August 15 is the Feast of the Assumption, a “holy day of obligation,” when Catholics are expected to attend Mass. This year millions of Catholics went to church sick at heart. I was among them.
The day before, the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had released a grand-jury report declaring that hundreds of Catholic priests had sɛҳuąƖly abused minors. The grand jury’s conclusions were summarized in reports that landed on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers around the world, as well as lead stories on all sorts of television news programs. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro spoke on The Today Show and nightly news broadcasts. No Catholics serious about their faith, indeed no one of any sensitivity, could have read about the report without feeling horror and shame. And anger. It was bad enough to read graphic accounts of anal and oral rape, sometimes combined with sacrilegious perversities; it was doubly appalling to be told that church leaders had systematically covered up these crimes and allowed abusers to go unchecked.
Within hours, the Pennsylvania grand-jury report was propelled to international status. The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow.” Adjectives piled up from Catholic and secular sources: abominable, revolting, reprehensible, nauseating, diabolical. The New York Times editorialized on “The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain.”
Months have passed but the report’s impact has not. At least a dozen states have announced they would follow Pennsylvania in conducting their own investigations (Illinois issued a preliminary report in December); the Justice Department has suggested that it, too, might get into the act. Pope Francis has called for bishops from around the world to address the sex-abuse scandal at the Vatican in February, where the Pennsylvania report will undoubtedly be a chief exhibit—as it currently is for Catholics both on the right and the left writing farewells to the church.
In fact, the report makes not one but two distinct charges. The first one concerns predator priests, their many victims, and their unspeakable acts. That charge is, as far as can be determined, dreadfully true. Appalling as is this first charge, it is in fact the second one that has had the greatest reverberations. “All” of these victims, the report declares, “were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all.” Or as the introduction to the report sums it up, “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.”

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This resistance is understandable. The report came on the heels of revelations about ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sɛҳuąƖ abuse of both adult seminarians and two minors. Ten days later, accusations from a former Vatican official, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, essentially enlisted the abuse scandal into the ongoing war between Pope Francis and his critics. Lurking in the background were other abuse scandals in Ireland, Chile, and Australia. And lurking at a much deeper level are years of often confusing but always mortifying reports of sɛҳuąƖ abuse by priests, inevitably reinforcing whatever doubts and disappointments Catholics have experienced.
Then there is the hard reality that not many people have actually read the report, let alone read it critically. That includes, I wager, even many of those publicly registering their outrage or privately nursing their spiritual distress. It includes, I can pretty safely add, the journalists on whose news accounts most of these people relied. Almost every media story of the grand-jury report that I eventually read or viewed was based on its twelve-page introduction and a dozen or so sickening examples the introduction and the report highlight, written in a language that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court later called “incendiary.”
How could it be otherwise? The report was alternatively described as 884 or 1,356 pages long—more on that strange discrepancy later. As a lifelong perpetrator of journalism I know about deadlines and how dependent a reporter can be on a summary, an introduction, or a spokesperson like the attorney general of Pennsylvania. You have time only to read a tiny fraction of such a massive docuмent. You cannot get knowledgeable, independent comment when no one else has read the docuмent either. You turn to soundbites from church officials or victims’ advocates that echo established scripts of what a story is about.  

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The sad and infuriating stories in the report, even in their sometimes excruciatingly graphic detail, were not news to those of us who were reading newspapers and watching TV in 2002. “Reports of sɛҳuąƖ abuse by priests of children and teenagers have taken on the dimensions of a biblical plague,” read a story on page one of the New York Times’s Sunday Week in Review. It mentioned estimates of victims over several decades ranging from 15,000 to 100,000. As the senior religion reporter at the Times from 1988 to 1997, I wrote that story in June 1993, almost a decade before the Boston Globe revelations.
Recalling such stories from the 1990s to 2002, I wondered whether Catholics and others had forgotten that flood of painful 2002 revelations, to say nothing of the prime-time exposés of the early 1990s. (In 2002 the Globe ran 770 Catholic sex-abuse stories, compared to twenty-five the year before; the New York Times ran 692.)  What about the 2004 and 2011 studies by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concluding that 4,392 priests, between 4 and 5 percent of the Catholic clergy, had been responsible for more than 11,000 cases of sɛҳuąƖ abuse between 1950 and 2002?  Had no one really taken to heart those earlier disclosures?
What precisely, I asked myself, did the Pennsylvania report tell us that was new?  Did it refute the crucial and widespread belief that the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People—passed by the Catholic bishops in June 2002, implemented nationwide, and backed by regular audits since then—had changed things dramatically? Did the report speak to the question, uppermost in many parents’ minds, whether children and teenagers were particularly at risk, right now, in Catholic schools and parishes, as media phrases like “the expanding Catholic sex-abuse scandals” or “a new wave of sex-abuse scandals” or sɛҳuąƖ-abuse scandals now “engulfing the church” might reasonably suggest?


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That is not my claim. I believe that the grand jury could have reached precise, accurate, informing, and hard-hitting findings about what different church leaders did and did not do, what was regularly done in some places and some decades and not in others. It could have presented ample grounds for at least three of its four rather unoriginal recommendations without engaging in broad-brush denunciations. It could have confirmed and corrected much that we think we know about the causes and prevention of the sɛҳuąƖ abuse of young people.
Instead the report chose a tack more suited to our hyperbolic, bumper-sticker, post-truth environment with its pronouncements about immigrant rapists and murderers, witch hunts, and deep-state cօռspιʀαcιҽs. Imagine, at least for a moment, that a declamation like “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all” came from one of our elected or televised demagogues. Would one really dismiss any fact-finding as uncalled for?
But it wasn’t a demagogic pundit or politician who chose that language right out of a nineteenth-century anti-papist tract. It was a grand jury. And therein lies a major misunderstanding.  

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Fuld believed this potential for abuse was particularly great when an investigatory grand-jury report named names; and the Pennsylvania report of course names not only hundreds of predators, but also more than fifty bishops and diocesan administrators treated as similarly guilty. The report’s introduction makes no bones about its intention to be judge and jury, and to hand down convictions for “crimes that will go unpunished and uncompensated” otherwise: “This Report is our only recourse. We are going to name names and describe what they did—both the sex offenders and those who concealed them. We are going to shine a light on their conduct, because that is what the victims deserve.”
It is clear that most people have taken the Pennsylvania report as what Judge Fuld called an “authoritative condemnation” without realizing its limitations. It is ironic that people raising perfectly legitimate questions about the accountability of bishops should overlook questions about the accountability of investigating grand juries. The findings of such reports can only be challenged after they are made public: by those impugned, by informed critics, independent investigators, dissenting politicians, the media, and so on.
In the Pennsylvania case, of course, the bishops are paralyzed. Not only has their credibility been sullied by past failures, often by deceased predecessors, but they long ago recognized that their first priority, rightly, must be to avoid making any excuses for predatory crimes or “re-victimizing” survivors. Who else might fill this void? Liberal journalists, civil libertarians, or academics unhappy with Catholic teachings on abortion and same-sex marriage? ProPublica?  Frontline? Conservative Catholics unhappy with Pope Francis? Liberal Catholics unhappy with a conservative hierarchy? Not likely.   

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When is Cardinal Pell facing his second trial?

I don't know but if the 'proof' is anything like the first trial then it doesn't say much for Australian justice. 

Part III is a nine-page overview of “The Church and child abuse, past and present.” Part IV devotes six pages to spelling out the recommendations mentioned in the introduction.
Then, in a 569-page “Appendix of Offenders,” the report profiles, diocese by diocese, all priests, deacons, or seminarians against whom the report concludes credible allegations of abuse have been found.  The report calls those profiles of more than three hundred priests possibly its “most important” and “final” section. Indeed, in some PDFs of the report online, including, shockingly, the one on the website of the attorney general’s office, the docuмent ends there, at page 884. In fact, more than 450 pages follow. These consist of photocopied responses from dioceses, former bishops, other diocesan officials, and even some accused priests protesting their innocence. Many of these docuмents raise important questions or present substantial criticisms. Although the report states that dioceses were invited to submit statements about their recent policies, there are no substantive grand-jury comments or replies.   
This organization is effective, lopsided, and unwieldy. Effective because of the dramatic, almost inflammatory rhetoric of the introduction and then because of the chosen eighteen examples. Lopsided, because the report devotes well over eight hundred pages to its chosen examples and encyclopedic “Profiles in Abuse.” Fewer than fifty pages, including that introduction, are devoted to the grand jury’s own analysis, findings, and recommendations. Unwieldy, because hundreds of pages separate each diocese’s three “horribles” from its complete roster of offenders in the appendix and again from any of the responses. Whether scrolling online or rustling through pages in print, it is daunting to track the claims and replies.

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