FILED · 2018 · CATHOLIC · SEXUAL
Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on Clergy Abuse
A two-year statewide investigating grand jury in Pennsylvania identified more than 300 credibly accused priests and over 1,000 child victims across six Catholic dioceses, naming each priest individually in the public record.
What happened
In August 2018, the Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania released the public version of Report 1 of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. The grand jury had spent two years reviewing roughly half a million pages of internal Catholic diocesan records, subpoenaed under state authority, covering six of Pennsylvania's eight dioceses: Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton.
The report identified 301 priests against whom credible accusations of child sexual abuse had been made and documented in the internal personnel records of the dioceses themselves. It identified more than 1,000 individual child victims, with the grand jury observing that the true number was almost certainly higher because diocesan files were incomplete and many survivors had not come forward.
The report named each accused priest individually and reproduced extensive verbatim excerpts from the dioceses' own internal correspondence — including memoranda discussing reassignment, payment, and the deliberate avoidance of contact with civil authorities.
Institutional response
Statutes of limitations barred criminal prosecution of nearly every accused priest. Pennsylvania's Catholic dioceses subsequently established victim-compensation funds; the largest, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (which was not one of the six dioceses covered by this report but established its own fund in response), processed claims through an independent administrator. State legislative attempts to open a retroactive civil-claim window — a "lookback window" — passed the House repeatedly but were blocked in the Senate until 2021, when a constitutional amendment process was opened.
Significance
The Pennsylvania report is the single most extensive public-record release of internal Catholic diocesan abuse files in any American jurisdiction. Where the Boston Globe established the methodology in 2002 (court-unsealed personnel files as the central evidence), the Pennsylvania grand jury demonstrated what becomes available when the same investigative posture is taken by a state attorney general with subpoena power.
Sources
- Office of Attorney General, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Report 1 of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury (released 14 August 2018).
- Substantive coverage: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Philadelphia Inquirer, Erie Times-News, Associated Press, August 2018 forward.
- Independent Reconciliation and Reparations Program reports (Diocese of Harrisburg, Diocese of Scranton, et al.).