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	Church Transfers Priest with Sexual Abuse Record Manila Standard Today April 20, 2010 http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/insideNews.htm?f=2010/april/20/news5.isx&d=2010/april/20 CATHOLIC church leaders said Monday they will transfer an American priest after they found out he was convicted of sexual misconduct in 1988, when he had been a seminarian. Joseph Skelton Jr. will be moved from his parish in Tagbilaran City, where he has served for years, to an undisclosed place, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines said. Skelton, an associate pastor of the St. Vincent Ferrer Parish in Calape, Bohol, was convicted of sexual misconduct in 1988 while still a seminarian in Detroit, Michigan. The priest has refused to talk about the matter, saying it would be best to talk with the Diocesan chancery. "I don't know how to explain it," he said, refusing to answer further questions.] Bishop Leopoldo Tumulak, who served as bishop of Tagbilaran from Nov. 28, 1992, until his appointment as Military Ordinary on Jan. 15, 2005, said he first met Skelton, then a seminarian, under the spiritual guidance of Bishop Felix Sanchez Zafra, Tagbilaran's third bishop. He said he didn't know that Skelton had been convicted before he was ordained. In Valletta, Malta, meanwhile, a tearful Pope Benedict XVI made his most personal gesture yet to respond to the clerical sex abuse scandal Sunday, telling victims the church will do everything possible to protect children and bring abusive priests to justice, the Vatican said. The emotional moment carried no new admissions from the Vatican, which has strongly rejected accusations that efforts to cover up for abusive priests were directed by the church hierarchy for decades. But the pontiff told the men that the church would "implement effective measures" to protect children, the Vatican said, without offering details. Benedict met for more than a half-hour with eight Maltese men who say they were abused by four priests when they were boys living at a Catholic orphanage. During the meeting in the chapel at the Vatican's embassy here, Benedict expressed his "shame and sorrow" at the pain the men and their families suffered, the Vatican said. "Everybody was crying," one of the men, Joseph Magro, 38, told Associated Press Television News after the meeting.
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