More than 150 members of the Roman Catholic clergy allegedly committed “horrible and repeated” sexual abuse of at least 600 children between 1940 and 2002 in the state of Maryland, a court found on Wednesday, alleging “conspiracy” and a cover-up by the hierarchy. churches.

Priests and archdiocese staff “engaged in horrendous and repeated abuse of the most vulnerable children in their community while archdiocese officials turned a blind eye,” the northeastern U.S. state’s district attorney’s office said in a report.

The document concerns the Baltimore Archdiocese near the capital of Washington. This is the fruit of research that began in 2018, as in other states, after a high-profile investigation in Pennsylvania.

The names of 156 priests and employees who allegedly systematically raped more than 600 children have been named. But the real number of victims isdefinitely much higher“, the authorities emphasized, noting, however, that a relatively small percentage of cases involve rape.

They insist on the “synergy” of the church hierarchy, which “refused to take into account allegations of child sexual abuse.”

“When it became impossible to deny this, the church limited itself to transferring the accused to positions in which they sometimes worked again next to the children,” the prosecution emphasizes. The text points out that church documents indicate that the archdiocese “was more concerned about avoiding scandal or negative publicity than protecting children.”

The prosecutor’s report, although official, is not an accusation and does not imply it.

In 2018, a Pennsylvania Attorney’s Office investigation uncovered cases of child sexual abuse by more than 300 “predatory” priests, at least 1,000 victims, that were covered up by the church.

The news shocked the US, before other states in turn discovered that there were thousands more victims.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office relied on thousands of documents, victim and eyewitness testimony in its investigation.

The names of the vast majority of those accused in these cases have been named. But most of those involved are already dead.

After the report was released, Archbishop William Lowry offered a “sincere apology” to the victims, acknowledging in a statement that “satanic acts were committed.” He vowed that this “reprehensible period” in his archdiocese’s history “will not be glossed over or forgotten”, assuring that “radical changes” have been made since the late 1990s to “end this scourge”.

Source: APE-MPE, Reuters.