A long-awaited grand jury investigation into clergy sexual abuse in Pennsylvania was released Tuesday in an interim, redacted form — detailing decades of alleged misconduct and cover-ups in six of the state’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses.
The roughly 900-page report, thought to be the most comprehensive of its kind, paints a horrid portrait of activity that occurred in the dioceses of Scranton, Allentown, Harrisburg, Greensburg, Erie and Pittsburgh, implicating 300 “predator priests” statewide who committed “criminal and/or morally reprehensible conduct.”
The grand jury found credible allegations by more than one thousand victims, but added “we believe that the real number … is in the thousands.”
One priest in the Diocese of Harrisburg — against whom previous reports were never acted on — abused five sisters in a single family. Another, in the Diocese of Greensburg, impregnated a 17-year-old girl, married her, then divorced her months later.
A priest in the Diocese of Erie admitted to assaulting at least a dozen boys, yet the bishop later thanked him for “all that you have done for God’s people.”
The grand jury said it reviewed half a million pages of internal church documents and “secret archives” that were readily available to bishops. The findings revealed a pattern of abuse that occurred in hundreds of parishes in 54 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties going back at least 80 years. It detailed how fellow clergy members conducted shoddy investigations into sexual abuse allegations and how bishops often sided with abusive priests.
The report counted 41 “predator priests” in the Diocese of Erie, 37 in Allentown, 20 in Greensburg, 45 in Harrisburg, 99 in Pittsburgh, and 59 in Scranton.
A majority of the activity described within the scathing investigation falls outside of Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations for sexual crimes, and those clergy members both named and currently blacked out of the report are not expected to face criminal charges.
But the grand jury issued presentments against a priest in the Greensburg Diocese and a priest in the Erie Diocese, who it said had sexually assaulted children within the last decade.
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