The San Jose Mercury News

So a key player in Pennsylvania clergy sexual abuse report keeps quoting Scripture. Why?

After the Pennsylvania attorney general dropped a bomb last month with its release of a massive report on clergy sexual abuse, we all started combing through the state’s media, seeing who was reporting on what.

Seven weeks later, they’re still out there working away. Although it’s not the state’s largest newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is leading the charge with numerous pieces packaged at this site.

The other day, the Post Gazette came up with a profile of the Pennsylvania deputy attorney general who was the leading force behind the nearly 900-page report and investigation.

It talks of a man with a strong moral sense; an ingrained conviction of right and wrong, of someone with the endurance to spearhead the five years of work that produced the massive report (which has elicited copycat investigations in at least eight other states).

HARRISBURG — Like in the Batman reruns he grew up watching as a kid, there is something about the battle between good and evil that, even as an adult, Daniel Dye can’t seem to shake from his conscience.

Maybe it’s because in those stories, someone shows up, flaws and all, when duty calls. Or maybe it’s because those people are unafraid and unabashed at feeling righteousness.

Mr. Dye, 38, muses openly about such things. On social media, where his posts often cite famous men in history or discuss the fight for justice. In a coffeehouse on an overcast weekday afternoon. And in a grand jury room, where as a senior prosecutor for state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office, he’s spent the last five years building the cases that led to the damning report on Catholic clergy sexual abuse in Pennsylvania — once even quoting scripture to a defrocked priest he was questioning.

As I perused more than a year of Dye’s tweets off his Twitter account, I saw a man who is passionate about punishing evil, especially regarding anything having to do with sexual abuse of children. He is also someone who very occasionally drops in a scripture quote into a tweet and, as the story says, likes Batman.

Wait. Scripture?


Please respect our Commenting Policy