BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun [Baltimore MD]
September 4, 2024
By Alex Mann
Survivors of child sexual abuse in Maryland on Wednesday demanded expediency from the state attorney general in its investigations of the Catholic dioceses of Washington and Wilmington, Delaware.
Members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, told reporters at a news conference that they hoped the Maryland Office of the Attorney General would release a report soon on child sexual abuse committed within the Archdiocese of Washington and the Diocese of Wilmington, both of which operate in several Maryland counties.
David Lorenz, Maryland director of SNAP, said he hoped the attorney general’s report on the abuse in those outposts of the Catholic Church would resemble the report that office released on abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Released last April, that document spanned more than 400 pages, detailing the abuse of more than 600 children by 156 clergy and others in the church, dating to the 1940s and including Baltimore and the nine other counties the diocese serves.
After releasing the report on abuse within the Baltimore diocese, Democratic Attorney General Anthony Brown pledged his office would continue to investigate clergy abuse in other Catholic dioceses that operate in Maryland. Headquartered in Hyattsville, the Archdiocese of Washington has parishes in five Maryland counties: Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince George’s and St. Mary’s. The Diocese of Wilmington serves Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“The OAG was given an infusion of funds to complete the investigation into the misdeeds of the Catholic Church in both of those dioceses,” Lorenz said. “They have staffed up and are performing their job well. Nevertheless, we want to urge them to complete this work as quickly as possible, but yet thoroughly.”
“It cannot be understated,” Lorenz added later, “the impact this report will have on survivors that have lived with guilt and shame for all of their lives, for decades, they’ve carried this burden around for a long, long time. When we finally get this report out, victims can finally release that burden of shame and guilt onto the place it belongs, onto the predator.”
Jennifer Donelan, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said in a statement that investigators want survivors to come forward by contacting the office’s abuse hotline at 410-576-6312.
“We continue to receive information from survivors about allegations of child abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore — including information received after our office released the Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore in April 2023 — and we continue to investigate sexual abuse associated with the Archdiocese of Washington DC and the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware,” Donelan said.
Archdiocese of Washington spokeswoman Paula Gwynn Grant said in a statement that the church has cooperated with the attorney general’s investigation.
“In addition, the Archdiocese remains fully committed to maintaining our robust safe environment program, which has been in place for decades, and our longstanding efforts to bring healing to survivors of sexual abuse within the Church,” Grant said.
Robert G. Krebs, a spokesman for the Wilmington diocese, noted that the church there paid $77 million to sex abuse survivors to settle its 2009 bankruptcy case and said it is “committed to full cooperation” with law enforcement investigations.
“The Diocese has cooperated fully with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, and several years ago, turned over to the Office all documents regarding clergy abuse in Maryland,” Krebs said.
“Unless you’ve experienced it, it’s almost impossible to bring voice to the feeling someone gets when their predator’s name is put on a piece of paper and they see it, and it says ‘I was right,’” Lorenz said. “Even if they’ve never told anybody, they’ve been telling themselves for 20, 30, 40 years, ‘Did this really happen? Did this really happen?’ And the sense of validation you get to see that name in print saying, yes ‘he was what I thought he was,’ you can’t describe it.”
It brought David Schappelle, an abuse survivor who is suing the Washington diocese in Montgomery County Circuit Court, “a weird sense of joy and delight” to see one of his abusers named in the attorney general’s report on the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
“Everybody’s going to have their own reaction, but for me it was a little bit of a sense of relief and a sense of, ‘Aha, let’s tell this story,’” Schappelle said.
The Baltimore Sun does not typically identify victims of sexual abuse without their consent. Schappelle said it was OK to include his name.
Schappelle filed the lawsuit after Maryland lawmakers passed the Child Victims Act, which erased time limits for people sexually abused as children to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled their torment, on the back of the release of the attorney general’s report on abuse in the Baltimore diocese.
A Montgomery County Circuit Judge ruled the law was unconstitutional when the Archdiocese of Washington challenged Schappelle’s lawsuit, but the fate of the Child Victims Act rests in hands of the Supreme Court of Maryland, which is handling several appeals about that law’s constitutionality. Oral arguments are scheduled for Tuesday, and the abuse survivors who urged expediency from the attorney general Wednesday also defended the child victims law.
Schappelle’s lawsuit alleges he was repeatedly sexually abused when he was a boy by two priests at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Gaithersburg.
A report on abuse like his in the Washington diocese, Schappelle told reporters, would represent the “truth” being exposed.
“That is why we’re all here,” Schappelle said, “so that the truth will come out.”