ABUSE TRACKER

UNITED KINGDOM
Your Local Guardian

By Rachel Bishop

A third man has been arrested in connection with the investigation into historic allegations of child abuse in the early 1980s at the Elm Guest House in Barnes.

Officers from Operation Fernbridge have today, Tuesday, July 9, arrested a 69-year-old at an address in west London on suspicion of possession of indecent images of children.

He was taken into police custody and has since been bailed to return, pending further inquiries, in September.

Reverend Tony McSweeney, 66, from Norfolk, was arrested in February 2013, along with another man aged 70 from East Sussex on suspicion of sexual offences relating to the guest house in Rocks Lane.

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NEW JERSEY
Courthouse News Service

By ROSE BOUBOUSHIAN

(CN) – The Diocese of Camden, N.J. cannot dismiss a woman’s claim that a priest sexually abused her repeatedly when she was 11 years old, a federal judge ruled.

Lisa Syvertson Shanahan, 44, sued the Diocese of Camden on May 15, 2012, claiming she had been sexually abused as a child by an ordained Catholic priest, Father Thomas Harkins of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Hammonton, N.J.

Shanahan, whose “devoutly Catholic” family “regularly attended Mass and participated in the ministry” at St. Anthony’s, attended Harkins’s catechism (CCD) classes while she was in fifth grade, from 1980-81, to prepare for religious confirmation.

Harkins sexually abused her 10 to 15 occasions, in his office and his bedroom in the church rectory, “by touching her genitals over her underwear,” the complaint states.

During the final incident of abuse, Shanahan says, “Harkins brought [her] to his bedroom in the priest’s home, the rectory, pulled down [her] tights, and sexual [sic] abused her by putting his hands on her genitals and digitally penetrating her.”

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MINNESOTA
Fairmond Sentinel

July 9, 2013
Jodelle Greiner – Staff Write, Fairmont Sentinel

BLUE EARTH – Investigators and prosecutors want to know what are in files found on the computer of Father Leo Charles Koppala before proceeding with the case against him.

Koppala, who had been serving as priest for Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Blue Earth, has been charged with second-degree criminal sexual conduct.

The charges stem from an incident June 7 in which Koppala allegedly engaged in sexual conduct with a child under 13 years of age, with the defendant being more than 36 months older than the child. The charges allege that Koppala, 47, fondled the child while visiting the home where the child was staying.

The subject of the computer files came up Monday at Koppala’s contested omnibus hearing.

His attorney, Philip J. Elbert, asked Judge Douglas Richards to suppress evidence gathered from a search warrant, and recounted the numerous times he has requested that the prosecution turn over evidence, such as an audiotape of a statement Koppala gave to police.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Agency

Vatican City, Jul 9, 2013 / 02:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican Bank donated some $70 million to charities in 2012, according to a Vatican statement released Thursday.

“The Members of the Council expressed their deep gratitude for the support given, often anonymously, to the Holy Father’s universal ministry in spite of moments of economic crisis, and encouraged perseverance in this good work,” said the July 4 statement of the Council for Cardinals for the Study of Organisational and Economic Problems of the Holy See.

The Vatican Bank, officially called the Institute for the Works of Religion, distributed its charitable funds among the Amazon Fund; the Pro-Orantibus Fund, which supports cloistered monasteries; the San Sergio Fund, which supports the Church in the former Soviet Union; and the Commission for Latin America, as well as other Catholic charities.

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NEW YORK
Chronicle of Higher Education

July 9, 2013 by Charles Huckabee

Nineteen former students of a high school that is run by Yeshiva University have filed a $380-million lawsuit against the New York university and the school, accusing administrators and teachers of covering up decades of physical and sexual abuse, The Jewish Daily Forward reported.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday, a week after the university’s chancellor and former longtime president, Rabbi Norman Lamm, announced his retirement in a letter that acknowledged having made mistakes in his response to students’ complaints of sexual abuse by administrators and faculty members at the high school. The Forward previously reported that Rabbi Lamm had allowed staff members accused of abuse to quietly leave their jobs, without reporting the accusations to law-enforcement officials or notifying their subsequent employers.

Rabbi Lamm is one of several former university administrators and trustees named as defendants in the lawsuit. He was the university’s president from 1976 to 2003. The assaults are alleged to have taken place during the 1970s and 1980s

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By IAN KIRKWOOD July 9, 2013

POLICE whistleblower Peter Fox has been questioned at length over his reaction to gay pornography found at the Lochinvar presbytery a few months after Father Jim Fletcher took up duties there as a priest.

In a session of cross examination before lunch on Tuesday, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox was taken through evidence he had previously given to the Special Commission of Inquiry sitting in Newcastle.

Mr Fox had said previously that a lay worker had found gay pornography in the presbytery and that Mr Fox believed it had belonged to Fletcher, who was subsequently convicted of abusing an altar boy and who died in jail in 2009.

But counsel assisting the inquiry, Julia Lonergan, put it to him that he had no evidence that proved the pornography belonged to Fletcher, and that another priest, Father Desmond Harrigan, had told him it belonged to him.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Dan Cox

A New South Wales inquiry into child sexual abuse has heard a Catholic Church worker lost his job because he supported his son, who had been the victim of a Hunter Valley paedophile priest.

It is the fifth week of the Special Commission’s public hearings in Newcastle, with senior policeman Peter Fox giving evidence for a 10th day.

The second stage of the inquiry is investigating his claims that senior Catholic clergy tried to cover up abuse by two priests, James Fletcher and Denis McAlinden.

Detective Chief Inspector Fox today told the inquiry he has heard several stories of reprisal from the Church, after victims went to police accusing priests of sexual abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

THE royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse has begun private hearings in Adelaide.

Royal commission chief executive Janette Dines said the face-to-face meetings involved people telling their stories to one or two commissioners in an informal setting.

The sessions will continue throughout July.

She said people who had come to similar meetings in Sydney and Brisbane in recent weeks had described them as positive experiences.

“We understand how difficult it can be for people to come forward and talk about what happened to them,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

A royal commission on institutional responses to child abuse is starting face-to-face, private meetings between commissioners and abuse victims in Adelaide.

Chief executive Janette Dines said the sessions would not provide direct evidence to the inquiry, but would give the commissioners a deeper sense of what the victims had endured.

“They’re completely confidential, no one from an institution will ever be present,” she said.

“What we attempt to do, recognising that this is a very difficult thing for people, is to make the session feel as secure and as relaxing and safe as possible.”

Ms Dines said feedback had been positive in Sydney and Brisbane from those who took part in the private meetings.

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AUSTRLALIA
Herald Sun

EDUCATION EDITOR SHERADYN HOLDERHEAD
THE ADVERTISER JULY 09, 2013

SEXUAL abuse of children within Australian institutions continues today, a national royal commission has heard.

Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse chief executive Janette Dines said it was unclear how large the inquiry would be but about 5000 people had made contact.

“It’s certainly bigger than anything that’s been attempted before in this country,” she said.

“Many of the people coming to is in a private session are talking about their experience for the first time – sometimes in 50, 60 or 70 years … Some people are talking about abuse that happened a long, long time ago but others are much more recent.”

The commissioners began private sessions in Adelaide on Monday and will be here until the end of the month. The informal face-to-face appointments give people the chance to tell their story.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Barney Zwartz
Religion editor, The Age.

Problems and experiences with the Catholic Church’s national abuse response have been targeted by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as its next focus of inquiry.

The commission wants to hear about victims’ experience with the Towards Healing process, how it dealt with complaints and provided redress. It published its second discussion paper – of a planned total of 24 – on its website on Tuesday afternoon.

Towards Healing, the church’s response process for every diocese except Melbourne and for every religious order, has been the nation’s busiest complaints procedure for victims of clergy child sexual abuse.

Introduced in 1996, it has upheld 310 complaints of criminal abuse of children in Victoria, with another 110 not going through the process because victims went to the police or withdrew, according to the church’s evidence to the Victorian inquiry into how the churches handled sexual abuse.

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ILLINOIS
Hispanically Speaking

Father Alejandro Flores is being deported to his native Bolivia after finishing a portion of his four-year sentence for sexually abusing an 8-year-old boy.

Flores, 40, was a priest in the Chicago suburb of Joliet who no longer has any “sort of public ministry” according to a Chicago Catholic archdiocese spokesman. The Catholic Church is taking steps to defrock Flores who they now claim should never have been ordained. Court records indicate the Church held up his ordination so he could receive counseling for viewing pornography on line and after hearing the victim and his brother call Flores “daddy”.

The Bolivian priest was recruited in 2004 to come serve the Catholic Church in the U.S. This is a common occurrence due to the fact the U.S. has declining number of men joining the priesthood.

The molestation of the eight-year-old started a year after Flores arrived and endured for five years according to court documents. Flores was a seminarian in West Chicago when the abuse began.

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AUSTRALIA
Dungog Chronicle

By Catherine Armitage July 9, 2013

The credibility of police whistleblower Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox came under prolonged testing in the NSW inquiry into whether the police covered up child sexual abuse allegations against Catholic priests in the Hunter Valley.

Counsel assisting the inquiry, Julia Lonergan SC, quizzed Chief Inspector Fox on Tuesday as to why he doubted an “extraordinary” alleged admission by one priest, Father Des Harrigan, that he had owned and subsequently destroyed gay pornography.

The policeman has given evidence that he suspected videos and magazines found in a presbytery at Lochinvar in 2003 had belonged to Father James Fletcher.

Ms Lonergan put it to Chief Inspector Fox that he had no evidence that the material belonged to Fletcher. She also suggested Chief Inspector Fox had not kept an open mind when speaking with Father Harrigan, and as a result did not believe the priest’s admission.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Patsy McGarry

A former missionary priest Peter Kennedy (74), who also worked on a locum basis in parishes around Ireland, was responsible for one of the largest ever settlements in a clerical child sex abuse case in the State.

In July 2003 one of his victims was awarded €325,000 in a High Court settlement with the St Patrick’s Missionary Society. He was a member of that congregation, based at Kiltegan, Co Wicklow, until he was laicised in 2003.

He was removed from active ministry in the 1980s following persistent complaints of sexual abuse against him dating back to the 1960s, when he was a missionary priest in Africa. In the late 1980s he moved to London, where he continued to be under the supervision of the St Patrick’s Society. He worked as a taxi driver.

Following publicity over the 2003 High Court settlement in Dublin he left London on a British passport and flew to São Paulo in Brazil where he taught English to adults.

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AUSTRALIA
Gay Star News

09 JULY 2013 | BY ANDREW POTTS

Whistleblower Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox has told a New South Wales (NSW) state inquiry into allegations that police helped cover up sex crimes by Catholic priests that a priest destroyed gay porn owned by another priest who abused children.

Fox told Australia’s ABC TV channel in 2012 that priests had destroyed evidence ‘before we were able to secure it’ when he had been investigating sex abuse claims against Catholic priests in the Hunter Valley region.

Fox told the inquiry that the evidence he alleges was destroyed was a cache of gay porn including videos and magazines found in a presbytery.

Fox told the inquiry that he believed the pornography had been removed and destroyed because it was owned by Father Jim Fletcher – who was later convicted of child abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

AAP

MICHAEL Malone believed he had inherited “a poisoned chalice” when he became bishop of the Maitland/Newcastle Catholic diocese, an inquiry into child sexual abuse has been told.

Whistleblower cop Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox told commissioner Margaret Cunneen Bishop Malone used that description when commiserating with the mother of a boy who had been repeatedly sexually assaulted during his teenage years by Hunter Valley priest James Fletcher.

Det Insp Fox said the mother told him in 2002 there was animosity between Bishop Malone and his predecessor Bishop Leo Clarke because Bishop Clarke had not revealed the extent of “indiscretions” and “bad decisions” that had taken place in the diocese, possibly for decades.

But the mother felt Bishop Malone was just “going through the motions” speaking to her and was not showing genuine pastoral care, Det Insp Fox said.

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SINGAPORE
KBND

The Roman Catholic church in Singapore has vowed to investigate any charges of sexual misconduct by its clergy after an Australian woman claimed she was abused by priests as a teenager in the city-state.

Singapore-born psychotherapist Jane Leigh, 36, said in an autobiography published last month that she had been sexually abused by two Catholic priests before she moved to Australia in 1995.

Leigh, now a practitioner in Melbourne, said in her book “My Nine Lives” that she was first abused by a priest in Singapore when she was 13. She alleged that she was abused by another priest when she was 15 after being sent to him for counselling.

Leigh used pseudonyms for both churchmen, but a Singapore newspaper reported over the weekend that it contacted the priests and they denied Leigh’s allegations.

“The Church is deeply concerned with any report of alleged sexual misconduct by its clerics, staff and those who volunteer their services in the Church,” the Archdiocese of Singapore said in a statement on its website Monday.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Dan Cox

The whistleblower behind an inquiry into child sexual abuse in the New South Wales Hunter Valley has been accused of lying to beef up his case of an alleged cover-up by the Catholic Church.

It is the fifth week of the Special Commission’s public hearings in Newcastle, with senior policeman Peter Fox giving evidence for the tenth day.

The second stage of the inquiry is investigating his claims senior Catholic clergy tried to cover up abuse by two priests.

The inquiry has previously heard a victim went to a Nelson Bay presbytery drunk and angry, accusing of priests of doing “filthy things to little boys”.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

A former priest who was on the run in Brazil for almost a decade has been jailed for 10 years for abusing 18 boys during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Peter Kennedy (74), a former member of the Kiltegan Fathers order, committed the abuse in five counties as he was moved from parish to parish.

In the early 2000s many of his victims began to come forward causing Kennedy to go to Brazil. He stayed there eight years until he was deported to the UK in 2011. From there he was returned to Ireland to face these charges.

Kennedy was a missionary in Africa before serving in several parishes in Ireland. He would use his position as a priest to gain access to the boys and molest them. In some instances he threatened them with damnation if they reported what he did and on one occasion told a boy that he [Kennedy] was an “angel of God and God didn’t mind what he did”.

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COLORADO
9 News

[with video]

CARBONDALE – The Archdiocese of Denver continues to defend a priest accused of sexual assault while admitting he made “a mistake” during an encounter with a woman.

The woman, named “Jane Doe” in a lawsuit, accuses Father Jose Saenz of taking advantage of her while she was drunk and depressed over the death of a friend.

The lawsuit alleges the sexual assault occurred at the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs in 2011.

“He manipulated the situation by telling her he needed to pray over her naked body,” said the woman’s attorney, Jeff Herman. “He would put holy water on her forehead and eventually manipulated a situation where he began to have sex with her.”

The lawsuit alleges the woman was trying to seek help from the priest.

In a written statement sent out on July 3, the Archdiocese of Denver defended Father Saenz, saying it “disputes the plaintiff’s allegations.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

CONOR GALLAGHER – 09 JULY 2013

In some instances he threatened the boys with damnation if they reported what he did

A FORMER priest who had been on the run in Brazil for almost a decade has been jailed for 10 years for abusing 18 boys over three decades.

Peter Kennedy (74), a former member of the Kiltegan Fathers order, committed the abuse across five different counties as he was moved from parish to parish.

On one occasion he told a boy that he was an “angel of God and God didn’t mind what he did”.

Some of the children went to their parents about the abuse but the situation was not reported to gardai or the church authorities. When one boy told his mother what had happened she slapped him and said “how dare you say that about a priest”.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

After a day of in-camera evidence, the inquiry into child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the New South Wales Hunter Valley will resume its public hearings this morning.

Senior policeman Peter Fox is still giving evidence to the Special Commission’s second terms of reference.

The inquiry is investigating his claims that senior church officials did not cooperate with police who were investigating two paedophile priests, Father Denis McAlinden and Father James Fletcher.

The inquiry went into a private session yesterday but will resume its public hearings this morning, with the cross examination of Peter Fox expected to wrap up today.

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UNITED KINGDOM
International Business Times

By Jacob Cherian | July 9, 2013

A statement issued by the General Synod of the Church of England offered an apology for failing to protect vulnerable adults, children, and young people from sexual and physical abuse.

However, that statement expressing an ‘unreserved apology’ by Archbishops were scoffed as a meaningless gesture by abuse survivors. The Synod met on Sunday to tighten up safe-guarding procedures and come up with relevant rules on the subject.

Before presenting survivors with the Church’s new apology motion, a statement from the Stop Church Child Abuse Group was read. Some of the members of this group were also present in the meetings. The group criticized the church policy by saying that members were not allowed to ‘speak for themselves.’ It also mentioned that survivors should have been consulted before taking action.

A third element of disparity brought out by the survivor’s group said that the apology fell short of any meaning, since it was made ‘without the costly engagement of reaching out to the victims,” reported the Daily Gaurdian

‘We cannot overestimate the importance of responding appropriately today,’ said The Archbishop of Caterbury Justin Welby, who replaces Rowan Williams as the leader of the Anglican Church headquartered in England. Bishop Williams

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MISSOURI
KCUR

[with audio]

A surprise ending to what may have been a landmark set abuse case against the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese.

Both sides reached a settlement in the middle of jury selection as trial was to begin in Jackson County Circuit Court at Independence, MO.

A statement from the diocese said, in part, that while facts of the case remain unclear, “the tragedy of it is certain.”

For the first time, at least in Missouri, an arm of the Catholic hierarchy had been sued alleging wrongful death stemming from sexual abuse.

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NEW YORK
Jewish Daily Forward

Editorial

True character, the man wrote, requires the courage to admit that, despite one’s best intentions, “I now recognize that I was wrong.” Imagine if every leader had the strength and the humility to write those words and to believe them, to acknowledge a mistake plainly and publicly, without embellishment or justification. Imagine if leaders simply apologized and took full responsibility for their mistakes, not as a calculated step toward vindication and further advancement, but because it was the right thing to do.

Norman Lamm’s July 1 letter announcing his retirement as chancellor of Yeshiva University contained that heartfelt admission and, by doing so, added back some luster to a legacy sadly tarnished by the abuse scandal that occurred at Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship educational institution under his watch. Ever since the Forward broke the news that former staff members at Y.U.’s Manhattan High School for Boys sexually abused students, Lamm struck us as the most honest of the school’s leaders. His letter confirms that impression.

His humble words stand in stark contrast to the current leaderhip’s refusal to independently investigate the abuse charges and commit to publicly report the findings. Lamm’s admission cannot substitute for a full accounting by his successor.

It can and should, however, pave the way. In an interview with our Paul Berger last December, Lamm acknowledged that during his long tenure as Y.U. president (from 1976 to 2003), he knew of abuse allegations against members of his staff and concluded that it was best to let the abusers quietly leave instead of reporting them to the authorities. Both of the alleged abusers named by the Forward went on to work at other Jewish institutions in the United States and Israel for years, until the initial story was published. Y.U., meantime, under Lamm and successor Richard Joel, declined to respond to the pleas of student victims to address the abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By IAN KIRKWOOD July 9, 2013

POLICE whistleblower Peter Fox has been questioned at length over his reaction to gay pornography found at the Lochinvar presbytery a few months after Father Jim Fletcher took up duties there as a priest.

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In a session of cross examination before lunch on Tuesday, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox was taken through evidence he had previously given to the Special Commission of Inquiry sitting in Newcastle.

Mr Fox had said previously that a lay worker had found gay pornography in the presbytery and that Mr Fox believed it had belonged to Fletcher, who was subsequently convicted of abusing an altar boy and who died in jail in 2009.

But counsel assisting the inquiry, Julia Lonergan, put it to him that he had no evidence that proved the pornography belonged to Fletcher, and that another priest, Father Desmond Harrigan, had told him it belonged to him.

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AUSTRALIA
Australian

DAN BOX From: The Australian July 09, 2013

THE detective at the centre of a state government inquiry into church child abuse has been forced to defend his public claim that Catholic priests destroyed evidence during a police investigation.

In a 2012 interview with the ABC’s Lateline program, which led to the establishment of the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox claimed priests had destroyed evidence “before we were able to secure it.”

Under cross-examination this morning, Mr Fox said this evidence was gay pornography found in a presbytery and reported to him in 2003, when he was investigating a pedophile priest, Father Jim Fletcher.

A different priest, Des Harrigan, subsequently admitted to destroying this material Mr Fox said, although he made no record of the conversation at the time.

Elizabeth McLaughlin, representing Father Harrigan, said her client disputed Mr Fox’s account of what took place, which he has since repeated under oath and in a formal report to the NSW Ombudsman’s office.

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NEW YORK
CBS New York

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (CBSNewYork/AP) — Nineteen former students at Yeshiva University High School filed a lawsuit Monday, accusing the school of covering decades of sexual abuse at the school.

The $380 million, 148-page lawsuit was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in White Plains, the New York Daily News reported.

The alleged abuse occurred in the between 1969 and 1989, the newspaper reported. It was disclosed in The Jewish Daily Forward beginning in December.

In the lawsuit, one alleged victim claimed administrators offered him a deaf ear when he said a Judaic studies teacher had sodomized him with a toothbrush, while others whose parents were Holocaust survivors were told by the principal not to tell their parents who had already suffered too much, the newspaper reported.

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NEW YORK
New York Magazine

By Adam Martin

Former Yeshiva University High School students who sued the university Monday for sexual abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of former instructors say the statute of limitations shouldn’t apply because the school committed fraud when it failed to reveal allegations against the former staffers. It’s a tactic that has worked before for Kevin Mulhearn, the lawyer representing the 19 plaintiffs. He represented 12 former students suing Brooklyn’s Poly Prep Country Day School, with whom that school settled in December after a judge said the case could go forward.

The 19 former students are seeking $20 million each from Yeshiva University, for alleged abuse first reported publicly in the Jewish Daily Forward. Their suit says the abuse took place between 1969 and 1989, though according to the New York Daily News state law says childhood abuse survivors must file civil litigation by the time they turn 23.

Their strategy will be to portray the school as engaging in fraud when it decided to fire the two rabbis accused in the suit — George Finkelstein, who became principal of the school, and Macy Gordon, who taught Judaic Studies — instead of reporting them to the police and alerting their subsequent employers to the allegations against them.

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NEW YORK
JTA

July 8, 2013

NEW YORK (JTA) — A $380 million lawsuit was filed against Yeshiva University by former students who allege the school covered up allegations of sexual misconduct by staff members.

The lawsuit, which was filed Monday in White Plains, N.Y., alleges a “massive cover-up of the sexual abuse of [high school] students … facilitated, for several decades, by various prominent Y.U. and [high school] administrators, trustees, directors, and other faculty members,” the Forward reported.

The Forward first published details of the claims against two former Yeshiva University staff members late last year. Rabbis George Finkelstein and Macy Gordon were accused of inappropriate contact with several students at the Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Manhattan.

Finkelstein left the high school in 1995 and took a post at a Jewish school in Florida before moving to Israel. Gordon also lives in Israel and until recently was a teacher at the Orthodox Union’s Israel Center. Both men deny the charges.

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NEW YORK
New York Times

By AL BAKER
Published: July 8, 2013

A lawyer for 19 former students at Yeshiva University High School for Boys filed a federal lawsuit Monday claiming that two former rabbis there carried out hundreds of acts of sexual abuse during the 1970s and 80s, and that the university’s leaders covered it up.

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According to a 148-page complaint lodged in Federal District Court in White Plains, the abuse included one case, in 1980, of a rabbi who sodomized a 16-year-old student with a toothbrush in his dormitory room in Upper Manhattan. Another boy claims a different rabbi abused him at least 30 times, in his office and the school’s halls, between 1978 and 1982, the lawsuit says.

The lawyer, Kevin T. Mulhearn, said that the depth of the abuse, which the plaintiffs claim occurred between 1969 and 1989, did not come to light until The Jewish Daily Forward published articles about it beginning in December. The lawsuit, echoing The Forward’s reporting, said administrators of Yeshiva University, which runs the high school, brushed off complaints about the two rabbis for years, and after they left the school, the university did not notify their future employers about the complaints. One of the men, Rabbi George Finkelstein, went on to work at a Jewish day school near Miami for several years.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

BY MICHAEL O’KEEFFE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

MONDAY, JULY 8, 2013

Nineteen former students at Yeshiva University High School have filed a bombshell $380 million lawsuit against the prestigious Jewish institution claiming horrific acts of sexual abuse that went unchecked for two decades at the Manhattan school.

“Yeshiva University High School held itself out as an exemplary Jewish secondary school when in fact it was allowing known sexual predators to roam the school at will seeking other victims,” said attorney Kevin Mulhearn, who filed the suit on behalf of the 19 plaintiffs. “Childhood sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community can no longer be condoned and excused.”

One victim claims administrators ignored his protests when he told them a Judaic studies teacher sodomized him with a toothbrush. Other victims — the children of Holocaust survivors — say a former principal persuaded them not to tell their parents after he sexually assaulted them because their mothers and fathers had already suffered through so much.

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NEW YORK
Jewish Daily Forward

By Paul Berger
Published July 08, 2013.

Nineteen former students of a Manhattan high school run by Yeshiva University have filed a $380 million lawsuit against Y.U. accusing administrators and teachers of covering up decades of physical and sexual abuse.

The lawsuit, filed July 8 in U.S. District Court in White Plains, N.Y., alleges a “massive cover-up of the sexual abuse of [high school] students…facilitated, for several decades, by various prominent Y.U. and [high school] administrators, trustees, directors, and other faculty members.”

The assaults are alleged to have taken place during the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when Y.U. faced severe financial problems.

In New York, criminal and civil cases of child sexual abuse must be brought before a victim’s 23rd birthday. However, Kevin Mulhearn, a lawyer representing the victims, argues in the suit that the statute of limitations does not apply because Y.U. fraudulently covered up the abuse.

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MISSOURI
KCTV

By DeAnn Smith, Digital Content Manager
By Heather Staggers, Reporter

INDEPENDENCE, MO (KCTV) –
The parents of a boy who committed suicide 30 years ago after he was allegedly abused by a Catholic priest will receive $2.25 million to settle their lawsuit.

Jury selection began Monday in a Jackson County courtroom, and opening arguments were slated to start as soon as Tuesday. The settlement was announced Monday afternoon.

Donald and Rosemary Teeman alleged that their 14-year-old son, Brian, committed suicide in 1983 after repeated abuse by Monsignor Thomas O’Brient at Nativity of Mary Parish in Independence. The parents sued in 2011 after a former altar boy disclosed the repeated abuse, which the now 86-year-old priest denied along with other abuse allegations.

The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph unsuccessfully sought to have the lawsuit thrown out because so much time had passed since the alleged abuse. But a judge found that the case could go forward because the diocese had sought to cover up the allegations. …

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said the diocese settled because the details of the cover up of the diocese’s knowledge of years of abuse by O’Brien would have been made public during a trial.

“We are grateful to the Teeman family for their courage and for putting aside their pain in order to protect others,” SNAP said in a statement. “Church officials may pretend this settlement is to spare this family pain but cases like this are often settled on the eve of a trial in order to protect how much they knew and how little they did to protect children.”

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MISSOURI
KMBZ

The Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese has reached a settlement with the family of a 14-year-old boy who committed suicide after claims that he was molested by a priest.

The diocese agreed to pay $2.25 million to the family of Brian Teeman. The Diocese will also place a bench at Nativity of Mary Parish in Brian’s memory.

In a statement, the diocese said they agreed to the settlement after considering the financial and emotional toll on all parties of an anticipated four-week trial.

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MISSOURI
San Francisco Chronicle

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) — The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph has reached a $2.25 settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by a Missouri couple who contended their 14-year-old boy committed suicide because of repeated sexual abuse by a Kansas City priest.

The boy, Brian Teeman, of Independence, died of a gunshot wound in November 1983. His parents, Donald and Rosemary Teeman, filed the lawsuit in Jackson County court in September 2011 after a man who was an altar boy with their son told them of the alleged abuse, The Kansas City Star reported (http://bit.ly/16jL4g5).

Jury selection for the trial was underway Monday in Jackson County court in Independence when the settlement agreement was announced.

The diocese said in a statement that it chose to settle the claim “in consideration of the financial and emotional toll on all parties of an anticipated four-week trial.”

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MISSOURI
The Kansas City Star

July 8

BY JUDY L. THOMAS
The Kansas City Star

The Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese has settled a wrongful-death lawsuit for $2.25 million with the parents of a boy who allegedly took his own life 30 years ago because of repeated sexual abuse by a Kansas City priest.

The settlement is the largest ever for the diocese in a single priest sexual abuse lawsuit. It came on Monday afternoon as jury selection was underway in Jackson County Circuit Court in Independence.

“This is one of the most significant cases we’ve ever worked on,” said Rebecca Randles, the attorney for Donald and Rosemary Teeman, who filed the lawsuit against the diocese and O’Brien in 2011 after a man who served as an altar boy with their son, Brian, told them of the alleged abuse. Brian Teeman, 14, died of a gunshot wound in November 1983 at the family’s home in Independence.

“This allows everyone to put this behind them,” Randles said. “It allows closure.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

CONOR GALLAGHER – 08 JULY 2013

A FORMER priest who had been on the run in Brazil for almost a decade has been jailed for ten years for abusing 18 boys during the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Peter Kennedy (74), a former member of the Kiltegan Fathers order, committed the abuse across five different counties as he was moved from parish to parish.

In the early 2000s many of his victims began to come forward causing Kennedy to leave Ireland for Brazil.

He remained there for eight years before being deported to the UK in 2011. From there he was returned to Ireland to face these charges.

Kennedy was a missionary in Africa before serving in several parishes in Ireland. He would use his position as a priest to gain access to the boys and molest them.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
The Cardinal Newman Society

July 8, 2013, at 1:46 PM | By Matthew Archbold

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has stated that a Catholic college’s plans to host a priest who has advocated for the ordination of women would “damage the unity” of the Church, according to a statement released exclusively to The Cardinal Newman Society.

In 2011, Fr. Helmut Schüller of Austria was a leader in a movement that issued a “Call to Disobedience,” which advocated for the ability of divorced and remarried Catholics to receive sacraments as well as the ordination of women and married men.

Currently, Fr. Schüller is touring the United States on what’s called “The Catholic Tipping Point” tour. That tour is being sponsored by organizations such as Call to Action, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Dignity USA, Future Church, New Ways Ministry, Women’s Ordination Conference, and Voice of the Faithful among others.

Last month Cardinal Sean O’Malley reportedly barred Fr. Schüller from speaking in a parish in the Archdiocese of Boston.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

The work to transform the Curia and the IOR has begun

ANDREA TORNIELLI
VATICAN CITY

“So Your Eminence, did you get the job done?” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, whose days as Secretary of State are numbered, knows that when Francis calls in person to check on the progress of a task he has set, there’s no beating around the bush. The cardinal usually has his audience with the Pope on Mondays. But a couple of days later, Francis calls Bertone himself – as the Vatican Secretary of State confided to figures close to him – to make sure that what was discussed is actually being put into action. Whoever thinks the Pope next door – who shows so much humanity and solidarity to those around him, bending down and hugging them during his audiences – has failed in his role as leader, is mistaken.

The second stop-off point on our journey through the small and big changes in Francis’ pontificate is to do with his leadership style. One Vatican prelate said that “in the almost eight years of Benedict XVI’s reign, the people working with him acted differently each time the Pope gave instructions for action to be taken. The Pope would think a nomination had been made, when in fact a series of obstacles had prevented it from happening. Some time later, Benedict XVI would find out that the process had been left unfinished and postponed…” There have been cases where nominations have been published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis – where all official decisions are published – without the interested party even being informed. This is because the head of the relevant dicastery did not agree with the nomination and tried to stop the Secretary of State from making it official, despite the Pope’s approval.

“Everyone in the Vatican recognises Benedict XVI’s greatness, the depth of his vision for the Church and the humility he showed by resigning; but you’ll have a hard time finding anyone in the Holy See who did not think the Curia’s work left a lot to be desired. This is evident when one looks at the Via Crucis of Ratzinger’s pontificate and the fact he had to personally intervene on a number of occasions to cover up for the failings of those who worked with him. For example when the excommunication of Holocaust denier, Bishop Williamson, was revoked.

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ILLINOIS
The Washington Times

By Cheryl K. Chumley -The Washington Times

A priest who was sent to jail for abusing an 8-year-old boy will be deported to Bolivia, law enforcement authorities said.

Alejandro Flores, a former priest with the Diocese of Joliet, said he wouldn’t appeal the deportation ruling, United Press International reported. He has been placed in the custody of immigration agents and is in the process of being removed from the priesthood.

His fall from grace was a dramatic one. Nine years ago, the Joliet Diocese actively recruited him to go to Chicago.

“We have zero say over [his deportation, but] certainly wouldn’t help [him],” diocese spokesman Edward Flavin told UPI. “We’re totally against him. He is restricted from any sort of public ministry.”

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
Riverfront Times

By Sam Levin Mon., Jul. 8 2013

Charles Manning, who was ordained as a St. Louis priest in 1997, has been acquitted of sexually assaulting a fifteen-year-old boy, but a jury ruled that he was guilty of supplying the teen with marijuana and alcohol.

A jury reached its verdict last week in Colorado Springs, where Manning was transferred in 2007. The allegation of sexual abuse — including claims that the now 78-year-old priest was behaving like a “jealous lover” toward the boy — surfaced in January 2012, prompting a local police investigation and a period of leave for Manning.

Now, the priest is free on bond but could face up to six years in prison for the guilty conviction of contributing to the delinquency of a minor connected to the drug charges.

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MISSOURI
Fox 4

[with video]

July 8, 2013, by Matt Stewart

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The civil trial against the Catholic Diocese will begin Monday, July 8. An Independence family is suing, claiming the diocese covered up sexual abuse by a priest against their son.

Thomas O’Brien was ordained in 1950 and worked as a priest in Kansas City and Independence until his forced retirement in 1983. In the past 10 years, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against him, claiming he sexually abused many altar boys, including Brian Teeman.

Teeman’s parents filed a lawsuit claiming sexual abuse against their son led to Brian’s suicide in 1983. He was 14 years old.

According the SNAP, the Survivors Network of Abused Priests, the lawsuit alleges that “following the sexual encounters, O’Brien would require them to change into their robes, prepare communion and serve at the mass.”

It also states that “O’Brien forced silence on [boys] by telling them that they would be kicked out of the Catholic Church, they would go directly to hell and their parents would disown them.”

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AUSTRALIA
ABC Perth

[with audio]

The Royal Commission into child abuse in Australian institutions will come to Perth on July 30 and WA people who wish to give evidence or tell their story are being encouraged to register their interest.

Geoff Hutchison spoke to the CEO of the Commission, Janette Dines, to get some insight into what to expect if you are interested in telling your experience.

You can telephone 1800 099 340

Or write to GPO Box 5283, Sydney, NSW, 2001

Or email registerinterest@childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

July 9, 2013

Barney Zwartz
Religion editor, The Age.

From the twitterati to lonely late-night-radio listeners, reaching the vast and diverse number of Australians affected by child sexual abuse is the biggest challenge facing the royal commission in its early stages, according to its chief executive Janette Dines.

She said the commissioners were acutely aware that in hearing victims’ stories they were ”bearing witness on behalf of the nation”.

The biggest obstacle to fulfilling this duty was that such different sections of the community had to be engaged – from those late-night-radio listeners who could not be contacted any other way, to disabled people, remote indigenous communities and young Twitter followers, Ms Dines said.

”We are going to have to hire someone who works 24/7 on social media. I don’t think a lot of royal commission CEOs go on late-night radio or television or hold meet and greet sessions in regional centres with local groups who can amplify the message and plug the gaps.”

Considerable care was being taken to protect the mental health of commissioners, staff and witnesses. She said vicarious trauma was relatively little understood, and had been listed this year for the first time in the manual of psychological disorders.

Counsellors were proactively preparing commissioners and staff, debriefing them after sessions, and organising regular checks from mental health professionals.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Gerald Kleba | Jul. 8, 2013

VIEWPOINT

I was wearing walking shorts and a sports shirt, so when the hospice nurse arrived at the house, I had to introduce myself: “I’m Gerry Kleba, the family priest.” I’m not much into clericalism, so I don’t use the title “Father.” Within minutes, the mother of the family slipped away peacefully, as her children and I prayed, cried, talked, even laughed. I’d known the family for 40 years. The older children — in their teens then — had typed the parish bulletin on stencils, mimeographed and folded them on Saturday mornings at the rectory.

I had barely left the house, started my Prius and driven to the corner when I started to feel not only very sad, but very, very angry.

I turned off the radio to examine my emotions as I drove through the old neighborhood that had been my parish for 10 years. Everything we had talked about this afternoon, happily recalling my private Saturdays with these teens, could never happen today. The clergy abuse, the scandal of the cover-ups, and the subsequent “Protecting God’s Children” program, which decrees that a priest can never be alone with young people, had made that impossible. No young priest today has a chance for the quality intimacy that makes celibacy worthwhile and compelling, because his life will have to be spent at arm’s length from the very youngsters who are the most in need. The implication is: “Child, you’re not safe with me. You can’t trust me.”

When trust is lost, no one knows how to restore it. And no institution has betrayed trust so blatantly as the Catholic church, where the lies and cover-ups are traceable to the highest echelons of the hierarchy, including the Vatican. Now that we have seen American cardinals among those assembled in Rome for the election of a pope, I am angrier than ever. Some of these men are directly responsible for the crisis that has resulted in keeping me and other priests from having warm, healthy relationships with young people.

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UNITED STATES
The Star-Ledger

[Cemetery Trust Transfer – All Documents – All Documents – Jeff Anderson & Associates]

By Star-Ledger Editorial Board
on July 08, 2013

When New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan was in charge of the Catholic Church’s Milwaukee operations, he moved an enormous pot of the church’s cash — $57 million — into a trust fund for cemetery maintenance. Though the archdiocese was in the middle of a gigantic lawsuit over its priests’ sexual abuse of children, Dolan called it routine bookkeeping.

Now the New York Times reports the discovery of a smoking gun: documents including a letter from then-Archbishop Dolan to the Vatican, explaining how the transfer protected the church’s millions in the event it lost in court.

Damning evidence, in 14 words: “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.”

Few believed Dolan then, when he insisted the money was meant to care for Catholic cemeteries. Doubt only grew when the archdiocese declared bankruptcy to shield its riches from the plaintiffs — who as children were raped and molested by priests.

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JAPAN
Tokyo Reporter

At around 5:45 p.m. on June 8, a security guard at a video rental shop in Fujimino, Saitama Prefecture peered around a shelf of titles to find a man with his pants down and masturbating in front of a female customer.

The exhibitionist, Shuko Araizumi, a 39-year-old assistant priest from the Tofuku-ji temple, located in Tokorozawa, was booked the next day by the Saitama Prefectural Police on public indecency charges.

Araizumi is the son of the chief priest of Tofuku-ji, a branch temple from within the Japanese Shingon Buddhist sect. With this not being his first lewd incident, Shukan Jitsuwa (July 11) reports that the patience of the local citizenry is wearing thin.

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UNITED STATES
Renew America

By Matt C. Abbott

On July 9, Catholic author, speaker and blogger Dawn Eden will be giving her testimony to the women-graduates of the Project Dawn treatment court in Philadelphia. (Click here to read about Project Dawn.)

The following is the text of her testimony, which had to be approved in advance by the court’s administrators.

———————————-

It is a joy and an honor for me to be here with you today as the City of Philadelphia honors your great achievement. I have attended several graduation ceremonies in my life, but I don’t believe I have ever been present at one where the graduates worked so hard, gave so much, sacrificed so much to see their graduation day.

As the author of a book on spiritual healing, I’ve been asked to give you a few words to help put your journey in perspective. Because graduation is not really an ending. Every graduation is a new beginning. And today you can now face the future with confidence and hope. Your achievements in this court show that you have within you the God-given power to face whatever challenges may come, with the strength that comes from within.

I can speak confidently about the power that we have from God to overcome personal challenges, because I have experienced that power in my own life. I was born into a Jewish family, my parents split up when I was five, and my sister and I were raised by my mother. It was during that time, when my father was no longer present to protect me, that I began to suffer sexual abuse. My first abuse was committed outside the home – by a janitor at the temple my family attended. When I told my mother what had happened, she said, “You let him do that to you.” I was five years old.

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WISCONSIN
Journal Times

LUKE FEUERHERM luke.feuerherm@journaltimes.com

CALEDONIA — An upbeat Sunday Mass at St. Louis Catholic Church in Caledonia came to a somber conclusion as the Rev. Mark Danczyk addressed clergy sex abuse claims contained in documents released last week.

Speaking to his congregation, Danczyk explained the current status of the lawsuit involving his parish, offered spiritual and professional counseling to parishioners and decried acts of sexual abuse against children.

“I firmly believe in my heart that there is a special place in hell for anyone who abuses a child,” Danczyk told his congregation Sunday.

Last Monday, an attorney released thousands of documents that detail allegations of child sex abuse made against 42 Milwaukee Archdiocese priests, including five local priests accused of abusing children in Racine County.

Among those accused priests with ties to the county was former St. Louis Catholic Church pastor Daniel Budzynski, who has admitted to more than 30 instances of abuse, and is accused of about 20 more, according to the records.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

The Church of England has been warned it cannot carry out a risk assessment of suspected paedophile priests in case it breaches their human rights, it emerged yesterday.

By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor
08 Jul 2013

The warning came as members of the General Synod voted to issue an “unreserved” expression of regret for the Anglican authorities’ failure to prevent sexual abuse in the past or even to listen to the victims.

Members of the Synod also backed a string of proposals designed to tighten up child protection arrangements.

In a joint statement, supported unanimously, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York said: “The sexual and physical abuse that has been inflicted by these people on children, young people and adults is and will remain a deep source of grief and shame for years to come.”

But the Church’s legal officials admitted that privacy rules, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, could make it difficult to force “credibly suspected” paedophile priests to go for a professional risk assessment.

An earlier report, conducted in the wake of the child abuse scandals in the diocese of Chichester, recommended sending anyone reasonably suspected of abuse to see professionals. But a briefing paper prepared by the legal office warns that this would involve “intrusive inquiries” and could run into problems with Article Eight of the European Convention – the right to private and family life.

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SINGAPORE
Malaysia Chronicle

A woman has written a book in which she makes an explosive claim – she was sexually abused by two Catholic priests when she was a teenager growing up in Singapore.

And when she told her mother about the first incident, she was chided for tempting the priest.
She was then sent for counselling with another priest, who also sexually abused her.

The author is Ms Jane Leigh, a 36-year-old single mother of two teenagers. She now lives in Melbourne, where she runs her own practice as a clinical psychotherapist.

Her book, My Nine Lives, which carries the subhead “A psychotherapist’s journey from victim to survivor”, was published last year.

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UNITED KINGDOM
ITV

The Church of England’s ruling General Synod has given its backing for a programme of changes designed to tighten up child protection procedures and prevent further scandals.

It comes after a formal apology for past child abuse.

They include:

* Removing the 12-month limit for bringing complaints under the Clergy Discipline Measure for complaints alleging sexual abuse.

* Clergy who have been defrocked or suspended, or who have no licence or permission to officiate, would also be prevented from robing or wearing clerical vestments in church under the proposals.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Huffington Post

Press Association

A bishop has said the Church of England “failed big time” over child protection as the General Synod formally apologised for clerical sex abuse.

The Rt Rev Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, said for “far too long” the Church of England, notably those in senior positions, had either disbelieved the stories of victims, believed them but tried to hide the truth away or hoped that by removing an offender the problem would go away.

“We can make all the excuses that we like about society being different in previous decades – or our understanding of abuse being so much better,” he said.

“We can note that our policies were different then and we followed those policies. But these take nothing away from the fact that we failed to listen properly, we did not acknowledge the wrong done, and we protected the institution at the expense of the person abused.”

He added: “We failed big time, we can do nothing other than confess our sin, repent and commit ourselves to being different in the years ahead.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
AFP

LONDON — The Church of England has formally apologised for child abuse by Anglican priests and for its own failure to prevent it.

The church’s governing body, the General Synod, voted unanimously to make the apology at a meeting in the northern English city of York and said it would now tighten its procedures.

“We failed big time,” Paul Butler, the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, said as he opened the meeting on Sunday.

“We cannot do anything other than own up to our failures. We were wrong. Our failures were sin just as much as the perpetrators sinned,” Butler added.

The synod also observed a 30-second silence following a statement from support groups for survivors of abuse, an issue which has already rocked the Catholic Church in a number of countries.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Church of England

Speech to General Synod July 2013 from the Rt Revd Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Notts, Chair of the Churches National Safeguarding Committee.

“The Commissaries Reports will I suggest be seen as landmarks in the Church of England’s responding to abuse committed by its clergy and other leaders. This can be the pivotal point when we turn from having a default position that is to defend the institution, even at the cost of failing to respond appropriately to those who have been abused, to one where we will listen to the survivor and begin from there.

“The Commissaries exposed serious failures in the Diocese of Chichester but in doing so exposed much wider institutional failings which affect every Diocese. For far too long the institution, and notably those in most senior positions, either disbelieved the stories that survivors told us or believed them but tried to hide the truth away or remove the offender elsewhere vaguely hoping that ‘the problem’ would go away. We can make all the excuses that we like about society being different in previous decades; or our understanding of abuse being so much better. We can note that our policies were different then and we followed those policies. But these take nothing away from the fact that we failed to listen properly; we did not acknowledge the wrong done; and we protected the institution at the expense of the person abused. We cannot do anything other than own up to our failures. We were wrong. Our failures were sin just as much as the perpetrators sinned. By failing to listen or act appropriately we condemned survivors to live with the harm when we should have been assisting them into whatever measure of healing might be possible.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Church of England

07 July 2013

General Synod voted today to acknowledge and apologise for past safeguarding wrongs. It also voted to endorse work on legislative and non-legislative changes to tighten procedures which have been identified following the Chichester Commissaries interim and final safeguarding reports.

Opening the debate, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, Chair of the Churches National Safeguarding Committee, said: “We cannot do anything other than own up to our failures. We were wrong. Our failures were sin just as much as the perpetrators sinned. By failing to listen or act appropriately we condemned survivors to live with the harm when we should have been assisting them into whatever measure of healing might be possible.”

The motion – that Synod accordingly acknowledges and apologises for past wrongs and seeks endorsement from the Synod for legislative and non-legislative progress to be made during the period of this Quinquennium – was debated.

An amendment moved by the Revd Preb Stephen Lynas was carried.

Following a division of the Synod, the motion, as amended, was overwhelmingly carried (360 for, 0 against, 0 abstentions).

It had been brought to Synod following consideration by both the House of Bishops and Archbishops’ Council so it could approve the next steps. (The proposed changes – including a consultation on certain legislative areas are outlined in Notes below).

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UNITED KINGDOM
Archbishop of Canterbury

Sunday 7th July 2013

General Synod members today voted overwhelmingly to acknowledge and apologise for past safeguarding failures. In the debate, Archbishop Justin called for a culture “that looks first to justice for survivors” and to clarity, transparency and admission of failures. He added this must be done “with survivors, not to them.” Read his full statement below

The statement we heard at the beginning of this debate was, I know, to all of us – as has been said – absolutely agonising. And what it says above all is that, for us, what we’re looking at today is far from enough. We are opening a process, continuing a process in many ways, that will go far further than we can imagine. The reality is that there will always be people who are dangerous who are part of the life of the church. They may be members of the congregation; we hope and pray that they will not be in positions of responsibility, but the odds are from time to time people will somehow conceal sufficiently well. And many here, as the Bishop of Herefordshire said, have been deeply affected, as well as the survivors who have so rightly brought us to this place. Many other people here have been deeply affected and badly treated. So we face a continual challenge and reality. This is not an issue we can deal with; it is something we will live with, and must live in the reality of – day in day out, for as long as the church exists – and seek to get it right.

And so the actions that we are developing must be ones that are persistent. It has been said they must be persistent by bishops. We wholeheartedly agree with that, all of us. We cannot, in twenty years, be finding ourselves having this same debate and saying ‘Well we didn’t quite understand then.’ There has to be a complete change of culture and behavior.

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ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune

By Christy Gutowski, Tribune reporter
7:18 p.m. CDT, July 7, 2013

A Diocese of Joliet priest who served time in prison for molesting an 8-year-old boy is not expected to fight federal immigration efforts to deport him to his native Bolivia.

Authorities said Alejandro Flores does not plan to appeal his deportation.

Flores was due to be paroled June 6 after serving part of a four-year prison sentence on criminal sexual assault charges. But immigration officials confirmed they took him into immediate custody. He remains at an undisclosed federal facility.

“We have zero say over (his deportation), and certainly wouldn’t help (him),” said Edward Flavin, a diocese spokesman. “We’re totally against him. He is restricted from any sort of public ministry.”

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MISSOURI
The Kansas City Star

July 7

BY JUDY L. THOMAS
The Kansas City Star

A civil trial begins Monday in a wrongful-death lawsuit alleging that a boy took his life 30 years ago because of repeated sexual abuse by a Kansas City priest.

The trial, in Jackson County Circuit Court in Independence, could be notable for the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, some say.

“This is an especially significant case,” said Timothy Lytton, a legal scholar at the Albany School of Law and author of “Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse.”

“One reason is that it’s rare for any of these cases to go to a jury; most of them are settled. The other reason is that it’s possibly the first high-profile case on the watch of the new pope.”

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Fox 6

[with video]

July 7, 2013, by Derica Williams

MILWAUKEE (WITI) — Milwaukee-area Catholics on Sunday, July 7th celebrated Mass for the first time since thousands of pages of documentation was released early last week, detailing the Milwaukee Archdiocese’ clergy sex abuse scandal.

“I’m feeling kind of sad about it, naturally. We hate to have people defect, you know, of course. Maybe we didn`t pray enough for them. Maybe they were in the wrong place — somebody made a poor choice,” parishioner Eileen Goff said.

Last Monday, thousands of pages of secret court documents were released, revealing sexual abuse involving 41 priests.

The court documents show some of the accused molesters were then shuffled around from church-to-church.

“That came as a terrible surprise to us. We could not believe that this would happen, but it did so we have to live with it. It doesn`t affect my faith. I expect people to be less than perfect,” Goff said.
While some parishioners hold true to forgiveness and not judging, others near Cathedral Square told FOX6 News they are feeling somewhat conflicted.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

[the documents – Jeff Anderson & Associates]

[the documents – Milwaukee archdiocese]

Tragic as the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church has been, it is shocking to discover that Cardinal Timothy Dolan, while archbishop of Milwaukee, moved $57 million off the archdiocesan books into a cemetery trust fund six years ago in order to protect the money from damage suits by victims of abuse by priests.

Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has denied shielding the funds as an “old and discredited” allegation and “malarkey.” But newly released court documents make it clear that he sought and received fast approval from the Vatican to transfer the money just as the Wisconsin Supreme Court was about to open the door to damage suits by victims raped and abused as children by Roman Catholic clergy.

“I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability,” Dolan wrote rather cynically in his 2007 letter to the Vatican. The letter was released by the Milwaukee Archdiocese as part of a bankruptcy court fight with lawyers in 575 cases of damages claims. The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011. The law bars a debtor from transferring funds in a way that protects one class of creditors over another.

The release of about 6,000 pages of documents provided a grim backstage look at the scandal, graphically detailing the patterns of serial abuse by dozens of priests who were systematically rotated to new assignments as church officials kept criminal behavior secret from civil authority.

It is disturbing that the current Milwaukee leader, Archbishop Jerome Listecki, said last week that the church underwent an “arc of understanding” across time to come to grips with the scandal – as if the statutory rapes of children were not always a glaring crime in the eyes of society as well as the church itself.

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NEW YORK
Jewish Journal

Posted by Rav Yosef Kanefsky

Between September 1977 and June 1981 I attended Yeshiva University High School, commonly known as MTA. During that time Rabbi George Finkelstein was the principal, and Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm – a once and forever hero of American Orthodoxy – was the President of the University.. I of course knew during those years, that there were certain students whom Rabbi Finkelstein aggressively invited into his office to “wrestle” with him. I “of course” knew, because everybody knew. Everybody already knew about it in the years before I got to MTA, and everybody continued to know about it in the years following.

For 30 years after graduating MTA I never thought about any of this, until this past December when the stories of what we now call sexual abuse – committed by Rabbi Finkelstein and one other faculty member – were detailed in the Daily Forward. Also detailed by the Forward was Rabbi Lamm’s eventual decision to quietly dismiss the abusers, without either reporting anything to the police, or telling their subsequent employers about what he knew. The months that followed the Forward’s revelations brought only half-apologies and mumbled rationalizations from YU. But this past Monday, Rabbi Dr. Lamm, now 85 and in failing health, resigned as university chancellor, and spoke at length about the scandal in his resignation remarks. A few representative sentences:

“At the time that inappropriate actions by individuals at Yeshiva were brought to my attention, I acted in a way that I thought was correct, but which now seems ill conceived. [I submitted to] momentary compassion in according individuals the benefit of the doubt by not fully recognizing what was before [me]. And when this happens—one must do teshuvah. So, I too must do teshuvah. True character requires of me the courage to admit that, despite my best intentions then, I now recognize that I was wrong.”

I am writing about this today neither to applaud Rabbi Lamm for his honesty and courage, – although such applause is appropriate – nor to point out what was missing from his statement – which spokespeople for the victims have already quite correctly done. I am writing rather, in order to open the question as to how it hapenned that an entire generation of MTA students – including me – failed to speak up about what we knew was happening (even if we didn’t yet have the vocabulary to describe it)? And even more to the point, how is it that faculty members – our teachers! – as well as members of the administration remained silent, never raising their voices? Why did we remain silent, and what responsibility do we have now?

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UNITED KINGDOM
Sky News

A bishop has said the Church of England “failed big time” over child protection as the General Synod formally apologises for clerical sex abuse.

The Rt Rev Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, said for “far too long” the Church of England had either disbelieved the stories of victims, believed them but tried to hide the truth away or hoped that by removing an offender the problem would go away.

“We can make all the excuses that we like about society being different in previous decades – or our understanding of abuse being so much better,” he said.

“We can note that our policies were different then and we followed those policies. But these take nothing away from the fact that we failed to listen properly, we did not acknowledge the wrong done, and we protected the institution at the expense of the person abused.”

He added: “We failed big time, we can do nothing other than confess our sin, repent and commit ourselves to being different in the years ahead.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Sam Jones
The Guardian, Sunday 7 July 2013

Victims of sexual abuse by Church of England clergy have rejected an apology from the general synod and called for an independent public inquiry to ensure abusers are held to account and better safeguards put in place.

In York on Sunday evening, the general synod voted unanimously to endorse the apology already made by the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to victims of abuse, and to back moves intended to tighten its safeguarding procedures.

The synod was told the church had failed victims of abuse “big time” by refusing to listen to their stories and by moving offenders to different areas in the hope that the problem would go away.

Paul Butler, the bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, said the church had sinned through its failure to act just as much as the abusers had sinned through their actions.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Hartlepool Mail

A bishop has said the Church of England “failed big time” over child protection as the General Synod formally apologised for clerical sex abuse.

The Rt Rev Paul Butler, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, said for “far too long” the Church of England, notably those in senior positions, had either disbelieved the stories of victims, believed them but tried to hide the truth away or hoped that by removing an offender the problem would go away.

“We can make all the excuses that we like about society being different in previous decades – or our understanding of abuse being so much better,” he said. “We can note that our policies were different then and we followed those policies. But these take nothing away from the fact that we failed to listen properly, we did not acknowledge the wrong done, and we protected the institution at the expense of the person abused.”

He added: “We failed big time, we can do nothing other than confess our sin, repent and commit ourselves to being different in the years ahead.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
ITV

by Mark Gough – last updated Sun 7 Jul 2013

Sue Cox was abused by a Catholic priest when she was ten – at a religious retreat in Matlock in Derbyshire.

Three years later, she was raped by him.

She now campaigns around the world in support of people who have been abused by clergy from all faiths.

Today the General Synod – the law-making body – of the Church of England is meeting to discuss the question of clerical abuse.

It is expected to agree to apologise for abuse carried out by members of the church.

Sue Cox was at the synod today as an observer – representing her organisation which helps victims throughout Europe.

She believes more should be done – more than an apology.

She said:

Our opinion is that the only answer they can come up with is to support an independent public inquiry because in that way we will know exactly what we are dealing with and we will tell them that the only way to get us on board really is to stand and be counted and to publicly support the idea of a public inquiry.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

The Church of England has formally apologised for past child abuse by Anglican priests and its own “serious failure” to prevent it.

The ruling General Synod, meeting in York, debated a report about abuse in the Chichester Diocese.

Members unanimously backed an earlier apology issued by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

Meanwhile, a man was arrested after two stewards were allegedly attacked at a Synod service in York Minster.

A Church of England spokesman said a man entered the minster as the service was starting and attacked the stewards when they asked him to stop.

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UNITED KINGDOM
ITV

[Stop Church Child Abuse]

The Church of England General Synod met in York today to discuss whether to offer an apology to survivors of clergy sex abuse.

The group ‘Stop Church Child Abuse Campaign’ said an apology is inappropriate until the church reveals the extent of abuse by clergy. It said:

The survivors of abuse should be central to this process. Instead we are being denied the opportunity to speak personally at the Synod. Our voices should be heard at this and every other debate on responding to survivors.

We still do not know how many victims of abuse are known to the church. The church has not identified who the victims are. Only a commitment from the church to call on the Government for a public inquiry to find the facts and then apologise directly to the victims of abuse would be an acceptable response at this stage. Recompense and support will also be essential.

A woman from the Midlands, who was sexually assaulted by a priest when she was a young girl, attended the talks today.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Fox 11

MILWAUKEE (AP) – – As the national clergy sex abuse scandal mounted following revelations in Boston in 2002, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan faced increasing pressure as the archbishop in Milwaukee to cut costs by defrocking problem priests and pushback from his staff when he hesitated, according to newly released records.

Clergy sex abuse victims have harshly criticized Dolan for payments made to at least seven abusive priests who were forced out of the church; they view the money as bonuses given to criminals. The archdiocese has said it long provided money to priests leaving the priesthood as a means of helping them transition into new lives; most were not accused of wrongdoing.

While victims have faulted Dolan for the payments, documents released July 1 show that others in the archdiocese also were pushing to get rid of the priests as a way to ensure that money was focused on caring for victims and church operations. Dolan and others likely saw the payments as a cost-effective way to speed up the priests’ departure.

The documents were made public as part of a deal reached in federal bankruptcy court between the archdiocese and victims suing it for fraud.

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VATICAN CITY
The Tablet (UK)

Robert Mickens – 6 July 2013

First an inquiry announced, then an arrest, followed by major resignations. It has been quite a week at the Vatican Bank, the financial organisation that Pope Francis has in his sights. But can he and his allies really get to grips with what has been happening behind its closed doors and ensure transparency?

Baron Ernst von Freyberg insists that the so-called Vatican Bank is a “well-managed and clean financial institution” that merely suffers from a bad reputation linked to old scandals. The German aristocrat and industrialist was hired last February after an extensive search to be the president of the bank – officially named the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR). And he recently began a media campaign to convince people that he and his team were well on the road to bringing greater transparency and propriety to the 71-year-old institution.

But a new and embarrassing scandal has caused a major obstacle to that journey and this past week the president was forced to admit that still more drastic measures were needed to truly clean up the IOR’s bad image and improve efforts undertaken in the past three years to combat money laundering and provide greater transparency.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Why Bishop Brandt?

We are parishioners of the Diocese of Greensburg, and we have many questions to ask our Bishop, Lawrence Brandt in the wake of some questionable decrees from him. Decrees that make no sense to us and appear to be having negative impacts on our Diocese. Since our questions to date have gone unanswered in private letters sent to the Bishop we are now making these questions and concerns public.

Is it true that priests, funds and vocations are shrinking within the Diocese of Greensburg? If these are true then why Bishop Brandt….

1. Do you live like a prince in a mansion on a large expensive compound when Pope Francis has asked the Bishops of the Church to live among and like the people of the Church?

2. Did you spend millions of dollars of Diocesan funds on lavish renovations, including a very expensive chair for yourself, at The Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, while parishes and Catholic Schools were being closed due to lack of funds?

3. If your strategic plan is to save the Diocese of Greensburg due to priest shortages, why would you ever dismiss Benedictine Priests who have faithfully served our Diocese for nearly 100 years?

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ILLINOIS
Pantagraph

July 05, 2013

A life of service: Bloomington’s ‘Father Doug’ retiring after 50 years in the priesthood

BLOOMINGTON — Two things — one involving a title and the other involving action — offer a glimpse into who is the Rev. Doug Hennessy. Read more

Father Doug Hennessy weighs in on some controversial questions involving the Catholic Church:

Q: What has been the impact on the Catholic Church of the (sex-abuse) scandal?

A: It was a serious blow to the church’s moral credibility and authority. It is very sad and tragic. It bankrupted the trust account that priests used to have. Now, we have to nurture and develop that trust. It was handled badly by church leadership. If someone feels they were mistreated, they should come forward to church leadership. The worst thing that can happen is to let that fester without dealing with it. We want to care for victims while respecting the privacy of individuals and recognizing that some priests have been falsely accused.

Q. Is the Catholic Church still experiencing a priest shortage?

A: Many of us who serve as priests would say yes. I think the church has worked hard to encourage vocations. Many of us (priests over 65) are retiring or going to God. The numbers among 45- to 65-year-olds are thin but there are more young priests coming on. Pastoral planning now involves more sharing of resources among parishes (including combining parishes’ programs, classes and support groups). And a great many lay people are volunteering.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Times

Ruth Gledhill Religion Correspondent

A protester this morning disrupted the annual General Synod service at York Minster as members prayed before contentious debates on child abuse and women bishops.

The attack was deflected by stewards shortly before the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, preached at the high-profile service, which came hours after Synod members met in secret in an attempt to resolve their differences over women bishops.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

[Archbishop Justin’s presidential address to General Synod – Archbishop of Canterbury]

Sam Jones
guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 July 2013

The archbishop of Canterbury has used his first General Synod address to warn the Church of England that, whether it likes it or not, “a revolution in the area of sexuality” is underway in society.

In a presidential address containing inescapable echoes of Harold Macmillan’s famous “wind of change” speech – which heralded the advent of African independence – the archbishop told the York synod that the recent debate over same-sex marriage had shown that society’s attitudes to sexuality were changing radically, and that the church risked appearing uncomfortably out-of-step.

“Anyone who listened to much of the Same Sex Marriage bill second reading debate in the House of Lords could not fail to be struck by the overwhelming change of cultural hinterland,” he said. “Predictable attitudes were no longer there. The opposition to the Bill was utterly overwhelmed … [and] there was noticeable hostility to the view of the churches.”

Welby added: “We may or may not like it but we must accept that there is a revolution in the area of sexuality.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

7 July 2013

The Church of England is expected to make a formal apology for past child abuse by Anglican priests, and its own “serious failure” to prevent it.

The ruling General Synod, meeting in York, will debate a report about abuse in the Chichester Diocese.

Members will be asked to back an earlier apology issued by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

A man has been arrested after two people were assaulted during a high-profile church service at York Minster.

The Archbishop of York was due to give the key sermon at the service, which forms part of the General Synod meeting, when the attack took place.

A spokesman for the Church of England said a man entered the minster as the service was starting and assaulted two people when he was asked to stop.

One of the Archbishop of York’s staff and a steward suffered minor injuries.

The service was attended by senior members of the Church of England including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Sam Jones
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 7 July 2013

A man has been arrested after attacking two Church of England staff during a General synod service at York Minster attended by the archbishops of York and Canterbury.

The man, who is understood to be well know to local police, began shouting and swearing as the archbishops’ procession entered the cathedral shortly after 10am on Sunday.

After coming within yards of the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, he was approached by a steward, whom he punched. Dave Smith, a member of the archbishop of York’s staff, then stepped in and was also punched by the man and left with a bloody nose.

Smith sat on the man until the police arrived.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

By JONATHAN PETRE

The Church of England will acknowledge its ‘deep grief and shame’ over clerical sex abuse today when it votes to make an historic apology to victims.

The move comes as The Mail on Sunday has learned of proposals being actively considered by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby for the Church to set up its first national commission on abuse.

In a strongly-worded joint statement issued before today’s vote at Church ruling body the General Synod, Archbishop Welby and the Archbishop of York John Sentamu said the suffering inflicted on children, young people and adults ‘is and will remain a deep source of grief and shame for years to come’.

The Synod, meeting in York, is expected to back a motion offering an ‘unreserved’ apology to victims after a series of shocking cases involving senior clergy.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Sunday Times

Tony Grew Published: 7 July 2013

THE Church of England will today be urged to apologise to children sexually abused by its clergy.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York will ask the church’s governing body, the General Synod, to back a proposal for a public apology at its meeting in York.

A document drafted by the church’s two most senior clerics calls on the church to “identify with the apology that we wish to offer unreservedly for the failure of the Church of England’s systems to protect children, young people and adults from physical and sexual abuse inflicted by its clergy and others”.

It also apologises for “the failure to listen properly to those so abused”.

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CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Times

Molestation allegations against Lawrence Sandstrom go back to the 1960s. His file will be among those released this summer by a host of independent Catholic orders.

By Victoria Kim and Harriet Ryan
July 6, 2013

The preschooler’s hair was falling out in clumps. He had stopped playing with other children and barely spoke to his teachers. He woke screaming each night, and during the day clung to his mother.

What’s wrong, she asked again and again. Finally, he told her: His big brother, adopted seven years earlier from the Maryvale Catholic orphanage in Rosemead, was molesting him. Devastated, she rushed the older boy to a therapist’s office, where he offered a harrowing explanation.

“He said that Brother Larry had done it to him at Maryvale — him and other children,” his mother recalled years later.

The man he named was Lawrence Sandstrom, a brother of the Holy Cross religious order and the subject of molestation allegations in Los Angeles stretching back to the 1960s. Over the years, claims against Sandstrom have cost the Catholic Church more than $3 million in civil settlements. But unlike in the L.A. Archdiocese, which released 12,000 pages of internal records on abusive priests in January, there has yet to be a full accounting of the church’s handling of Sandstrom.

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UNTED KINGDOM
Telegraph

The Church of England is expected to vote today on whether to make an historic apology to victims of sexual abuse, as the Archbishop of Canterbury considers setting up the church’s first commission on abuse.

By Claire Carter 07 Jul 2013

Archbishop Justin Welby and the Archbishop of York John Sentamu have issued a joint statement ahead of today’s debate at the General Synod in which they urge church members to support an ‘unreserved apology’ to victims of clerical sexual abuse.

The church is also set to overhaul its procedures in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse.
The vote is due to take place this afternoon. A motion urges the Synod to “endorse the Archbishops’ statement expressing on behalf of the Church of England an unreserved apology for the failure of its systems to protect children, young people and adults from physical and sexual abuse inflicted by its clergy and others, and for the failure to listen properly to those so abused.”

The vote follows convictions of clergy who abused scores of victims and the arrest of former Bishop of Gloucester Peter Ball on suspicion of eight sex offences against eight boys and young men.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Argus

By Finn Scott-Delany, Senior Reporter

Bishops will apologise unreservedly following a damning report into child abuse in Sussex.

The General Synod is expected to endorse the “unreserved apology” to victims today.

The high-level acknowledgement follows an official inquiry set up into abuse within the Diocese of Chichester.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said the report described a painful story of “individual wickedness” and “systematic failings”.

Archbishop Justin Welby wrote: “The sexual and physical abuse that has been inflicted by these people on children, young people and adults is and will remain a deep source of grief and shame for years to come.

“History cannot be rewritten, but those who still suffer now as a result of abuse in the past deserve this at least, that we hear their voices and take action to ensure that today’s safeguarding policies and systems are as robust as they can be.”

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WISCONSIN
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel

John Pilmaier was 7, a second-grader at St. John Vianney School in 1977, when Father David Hanser walked into his classroom and asked for a volunteer to help him with a project.

Several children raised their hands, Pilmaier says, but he was chosen.

And so they walked, Father Dave and John, to the rectory that the priest called home. Once there, Hanser sexually assaulted the boy, then warned him not to tell anyone, saying his parents would be angry with him.

John Pilmaier is the final entry, just three lines, in the history of the now-defrocked Hanser, which was released Monday with thousands of pages of documents as part of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy proceeding.

Hanser’s file recounts what Pilmaier and his parents had already come to suspect: that their once-trusted parish priest may have sexually assaulted numerous children over the years, dating at least to the 1960s.

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CALIFORNIA
Merced Sun-Star

By Marcos Breton — mbreton@sacbee.com

The nature of faith is to believe in something larger than yourself.

The danger of faith is to believe something that isn’t true – either because you need to believe it or because you can’t face the truth.

That’s when faith becomes delusion and denial.

It happened Friday, when celestial faith was projected onto a mortal, a priest, who pleaded no contest to sexually molesting a 13-year-old girl – even as the priest’s friends watched the proceedings in court.

The Rev. Uriel Ojeda, once the shining star of the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento, was handcuffed and taken into custody after accepting a plea for forcing himself on a young girl. It was a cold legal conclusion to a tragedy of faith placed too fervently in one young man.

But his followers saw something else.

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WISCONSIN
Fond du Lac Reporter

Written by
Sharon Roznik
The Reporter Media

The day John Schmitz burned his Roman Catholic collar was a turning point in his life.

Raised in St. Peter and a graduate of St. Lawrence Seminary in Mount Calvary, Schmitz was firmly rooted in the Catholicism that ran through what is known as the Holyland in northeastern Fond du Lac County.

But after almost a decade serving as a priest, including five years at St. Mary’s Church in Fond du Lac, he said he had enough and could no longer stand in front of a congregation and preach something he did not believe.

“I knew then there were pedophiles, priests who were being shuffled from one place to another,” said Schmitz, who has authored a book “A Funny Thing Happened on My Way Out of Church.”

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VATICAN CITY
Minnesota Public Radio

July 6, 2013

By FRANCES D’EMILIO, Associated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis called for structural renewal in the Catholic church to keep up with the times, although advising future priests and nuns Saturday to shun costly trappings like the latest smartphones so they can use more resources to help the poor.

Francis has been waging a campaign to root out corruption and power plays in the Vatican’s bureaucracy and to keep sight of what is essential in the church he was elected in March to lead.

The Argentine-born pontiff offered the encouragement for renewal in a homily during Mass Saturday at the Vatican City hotel where he lives. Francis told Catholics “not to be afraid of renewing some structures” to accord with “the places, the times” and the people, but he didn’t specify what needed to be changed.

He said, “In Christian life, even in the life of the church, there are ancient structures, transient structures: It is necessary to renew them!”

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Towleroad

Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, a Catholic Cardinal from the Dominican Republic, is facing a great deal of controversy as of late. Cardinal de Jesus has recently come under fire for using a gay slur, “maricón” (which is generally translated to mean “faggot”), to refer to James “Wally” Brewster, Barack Obama’s gay nominee for U.S. ambassador to the Caribbean nation.

Now, the Cardinal could potentially be facing even greater trouble, thanks to accusations of pedophilia taking place in his diocese, as well as evidence of a potential cover up.

Dominican Today has reported that the “Santiago Office of the Prosecutor on Wednesday announced it awaits the Immigration Agency to specify whether Catholic priest native of Poland, Wojciech (Alberto) Gil, accused of pedophilia by several families, left the country with another identity.” Gil managed to flee the country after the accusations began to draw attention to the small village of Janico. Two minors from the village have also left the country, although it has not yet been determined whether they did so in the company of the priest.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
The New York Times

By FRANK BRUNI
Published: July 6, 2013

BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping, searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.

But the words I keep marveling at aren’t from that wretched trove. They’re from an open letter that Jerome Listecki, the archbishop of Milwaukee, wrote to Catholics just before the documents came out.

“Prepare to be shocked,” he said.

What a quaint warning, and what a clueless one.

Quaint because at this grim point in 2013, a quarter-century since child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church first captured serious public attention, few if any Catholics are still surprised by a priest’s predations.

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AUSTRALIA
Border Mail

By Catherine Armitage July 7, 2013

The bishop showed the policeman into his bedroom. It could hardly have been a more genteel setting, a Catholic retirement facility at Lake Macquarie on the NSW central coast. He was cordial and welcoming. He’d laid out church documents on his bed in preparation.

But then the bishop duped the policeman. Ultimately, a paedophile priest got away, according to evidence at the NSW government’s special commission of inquiry into alleged cover-ups of child sexual abuse by two priests in the Hunter region.

The evidence before the inquiry is that senior church figures knew of recurring sex abuse allegations against paedophile priest FatherDenis McAlinden from 1954 but dealt with them by moving him around Australia and removing him from the priesthood instead of going to the police.

Senior clergy identified in church correspondence and witness statements tendered to the inquiry include bishops John Toohey, Leo Clarke and Michael Malone of the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese and Father Brian Lucas, now general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. Clarke involved the pope’s ambassador to Australia, Archbishop Franco Brambilla.

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VATICAN CITY
Time

By Alessandro Speciale / Rome @TIMEWorldJuly 05, 2013

On Friday, Pope Francis fast-tracked approval for the sainthood of two recent pontiffs: Pope John Paul II, who presided over the Church at the end of the Cold War, and Pope John XXIII, who held the liberalizing Second Vatican Council half a century ago. To do so, Pope Francis undercut the Vatican’s traditional bureaucracy and its complex protocols regarding the proof of miracles required to canonize saints. For the Argentine cleric, who assumed the papacy’s top role earlier this year, the move is just the latest sign of his reformist impulses.

Far removed from the realms of saints and miracles, Pope Francis, it seems, has sought to shake up some of the Vatican’s more earthly institutions. The past two weeks have been filled with drama for the Vatican Bank, a tiny organization operating from within the Vatican walls that has been time and again a source of scandal and embarrassment for the Catholic Church. The latest intrigue began with the arrest on June 28 by Italian police of a senior monsignor, Nunzio Scarano, for allegedly planning to smuggle €20 million to Italy in a private jet. Pope Francis then ordered an unprecedented review of the bank by an independent commission. On July 1, came the surprise resignation of the bank’s two top managers. Director General Paolo Cipriani and his deputy, Massimo Tulli, who have led the bank for almost a decade, “have decided that this decision would be in the best interest of the Institute and the Holy See,” said a Vatican statement.

While the Vatican presented their resignation as voluntary, Pope Francis’ move to create a review commission, handpicked by him, with full powers to request documents and question people on the activities of the bank, was clearly seen as a vote of no confidence towards the bank’s management. That is a major step toward establishing better financial transparency for the bank, which is formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) and has long been criticized for its secrecy and lack of accountability. Vatican authorities “have come a long way in a very short period of time” according to Moneyval, a European financial watchdog based in Strasbourg, France. “Catholics around the world have felt Pope Francis’s warmth,” said a Vatican source, referring the simple, heartfelt style of the Argentine pontiff. “But also in the Vatican someone is starting to feel the heat.”

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VATICAN CITY
ABC News

[with video]

By Hans-Jürgen Schlamp in Rome, SPIEGEL
July 6, 2013

It appears Pope Francis truly wants to change the Catholic Church. He’s reforming the Vatican Bank first, but he’s also circumventing the old guard wherever he can. The establishment is up in arms.

A cardinal in Rome earns about ?3,000 [euros] ($3,888) a month, even less than a pastor in Germany. But a cardinal’s life in Rome is a lot more expensive — with visits to restaurants and shopping at boutiques for the upscale clothing men of the church are expected to wear, not to mention their jewelry and the antiques they display in their apartments. So it’s good to have friends who can treat you or otherwise provide support now and then.

Friends are also happy to give a cardinal a hand — and not just out of religious considerations. A cardinal can be helpful in both political and business terms. So it’s not surprising that a symbiotic relationship between parts of the Curia and the upper class around the world has formed — one that brings together the establishment, luxury and power. It’s a nice little tradition that new Pope Francis would like to put an end to. For the Catholic establishment, though, it is nothing less than a catastrophe.

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VATICAN CITY
Calgary Herald

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS JULY 6, 2013

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis says the Catholic church needs to renew structures to accord with “the places, the times.”

Francis has been waging a campaign to root out corruption and power plays in the Vatican’s bureaucracy and to keep sight of what is essential in the church he was elected in March to lead.

The Argentine-born pontiff offered the encouragement for renewal in a homily during Mass Saturday at the Vatican City hotel where he lives. Francis told Catholics “not to be afraid of renewing some structures” to accord with “the places, the times” and the people, but he didn’t specify what needed to be changed.

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VATICAN CITY
Times LIVE (South Africa)

AFP

Pope Francis on Saturday said Catholics should not be afraid of renewing “old and flimsy structures” in the Church, as he plans a major overhaul of the scandal-ridden Vatican bureaucracy and bank.

“In Christian life and in Church life too there are old and flimsy structures. We need to renew them,” the pope said in his homily at a private mass for Swiss Guards, Vatican radio reported on its website.

“We should not be afraid of allowing the flimsy structures that imprison us to fall down,” he said.

“The Church has always allowed itself to be renewed… That is how the Church has developed, leaving it to the Holy Spirit to renew these structures. We should not be afraid of this,” the pope was quoted as saying.

Francis, a moderate conservative elected by a conclave of cardinals in March, has launched an investigation into the Vatican bank and has ordered a group of top cardinals to propose ways of reforming the Vatican administration at a meeting planned for October.

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ROME
Chicago Tribune

Reuters
July 6, 2013

ROME (Reuters) – Italian prosecutors have dropped inquiries into the Vatican bank’s former president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi after concluding a money laundering investigation, judicial sources told Reuters.

Prosecutors accuse the bank’s director general, Paolo Cipriani, and its deputy director Massimo Tulli, who both resigned this week, of “authorizing illegal financial transactions”, said the sources, who asked not to be named.

The Vatican bank was not immediately available for comment on Saturday and in the past a spokesman has declined to comment. Reuters was unable to reach the two men accused in the probe.

A judge will now decide whether to proceed to a trial of Cipriani and Tulli.

The two directors left the bank on Monday after the arrest of a senior cleric who is accused of plotting to smuggle millions of euros into Italy from Switzerland.

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VATICAN CITY
Financial Express

Italian investigators have said that the Vatican bank operated in a way that facilitated money laundering, according to leaked papers quoted by two Italian newspapers today following a three-year inquiry.

The bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR in Italian), did not carry out enough checks on its clients and account holders were allowed to transfer large sums on behalf of others.

“There is a high risk that the way the IOR operates, without specifying its real clients, can be used as a screen to hide illegal operations,” prosecutors wrote in a document that was quoted by Corriere della Sera.

They also faulted Italian banks that accepted transfers from the IOR for failing to probe the origin of the money, which is then moved into other banks.

“The IOR can easily become a channel for the laundering of money with a criminal origin, they said.

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CHICAGO (IL)
CBS Chicago

[with video]

CHICAGO (CBS) — The Vatican on Friday cleared the late Pope John Paul II for sainthood.

The news was greeted with joy among the Chicago Polish community, who also recalled with fondness the historic trip John Paul took to Chicago more than 30 years ago.

However, the news is not without some controversy, as CBS 2′s Chris Martinez reports.

The Survivors Network Of Those Abused By Priests said John Paul did nothing to stop the abuse crimes at the hands of priests in Chicago and across the United States.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

By Kaitlynn Riely / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

One was pope for only a handful of years, 1958 to 1963, but he opened a council whose effects have lasted much longer. The other led the Roman Catholic Church for nearly three decades, 1978 to 2005, defining the role of pope for a generation.

Popes John XXIII and John Paul II lived in different times and faced different challenges, said Pittsburgh Bishop David A. Zubik, but they shared something.

“They had a charisma that made them the right person at the right time,” he said.

Now, they’ll share something else: At the same time Friday, both men were cleared for sainthood.
The current Pope Francis announced that John Paul II and John XXIII would be canonized. No date has been set for the official ceremonies, but they are expected to occur by the end of the year. …

However, not everyone greeted the news positively.

Barbara Blaine, founder of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, called the canonization “rubbing salt into the wounds” of those affected by the clerical sex-abuse scandal.

“We believe that’s one more sign that church officials are doing one thing and saying the other,” Ms. Blaine said.

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AUSTRALIA
lewisblayse.net

Lewis Blayse

The first week of the second session of the NSW government enquiry into clerical child sexual abuse in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese heard further evidence from Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox, more local police officials and the current Bishop of Newcastle-Maitland, Bill Wright. Bishop Bill Wright tried to right the wrongs with, what the media described as an “emotional” apology to victims.

It saw an example or two of apparently-skewed reporting in that minor errors by Mr. Fox were prominently reported by some corporate media outlets, while other, more serious, errors were not well-covered. The chief example was that Inspector Fay Dunn contradicted testimony by Chief Inspector Wayne Humphrey that she had authorized a search of Detective Chief Inspector Fox’s office while he was on leave.

Further, Mr. Humphrey withdrew part of his sworn affidavit in which he had accused Mr. Fox of refusing repeated requests to hand over evidence. He said the statements were “unfair to Mr Fox,” and apologized for making “an error on my part.” The original allegation received wide coverage, while the retraction did not.

In 2009, Bishop Malone released some documents to a victim, which were passed on to local journalist, Joanne McCarthy, and then on to police. The documents have been released to the public by the enquiry. They clearly demonstrate cover-ups for two serial offenders, Fr. Fletcher and Fr. McAlinden (see previous postings).

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IRELAND
Journal

MAGDALENE SURVIVORS HAVE been provided with a guide to the redress scheme by a group that advocated for some of the women in their fight for compensation.

JFM (Justice for Magdalenes) Research, the survivor advocacy group, has published the Survivor Guide to Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme. It said that a number of survivors had expressed difficulty in filling out the application form for the compensation.

Entitlements
JFM Research said the guide aims to assist survivors in understanding their entitlements under the scheme developed by Mr Justice John Quirke and announced by the government on 26 June.

Mr Justice Quirke recommended in a report that the Magdalene survivors should all receive cash payments in the range €11,500 (if their duration of stay was three months or less) to €100,000 (duration of stay of 10 years or more).

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