May 12, 2023
Dear Friends in Christ,
The report by the Maryland Office of Attorney General that documents the tremendous harm caused to innocent children and young people by some ministers of the Church is horrific, deeply sad and an incredibly painful reminder of the past failures of the Archdiocese.
In turn, headlines and media narratives have emerged in the weeks since its release, and what appears in many of these news stories does not provide a full or completely accurate picture and certainly does not detail in any way the 30-year history of the Archdiocese’s accountability and enforcement efforts.
The opposite of “cover up” is accountability and transparency. The Archdiocese significantly enhanced its accountability to the faithful and to the public at large beginning in 1993 by consistently reporting all allegations of child sexual abuse to law enforcement, even when the victim-survivor making the allegation was already an adult. The Archdiocese has further demonstrated transparency by publishing a list of priests and brothers accused of child sexual abuse on our website, a measure which is undertaken by virtually no other institution outside of the Catholic Church. The Archdiocese’s actions and decisions regarding each allegation of child sexual abuse have been scrutinized by an Independent Review Board for 30 years to ensure absolute accountability and avoid any possibility of “cover up.”
And so, I want to state unequivocally: No one who has been credibly accused of child abuse is in ministry today or employed by the Archdiocese.
Some members of clergy whose names have been tied more recently to media coverage focusing on a “cover up” are, in fact, some of the very people who helped force a culture change that rooted out evil and shut out attempts to conceal the failures or hide abusers. How is it a cover up if you report everything to law enforcement? Among this generation of Archdiocesan leadership are those who created the Office of Child and Youth Protection and the Independent Review Board. They also ushered in the era of reporting allegations of abuse to law enforcement — and in many cases were the very ones who made such reports. They also took the pioneering steps to publish the list of credibly accused priests and brothers mentioned above when the Archdiocese was only the second diocese in the country to do so at the time. They, too, implemented the policies for screening and training of tens of thousands of employees, volunteers, members of clergy and children, as well.
Even so, while this is today’s strong and effective stance, to be sure, allegations of child sexual abuse were not always handled in this way decades ago. Indeed, we have learned a lot along the way, and as a result our response today is different. But to say that certain priests of this generation of leadership willingly or knowingly perpetuated the sexual abuse of children is simply not the case. They followed what were understood as the best practices of those decades and worked in good faith to improve the Church’s response.
All clergy and staff employed by the Archdiocese are committed to a culture where child protection is paramount. This includes various actions in strict compliance with our child protection policies. We report to law enforcement all allegations. We mandate the trainings and screenings that are central to our culture of accountability, and we recognize our responsibility to respond pastorally to all those who have been harmed by ministers of the Church. To be clear, over the past decades we have endeavored to learn from our mistakes and improve on all of our efforts aimed at preventing the abuse of even one more child.
I believe now in the suitability of today’s pastors for ministry and in their capable leadership and pastoral care, as well as their commitment to enforcing the child protection policies that some of them even helped to create.
Before I conclude this letter, I ask for you to join me in praying that this public accounting of historical failures will bring healing to victim-survivors, peace to the faithful and reconciliation to the Church.
Most Reverend William E. Lori
Archbishop of Baltimore
Read the text of Archbishop Lori’s pastoral letter here
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Christian Kendzierski
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