Quartz: The Catholic Church’s seven-point system for covering up abuse

Church officials followed a “playbook for concealing the truth,” the reports states. The patterns were similar enough that FBI analyses of the church’s responses yielded seven rules, basically, an institutional guide to covering up abuse. Here are seven principles the jurors note: 

1. Make sure to use euphemisms rather than real words to describe the sexual assaults in diocese documents. Never say”rape”; say “inappropriate contact” or “boundary issues.” 
2. Don’t conduct genuine investigations with properly trained personnel. Instead, assign fellow clergy members to ask inadequate questions and then make credibility determinations about the colleagues with whom they live and work.
3. For an appearance of integrity, send priests for “evaluation” at church-run psychiatric treatment centers. Allow these experts to “diagnose” whether the priest was a pedophile, based largely on the priest’s “self-reports” and regardless of whether the priest had actually engaged in sexual contact with a child.
4. When a priest does have to be removed, don’t say why. Tell his parishioners that he is on “sick leave,” or suffering from”nervous exhaustion.” Or say nothing at all.
5. Even if a priest is raping children, keep providing him housing and living expenses, although he may be using these resources to facilitate more sexual assaults.
6. If a predator’s conduct becomes known to the community, don’t remove him from the priesthood to ensure that no more children will be victimized. Instead, transfer him to a new location where no one will know he is a child abuser.
7. Finally, and above all, don’t tell the police. Child sexual abuse, even short of actual penetration, is and has for all relevant times been a crime. But don’t treat it that way; handle it like a personnel matter, “in house.” [...]

Still, some Catholic officials, such as Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh, denied that the church hid crimes, saying in a news conference reported by the New York Times (paywall), “There was no cover-up going on. I think that it’s important to be able to state that. We have over the course of the last 30 years, for sure, been transparent about everything that has in fact been transpiring.”

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