The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is the second largest diocese in the United States. According to statistics from 2014, 932 archdiocesan priests and 913 priests of religious order as well as 359 deacons, 1,493 religious brothers, and 3,153 nuns serves a community of 2,634,624 catholic people belonging to 296 parishes located in the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island as well as in the counties of Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester, New York. It also operates hundreds of schools, hospital and charities.
Not the most transparent list
The list released by the archdiocese includes 53 priests or deacons who were credibly accused of abuse, admitted to it, were convicted of a crime related to it, or were involved in a civil settlement.Most of them have been defrocked or have passed away. Another 60 have died or have left the ministry before being accused in cases that settled with the compensation program of the archdiocese. Unlike other dioceses’lists, the list of the archdiocese of New York doesn’t provide the locations were the alleged abusers worked. The list doesn’t provide either alleged abusers who were working in the diocese but belonged to another order (such as Jesuits priests). The archdiocese didn’t reveal either any information related to the allegations reported to the church but provided a graph showing that most of the alleged abuses occurred between 1950 and 1990.
Pressed by victims’advocates, the archdiocese of New York disclosed its list after the the diocese of Newark, Hartford and Brooklyn (which also encompass Queens) as well as the Jesuit province including New York came forward at the beginning of the year. Bishops from all over the US have been releasing lists of alleged sexual abusers following a Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing decades of clerical abuse allegations.
Earlier last week, a list of 150 former members of the Boy Scouts of America accused of sexually abusing children was also released to the public.