UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture
By Phil Lawler Mar 14, 2016
For anyone who has been following the sex-abuse scandal in the American Catholic Church, the Pennsylvania grand-jury report on the failures of the Altoona diocese follows a depressingly familiar pattern. There are the priests who molest adolescents (virtually always boys), the treatment centers that give the predators clean bills of health, enabling them to find more prey. But in the whole sad 145-page report (which is embedded in this Post-Gazette report there are also some remarkable new features:
Appeals to emotions. A grand jury’s proper function is to determine whether or not there is adequate evidence to justify criminal charges. In this case the grand jury decided that there was not, because the statute of limitations bars prosecution of crimes from the distant past. But this report is not a dispassionate, factual document; it is clearly written with a goal of rousing public outrage. The pages are laced with moral (as opposed to legal) judgments, and the prose occasionally turns purple. “A man not fit to be around a child was tasked to tend their souls,” the grand jury laments. And later: “These men wrote their legacy in the tears of children.” That sort of language might be appropriate for a newspaper editorial; it is not for a grand-jury report.
Self-congratulation. The grand jury proudly announces that it “learned” that priests were placed on “sick leave” to camouflage the fact that they were being investigated and/or treated for sexual misconduct. That’s not exactly ground-breaking detective work. Those of us who were following this story “learned” that ruse at least a dozen years ago, and now you can “learn” the same thing by spending a couple of hours at the local movie theater and watching Spotlight.
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