Cardinal Joseph Tobin is a powerful figure who long ago pledged “a new level of transparency” on abuse. Now he’s making the same promises amid a new scandal.
Six years ago, New Jersey’s highest-ranking Catholic Church leader promised “a new level of transparency” following one of the worst abuse scandals in the church’s history.
Cardinal Joseph Tobin had just published a list of clergy members who were credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Newark — the largest in the state, with more than 1 million Catholics. That list of clergy members was “not an endpoint in our process,” Tobin said, but “an expression of our commitment to protecting our children.”
Since then, however, the archdiocese under Tobin’s leadership has shielded the public from details of alleged abuse within its ranks and at Seton Hall related to one of his predecessors, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who had been accused of decades of sexual abuse and later stripped of his ministry.
Tobin himself is a powerful figure, not just in New Jersey but in the Roman Catholic Church worldwide: He is a member of the College of Cardinals that selects the pope, sits on the Vatican’s equivalent of the Supreme Court and advises the pope on nominations of bishops.
Yet just months after Tobin made that pledge of transparency, the archdiocese instructed a seminary leader named Joseph Reilly to not answer questions about a 2014 allegation of sexual harassment at Seton Hall University, according to documents first reported by POLITICO in December. Seton Hall, whose boards Tobin sits on as the leader of the archdiocese, then hired Reilly as its new president last year, despite an independent recommendation that the archbishop remove him from leadership for failing to properly report past abuse allegations.
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