Ethics Newsline®

BOSTON
At least seven grand jury investigations are believed to be under way across the United States as state prosecutors look into the role Roman Catholic bishops may have played in sheltering priests accused of sexually abusing children.

The criminal investigations, most prominent in Boston and New York, are also being carried out in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and St. Louis, USA Today reported last week.

Legal experts caution that the grand jury investigations face steep hurdles due to expired statutes of limitations and the difficulty of prosecuting someone for enabling another person to commit a crime.

But even if criminal indictments fail to emerge, many say a clearer picture of how the church sheltered, shuffled, and protected alleged abusers from prosecution will likely emerge, according to the Boston Globe.

“Convening a grand jury makes sense because it protects against the practice that the church can make discretionary decisions on disclosure” of documents about abusive priests, New England School of Law professor Wendy Murphy told the Globe.

“The rules are much tougher with a criminal grand jury, and the sanctions for noncompliance much more severe,” added Murphy, a former prosecutor who now represents alleged victims of sexual abuse. “To make sure that all the paper gets produced, unredacted, the grand jury is a solution.”

Boston Cardinal Bernard Law is reportedly the target of one such investigation due to his handling of allegedly abusive priests, including Rev. Paul Shanley, who was transferred and allowed to work with children despite known allegations of sexual abuse, the Associated Press reported.

The Boston diocese run by Cardinal Law, who has become a lightning rod for public anger and Catholic dissent, last week announced that overall church spending will be cut by 40 percent during its new fiscal year, largely due to a lack of response to Law’s recent fundraising pleas.

“So far the returns … have been very discouraging,” an unidentified high-ranking church official told the Globe, noting that Catholics were not responding to Law’s request for funds. “Quite frankly, the whole thing is a mess.”

The Washington Post reports that parishioners across the country may be punishing the church for its handling of the sex abuse crisis.

According to a recent Post poll, more than half of all U.S. Catholics disapprove of the bishops’ efforts to tackle the problem of sexually abusive priests.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced a new church policy, promising to remove any abusive priest from public ministry. Their “zero tolerance” policy, however, would not defrock abusive priests, but rather would transfer them to cloistered, supervised conditions away from minors.

That policy failed to appease much of the public, including many Catholics who accuse the bishops of shunting the problem onto priests without accepting enough responsibility. At the USCCB meeting, the bishops deferred the issue of how to hold themselves accountable, promising a committee report in six months, according to the Post.

While promising to punish priests, “the bishops say absolutely nothing about sanctions or consequences for the bishops themselves who covered up sex abuse or moved priest felons around to other parishes or even dioceses,” Catholic reform group Call to Action said last week.

Since January, at least 250 U.S. priests have been dismissed or resigned their posts, joining roughly 1,250 others over the past 40 years, according to statistics from USA Today.