AG's Catholic Grand Jury Report Belonged On History Channel

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Wading through the state attorney general's thick grand jury report on the Catholic Church is like wandering through a graveyard.

Of the 250 or so accused predator priests whose alleged perverted exploits are chronicled in 1,356 pages, I counted at least 117 confirmed dead bodies. Another 13 of these ancient men of the cloth who were born before 1940 had the dates of their deaths listed in the report as "unknown."

Some of these codgers were born back in the 1920s; the birthday of the most ancient alleged pervert was way back in 1896, seven years before the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane.

The most ancient predator priest whose death could be confirmed was born in 1869, four years after the Civil War ended. Another alleged predator priest laid out in the report had been dead since 1950, before Eisenhower was president. The crimes these priests allegedly committed against children in six dioceses around the state were from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. One alleged victim, identified as Bob from Reading, was 83.

Was this really news? Or something that should have run on the History Channel?

In Philadelphia, the report issued by Attorney General Josh Shapiro brought back memories of the groundbreaking 2005 grand jury report on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia done by former D.A. Lynne Abraham.

"There's nothing new here; it's the same playbook," said Alan J. Tauber, a criminal defense lawyer whose stable of priestly abuse clients include Msgr. William J. Lynn. According to Tauber, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro "took the [Philadelphia] grand jury report and he like replicated that, he served subpoenas, he got the secret archive files; they [the AG's office] basically replicated" the Philadelphia grand jury report of 2005.

Certainly the evasive tactics of the church to keep the clergy's sins out of the courts and the newspapers seemed familiar, as if the six dioceses profiled in the report were all operating out of the same playbook used in Philadelphia.

Which of course they were.

As for Alan J. Tauber Esquire, he was just getting warmed up.

"This report is like the explorer, John Cabot, who lands on Cape Cod in 1497," Tauber opined. "And the press is treating Cabot like he's Christopher Columbus, and he just discovered America."

Ah the press. Over at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where criminal indictments are typically treated as though the prosecutor, face glistening, just brought them down from Mount Sinai, it was a jail break. The Inky's crack team of social justice warriors cranked out seven news stories and a column decrying the church's historic sins as though it had all just happened yesterday.

From the look of the Inky's front page, you would have thought that the terrorists had flown airplanes into skyscrapers again, or we had just landed an astronaut on Mars. Instead, some headline-seeking prosecutor -- Shapiro --had just issued an autopsy report on one of the media's favorite whipping boys, the Roman Catholic Church. And on the Inky's front page, Josh was getting the treatment reserved for unfolding natural disasters.

"Thank God for the criminal investigators and prosecutors," raved crusading columnist Maria Panaritis. "Thank God for the grand jury subpoenas . . . Thank God for the courage of the victims. For without them, Attorney General Josh Shapiro and his team would have had no real case to root out and unveil decades of depravity and systemic abuse by clergy, overseen by complicit [church] superiors."

"Do not, however, thank the Men of the Cloth," Panaritis continued in her sermon. "For many of them, despite their broadcast sanctimony, were among the liars, the hustlers, the actors who protected the predators."

Another Inky story detailed a child porn ring in Pittsburgh run by priests back in the 1970s. Three of those priests were arrested 30 years ago on unrelated sex abuse charges.

Memo to the guys in black robes -- maybe it's not such a great idea to hang onto all those records you've been hoarding under lock and key for so many decades under orders of the Vatican. Have you guys ever heard of a paper shredder? It would have saved you a lot of grief.

Over at the law office of Lynne Abraham, the former D.A. didn't seem upset by the knock-off report that Shapiro had cranked out.

"Didn't you know that imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery," Abraham wrote in an email. She too was struck by the similarities between what happened in Philadelphia, and what happened in the six other dioceses around the state probed by Shapiro.

"It's as though the priests learn how to read and then pass out a script -- 'How to molest little kids,'" Abraham said about the familiar grooming tactics of the alleged predators. As far as Abraham was concerned, she'd be happy if there were more grand jury reports on sex abuse.

"Every prosecutor in the country should be doing the same thing, but it will be the same report over and over again, this time naming thousands," she said. "Sexual perversion runs deep and continuous in the priesthood. After all, it's been going on for centuries."

And to prove it, all you have to do is read the AG's report. As far as Josh Shapiro was concerned, everything old was new again.

"We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this," the report said. "We know some of you have heard some of it before.  There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere."

Although he was decades late to the party, the AG's claim to fame was record numbers -- after all, the AG had rounded up 300 alleged predator priests who had allegedly raped and abused more than 1,000 victims.

By comparison, the AG pointedly noted in its report, Boston only had between 150 to 250 predator priests, Philadelphia, only 60 predator priests, and Altoona-Johnston, only 50 predator priests.

Josh wins.

In his encyclopedia on all the alleged sex crimes in the history of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania, Attorney General Shapiro managed to describe a couple of fresh perversions -- notably a priest during the early 1980s who, after allegedly forcing a boy to give him oral sex, allegedly washed the boy's mouth out with a squirt of purifying holy water, a fresh supply of which the padre just happened to be carrying.

The alleged perpetrator, however, Father Thomas J. Benestad, a former pastor who's 73 and retired, the report noted, "vehemently denies" the accusations.

The AG report stated that a church investigation had sided with Benestad and that a local D.A. had said that the alleged crimes were past the state of limitations, so no charges were ever filed. Other than the lurid charges stated in church records by the same dumb guys who write down everything and keep it forever, there was no other proof offered by the AG that these crimes had actually happened.

Then there was Father Gregory Flohr, who, back in 1969, allegedly used a rope to tie up an altar boy in the confessional, before allegedly sodomizing him with a crucifix.

Father Flohr could not be reached for comment, as he's been dead for 14 years.

Now, we all are painfully aware that Catholic priests have done many horrible things to many children over the years, and that the bishops they worked for conspired to systematically cover all of it up. But perhaps some skepticism is required because the charges contained in the AG's report are after all, technically just accusations, and there will be little due process for this clerical crime spree since only two of the 300 priests mentioned in the report could be charged with crimes.

Here in Philadelphia, we found out the hard way that not every accusation of sex abuse turns out to be true.

We had a former altar boy named Danny Gallagher, AKA "Billy Doe," who claimed that a priest allegedly attacked him inside a church, stripped him naked, tied him up with altar sashes and proceeded to rape him.

Gallagher also claimed that another priest allegedly held him captive in the sacristy and behind locked doors, anally raped him for five hours. Gallagher also claimed that a schoolteacher who gave him a ride home in his car allegedly strangled the altar boy with a seat belt while beating and raping him.

All of those lurid accusations were dutifully chronicled in church records, as Gallagher  radically kept changing all of his stories of abuse, but none of it turned out to true. The lead detective in the case came forward to testify that he caught Gallagher telling many lies, and that Gallagher had even admitted to the detective that he had made up many of his stories. As a result of the detective coming forward, the D.A. let the schoolteacher who had been convicted of rape out of jail nearly a dozen years early.

It was too late, however, to help one of those accused priests, Father Charles Engelhardt, who had died in jail.

Of course, while the detective came forward to testify, and Danny Gallagher's credibility was going up in smoke, the Inquirer willfully ignored the logical implications, namely that an entire 2011 grand jury report written around the wild but not-yet investigated allegations of Gallagher, an indictment that sent three priests and a Catholic schoolteacher to jail, was not only wrong, but turned out to be a fraud perpetrated by willful prosecutorial misconduct, as testified to by the D.A.'s own lead detective!

On the day the D.A. let the schoolteacher out of jail, all the Inky's social justice warriors were busy, so the newspaper ran a brief AP story.

Now that's what you call objective reporting.

On the witness stand, the detective told a judge how he repeatedly told the lead prosecutor in the case, former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, that his investigation had shown that Gallagher was lying, but that Sorensen kept saying she didn't believe him, and finally she replied, "You're killing my case."

It got worse. For eight years, in three different courtrooms, in front of three different judges, former ADA Sorensen and her colleagues in the D.A.'s office had claimed that in 2010, on the day she first interviewed Danny Gallagher behind closed doors, she never took any notes.

Amazingly, eight years later, seven typed pages of those "lost" notes suddenly reappeared as glaring stone-cold proof of prosecutorial misconduct.

And what did the Inquirer do about that? Absolutely nothing, because at the Inky, prosecutors always wear white hats and victims of sex abuse always tell the truth. That's why the Inquirer never prints the names of accused victims, and why they never outed Danny Gallagher, although they have no problems about hanging all of those accused priests in the public square.

In Philadelphia, we have also learned that sometimes, even an accusation from a certified victim turns out to be untrue. That's why it's important to investigate every accusation before we hang somebody.

For example, that 2005 grand jury report on the Philadelphia archdiocese lists a victim named "Ruth" who was repeatedly raped as a child by a predator priest who got her pregnant, and then paid for an abortion.

Decades later, after Ruth got into therapy, she started telling wild stories about black Masses held underground at the seminary, and a ceremony where she was allegedly "married" to the archbishop of Philadelphia, who, supposedly, along with some other priests, proceeded to rape her on the altar.

Detectives determined that the stories weren't credible. A group of sympathetic Catholic women who organized to support Ruth disbanded, after they came to the same conclusion.

When the Philadelphia D.A.'s office put priests on trial in 2012 for abuse, Ruth showed up in the courtroom as an observer. I asked a prosecutor why he didn't put Ruth up on the witness stand. He smiled and said if he did that, it would be a gift to the church's defense lawyers.

Shapiro was on safer ground when he talked about the institutional coverup in the church.

"The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid 'scandal,'" the report said. "Abuse complaints were kept locked up in a 'secret archive.' That is not our word but theirs; the church's Code of Canon Law specifically requires the diocese to maintain such an archive. Only the bishop can have the key."

Yeah, yeah, here in Philly, we heard all that 13 years ago, in the grand jury report on the Philadelphia archdiocese. The playbook when the church discovered they had an alleged pervert priest on their hands was always the same. Send the padre off for evaluation at a church-run psychiatric center. Start out diagnosing the priest by asking him, hey, Father, are you a pedophile? If he denied it, there was no proof.

If a priest had to be removed, "don't say why," the AG's grand jury report said. Tell the parishioners he's on sick leave, or suffering from nervous exhaustion. Or don't say anything. Just ship him off to another parish, where he can set up shop again with new victims. And for God's sake, don't bother telling anybody.

On This Week, David Zubik, the bishop of Pittsburgh, told host George Stephanopoulos, "The church of Pittsburgh today is not the church described in the grand jury report."

The bishop's right, and that applies as well here in Philadelphia.

They may have done it only because they had a loaded gun pointed to their heads, but it's true that the bishops have been forced to clean up their act. In Philadelphia, a recent case with one of Alan Tauber's more notorious clients, Father Mark Haynes, illustrates that point.

In 2015, the cops caught Haynes going on the net and posing as a teenage girl offering naked photos and videos, so the priest could seek naked photos and videos from other girls.

The day after he was arrested, the archdiocese booted Father Haynes out of the rectory. There was no church-ordered therapy at a church-run institution, no cover-up, no transfer to another parish, not even an offer to provide Haynes with counseling.

Instead, Haynes was out on the street. Days later, in every pulpit of the archdiocese, a priest read a statement from the church outing Father Haynes as an alleged predator priest under arrest, and asking any past victims to come foreword.

Two adults did just that, claiming that 30 years ago, they'd been abused by the priest. The statements of the two alleged victims jacked up the sentencing guidelines for Father Haynes, who had pleaded guilty to seven counts of child pornography and destruction of evidence.

In 2016, a judge sentenced the 56-year-old priest to 20 years in jail, a $15,000 fine, and upon his release, ten years of supervised probation. Haynes, whom Tauber described in court as "a woman occupying a man's body," was said to be cooperating with a voluntary laicization process where he would be defrocked.

"The archdiocese's response was an up-to-the-minute textbook response to allegations like this," Tauber said.

Yes, thanks to the efforts of that 2005 Philadelphia grand jury and prosecutors like Lynne Abraham, there's been a radical change in the behavior of the bishops. But it didn't get much notice in the media hoopla over Shapiro's report.

The bottom line of this caper: Shapiro's knock-off report about ancient alleged sex crimes in the Catholic Church didn't tell us anything new. But the coverage of that report now serves as a fresh example of persistent and ongoing media bias.