ABUSE TRACKER

IRLAND
Focus

Entdeckt wurde das Massengrab von zwei Forscherinnen. Eine von ihnen, Catherine Corless, glaubt laut Sixsmith nicht, dass dies das einzige Massengrab in Irland ist: “Ich weiß, dass es in ganz Irland solche Gräber gibt. Und es gibt Menschen, die endlich Gewissheit haben wollen. Unbekannte, identitätslose Kinder wurden einfach abgelegt. Wir hoffen, dass wir ihnen zumindest hier in Tuam zu ein bisschen Gerechtigkeit verhelfen können.”

Warum die Frauen trotz der Gräueltaten in solche Kloster gingen, erklärte Corless im Gespräch mit der US-Zeitung “Washington Post” so: “Es war das schlimmste Verbrechen, das eine Frau begehen konnte. Selbst wenn sehr oft eine Vergewaltigung die Ursache war.” Die Frauen seien von ihren Familien verstoßen worden, die Mutter-Kind-Heime oft die einzige Zuflucht gewesen.

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IRLAND
Focus

Martin Sixsmith wurde bekannt durch sein Buch “Philomena”, das jüngst mit Judi Dench in der Hauptrolle verfilmt wurde. Nun berichtet Sixsmith von einer weiteren herzzerreißenden Geschichte: In einem irischen Mutter-Kind-Heim starben über Jahrzehnte Hunderte Kinder. Ihre Leichen endeten in einer Grube vor dem Gebäude – ein westeuropäisches Massengrab.

Dieses Erlebnis wird Martin Sixsmith für immer verfolgen: Der Autor des inzwischen verfilmten Dramas “Philomena” hat im irischen Tuam ein Massengrab besucht. 800 Kinder wurden dort zwischen 1920 und 1970 auf dem Grundstück eines Mutter-Kind-Heims verscharrt – von den dort lebenden Nonnen.

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IRLAND
Kronen Zeitung

Die Vergangenheit holt Irland ein: missbrauchte Kinder in Schulen und Heimen, ausgebeutete Frauen in Arbeitshäusern, und nun auch noch Massengräber voller Kinderknochen. Die Überreste von 796 Kindern und Säuglingen liegen im westirischen Ort Tuam. Die Spuren führen in ein katholisches Heim für ledige Mütter, das von 1925 bis 1961 von Nonnen betrieben wurde. Die Kinder sollen zwischen 1921 und 1965 gestorben sein.

In den irischen Heimen für unverheiratete Mütter lag die Kindersterberate “bei über 50 Prozent”, erklärt Susan Lohan von der Initiative “Adoption Rights Alliance”. Zu Tausenden wurden die kleinen Leichen anonym verscharrt. Der Fall, der derzeit Schlagzeilen macht, ist besonders grausam. Fast 800 Skelette liegen in einer Jauchegrube in Tuam, einem Örtchen im Westen des Landes.

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IRLAND
N-TV

Von Nora Schareika

Bis in die 1960er-Jahre leben irische Mütter mit unehelichen Kindern wie Aussätzige in kirchlichen Heimen. Die Kinder müssen für ihre pure Existenz büßen und erreichen kaum das Schulalter. Aktivisten rollen nun die Geschichte eines Baby-Massengrabs neu auf.

Neue Enthüllungen über die teils grausige Vergangenheit der Heime für unverheiratete Mütter in Irland setzen die Regierung in Dublin unter Druck. Besonders die Geschichte eines abgelegenen Heims im Westen des Landes bewegt die Iren, nachdem lokale Medien mit Zeitzeugen gesprochen, Fotos und schockierende Details veröffentlicht haben.

In der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts hatten Familien ihre Töchter in solche Heime abgeschoben, weil diese unverheiratet schwanger geworden waren – im erzkatholischen Irland jener Zeit eine Schande.

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IRELAND
Irish Central

Cahir O’Doherty @randomirish June 08,2014

Reporting from Tuam, County Galway

“You would not talk to them,” the locals told me in Tuam near Galway City this weekend, “they were outcasts.”

They were speaking to IrishCentral about the mothers and babies secreted away to The Home, an 1840’s institution run by the Bon Secours sisters in the town from 1925 to 1961, but this week locals insisted that more and more people want to remember them now.

One of them is Paul Kanahan, 46. Yesterday he took the long drive to Tuam from his home in County Sligo to visit the site that in the last fortnight has become one of the most controversial in the world.

Inspired by news reports, Kanahan told IrishCentral he made the trip to the unmarked grave site to pay his respects to the Home Babies and reflect on his own experience as a Home Baby from another notorious mother and baby home called Castlepollard in County Westmeath.

An adoptee and now a father himself, Kanahan found his birth mother and sister in 2010 through a series of lucky breaks and with the health of a priest and a Facebook page for adoptees from the Castlepollard Mothers and Babies home.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

We need to know why the death rate among ‘illegitimate’ children was so high, writes Gene Kerrigan

How come hundreds of children died in the care of a Catholic Church institution in Tuam? And how come some – if not all – of them were disposed of like spoiled fruit? Dumped beside a septic tank. Why did it happen?

What do we know about this country that might explain how such a thing could happen?

And let’s leave aside the unbearable thought that there were more – many more – children, in other locations, who had similarly short lives and who were disposed of with similar lack of human dignity.

It didn’t just happen. It wasn’t just bad management. It took years of organisation, strategies of intimidation and control. And, let’s face it, it took a citizenry steeped in fear and reverence.

A population that was deferential. People who did what they were told. People who didn’t dare ask questions.

Not, of course, that dumping the bodies of almost 800 kids near a septic tank was the object of the exercise – that was just a byproduct. Just some human waste that had to be tucked away in a suitable place.

It was about sex and power. It was about the right of the Church to do whatever it thought necessary to preserve its domain. It stemmed from a hierarchy of old men who were obsessed with sex.

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IRELAND
Daily Mail (UK)

By ALISON O’REILLY
PUBLISHED: 7 June 2014

One woman who knows the truth of how nuns in Ireland of the late 1950s handled the children entrusted to their care is Mary Lawlor, who was adopted out by the nuns at Sean Ross Abbey, Co. Tipperary.

Letters she obtained from her adoptive parents detailing how she was given to them also sheds light on the nuns’ attitudes towards children of poorer single mothers.

The nuns cautioned the prospective parents not to pick a child of the ‘wrong class’, and to take a young child as ‘the better class girl has to leave here quickly so as not to be detected in her sorrow’.

In a letter dated July 26, 1961, sent to the adoptive parents of Mary Lawlor, the sister in charge of the Roscrea institution reads:

‘We had a wonderful reference from your priest and we think you should take a baby over six months… the baby will be brought up just as you would bring your own child up and a child of two years has been too long in an institution to fall easy into your ways. We have a very nice little girl Mary Margaret who is of good background and very intelligent,’ the nun wrote.

Speaking to the Irish Mail on Sunday, Mary Lawlor said the nuns also gave her adoptive parents a book detailing how to look after a baby.

‘They were picking and choosing babies, so the older ones – who would have needed a bit more
support – ended up being left there because the nuns were putting people off them.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

David Ellery
Reporter for The Canberra Times.

Daniel Hopkinson is 36 years old and still waiting for his life to start. The former Marist College Canberra student has never been able to finish a university degree, make a long-term relationship work or secure lasting employment.

“I am now unemployed, under-educated and still looking for a life path,” he wrote in a submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on May 23.

He had been prompted to tell his story for the first time in more than two decades by the news the commission was to hold a public hearing in Canberra starting on Tuesday, June 10.

While specific details of his allegations cannot be published as they have yet to be tested in a court of law, Mr Hopkinson names a brother, whose name has not come up in previous investigations and court actions, as an alleged sexual predator.

Mr Hopkinson says while he was never sexually abused himself, he did become aware other children were being molested, and that in his final year at the college in the mid-1990s, he confronted staff over that abuse.

“I was victimised by this individual [the alleged sexual predator] for three years [from year 4] and when I progressed into the senior school, the victimisation continued through different brothers.”

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IRELAND
Sunday Independent

Ralph Riegel
Published 08/06/2014

THEY were made to scrub the hard, cold floors on their knees with a toothbrush, and to cut the huge lawns with only a scissors.

Mothers at the Bessborough mother-and-baby home in Co Cork, privately referred to as “a secret penitential jail”, were refused all social contact with the outside world, and not allowed to even speak with each other.

Former inmates believe up to 3,000 children are buried in unmarked graves at the country’s largest mother and baby home.

John Barrett, who was born at Bessborough on July 17, 1952, told the Sunday Independent: “If there are 800 babies buried in a single plot in Tuam, I can guarantee you that there are thousands buried at Bessborough. I would estimate from my information that there are probably between 2,000 and 3,000 children buried there.”

The infant mortality rate at Bessborough in the late Forties was 55 per cent – meaning burials would have been taking place on a weekly basis.

The young women were routinely forbidden from attending the funerals of their babies and, in one case, a woman who lost her baby received nothing more than a pair of his shoes as she was sent home.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

But in Ireland we have never pursued the people responsible for horrors such as the little bodies in the cesspit.

Emer O’Kelly
Published 08/06/2014

Seventy years ago, on the orders of a maniac, little children and babies were herded into barren camps in Germany and occupied Poland by men in black uniforms. They were starved to death in those camps; sometimes they had hideous medical experiments carried out upon them while alive, so hideous the silence of death was probably merciful. And when they died, their little bodies were thrown into huge pits. Because they were scum: Jewish scum.

And since then we have called what was done in those camps the greatest collective evil ever carried out by humankind.

Twenty years ago, the opposing tribes who comprised the population of a country called Rwanda festered in such hatred for each other that one tribe took to the ritual slaughter of the other in an attempt to wipe its existence from the face of the earth. And often the mass of slaughtered bodies, including those of little children, and comprising 20 per cent of the country’s population, was so great that they were flung unceremoniously into great pits. Because they were scum: tribally inferior scum.

A year later, a town was wiped off the face of the earth in a place called Srebrenica in what had until recently been Yugoslavia, the flower of its youth, the young men and boys, marched into woodland where they were ritually slaughtered, and their bodies thrown into huge pits. Because they were scum: Muslim scum.

And the men who gave the orders and supervised the slaughter went on the run. But the world pursued them, and charged them with crimes against humanity.

And in Ireland, where there is still a widespread smugness about our decency and our devotion to the Faith of our Fathers, the Virgin Mother of God, and the efficacy of the Holy Rosary, a pit has been found filled with the skeletons of tiny babies and small children, 800 of them, dumped in the pit which some prefer to call a “mass grave” but is actually a septic tank.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

Jun 08, 2014 By Adelina Campos

Shocking claim after woman’s 35-year search to find her infant cousin’s burial place

Every household in Ireland could be rocked by the forgotten babies inquiry, a mum-of-two warned last night.

Mary Frances Joyce, who has been trying to find the grave of her infant cousin for more than three decades, said: “Ireland needs to get its head out of the sand because tens of thousands of women were sent to mother-and-baby institutions and had children there.

“I don’t think there is a family in this country that hasn’t got a dark secret hanging over them somewhere.”

Mary’s cousin was born at Castlepollard, Co Westmeath, one of the largest mother-and-baby homes in the country on October 4, 1950.

She died just over two months later but there is no burial record for her.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Published 07/06/2014

Gerard O’Regan

There was a time in rural Ireland when the amount of money donated by individuals and families to various Catholic Church collections was read out from the altar by the local priest at Sunday Mass.

As the priest intoned his way through the names, listing whether they gave five shillings, 10 shillings, one pound, or even the odd five pounds, it was a public affirmation of where people were placed in the social hierarchy. Those financially better off were obviously near the top of the contributions list, those doing not too badly in the middle, and the really hard done by somewhere near the bottom.

So when it came to monies for Christmas or Easter Dues, or whatever the awesome power of unquestioned Irish Catholicism expected at the time, everybody knew and accepted their place. This was determined by their economic circumstances. And it would be unmarried mothers from the five shillings – or less – contributions figure, who would most likely end up in places like the converted Famine workhouse run by the nuns in Tuam, now at the centre of international controversy.

Those who want to get their heads round the fact that the bodies of nearly 800 babies and young children were seemingly disposed of in such shocking circumstances need to transport themselves back to the Ireland we had from the 1920s to the 1960s. It is absolutely pointless, when trying to understand the motives of the nuns involved, applying the norms of this more affluent, mainly secular, better informed age, to the psychological rigidity of Ireland back then.

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CALIFORNIA
CBS SF Bay Area

DAVIS (CBS/AP) — A Roman Catholic priest has been charged with three felonies for allegedly engaging in a sexual relationship with a teenage girl he met while working at a Davis church.

Yolo County prosecutors released a criminal complaint on Friday that charges the Rev. Hector Coria Gonzales with three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse.

According to the complaint, the charges stem from encounters between the 46-year-old Coria and a 17-year-old girl that took place at a home, in a vehicle and at the church rectory over eight months.

Coria has been a staff pastor at St. James Parish in Davis for almost two years. After his arrest in May, Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento put him on leave.

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UNITED STATES
New Oxford Review

By Jay Dunlap

Jay Dunlap served as communications director in North America for the Legion of Christ and its lay affiliate, Regnum Christi, from 1998 to 2006 and as a communications consultant from 2006 to 2010. He is currently President of Madonna School & Workshop, the Archdiocese of Omaha’s outreach to children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

This April Popes John XXIII and John Paul II were canonized together. This moment of great rejoicing in the Church arose under a shadow, due in large part to two high-profile television documentaries that detail how the Church responded — or failed to respond — to the criminal actions of Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ. A PBS Frontline investigation titled Secrets of the Vatican, and a documentary on Irish television titled The Legion, both dwell on the fact that three Popes — John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II — failed to take action when informed of Fr. Maciel’s sexual abuse, drug addiction, and misuse of funds.

There is a good explanation for why these three Popes did not move against Maciel. The explanation does not excuse inaction, nor does it abrogate responsibility at various levels of the Vatican for having enabled Maciel’s corruption and deception. But such an explanation answers the question raised about these three Popes: Why didn’t they act?

I served as communications director for the Legion of Christ in North America from 1998 to 2006. My responsibilities included media relations and helping the Legion in crisis management. Published reports of allegations against Fr. Maciel kept me and my colleagues busy for long stretches of time. And a central part of the Legion’s response, I am convinced, explains why the three Popes ignored the allegations: “The charges had already been thoroughly examined and found baseless.” Or so we were led to believe, and so we told others.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Nick Webb
Published 08/06/2014

Former AIB chairman Peter Sutherland flew to a crisis meeting in the Vatican last July as Pope Francis, left, sought to deal with the financial scandals that have hit the Catholic Church.

Sutherland addressed the Council of Cardinals, the most senior advisers to the Papacy, in a room close to Doma Santa Marta, the Pope’s residence.

Sutherland, an unpaid financial adviser to the Vatican, is understood to have pressed for the church to change its ways. ‘Transparency is important and necessary’ is said to have been the theme of his briefing. Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs international, was appointed as an adviser to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, an asset manager for the Vatican.

Pope Francis has ordered a major reform of the Vatican’s banking and financial systems after a series of scandals have emerged in recent months.

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TEXAS/ARIZONA
El Diario

[Summary: A priest who belonged to the El Paso diocese until 2002 remains suspended from his job after being accused to sexually abusing an adult with mental disabilities in Tucson, Ariz. Cleric Richard Zamorano allegedly began a friendship with the claimant, who is classified as a vulnerable adult with mental disabilities, and the person has now filed a civil complaint against the church. According to the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, the lawsuit also alleges that the Tucson and El Paso dioceses were aware of the risk posed by the priest.]

Perla Chaparro
El Diario de El Paso

Un sacerdote que perteneció a la Diócesis de El Paso hasta 2002, continúa suspendido de sus funciones luego de que se le acusara de presunto abuso sexual a un adulto con discapacidad mental en Tucson, Arizona.

El clérigo Richard Zamorano inició presuntamente una amistad con el reclamante, quien es calificado como un adulto vulnerable con discapacidad mental, y está presentando ahora una queja civil en contra del eclesiástico.

Se dice que el sacerdote, quien fue investigado y el caso fue cerrado–, pasó por el demandante a su casa, y presuntamente Zamorano compró alcohol para sí mismo y para el demandante, luego lo llevó a un hotel en el Condado de Pima y abusó sexualmente de él, según el portal de Courthouse News Services y en base a la queja.

De acuerdo a la Red de Sobrevivientes Abusados por Sacerdotes (SNAP), la demanda también alega que la Diócesis de Tucson y de El Paso eran conscientes del riesgo que planteaba el sacerdote y fallaron en no advertir sobre él.

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CANADA
Cape Breton post

Dolores Campbell
Published on June 06, 2014

Will the repentance service on Sunday in Port Hawkesbury signify case closed to the abuse scandal as it applies to the Diocese of Antigonish?

It was to be a reconciliation service when it all began quite a few months ago, but those attending any of the seven meetings held to prepare for such a service heard quite a bit of anger expressed by parishioners as to how the scandal had impacted on their lives.

Some thought any such service would merely keep open the wound the abuse scandal had inflicted on the world, and especially on our diocese. For them, it was time to move on. And, in fact, many were trying to do just that in their home parishes.

At the time, many were upset at new security requirements for anyone working with children in their parishes, despite some having been involved in those ministries for years. In fact, anyone wishing to donate their time and energy to assisting in any way in their various parishes faced security checks.

Church closures were blamed on the fact that money was confiscated and used for abuse compensation; leaving a shortfall for churches needing maintain their buildings and programs. The fact that church closures have been on the books for more than 30 years cut no ice with those faced with the loss of their worship space.

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times

KURT STREETER

The four men were dressed in white and cream-colored robes. They knelt on the stone floor, ending up face down in a supplicating sign of obedience and respect. In front of thousands of onlookers, they were about to become Catholic priests.

“Lord have mercy,” the crowd chanted, slowly. “Christ have mercy…. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us….”

It was a ritualized, peak moment during Saturday’s ordination — an annual event held at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in which seminarians become full-fledged priests, prepared after years of study to serve parishes throughout the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. …

Even as the number of parishioners climbs, the Roman Catholic church has long struggled with a shortage of priests in the U.S., a falloff that hasn’t been helped by sex abuse scandals that have rocked the church in recent years. (Cardinal Roger Mahony, whom some blame for failing to aggressively root out abuse during his tenure as L.A.’s archbishop, was on hand at Saturday’s ceremony.) There are currently about 40,000 priests nationwide, according to statistics from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. In 1965, there were about 60,000.

The shortage isn’t felt as acutely in Los Angeles, said Father Sam Ward, the diocese’s associate director of vocations, partly because the region attracts clerics from outside areas. Still, the diocese is pushing to boost the number ordained locally each year.

Heartened by the number of men who’ve recently entered the diocese’s St. John’s Seminary — enrollment hit 92 in the fall of 2013, up from 71 in 2008, an uptick ascribed in part to the popularity of Pope Francis — officials say they expect to soon be ordaining groups of 10 to 12 priests, and possibly more, each year.

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

Article by: TONY KENNEDY , Star Tribune Updated: June 7, 2014

The Rev. Timothy McCarthy was the “kids’ pastor” who wore sneakers under his vestments and dropped profanities into his sermons. Girls had crushes on him, and parents let their children go camping with him.

When McCarthy abruptly resigned the priesthood in 1991, he told his flock at the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer in Maplewood that he had outgrown Catholic Church dogma. He was quitting, he said, to go down a new spiritual path.

But newly released files reveal that the church ousted McCarthy after allegations that he sexually abused two boys early in his career and later engaged in an exploitative sexual relationship with a college student. Despite those concerns, the church helped McCarthy gain credentials that allowed him to work closely with teenagers and young adults. He later lost his job as a Hennepin County correctional officer after being accused of criminal sexual conduct with a 17-year-old.

McCarthy’s previously hidden history is laid out in documents that the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis divulged under an order from a Ramsey County district judge in a clergy sexual abuse lawsuit brought by St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson. The court order has triggered the release of more than 70,000 pages of classified memos about more than 45 accused priests — and could bring more litigation under a change in Minnesota law that allows people to bring claims of long-ago abuse.

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CALIFORNIA
Daily Democrat

By The Associated Press and Democrat staff
CREATED: 06/07/2014 0

A Roman Catholic priest has been charged with three felonies for allegedly engaging in a sexual relationship with a teenage girl he met while working at a Davis church.

The Sacramento Bee reports that Yolo County prosecutors released a criminal complaint on Friday that charges the Rev. Hector Coria Gonzales with three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse.

According to the complaint, the charges stem from encounters between the 46-year-old Gonzales and a 17-year-old girl that took place at a home, in a vehicle and at the church rectory over eight months.

Gonzales has been a staff pastor at St. James Parish in Davis for almost two years. After his arrest in May, Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento put him on leave. According to a Facebook page of St. Thomas Catholic Church in Paradise, he was ordained in January 2011.

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AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury

By GEMMA KHAICY June 8, 2014

n the wake of sex abuse scandals enveloping the Catholic Church and an ageing population of priests, Stephen Varney stepped into a seminary at age 26. Nearly six years later he couldn’t be happier. He speaks to GEMMA KHAICY about his decision to be a priest.

Stephen Varney doesn’t have sex.

He has made a vow of celibacy because, he says, his life is filled with a passion greater than his carnal cravings.

His deep love of God and commitment to his faith provides him with satisfaction no woman can fulfil.

Ironically, he says, this sacrifice allows him to connect with others on a deeper level as he enters the priesthood. …

Italian women in love with priests sent a letter to Pope Francis last month asking him to make celibacy optional, while other proponents of overturning this rule have linked it to the sexual abuse of children.

The church, however, has rejected this argument, saying paedophilia is the result of psychological problems.

“I think it’s a bit rude to imply that someone who is living a celibate life, whether voluntary or involuntary, is somehow a potential child abuser,” Stephen says.

“It seems strange in my mind to think if you were going to disregard your vow of celibacy, why that would suddenly be towards children.

“It’s completely abnormal.”

As a priest-to-be, he says sex abuse scandals and cover ups in the church have been demoralising at times.

“I am disgusted by it and you might even lose faith in what you’re doing, but that would give even more power to those who have done wrong,” he says.

“I think the Royal Commission needs to happen and I am willing to be that champion of faithful priesthood and helping the victims who have been abused by priests or people in other institutions.”

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CANADA
Winnipeg Free Press

By: The Canadian Press

PORT HAWKESBURY, N.S. – The Roman Catholic Diocese of Antigonish, N.S., says it will hold a special service to acknowledge the pain of victims of sexual abuse.

Father Donald MacGillivray says he hopes the victims of the abuse by members of the clergy will attend the service, which is being held at 3 p.m. Sunday at St. Joseph’s Church in Port Hawkesbury.

MacGillivray says the service was agreed upon as part of a class-action lawsuit against several priests dating back more than 50 years.

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IRELAND
The Sunday Times (UK)

Justine McCarthy Published: 8 June 2014

THE historian who discovered that 796 children may be buried in a mass grave in the west of Ireland believes three mothers are also interred there with their babies.

Catherine Corless has established that nine women were buried in the grave in the grounds of the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway. She has identified three of them by matching the home addresses on their death certificates with the addresses of those of the children. She has so far been unable to identify the other six women.

Corless is adamant that the Tuam crypt, which she says was originally a septic tank, contains scores of bodies.

Barry Sweeney, who accidentally found the grave in 1975 when he was playing there with a friend, Francis Hopkins, said he had been left with the impression that there were “about 20 bodies” of boys aged 10 to 12.

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IRELAND
culchieworks

The tides are finally turning…

Twenty years I’ve been at this, promoting and advocating for the rights of adopted people in and from Ireland (and in the US). We’ve talked, cajoled, written, and held countless meetings with successive governments in that period. A small but fearless band of us connected in the early days of the Internet, spanning the Atlantic. It was the first time I’d ever spoken with people adopted in and from Ireland in my life. We eventually began a Yahoo! group, which even today continues to receive members and posts. Some of us who had been ‘banished’ to the US, particularly in the Northeast, formed a small group (Adopted Citizens of Eire).

The topics have certainly been well-covered, even internationally. In 1989, activist and survivor Paddy Doyle led the charge with his excellent The God Squad. In 1997, former RTÉ journalist Mike Milotte researched and published his results on the trafficking of children from Ireland to the US in his seminal Banished Babies (updated in 2012). Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan had written Suffer the Little Children on the heels of Raftery’s award-winning three-part series States of Fear on RTÉ in 1999. Stephen Humphries produced an excellent documentary on the Magdalene Laundries, Sex in a Cold Climate, in 1997 and it eventually became the basis for Peter Mullan’s award-winning feature film The Magdalene Sisters in 2002. BBC also released the documentary Sinners in 2002. The latest, and perhaps most widely-seen chronicle of Irish adoption, is the award-winning film Philomena. The film was inspired by Martin Sixsmith’s 2009 book, The Lost Son of Philomena Lee. And our heroine, the real-life Philomena Lee, has been playing a blinder as one of the most eloquent, gracious and courageous spokeswomen for Irish mothers of loss. Thanks to her good work, Adoption Rights Alliance has now partnered with The Philomena Project, and it set the cogs in motion toward the most recent explosion and revelation in Tuam.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Documents offer glimpse of correspondence

Cases that may be used as evidence

By Lilly Fowler • lfowler@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8221 AND Robert Patrick • rpatrick@post-dispatch.com 314-621-51541

When the Rev. Joseph D. Ross was assigned to minister at St. Cronan Church, the other priest there already knew his secret.

He heard the pastor coming to help him in 1991 had just returned from the St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md., a mental health treatment center for Catholic clergy, according to court filings.

The priest recognized that in all likelihood this was code for Ross having just undergone therapy for a sexual attraction to children. Although the priest worried about the well-being of the parishioners, according to court filings, the Archdiocese of St. Louis assured him that Ross was fit to return to ministry.

Twenty years later, a young woman who attended St. Cronan between 1997 and 2001 would claim she was abused by Ross when she was only 5 or 6 years old, filing a civil lawsuit against the priest and the archdiocese. The alleged victim and perpetrator are set to finally have their day in court when a trial begins next month at the Carnahan Courthouse in downtown St. Louis. …

JOSEPH D. ROSS: A TIMELINE

In a lawsuit, a woman claims the Rev. Joseph D. Ross abused her when she was a child attending St. Cronan Church. The suit also claims the Archdiocese of St. Louis failed to take steps to protect children.

1969 • Ross is ordained.
1969-1974 • Ross is assigned to Immacolata Catholic Church in Richmond Heights.
1972 • Ross is arrested after being caught by police masturbating with two other men in a store bathroom. The charges are later dismissed.
1974-76 • Ross is assigned to St. William in Woodson Terrace.
1975-77 • According to a 2002 lawsuit, Ross is accused of sexually abusing a young boy at St. William.
1978-82 • Assigned to St. Bridget of Kildare in Pacific.
1982-86 • Assigned to St. Francis De Sales in St. Louis.
1986-88 • Assigned to Christ the King in University City.
1986 • Ross is charged with grabbing and kissing an 11-year-old boy multiple times during confession at Christ the King. He pleads guilty in 1988 to sexually assaulting the boy and is sentenced to two years probation.
1988 • Sent to treatment center in Washington D.C. area.
1989 -1991 • Assigned to Corpus Christi Parish in Jennings.
1991 • Assigned to St. Cronan Church in St. Louis.
1997-01 • According to the current lawsuit, Ross is accused of molesting and raping a young girl. Criminal charges are filed in the case in 2008, but are dropped in 2010.
2002 • The Vatican announces Ross’ laicization. Ross then moves to Arkansas.
Source: Post-Dispatch archives and BishopAccountability.org

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Caroline Crawford and Tom Brady

GARDAI are preparing an initial dossier for Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald on reports of an unmarked grave at a former Catholic Church-run home where almost 800 children died.

But it is not clear when they will be in a position to determine if a criminal investigation is warranted.

Two local senior officers, Chief Supt Tom Curley and Supt Patrick McHugh, visited the site in Tuam, Co Galway, yesterday along with 51-year-old Frannie Hopkins, who found what he believed to have been a mass grave there when he was 12 years old.

Separately yesterday, President Michael D Higgins said he was “appalled” at the terrible reports that have been appearing, in particular in relation to the high death rates in Tuam.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Ralph Riegel
Published 07/06/2014

A MAN born in one of the most notorious mother-and-baby homes has called for a major audit of its cemetery to establish whether it too hides a mass grave.

John Barrett said: “I have been saying for years that we need answers about what exactly happened at places like Bessborough.

“There were always rumours about burials and the (Bessborough) graveyard. There could well be thousands of babies buried there. This was the largest mothers-and-baby home in Ireland so who knows?

“I think we now need to find out whether these were just rumours, or whether just like Tuam in Galway, there was some- thing tragic going on.”

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

NCR Staff Catholic News Service | Jun. 7, 2014

WASHINGTON The U.S. bishops are scheduled to meet in New Orleans June 11-13. On their agenda is a discussion of today’s economy and its impact on marriages and evangelization. They are also to review their efforts in preventing sexual abuse of children, strengthening marriage, helping typhoon victims and preparing for upcoming church-sponsored events on family life.

The bishops are to hear presentations on “Marriage and the Economy” and “the New Evangelization and Poverty” on the second day of their gathering before they close for executive sessions.

The first day is to be filled with reports on upcoming events, including presentations on the Oct. 5-19 extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the family and on the World Meeting of Families, set for Sept. 22-27, 2015, in Philadelphia. …

Other items on the agenda for the meeting include:

* The annual progress report of the bishops’ efforts to protect children and young people from sexual abuse, presented by Francesco Cesareo, chairman of the National Review Board;

* Debate and vote on the renewal of the bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, formed in 2011, for an additional three-year term;

*An update on the work of the bishops’ Subcommittee on the Catechism and their Subcommittee on the Promotion and Defense of Marriage;

* Debate and vote on the request for renewal of the “recognitio,” or Vatican approval, for the national directory for the formation, ministry and life of permanent deacons.

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IRELAND
Daily Mail (UK)

Thousands of children in Irish care homes at centre of ‘baby graves scandal’ were used in secret vaccine trials in the 1930s

By HARRIET ARKELL and NEIL MICHAEL

Scientists secretly vaccinated more than 2,000 children in religious-run homes in suspected illegal drug trials, it emerged today.

Old medical records show that 2,051 children and babies in Irish care homes were given a one-shot diphtheria vaccine for international drugs giant Burroughs Wellcome between 1930 and 1936.

There is no evidence that consent was ever sought, nor any records of how many may have died or suffered debilitating side-effects as a result.

The scandal was revealed as Irish premier, Enda Kenny, ordered ministers to see whether there are more mass baby graves after the discovery that 800 infants may be buried in a septic tank outside a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Co. Galway.

The Taioseach intervened from the United States yesterday to say that he had ordered his officials to ‘see what the scale is, what’s involved here, and whether this is isolated or if there are others around the country that need to be looked at.’

Michael Dwyer, of Cork University’s School of History, found the child vaccination data by trawling through tens of thousands of medical journal articles and archive files.

He discovered that the trials were carried out before the vaccine was made available for commercial use in the UK.

Homes where children were secretly tested included Bessborough, in Co. Cork and Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, both of which are at the centre of the mass baby graves scandal.

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IRELAND
Irish Central

Patrick Counihan @irishcentral June 07,2014

More than 2000 Irish children in religious run homes were subjected to drugs trials in the 1930s according to a shocking new report.

As the Tuam burial ground scandal erupts, it has now emerged that Catholic Church run homes and state institutions let the children of unmarried mothers be used in medical experiments.

The Irish Daily Mail has published a damning report which outlines how scientists secretly vaccinated more than 2,000 children in religious-run homes in suspected illegal drug trials.

The paper says that old medical records show that 2,051 children and babies in Irish care homes were given a one-shot diphtheria vaccine for international drugs giant Burroughs Wellcome between 1930 and 1936.

The report adds that no evidence exists that consent was ever sought.

Historian Michael Dwyer who unearthed the documentations says that no records of how many may have died or suffered debilitating side-effects as a result are in existence.

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IRELAND
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tuam

Archbishop Neary welcomes the announcement today of the Minister to establish a Cross-Departmental Examination for the burial arrangements of Children in Mother and Baby Homes.

I was greatly shocked, as we all were, to learn of the extent of the numbers of children buried in the grave-yard in Tuam. I was made aware of the magnitude of this situation by media reporting and historical research. I am horrified and saddened to hear of the large number of deceased children involved and this points to a time of great suffering and pain for the little ones and their mothers.

I can only begin to imagine the huge emotional wrench which the mothers suffered in giving up their babies for adoption or by witnessing their death. Many of these young vulnerable women would already have been rejected by their families. The pain and brokenness which they endured is beyond our capacity to understand. It is simply too difficult to comprehend their helplessness and suffering as they watched their beloved child die.

Regardless of the time lapse involved this is a matter of great public concern which ought to be acted upon urgently. As the diocese did not have any involvement in the running of the home in Tuam we do not have any material relating to it in our archives. I understand that the material which the Bon Secours Sisters held, as managers of the Mother and Baby Home was handed over to Galway County Council and the health authorities in 1961.

I welcome the announcement today by Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Mr. Charlie Flanagan, TD to establish a Cross-Departmental examination for the burial arrangements of Children in Mother and Baby Homes. This will have the legal authority to examine the situation and to determine the truth. While the Archdiocese of Tuam will cooperate fully nonetheless there exists a clear moral imperative on the Bon Secours Sisters in this case to act upon their responsibilities in the interests of the common good.

The Diocese will continue to work with the Sisters and the local community to provide a suitable commemorative prayer based memorial service and plaque and to ensure that the deceased and their families will never be forgotten.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Caroline Crawford
Published 07/06/2014

Bodies of nine women who died in the Tuam Mother and Baby home may also lie near the 796 infants buried in a septic tank on the grounds, according to locals.

The records obtained by local historian Catherine Corless – which show that close to 800 babies died at the Tuam Mother and Baby home – also reveal that nine women died over the same period.

However, she has been unable to ascertain where their graves are.

Local man Martin Ward, who is heavily involved in the committee to erect a plaque in memory of the dead, said he believes the women lie alongside the infants.

“We believe there’s nine women buried there as well,according to the records. They show nine women died and we presume that they are buried there,” he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

Jun 07, 2014 06:00 By Adelina Campos

President Higgins calls for State inquiry as detectives finally begin to investigate the horrific discovery

Gardai have launched an investigation into the mass baby grave scandal, it was revealed last night.

Detectives have questioned two men who found bones on the site in Tuam, Co Galway, in 1975.

They will now decide whether to launch a full criminal investigation into the dumping of the children’s bodies without proper burial or records.

The move came as President Michael D Higgins said he was “appalled” by the revelations and called for a Government inquiry.

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IRELAND
Newstalk

Eoin Brennan

Saturday 7 June 2014

The bodies of nine women who died at the Tuam mother and Baby home may also be in the septic tank believed to hold the bodies of 796 children.

Catherine Corless – the local historian who first discovered the death records of the children – show nine women also died at the home during the same period and their burial spots are currently unkown. At this point Corless can confirm that the women died at the home between the years of 1937 to 1961 but she has not been able to find graves for the women. Corless stresses that she cannot confirm the nine are buried with the children.

“When I was getting the names of the children who died in the home …they also gave me a list of nine adult women who died, and it stated on the certs that they died in the home in Tuam.

“Now, I can’t confirm that they were buried with the children. They died in the home during the years from 1937 to 1961, that’s all I can tell you. I have nine names and I have no idea where they are,” Corless told Newstalk.

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IRELAND
Herald

BY CAROLINE CRAWFORD – 07 JUNE 2014

DETECTIVES have visited the site where almost 800 babies are believed to be buried in a mass grave.

Two officers called to the site in Tuam, Co Galway, yesterday along with Frannie Hopkins (51) who found the mass grave when he was 12.

It is also feared that the bodies of nine women who died in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home may lie near the 796 infants buried in a septic tank in the grounds.

After meeting the detectives, Mr Hopkins went through in detail where he had discovered the bodies.

“They brought me up to the site and I showed them where it was and how we came across it. It was all quite informal and only took about 15 minutes,” he said.

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IRELAND
Bock the Robber

Posted by Bock on June 6, 2014

The bishop of Tuam has released a statement in which he seeks to distance his diocese from the appalling treatment of the women who were locked up in the notorious Mother and baby Home.

In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of Cardinal Cahal Daly, who also sought to distance himself from any responsiblity for the monstrous behaviour of Father Brendan Smyth, the paedophile whose activities brought down a government and first exposed to the world what was really going on behind the veil of sanctity in Ireland.

Daly, you might recall, pointed out that he had no authority over Brendan Smyth, because the priest was a member of the Norbertine order and was therefore under the control of his religious superior within that order. This was why, according to Daly, he could not intervene in the priest’s rape of children. He was powerless to do so.

Oddly enough, this lack of power didn’t prevent Daly’s successor from intervening in the activities of another priest who was also a member of a religious order. Cardinal Seán Brady who, as a young priest, had sworn abused children to secrecy on pain of damnation, had no hesitation in stepping in when Father Iggy O’Donovan, an Augustinian priest in Drogheda committed a transgression in 2006.

His crime? Iggy O’Donovan celebrated an ecumenical service with a Protestant clergyman, in a spirit of reconciliation and solidarity.
…

When Dr Deeny, the Chief Medical Officer, unilaterally closed Bessborough Home because of the number of children it was killing, the Papal Nuncio complained him to DeValera on the order of Bishop Lucey of Cork, even though the home was run by nuns.

The bishops knew everything and the bishops controlled everything. Let us not forget that this bishop of Tuam was the very same one to whom the entire county library catalogue was submitted for vetting. Gilmartin selected the books to be burned, and yet, somehow, Michael Neary would have us believe he was a benign, bumbling old Santa Claus figure who had nothing to do with the systemic oppression of women in post-independence Ireland.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article posted 7 June 2014)

Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission is currently investigating how Catholic Church authorities ignored the crimes of a Marist Brother who (for legal reasons) is being referred to as “Brother Z.A.” He was inflicted on Australian Catholic schoolchildren for 20 years. The letters “Z.A.” do not refer to this Brother’s real name; this is merely the Royal Commission’s code-name for him. Some revelations about the cover-up are likely.

Broken Rites understands that “Brother Z.A” worked as a primary teacher, from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, in various Catholic schools in Queensland, New South Wales and Canberra.

Starting on 10 June 2014, the Royal Commission is holding a week or more of public hearings (Case Study 13) which will include the question of how the Marist Brothers administration responded (or failed to respond) to the crimes of “Brother ZA”, plus another Marist (Brother John “Kostka” Chute).

These public hearings will examine:

* Any steps taken (or not taken) by the Marist authorities to report these allegations to the police.
* The response of government and other agencies to these allegations.
* The settling of compensation claims for victims of Marist Brothers, including Brother Kostka Chute and Brother Z.A.

The public hearings of Case Study 13 (including both Kostka Chute and ZA) will be streamed, via webcast, on the Royal Commission’s website. To reach the Commission’s webpage for Case Study 13, click HERE.

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IRLAND
euronews

800 tote Säuglinge: Irland ordnet Untersuchung an

In Irland werden die mysteriösen Todesfälle von Kleinkindern neu aufgerollt. Bereits 1975 war in der Stadt Tuam ein Massengrab mit fast 800 Leichen entdeckt worden. Dabei soll es sich um Säuglinge aus einem Mutter-Kind-Heim handeln, das von 1925 bis 1961 von katholischen Ordensschwestern betrieben wurde.

“Ich habe Kinder- und Jugendminister Flanagan damit beauftragt, eine Kommission zu bilden, um das Ausmaß und die Beteiligten festzustellen”, sagt der irische Premierminister Enda Kenny. “Es soll herausgefunden werden, ob es sich um einen Einzelfall handelt oder ob es andere gibt, die untersucht werden müssen”, so Kenny weiter.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Neue Presse

[Summary: On theWeihnachtsfeiertag holiday in 1998 there was an uproar in the St. Mary parish in Sonnenfelt. A father got up from his seat, went into the sanctuary and accused the pastor of sexually abusing is son. The boy was an altar boy. The believers were shaken.]

Coburg/Berlin – Am zweiten Weihnachtsfeiertag des Jahres 1998 kommt es in der katholischen Kirchengemeinde St. Marien in Sonnefeld zu einem Eklat. Ein Vater steht auf, geht in den Altarraum und wirft dem Pfarrer während des Gottesdienstes vor, seinen Sohn sexuell missbraucht zu haben. Der Junge war Messdiener gewesen. Die Gläubigen sind erschüttert.

Am 4. Januar 1999 informiert ein Mitglied der katholischen Kirchengemeinde Ebersdorf/Sonnefeld den Generalvikar der Erzdiözese Bamberg, Alois Albrecht. Es folgen innerkirchliche Prüfungen, und dann schaltet das Erzbischöfliche Ordinariat die Staatsanwaltschaft Coburg ein. Eine Lawine ungeahnten Ausmaßes kommt ins Rollen.

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ITALIA
A ragion verduta

[Summary: In Italy, only two dioceses – Bessanone and Verona – after dozens of sexual abuse complaints have decided to establish a commission of inquiry]

Redazione: Questo libro appare la naturale estensione all’Italia del suo precedente lavoro. Nel nostro Paese non si sono però avute commissioni d’inchiesta sull’argomento, abbiamo anzi una conferenza episcopale che pare ami ribadire che non vi è alcun obbligo di denuncia dei sacerdoti pedofili. Come si sta evolvendo la situazione in Italia?

Tulli: In Italia, fino a oggi solo due diocesi in seguito a decine di denunce che peraltro erano rimaste inascoltate per anni hanno deciso di istituire una commissione d’inchiesta: Bressanone e Verona. In entrambi i casi gran parte delle denunce sono risultate fondate ma la prescrizione ha negato la possibilità di ottenere giustizia alle vittime. Si è trattato peraltro di commissioni che hanno agito a livello “locale”. Nel nostro Paese, diversamente dall’Irlanda, Belgio, Stati Uniti, Australia, Olanda, Germania solo per citarne alcuni, non è mai nemmeno stata ipotizzata la possibilità di istituire una commissione d’inchiesta a livello nazionale che facesse luce quanto meno sulle dimensioni del fenomeno.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Sexueller Missbrauch durch Angehorige der katholischen Kirche

“Du sollst nicht schweigen” – Priester erhebt Vorwürfe gegen das Bistum: “Man habe ihm im Priesterseminar nicht beigebracht, dass man so etwas nicht tun dürfe.”

Jahrelang wird eine Minderjährige von einem katholischen Pfarrer missbraucht – drei Jahrzehnte später macht sie sich auf ihre Weise Luft

Von Hans Holzhaider

Würzburg – Zum Aufruf vor dem Zivilrichter Peter Müller am Landgericht Würzburg kommt die Sache Fromm gegen Weiß (Namen geändert). Johannes Fromm, 70, katholischer Pfarrer im Ruhestand, will Claudia Weiß, 40, verbieten lassen zu behaupten, er habe sie sexuell missbraucht oder sexuelle Handlungen an ihr vorgenommen. Ferner soll es, fordert der Kläger, Frau Weiß verboten werden, zwei Schreiben des Missbrauchsbeauftragten und des Generalvikariats des Bistums Würzburg, in denen auf diesen sexuellen Missbrauch Bezug genommen wird, zu verbreiten oder an Dritte weiterzuleiten.

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IRELAND
Finfacts Ireland

By Michael Hennigan, Finfacts founder and editor
Jun 6, 2014

Every country is an Organised Hypocrisy to some degree. Countries have aspirations and stated principles, which more often than not, contrast with a grim reality – – at least in democracies today, there is an opportunity for some rebalancing.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and a cruel slave master, who had penned the line in the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” fathered at least six children with his slave Sally Hemings but he regarded them as sub-human, while Karl Marx a German philosopher, who had seen the grim existence for workers in Germany and Britain in the first century of the industrial revolution, would not have expected to become the god of brutal dictatorships that crushed the human spirit in the twentieth century.

The revelation that 796 babies died in a facility run by a religious order in Tuam, County Galway over 36 years, is shocking even after the litany of stories of abuse in recent decades.

Two sectarian states had developed in Ireland from the 1920’s and in the South, behind the veneer of “republican principles,” conservative elites held power and brooked little opposition.

In the Irish Times in 2009, the late journalist Mary Raftery wrote on Mr Justice Seán Ryan’s report on decades of child abuse in Ireland: “It’s is quite simply a devastating report. It is a monument to the shameful nature of

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IRELAND
Journal

IN THE SPACE of two weeks, the story about a mass grave at a former mother and baby home in Galway has grown from something that was just talked about locally in Tuam to a worldwide news story.

The oh-so-gradual unfolding of the story, beginning in the 1970s with the discovery of multiple skeletons, seemed to take people by surprise. After breaking in the media almost a fortnight ago, it took more than a week before any politician made a comment about it, and it was days before national mainstream outlets covered it.

Here, we look at how the story has unfolded, and all of the many, many questions that still remain.

What is the home at the centre of the controversy?

From 1925 until 1961, an order of nuns calls the Bon Secours Sisters ran an institution at this building in Tuam in Co Galway.

The institution was called St Mary’s but was known locally as The Home. Unmarried women in the area who became pregnant were sent there to give birth away from their families, as at the time, having a so-called ‘illegitimate’ child was regarded as shameful.

The babies were then left in the orphanage to be raised by the nuns. Some of them were put up for adoption while some remained in the care of the nuns.

Some of the poorer women who gave birth were forced to work for the nuns in the institution after they had their child as a way to pay for the service which had been provided to them.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

Jun 06, 2014 00:11 By Jilly Beattie

The 81-year-old said she now knows her son Anthony was “lucky” because he “lived and loved” although she was never reunited with him

Movie inspiration Philomena Lee spoke yesterday of her horror over the mass baby grave.

The 81-year-old’s struggle to find her son Anthony who was taken from her in an unmarried mother and baby home touched millions when it hit the big screen as an acclaimed film starring Dame Judi Dench.

And yesterday, Philomena said: “Now I know we were the lucky ones.

“For 50 years I kept my sweet boy a secret until I could hold it in no longer.

“My dream was to be reunited with him but sadly it was not to be and the grief I have suffered has broken me many times.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

By Michael Clifford

THE Tuam babies story this week says much about the past, but about the present also.

The graveyard in the grounds of the former so-called mother-and-baby home was first discovered by two 12-year-old boys, in 1975. One of them opened the concrete cover and was met with the horror below. Pretty quickly, the cover was drawn across again. In the 1970s, the past had not yet been acknowledged. Indeed, the past wasn’t even past.

The next major juncture in the story was last October, by which time local historian, Catherine Corless, had painstakingly compiled and matched records from the home. Corless concluded that the concrete tank must contain most, if not all, of the nearly 800 infants who had died in the home during its existence, between 1925 and 1961.

The story was first published in the Connaught Tribune on October 10 last, which reported that the number of babies allegedly involved was 788. Continuing research has brought this number up to 796.

Declan Tierney’s report in the Tribune began: “Research has shown that there are 788 children, from newborns to eight-year-olds, buried in a graveyard that was attached to an old orphanage in Tuam.

“And a group of interested individuals have now established the names of each of the children, what age they were when they died, and the causes of their deaths. It is now their intention to erect a memorial in their honour and this will contain the names of each of the 788 children.”

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VIRGINIA
Fredericksburg.com

BY AMY FLOWERS UMBLE / THE FREE LANCE–STAR

Priests at a Stafford County Catholic church are ready to handle any concerns that arise from the news that a former church member faces 111 felonies involving child molestation.

A Stafford grand jury indicted Thomas Francis Villacres on those charges Monday. Villacres, a former chairman of the Stafford County School Board, now lives in Florida.

While living in Stafford, Villacres was a member of St. William of York Catholic Church in North Stafford.

The Rev. Robert DeMartino is prepared to answer any questions parishioners may have about Villacres and the charges, said Michael Donohue, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Arlington. And if anyone comes forward to report abuse, DeMartino would encourage them to contact law enforcement, Donohue said.

The priest also plans to announce Villacres’ arrest, although those plans are not concrete yet. Church bulletins were printed Monday, before the charges against Villacres were published in the newspaper, Donohue said.

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LAS VEGAS (NV)
KTNV

CREATED Jun 6, 2014

Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) — A youth pastor from California has been arrested in the death of a Las Vegas man from last year.

Family members confirm police arrested Robert L. Cox on Tuesday. According to police records, Cox is accused in the murder of Link Ellingson, who died in December, 2013 of head injuries from an altercation outside a Las Vegas pub that happened months earlier.

Police records show Cox was visiting Las Vegas on June 13, 2013, with his family and interns as part of a ministry program. The group stopped for food at the Four Kegs Sports Pub on North Jones Boulevard near U.S. 95. The altercation with Ellingson took place in the parking lot afterwards, police wrote.

In police documents, officers said Cox punched the 6’8 Ellingson, who fell and hit his head. The records show Cox later denied throwing any punches.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Tribune

By Melissa Harris
Tribune columnist
4:02 p.m. CDT, June 6, 2014

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, a Roman Catholic who has clashed with Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, has presided over two gay weddings this year, including a double wedding last week.

The double ceremony, held at Keith House in Chicago’s South Loop, marked the first time a member of the state’s highest court has married a same-sex couple since all counties began issuing marriage licenses to them in June, Burke said.

A brother and sister each married same-sex partners, said Burke, whose daughter knows one of the couples.

“That’s how they reached out to me,” Burke said. “The guys walked the girls down the aisle, and then took their respective partners’ hands. The girls wore wedding dresses. The guys had on nice suits and royal blue ties.”

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TEXAS
Valley Morning Star

By ILDEFONSO ORTIZ

A Mission teenager claims a Catholic deacon at a Mission church sexually abused him for about two years, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.

The victim — now 18 years old — claims that from 2010 to 2012, when he was an altar boy at the San Cristobal Magallanes parish in Mission, Deacon Ronaldo Mitchell Chavez sexually assaulted him, the teen’s attorneys said in the lawsuit.

Police on Jan. 17 arrested Chavez on a charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child. Last month, an Hidalgo County grand jury returned an indictment against him on the sexual abuse charge. The case remains pending in the 430th state District Court.

In the lawsuit, attorneys seek exemplary damages claiming that the diocese should have known that Chavez was a danger to children, but instead he had unlimited access to the altar boys at the parish.

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PARAGUAY
ABC Color

El obispo de Ciudad de Este, Mons. Rogelio Livieres Plano, dijo ayer a ABC Color: “No voy a pedir perdón mientras que (Cuquejo) no se retracte de lo que dijo de mi sacerdote. ¿De dónde sacó la prensa que yo le llamé?”. Su tío, Mons. Jorge Livieres Banks, intentó mediar, pero no tuvo éxito.

Livieres Plano sigue con su enojo con el arzobispo de Asunción, Mons. Pastor Cuquejo. Ayer, en contacto con ABC Color, dijo categóricamente que no le va a pedir perdón. “No voy a pedir perdón mientras que (Cuquejo) no se retracte de lo que dijo de mi sacerdote (Carlos Urrutigoity, acusado de abuso sexual). ¿De dónde sacó la prensa que yo le llamé?”, preguntó en alusión a publicaciones en la web que daban como un hecho la reconciliación e incluso mencionaban que había llamado a Cuquejo para pedirle perdón.

El obispo paranaense agregó que estaba con la conciencia tranquila, “aunque él sea el metropolitano”.

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PARGUAY
ABC Color

CIUDAD DEL ESTE (De nuestra redacción regional). Las repercusiones que tuvo la advertencia de autoridades religiosas de los Estados Unidos acerca del supuesto peligro que representa el sacerdote argentino Carlos Urrutigoity para los jóvenes podrían sentirse en los estrados judiciales locales. Urrutigoity fue denunciado por conductas homosexuales y pedófilas en Argentina y Estados Unidos.

La fiscala de la Niñez de Ciudad del Este María Graciela Vera Colmán explicó que ayer recibió una denuncia verbal de que habría una o varias víctimas de abusos sexuales de Urrutigoity, pero que no tiene informaciones concretas.

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PARAGUAY
El Universal

[Summary: The bishops of two major cities in Paraguay are in a public confrontation regarding the Argentina priest Carlos Urrutigoity who is alleged to have assaulted a student in the United States.
The battle between Rogeligo Livieres Plano of Ciudad del Este and the Archbishop of Asuncion, Pastor Cuquejo, broke after the second suggested that an investigation be reopened to find study allegations of child molestation against Urrutigoity. Livieres appointed Urrutigoity as his number two official and has defended him saying the case is closed.]

El sacerdote argentino Carlos Urrutigoity fue acusado en Estados Unidos de asaltar sexualmente a un estudiante

Los obispos de las dos principales ciudades de Paraguay protagonizan un enfrentamiento público en torno a la figura de un sacerdote argentino que fue suspendido por pedofilia en Estados Unidos y ahora vive en el país sudamericano.

La batalla entre el obispo de Ciudad del Este, Rogeligo Livieres Plano, y el arzobispo de Asunción, Pastor Cuquejo, estalló después de que el segundo sugiriera reabrir una investigación para averiguar si son ciertas las acusaciones de abuso de menores contra Carlos Urrutigoity.

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PARAGUAY
Entorno Inteligente

[Summary: The public ministry has opened an official investigation of Argentine priest Carlos Urrutigoity who is accused of pedophilia. Maria Graciela Vera said they will verify all the charges against him and try to contact the family to see if they wish to make a complaint. Penalties for rape of children can be prison terms of up to 15 years or more. At the same time, the U.S. organization called Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests issued a statement asking that Paraguay suspend the priest from his clerical functions. Urrutigoity is now second in the structure of the Ciudad del Este diocese.]

Hoy.com.py / El Ministerio Público abrirá una investigación de oficio, contra el sacerdote argentino Carlos Urrutigoity, quien es acusado de pedofilia.

La fiscal de la niñez y adolescencia, María Graciela Vera, confirmó a la redacción de HOY, que investigará de oficio al cura Carlos Urrutigoity.

“Vamos a verificar todas las acusaciones en su contra y tratar de contactar con los familiares para ver si desean formular una denuncia”, expresó Vera.

Las penas por violación en niños, pueden ser de hasta 15 años, e incluso más, dependiendo del agravante de cada causa.

Sobre este mismo caso, la organización de Estados Unidos, denominada Red de sobrevivientes abusados por sacerdotes, emitió un comunicado días atrás, solicitando que Paraguay suspenda al cura .

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church?: An Excerpt re: President George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI

I’ve mentioned in the comboxes here in the past several days that I’m now reading Hans Küng’s new book Can We Save the Catholic Church?, trans. Dr. Herrlinger of Tübingen, with reworking by Thomas Riplinger and Andrew Lyon (London: William Collins, 2013). Kathy Hughes, a faithful reader of and contributor to this blog, kindly sent me a copy of the book.*

In days to come, I’ll be sharing some reports from my reading. As I begin the book, I’m struck by how the question in its title is echoed in a book another faithful reader of and contributor to Bilgrimage has sent me: Ruth Krall recently sent me a book by Sister Karol Jackowski entitled The Silence We Keep: A Nun’s View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (NY: Harmony, 2004). I’ve only dipped into this book, but as I begin Küng’s book, it interests me very much to see that Jackowski starts the final chapter of her book with the following questions:

So what happens next? Is this the end of the Catholic Church? Is this curtains for Catholicism?

Why are so many people asking such questions right now, I wonder as I begin Küng’s book. People who are, after all, “official” representatives of the church: Küng is a priest, a theologian, and was a peritus at Vatican II; and Jackowski is a nun . . . .

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from Küng’s book that caught my attention yesterday:

It was no coincidence that at Bush’s invitation, Benedict happily celebrated his 81st birthday in the White House, together with the autocratic president: both men, Bush and Ratzinger, proved themselves over the years incapable of learning anything, for example in their common stance on the issue of abortion (60-1).

Keep in mind that Küng knows Ratzinger intimately, that both were periti at Vatican II, and were friends during that period. Küng notes that, when Ratzinger was made pope, Küng held out hope that Benedict would begin to repair some of the tremendous damage he had inflicted on the whole church as the German shepherd watchdog heading the former Inquisition, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the autocratic pope now known as St. John Paul II.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Donald Clarke

Sat, Jun 7, 2014

Much confusion still surrounds the alleged discovery of human remains near a mother-and-baby home run by the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam.

Since its appearance in the Irish Daily Mail, the story has buzzed furiously about social media while broadcasters and other newspapers tried to sort rumour from hard fact.

By Wednesday, Charlie Flanagan, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, was sufficiently concerned to describe the revelations as “a shocking reminder of a darker past in Ireland when our children were not cherished as they should have been”.

Further details are gradually oozing their way across newsprint and the airwaves. Whatever we subsequently learn about this squalid story, it can’t be denied that the Catholic Church has had another bad week. (That organisation doesn’t have too many good ones these days.)

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KENTUCKY
Courier & Press

By Beth Smith
Posted June 6, 2014

A Colorado jury has convicted a former Henderson youth minister of sexual abuse related charges.

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KENTUCKY
Tristate Homepage

A former Henderson youth pastor is convicted of 16 sexual abuse related charges in Colorado while still facing similar charges in the tristate.

44 year-old John Brothers is a former youth minister at Hyland Baptist Church. He could face life in prison.

Now this is just the beginning of Brothers’ days in a courtroom.

He is still awaiting trial in Henderson.

Brothers was first arrested in 2011 for the alleged sexual-abuse of two members of Hyland Baptist’s Youth Group.

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NEW JERSEY
News 12

[with video]

MORRISTOWN – A victim of sexual abuse by a priest is speaking publicly after Delbarton School has agreed to lift a confidentiality order going back 30 years.

For the first time, Bill Wolfe can speak publicly about the horrors that happened to him at the elite Delbarton School in Morristown. “It feels literally like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he says.

Wolfe turned to a Delbarton priest for guidance when he was 14 years old, and says he was abused. “He asked me to expose myself, and then he asked me to relieve myself, to masturbate.”

The victim revealed the abuse to his family and successfully sued Delbarton, but under a 1988 court settlement, Wolfe had to remain silent until Thursday.

After suing Delbarton again, the Catholic boys high school run by the monks of St. Mary’s Abbey agreed to lift the gag order.

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AUSTRALIA
Dubbo Photo News

Fact, fiction and a fight far from over: Special Commission Enquiry report backs Grant

Saturday, 07 June 2014 12:48 Written by Jen Cowley

It’s a rare politician who doesn’t like to be proved right, but on at least this occasion, vindication is bittersweet for Troy Grant – former policeman turned politician and, recently, state government minister.

This week, a report from the Special Commission of Enquiry – set up to examine claims by former detective Peter Fox about the conduct of police in investigating child sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle – found that Grant, who led those investigations as a young detective during the 90s, was “an impressive and credible witness”, while rejecting Fox’s assertions that Grant had referred to “Catholic mafia” and complained of police hierarchy hindering his investigation.

Grant has always denied Fox’s version of their conversation, and has expressed his disappointment, on many occasions, over what he saw as a cruel distraction from the issue at hand – finding justice for the victims of child sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy.

The report is weighty – and Grant is glowing in his praise of Commissioner Margaret Cunneen in getting to the bottom of allegations made by Fox who, it’s now widely agreed, lost perspective on an otherwise admirable crusade for justice.

According to the commission, Grant’s evidence into the investigation of priest Father Vincent Ryan (who was subsequently found guilty of offences against 31 victims and sentences to lengthy gaol terms) was “persuasive”.

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TEXAS
Fox 2

[with video]

This civil lawsuit follows a similar criminal indictment for charges of continuous sexual abuse of a child that Ronaldo Mitchell Chavez is facing.

A statement released by the Salinas-Flores law firm accuses the diocese of Brownsville of negligence in the case of sexual assault of a minor.

The civil suit points to the alleged abuser Ronaldo Mitchell Chavez who was a deacon at the San Cristobal Magallanes parish in mission during the alleged assault.

The victim referred to as ‘John Doe 1′ to protect his identity, claimed to have suffered a continued sexual assault when the teenager was between 14 and 16 years-old from 2010 to 2012. Two years later the plaintiff decided to file a criminal complaint in December which led to the consequent arrest of Chavez by mission police in January.

The prosecution attorneys believe other victims are still out there, they realize fear is a factor, especially if it seems to go against their own faith.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Sharon Foley

Fri, Jun 6, 2014

It is hard not to be horrified, sickened and shocked at the heartbreaking revelations that 796 babies died and may have been buried in a mass grave in the grounds of a home run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours in Tuam, Co Galway, between 1925 and 1961.

As a mother, I am mourning to my core the loss of these precious lives. It is nearly beyond my capacity to understand how helpless, tiny human beings could have been apparently discarded and treated in this way.

The full facts surrounding the deaths will probably never be established. But the question on all our minds is what happened these babies? Did they die when the mother was in childbirth? Did they die from malnutrition and neglect? Did they die from an illness that is now easily treatable? Did they die alone?

These infants died in a mother and baby home at a disgraceful period in Ireland when unmarried mothers were banished and hidden away and cruelly forced to give up their infants for adoption on birth.

As founding chief executive of the government-funded Crisis Pregnancy Agency, I understand the trauma of a crisis pregnancy and our shameful history in failing to support Irish girls and women who were pregnant and unmarried.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Even the story of Philomena Lee, as recounted in the film starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, did not stir the national conscience to action

Sat, Jun 7, 2014

Eighteen years ago, on May 11th, 1996, Padraig O’Morain wrote in this newspaper about a woman he called Eileen, whose baby was taken from her in a mother-and-baby home and sent to the US for adoption.

It followed an announcement the previous month by Dick Spring, who was at the time the tánaiste and minister for foreign affairs, that files on the adoption of Irish babies in the US had been found. It was said this offered hope that birth mothers and children taken from them for adoption could meet again.

We’ve had four statutory reports since then on the abuses of children, and the McAleese report on the Magdalene laundries, but no investigation into mother-and-baby homes.

Even the deeply moving story of Philomena Lee, as recounted in the film ‘Philomena’ last year, did not stir the national conscience to action.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Rosita Boland

Sat, Jun 7, 2014

‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”

The story that emerged from her work was reported this week in dramatic headlines around the world.
“Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves” – The Guardian.

The Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, which was a home from 1930 to 1970. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA WireThis time, the issue of mother and baby homes must be addressed

“Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – The Washington Post.

“Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland” – Al Jazeera.

“800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – New York Daily News.

“Almost 800 ‘forgotten’ Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home” – ABC News, Australia.

Corless, who lives outside Tuam, has been working for several years on records associated with the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home in the town. Her research has revealed that 796 children, most of them infants, died between 1925 and 1961, the 36 years that the home, run by Bon Secours, existed.

Between 2011 and 2013 Corless paid €4 each time to get the children’s publicly available death certificates. She says the total cost was €3,184. “If I didn’t do it, nobody else would have done it. I had them all by last September.”

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

By Shaun Connolly

AS horrific as it is, the dumping ground for hundreds of dead babies at the Bon Secours home in Tuam should not be the focal point of our concern, but rather how they ended up there, and why no one cared for so long.

The grim revelations that have been forcing themselves slowly to the surface of public consciousness for decades once again show our politicians only act with speed when it is in their interest to do so.

Even calling the Tuam establishment a “home” feels wrong, as Independent TD Catherine Murphy demanded the grave be labelled a crime scene.

“We are hearing references to ‘burials’, when, in fact we are talking about bodies being disposed of in a septic tank. Clearly, these were not respectful burials — they were disposals, as though these children were subhuman. It is stomach-churning. If this septic tank was discovered anywhere else in the country other than beside a religious institution, it would already have been declared a crime scene. It begs the question of why, in fact, it has not been declared as such, which it should and must be,” Ms Murphy told the Dáil.

And in response we got the usual platitudes of pity and pious shock from the Government front bench, but precious little else.

In his first test as Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan flailed around badly, getting off to a poor start with group think, jargon-speak about looking at creating an “inter-departmental process” to deal with the situation which should see a response within a month, so the Government can decide what to do next. Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald has also been extraordinarily slow in intervening.

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CALIFORNIA
Merced Sun-Star

BY DARRELL SMITH
dvsmith@sacbee.comJune 6, 2014

The Davis priest arrested in May on suspicion of having sex with a 17-year-old girl faces three felony charges tied to the allegations.

In a complaint released Friday, Yolo County prosecutors filed three felony counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and a misdemeanor charge of oral copulation with a person younger than 18 years old against Hector Coria Gonzales.

A priest at St. James’ Parish since July 2012, Gonzales is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in Yolo Superior Court in Woodland.

Prosecutors say Gonzales, 46, engaged in sexual relations with the teenager over an eight-month span starting in September 2013, including alleged intercourse at a home, in a vehicle and at the church’s rectory, located on the Davis parish campus.

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UNITED STATES
PopeCrimes& Vatican Evils.

Paris Arrow

June 6, 2014 – the 70th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy and the discovery of Irish Holocaust of 800 little babies skeleton in a septic tank dumped by stupid Roman Catholic Nuns obedient to Roman Catholic Evil Popes obsessed with the doctrines of the Virginity of Mary and superiority of the Vow of Chastity of nuns and priests over lay men and lay women. See the popes below who reigned from 1927 – 1961 during this Irish Holocaust of Irish babies born of unwed mothers in the horrific hands of evil nuns.

TOP 10 inspirations of Christ impelled on D-Day

If The Hague will not condemn the Vatican for its priests and nuns’ crimes against humanity and if the United Nations will not remove the Vatican as a “country” member of the UN, God will take matters into His own hands soon – because He has been asking us to tell the world: (1) that Pope Francis is the ultimate evil con-artist the CON-Christ and the biggest thief in mankind’s history, and that he is a Jesuit Master of Deceits and the Opus Dei Beast Pretender and Impostor of Jesus read our related article, Hidden Heist in the Holy See. The SECRET biggest heist in the history of mankind!

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MEXICO
Proceso

[Summary: Alberto Athie, a former priest and one of the leading activists in Mexico who are fighting pedophilia, said today he is sending a letter to Pope Francis asking him to once and for all “stop this slaughter of sex abuse against thousands of children worldwide.]

-MÉXICO, D.F. (apro).- El exsacerdote Alberto Athié, uno de los principales activistas contra la pederastia clerical, anunció hoy que en los próximos días enviará una carta al Papa Francisco para pedirle que de una vez por todas “paren esta masacre de abusos sexuales en contra de miles de niños en el mundo”.

En declaraciones a MVS Noticias, alabó la decisión del Vaticano de expulsar al sacerdote pederasta Eduardo Córdova Bautista, aunque lamentó la forma como la arquidiócesis potosina manejó el asunto, cuidando siempre la imagen de la iglesia y de sus representantes, en lugar de proceder a castigarlo.

Athié fue la primera persona que sacó a la luz pública el caso del padre Córdova, a quien definió como una persona con liderazgo, carisma y una inteligencia brillante que supo codearse con el poder, “aunque no más perverso que Maciel” .

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CANADA
The Chronicle-Herald

BRIAN MEDEL YARMOUTH BUREAU
Published June 6, 2014

Author’s book Deliver Us From Evil details allegations against now-deceased priest

YARMOUTH — The book’s pages chronicle Del Boudreau’s memories, allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of “the most evil” man he says he has ever known, now-dead Catholic priest Adolphe LeBlanc.

Boudreau first came forward five years ago to talk about what was done to him and now, at 70, he has penned Deliver Us From Evil, a memoir he published this week.

Fr. LeBlanc died in the 1970s, after allegedly assaulting dozens of boys.

And although the abuse has not been proven in court, Boudreau was one of six victims who received part of the $1.5-million settlement from the Diocese of Yarmouth in 2011.

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TEXAS
The Monitor

Ildefonso Ortiz | The Monitor

McALLEN — Attorneys representing a Mission teenager have sued the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville alleging negligence after the teen had been a victim of sexual assault by a deacon.

The victim who is only identified as John Doe and is now 18-years old claims that from 2010 to 2012 when he was an altar server at the San Cristobal Magallanes parish in Mission, Deacon Ronaldo Mitchell Chavez sexually assaulted him, records show.

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TEXAS
Valley Morning Star

Posted: Friday, June 6, 2014

By Ildefonso Ortiz, The Monitor

McALLEN — Attorneys representing a Mission teenager have sued the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville alleging negligence after the teen had been a victim of sexual assault by a deacon.

The victim, who is only identified as John Doe and is now 18-years old, claims that from 2010 to 2012 when he was an altar server at the San Cristobal Magallanes parish in Mission, Deacon Ronaldo Mitchell Chavez sexually assaulted him, records show.

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TEXAS
Valley Central

A former altar boy has filed a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Diocese of Brownsville.

The now 18-year-old victim filed the lawsuit at the Hidalgo County Courthouse on Thursday morning.

According to the lawsuit, the teen claims he was sexually abused by Ronaldo Mitchell Chavez.

The teen claims Chavez sexually abused him several times between 2010 and 2012 while serving as an altar boy.

Chavez worked as a deacon at at the San Cristobal Magallanes Catholic Church in Mission where he befriended and later sexually abused the boy.

Mission police arrested Chavez on a continuous sexual abuse of a child charge back in January.

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IRELAND
RTE News

A private engineering company has carried out a subsurface radar examination of the site at the former Bons Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.

The examination follows reports of an unmarked mass grave at the former Catholic church-run home, where almost 800 children died between 1925 and 1961.

TST Engineering was commissioned to do the work by the Irish Mail on Sunday.

The examination has been completed and a company spokesperson told RTÉ the results will be known within a few days.

In a statement, the Irish Mail on Sunday confirmed the Ground Penetrating Radar analysis was conducted by TST Engineering.

“Following consultation and ongoing co-operation with local historian Catherine Corless and the Children’s Home Graveyard Committee, the Irish Mail on Sunday commissioned a survey of the site of the alleged mass grave at the site of the former Tuam mother and baby home at the Dublin Road housing estate.

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IRELAND
Washington Post

BY MARTIN SIXSMITH June 6

Martin Sixsmith’s book, Philomena, published by Penguin Books, was adapted for the screen last year.

The discovery of a grave containing the remains of as many as 800 babies at a former home for unmarried mothers in Ireland is yet another problem for the Irish Catholic Church. The mother and baby home at Tuam in County Galway was run by the nuns of the Sisters of Bon Secours and operated between 1925 and 1961. It took in thousands of women who had committed the “mortal sin” of unwed pregnancy, delivered their babies and was charged with caring for them. But unsanitary conditions, poor food and a lack of medical care led to shockingly high rates of infant mortality. Babies’ bodies were deposited in a former sewage tank.

Sadly, the mass grave at Tuam is probably not unique. I visited the site — the home was demolished in the 1970s — and spoke with locals who remember babies’ skulls emerging from the soil around their houses. When boys broke open the cover of the sewage pit, they found it “full to the brim” of skeletons. Tuam was only one of a dozen mother and baby homes in Ireland in the years after the Second World War, all of which treated their inmates in a similar fashion.

During 10 years of research into the Catholic Church’s treatment of “fallen women” — I wrote about one of them in my book, Philomena, later turned into a feature film starring Dame Judi Dench — I discovered that the girls were refused medical attention, including painkillers, during even the most difficult births; the nuns told them the pain was the penance they must pay for their sin. In the home where Philomena gave birth, an unkempt plot bears the names of babies and mothers, some as young as 15. There are undoubtedly many more there who have no memorial. …

That sense of guilt and shame remained with the girls for life. One woman whose child was born in Tuam told me she felt it was wrong of her to talk to me even now. At first it was hard to persuade Philomena to tell me her story, too. But when my book was published, she received letters from other “fallen women” saying how grateful they were that someone had had the courage to break the Omertà.

The warped code of honour behind the decades of silence had been inculcated by an all-powerful Catholic Church. For much of the late 20th century, the Irish civil authorities were in thrall to the hierarchy; Archbishop John Charles McQuaid threatened pulpit denunciations if the government contradicted his policies. So the state connived in the mother and baby homes, paying the nuns at Tuam and all the other homes a per capita rate for every inmate.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

Jun 05, 2014 By David Coleman, Adelina Campos

John Rodgers tells how disease was rife and kids would vanish overnight at the hellish home where mass unmarked grave was found

A survivor of the mother and baby home at the centre of the graves scandal last night revealed the hellish conditions kids were forced to live in.

John Rodgers, 68, described it as the home in Tuam, Co Galway as a “rabid playground where you couldn’t get too attached” because kids would simply disappear.

John, who spent five years there, believes the terrible conditions they were forced to live in were responsible for the high mortality rate.

He explained: “We’d all been separated from our mothers early on. And I remember the place being overrun with children, maybe 200 or 300.

“Many of them were ill, including me. It was like a rabid playground.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

Jun 06, 2014 By Sarah Bardon

He said a full inquiry is needed to provide answers to the Irish public

President Michael D Higgins has said he is appalled at the discovery of a mass unmarked grave at a mother and baby home in Galway.

He said: “I was appalled as I know so many in Ireland were at what has been reported and what has been found.

“My first reaction was of enormous sadness. These are children who while they were alive had rights, the rights to protection and who if dead had the right to be looked after with dignity. Time doesn’t remove any of those rights.

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PARAGUAY
GlobalPost

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — It’s been a weird week in Paraguay.

Early on Tuesday, GlobalPost published this story about rogue priest Carlos Urrutigoity, an Argentine national long accused of abusing young men who was recently promoted to second-in-command of the diocese of Ciudad del Este.

By Thursday evening, the story had caused a deep schism in Paraguay’s Catholic Church, with the country’s two most powerful bishops trading jabs and insults over the controversial priest. In Asuncion, the country’s capital, the archbishop was defending claims of homosexuality from the bishop of Ciudad del Este while simultaneously calling on the Vatican to fully investigate Urrutigoity.

Meanwhile, after Pope Francis announced a “zero tolerance” policy on sexual abuse last week, Paraguayan activists involved in the Urrutigoity scandal question how long the problem priest will remain in service and in contact with young people.

Let’s break down the week’s events:

Tuesday, June 3: GlobalPost publishes investigation at 1:19 a.m.*

GlobalPost publishes this story, the result of an investigation into Carlos Urrutigoity, who was accused in a 2002 lawsuit of abusing at least two young men in the diocese of Scranton, Penn.

Urrutigoity, who resurfaced in 2008 in rural Paraguay, was promoted last year to the position of Vicar General of the diocese of Ciudad Del Este.

Among the most shocking elements of the story: a March 15 statement from the bishop of Scranton calling Urrutigoity a “serious threat to young people.”

Urrutigoity denies ever molesting anyone, maintaining that he’s the victim of a smear campaign.

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KENTUCKY
The Courier-Journal

Claire Galofaro, The Courier-Journal June 6, 2014

The Catholic priest sentenced last week to 15 years in prison for molesting an altar boy in the 1970s will have a shot at parole after less than two years.

The Rev. James Schook, 66, will be eligible for parole in April 2016, according to Department of Corrections records.

Schook, who is dying of cancer, was assigned to serve his time at the Kentucky State Reformatory in Oldham County, which has a nursing care facility and a hospice unit, capable of caring for terminally ill inmates.

There he will join another convicted pedophile priest. Louis Miller, 83, is serving a 30-year prison sentence for abusing 29 boys in Jefferson and Oldham counties over three decades. He was convicted in 2003, and became eligible for parole in 2009.

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IRELAND
Friendly Atheist

Irish Archdiocese Official Reacts to 800 Children’s Skeletons in a Sewage Tank: “We Can’t Judge the Past”

June 6, 2014 By Terry Firma

I just learned that in Ireland, Father Fintan Monaghan, a Catholic Church official in whose archdiocese the skeletal remains of almost 800 children were found in a septic tank, weighed in with an opinion on the matter.

The bones, if you’ll recall, are those of babies who were born to unwed mothers, and who died under the awful neglect of Bon Secours nuns between 1925 and 1961. The child mortality rate in Irish Catholic institutions for “fallen women” was reportedly as high as fifty percent.

Regarding the remains of the 800 children found in that sewage tank, Monaghan told a TV crew:

“I suppose we can’t really judge the past from our point of view, from our lens. All we can do is mark it appropriately and make sure there is a suitable place here where people can come and remember the babies that died.”

Got that? We can’t judge the past. Pray tell, father — just how recently should acts of such crassness and cruelty have taken place so that we are allowed, in your divinely-inspired opinion, to judge the perpetrators?

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IRELAND
Breaking News

06/06/2014

The Pro Life Campaign group says it is too early to say whether a criminal investigation should be carried out in relation to the Tuam babies scandal.

The bodies of hundreds of dead babies were discovered in a septic tank on the grounds of a former Mother and Baby Home in Co Galway.

Last night, the Sisters of Bon Secours, who ran the home, said its members would co-operate fully with any Government inquiry.

Some TDs have claimed the mass grave should be treated as a crime scene and a Garda investigation should be launched.

But the Childrens’ Minister said it is not up to him to tell the Gardaí what they should or should not be investigating.

Cora Sherlock of Pro Life Campaign says the full facts of what happened should be established first, before deciding whether a criminal investigation is warranted.

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IRELAND
Truthout

Friday, 06 June 2014
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

In 1995, several young boys in western Ireland came across something buried beneath a cracked piece of concrete. It turned out to be the septic tank for an old building, demolished decades earlier, that had been known as The Home. Run by the Bon Secours nuns, a Catholic sect, The Home had been, from 1925 to 1961, a place where unwed pregnant Irish women could hide themselves from an astonishingly judgmental society to carry their babies to term, and then flee into whatever new life they could manage to find.

Being unmarried and pregnant in Ireland during this time, you see, was utterly unforgiveable, and dangerous. A fair portion of the reason for this was the fact that Ireland – riven and torn asunder by disputed British rule, IRA warfare and all attendant chaos therein – saw fit to leave a vast swath of social concerns like schooling, orphanages and hospitals in the hands of the Catholic Church…and while the newly-minted Pope Francis has put a broadly-grinning happy face on Catholic doctrine, the fact of the matter is that women took the brunt of the consequences when they were raped and got pregnant, or had sex and got pregnant, because of the Church’s ironclad teachings.

The children, also. The nuns charged to care for the children of The Home deliberately ostracized them from the other children in the community, starved them, neglected them, disdained them, because they were the offspring of “fallen” women who had dared to get pregnant outside of the bonds of holy Catholic matrimony. The so-called “sins” of the mother were visited brutally and harshly upon their children.

You see, that septic tank those boys found in 1995 was filled with the bones of some 800 children who had been delivered in The Home. Malnutrition and neglect, measles and tuberculosis and pneumonia, compounded by disgust for the mothers who bore them, laid waste to these children. Their remains were not buried, or burned, or even thrown in a trash heap. They were dropped into a vat of feces and urine, and at the time of this printing, their bones remain there still.

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NEW JERSEY
Religion Dispatches

Post by PATRICIA MILLER

A central contention of the Catholic bishops’ “religious liberty” argument is that Catholics shouldn’t have to “check their faith at the door” when it comes to religious objections to contraception or same-sex marriage in public life. In other words, Catholics are always on duty, whether at church or at home or at work at Hobby Lobby or baking a wedding cake.

But the same thing doesn’t hold true for priests who molest children. They, apparently, are “off duty,” or so argues the Diocese of Trenton, NJ. A lawyer for the diocese told the Delaware Supreme Court that Rev. Terence McAlinden wasn’t “serving in his capacity as a priest” when he molested a New Jersey teenager he took on trips to Delaware.

When one of the justices asked how you could tell if a priest was on duty, the lawyer argued:

“Well, you can determine a priest is not on duty when he is molesting a child, for example. … A priest abusing a child is absolutely contrary to the pursuit of his master’s business, to the work of a diocese.”

And the court bought it, ruling that Naples didn’t have a case because he couldn’t prove the trips were “church sanctioned.”

So I guess by that definition none of the 850 priests who have been defrocked by the Vatican for molesting minors were “on duty.” Problem solved.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Get Reading

Jun 06, 2014 By Natasha Adkins

A jury at Reading Crown Court returned their final verdicts on nine counts of indecent assault shortly after 1pm today.

Brian Spence, of Nursery Close, Hook, stood trial for nine indecent assault charges involving four girls aged between 10 and 15.

The jury of nine men and three women returned unanimous guilty verdicts on four counts shortly before 2.20pm yesterday afternoon, before delivering three majority guilty verdicts today.

On the final two counts the jury were not able to reach a decision. The Crown Prosecution Service said they did not want a retrial but asked that the charges lie on file.

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IRELAND
The Independent (UK)

DAVID MCKITTRICK Author Biography Friday 06 June 2014

The “Irish Holocaust” saw hundreds of babies left to die – and the practice may have been more common than first thought

The first glimpse of the horror came in the 1970s when two boys prised up some cracked concrete slabs in the grounds of a home run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours in Tuam, County Galway. One of them, Barry Sweeney, then 12 years old, vividly recalls the moment: “There it was,” he says, “skulls piled on top of each other. It was just bones and bits of rags and whatever, just a jumble.”

He and his friend took to their heels. “We just ran,” he recalls. The adults they ran to were also shocked, but at the time it was not regarded as a sensational discovery, for Ireland holds many unmarked graves, often containing the remains of victims of the 19th-century famine.

The bodies of the infants had been stacked – buried is too formal a word – in a disused septic tank. The scene was sealed, a priest gave a blessing and locals erected a grotto.

Only now is the realisation dawning that for decades the Galway earth has held the skeletons of 800 babies and toddlers in “a jumble” that is one of the country’s most unthinkable secrets.

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PARAGUAY
Wochenblatt

von Jan Päßler

Ciudad del Este: Der argentinische Pfarrer, Carlos Urrutigoity, der vor Jahren wegen Anschuldigungen des sexuellen Missbrauchs an Jungen wie Mädchen beschuldigt und später suspendiert wurde, tauchte schon vor geraumer Zeit wieder in Ciudad del Este auf. Unter dem Schutz von Bischof Rogelio Livieres Plano versieht er seinen Dienst, trotz riesigem Medienrummel. Urrutigoity wurde nach den Anschuldigungen, die teilweise mit Geld durch die Kirche ein Ende fanden, in eine Einrichtung eingewiesen, die ihm attestierte nicht wieder in den religiösen Dienst zurückzukehren. Nach Ansicht von Bischof Livieres Plano jedoch ist der Fall geschlossen und an seiner Arbeit ist nichts auszusetzen. Der Erzbischof von Asunción, Pastor Cuquejo, ist jedoch dafür eine erneute Untersuchung einzuleiten.

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ITALIA
Il Fatto Quotidiano

[Summary: A priest of the Ferrarese has been sentenced to one year and four months is prison for sexual assault on a child.]

di Marco Zavagli | 5 giugno 2014

Un sacerdote del Ferrarese è stato condannato a un anno e quattro mesi per violenza sessuale su un bambino di pochi anni. È il verdetto di primo grado che esce dal tribunale di Ferrara, dove si è tenuto in rito abbreviato un processo per atti durante una festa di compleanno. La vittima è il figlio minore di una coppia di origine serba che il prete ospitava nella propria abitazione. Il fatto contestato risale al 2010, quando la famiglia arriva in un paese della provincia ferrarese e viene ospitata dal don, 60 anni, che offre loro vitto e alloggio. Ben presto la convivenza inizia a stare stretta e il prete invita la famiglia ad andarsene. Il padre di famiglia, 35 anni, non la vede allo stesso modo e ne nasce una causa civile che darà ragione al sacerdote. La famiglia però non trasloca nemmeno dopo la sentenza di occupazione abusiva dell’appartamento. Intanto parte la denuncia per violenza sessuale ai danni del bambino della coppia, che si costituisce parte civile attraverso l’avvocato Giovanni Montalto. Si parla di particolari attenzioni ricevute dal minore durante una festa di compleanno.

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SURINAME
Werkgroep Caraibisch

[Summary: In an open letter to the Surinamese bishops, the justice ministry and police, National Assembly and Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Organization for Justice and Peace, it is said there is a potential criminal judicial investigation into allegations of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Suriname.]

door Roy Frits Lansdo

Paramaribo – Dit is een open brief aan de Surinaamse bisschoppen, het Ministerie van Justitie en Politie, De Nationale Assemblee, het Inter-Amerikaanse Hof voor Mensenrechten en de Organisatie voor Gerechtigheid en Vrede, aangaande een potentieel strafrechtelijk justitieel onderzoek naar potentieel seksueel (kinder)misbruik door rooms-katholieke geestelijken in de Republiek Suriname.

Bisschop W de B., hoe staat het met het potentieel seksueel molest van onschuldige (minderjarige) gelovigen of de waarheid over het potentiële kindermisbruik binnen de rooms-katholieke kerk in de republiek Suriname?

Room-katholieke bisschoppen van de republiek Suriname moeten geen slapende honden wakker maken om zich te mengen in Surinaamse binnenlandse democratische politieke aangelegenheden! De democratie en rechtstaat van Suriname staat niet onder curatele van de rooms-katholiek kerk. De rooms-katholieke kerk moet zich bezig houden met theologische aangelegenheden. De scheiding der machten, de trias politica met name van kerk en staat.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Aktuell

[Summary: Canonist Thomas Schuller anticipated that Bishop Emeritus Franz-Peter van Elst Tebartz must use a portion of his retirement salary for redress. A corresponding action for damages for being prepared and was expected from the Vatican courts, Schuller said in an interview with SWR magazine. The bishop was forced to resign after it became known that he spent more than 40 million euros renovating the bishop’s house.]

Der Kirchenrechtler Thomas Schüller rechnet damit, dass der emeritierte Bischof Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst einen Teil seines Ruhestandsgehaltes für Wiedergutmachung verwenden muss. Eine entsprechende Klage auf Schadensersatz sei in Vorbereitung und werde von den vatikanischen Gerichten erwartet, sagte Schüller in einem Interview dem SWR-Magazin “zur Sache Rheinland-Pfalz!”.

Ein Bischof könne nur beim höchsten römischen Gericht, der Sacra Rota, auf Schadensersatz verklagt werden, erläuterte der Direktor des Instituts für Kanonisches Recht der Universität Münster.

Papst Franziskus hatte im März den Rücktritt von Tebartz-van Elst angenommen und den Paderborner Weihbischof Manfred Grothe als Apostolischen Administrator der Diözese eingesetzt. Zuvor war Tebartz-van Elst nach heftiger öffentlicher Kritik an den explodierenden Baukosten für seine Residenz und an seinem autoritären Führungsstil vom Papst beurlaubt worden.

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WORCESTER (MA)
MassLIve

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — A lawyer for the Roman Catholic Worcester Diocese has asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed against the church by two gay men who say they were denied the right to buy diocesan property because church officials were concerned they would host gay weddings there.

James Fairbanks and Alain Beret filed suit two years ago for loss of civil rights and dignity and for emotional distress.

They planned to buy Oakhurst, a former Catholic retreat in Northbridge, and turn it into a venue for special events.

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MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

By Joe Soucheray
jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 06/06/2014

The average parish priest is a working stiff who is on call 24 hours a day. They hear confessions, celebrate Mass, visit the sick, write sermons, lead prayer groups, organize fall festivals, collect money to stoke the boiler, and, generally speaking, don’t have two nickels to rub together for a golf game.

Some of these working stiffs go off the rails and commit sins against humanity, but certainly not the majority of them. Why, given the weakness of their leaders, their bosses, it is a miracle of the church that these working stiffs even still have a ship to run.

Archbishop John Nienstedt has been absolutely worthless in meeting the crimes against humanity — the abuse of children — square in the face. He thought everything had been taken care of by his predecessor, Harry Flynn, who was a gregarious guy out in public, to the point where you could feel comfortable calling him “Arch,” because maybe you saw him at the next table at The Lexington and you picked up his check.

Now, Flynn’s testimony has been made public and it is sad to realize that he is just as worthless as Nienstedt in facing up to the priests who have gone off the rails, the priests who are giving the average parish working stiff a bad name.

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UNITED STATES/PARAGUAY
Jeff Anderson & Associates

JEFFREY R. ANDERSON

In what has become a tragically routine turn of events, another credibly accused priest has been sheltered from justice by Catholic hierarchs. Indeed, an accused priest, Father Carlos Urrutigoity, was promoted to vicar general of the Diocese of Eastern Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este following accusations of sex abuse in three other locations. One of these was the Diocese of Winona in Minnesota.

Urrutigoity was ordained as a member of the rigidly traditionalist Society of St. Pius X in the Diocese of Winona in 1989. But far from having a promising start to his career as a priest, Urrutigoity had already been accused of molesting a seminarian at Our Lady of Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina, where he was obtaining his religious education. Rather than investigating Urrutigoity’s record and proceeding with caution, however, the Diocese of Winona afforded him a second chance. It was this second chance that gave Urrutigoity the opportunity to abuse his second seminarian, a young man at the Diocese of Winona.

If two accusations of abuse weren’t enough, Urrutigoity was sent to the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1997 and was allowed to continue in ministry. Espousing radical beliefs and creating a Tridentine Rite group called the Society of St. John in 1998, Urrutigoity counseled young males where he resided at St. Gregory’s Academy in Moscow, Pennsylvania. There, Urrutigoity provided cigars and wine to boys, also urging them to sleep in the same bed as him. With elaborate plans to create a separate town to insulate the Society of St. John,

Urrutigoity plotted to continue his pattern of abuse in Pennsylvania. These plans were stymied by a 2002 lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania alleging sexual abuse of at least two children, however, and Urrutigoity fled to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay.

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Not once.

Over a span of 18 years, that’s how often the one-time head of the US bishops child sex abuse panel called police about admitted, proven or credibly accused predator priests.

Not once.

That’s also how often he told others on his staff to call police about admitted, proven or credibly accused predator priests.

How do we know this?

Because these are admissions made under oath by the prelate himself – the now-retired Twin Cities Archbishop Harry Flynn.

[Minnesota Public Radio]

“Well, maybe Flynn never called the cops – or told others to do so – because there were no pedophile priests in his archdiocese?” one might wonder.

Hardly. There are 53 publicly accused child molesting clerics in his archdiocese. (The number of actual child molesting clerics is, of course, no doubt much higher. And that doesn’t count the predators who technically belong to a religious order or another diocese that were working in the St. Paul archdiocese and molested kids.)

And let’s look closely at what years those were: 1995-2008. So part of Flynn’s tenure heading the Twin Cities church (2002-2008) were after 2002, the year when Flynn and his brother bishops emphatically and repeatedly pledged – in a formal and allegedly binding new church policy – to call police about known and suspected child sex crimes by clergy.

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IRELAND
Bock the Robber

[with news clippings from that era]

The Ireland of 1924 was a bleak place for anyone who didn’t subscribe to a narrow, rigidly Catholic view of the world, as the following newspaper extract shows.

The most conservative revolutionaries ever, as Kevin O’Higgins described himself and his colleagues, wasted no time in getting down to ultra-orthodox business, stamping out everything that didn’t fit in with their emotionally-dysfunctional outlook on life, and that included books. Barely eight years later, of course, in another European country, book-burning would assume an even more sinister place in history, but the ignorance was the same.

The overbearing intolerance behind the acts of intellectual vandalism was no greater in Germany than it had been in Ireland, only two years after achieving freedom for a small elite and selling it to the masses as a great act of liberation.

Just read this, from the proceedings of Galway County Council in 1925, in case you doubted what sort of country the freedom fighters carved out for the weak, the poor or those with the temerity to think for themselves. Is this any different to behaviour we’d expect from the Taliban, or any of the other ignorant, oppressive religious extremist groups we like to condemn these days?

Context: this book-burning took place in an Ireland where unmarried mothers were classified as offenders. It happened the same year the Tuam mothers and babies home was set up, where the Bon Secours nuns used the young women as slaves and penitents, and where 800 children died of malnutrition and neglect in the name of Christianity, because the Irish people were so ashamed of themselves, of their humanity and of their very survival that they treated their own daughters as pariahs and criminals.

The boldfaced text in this extract is mine, for emphasis. The italics are from the original.

Personally, I find the arrogance, the ignorance and the sheer hypocrisy of this mindset staggering, but unless we face up to the fact that this is the State our freedom fighters carved out for themselves and their cronies, we have no future as a mature independent nation.

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IRELAND
Herald

CAROLINE CRAWFORD AND NIALL O’CONNOR – 06 JUNE 2014

The man who unearthed the remains of hundred of babies when he was just 12 years old said he will never forget the sight as long as he lives.

Frannie Hopkins was playing with a friend at the Tuam site back in 1975 when the pair noticed that one of the slabs covering an old septic tank had come loose.

It’s now believed that the bodies of almost 796 babies were dumped there after dying at a nearby mother and baby home run by nuns.

The babies are thought to have died from neglect and malnutrition.

“At the time we found a concrete slab over what I described at the time as a tank I now see it was a tomb,” Mr Hopkins told The

“We removed the lid and we found that it was full of skeletons, they appeared to be that of children. They were tiny skeletons, there just seemed to be an awful lot for one small little grave.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

Dan Box
Crime Reporter
Sydney

OUTSIDE the office of the Catholic bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, in NSW’s Hunter Valley, hangs a sepia portrait of his predecessor, Leo Clarke, the bishop who protected a pedophile priest.

The late, bespectacled bishop’s repeated failure to report his knowledge of child abuse to police over several decades from 1976 was “inexcusable”, according to the final report of an 18-month state inquiry, handed down last week. Yet the portrait will remain.

“I would strongly oppose removing Bishop Clarke’s portrait, because you are almost then trying to censor history. He is part of this story,” says Sean Tynan, manager of the diocese’s child protection service.

This small but significant decision is just one part of the reckoning forced on the diocese by the findings of the NSW special commission of inquiry. Nor is the church alone; the local police force and others associated with the “whistleblower” detective who provoked the inquiry are only now beginning to count the cost.

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AUSTRALIA
SNAP Australia

Issues Paper 6
Redress Schemes
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse …

Abuse of Power/Power Imbalance

Despite being sexual crimes, the core of child sexual abuse is an abuse of power by adults in positions of authority over children. Children are targeted because of their vulnerability, powerlessness, lack of credibility, and ease of manipulation and coercion.

Which particular child is chosen as prey is often more closely related to special vulnerability than any other factor, even availability. Many predators go to great lengths, and expense, to groom a particular child.

Once successful in manipulating the child into a position where the child feels unable to avoid or stop the attacks, the abuse can continue for years, with little fear of the child being able to understand they have a right to complain, far less of actually making a complaint.

A particularly poignant example of this is the US case of Father Lawrence Murphy, who sexually abused at least 200 deaf boys, particularly targeting those unable to speak, and thus even less able than most child victims to ask for help to stop their abuse.

Once the sexual contact has ended, often after years of torture, the abuse of power, inflicted by the institution protecting and enabling the sexual predator, continues. Additional harm is inflicted through minimisation, disbelief, community ostracisation, threats, blaming and shaming, and denial of access to justice or assistance to recover.

The significant additional damage inflicted by this campaign of often deliberate re-abuse is traditionally ignored or underestimated.

When the few victims who manage to speak out about our abuse demand justice or redress, our needs are once again subjugated by manipulative, authoritative, well funded attempts to evade financial, moral and criminal responsibility, and publicity and public scrutiny, by the abusive institution.

All of these additional abuses of power push victims ever further along the path of self destruction that the sexual abuse set us upon. Far too many reach the ultimate destination of suicide.

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NEW JERSEY
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Friday, June 06, 2014

Statement by Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314-503-0003, SNAPdorris@gmail.com )

A New Jersey clergy sex abuse victim has essentially won his lawsuit which frees him from a church-imposed gag order. He is to be commended. We are grateful for this brave victim who has tirelessly worked to expose the truth and protect children.

And Catholic officials at Delbarton School should be ashamed of themselves.

[The Star-Ledger]

William P. Wolfe was sexually abused by Fr. Timothy Brennan at Delbarton school. Brennan later plead guilty to child sexual abuse. Wolfe signed a confidentially agreement with the school, which prevented him from healing, exposing the truth and helping to prevent future abuse.

Confidentially agreements put children at risk. Victims are often manipulated into signing them when they are at one of their most vulnerable moments. We are glad Wolfe was released from his. And we are grateful Wolfe has reached out to other victims through his newspaper interview. We hope others gain courage from him and work to expose the truth and start healing, especially those who are suffering because of child sexual violence, officials’ betrayals and awful gag orders.

Finally, we hope Delbarton officials withdraw their mean-spirited lawsuit against Wolfe’s attorney Greg Gianforcaro.

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VATICAN CITY
The Age

Cardinal George Pell’s power to clean up the Catholic Church’s finances has received a boost with Pope Francis’ sacking of the five-man board of the Vatican’s financial watchdog – all Italians.

In the latest move to break with an old guard associated with a murky past under his predecessor, the Vatican said the pope named four experts from Switzerland, Singapore, the United States and Italy to replace them on the board of the Financial Information Authority (AIF). The new board includes a woman for the first time.

All five outgoing members were Italians who had been expected to serve five-year terms ending in 2016 and were laymen associated with the Vatican’s discredited financial old guard.

Reformers inside the Vatican had been pushing for the pope, who already has taken a series of steps to clean up Vatican finances, to appoint professionals with an international background to work with Rene Bruelhart, a Swiss lawyer who heads the AIF and who has been pushing for change.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Caroline Crawford
Published 06/06/2014

The man who discovered the remains of hundreds of babies in a septic tank has recalled the “tiny skeletons” he encountered when he unearthed the grave when he was just 12 years old.

Frannie Hopkins was playing with a friend at the site in Tuam, Co Galway, back in 1975 when the pair noticed that one of the slabs covering an old septic tank had come loose.

“At the time we found a concrete slab over what I described at the time as a tank, I now see it was a tomb,” he said.

While Taoiseach Enda Kenny has confirmed that a review of the extent of these mass graves around the country will be carried out, there is extensive evidence that officials knew of the high number of infant deaths in these homes decades ago.

Records show that of 120 babies born in a home in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, in one year, 60 died.

In 1930, 42 babies died in the Tuam home at the centre of the emerging scandal.

Inspectors found that malnutrition was common and certain infections spread quickly.

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