CONCORD (NH)
Union Leader
Jan 13, 2019
By Kevin Landrigan
Nearly 10 years after a precedent-setting agreement with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester ended, state prosecutors report few recent incidents of clergy sex abuse in New Hampshire.
“We have not seen a flood of complaints that other jurisdictions have seen since we had our own settlement agreements and the audits that went on,” said Deputy Attorney General Jane Young.
“This could be because we’ve already gone through this process before; it’s hard to know.”
The past year has been a devastating one for the Catholic Church in America, with a federal investigation and probes in at least 14 states and the District of Columbia.
Nearly all of this sprang from a grand jury in Pennsylvania last August that produced an 800-page report alleging 1,000 incidents of sexual molestation by more than 300 priests in six different dioceses.
Following those allegations, attorneys general in Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, Virginia and Washington, D.C., launched their own criminal investigations into the church.
At the dawn of 2019, Pope Francis issued a stern message to U.S. Catholic leaders while they were gathering for a spiritual retreat on the topic at the Mundelein Seminary in Illinois.
“The church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them,” Francis wrote in a letter that mixed compassionate encouragement and blunt criticism.
Pope Francis wrote that blame-shifting by church leaders had led to mistrust and pain among the church’s followers.
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