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Church protected more than 300 'predator priests' in Pa., grand jury says

Church leaders protected more than 300 "predator priests" in six Roman Catholic dioceses across Pennsylvania for decades because they were more interested in safeguarding the church and the abusers than tending to their victims, says a scathing grand jury report released Tuesday.

More than 1,000 young victims were identifiable from the church's own records, the report says.

“The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid scandal,” the report says. 

"Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing: They hid it all.”

This is just one state.

There should be hundreds of prosecutions in Pennsylvania, alone.

The Catholic Church is a global kiddie porn and child abuse ring.

Can we have some RICO prosecutions?

The Catholic Church’s seven-point system for covering up abuse

“We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this.” So begins the scathing account (pdf) of a Pennsylvania grand jury after investigating 70 years of child sex abuse by more than 300 Catholic priests in six dioceses across the state. 

“We are sick over all the crimes that will go unpunished and uncompensated. This report is our only recourse,” the jurors write.

More than 1,000 offenses were uncovered, though many more are suspected to have occurred, they say. 

Most of these cases can’t be prosecuted now—only two have yielded criminal charges so far. 

The crimes were too ably covered up by the dioceses for too long—so the report is the only way of exposing the many church authorities involved in a criminal betrayal that went on for decades and left so many scarred.

Get rid of the statute of limitations for these crimes.

Where it's too late for prosecution there should be mass, public firings with the public notified of exactly what the fired clergy did.

“We are going to name their names and describe what they did—both the sex offenders and those who concealed them. We are going to shine a light on their conduct because that’s what the victims deserve,” the jurors write.

. . . .

Church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth,” the reports states. 

The patterns were similar enough that FBI analyses of the church’s responses yielded seven rules, basically, an institutional guide to covering up abuse. 

Here are seven principles the jurors note:

1. Make sure to use euphemisms rather than real words to describe the sexual assaults in diocese documents. Never say”rape”; say “inappropriate contact” or “boundary issues.”
2. Don’t conduct genuine investigations with properly trained personnel. Instead, assign fellow clergy members to ask inadequate questions and then make credibility determinations about the colleagues with whom they live and work.
3. For an appearance of integrity, send priests for “evaluation” at church-run psychiatric treatment centers. Allow these experts to “diagnose” whether the priest was a pedophile, based largely on the priest’s “self-reports” and regardless of whether the priest had actually engaged in sexual contact with a child.
4. When a priest does have to be removed, don’t say why. Tell his parishioners that he is on “sick leave,” or suffering from”nervous exhaustion.” Or say nothing at all.
5. Even if a priest is raping children, keep providing him housing and living expenses, although he may be using these resources to facilitate more sexual assaults.
6. If a predator’s conduct becomes known to the community, don’t remove him from the priesthood to ensure that no more children will be victimized. Instead, transfer him to a new location where no one will know he is a child abuser.
7. Finally, and above all, don’t tell the police. Child sexual abuse, even short of actual penetration, is and has for all relevant times been a crime. But don’t treat it that way; handle it like a personnel matter, “in house.”

Catholic Priests Ran Child Porn Ring Out Of Pittsburgh Diocese

In one particularly heinous episode documented in the report, a group of Catholic priests in Pittsburgh ran an extensive child porn ring where children were sexually exploited and groomed for abuse. 

Working together, the priests would select, target, and groom young teen boys to exploit.

According to the grand jury report, the Revs. George Zirwas, Francis Pucci, Richard Zula, Francis Luddy, and Robert Wolk, were all part of a “ring of predatory priests” who raped children, shared intelligence on potential victims and manufactured child pornography in parishes and rectories.