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What did the report add to the intense and important debates about priestly celibacy, teachings on sɛҳuąƖity, ingrown clerical culture, church authority, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity in the priesthood, and responsibility toward victims—to say nothing of older conflicts, going back to the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath, about contraception, women’s roles in the church, sɛҳuąƖ ethics, religious education, Vatican authority, and any number of other issues big and small?
I have written elsewhere on many of these topics, in essays and a book that hardly cast a favorable light on the nation’s Catholic bishops or their handling of the sex-abuse crisis. I am not addressing those topics here. I am not taking sides in the smoldering arguments about Pope Francis. I am not asking who knew what, when, and how about Cardinal McCarrick. I am not floating new ways to assure episcopal accountability. I am looking only at the Pennsylvania report’s ringing charges about the handling of abuse: Are they true?    
Yet something even more basic triggers the resistance to any questioning of the Pennsylvania report—what is popularly labeled binary thinking. To question the report’s conclusions is to affirm the very opposite. If it is not true that all victims were “brushed aside,” then it must be true that no victims were ever brushed aside. If it is not true that church leaders routinely acted to protect their priests and institutions, then it must be true that no church leader ever did that.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121

Investigating grand juries


Grand juries are legal entities deeply rooted in common law and incorporated into the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Their purpose is not to determine guilt or innocence but only whether there are sufficient grounds to bring an indictment and trigger a trial. The trial is where guilt or innocence will be determined by all the adversarial procedures of examining evidence and testimony presented by both sides under strict supervision by a judge. Grand juries do not operate under those rules. They hear evidence ex parte—that is, with no representation from those under investigation. They operate in secret. And in practice, they operate almost completely under the direction of a local, state, or federal prosecutor, a district attorney or attorney general, whose conclusions they almost invariably rubber-stamp.
For this reason grand juries have become controversial. Whether indictments are obtained or not may depend on the political needs of elected prosecutors, an issue raised by minority communities in regard to killings by white police. Investigating grand juries, like the one in Pennsylvania, has also proved problematic. Stanley H. Fuld, a noted jurist who was chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, once pointed out that an indictment “is but the first step in a long process in which the accused may seek vindication through exercise of the right to a public trial, to a jury, to counsel, to confrontation of witnesses against him and, if convicted, to an appeal.” On the contrary, a grand-jury investigative report, “is at once an accusation and a final condemnation, and, emanating from a judicial body occupying a position of respect and importance in the community, its potential for harm is incalculable.” As a judicial docuмent, a grand-jury report, Fuld continued, “carries the same sense of authoritative condemnation as an indictment does, without, however, according the accused the benefit of the protections accorded to one who is indicted.”

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121