Maryland attorney general acknowledges that church has changed response

In a message to members of the Archdiocese of Baltimore April 5 after the release of the Maryland Attorney General’s report on sexual abuse in the archdiocese over the last 80 years, Archbishop William E. Lori noted that the policies and processes have changed since the number of incidents of abuse peaked in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The archdiocese is not the same organization it was when, as the report documents, cases of abuse peaked during the 1960s and 1970s. Instances fell every year and every decade since then, alongside the development of canon and criminal law and Archdiocesan accountability standards and policies designed to protect children,” the archbishop said.

Asked by the Catholic Review at a press conference the day of the release whether the archdiocese was still covering up abuse, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown sidestepped the question.

But a day later, Brown, who inherited the investigation from his predecessor, Brian Frosh, appeared April 6 on WYPR radio’s “On the Record” with Sheilah Kast, who asked Brown if the archbishop’s contention that the church has changed is accurate.

“I won’t take issue with Archbishop Lori’s categorization of the archdiocese today,” Brown told WYPR. “What I’ll tell you is that we have reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, and it is accurate to say that the abuse that we discovered and uncovered pre-dates the current leadership in the Archdiocese and they are offenses that occurred in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and through the ’80s, some maybe as recently as the ’90s.”

After he had submitted the report to the Baltimore City Circuit Court asking for permission to release it, Frosh also noted in a late November interview with WYPR’s Kast that he believed the archdiocesan cover-up is over by saying, “To the best of my knowledge, it is.

“The church changed its policy dramatically in 2002 and the law by that time had mandated reports of child abuse and the church has since then, as far as we can tell, followed the law, reported child sexual abuse when it was reported to them,” Frosh said in the interview.

In communications accompanying the release of the report, Archbishop Lori emphasized that the archdiocese reports all allegations of sexual abuse within the church to law enforcement, the appropriate state’s attorney and the Office of the Attorney General, a practice that has been in place since the 1990s.

The law changed in 1993 to mandate reporting of abuse when the victim was already an adult or the abuser is no longer alive.

Also that year, the archdiocese established its first Independent Review Board to review reports of child sexual abuse by Church personnel and issued written child protection policies. Requirements in the policies included mandatory reporting of child abuse, cooperation with law enforcement authorities, trainings for clergy and other Church personnel, required reference and background checks, and procedures for pastoral response.

The archbishop said that one of the ways to respond to victim-survivors is “to continually demonstrate an ever-renewed commitment to create a church that is safe. This church of today is not the church of yesterday. But neither can we rest on our laurels,” Archbishop Lori said. “Never would I ever say we’re done with this. We’re not done because as we learn better and better how to spot the signs of sex abuse, as we learn better and better how to help people who have been abused, those best practices and others have to be incorporated into what we say and what we do.”

Email Christopher Gunty at editor@CatholicReview.org.

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