Dallas Database Profiles Catholic Cover-ups

By: Carl Sullivan As the National Bishops Conference prepared to meet in Dallas this summer, The Dallas Morning News looked for ways to bring something new to the pedophile priest story.

Beginning with their own enterprise stories about a Dallas pedophile priest from the late 1990s by reporter Brooks Egerton, the paper decided to focus on what role Catholic leaders across the country had played in the burgeoning scandal. "[Egerton] proposed that we examine the 178 bishops from across the country," said Projects Editor Pam Maples. "The key question that we wanted to answer was: What do these bishops coming to Dallas for this meeting bring to the table? What have their experiences been with this issue?" Specifically, did these Catholic leaders play a role in protecting priests accused of pedophilia?

After three months of work, the Morning News last week published a searchable database of 111 bishops that have a documented history of protecting accused pedophile priests (about 2/3 of the total). "There were other dioceses where we couldn't nail down the facts with enough specificity to include them," Maples said.

Maples, along with Egerton and another reporter, Reese Dunklin, ran the 178 bishops' names through a series of databases including LexisNexis. When bishops turned up in news stories about sexual abuse, the Morning News worked to build its own documentation of each case by reading through court documents and interviewing lawyers, victims, and church officials. A single accusation against a bishop wasn't enough for inclusion in the database, Maples said. Instead, the newspaper only included bishops who had strong cases built against them.

Searchable by state, diocese, or name, the free service is available at http://www.dallasnews.com/specialreports/?9.

During the National Bishops Conference last week, the Morning News' database attracted a slew of media attention, including reports on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, the BBC, multiple radio outlets, and many local TV affiliates across the country.

"We produced something that gave an overarching view of how the church leadership has been involved in this issue," said Maples, who was pleased with the results.