Maryland’s attorney general released some previously redacted names in its staggering report on child sex abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore on Tuesday, however the names of 5 Catholic Church leaders remained redacted amid ongoing appeals, prompting criticism of the church by victims’ advocates.
While the names of the high-ranking church leaders have already got been reported by local media, the Maryland director of Survivors of those Abused by Priests said he was disillusioned, but not surprised that resistance continues against transparency and accountability.
“Once again, it just shows that the church just isn’t doing what they are saying they’re doing,” said David Lorenz. “They’re just not. They’re not being open and transparent, and so they needs to be, and so they claim to be.”
Lorenz said he questioned whether the names within the report would ever be made public.
“I don’t have a ton of confidence, since the church is incredibly powerful and intensely wealthy and so they are paying for the lawyers for these officials,” Lorenz said. “We know that. They are paying the lawyers of the officials whose names are still being redacted.”
Christian Kendzierski, a spokesperson for the archdiocese, said the archdiocese has cooperated with the investigation, which began in 2019.
“At the identical time, we believed that those named within the report had a right to be heard as a fundamental matter of fairness,” Kendzierski said. “In today’s culture where hasty and errant conclusions are sometimes quickly formed, the mere inclusion of 1’s name in a report resembling this could wrongly and eternally equate anyone named — irrespective of how innocuously — with those that committed the evilest acts.”
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office said in an announcement last month that the five officials whose names remain redacted “had extensive participation within the Archdiocese’s handling of abuser clergy and reports of kid abuse.” The attorney general’s office noted a judge’s order that made further disclosures possible.
“The court’s order enables my office to proceed to lift the veil of secrecy over a long time of horrifying abuse suffered by the survivors,” Attorney General Anthony Brown said on the time.
The names of eight alleged abusers that had been redacted were publicized in a revised report released Tuesday.
Brown’s office said appeals are ongoing regarding further disclosure of redacted names and the agency could release an excellent less redacted version of the report later.
The names were initially redacted partly because they were obtained through grand jury proceedings, that are confidential under Maryland law and not using a judge’s order.
Those accused of perpetuating the coverup include Auxiliary Bishop W. Francis Malooly, in response to The Baltimore Sun. Malooly later rose to grow to be bishop of the Diocese of Wilmington, which covers all of Delaware and parts of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He retired in 2021.
Another high-ranking official, Richard Woy, currently serves as pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in a suburb west of Baltimore. He received complaints about certainly one of the report’s most infamous alleged abusers, Father Joseph Maskell, who was the topic of a 2017 Netflix series “The Keepers.”
In April, the attorney general first released its 456-page investigation with redactions that details 156 clergy, teachers, seminarians and deacons inside the Archdiocese of Baltimore who allegedly assaulted greater than 600 children going back to the Nineteen Forties. Many of them are actually dead.
The release of the largely unredacted report comes just days before a recent state law goes into effect Oct. 1, removing the statute of limitations on child sex abuse charges and allowing victims to sue their abusers a long time after the actual fact.
