Three words separate the thousands of Pennsylvanians who say they were molested as children by Roman Catholic priests from receiving justice and compensation for their suffering: statutes of limitations.
They are the reason why just two of the 301 priests named last week in state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s bombshell report on sex abuse of children by priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses have been charged with crimes.
That is also why most of the victims are unlikely, at this point, to get a dime in recompense.
And while the findings in Shapiro’s report were greeted with universal revulsion and profuse apologies from the Catholic Church, expert say there’s no guarantee that anything is going to change for the aging victims of unspeakable acts that were inflicted on them when they were kids.
Currently, the statute of limitations law in Pennsylvania allows victims of child sex abuse to come forward with criminal allegations until they are 50 years old. The age cutoff for filing civil claims is 30.
In the wake of the Shapiro report, which recommended reforming statute of limitations laws, Pennsylvania state Rep. Mark Rozzi — a Democrat who says he was 12 when he was raped in a shower by a priest — renewed his call for doing away with them for filing new criminal charges and civil suits against child sex abusers.
