• • •
District Attorney Lynne Abraham convened the grand jury investigation of archdiocesan clergy in Philadelphia during the spring of 2002, at a time when allegations of widespread abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston opened the door to a national test of faith in the church.
The lengthy inquest concluded with a 420-page report three years later that documented assaults on youngsters by 63 priests, dating to 1967, and alleged that two former archbishops, Cardinal John Krol and Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, knew of rapes, molestations and other assaults and undertook cover-ups to thwart lethal publicity and potentially costly lawsuits against the archdiocese.
But the grand jury also concluded that prosecutions no longer were an option — provisions within state laws and the expiration of legal time limits prohibited authorities from filing charges.
"The abuser priests, by choosing children as targets and trafficking on their trust, were able to prevent or delay reports of their sexual assaults, to the point where applicable statutes of limitations expired," the grand jury said in its findings. "And archdiocese officials, by burying those reports they did receive and covering up the conduct, similarly managed to outlast any statutes of limitation. As a result, these priests and officials will necessarily escape criminal prosecution."
The panel, also noting that pursuing civil liability could be the only means for many victims to gain acknowledgment of what they’ve endured, recommended that the state legislature give thought to modifying, or even suspending, civil statutes of limitation in cases of child sexual abuse.
While chairman of the judiciary committee, Pennsylvania House Speaker Dennis O’Brien, a longtime state lawmaker from Northeast Philadelphia, guided the state’s legislative response to the Philadelphia Grand Jury Report. Gov. Ed Rendell enacted those measures last November.
The law extended the criminal statute of limitations for any case of child abuse by 25 years — victims can pursue prosecution until their 50th birthday — despite lobby efforts against it by the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference.
But it also addressed broader areas, such as strengthening reporting requirements to law enforcement and requiring all employers to do background checks of potential employees who would have regular contact with children.
• • •
Beginning in 2002, as revelations of decades of clergy abuse and cover-ups in the Archdiocese of Boston unearthed similar scandals around the country, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia — which would have its own cross to bear with the 2005 grand jury report — started to change the way it handled reports of abuse against priests.
Victims now make those reports to victim-assistance coordinators within the archdiocese, a change from the prior procedure of informing clergy. The archdiocesan coordinators also help victims find and arrange counseling or needed social services.
"A lot has changed," said archdiocesan spokeswoman Donna Farrell. "Our focus is on enhancing our service to victims."
Last year, Mary Achilles came on board as the victim advocate within the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. She also came with strong credentials, having worked with victims of crime for more than 20 years, including a 10-year tenure that ended in 2005 as the first victim advocate for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
According to Achilles, Philadelphia’s archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, has been highly receptive to meeting with victims in a place that is comfortable to them. That outreach contradicts the philosophy of his predecessor, Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua, who was portrayed in the grand jury report as an archdiocesan leader who preferred to keep his distance from victims.
The Philadelphia archdiocese also has undertaken a financial investment in the needs of abuse victims. Now it pays for therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, medications, tuition assistance for children in Catholic schools, emergency expenses, and even funeral expenses.
Since the start of the victim-assistance program five years ago, Farrell said, the archdiocese has served about 290 people — victims and family members. At the moment, she added, reimbursement for costs of inpatient and outpatient counseling, as well as other services, is being provided to 95 people.
The archdiocese expects to have spent more than $1 million for program costs during calendar year 2007.
Such support to improve the well-being of victims, Achilles noted, often must be a long-term commitment.
"We can’t write a check and walk away," she said. "We’re on a journey (with them) for a period of time, depending on what their needs are to make what Cardinal Rigali says is a peaceful life — whatever that may be."
• • •
Karen Becker directs the Office for Child and Youth Protection within the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. In August, as part of her office’s outreach, Becker and Michael J. McArdle, the president of Archbishop Ryan High School, sent a letter to Ryan alumni to inform them that administrators had received four allegations of sexual abuse that had occurred at the school — one episode that spanned the late 1970s to the early ’80s, another that reportedly occurred in the mid-’80s, and two others alleged to have taken place in the mid-’90s.
The letter also was an appeal to former Ryan students to come forward with information about sexual abuse in the past. The correspondence alerted recipients to the existence of the archdiocesan Victim Assistance Office.
The letter, however, did not identify the priests alleged to have been involved. Farrell, the archdiocesan spokeswoman, said the clergymen no longer were at Ryan and referred the Times to the Franciscans of the Assumption Province, whose order has served at Ryan since the school’s inception more than 40 years ago. But the Franciscan order also refused to identify the priests who had been implicated.
In an e-mailed statement to the Times, the Rev. Leslie Hoppe, provincial minister of the Wisconsin-based order, empathized with victims and was hopeful that the Catholic educators at Ryan would not be judged by allegations against the former staff members.
"The Franciscans of the Assumption Province has served at Archbishop Ryan High School since the school was founded in 1966," Hoppe wrote. "In the course of forty-one years, many Franciscan priests and brothers ministered there with integrity and commitment in order to help provide a Catholic education to their students. Of the scores of Franciscans who have served at Archbishop Ryan High School, there have been four whose actions have harmed some of the students entrusted to their care.
"Sexually abusing young people is a grave sin that is incompatible with the values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ," Hoppe said. "The Franciscans of the Assumption Province apologize to the young people harmed by four members of our fraternity, to their parents, and to the Christian faithful of Philadelphia. We ask your forgiveness as we recommit ourselves to serve at Archbishop Ryan High School with integrity."
Hoppe told the Times that disclosing the names of the four priests would be "counterproductive."
"Of the four individuals responsible for incidents of sexual abuse, two are deceased. The other two are living lives of prayer and penance," he wrote. "They have no ministry outside of the friaries where they live. They live under strict supervision and have no contact with children and young people."
Charles Gallagher, the deputy district attorney involved with the city’s grand jury investigation five years ago, said all allegations of child sexual abuse his office was aware of against Franciscans who worked at Ryan are beyond the statute of limitations and cannot be prosecuted.
At this time, Gallagher added, he had no verification whether the two surviving priests referred to in the Ryan letter sent to alumni are Franciscans already known to his office.
In June 2004, a former Ryan student who graduated in 1996, Arthur Baselice III, filed a lawsuit against the school and the archdiocese, among others, while accusing the Rev. Charles Newman of sexually abusing him as a teen in the mid-1990s, plying him with drugs and alcohol, and paying him thousands of dollars to feed a resulting drug habit. Baselice also accused the Rev. Thomas Luczak of offering him $50,000 to forgo his suit against the archdiocese, which has denied any knowledge of such a financial offer.
Newman, who was Ryan’s principal when Baselice attended the school, resigned as the school’s president in 2003 after auditors informed the archdiocese of "financial irregularities" discovered in the high school’s budget.
Baselice’s lawsuit was dismissed later in 2004, and a subsequent appeal to state Superior Court to reinstate it was rejected because of a lapse of the statute of limitations.
Baselice died last November at age 28. The attorney who prepared his lawsuit, Jay Abramowitch, said last week he is uncertain whether Baselice’s estate could revive the litigation if there were legislative approval of a window that could benefit past victims who lost out to the ticking clock.
"That’s the question. If there is a window statute, it would depend on how it’s interpreted, if it’s (a case that has) already been dismissed," the attorney said. "In Delaware, the window is for all the cases."
• • •
Achilles, the victim advocate for the archdiocese, said the letter distributed two months ago to Ryan alumni sought to reach out to a targeted population.
"We want to provide you with assistance. It’s accomplished that," she said of the intended message. "It’s the second school we did this at. We have had some phone calls. Some just want to talk about the issue, some people call anonymously."
O’Brien, the Northeast lawmaker and a Ryan alumnus who received the letter, commends the school’s efforts to reach out to students from the past.
"I applaud Ryan for trying to identify those that were abused and to get those people programs and counseling where appropriate," O’Brien said.
Despite the concerns of some parents and alumni, Achilles maintains that the decision to withhold the four clergy names was made for a good reason.
"We didn’t want it to be that painful," she said, explaining that there could be victims who, for their own reasons, do not wish to come forward and revisit the past.
However, because the Catholic church continues to repair an image tainted by scandal and a lack of forthrightness, even with the positive steps of victim outreach, withholding identities could rekindle the public perception that the church continues to protect its own interests.
That’s the concern that Tammy Lerner, Pennsylvania director of the Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, has about the reticence of the archdiocese and the Franciscan order to identify the subjects of the Ryan letter.
"Even though some may be dead, it’s essential to find victims to get healing, to find justice. There are a number of victims living in silence, thinking they are the only ones," Lerner said.
It’s for just that reason that the Diocese of Wilmington, Del., decided last year to reverse its longstanding policy of withholding the names of accused priests. Diocesan leaders concluded that focusing a public spotlight on such cases could help prevent future misconduct and encourage past victims to believe they could come forward and have faith that the diocese would investigate their allegations.
Releasing names and information are crucial requirements of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ $660 million settlement during the summer with more than 500 victims of clergy abuse, wrote constitutional-law scholar Marci Hamilton in a recent issue of FindLaw, a magazine devoted to legal issues and commentary.
It proved costly for the archdiocese. Hamilton noted that about half of the average individual settlement — $1.3 million per victim — will be paid by insurance. The balance is the responsibility of the archdiocese, paid with "funds and properties not dedicated to religious purposes," Hamilton said.
• • •
During last month’s conference in New York, the attendees came together to deliver a unified call for all states to reform arbitrary statute-of-limitation laws that bar victims of childhood sexual abuse from bringing criminal and civil legal actions against their assailants.
In Pennsylvania, four bills addressing the civil and criminal statute of limitations for such offenses are pending in the state legislature — two originating in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate:
o House Bill 1137, which was referred to the House Judiciary Committee in May, would extend the civil statute of limitations until the abuse victim reaches age 50. That would mirror the extension in criminal cases enacted by Gov. Rendell a year ago.
o House Bill 1574, referred to the committee in June, would provide a one-year window allowing victims of childhood sexual-abuse offenses to file civil litigation previously invalidated by a statute of limitations.
o Senate Bill 326, referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, would eliminate the statute of limitations on civil suits involving child sex-abuse offenses if the victim is under age 14.
o Senate Bill 553, also referred to the committee in March, would eliminate the statute of limitations on criminal prosecution for all child sex-abuse offenses.
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is firm in its opposition to the idea of a window that would permit judicial actions previously nullified by a lapse of time.
"Our focus has been on assisting victims and being with them. We do not believe in the idea of removing the statute of limitations," said Farrell, the archdiocesan spokeswoman. "The statutes exist for numerous reasons, and for good reasons."
Very old cases, she said, make it less likely that witnesses, including the alleged abuser, would be able to testify.
"It makes defending lawsuits difficult," she said.
Advocacy groups like the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) don’t share that view. In its support of window legislation, the national organization emphasizes that the burden of proof would continue to rest with the victim, not the person who has been accused. Such legislation doesn’t relax any rules of evidence, the group says, stressing that an institution can be held liable only if it is proved that leaders knew of a person’s predatory past but failed to take appropriate action.
During the past three weeks, parishioners throughout the Philadelphia archdiocese have received a brochure outlining its actions to assist victims of clergy sexual abuse, along with a letter from Cardinal Rigali.
"The changes reflect the recognition that victims are not at fault and that we are committed to assisting them in any way for as long as they need," the cardinal wrote. "Integrity of life is their right, and helping them pursue it is my pledge." ••
Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com
For more information . . .
The archdiocesan Victim Assistance Office can be reached at 1-888-800-8780, or visit
http://archdiocese-phl.org/protection/
Other organizations that can offer assistance include:
• Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), www.snapnetwork.org
• The Awareness Center Inc., www.theawarenesscenter.org
• National Association to Prevent Sexual Abuse of Children, www.napsac.us
• Road to Recovery Inc., www.road-to-recovery.org