Catholic Revolt

For The Washington Post

Spiritual Healer Draws Crowds in Argentina

for The Washington Post

handout

US President Joe Biden Tennessee State Representatives

The Washington Post

The National Cathedral installs stained glass windows dedicated to racial justice to replace the original confederate themed display on August 22 in Washington, DC.

Trump Classified Documents

Mt Hebron Baptist Church of Hartwell, GA

Good Friday celebrations in Chennai, India - 07 Apr 2023

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott Discusses 10 Commandments Case

Stringer

Southern Baptist New Orleans

Mosaic of Jesus Christ

Contributor

BESTPIX - Protestors Rally At Texas Capitol Against Anti-LGBTQIA+ Legislation

Staff

Southern Baptists

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

This is the technology we’re loving right now

NASA moon capsule suffered extensive damage during 2022 test flight

Microsoft is changing how you log in to your accounts

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Hope Hicks witnessed nearly every Trump scandal. Now she must testify.

Elections 2024 latest news: Biden to honor distinguished Americans; Trump back in N.Y. court

To the Gaza protesters helping to elect Trump: Give it a rest

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Miss Manners: Host eats luxurious breakfast, leaves cereal for guest

Ask Amy: Should I be the best man if I think the bride is abusive?

Carolyn Hax: Husband keeps pushing modest spouse to wear sexier clothes

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

Hope on the horizon | The Trump Trials: Sidebar

Police break into UCLA encampment

The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Ukrainian men abroad voice anger over pressure to return home to fight 

U.K. local election results could spell doom for Conservative Party

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

Nationals can’t solve Nate Eovaldi, drop series finale to Rangers

Trump

Since the 1990s, when Jean Wehner started to remember the “sexual torture” she endured as a Catholic high school student, she has sued the Baltimore Archdiocese, written a memoir and appeared in a Netflix documentary about her abuse. But the release earlier this month of a Maryland attorney general’s <a href="https://www.marylandattorneygeneral.gov/news%20documents/OAG_redacted_Report_on_Child_Sexual_Abuse.pdf" target=_blank>report</a> citing decades’ worth of internal church records about her abuser — it all brought a kind of bitter validation, Wehner says, to that terrified little girl.

“I’m my own worst detective as an adult. I was taught by my faith system to be a good girl, not to lie, not to believe something that isn’t true. I’m always still doubting myself and dissecting everything and challenging myself,” said Wehner, 69, now a wellness practitioner in Elkridge. “This puts the detective to rest. The adult me, who has been trying to integrate with this child, can now say: ‘Oh hell yes, I will 100 percent stand up for you.’”

Maryland AG releases report on alleged Catholic clergy sex abuse

The report released Wednesday into Catholic clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore joins at least 20 others that government officials have done in Catholic dioceses around the country. While the topic of clergy abuse has been a steady drumbeat in the news for more than two decades, the impact of these reports — these official words in official documents — is incredibly powerful for survivors, even those who are now graying.

Survivors in Maryland and other parts of the country where reports have happened said these are extremely intense documents that can collapse the decades, in both healing and terrifying ways.

For people whose abuse was denied in the past by officials, seeing their suffering affirmed in print brings both relief and anger. Some learn that specific, intimate details of their abuse were repeated with other youths, and that they share a horrible secret with other wounded strangers. Some believe the stamp of societal institutions like the attorney general and the Catholic Church will awaken a numb populace to the fact that sexual abuse’s damage can be lifelong. Some will never even read a document thick, for them, with trauma.

Bill O'Leary

Teresa Lancaster decades ago sued the Archdiocese of Baltimore for alleged mishandling of Father Joseph Maskell, who had abused her in the late 1960s when he was her counselor at Archbishop Keough High School. While the<a href="https://www.archbalt.org/child-and-youth-protection/priests-and-brothers-accused-of-abuse/" target="_blank"> archdiocese says</a> in its <a href="https://www.bustle.com/p/who-is-teresa-lancaster-the-keepers-subject-is-telling-her-story-57894" target="_blank">statements</a> that it learned only in the 1990s that Maskell had “abused,” the new report shows multiple instances starting in the mid-1960s when top figures in the archdiocese were told that Maskell would interview Boy Scouts about their sexual fantasies and practices and was alone with young girls in the rectory for hours under “suspicious” circumstances.

“There were a lot of reports on him. If they had stopped him, [I and other victims of Maskell] would never have been abused. When we needed to be believed, we weren’t,” said Lancaster, now an attorney.

She has only read a slim slice of the graphic, 463-page report so far, saying it’s “overwhelming.” Overwhelming but essential, she said.

“When people see it in print they realize the extent of the torture. When you say: ‘I was abused,’ they don’t realize the neatly planned coverups by higher-ups that enabled it to spread like wildfire. The details are important. It’s different to picture yourself 16 years old, naked on a priest’s lap. How would you like your son or daughter to be in that position?”

Mary McHale said it felt empowering in 2018 when then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released and read at a news conference parts of a grand jury report that included the Rev. James Gaffney, who abused her when she was a Catholic high school student in Reading in the 1980s. At the time she was coming to terms with being a lesbian and he used the secret as a basis for the abuse, she said. She told her parents and others at the time, but asked them not to report it because she was terrified her sexuality would become public.

Multiple priests and survivors from her childhood community were in the report, she said, and it “felt good seeing it in print. Over the years I was sick of people minimizing” abuse in the Catholic Church, said McHale, 51, a physical therapist and trainer.

But McHale’s initial expectations after the report came out weren’t met, she said. “I thought it would have this huge impact here. In a Catholic culture, everyone you live around, work with — you’re all Catholic. To stand up and speak against it, a lot of people aren’t too pleased with that even now. As time marches on, people move on. People who are practicing tell themselves ‘It’s just a few bad eggs.’ But it’s not. It’s systemic coverup.”

Survivor and longtime prominent advocate David Clohessy said the government investigations, of which there are <a href="https://www.bishop-accountability.org/AtAGlance/reports.htm" target=_blank>at least 20</a>, “are a very mixed bag.” While they can have a healing effect, many are very superficial and skim the surface, he said. He praised reports in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

“These reports are welcome but are a very poor substitute for real justice, criminal prosecution and harsh punishments which are most effective at deterring future coverups, inside and outside the church. And none of the attorneys general have really done the kind of aggressive outreach to victims, witnesses and whistleblowers that will really help more people who saw, suspected or suffered abuse to speak up,” he said.

According to Bishop Accountability, an archive and advocacy group for abuse survivors, the new Maryland report includes the names of 33 clergy members who were not previously identified as abusers by the archdiocese.

In a detailed FAQ published last week about the report, the Archdiocese of Baltimore said that it “does appreciate some aspects of the report” and that “acknowledging the painful reality of child sexual abuse in the Church is a significant source of support for victims and a moment of transparency that helps in the effort to protect children.” However, it criticized the report as giving an unfair picture of the modern-day archdiocese. It “does not acknowledge the full scope of the Archdiocese’s efforts to protect children in recent decades” and doesn’t give enough weight to the fact that the number of new allegations dropped dramatically, the church said.

Survivors interviewed for this story describe the new anger generated by reports — like Maryland’s — in which some names of alleged abusers or those who facilitated a coverup are redacted for now, or church leaders framing abuse as a historical issue. Part of their suffering, some say, happens when Catholic officials fight to keep the lawsuit windows very small, or to file for bankruptcy when faced with costly mandates to pay survivors, or to go along with redactions.

“They didn’t give those [internal church records] over until they were subpoenaed. When they speak to the past, I’m not hearing them speak to the survivor in front of them who still carries that wounded child,” said Wehner, whose brother had to read and then summarize for her the parts of the Maryland report that pertained to her.

“There are people who couldn’t go out that front door” the day the report was released, “who couldn’t go to that meeting” that Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown held with survivors that day, “who haven’t told their families because of that fear.” To her, when church leaders characterize abuse as a problem in the past, that fear is triggered.

Southern Baptists passed abuse reforms. Now they have to make them stick.

Lara Fortney-McKeever and four of her nine sisters were sexually assaulted by a priest in the Diocese of Harrisburg, Pa., in the 1980s. They believed they were forbidden to talk about it for more than two decades, McKeever said, until the grand jury probe started around 2016. In the report <a href="https://www.bishop-accountability.org/PA_40th_GJ/Cases_and_Profiles/2018_08_14_PA_GJ_Priests_Harrisburg_12_Giella.pdf" target=_blank>they learned </a>that several high-ranking clergy — including then-Harrisburg Bishop William Keeler, who went on to become the archbishop in Baltimore — received a complaint about the priest, the Rev. Augustine Giella, but failed to remove him.

Reading the report “was bittersweet. It validated what we felt we knew, but then we saw five years could have been saved.” Her younger sisters’ assaults could have been prevented, they learned. She’s still searching for how she feels about what she learned in the report.

“I was able to hide in a happy place for years, and it made me face a reality that I may not have been ready to face. But in hindsight, it did end up becoming healing for me because it’s helped me reach so many that were afraid to come forward,” she said. “Sunlight is disinfectant for evil.”

Nieman Fellowship, 2016-2017

Religion Newswriters Association, overall excellence in religion reporting at large news organizations, first place, 2011, 2013 and 2017

University of Wisconsin at Madison, BA in journalism and history

New York University, MA in Near Eastern studies

Michelle Boorstein has been a religion reporter since 2006. She has covered the shifting blend of religion and politics under four U.S. presidents, chronicled the rise of secularism in the United States, and broken financial and sexual scandals from the synagogue down the street to the Mormon Church in Utah to the Vatican.