This was the first time a bishop had conducted such a sweeping purge of his predecessors’ symbolic legacies, although the names of individual bishops and priests involved in the sexual-abuse scandal have previously been excised from church buildings.
Anticipating the release of a state grand-jury report exposing decades of mishandled cases of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania, the bishop of Harrisburg on Wednesday ordered the removal of the names of former bishops dating to the 1940s from church buildings, schools and halls.
This was the first time a bishop had conducted such a sweeping purge of his predecessors’ symbolic legacies, although the names of individual bishops and priests involved in the sexual-abuse scandal have previously been excised from church buildings.
“I express profound sorrow, and I apologize to the survivors of sexual abuse, to the Catholic faithful and to the general public for the abuses that took place and for those church officials who failed to protect children,” the bishop, Ronald Gainer of Harrisburg, said at a news conference.
The move comes as Catholics in the United States have been reeling from a new wave of accusations that have brought down a U.S. cardinal and revealed possible cover-ups at the church’s highest levels. Church officials knew for years about allegations that a former cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, had sexually molested young men training to be priests in New Jersey, according to news reports, but failed to take action.
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With Catholics calling for a Vatican investigation into McCarrick, the president of the U.S. bishops conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, released a statement Wednesday saying the accusations “reveal a grievous moral failure within the church.” He said the bishops’ conference had begun to consider a course of action and would “pursue the many questions” raised by the case “to the full extent of its authority.”
McCarrick, 88, resigned from the College of Cardinals last week after an additional report that for years he had sexually abused a boy he had known since baptizing him as a baby. The archbishop, a globally known figure who had led the Washington archdiocese, is set to face a church trial.
In Pennsylvania, Catholic leaders have been bracing for the scheduled release this month of what is expected to be a bombshell grand-jury report examining the scope of child sexual abuse in the state. Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has said the report would be a comprehensive look at accusations against more than 300 priests in six dioceses, dating back seven decades.
Gainer announced steps Wednesday to address the failures. He waived the confidentiality agreements of abuse victims who had received settlements from the diocese, permitting them to speak publicly without fear of legal repercussions.
He released the names of 71 priests, deacons and seminarians who have been credibly accused of abuse in Harrisburg since 1947, the period examined by the grand jury.
And he said the diocese had posted new guidelines to prevent child sexual abuse (the U.S. bishops adopted a set of guidelines in 2002 after an outbreak of sexual- abuse allegations in Boston).
With his blanket decree, Gainer did not say whether all of his predecessors had been negligent in handling abuse. Among the former Harrisburg bishops are Kevin Rhoades, who is serving as the bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend in Indiana. Another is Cardinal William Keeler, who as archbishop of Baltimore was the first U.S. bishop to volunteer to post the names of priests accused of abuse in his archdiocese. Keeler died in 2017.
Gainer is the president of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, the church’s statewide public policy arm, which has lobbied state lawmakers against expanding the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse.