The following is a news release of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts…
On September 30th, the Office of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell released a 200 page report on historic claims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester.
The report claims that more than 1,000 children were molested by some 270 clerics from the three dioceses, over an unspecified number of years.
In the text, the authors of the report acknowledge the assistance of such strident anti-Catholic groups as SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests), Bishops Accountability, and Voice of the Faithful.
The report, predictably, calls for the elimination of the statute of limitations for civil suits against the Church, the abolition of the $20,000 compensation cap which applies to findings against charitable and religious institutions, and the establishment of a retroactive “lookback period” for abuse victims who failed to file before the expiration deadline.
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts called the report “a self-aggrandizing exercise by a Planned Parenthood endorsed elected official, who has long viewed the Catholic Church as an ideological adversary.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comments:
“The Attorney General of the Commonwealth is charged with prosecuting crime through the indictment of criminal offenders. That is the purpose of a grand jury report, to secure an indictment.
There will be no indictments or prosecutions consequent to this grand jury report however, on historic sexual abuse in three Massachusetts dioceses, as all of the incidents detailed occurred decades ago.
As the Diocese of Worcester has pointed out, ‘the vast majority of cases occurred 40 to 60 years ago.’
Instead of securing an indictment, our grandstanding Attorney General is looking to score political points, thirty-four days before a general election.
In a cheap shot against the Catholic Church, Attorney General Campbell is recycling old news to incite a moral panic, misleading the public into believing that sexual abuse remains widespread in the Church, and that comprehensive reforms, which were enacted more than twenty years ago, have failed to address the problem.
It is, perhaps, not a coincidence in timing that the bishops of the Commonwealth have just endorsed a referendum campaign to repeal the state’s odious, newly enacted late term abortion law.
Finally, one notes the callous hypocrisy of the Attorney General insisting that we must ‘do all that is necessary to ensure the safety of our children’, when she supports abortion up to birth.
That is not all. Campbell has established a new Reproductive Justice Unit in her office to harass pro-life crisis pregnancy centers.
Now, she has just announced that she will defend the Massachusetts so-called Shield Law, which allows Bay State abortionists to ship the lethal abortion drug Mifepristone to states where child killing is prohibited, without fear of criminal prosecution or civil liability.
Campbell is a fanatical proponent of child killing, for whom long past claims of clerical sexual abuse offer a target rich environment.”
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