Church Abuse Victims Call 'Bullshit' On Cardinal Dolan's Supposedly Independent Investigation

Facing increasing public and financial pressure over allegations of sexual misconduct within New York's parishes, Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Thursday announced the appointment of an outside investigator, who he says will be given "complete access" to archdiocese records on how abuse claims were handled.

The probe will be led by Judge Barbara Jones, a former federal judge in Manhattan for almost two decades, who more recently reviewed documents related to the case against Michael Cohen. She was promised full independence, she said during a news conference on Thursday, and instructed to "leave no stone unturned."

In his own statement, Dolan said that he'd asked Judge Jones to "conduct an independent, scrupulous review to see if there are gaps, if there are things we should be doing and are not, and, hopefully, to affirm that we are doing our best to live up to the promises we bishops made to our people in 2002."

But in the view of some victims of church abuse, Dolan's promise of independence rings hollow. "If he controls the information, then it's not independent," said Tim Lennon, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. "It's a sham, it's window dressing on top of the thing that they're trying to deflect attention away from...I think it's bullshit."

"Archbishop Dolan is pointing at this bright object, saying, 'look here, look here at this judge,' when at the same time he's sitting on information," Lennon continued, ticking off a list of bishops who have withheld key information about abusive priests after promising full disclosures. A list of accused clergy released by the Diocese of Buffalo in March, for example, was recently revealed to be significantly incomplete. The Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, likewise, exposed numerous holes in statements made by dioceses across the state.

Notably, Dolan's comments made no mention of New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood's own investigation into the state's eight Catholic dioceses, launched earlier this month. Nor did the Archbishop refer to the historic settlement reached on Tuesday between the Diocese of Brooklyn and four men who were sexually assaulted by a church teacher in Clinton Hill between 2003 and 2009.

The Archdiocese has repeatedly sought to distance itself from that scandal, despite the fact that the young boys were abused on church property by a prominent church leader who lived in the church's former schoolhouse. A document accompanying Dolan's statement on Thursday declared, "the vast majority of clerical sex abuse took place before 2000."

While the Archdiocese has attempted to paint the abuse scandal as a thing of the past, Dolan did acknowledge on Thursday that recent months had been a "Summer of Hell" for the Catholic Church. "Autumn can't come fast enough," he added. Yes, starting tomorrow this whole scandal will be in the rear view mirror...