Harrisburg, Pa., Jul 9, 2018 / 02:40 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Several Pennsylvania news outlets and victims of clergy sex abuse sued Friday for the release of a grand jury report which details cases of abuse in six of the state’s eight Catholic dioceses. The state supreme court had blocked the release.
Todd Frey, who testified to the grand jury about having been abused by a priest, filed a petition with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court July 6, saying the delayed release of the report is re-traumatizing victims. Philadelphia attorney Tom Kline has filed suit on behalf of another, unnamed victim.
Frey’s court filing said the stay on the report’s release “replicates and continues” the silencing he experienced as a youth.
Nine news outlets argued that Pennsylvania law requires that the more-than-800-page report, a “matter of extraordinary public importance”, be released publicly.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced June 29 he would be taking legal action to force the report’s release.
The state’s two dioceses which are not subjects of the report, Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown, have already undergone similar investigations.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court stayed the release of the report June 20, after numerous individuals named in the report objected to its release, citing concerns of due process and reputational rights guaranteed by the state constitution.
Those who requested a block on the release of the report have said that though they could file written rebuttals with the grand jury, they could not present their own testimony or evidence, or cross-examine witnesses.
The objections were made by around 24 persons, including current and former clerics. The dioceses named in the report have all said they did not apply for the stay, and that they support the publication of the report.
The individuals who asked for the stay said the report “denies them due process based upon the lack of a pre-deprivation hearing and/or an opportunity to be heard by the grand jury,” according to the state supreme court.
Justin Danilewitz, an attorney representing the current and former clerics who sought to block the report’s release, said the report is replete with inaccuracies. He wrote that “grand jury secrecy protects those, like the Clergy Petitioners, whose reputations may be unjustly harmed, including the innocent wrongly accused.”
Lawyers for the media outlets requesting the report’s release have said a redacted version could be released to respond to those concerns, while the court considers challenges to the full report’s release, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
Some priests have said they would not object to the release of a redacted version of the report, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.
Efrem Grail, an attorney representing an individual named in the report, has written that “There is simply no reason why speed in this entire proceeding will lead to anything other than injustice and confusion.”
Witnesses who testified to the grand jury want the report “to bring sweeping change, forcing their abusers and the church to be accountable and take responsibility. They hope it encourages other victims who haven’t come forward after years of dealing alone with their trauma to get the help they need. They also hope it propels lawmakers to change Pennsylvania law to give prosecutors more time to pursue charges against child predators and victims more time to sue for damages,” according to the Associated Press.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted in 2002 a Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which has been the foundation for the efforts to provide a safe environment in the Church in the US.
The charter obligates all compliant dioceses and eparchies to provide resources both for victims of abuse and resources for abuse prevention. Each year, the USCCB releases an extensive report on the dioceses and eparchies, including an audit of all abuse cases and allegations, and recommended policy guidelines for dioceses. The guidelines of the current charter have been implemented in every US diocese.
The charter has been continually updated, including earlier this year.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has said its stay order will be revisited “when the proceedings before it have advanced to a stage at which either the petitions for review can be resolved, or an informed and fair determination can be made as to whether a continued stay is warranted.”
Petitioners must submit briefs to the court by July 10, and the attorney general is to respond by July 13.
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The Betty White stamps are out too.
Life is good.
Buckley was a classic conservative, not a right wing populist. They are not the same thing.
A classic conservative believes in the Constitution, the separation of powers. Right wing populists seem to want an all powerful executive, unrestrained by the Constitution.
Yes, Buckley wanted a smaller Federal Government, but he also wanted a Federal Government that operates within the law.
Both definitions serve only to create dismissive means of understanding by the enemies of conservatism. The driving factors of anyone gravitating towards an identification as a conservative have always been culturally based and intuitively based on religion. Despite how many bad historians falsify history by associating leftist tyrannies with the political right, conservatives, not progressive secularists, value, innate truth, natural law, and rights as divine endowments rather than political inventions.
Hitler and Mussolini were”Leftists?” I don’t think so. They were Fascists. Ditto Franco, Peron, etc.
Fascists are leftists. Don’t be swayed by the preposterous projections of leftist history.
So, there is no Extreme Right? I don’t agree that Fascists are Leftists. Communists are indeed extreme Left, but Fascists are extreme Right.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a Leftist, not a classic Liberal. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a true Conservative, but a Right Winger. I wish the media would get this right.
It really matters little to those suffering under a totalitarian regime what the regime leadership identifies as. Totalitarian is as totalitarian does.
Who are those who deny objective morality. Those who actually deny it, such as all leftists including all communists and fascists, or those who affirm objective morality, such as those who value conserving immutable truths, such as all right wing anti-fascists and anti-communists. Reconsider your knowledge of history in place of the cliched assumptions of airheaded academics, journalists, and historians.
William: Your definitions are the accepted conventions, so they can’t be faulted for their intent.
Nonetheless, as the post war Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and others pointed out, the very concept of an ideological political spectrum is an invention of religion hating revolutionaries who always stood to salvage respectability by creating the fiction of moral equivalency between those competing socialist factions who identify themselves differently whether they see nationalized tyrannies or internationalist tyrannies as primarily the means to social utopia, which they assume, everyone desires.
Liberals believing they have been fair to conservatives place their ideas at some place on this fictional spectrum but are not fair enough to know that conservative arguments revolve around denying this spectrum. Conservatives might grudgingly concede the language of the revolutionaries at times, for purposes of rebuke, while making the religious argument that only a moral people can create honor and justice in society, and there can never be anything “revolutionary” in the human condition. Conservatives don’t see government as their savior, nor do they even view conservatism as an “ideology” since that term assumes truth is manmade rather than divinely endowed. Buckley’s famous quip for original sin and against the myth of progress in the human condition was his plea to stand atop history and yell, “Stop!”
Buckley on a stamp! A great move, although on his “Firing Line” he immediately would have debated the reasons behind today’s inflated price of stamps. His Stamp Act, for sure.
And, this commemoration is much to be preferred over placing Obama on Mount Rushmore as some fantasized earlier.