Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown challenged the veracity of a statement the Archdiocese of Baltimore posted on its website about a report by Brown’s office detailing decades of child sex abuse and torture by Catholic clergy in Maryland and the church’s coverup.
On April 5, the day the report’s was made public, the Archdiocese posted to its website answers for what it described as frequently asked questions about the 450-page report the attorney general’s office released last week, airing publicly for the first time the staggering scope of abuse committed by priests and others affiliated with the church.
In one section, the Archdiocese addressed 10 living people accused in the report of abuse whose names were redacted from the document, saying the names “were not redacted at the request of the Archdiocese” and that the “attorney general requested that their names be redacted, and the court ordered it.”
Brown, a Democrat who assumed office in January, said that’s misleading because the names were shielded from public record in response to a court order, not at his office’s request. In a statement released Friday, Brown challenged the Archdiocese to release the names.
“The Archdiocese can, at any time, publish those 10 names on their website as individuals who have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse, yet they have not done so, despite having the full and completed report since November, as well as information about those 10 individuals for many years,” Brown said. “They are uniquely positioned to legally release those names to the public at any moment as part of their credibly accused list, should they choose to do so.”
He issued the statement to “set the record straight,” said Jennifer Dolan, a spokesperson for Brown.
“The Office has spent four years in a very difficult process of disclosing more, not less,” Dolan told The Baltimore Sun in an email. “The Archdiocese of Baltimore should know better and should remove this misleading information from their website.”
A spokesman for the Archdiocese said Friday morning it “will continue to follow the court’s process.”
The dispute adds tension to the fallout from the long-awaited release of the report and fuel to the demands of abuse survivors for the Archdiocese to publish the redacted names.
David Lorenz, Maryland director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, agreed with Brown’s interpretation that the Archdiocese could release the redacted names if it chose.
“Most of the information released in this report, including the redactions, could have been made public 10 years ago,” Lorenz said in an email. “That the Church congratulates themselves on their new-found transparency is the height of hypocrisy and is a wound to the mind of anyone willing to give this even a second’s worth of thought.”
The report lays out in wrenching detail how 156 clergy and other Church officials tormented more than 600 children and young adults over 80 years dating to the 1940s.
It revealed the names of 36 abusers not listed as credibly accused by the Archdiocese of Baltimore, which covers Baltimore and nine counties in Central and Western Maryland.
The report also shielded the identities of several church officials accused of covering up abuse.
In its FAQ, the Archdiocese said none of the 10 abusers redacted from the report are “in ministry today.”
It does not mention that the Catholic Church paid at least some of the legal costs for a group of people who sought to have their names shielded.
Former Attorney General Brian Frosh, whose administration oversaw the four-year investigation culminating in the report, questioned the Archdiocese’s transparency in his first public appearance since the report became public.
“The protestations about them supporting its release are undermined by the fact that they are actually paying for the folks that are trying to stop its release and who got the redactions,” Frosh said.
The Most Rev. William E. Lori, archbishop of Baltimore since 2012, described his and other Catholics’ “shock” and “horror” at the revelation of the church’s “enormous” history of abuse.
He also said the attorney general’s office, with the report’s release, “signaled that the cultural changes, child protection policies and accountability measures the archdiocese began implementing more than a generation ago have proven successful.”
Frosh disagreed.
“As far as we can tell, the archdiocese started complying with the law in 2002,” said Frosh, referring to obeying legal mandates to report child abuse to authorities. “I would not say that they have done everything they can to stop child abuse, to hold people accountable."
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