Catholic Church faces ongoing sex abuse crisis

The Catholic Church’s New York Archdiocese released the names of 115 priests and five deacons it said credibly sexually abused minors or credibly possessed child pornography Friday. The church said the crimes mostly took place from the the 1950s through the 1990s, with two cases occurring after 2002.

“I write today as someone who himself realizes the shame that has come upon our Church due to the sexual abuse of minors,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of the New York Archdiocese, wrote in a letter to parishoners. “I write to ask forgiveness again for the failings of those clergy and bishops who should have provided for the safety of our young people but instead betrayed the trust placed in them by God and by the faithful.”

The Vatican has angered many Catholics by urging American bishops to delay voting on two proposals relating to the child sex abuse crisis scheduled for discussion at their annual meeting this week.

Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), announced Monday morning during the organization’s annual fall assembly in Baltimore that the Vatican had asked them to delay votes on two scheduled proposals involving the USCCB’s fight against clerical child sex abuse until after a global conference on the subject scheduled to take place at the Vatican in February.

Justice is coming slowly for the victims of the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis. Since an August Pennsylvania grand jury report identified hundreds of priests accused of molesting at least 1,000 minors over the past seven decades in that state, several other states have announced their own investigations into historical Catholic clerical child sex abuse.

The scope and scale of the Pennsylvania report were made possible by the state’s legal structures, which give the attorney general’s office a significant degree of power to conduct investigations through the grand jury system. However, each of the states below has taken steps toward centralizing the likely hundreds, if not thousands, of potential cases of clerical sex abuse that may have taken place over the past few decades.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court made public one of the broadest-ever investigations into Catholic clerical sex abuse of minors in the United States in August. The document, a 1,400-page grand jury report, is the result of an 18-month probe by Pennsylvania state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and names at least 300 priests accused of child sex abuse by more than 1,000 victims throughout the state.

Some of the priests’ names in the report have been redacted. The report’s release was delayed after several clergy members named in the report filed legal challenges against its publication. Shapiro told reporters at a news conference that the report details “systematic coverup by senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican.”

The Department of Justice has subpoenaed records from seven of Pennsylvania’s eight dioceses as part of a wider investigation into clerical sex abuse.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, as well as the dioceses of Scranton, Harrisburg, Greensburg, Erie, Allentown, and Pittsburgh, confirmed to several reporters on Thursday that they’d received federal subpoenas relating to documentary evidence of child sex abuse. It’s not yet clear whether the eighth diocese, Altoona-Johnstown, has also received a subpoena, as representatives there have not yet responded to reporters’ request for comment, according to the New York Times.

The embattled archbishop of Washington, DC, has resigned over his role in covering up several instances of abuse of children by Catholic priests.

Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Donald Wuerl on Friday, after Wuerl was implicated in several cover-ups of child sex abuse over the past few decades. The move comes after weeks of speculation that Francis was considering allowing Wuerl to resign. As is customary among Catholic archbishops, Wuerl had automatically submitted a resignation letter to Francis when he turned 75, two years ago. Francis rejected his resignation, however, as is also customary, and Wuerl has served at Francis’s pleasure ever since, unable to leave his post without Francis’s permission.

Catholics’ confidence in Pope Francis has plummeted. According to a Pew study released on Tuesday, just three in 10 American Catholics say they approve of Francis’s handling of the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis, following a summer of abuse revelations that have rocked the Catholic Church.

In 2015, 54 percent of Catholics reported having a generally favorable view of Francis’s handling of clerical sex abuse, telling Pew they thought he was doing either an “excellent” or “good” job on the issue. In January of this year, shortly after Francis came under fire for dismissing accusations of a clerical cover-up of child sex abuse in Chile as mere “calumny,” that number dropped to 45 percent.

Pope Francis’s favorability rating among Americans has plummeted sharply in the aftermath of this summer’s deluge of revelations in the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis, according to a poll conducted by Gallup this week. Francis’s approval rating among Americans is down to 53 percent, according to the poll conducted from September 4 to 12.

In September 2015, according to Gallup, about 70 percent of Americans felt favorably about the pope. That number declined only slightly to 66 percent by early August.

Just moments before an American delegation of cardinals arrived at the Vatican to discuss the clerical sex abuse crisis with Pope Francis on Thursday, Francis announced that he had accepted the resignation of West Virginia bishop Michael Bransfield following allegations of sexual harassment of adults. Francis also announced that he had authorized another bishop, William Lori of Baltimore, to investigate those allegations.

In a statement, Lori referred only to the plan to investigate Bransfield’s alleged sexual harassment of adults. However, in 2012, Bransfield was also accused of having sex with a minor by an unnamed witness in an unrelated clerical sex abuse trial. The witness claimed to have heard the account from another priest. At that time, Bransfield vociferously denied all accusations against him, saying, “To be now unfairly included in that group and to hear the horrific allegations that are being made of me is unbelievable and shocking. I have never sexually abused anyone.” He continued to serve as bishop, and did not face any repercussions for the allegations at that time.

Pope Francis will meet with several senior United States archbishops on Thursday to discuss accusations of abuse against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, and the broader fallout of the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis. While Francis has previously met with US cardinals individually about the issue, this latest meeting nevertheless represents a significant step forward in terms of the Vatican’s handling of the crisis.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, announced Tuesday that he would lead a delegation of American senior clerical officials to the Vatican for a private audience with the pope. Archbishop of Boston Sean O’Malley, a longtime Francis ally and a vocal advocate of abuse victims’ rights, is also expected to attend.

His story was one of thousands.

“It happened in the wee hours of the morning,” a Pennsylvania man wrote in a letter to the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 2008, describing the moment he tried to take his own life. He’d spent the night drinking heavily, “which my doctors have explained may have induced an inescapable episodic flashback of sexual abuse, which has haunted me over the years.”

I should not be so shocked.

As a Jesuit, a Roman Catholic priest — as somebody who lives and breathes the church — I should have understood already how broken the institution of the church can be. After all, the scandal of child sex abuse and its cover-up by the church hierarchy broke in Boston in 2002. Then it happened again in Minnesota in 2012. That list could go on. I read about those scandals years ago with both anger and sadness. But in reading the recent Pennsylvania reports detailing yet another cover-up of clergy sexual abuse, I found shock giving way to shame.

Pressure is mounting for Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, DC, to resign over his role in the cover-up of the clerical child sex abuse crisis.

In the two weeks since a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report accusing 300 Catholic priests of abusing over 1,000 minors in that state, there’s been an increasing number of calls for Wuerl, the highest-ranking priest implicated in the report, to resign. The report alleged that Wuerl, at that time the bishop of Pittsburgh, knowingly allowed several pedophile priests to return to active ministry after accusations of child sex abuse.

Reeling from new claims of unfettered sexual abuse at the hands of priests and cover-ups by high-ranking officials, the Catholic Church is facing one of its most serious and divisive crises of the 21st century.

Last weekend, a former Vatican official, ex-papal nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò, published an incendiary open letter calling for Francis to resign for willfully turning a blind eye to ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s decades of sexual abuse and harassment against junior seminarians under his authority. (McCarrick has also been accused of abusing two minors; Viganò does not make any mention of those cases and does not imply Francis knew about them.)

The Catholic Church found itself at the heart of one of its most serious crises yet when a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report last week, detailing the extent of child sex abuse allegations by Catholic priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses. The report estimated more than 300 priests across the state abused at least 1,000 known victims, and it condemned the wider clerical culture that allowed senior priests to turn a blind eye to the abuses, often quietly shuffling offending priests into new dioceses, where they would have unfettered access to new victims.

The allegations pointed to a systemic culture of secrecy in the Catholic Church, and implicated a number of church officials — including Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC — in the cover-up.

Pope Francis’s planned weekend visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families comes at a tumultuous time for the Catholic Church around the globe.

Last week’s grand jury report out of Pennsylvania, uncovering years of child sexual abuse at the hands of hundreds of priests across the state, is the latest entry in a laundry list of scandals that have rocked church leaders and parishioners in recent years. In Ireland, historically among the most Catholic countries in the world, churchgoers are experiencing their own nationwide reckoning with sexual abuse of children by priests and a subsequent, systematic cover-up that allowed such abuse to happen.

Pope Francis formally apologized to Catholics everywhere for the church’s mishandling of the Catholic clerical sex abuse scandal, less than a week after a Pennsylvania grand jury report implicated 300 Catholic priests in sexual abuse against more than 1,000 people decades ago.

In a 2,000-word open letter released through the Vatican’s media outlet and addressed “to the People of God,” Francis personally expressed deep contrition on behalf of the church for both the abuse and its decades-long cover-up.

A group of 75 Catholic clergy members and scholars have urged Pope Francis to backtrack on his decision to declare the death penalty “inadmissible” in Catholic teaching.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis authorized a change in the Catholic Catechism, the official teaching document of the church, to intensify the language pertaining to the defensibility of the death penalty.