The Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Continues

Twenty ears ago this past February the Boston Globe began its series that revealed the scope of the sexual abuse of children and youths by Catolic clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston.   Ever since then stories of similar abuse and deliberate cover ups by the Church hierarchy have literally covered the globe.  The Boston archdiocese was not an abberation but rather the norm world wide.  Since then the Church has paid out billions of dollars in settlements and countless diocese have filed for bankruptcy trying to keep victims still alive from receiving due compensation.  Sadly, many victims took their own lives and others have suffered from feelings of guilt even though they were victims.   Many Catholics including myself (and pretty much my entire family) have left the Church and "new policies" have been supposedly adopted by the Church to prevent future abuse.  But the underlying causes for the abuse have not changed.  The Church continues to cling to a 12th century understanding of sex and human sexuality, gays and sex and women (evil temptresses from the mythical Eve forward) are demonized and /or obsessed over resulting in continued emotional and psychological harm to millions of youth and LGBT individuals across the globe - it took two years of therapy for me to shed the psychological poisoning I had experienced growing up in the Church.  The latest revelations of the Church's lack of moral standing to lecture anyone on morality or sexuality comes out of the Archdiocese of Baltimore where the same familiar patterns of abuse and coverup have been detailed in a report filed by the Maryland Attorney General.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the moral cesspool that is the Church hierarchy and its apologists.  Here are highlights:

A nearly four-year investigation of the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore tallied more than 600 young victims of clergy sexual abuse over 80 years, a court filing by the Maryland attorney general said Thursday. The probe, the second in the country by a state prosecutor, after Pennsylvania’s, seeks to bring accountability and detail to cases long covered up or shrouded by statutes of limitation.

The filing by Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) comes in the 20th anniversary year of an investigative series by the Boston Globe that dug into the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in the United States. Major reforms and multibillion-dollar legal settlements have reduced the number of accusations over the decades, but advocates in and out of the church say that full restitution has never come and such chronicles are important.

“Now is the time for reckoning,” said the 35-page filing in Baltimore City Circuit Court that asks a judge to approve the release of the full 456-page report. Because the report includes information from grand jury testimony, a judge’s approval is required. “Publicly airing the transgressions of the Church is critical to holding people and institutions accountable and improving the way sexual abuse allegations are handled going forward,” the attorney general argued in the filing.

The filing says the report identifies 115 priests who have already been prosecuted or identified by the church as “credibly accused,” and that it includes an additional 43 priests “accused of sexual abuse but not identified publicly by the Archdiocese.” That is 158 priests.

“The investigation also revealed that the Archdiocese failed to report many allegations of sexual abuse, conduct adequate investigations of alleged abuse, remove the abusers from the ministry or restrict their access to children. Instead, it went to great lengths to keep the abuse secret,” the filing says. One parish had 11 abusers over 40 years.

Earlier Thursday, a spokesman for the archdiocese said it has “fully cooperated” since Frosh began the investigation in January 2019, including providing more than 100,000 papers.

David Lorenz, Maryland leader of SNAP, an organization that advocates for church abuse victims, said he was struggling to digest the scope of abuse and called the report “disturbing.”

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said, “and I just wish I could reach out to each of [the victims] and say: ‘It’s okay, it’s not your fault. Please seek help. There are people out there helping, who want to help, who will believe you, who won’t ridicule you, who won’t deny what happened to you. No matter how bad you think it is, it was never your fault.’ ”

Terry McKiernan, president of the watchdog and research group BishopAccountability.org, said that because the investigation is based on hundreds of thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents, the attorney general’s report has the potential to reopen a nationwide push for new laws and public accountability on how the church handled problem priests.

“It becomes a lot harder to ignore these issues when you have a 500-page report on how bad things are on your desk,” McKiernan said. “They’re going to have knowledge about failures in the archdiocese and management that we don’t know anything about yet,” he said of investigators. “The fact that they have uncovered … 11 accused priests over the years that worked in a single parish, that is shocking, and it’s the sort of thing we see when we approach full accountability at an archdiocese.”

A Pennsylvania grand jury made worldwide news in 2018 when it issued an 800-page report — a first of its kind — that led to arrests of priests in Michigan, protests in Maryland, an early retirement for a Washington archbishop and new policies from New York to the Vatican.