After child abuse accusations, Catholic priests often simply vanish

Inside the priests story: Searching for the abusers
By Michelle Boorstein
The Washington Post

The story started the way some of the best ones do, with a basic sort of question, the kind of question someone tosses out casually at the dinner table: What ever happened to the Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse in our area?
Literally, where are they -- are they still in ministry? How were their cases handled? What happened to their faith? After years of the subject being on The Post’s back burner, new scandals were emerging this spring in European parts of the church and questions were being raised about Pope Benedict’s connections to old cases – the subject was in the news, which led us on The Post’s religion staff to have this dinner-table-like conversation one day this spring. Little did we know what we were ourselves getting into.

Eight months later, our attempt to answer that question ran on The Post’s Web site and in the paper this weekend. It was one of the most convoluted reporting challenges I’ve had in my nearly 20 years on this job, and in truth, reporter Willian Wan and I weren’t able to comprehensively answer our own question. This is due to several major factors: church secrecy, basic privacy rights, priests being either dead or unwilling to be interviewed, and the simple passage of time. People forget details. Records get lost.
As we launched our project to find these men who had been at the center of such a sensitive, charged part of the Catholic Church narrative, we were stopped in our tracks. There was no list of names to work off. The church gives a number of how many men were accused, but the names aren’t all public.
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Church officials were mostly patient with us over the many weeks, sharing many details and going back to check dates when they felt they could. They couldn’t share some details, they said, such as about priests who had already died when they were accused, or if court settlements barred them from releasing information.
But many details remained mysteries to us. A new case popped up late in the game that church officials hadn’t mentioned. Since publication of the story, we’ve learned of other allegations we will pursue, but my broader conclusion is that many of the wounds related to this subject are not, despite church officials’ desires, closed. Many Catholics and abuse advocates want more transparency and accountability, even in decades-old cases. When I consider hurdles we never overcame, even with months of Post resources, it makes me wonder whether people involved in this issue – on both sides – will ever find peace.