The Pennsylvania grand jury report on child sexual abuse by priests detailed some of the tactics used by Roman Catholic Church leaders to conceal the crimes over a period of 70 years, including urging church members to never tell the police.
"It's like a playbook for concealing the truth," the grand jury said in the report released Tuesday. Its investigation identified more than 1,000 sexual-abuse victims in six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, leader of the Washington Archdiocese, was accused in the report of helping to protect abusive priests when he was Pittsburgh's bishop from 1988 to 2006.
Wuerl has disputed the allegations.
At a Mass held Wednesday in Washington on the feast of the Assumption of Mary, Wuerl did not address the accusations against himself, but he urged parishioners not to lose confidence in the church over the "terrible plague" of abuse.
As church officials scrambled to defend themselves, the state attorney general's office said its hotline for victims had lit up, fielding more than 150 calls within 24 hours of the report becoming public.
Calls to the hotline in 2016 spurred the grand jury investigation, and Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the investigation is still going on.
A former Pennsylvania county prosecutor was fired Wednesday from his job as an attorney for a county youth services office after the report showed that, as Beaver County's elected district attorney in the 1960s, he stopped an investigation into alleged child abuse by a priest to gain political favor from the Pittsburgh Diocese.
Special agents from the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime reviewed evidence collected by the grand jury, the report says, and identified a series of practices that were regularly used by the six dioceses to cover up reports of abuse.
"While each church district had its idiosyncrasies, the pattern was pretty much the same," the report says. "The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid 'scandal.' That is not our word, but theirs; it appears over and over again in the documents we recovered."
Here is how the grand jury described the Catholic Church's methods for covering up abuse and protecting priests:
"First, 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.'
"Second, 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.
"Third, 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.
"Fourth, 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.
"Fifth, 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.
"Sixth, 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.
"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.'"
Information for this article was contributed by Scott Dodd of The New York Times; and by Marc Levy, Mark Scolforo, Claudia Lauer and Michael Rubinkam of The Associated Press.
A Section on 08/16/2018