The attorney general of Maryland accused the Archdiocese of Baltimore of covering up child sexual abuse perpetrated by 156 current or former members of clergy against more than 600 victims during a period of six decades Wednesday.
The report, which is partially redacted, is the fruit of a four-year investigation by the Maryland Attorney General’s office and the City of Baltimore Grand Jury, which obtained hundreds of thousands of documents from the Archdiocese of Baltimore over the course of the investigation.
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“This report illustrates the depraved, systemic failure of the Archdiocese to protect the most vulnerable — the children it was charged to keep safe,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said. “Based on hundreds of thousands of documents and untold stories from hundreds of survivors, it provides, for the first time in the history of this State, a public accounting of more than 60 years of abuse and cover-up.”
Brown added that “time and again, the archdiocese chose to safeguard the institution and avoid scandal instead of protecting the children in its care. This report shines a light on this overwhelming tragedy, and it was the courage of the survivors that made it possible.”
The report lists 156 different diocesan clergy, members of religious orders, or employees who allegedly perpetrated the sexual abuse of children while under the employment or authority of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. The vast majority of the individuals listed in the report are no longer alive. The report also notes that it is not a criminal indictment.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore is the oldest Catholic diocese in the United States, established by Pope Pius VI on November 6, 1789, shortly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. The first bishop of the then-diocese of Baltimore was Bishop John Carroll, the cousin of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.
The report details hundreds of instances of abuse by the named priests and others under the authority of the archdiocese from the 1930s until 2002. The victims were girls and boys alike.
In most cases, the diocese often removed priests from the parish where the allegation of abuse surfaced and placed them at another assignment within the archdiocese or moved them out of the jurisdiction altogether.
The report did not reserve all its scathing criticisms for the archdiocese, noting that public authorities and even the press had worked with the archbishop to “avoid transparency and accountability” in the rare cases where law enforcement was involved.
In one case from 1958, the report details how then-Archbishop Francis Keough worked with local Catholics to resolve an abuse allegation in the private chambers of a judge, thus avoiding a criminal trial. Church officials also later convinced a local newspaper not to print a story detailing the allegations of abuse against the priest.
But despite the stunning quantity of alleged abuse cases, numerous priests listed as credibly accused by the archdiocese were eventually stripped of their ability to celebrate Mass by the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Vatican, and a number were removed from the clerical state entirely, primarily after the Catholic clerical sex abuse scandal was first exposed by the Boston Globe in 2002.
Following the newspaper’s famous report on the Archdiocese of Boston’s cover-up of clerical sex abuse, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops implemented the Dallas Charter, which strengthened diocesan policies towards allegations of abuse.
The Maryland report says that the implementation of the Dallas Charter “did significantly improve the internal handling of reported child sex abuse,” however the report also advocates for removing the statute of limitations for civil actions.
In a letter to the Catholics of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, William Lori, the current archbishop of the archdiocese, lamented the contents of the report, calling the document “a sad and painful reminder of the tremendous harm caused to innocent children and young people by some ministers of the Church.”
“The report details a reprehensible time in the history of this Archdiocese, a time that will not be covered up, ignored or forgotten,” Lori said. “Acknowledgment, I know, is of utmost importance. My immediate predecessors and I have offered unyielding public acknowledgment of the horrors of this era. In 2002, the Archdiocese publicly released the names of clergy members credibly accused of committing child sexual abuse, dating back to the 1930s. We continue to make public the names of abusers as we learn about them and as new accusations are reported.”
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But Lori was also quick to note that the archdiocese has made widespread changes to how it responds to reports of clerical sex abuse.
“The Archdiocese is not the same organization it was when, as the report documents, cases of abuse peaked during the 1960s and 1970s,” he said. “Instances fell every year and every decade since then, alongside the development of canon and criminal law and Archdiocesan accountability standards and policies designed to protect children. Having spent four years investigating the Archdiocese, former Attorney General Brian Frosh signaled that the cultural changes, child protection policies and accountability measures the Archdiocese began implementing more than a generation ago have proven successful.”
