“While each church district has idiosyncrasies, the pattern was pretty much the same,” the jury said. “The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid scandal. This is not our word, but theirs, it appears over and over again in documents we recovered.”
Additionally, the report stated that the dioceses kept the records of child sexual abuse allegations in a “secret archive.” The Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law requires dioceses to maintain such an archive.
In the documents, the dioceses used euphemisms instead of the actual word to describe the sexual assaults or rapes. For example, they used the phrases, “inappropriate contact” or “boundary issues.”
