HARRISBURG — The long-anticipated grand jury report on Catholic clergy sex abuse was released Tuesday — yet much still remains hidden.
Dozens of pages in the report were blacked out from public view as a ferocious legal battle over its full release remains unresolved. Many of the redactions pertain to priests who were accused of abusing children and are listed toward the end of the report, in a section titled “Appendix of Offenders.” The name of a former bishop in Greensburg is also redacted, but the claims against him are unclear.
The redacted version is at least a partial victory for nearly two dozen clergy members who argued that the report either contained inaccuracies or unjustly harmed their reputations, which are protected under the state Constitution, by failing to give them an adequate chance to defend themselves.
Their case landed before the state Supreme Court, whose justices late last month authorized the release of the redacted version — minus the petitioners’ identifying information — at least until the justices can hear arguments on those underlying claims next month.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Tuesday that his office will continue pressing for the public release of the unredacted document.
“Every redaction represents an incomplete story of abuse that deserves to be told,” Mr. Shapiro said at a news conference on the report, adding: “You can be certain that we will fight vigorously to remove every redaction and tell every story of abuse and expose every cover-up.”
• A grand jury spent nearly two years investigating six Roman Catholic dioceses across the width of Pennsylvania. The report could answer basic questions about reported abuse that are still unknown.
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Religious leaders say a future Pennsylvania grand jury could find evidence of sexual abuse and cover-up among other religious groups and youth-serving organizations.
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Seven Pennsylvania news outlets petitioned the state Supreme Court for access to the grand jury report.
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Some priests raised the issue with parishioners, but others are waiting until the report comes out to respond to it.
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More than two dozen people, including current and former clergy members, challenged the release of the report, claiming it leaves them “wrongly accused and falsely implicated.”
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Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices received more than $180,000 in donations from law firms in clergy abuse case, records show.
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Even as state Supreme Court proceedings played out, the survivors of abuse found their voices and found each other.
Little is known about the petitioning clergy members, despite hundreds of pages of related court documents that have since been made public. Initially, even their lawyers’ names were shielded from public view and most of the affected dioceses have denied a role in the legal challenges.
Just one petitioner, former Erie Bishop Donald Trautman, identified himself as he dropped his appeal earlier this month, after the attorney general’s office agreed to stipulate that some of the blistering critics of church leadership didn’t apply to him directly.
In other cases, a few petitioners have previously been described by their initials, and only snippets about their involvement in the scandal have been disclosed.
One, for example, was described in the report as an abuser, but argues that the claim was unsubstantiated. Another said the report, if released in full, would reveal his private psychiatric assessments and treatment plans. Yet another clergy member said the report falsely implied he had inappropriately cleared a priest of wrongdoing, thereby endangering children.
When the report was finally released Tuesday, it became clear that many of the petitioners were priests accused of sexual misconduct. Under a section about the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which detailed information on 99 priests, information on at least eight offenders was blacked out.
The majority of justices, in ruling to keep the names temporarily shielded, said they believed that the clergy members raised legitimate due process concerns but that they are not “of one mind” on the best way to remedy that.
Many in the legal community and the state Legislature are watching the case closely, as its outcome could determine the ability of prosecutors to use grand jury reports to expose such wrongdoing in the future.
First Published: August 14, 2018, 9:47 p.m.
