More than 600 children were sexually assaulted by roughly 150 Catholic priests associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore, according to a new report by the attorney general of Maryland.
The report spans 80 years of abuse at the oldest Roman Catholic diocese in the country, which extended to the majority of Maryland. Decades of coverups have been revealed, including one deacon who admitted to sexually assaulting more than 100 children.
“The sheer number of abusers and victims, the depravity of the abusers’ conduct, and the frequency with which known abusers were given the opportunity to continue preying upon children are astonishing,” said the report. “The staggering pervasiveness of the abuse itself underscores the culpability of the Church hierarchy.”
Today we released our redacted “Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore,” after an intensive four-year investigation into allegations of child sexual abuse and cover-up of that abuse by the leadership of the Catholic Church. https://t.co/hhbGYDnReD
— Anthony G. Brown (@OAGMaryland) April 5, 2023
There were 156 abusers listed, with ten names redacted and over 600 victims. The report states that there are likely many more victims that did not come forward. (RELATED: Man Convicted Of Raping 13-Year-Old Girl Gets Rehab, Not Prison)
Multiple parishes housed several abusers at once. St. Mark Parish in Cantonsville had 11 abusers living there at once from 1964 to 2004, and four other parishes had six abusers each.
The Maryland Attorney General’s office started this investigation in 2019, and analyzed over 100,000 documents, some dating as early as 1940. “Based on hundreds of thousands of documents and untold stories from hundreds of survivors, it provides, for the first time in the history of this State, a public accounting of more than 60 years of abuse and cover-up,” said Attorney General Anthony Brown in a press release provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
On Wednesday, Maryland’s Legislature passed a bill that would end the statute of limitations for abuse victims, and Gov. Wes Moore is in support. The Baltimore Archdiocese claims it has already paid more than $13 million to victims of abuse since 1980, according to the report.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore did not immediately respond to Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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