Nearly 200 Baltimore Catholic clergy members and administrators were exposed Wednesday as sexual predators as part of a sweeping four-year investigation by the Maryland Attorney General.
The “Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore” — released during Holy Week and just four days before Easter — describes how the religious leaders used their authority and trust to sexually abuse more than 600 children over the past 80 years, a corruption that was covered up by the church.
“This Report illustrates the depraved, systemic failure of the Archdiocese to protect the most vulnerable – the children it was charged to keep safe,” AG Anthony Brown said in a statement.
“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. Time and again, the Archdiocese chose to safeguard the institution and avoid scandal instead of protecting the children in its care.”
The damning report was released following an “intensive” investigation into allegations of abuse dating back to the 1940s at the hands of the oldest Roman Catholic diocese in the country.
It details the credible allegations of child sexual abuse for 199 current or former Catholic clergy, seminarians, deacons, members of religious orders, teachers at Catholic schools and other employees of the Archdiocese.
About 150 of the named abusers — most of whom were male clergy — committed the prevented crimes while serving or living in the Archdiocese, while the others allegedly committed the crimes in other jurisdictions, but had lived or worked in the Archdiocese at one point in their careers.
Some parishes, schools and congregations had more than one abuser at the same time. St. Mark Parish in Catonsville, for example, had 11 abusers living and working there between 1964 and 2004.
The explosive report also details how the Archdiocese covered up the twisted pattern of abuse and protected the abusers.
One offender, Father Laurence Brett, admitted to sexually abusing a teenager at a Catholic university in Connecticut in 1964. Under the guise of hepatitis treatment, Brett was sent to New Mexico, then Sacramento, where he reportedly abused another teen boy.
He was later assigned to Baltimore, where he served as chaplain at a Catholic high school for boys. He was allowed to resign in 1973 after several students accused him of abuse. Dozens of other victims came forward in the following decades, but school officials never reported the abuse and he died in 2010 without ever facing charges.
Only one person has been indicted through the investigation: former Catholic high school wrestling coach Neil Adleberg, 74, who was arrested last year and charged with rape and other counts. The case remains ongoing.
Baltimore Archbishop William Lori offered his “most earnest apology on behalf of the Archdiocese” in an online statement Wednesday along with a promise to continue making abusers’ names public.
“The report details a reprehensible time in the history of this Archdiocese, a time that will not be covered up, ignored or forgotten,” Lori said.
“It is difficult for most to imagine that such evil acts could have actually occurred. For victim-survivors everywhere, they know the hard truth: These evil acts did occur.”
Also on Wednesday, the state legislature passed a bill to end a statute of limitations on abuse-related civil lawsuits, sending it to Gov. Wes Moore, who has said he supports it.