A lay committee created by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington has identified 52 former or deceased priests accused of sexually abusing children in Vermont. The names of those with substantiated allegations against them will be released as soon as next month, Bishop Christopher Coyne said Thursday night at St. Mary’s Church in St. Albans.
About 75 people attended the first in a series of what the bishop calls public town hall meetings around the state this month.
The meetings are being held as the diocese faces a fresh investigation led by the Vermont Attorney General’s Office into decades-old abuse of children at the former St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington.
The tally of accused priests includes those who worked in the diocese since 1960 and had at least one allegation of sexual abuse made against them. The list to be made public will not include all 52 names, Coyne said, because in some cases both the accuser and the accused are dead, and the allegation was never proven.
Coyne said the committee, which is examining church files, has another month or so of work to finalize its review. “The hope is that we will release the names of any priest that has an allegation that is then substantiated by the file itself,” Coyne said.
Town hall attendees, most of whom identified themselves as Catholic churchgoers, asked Coyne about the sexual abuse scandal. But most of the 90-minute discussion focused on the myriad other concerns facing the church, including falling attendance and clerical celibacy.
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The Catholic Church seems to be infested with pedophile priests throughout this country, given all of the stories that keep breaking year after year, including the recent one in Pennsylvania. No wonder attendance is dropping; their credibility is dropping right along with it. But the real question people should be asking is why aren’t these priests sent to jail? Instead we have this divine perpetrator protection program, where the priests who get caught are just reassigned to positions in far away places. A radio show on public radio recently described an area in Alaska, where some of the worst pedophile priests had been reassigned to a region in Alaska with an indigenous population, who they then proceeded to abuse there, after having committed abuse in other states where they originated from. This needs to be treated as the criminal activity that it is, with police investigations and prosecutions and jail time, not just internal church investigations where they release some records, issue an official apology and make the occasional settlement payoff. I have a Catholic friend who grew up in Brooklyn, who’s brother was molested and raped repeatedly by a priest for years when he was a child, and that was over 50 years ago, and the nuns were in on it too, and knew what was happening to him. It is a sadistic and systemic institutional sickness and criminal mindset that goes back generations.
This is all smart PR from Coyne, but I hope he does not succeed. They do not deserve rehabilitation, this is an institution that has chosen, again and again, to protect abusers. For centuries. Their assets should be seized by the state.
The priests should all rot in jail instead of being reassigned! They are no better than serial rapists but the church doesn’t seem to care!