. A year later, he created a Vatican tribunal to hear cases of bishops who fail to protect children from abusive priests.
He directed church leaders to take a more aggressive role at protecting minors, issuing two decrees – so-called motu propio – once in 2016 and again in 2019. The former specified that “grave causes” called for the removal of a bishop, particularly in cases of “sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults.” The latter required clerics and religious brothers and sisters, including bishops worldwide to report sex abuse cases and sex abuse cover-ups.
Most of these measures were regarded as ineffective by those they most affected. The Francis rules maintained investigations of bishops in the hands of their fellow bishops, with no duty to report to the public or notify civil authorities.
The advisory commission, which has come under criticism, has been ineffective, refusing to implement its recommendations and leading many of its own members to resign in protest. In the 11 years since its formation, the commission has only released a single report, SNAP reported. In 2022, the commission was placed under the authority of a Vatican office known for its own role in cover-up.
“The pontifical commission was a complete joke,” said former state Rep. Mark Rozzi, who spent the better part of his tenure in the Legislature trying to advance statute of limitations reforms for victims of child sex abuse.
“You know, when you would talk to some of the other survivors or some of the people that were the members of that commission who were survivor advocates, they had resigned. They were calling it toothless and the recommendations that they even made to implement in that commission were just completely ignored.”
For Rozzi, the pope’s passing has dredged up emotions that have remain never far from the surface.
At 13, Rozzi was sexually abused by his parochial school priest, who had groomed him for months with hamburgers, beer and pornography before raping him in a rectory shower. The silence he had pledged to himself about the abuse nearly broke his spirit; then in 2009, a second childhood friend, who also had been a victim of Rev. Edward Graff, killed himself. Rozzi channeled the pain and their memories in charting a career in public office – the intent to change Pennsylvania law.
During his 11 years in the Legislature, the Berks County Democrat came to full realization of the power of the Catholic Church. He saw some victories legislatively, but mostly the overwhelming sense that neither he nor any other of the thousands of survivors across the country mattered much at the end of the day.
“I don’t think sadness is the right word to use,” Rozzi said of the pope’s passing. “I think it’s more anger. I still have a lot of anger in me that the church allowed my abuse to happen. The church allowed my predator to transfer from parish to parish and continue abusing kids. That still angers me…They all knew what he was doing and they still continued to look the other way and allowed us, the children, to be abused.”
Rozzi said predator priests got a slap on the wrist, he struggled for years with shame, guilt and the feeling of worthlessness. Amid that turmoil, his statute of limitations expired.
“Pope Francis, he acknowledged it and he slapped out some reforms and removed (Archbishop Theodore) McCarrick and some other high-profile abusers but what he didn’t, what he hasn’t done, is he hasn’t ended the church’s resistance for survivors who are seeking justice in the legal court,” Rozzi said. “He has not told all the churches, all the dioceses across the United States, focus on that. He hasn’t told legislators, ‘back off, let this happen. Let’s have full transparency. Let the cards fall where they will.”
Indeed, Francis mishandled several public and damaging situations that arguably signaled to survivors his true concern for them.
In 2018, Francis dismissed allegations against a Chilean bishop who was accused of covering up alleged abuses by a priest. The pope excoriated victims in his defense of the bishop. In the face of growing protest, Francis acknowledged his mishandling of the crisis and eventually accepted the resignations of three bishops.
That same year, the pontiff accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals, suspending him from public ministry but directing him to lead a “life of prayer and penance in seclusion.”
The McCarrick saga, which featured decades of credible allegations of sex abuse by the powerful prelate, further eroded trust in the church and underscored the enduring church hierarchy that looked away from predator clergy and protected them over their victims.
A Vatican investigation largely found that Francis – like bishops, cardinals and other popes – downplayed or dismissed multiple reports of sexual misconduct by the powerful U.S. Catholic leader.
In August of that year, the Pennsylvania grand jury chronicled abuse allegations against more than 300 priests and other church workers across seven decades, starting in 1947, in six of the state’s eight dioceses. The Vatican months later would put on hold a meeting of U.S. bishops poised to vote on an action plan to deal with predator priests.
“Pope, Francis, while he has been relatively progressive with respect to LGBTQ issues, and he has made some statements about the abuse crisis, he never pulled together the American bishops, who tend to be very conservative, and forced them to stop playing hardball with the victims,” said Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who for years has advocated on behalf of survivors and pushed for statutory reform.
“What we’ve seen over the course of the years is that the law firms that the church is hiring and the tactics that they’re using are getting more and more hurtful to victims. And it’s almost as though the bishops are now taking this very defensive attitude that every victim is an enemy. So, from where I’m sitting, the Vatican has not made things better.”
Over the years, survivors, including Dougherty and Rozzi, have traveled to Rome in the hopes of getting an audience with Francis. It never happened.
“I felt sad for the survivors that keep going over there, because they’re not listening,” Hamilton said. “They’ve never gotten a meeting with anyone, let alone the pope. It seems to me that we should just deal with the truth here and the truth is that there is no pathway to justice through the Vatican.”
Hamilton, who is CEO of CHILD USA, has been instrumental in the reform of statute of limitations laws across the country. The organization has shepherded more than 300 bills in statehouses since 2002; 30 states have revived expired claims, some permanently.
Despite all their advocacy, survivors of child sexual abuse in Pennsylvania have largely failed to effect substantive reform in the law. For decades they have been imploring legislators to reform archaic statutes of limitations, which prevent them from bringing their abusers to justice, but have seen only measured gains.
Under Pennsylvania law: The civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse and trafficking claims against all defendants is age 55. There is no criminal statute of limitations for many child sex abuse offenses; the statute of limitations is age 55 for all other child sex abuse felonies and misdemeanors.
The law is widely regarded as favoring predators over victims.
“Francis could have absolutely ended the Catholic Church’s legal resistance for us trying to seek justice,” Rozzi said. “They have never done that. The cardinals, the bishops in the United States have never, never done that. They act like they want full transparency. Well, open up all the Vatican records internationally, not just across the United States. Let’s see exactly how complicit the Vatican was.”
Francis, formerly Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina, arguably leaves behind a legacy anchored on mercy and compassion for all. He exalted the common humanity of all people and excoriated injustice and greed. Compared to other pontiffs, he lived a simple life.
In January, in a review of the pontiff’s memoir, Hope: The Autobiography, The National Catholic Reporter noted one of his writings: “Melancholy has always been a companion in my life,” the pope wrote.
The book, the outlet noted, is peppered with stories of regret and humiliation “If I consider what is the greatest gift that I desire from the Lord, and have experienced, it is the gift of shame,” Francis wrote.
Mike McDonnell, who was abused as a child by his Philadelphia Archdiocese priest, signaled a measure of the forgiveness that Francis reminded his church was the essence of God.
Francis did more for survivors than his predecessors, McDonnell, lead member for SNAP in Philadelphia, said. He praised him for having reached out to survivors across the world, and for his attempts to bring transparency to the church, however measured.
“The only problem is when it comes to canon law, there’s nothing transparent,” McDonnell said. “We’re not seeing any restrictions being handed down other than some resignations requested. So there’s still a lot more work to be done. And I think Francis has done the best that he could in these circumstances. There’s a political environment under the canon structure that most of us really don’t truly understand.”
McDonnell was sexually abused by a priest as a child in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which in 2005 and 2011 was the target of another grand jury investigation that found widespread and systemic child sex abuse by priests and cover-up by church officials.
McDonnell testified before two grand jury panels.
“I think that during a 13-year period, he’s taking the ball as far down the field as he can, but we’re still missing that zero-tolerance policy.”
In the coming weeks, as they have done for thousands of years whenever there is a papal vacancy, the College of Cardinals will gather in St. Peter’s Basilica for a Mass invoking the guidance of the Holy Spirit in electing a new pope. The cardinals will elect a new pope in a process called a conclave, a secret ballot election that takes place in the Sistine Chapel.
McDonnell said that whoever that man is has the opportunity to set a new course for the church and throw open secretive files, investigations and disciplinary procedures.
“I think that is really going to be key for the public to be able to see a true form of accountability on the part of dioceses to make these lists public,” McDonnell said. “The next pope has an opportunity to make some significant changes under canon law to make that happen.”