The Catholic Church is blocking a sex abuse investigation, Washington’s attorney general says

The Catholic Church is refusing to cooperate with a Washington state investigation into whether it improperly used charitable trust funds to cover up sexual abuse by priests, Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Thursday, urging a court to to force the Archdiocese of Seattle to release decades of records.

The archdiocese called the allegations a surprise and said in a statement it welcomed the investigation and had been cooperating since receiving a subpoena last July. The archdiocese shares the state’s goals – “to prevent abuse and to help survivors of victims on their path to healing and peace,” it said.

“We have a good understanding of the contents of our files and have no concerns about sharing them lawfully and fairly with the Attorney General,” the statement said.

Ferguson, himself a Catholic, said at a news conference that the archdiocese had refused to provide a single document that had not already been made public, claiming it was exempt as a religious institution. The archdiocese also denied this, saying it offered to provide private testimony this week, but the attorney general’s office said it was not interested.

Ferguson said the archdiocese ignored a second subpoena issued this spring seeking records about how the church handled the sexual abuse allegations. They also included financial records about how she may have spent charitable trust money moving priests from parish to parish after they were accused of sexual abuse.

“The church has more information than it has shared with the public,” Ferguson said. “We believe the public has a right to see these records.”

Some 23 states have conducted investigations into the Catholic Church, and so far at least nine have issued reports detailing their findings. In some cases, these findings went far beyond what church officials had voluntarily disclosed.

For example, the six Catholic dioceses in Illinois had publicly reported that 103 clergy and religious brothers had been credibly accused of child sexual abuse. But in a damning report last year, the Illinois attorney general’s office said it had uncovered detailed information about 451 people who sexually abused at least 1,997 children.

Maryland also reported shocking evidence last year of how widespread the abuse was: More than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore abused over 600 children, often avoiding responsibility. In 2018, a grand jury in Pennsylvania found that more than 300 Catholic clergy in that state had abused more than 1,000 children over the past 70 years.

The Archdiocese of Seattle has released a list of 83 clergy it says have been credibly accused, and says it was among the first in the country to begin crackdown and prevention efforts starting in the 1980s to take action against sexual abuse by priests. Sexual abuse by church staff peaked in 1975 and there have been no reports since 2007, the archdiocese said.

But despite decades of complaints from survivors of clergy sexual abuse, the extent of the scandal in Washington state remains unknown, Ferguson said, because the church has not released its files or explained why it found the allegations against other priests lacking credibility.

Prosecutors, who have long called for the church to open its books, welcomed Ferguson’s announcement and said they regretted its need. Transparency is essential to healing the church, said Terry Carroll, a steering committee member of Heal Our Church, a Catholic church reform organization in Washington.

“We call on the church and its legal representatives to cooperate fully with the investigation by providing full access to all relevant records, including internal office memos, legal correspondence and financial information,” Carroll said during Thursday’s press conference. “Church members and survivors deserve no less.”

Ferguson’s investigation is civil, not criminal, and focuses on the three dioceses in Washington – Seattle, Spokane and Yakima. He said the Spokane and Yakima dioceses have refused to provide documents, but the attorney general’s office is not yet seeking court orders to force them to comply.