Say hello to Cardinal Bevilacqua.... - Democratic Underground

QuettaKid

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Fri Sep-23-05 01:32 PM
Original message

Say hello to Cardinal Bevilacqua....

Edited on Fri Sep-23-05 01:35 PM by QuettaKid

If you have a blog or website, I would ask that you duplicate this post or your own version of it. Anthony Joseph Bevilacqua may have escaped justice, but perhaps we can help in some small way to make certain his deeds do not escape notice:

After a three-year investigation, a grand jury in Philadelphia reported yesterday that two leading figures in the U.S. Roman Catholic hierarchy, Cardinals John Krol and Anthony Bevilacqua, deliberately concealed the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by at least 63 priests in that city from 1967 to 2002.

The grand jury also found that the Philadelphia Archdiocese kept 10 accused child molesters in active ministry even after June 2002, when all the U.S. bishops promised in Dallas to remove any priest who had ever faced a credible allegation of abuse. Two accused priests are still in ministry in Philadelphia, prosecutors said.

The scathing, 418-page report vents the grand jury's frustration that it was unable to indict anybody. It says there is clear evidence in church files that Krol, who died in 1996, and Bevilacqua, who retired two years ago, "enabled and excused" abuse by transferring accused priests from parish to parish without warning parishioners or informing police.

Among the priests they protected, the grand jury said, was one who raped an 11-year-old girl and then took her in for an abortion, and another who groped a teenage girl while she lay immobilized in traction in a hospital bed after a car accident.

"But the biggest crime of all is this: it worked," the report said. "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. And Archdiocese officials, by burying those reports they did receive and covering up the conduct, similarly managed to outlast any statutes of limitation. . . . We surely would have charged them if we could have done so."

Read the source documents:

* Grand Jury Report on the Sexual Abuse of Minors By Clergy
* Archdiocese of Philadelphia Response To The Grand Jury Report

Bevilacqua and the priests couldn't be prosecuted because of applicable statute of limitations. The Church, in a blistering reply, accuses the grand jury of trying the case in the press, to which I plead guilty. It's the only forum available and these men need to be tried. As Marci Hamilton notes, the heartbreaking truth at the center of this story is that the coverup worked:

"Unbelievably, the Archdiocese repeatedly tries to make it sound as though the lack of indictments absolves it of criminal and moral responsibility. But the truth is, they got off on a technicality. Let's put the technicality of the statute of limitations aside, and look at the substance of the report. It is unequivocal. On the merits, but for the statute of limitations, the dozens of priest perpetrators, who were placed in one parish after another, were guilty of rape, statutory sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, endangering welfare of children, and corruption of minors. "

Please help tell the story of Anthony Joseph Bevilacqa. If you do post on the subject, please use the word "evil" in your post title so that those who search for it in the future will find it personified in the form of Cardinal Bevilacqua.