ABUSE TRACKER

ROME
National Catholic Reporter

Marie Collins | Mar. 14, 2017

Editor’s note: Marie Collins of Ireland is a clergy sexual abuse survivor who resigned March 1 from Pope Francis’ Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave an interview shortly following Collins’ resignation. Collins has written an open letter to Müller in response to that interview, which she asked NCR to publish below.
Dear Cardinal Müller,

I read with interest the answers you gave to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera March 5 in reply to items in my statement following my resignation from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. There are some things you say in this interview to which I feel I need to respond.

You state you “cannot understand the talk of lack of cooperation” between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and the pontifical commission.

Maybe I can help with an example. In 2015, invitations went to your Congregation from some of the commission’s working groups asking that a representative attend their upcoming meetings in Rome to discuss issues of mutual interest.

The invitations were declined and then the members were informed by the Commission Secretary, Msgr. Robert Oliver, that face-to-face meetings would not be possible and any communication with dicasteries must be done in writing.

Things changed eventually, but this took over a year. It was September 2016 before a representative of the CDF was made available and attended Commission working group meetings. The discussions which ensued were very helpful, hopefully for your Congregation as well as the Commission.

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GEORGIA
Golden Isles News

By WES WOLFE wwolfe@goldenisles.news

On Aug. 25, 2016, the Rev. Kenneth Adkins drove from Florida to meet with Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents at their office in Kingsland. The next day, he was under arrest for felony child molestation.

The question debated in a motions hearing Monday in Glynn County Superior Court was whether his statement in that Aug. 25 interview should be a part of the evidence in the case against Adkins, who faces 11 counts related to alleged sexual activity between him, an underage boy and an underage girl in 2010.

Adkins has been a pastor in Brunswick for nearly 10 years and runs a public relations firm in Jacksonville.

Richard Dial, GBI Special Agent-in-Charge, conducted the interview with the case manager for the investigation, fellow GBI Special Agent James Feller, and testified during the hearing as to what occurred.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Democrat

By Dave Sutor
dsutor@tribdem.com

Victim Services Inc. has experienced approximately a 200 percent increase in the number of adult male survivors of childhood sexual assault seeking help within the past year.

That time period roughly coincides with how long has passed since the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General released a grand jury report, on March 1, 2016, in which it provided details about an alleged decades-long coverup of child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona–Johnstown.

Mike Oliver, executive director of Victim Services, said there is “no way to gauge” if the report led directly to the increase because “that’s not a question that we ask (clients).”

But the publicity might have led to victims – both those abused by priests and other individuals not affiliated with the church – coming forward. …

Founders of the new local Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests chapter recently reached out to Victim Services to discuss what can be done to help individuals assaulted by church authority figures. “While we don’t have anything official on paper or any type of official linkage whatsoever (with SNAP), we would be able to help those individuals the same as we would be able to provide service to any victim of sexual assault within Cambria or Somerset County,” Oliver said.

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GERMANY
Times of India

Divya Chandrababu | TNN | Updated: Mar 14, 2017

Paedophilia is a diagnosis and not a crime, says Dr Klaus Beier, who leads a programme in Germany to treat paedophilically inclined adults and juveniles.

In an interview to TOI, Beier says to protect children, a healthy society must accept that “paedophilia is a reality amongst us and we need to work towards prevention.”

With India’s legislation mandating reporting which overrides patient confidentiality, he says those found offending must be given stringent punishment but we must simultaneously focus on preventing this crime by investing in assessing and treating juvenile offenders and reaching out to adults before they act out on their sexual urges towards children.

Beier, director of Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine, Berlin, was touring cities in India to train professionals and the institute is planning to roll out an online programme in India for self-referred paedophilically inclined men. He was in Chennai earlier to deliver a lecture on preventing child sex abuse and use of child sex abuse images.

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Press TV (Iran)

These are some of the headlines we are tracking for you in this episode of On the News Line:

Priests sexual escapades

The Roman Catholic Church, over the past few decades, has been rocked by revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children and women by priests. The latest of such reports surfaced last week in Italy where a priest was suspended from his parish over claims he used internet sites to recruit potential sex partners. Another priest is also facing defrocking as well as judicial proceedings over allegations he had dozens of sex partners. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for sex scandals that have tarnished the Catholic Church’s reputation worldwide. Last month, an Australian commission on child abuse made shocking revelations after launching a 4 year probe. It found that 7 percent of all Catholic priests in the country were alleged sex abuse perpetrators. The average age of victims was said to have been 10 for girls and 11 for boys.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Michael O’Regan

Eamonn Casey, who has died aged 89, was a high-profile and charismatic member of the Irish Catholic hierarchy when he was embroiled in a scandal leading to his resignation as bishop of Galway 25 years ago.

The revelation, in May 1992, that he was the father of a teenage son, following an affair with American woman Annie Murphy when he was bishop of Kerry in the 1970s, shocked the church and many of its followers and led to international media coverage.

Although its decline had begun at the time, the church was a much more powerful institution than it is today. It was part of an Ireland with no divorce and no same-sex marriage, while the scandals involving clerical and institutional abuse had yet to emerge.

‘Personal reasons’

It was against this background Casey resigned for “personal reasons’’, following the revelation in The Irish Times that he had been making payments to a woman in Connecticut over a 15-year period.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Patsy McGarry

That May morning almost 25 years ago had a seismic effect on the Catholic Church in Ireland.

On Thursday May 7th, 1992, The Irish Times ran a front page story headed “Dr Casey resigns as Bishop of Galway”. It referred to “payments amounting to $115,000 to a woman in Connecticut and a lawyer in New York on July 25th, 1990, and other regular payments to the woman over a period of 15 years since the mid-1970s.”

Within days Annie Murphy was interviewed on RTÉ ’s Morning Ireland radio programme and told her story.

The Ireland of 1992 was a foreign country. Albert Reynolds had been taoiseach for three months and in “a temporary little arrangement” with the Progressive Democrats. Minister for health Dr John O’Connell was preparing a Bill to allow contraceptives be sold in public and there were nervous whispers of another divorce referendum.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Conor Lally

A group representing women coerced during pregnancy has stopped co-operating with the Mothers and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation over concerns about how it is being run.

The Irish First Mothers group is seeking clarity from the State on whether testimony given to the commission will be sealed. It is fearful the confidential nature of the commission may mean victim accounts will never be aired publicly.

The group is concerned the evidence may be disbarred from ever contributing to criminal inquiries that may follow the recent revelations about the Tuam mother and baby home.

Irish First Mothers founder Kathy McMahon said the revelations about Tuam had changed the parameters of public debate about mother and baby homes.

Earlier this month the commission said “significant quantities” of human remains found at a home in Tuam run by the Bon Secours order were those of infants.

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GUAM
KUAM

Updated: Mar 12, 2017

By Krystal Paco

They’ll continue to picket until their final demand is met.

Sunday marked the 34th week of protests in front of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica. Dozens of members of the Concerned Catholics of Guam and the Laity Forward Movement greeted church goers with signs demanding that Archbishop Anthony Apuron be defrocked.

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IRELAND
IrishCentral

Frances Mulraney @FrancesMulraney March 13, 2017

Two Irish Archbishops addressed the Tuam baby scandal in their homilies this weekend, both condemning the actions of the Mother and Baby home in the Galway town where a grave containing the bodies of 796 infants and children was confirmed earlier this month.

In his homily delivered at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin on Sunday evening, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, stated that all must be done to ensure the full truth of the mother and baby homes is known, calling for a full investigation into practices of the time.

“When an institution becomes trapped within its own self-interest, inevitably there will be those who begin to think that they can act as they wish and can even think and claim that, in doing things as they wish, they are doing the work of the Lord,” he said.

“It is not something that can be wallpapered over or interpreted by clever spin-doctors.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Aodhan O’Faolain

An application by a man seeking information about his infant sister, who is believed to have died in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, has been adjourned at the High Court for a further week.

Peter Mulryan (73), of Derrymullen, Ballinasloe, Co Galway, whose sister Marian Bridget Mulryan is believed to be among 796 children recorded as having died at the home, has initiated proceedings against Tusla aimed at getting any information that may exist about her.

A Marian Bridget Mulryan is recorded as having died in February 1955, nine months after she was born at the home.

Mr Mulryan went to the Tuam home with his mother just days after his birth in July 1944. His mother later appeared to have gone to a Magdalene institution and he was fostered out at the age of four.

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IRELAND
Galway Advertiser

Sinn Féin councillor Cathal Ó Conchúir has called on Galway mayor Noel Larkin to open a book of condolences for all the children that died in the mother and baby homes .

Speaking today, Councillor Ó Conchúir said: “This is our holocaust and we should at least remember the most innocent and precious lives that passed away in these homes and who were buried in septic tanks. I will also be sending a request to An Coiste Logainmeacha – the committee that are involved in naming estates, roads etc. – to rename the Western Distributor Road as Bóthar Máthair agus na Leanaí in remembrance of the deceased children and as a reminder to society that this can never happen again”.

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UNITED STATES
The Irish Post

March 13, 2017, By Erica Doyle Higgins

A MISSIONARY nun has told The Irish Post how she was sold from a Mother and Baby home in Ireland to an American family – only to be finally reunited with her birth mother five years ago.

Sister Brigid O’Mahony, who is now based with the Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus in New York, says her American parents bought her from the Sisters at Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in 1954.

“As soon as I could think, my American parents told me I was from Ireland, from a work home,” she told The Irish Post in an exclusive interview.

“They explained to me that babies were sold to American parents, and that I was lucky enough to be sold to them as many of the children in these homes never got out,” she added.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Bucks Herald

An 84-year-old priest who lives in Aylesbury is facing four historic allegations under the Sexual Offences Act.

Father Patrick Bailey now lives at a nursing home in Aylesbury, but his offences are alleged to have been committed in Bedford and Chesham.

Father Bailey was in charge of the Holy Child and St Joseph Catholic church in Midland Road, Bedford for many years.

He was also once the director for education for the Northampton Diocese.

Two of the allegations refer to indecent assaults that allegedly happened in Bedford between November 1989 and October 2001. They relate to two different men, both over 16 years of age.

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IRELAND
The Irish News

Tom Kelly
13 March, 2017

A few years ago my work took in me into contact with a religious order, which operated two orphanages in Northern Ireland.

In preparing for media interviews I questioned two nonagenarian nuns who worked in Derry in the 1940s and 50s. Their superiors had committed to sending young children from their institutions to Australia as part of a UK government policy at that time.

It’s hard to imagine anything worse than the enforced migration of young children, splitting them from their already tenuous links to the communities from which they came.

In explaining, one sister described what Derry was like after the war and in particular she admitted that many of the nuns having entered the convents as teenagers had no experience or training in social work or childcare making them totally unsuited to the role of a carer.

Furthermore she described how in some cases widowed fathers unable to cope emotionally but more likely financially, (as they couldn’t become full time stay at home parents), would abandon an entire family at the door of the convent. TB and diphtheria, which were rife amongst the poor and working class, often became rampant viruses in the confined and overcrowded orphanages. She told of nuns visiting local butchers and bakeries to collect food to supplement the inadequate subsidy provided by the government.

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IRELAND
Connacht Tribune

Galway Bay fm newsroom – The majority of unmarked childrens’ graves in Ireland are in counties Galway, Mayo and Kerry.

The government has confirmed that hundreds of unbaptised children are buried across Galway – along with those buried at the site of the former mother and baby home in Tuam.

There are almost 500 unmarked childrens’ graves across the county.

This includes two large so-called ‘paupers graves’ at Mountpleasant in Loughrea, and another site in Tuam, close to the mother and baby home site.

Archaeologists have identified over 1,400 unmarked graves across the country – the majority of which are in Galway, Mayo and Kerry.

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IRELAND
The Journal

TAOISEACH ENDA KENNY is the latest political figure to weigh-in and tell the Catholic Church that they have an obligation to pay the compensation they owe to survivors of abuse.

Speaking in Philadelphia, Kenny told RTÉ News that the Church and its congregations should measure up to their responsibility.

“I would expect congregations and the Church to reflect on serious of this and measure up to their requirements,” said the Taoiseach.

“We had a position following the residential institutions and the amount of restitution to be made there, and that hasn’t been – what was set out in the beginning,” he added.
2002 agreement

In 2002, an indemnity agreement was entered into by the Fianna Fáil Government and 18 religious orders. Under this agreement, the congregations agreed to hand over €128 million in cash and property. This was increased to €353 million after the publication of the Ryan report.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY PADDY CLANCY
13 MAR 2017

Hail, glorious St Patrick!

How proud I was as a youngster to sing Ireland’s favourite greeting to the man after whom I was christened.

What excitement raced through my boyhood mind as I chanted the next line in the hymn celebrating his name – “Dear Saint of Our Isle!”

I was a bit puzzled when I reached “On us, your poor children; bestow a sweet smile.”

OK, I got the bit about asking him to smile on us! After, all hadn’t he brought Christianity to us and the nuns and religious brothers who taught us and the priests who prepared us for Holy Communion and Confirmation made sure we never forgot that.

But for a long time I couldn’t figure out why we were being referred to in the hymn as “poor” children.

Of course, in my childhood mind I thought poor just meant financially not well off.

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IRELAND
BBC News

The echo of hobnail boots coming down the road was the signal that the “home babies” of Tuam were heading to school.

Kevin Dwyer grew up close to the high walls of the mother and baby home in County Galway, where the remains of up to 800 babies and children have been uncovered in a mass unmarked grave.

The illegitimate children of so-called “unmarried mothers” were, he said, considered “the children of sin”.

They were “the devil’s children, they weren’t encouraged to mix”.

The children are believed to have died from natural causes, but the search for their remains has raised questions about the living conditions and practices within such Church-run institutions.

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IRELAND
Washington Post

By Fred Barbash March 13

Among the bitter images of his childhood at “The Home for Mothers and Babies” in Tuam, Ireland, two stand out as particularly wrenching to John Pascal Rodgers.

Of the first, he has no independent recollection as he was only a year and a half old. His mother told him 48 years later about it. One day at Tuam, she explained, she found out that she was about to be separated from her son by the nuns who ran the home, perhaps forever. So she came in and “cut off a lock of my hair as a memento.”

The nuns then sent her to a workhouse in Galway, he said. She was 17-years-old. “The key was turned in the door and she remained there 15 years until she got the courage to escape.”

Of the second image, some four years later, he does have independent knowledge because he was older then and it was so painful.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on the lack of data presented by those making the case for a “mass grave” in Tuam, Ireland:

Reform advocates, for any cause, have a tendency to exaggerate the problem they seek to remedy, and the extremists in their ranks are even worse. A case in point is the “mass gave” issue.

I have a doctorate in sociology from New York University, and I am accustomed to rendering decisions based on data, empirical evidence, and logic. Everyone has an opinion on any given subject, but those that are unsubstantiated do not carry as much weight as those that are. On this score, the mass gravers come up short. Much of their reasoning is based on conjecture, and some of it is pure fiction. It hardly exaggerates to say that their evidence is lacking.

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IRELAND
IrishCentral

Jean Farrell @IrishCentral March 13, 2017

If you need to know how Tuam babies cases happened look no further than the attitude of the Irish church to women in the 20th century.

It is fair to say the attitude was there among Protestant clergy too, given there were similar horrific deaths in the Protestant Bethany Home, where 222 babies and children died.

Women, especially poor or uneducated ones, were mere chattels of men, incapable of intelligent thought. Certainly, they should never be allowed to vote.

In 1909 Father David Barry wrote the following in a magazine called Irish Ecclesiastical Record:

“Allowing women the right to vote in Ireland is incompatible with the Catholic ideal of domestic life. It would fare ill with the passive, patience, meekness, forbearance and self-repression looked upon by the church as the special privilege of the female soul.”

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INDIA
The Ladies Finger!

March 13, 2017
By Sharanya Gopinathan

Arre, where to begin yaar?

Earlier this month, Father Robin Vadakkuncheril from St Sebastian’s Church in Kottiyoor of Mananthavady diocese was arrested on charges of raping a minor girl inside the church. When the girl gave birth to the child, the priest allegedly asked the girl’s father to find somebody to take the fall for him to save the church from disgrace. In a bizarre twist in an already horrifying event, the father told police that he himself had raped his own daughter. Upon further questioning, he admitted that he actually had not raped his daughter, and had concocted this story in order to protect the priest and the church. He also says that Robin paid the girl’s medical bill in the hospital, and then tried to flee the country to Canada.

Last week, the Mananthavady diocese met to find ways to “protect the sanctity” of the church and prevent such events from happening in the future. Of course, the only measure that they have announced so far is that they will be installing CCTV cameras in all the churches, and said that the rest of the measures are still being discussed.

I can’t for the life of me understand why installing CCTV cameras is the first option people in power turn to when dealing with issues of violence against women. In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal made a famous promise to install 15 lakh CCTV cameras all over the city as a means of making it safer for women (and has received tons of flak for failing to do so, but that’s another story). A move like constant city-wide surveillance by the State is a complex issue that needs active public discussion and debate before being implemented as policy, it isn’t something that should just be shoved down our throats by politicians in the guise of protecting women.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Lorna Siggins

Possible interference with birth and death certification at mother and baby homes in Tuam, Co Galway, and in Cork was highlighted as requiring further investigation in official HSE correspondence over four years ago.

A draft briefing paper for senior HSE management in October 2012, marked strictly confidential, noted that deaths recorded at the Bessboro mother and baby home in Cork dropped “dramatically” in 1950 with the introduction of adoption legislation.

“This…may point to babies being identified for adoption, principally to the USA, but have been recorded as infant deaths in Ireland and notified to the parents accordingly,” it said.

It added that further detailed study was required before this theory could be proven or disproven.

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IRELAND
Herald

Jane Last – 13 March 2017

Father Brian D’Arcy says the Tuam and Grace scandals should “fill us with disgust and lead us to hang our heads in shame”.

The outspoken priest asked how Ireland “can establish a pro-life culture if this is how we treated the most vulnerable mothers and babies”.

Writing in his column in yesterday’s Sunday World, the cleric told readers he visited the Tuam site in recent days to see it for himself.

“It left me shocked, numbed and very angry. The problem was – and still is – I didn’t know where to direct my anger.

Blame

“Saying ‘blame the nuns’ is an easy option. The people who ran the Mother and Baby homes, including the nuns, did much great work.

“But what happened to their sense of decency and common sense when they disposed of dead babies in a septic tank?

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Ian Begley
March 13 2017

The husband of Catherine Corless said he never realised his wife was “on trial” as her work on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home was vindicated by the Commission of Investigation.

In 2015, the commission was established by the government to investigate former mother and baby homes across Ireland.

Mrs Corless carried out extensive research and she believes that 796 babies were buried at the site of the mother and baby home which was run by the Bons Secours order in Tuam, Co Galway.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan show, her husband Aidan Corless said: “When the word started appearing that Catherine was being vindicated, I thought ‘good Lord, I didn’t even realise Catherine was on trial’.

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GUAM
KUAM

Updated: Mar 13, 2017
By Krystal Paco

While there’s been limited information on Archbishop Anthony Apuron’s canonical trial in Rome, Pope Francis gives a brief update during an interview with a German newspaper.

The Pope was providing comment on his decision to send Cardinal Raymond Burke to Guam, which was rumored to be a form of punishment. The pope clarified, “Cardinal Burke was [in Guam] because of some terrible incidents there. For that I’m very grateful to him, he’s an excellent lawyer, but I believe the assignment is almost completed.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Kevin Doyle and Niall O’Connor
March 13 2017

Religious congregations need to “measure up” and take responsibility for the restitution owed to victims of abuse, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said.

Speaking in Philadelphia, Mr Kenny said the Catholic Church had not lived up to expectations in terms of compensation.

He said the Church must “measure up in so far as accepting responsibility or agreements as far as restitution is concerned and get on with it”.

Asked whether the Pope should intervene in order to put pressure on religious orders to pay more in compensation, Mr Kenny replied: “I would expect that the congregations and the Church would reflect on the seriousness of this and measure up to their requirements.

“I referred a number of matters to the Pope when I met with him last year and I would expect that the Vatican would respond to those.”

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INDIA
The News Minute

Monday, March 13, 2017

The Mananthavady diocese, which has been facing the wrath of the people after the arrest of the priest Robin Vadakkenchery in the alleged rape of a minor girl in Kannur, has brought out a set of rules and guidelines to safeguard sanctity of the church.

Last week’s Pastoral Council meeting held in Mananthavady has come up with 12 guidelines and also decided to form grievance cells at the parishes.

The meeting also decided to install CCTV cameras in all churches and institutions that come under the Mananthavady diocese. The Times of India reports that church authorities were not ready to reveal the details of the guidelines.

“In the backdrop of the incident, we will undertake serious reforms and will plug all loopholes to ensure that it is not repeated. The discussions are still under way at different levels. We will come up with an action plan and announce it to the public soon,” the PRO of the diocese, Fr Jose Kocharackal, told ToI.

He also said that CCTV cameras will be installed in churches at the earliest.

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

Haidee V Eugenio , heugenio@guampdn.com March 13, 2017

The Archdiocese of Agana, which last year spent about $213,000 more than it collected, is trying to restore public confidence in its leadership as it asks residents to donate to the archdiocese and its programs during the current Lenten season.

The archdiocese has embraced financial transparency and accountability to help rebuild that trust, Coadjutor Archbishop Michael Jude Byrnes and other officials said as the church deals with a deficit and at least $125 million in clergy sex abuse lawsuits.

Byrnes said there has been great skepticism, distrust, questioning and lack of confidence by many Guam Catholics toward the leadership of the archdiocese, the curia and the chancery.

“With earnest hearts, greater transparency and accountability, we pledge to restore that trust,” Byrnes wrote in a March 5 pastoral letter appealing for financial pledges to help the archdiocese fund its ministries and services.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is to hold a global seminar at the Pontifical Gregorian University on safeguarding children.

The event, entitled ‘Safeguarding in Homes and Schools: Learning from Experience Worldwide’, takes place on 23 March and is organized in collaboration with the Centre for Child Protection of the Gregorian University.

It is to have a particular focus on Latin America.

Chaired by the Commission’s President, Cardinal Seán O’Malley, OFM Cap, guest speakers from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico will be joined by experts from Australia and Italy to share their experience of promoting a culture of safeguarding in Catholic schools, institutions and communities.

A communiqué from the Commission says the event will look at “the urgent need for research in this area” and will host experts from the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Pontifical Salesian University, and the Pontifical Faculty for Education Science Auxilium.

Please find below the full communiqué:

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors [PCPM], in collaboration with the Centre for Child Protection of the Pontifical Gregorian University, is hosting a global seminar on safeguarding and education, with a particular focus on Latin America.

Guest speakers from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico will be joined by experts from Australia and Italy to share their experience of promoting a culture of safeguarding in Catholic schools, institutions and communities.

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AUSTRALIA
Western Advocate

JACINTA CARROLL
13 Mar 2017

THE family of the first victim to speak out about historic sexual abuse at St Stanislaus’ College has joined the chorus of voices calling for the Royal Commission investigating Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse to hold an open public hearing in Bathurst.

Carol Nielsen, whose son Tor was the whistle-blower on the historic abuse at the school, said it was important not only for individuals but for the community that a hearing was held.

She was speaking as Greens MLC David Shoebridge prepares to host a public forum in Bathurst on Tuesday night.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
News Letter

Sinn Fein has demanded that the British government fund compensation payments to victims of historical institutional abuse in Northern Ireland.

Party leader in the Province, Michelle O’Neill, said she has raised the issue with Secretary of State James Brokenshire as part of the current talks to restore power-sharing at Stormont.

Ms O’Neill insisted that she will continue to push Mr Brokenshire on the matter over the next few days.

In January a report by the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA) found that children’s homes run by some churches, charities and state institutions in Northern Ireland were the scene of widespread abuse and mistreatment of young residents.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
4NI

Sinn Féin is calling on the British Government to fund compensation payments to victims and survivors of historical institutional abuse in Northern Ireland.

The party’s leader, Michelle O’Neill, confirmed she recently discussed the issue with NI Secretary James Brokenshiire.

She said: “No one could fail to have been moved by the harrowing evidence brought forward during the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry.

“Sinn Féin believes that victims and survivors are entitled to redress as a result of their abuse.

“We have raised this directly with British Secretary of State James Brokenshire during the current talks, putting forward our position that his government should pay for the redress for victims and survivors.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Monday, March 13, 2017

Daniel McConnell and Fiachra Ó Cionnaith

The Government is on a collision course with the Vatican over the funding of redress payments to sex abuse victims, saying it wants to seize lands owned by the Church.

In some of the strongest terms used against the Church by an Irish government, Taoiseach Enda Kenny warned Church authorities they must “get on with it” in terms of meeting their share of the cost of compensating victims of abuse.

Mr Kenny said the Church must “measure up to the responsibilities that they accepted”.

Speaking in Philadelphia, Mr Kenny said religious orders must “reflect on the seriousness of this” before they are forced to do so.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

Syranno Baines

Co-founder of the recently formed Tambourine Army Latoya Nugent is calling for church congregations islandwide to publicly expose ministers of religion who continue to abuse women and children while using their positions in the Church to evade prosecution.

Tambourine Army was formed in January as a result of the sex scandal that rocked the country and which saw three highly placed members of the Moravian church charged with having sexual intercourse with minors in separate instances.

Aimed at fighting gender-based violence in Jamaica, Tambourine Army staged a successful road march from 127 Molynes Road, Covenant Moravian Church, to the clock in Half-Way Tree, St Andrew, on Saturday. The march attracted international attention.

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AUSTRALIA
Insights

Uniting Church leaders appearing before the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse have pledged to survivors to make the Church the safest place it can be for children.

President Stuart McMillan assured the Royal Commission hearing in Sydney on Friday 10 March that the Uniting Church would continue to apply the lessons learned from the Commission’s work.

“As church leaders we pledge ourselves to continue to understand and to implement the lessons of the Royal Commission and remain open to the insights of survivors and professionals.”

“We pledge to continuously seek improvement; to regularly renew our policies and practices in all parts of our Church, to ensure that they reflect the best practice for care, service and support of children.”

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CALIFORNIA
Desert Dispatch

By Charity LindseyStaff Writer

BARSTOW — Barstow Christian School administrators’ recent admission that previous school policy on reporting child abuse was unlawful came just weeks before the release of former school secretary and convicted child molester Kristen Blanton, according to victim lawyers.

While Blanton was set to be released Sunday, a motion filed last month alleges that BCS Principal Heather Bradford knew of Blanton’s inappropriate contact with the 14-year-old male student victim as early as three months before her arrest and failed to report it.

The victim’s attorneys filed the motion in San Bernardino Superior Court to add punitive damages to their lawsuit against the school and Blanton, two years after she was arrested for allegedly molesting the victim multiple times beginning in October 2014.

During deposition testimony last month, according to court documents and the victim’s lawyers, both Bradford and BCS Superintendent and Senior Pastor of Barstow Free Methodist Church Dr. Chris Monroe admitted that the school’s written policy on reporting childhood abuse violates the state mandatory reporting laws.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Samantha Donovan

Pope Francis’ recent decision to reduce sanctions for convicted paedophile priests is a worrying sign, the CEO of the Catholic Church’s Australian Truth Justice and Healing Council says.

“It’s not a good indication of a strong zero-tolerance approach,” Francis Sullivan said.

Pope Francis became leader of the world’s Catholics just as Australia’s royal commission into child sexual abuse was getting underway.

His initial promise to tackle clerical sexual abuse was a promising sign to Catholics like Mr Sullivan.

But in a recent case, the Pope overruled the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to defrock an Italian priest, Mauro Inzoli.

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AUSTRALIA
Border Mail

One year on from a delegation of Ballarat abuse victims to Rome, a senior catholic official has expressed his frustration at the stalls to reform being instigated in the Vatican.

Truth Justice and Healing Council CEO Francis Sullivan said he feared the Pope may be retreating from his crackdown on pedophile priests as Vatican bureaucrats do all they can to undermine reform efforts,

The Catholic Church in Australia could end up as a “marginalised rump” unless there is real change to an institutional culture hell-bent on self-protection and self-preservation, Mr Sullivan said.

Last March a group of Ballarat sexual abuse victims travelled to Rome to hear Cardinal George Pell’s evidence to the Royal Commission.

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Editorial Board
March 12

WHEN POPE Francis established a commission in 2014 to address sexual abuse by clergy members, he picked two survivors, victims themselves, to serve on the 17-member panel. Now, three years later, both are gone, having denounced foot-dragging and official intransigence inside the Vatican.

The fact that no survivors now serve as active members of Francis’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is a measure of the Holy See’s resistance to change, and of its apparent inability to come to terms with the moral challenge posed by pedophile priests and bishops who enabled them. Sadly, the resignation this month from the commission of one survivor, which followed the forced ouster a year earlier of another, is only one among the more recent indications that the pope’s public pledges of zero tolerance for abuse and expressions of sympathy for victims are unmatched by institutional transformation.

In 2015, it was the pontifical commission that recommended establishing a tribunal to hold accountable bishops who turned a blind eye to abuse within their dioceses by shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish. Francis adopted the recommendation, then dropped it a year later in the face of bureaucratic impediments. He said bishops would be dealt with under existing Vatican rules, but none have been explicitly disciplined for negligence involving sexual abuse.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Lorna Siggins

Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin has said “everything must be done to enable the truth to emerge” about the treatment of children and mothers in church-run institutions in Ireland.

The sad facts “once again” emerging over such treatment challenges the church to a “deep self-examination and repentance” and “is not something that can be wallpapered over or interpreted by clever spindoctors”, Dr Martin said.

In his homily delivered at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin on Sunday evening just over a week after confirmation of “significant” infant remains at the former Bon Secours home in Tuam, Dr Martin urged full investigation of practices at the time.

“When an institution becomes trapped within its own self-interest, inevitably there will be those who begin to think that they can act as they wish and can even think and claim that, in doing things as they wish, they are doing the work of the Lord,” he said.

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INDIA
Times of India

TNN | Updated: Mar 12, 2017

Kozhikode: The Catholic diocese of Mananthavady, which has been rattled by the arrest of a parish vicar over the alleged rape of a minor girl in Kannur, has come up with a set of guidelines to safeguard the sanctity of the church and to step up its vigil against such incidents.

The meeting of the priests and pastoral council members held at the bishop’s house at Mananthavady last week has decided to implement a 12-point guideline to ensure greater transparency and probity in the affairs of the diocese.

Among the decisions taken at the meeting include installing CCTV cameras in all churches and institutions run by the diocese.

Also, it has been decided to constitute grievance cells in parishes to address the complaints at the local level.

The authorities of the diocese, however, refused to divulge the details of the decisions saying that discussions are still under way.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

ANALYSIS
By Jonathan Flynn

The presentation of victim impact statements is one of the most powerful and revealing parts of a child sexual abuse trial.

Each one is different, a unique voice speaking out, usually after decades of painful, secretive silence. But there is a terrible consistency in the effect the abuse had on these people’s lives:

“I feel pain and self-hatred. I tried to obliterate it with alcohol.”

“It made my life the living embodiment of hell.”

These are some of the statements I’ve heard in sentencing submissions for clerical abusers from my old school, Saint Stanislaus’ College. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems are described by nearly all the victims. Suicide attempts are also mentioned.

Most of the statements I heard were read out by an advocate or legal representative. At the trial of the worst Saint Stanislaus’ offender, Brian Spillane, the son of one victim read his father’s words.

The abuse had destroyed this man’s ability to have close relationships. His son had remained at his side throughout.

Another of Spillane’s victims read his own statement. It was a similar story.

“I’ve lost the ability to face the world with optimism and hope,” he said.

Then he described the pain of having to tell his wife and children about the ordeal he had been through — causing them suffering added to the injury the abuse had brought decades earlier.

His voice cracked as he read his statement. People in the court were crying. I heard one person behind me whisper “come on mate” as he struggled to get the words out.

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IRELAND
Sunday World

By Patrick O’Connell

Bon Secours head nun Sister Marie Ryan refused to speak of the horror of the 796 Tuam babies, many believed to have been buried in a cesspit at the Mother and Baby home, when confronted by the Sunday World.

As the Sisters of the Bon Secours face calls for the order to be disbanded and its €152 million private health care empire handed over to the State, we tracked down the most senior member of the Order to her Cork home.

Asked by the Sunday World to comment on allegations in the High Court that she “as is the norm for the Bon Secours sisters – is lying through her teeth” about what levels of knowledge the order had over the fate of the Tuam babies, Sr. Ryan replied with a terse “no comment”.

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IRELAND
Connacht Tribune

By Declan Tierney – March 12, 2017

Around 80 residents in Tuam are now wondering if they are sitting on the remains of dead children that were buried in the mother and baby home in the town; and they fear that their properties could now be excavated as the next part of this horrific investigation begins.

Homeowners on Athenry Road in Tuam, whose houses were built on the site of the Tuam mother and baby home, are now concerned that they could be living over shallow graves. Some are anxious that the matter be investigated.

The houses at Athenry Road in Tuam were built around during the 1970s when the mother and baby home was long closed. The houses were constructed by Galway County Council at the time.

Following last weekend’s revelation that human remains were discovered at the Tuam home, local residents are now concerned that their properties may have been built over ‘unofficial’ graveyards.

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IRELAND
IrishCentral

Niall O’Dowd @niallodowd March 12, 2017

The parish priest came for Delia Mulryan one dark winter’s night in 1944 in the little west of Ireland parish. Delia was seven months pregnant, the baby was created out of wedlock, and the clergyman was hell bent on running the devil out of town.

As her son Peter Mulryan, then in the womb, now 73, relates it the parish priest was furious and spitting blood. ”The woman is bringing scandal to our community” he warned the petrified 17-year old’s father. “She must be removed.”

The power of the church was such that her father did not raise a protest. The priest wanted her gone now, immediately she would not be allowed to stain the good name of the parish.

Her departure couldn’t even wait for daybreak.

It was a time before many automobiles in rural Ireland and dirt roads. The priest had an old fashioned bicycle with a crossbar on it. He grabbed the shaking young girl and left the house.

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AUSTRALIA
The Independent (UK)

Jon Sharman

A senior Australian Catholic official has warned that Pope Francis may be “backsliding” in his crackdown on paedophile priests in the face of an intransigent Vatican establishment.

Francis Sullivan, who is in charge of the Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, said he feared the Vatican’s “bureaucrats and courtiers [were] doing all they can to either undermine the Pope or driving an agenda” of protecting the institution, according to Australian Associated Press (AAP).

In 2014 the Pope ordered a “zero-tolerance” stance on members of the clergy who abused children. Before that the church had been criticised by the UN for the frequency with which allegedly abusive priests were moved to different areas rather than turned over to police.

Mr Sullivan also pointed to the resignation from the Vatican’s child protection commission of campaigner and abuse survivor Marie Collins, who had accused the institution of a “shameful lack of cooperation”, as evidence of a culture of self-preservation, the AAP reported.

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INDIA
The Independent (UK)

May Bulman @maybulman

The father of a girl in India who was allegedly raped by a Catholic priest falsely claimed he committed the crime daughter in order to save the religious leader from disgrace, according to reports.

Police in Kerala said the biological father of a 17-year-old victim told them he was guilty of raping her last May, but it has since emerged that this was a lie in attempt to protect the reputation of a local priest, NDTV reported.

Robin Vadakkuncheril, bishop of the Mananthavady Diocese in Kerala, was arrested at the end of February on charges of raping the teenager last year, in what has been described as the worst sex scandal in the history of Kerala’s Catholic establishment.

Following the arrest of Mr Vadakkuncheril, 48, the girl’s father told the Indian Express: “The priest betrayed our family and our faith in the Church. After my daughter delivered the baby, he wanted someone to take responsibility for the birth. How could I find someone for this job?

“Finally, I had to falsely state that I was the father of my daughter’s baby. As a believer, I also wanted to avoid the disgrace falling on the priest and the Church.”

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IRELAND
RTE News

Minister for Health Simon Harris has said Pope Francis needs to tell religious orders to pay the compensation they owe to abuse victims.

Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, Mr Harris said that religious leaders in Ireland must also address the issue the next time they make a public statement.

The Government would now look at every legal tool at its disposal to ensure the religious orders pay more of the €1.5bn compensation bill, the minister said.

To date religious orders have contributed just 13% to the compensation fund.

This contribution is underpinned by an agreement with 18 religious orders negotiated by former Fianna Fáil minister Michael Woods in 2002.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Ronan McGreevy

Philomena Lee has described revelations about the Tuam mother and babies as “absolutely appalling”.

Ms Lee gave birth in Sean Ross Abbey, Co Tipperary to a child who would go on to become a senior legal counsel to two American presidents.

Her son Michael Hess, who she was forced to give up for adoption in 1952, died from AIDS in 1995. He would have been 65 this year if he had lived.

He visited Sean Ross many times looking for his birth mother, but the nuns there, who knew where Ms Lee lived, refused to connect mother and son.

Her story was turned in the critically acclaimed film, Philomena, released in 2013. Judi Dench, who played her, received an Oscar nomination for the role.

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AUSTRALIA
Western Advocate

MURRAY NICHOLLS
12 Mar 2017

GREENS MLC David Shoebridge will host a public forum in Bathurst this week to support the survivors of historic sexual abuse at St Stanislaus’ College.

Holding The Church to Account will discuss ways to make amends to the victims of abuse and how to make institutions accountable for past wrongs.

Mr Shoebridge said he was hosting the forum in response to the decision by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse not to hold a public hearing in Bathurst, despite the city’s chequered history.

“Often in a regional community it can be hard to find the space to talk about these deeply tragic and disturbing local events,” he said.

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INDIA
India Today

Posted by Ganesh Kumar Radha Udayakumar
New Delhi/Thiruvananthapuram, March 12, 2017

The father of a minor girl who was allegedly raped and impregnated by a Catholic priest in a Kerala parish, has said he lied about raping his daughter to protect her aggressor and the Church, the Indian Express reported on Saturday.

The victim, a 17-year old student in eleventh grade, gave birth to a baby last month.

Her father said he turned in the priest, 48-year old Father Robin Vaddakumchiryil, after being taken into custody and told he would be behind bars for a long time, the Indian Express report said.

He said the priest “wanted someone to take responsibility” for the baby’s birth, the report added.

Meanwhile, the girl’s mother told the Indian Express that she and her husband remain “faithfully loyal” to the Church, and their daughter “is determined to fight back by focusing on her studies.”

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COLOMBIA/NEW YORK
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: Jaime H. aka James Duenas was ordained in his native Colombia in 1950. In the late 1960s he began work in the Archdiocese of New York, assisting in parishes in Manhattan, Staten Island, Tuxedo, the Bronx and North Tarrytown. Beginning in 1991 and for nearly 25 years, he was the sole priest at Nativity of Our Blessed Lady in the Bronx. Of note are several unexplained gaps in his assignment history – the Official Catholic Directory does not index him 1974-1978 or 1981-1984.

In August 2011 a 16-year-old girl reported to police that Duenas, age 87, had sexually abused her in the rectory of Nativity of Our Blessed Lady over a three-day period during the previous week. She had recently been hired to work at the parish. Duenas was arrested and charged with sexual abuse, forcible touching and endangering the welfare of a child. He pleaded guilty to the charges, but told police, “The girl was wearing short skirts” and “she didn’t mind the massage.” He was suspended from ministry.

Duenas died June 6, 2014. Later the same month his victim filed a civil lawsuit.

Ordained: 1950

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GUAM
The Guam Daily Post

Neil Pang | The Guam Daily Post Mar 12, 2017

A legal counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana intends to argue for the dismissal of the 25 child sex abuse cases currently sitting in the U.S. District Court of Guam by challenging the legality of the law which lifted the statute of limitations on civil action for child sex abuse.

Public Law 33-187, formerly Bill 326-33, was signed into law in September 2016 and opened the door for civil action against perpetrators of child sex abuse.

Court documents filed in federal court yesterday indicate that the archdiocese’s counsel, Attorney John Terlaje, will file a motion to dismiss all 25 cases and intends to challenge the legality of the law, which permitted the suits to be filed in the first place.

Former Sen. Frank Blas Jr., who co-sponsored the original legislation that lifted the statute of limitations, told The Guam Daily Post he was not concerned about the challenge and believed the law would pass muster in court.

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SCOTLAND
The Sunday Times

Mark Macaskill
March 12 2017
The Sunday Times

Dozens of victims of childhood abuse have threatened to withdraw from a Scottish inquiry amid concern they will be stripped of their anonymity if they give evidence.

At least 50 individuals who say they were sexually and physically abused as children have expressed deep misgivings after Lady Smith, a judge who is chairing the Scottish child abuse inquiry, warned that organisations or individuals accused of child abuse may be told the names of their accusers.

In Care Abuse Survivors (Incas), a charity awarded core participant status at the inquiry, said about 30 people had threatened to back out, including some who have given statements but have since refused to sign them. Wellbeing Scotland, a charity fighting for core status, said about 20 victims of childhood abuse had decided against giving evidence.

Under the terms of the inquiry, Lady Smith has discretion to grant a restriction order that would preserve an individual’s anonymity. However, she has made it clear that there is “no blanket rule” and that the inquiry is legally obliged to “be fair to everyone involved”.

Amid mounting concern over the issue, campaigners met inquiry officials last week and requested that survivors are given ample warning that their name is to be released, so they can make representations and seek a restriction order under section 19 of the Inquiries Act.

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SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland

Paul Hutcheon, Investigations Editor / @paulhutcheon

SCOTLAND’s beleaguered child abuse inquiry has suffered another setback after the Government sent out a desperate appeal for staff to work on its side of the investigation.

A leaked email reveals the Government is at “serious risk” of missing a deadline set by the inquiry and warns of a “potential loss of credibility” among stakeholders.

Scottish Labour MSP Iain Gray said: “How many crises does it take before the Scottish Government gets a grip of this?”

Established in 2015, the inquiry is examining the abuse of children in care going back decades. It is currently taking evidence from people who were abused and a report is expected by late 2019.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE
Union Leader

By DAVE SOLOMON

IN THE MAD DASH to wrap up Thursday’s marathon session of the House of Representatives, Speaker Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, presided over a series of tabling motions that left questions about the fate of several bills, including the so-called “Pedophile Protection Act,” HB 106.

That bill, which requires corroborating evidence in sexual assault prosecutions, was widely considered dead on arrival in the House, yet was tabled.

As evening approached, the House still had 22 bills to deal with, and Republican leadership was growing concerned about keeping enough Republicans in their seats.

Democrats had already tried once to revive a bill on civil rights protections for transgender individuals, and would likely try again if enough Republicans left the chamber, and enough Democrats stayed behind.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press

BY ALEX SANZ AND MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina district attorney says two assistant prosecutors no longer work for him amid charges they sabotaged investigations into abuse in their secretive religious sect.

District Attorney David Learner’s Friday announcement came just two days after he asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into allegations by former Word of Faith Fellowship members against Frank Webster and Chris Back. As part of an ongoing investigation by The Associated Press, nine ex-congregants had said the men, both of them ministers of the sect, provided legal advice, helped at strategy sessions and participated in a mock trial for four congregants charged with harassing a former member.

“I cannot allow the integrity of the office to be called into question,” Learner said in a statement. “My administration is dedicated to the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice.”

The ex-congregants also said that Back and Webster, who is sect leader Jane Whaley’s son-in-law, helped disrupt a social services investigation into child abuse in 2015, and had attended meetings where Whaley warned congregants to lie to investigators about abuse incidents.

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NORTH CAROLINA
WLOS

by Frank Kracher

SPINDALE, N.C. (WLOS) —
Former members of a controversial North Carolina church gathered in Spindale on Saturday for a community meeting.

More than 100 people listened to stories of former Word of Faith Fellowship members, who consider themselves “survivors.”

They left the Rutherford County-based church because they said they’d been physically and psychologically abused.

This gathering comes after a district attorney for three counties asked the state to investigate two of his assistant prosecutors for alleged involvement in coaching defendants as part of cases against Word of Faith Fellowship. Two days after he announced the request, DA David Learner released a statement saying those two prosecutors were no longer working for him.

Those who spoke on Saturday said their parents were already members. So, as children, they had no choice to leave on their own.

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Catholic Archbishop of Tuam has called for a detailed examination of the role of the Church and the State in the running of mother and baby homes.

In a homily delivered at mass this evening, Dr Michael Neary said the Commission of Investigation must deliver clear and objective findings, no matter what the consequences for the institutions involved.

It was reported last week that “significant quantities” of human remains were discovered at the site of a former mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.

The mother and baby home was run by the Bon Secours order from 1925 to 1961.

It is the second weekend in a row that the Archbishop has used his homily to deal with the fallout from the recent update from the Commission.

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IRELAND
Dublin Live

BY CLAIRE SCOTT
11 MAR 2017

James Fenning has little memory of the years he spent in one of Ireland’s most infamous Mother and Baby Homes, The Bethany Home in Dublin.

James says part of himself doesn’t want to recall that time in his life, and he still suffers ailments that stem from the treatment he endured there.

The home, which opened in 1921 in Rathgar, subsequently moved to the Orwell Road before closing in 1972.

Many survivors claim to have suffered severe physical abuse and neglect at the hands of those who ran the notorious institution.

Its now believed up to 247 children died in Bethany Home following research carried out by survivor and author, Derek Linster.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Ciarán D’Arcy

A local historian whose research led to last week’s Tuam babies announcement says she believes there are “many mass graves” at former mother and baby homes throughout Ireland.

Catherine Corless said further remains of infants are likely to be found within the grounds of the Tuam home, and called on investigators to explore other sites.

“I think there are many mass graves around Ireland in the mother and baby homes. Tuam is the little bit worse, the fact that it was a sewage area,” she said.

The so-called “kitchen table historian” said that her interest in the topic began from an early age when “miserable”, raggedly-dressed children from the home attended her school.

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

MARCH 12, 2017

Megan Neil
Australian Associated Press

The extent of child sex abuse in the Australian Anglican Church will be laid bare as its leaders answer for what one bishop describes as a protection racket for pedophiles.

Church records on child sex abuse claims will be released as its senior leaders face the royal commission’s final Anglican hearing that begins in Sydney on Friday.

University of Sydney law professor Patrick Parkinson says there are pockets within the Anglican Church that have pretty appalling records of child abuse.

“There’s definitely pockets of real shame in the Anglican Church,” Professor Parkinson told AAP.
“What you see is an appalling history in certain parts of the Anglican Church but I don’t think it’s fair to say that that’s uniform across the Anglican Church as a whole.”

The royal commission has examined child abuse in a number of Anglican dioceses including Newcastle and Grafton, as well as a network of pedophiles in the Church of England Boys’ Society.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Ciarán D’Arcy

Independent Alliance minister John Halligan has compared child mortality rates in mother and baby homes to Nazi concentration camps.

The Waterford TD also said religious orders found guilty of criminal neglect should have their assets seized.

The Minister of State for Training and Skills said elderly nuns who worked in the homes should be interviewed as part of expected criminal investigations to be conducted by gardaí.

“Old age should not diminish accountability for any crime or alleged crime. If you bear in mind that the child mortality rate at Bessborough in 1943 was approaching 70 per cent, sure that’s similar to concentration camps,” he said.

“Are we seriously saying that because somebody is ill or aged that we shouldn’t at least interview them? If you look at what’s happened at Belsen, Auschwitz, Dachau, even up to last year individuals who are alleged to have carried out horrendous crimes in their 80s and 90s were interviewed.”

Mr Halligan was speaking to RTÉ Radio on Saturday in the wake of confirmation last week from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission that “significant quantities” of human remains found at a mother and baby home in Tuam run by the Bon Secours Sisters belonged to young infants.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Maeve Sheehan
March 12 2017

The Archbishop of Tuam has called for the probe into the scandal of mother and baby homes to be widened beyond religious orders.

Archbishop Michael Neary also apologised for the role of the Catholic church “as part of that time and society” when “particular children and their mothers were not welcomed, they were not wanted and they were not loved”.

The Archbishop delivered a homily at the Cathedral of the Assumption in Tuam yesterday, near where children’s remains were discovered on the site of what was St Mary’s mother and baby home run by the Bon Secours sisters.

Speaking yesterday, he said there is “an urgent need for an enquiry to examine all aspects of life at the time, broadening the focus from one particular religious congregation, and instead addressing the roles and interrelationships between church, State, local authorities and society generally.”

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IRELAND
Breaking News

The Archbishop of Tuam says the Mother and Baby Home inquiry should look at society in general, and not just the religious order that ran the institution.

Dr Michael Neary made the call in a homily this evening in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Tuam.

Archbishop Neary said there was an understandable sense of shared anger about what had happened in Tuam, but warned that the use of what he called “highly-charged emotive language,” may be counter-productive.

Dr Neary said he would like to see the inquiry into the Mother and Baby Home look into all aspects of life at the time, not just the Bon Secours sisters who ran the institution.

He hoped it would look at the relationships between Church, State, local authorities and society generally.

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IRELAND
The Sunday Times (UK)

Justine McCarthy
March 12 2017
The Sunday Times

The Catholic archbishop of Tuam, Micheal Neary, has called for the inquiry into mother-and-baby homes to be widened beyond “one particular religious congregation” and to look at society’s stigmatisation of single mothers.

In a homily last night, Neary said confirmation by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission that “a significant number” of remains were interred in a sewerage chamber in the grounds of the Tuam home run by the Bon Secours nuns was “deeply distressing”.

Noting that compassion and mercy had been “sorely lacking” in Irish society at the time, Neary said: “It was an era when unmarried mothers — as our society at the time labelled women who were pregnant and not married — were often judged, stigmatised and ostracised by their own community and the church, and this all happened in a harsh and unforgiving climate.”

He said this dimension of social history needed to be examined to explain what happened. “Perhaps we could begin with this fundamental question: how could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?”

Neary said there was an “urgent need” for an inquiry to examine all aspects of life at the time, broadening the focus from one particular religious congregation, and addressing the inter-relationships between church, state, local authorities and society.

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ROME
Yahoo! News

Catherine MARCIANO
AFP News
March 11, 2017

Elected in 2013 with a brief to reform a scandal-hit Vatican, Pope Francis has launched numerous initiatives but, four years later, he is still struggling to deliver real change.

As he celebrates his fourth anniversary at the head of the Catholic Church on Monday, the affable Argentine continues to bask in a remarkable level of popularity around the world thanks to his popular touch, plain speaking and his humble, modest style.

But inside the Vatican Curia there is not always the same enthusiasm for a pope who has regularly lambasted the administration that runs the global church. …

The sensitive issue of clerical sex crimes illustrated this double difficulty last week when Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins resigned from the pope’s advisory panel on the issue blaming “shameful” obstruction from within the Curia.

But some Vatican insiders say depictions of a kind of civil war in the upper echelons of the Church are wide of the mark.

“We need to get rid of this cliched idea of a reforming pope on one side and a group trying to block him on the other,” said German cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller, the head of the department targeted by Collins’ criticism.

“This simplistic idea of a good pope and a wicked Curia is dangerous for the pontiff because it can leave him isolated,” said Gianni Valente, of the specialist review Vatican Insider.

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

MARCH 12, 2017

Megan Neil
Australian Associated Press

The Pope may be retreating from his crackdown on pedophile priests as Vatican bureaucrats do all they can to undermine reform efforts, a senior Australian Catholic official has warned.

The Catholic Church in Australia could end up as a “marginalised rump” unless there is real change to an institutional culture hell-bent on self-protection and self-preservation, Truth Justice and Healing Council CEO Francis Sullivan says.

Mr Sullivan, who has led the Australian church’s response to the four-year child sex abuse royal commission, points to very disturbing recent developments in Rome including reports Pope Francis is starting to go light on some pedophile priests.

“You have to seriously wonder whether this isn’t the Pope backsliding on what has been a strong and determined crackdown on offending priests and the circumstances that allowed abuse to take place,” he said.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

The extent of child sex abuse in the Australian Anglican Church will be laid bare as its leaders answer for what one bishop describes as a protection racket for pedophiles.

Church records on child sex abuse claims will be released as its senior leaders face the royal commission’s final Anglican hearing that begins in Sydney on Friday.

University of Sydney law professor Patrick Parkinson says there are pockets within the Anglican Church that have pretty appalling records of child abuse.

‘There’s definitely pockets of real shame in the Anglican Church,’ Professor Parkinson told AAP.

‘What you see is an appalling history in certain parts of the Anglican Church but I don’t think it’s fair to say that that’s uniform across the Anglican Church as a whole.’

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Democrat

Editorial

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown this past week pledged to tighten guidelines for dealing with priests accused of sexual abuse, and to have an outside committee provide oversight for the welfare of children.

How tragic that the church – any church – must take steps to protect innocent children from the clutches of pedophiles disguised as men of God.

However, we concur with child victim and now advocate and businessman Shaun Dougherty of Johnstown: This is “a great first step” in the push to protect children.

But the effort announced by Bishop Mark Bartchak must be just the beginning in a parade of actions that will not only embrace potential victims in a net of safety, but also will provide comfort and justice for those who have been victimized through the years.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Editorial

In a State apology to the women of the Magdalene laundries in 2013, Enda Kenny said that just as the State had accepted its direct involvement, society too had its responsibility to bear. He believed that he spoke for all when he said that we had put away these women “because for too many years we put away our conscience”. People, he said, swapped personal scruples for a solid public apparatus that kept them in tune and in step with a sense of what was ‘proper behaviour’ or the ‘appropriate view’ according to a moral code that was fostered at the time, particularly in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. “We lived with the damaging idea that what was desirable and acceptable in the eyes of the Church and the State was the same and interchangeable,” he said.

The recent discovery of a significant number of remains at what was a mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway, and the grim expectation that further finds will follow at other such homes around the country, is the latest unfolding in the same story which was not unknown then, but was deeply hidden, buried if you like, in the secret chambers of the nation’s often cruel and twisted heart. We are reminded of a scene from Tom Murphy’s extraordinary play Bailegangaire. “Another story,” protests Mary when Dolly plans to explain away an “illegitimate” child: “Oh the saga will go on.”

The saga is ongoing until the full truth is known, if never quite fully reconciled. In that sense, Murphy’s play is a profound part of the national narrative, in the words of Mommo, which has become a litany of “misfortunes”, of “fields haunted by infants”, which made for grim if unspoken news then and it does now, with an essential difference in this so-called modern Ireland, which is that it must be spoken of loudly, and then louder still.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Jim Cusack
March 12 2017

A new programme to train gardai in interviewing child sexual abuse victims has been introduced following repeated instances of cases taking up to six years to prosecute.

Last October it was revealed that the case of an eight-year-old girl allegedly raped by a teenage boy during a party at her home was left languishing in the Garda’s system for six years before it was finally dropped.

Various failures were highlighted by a Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) investigation into the case of ‘Miss A’ who was attacked at her home in July 2008.

The case was initially investigated and was “almost complete” within a month but then left for six years owing to a “systems failure'” GSOC concluded. The prosecution was then dropped.

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INDIA
The New Indian Express

By Ajay Kanth | Express News Service | Published: 12th March 2017

KOZHIKODE: A spurt in child sexual abuse cases was recorded for the period February- March 2017. “It’s an anomaly”. “Blame poor policing”. “The numbers are inflated”. This was the common refrain that echoed from the pulpit of newsrooms and through screaming headlines.

Sadly, reality lies somewhere far away. The spurt in abuse cases cannot be bracketed to a particular period or month or shrugged off as a ‘rare phenomenon’. It is unequivocally a sickening trend prevailing in Kerala right from 2013.

Ever since the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) came into being, sexual offences of all nature against children were registered under this Act. Data with police reveals the number of POCSO cases have been on the rise since 2013.

Even if we analyse the number of cases in the first quarter of each year between 2013 and 2017, we could see a steady spike in cases registered between January and March. Senior police officers said the scenario in Kerala has been really disturbing for the last couple of years and the sudden hype in the media is the fallout of a campaign unleashed by people with vested interests.

“The Kottiyoor rape incident involving a priest has triggered a chain reaction. And catching on the trend, details of other cases started hogging the media limelight.

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UNITED STATES
Crux

Catholic News Service March 11, 2017
CONTRIBUTOR

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Catholic News Service asked Father Michael Fuller, executive director of the Secretariat of Doctrine and Canonical Affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to explain the difference between3. Why do some people suggest that not being married might be a cause for child sexual abuse? ,,,

3. Why do some people suggest that not being married might be a cause for child sexual abuse?

This is a difficult one, and must first be answered by the fact that studies conclude that there is no link between celibacy and child sexual abuse. For thousands of years, and in many different religious traditions, celibacy has been practiced and has not been a cause for child sexual abuse. In our times, people have a great difficulty in thinking anyone could live a life of celibacy (even with the countless number of people who do) and so they think that there must be a link between the two.

Our culture today is oversexualized, which has led us to think that sexual relationships are something unreasonable or unnatural to forgo, and so when there is a crisis such as child sexual abuse, people believe there is a link, when of course, there is not one. Sadly, child sexual abuse is all too common, and involves abusers from all walks of life and it is something that should never happen. One good that has come out of this crisis is the growing awareness of this terrible abuse, which is leading to better means of prevention. celibacy and chastisty, a promise and a vow.

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GHANA
GhanaWeb

The lawyer for Bishop Daniel Obinim has accused the complainant in the case in which the bishop has been charged for abusing two teenagers of being an opportunist.

At yesterday’s hearing at the Accra Circuit Court, Lawyer Raphael Poku Adusei claimed the complainant, Ms Irene Abochie-Nyahe, was seeking fame and an opportunity to advance her legal career.

He further submitted that the complainant and her organisation, known as Legal Assistance Network Ghana, wanted to ride on the back of the popularity of Bishop Obinim to attract media attention.

“Your motivation in this case is to be popular in order to advertise your services to the public. You also want to make yourself relevant in the legal profession,’’ he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Pat Leahy

The agreement between the State and the country’s religious orders has been repeatedly questioned since it came to light in the months after it was agreed in 2002.

Minister for Education Richard Bruton said on Friday that “moral pressure” will be applied on the orders, in a bid to persuade them to contribute more of the cost of compensating abuse victims.

Experience, however, suggests that the prospects for translating moral pressure into hard cash are mixed at best.

Legally, the 2002 deal it is rock solid. There is no unpicking it; that much is clear.

What is much less clear is why the State agreed it in the first place.

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Tribune-Democrat

By Dave Sutor
dsutor@tribdem.com

Children – and the adults they eventually become – are obviously the individuals most directly affected when a pedophile religious leader commits a sexual assault.

But they often do not suffer alone.

Family members and friends watch their loved ones wrestle with substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anti-authority anger and self-destructive inter-personal relationships – while often not even knowing the root cause of their emotional struggles.

Helping victims interact with those closest to them – in order to create stronger relationships – is part of the mission being carried out by the newly formed Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests that was founded by John Nesbella and Thomas Venditti.

“We keep talking about the victim – like me, as a victim,” said Shaun Dougherty, a SNAP supporter from Johnstown. “Well, there’s a whole circle around me that’s also affected by this. My family’s been affected by this. My friends have been affected by this. Past jobs have been affected by this. Past relationships have been affected by this.”

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NEW YORK
Road to Recovery

Discovery of “mass baby grave” behind nuns’ convent and residence for women and babies in Tuam, Galway, Ireland, demands a reassessment of the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations throughout the world, especially in New York City

The New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee has rejected a request by Road to Recovery, Inc., to enter a contingent of marchers in the March 17, 2017, parade in order to honor the deceased babies who were recently found in a mass grave in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland

Parade President and Director, Dr. John Lahey, and New York Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan must honor and reverence the deceased babies of Galway and all of Ireland by asking marchers and others to demonstrate their sadness and horror with a gesture of solidarity (such as wearing black armbands) and ordering Catholic parishes and institutions to schedule memorial services

What
A gathering of abuse survivors, advocates, concerned Catholics, and the general public to memorialize and reverence the deceased babies, toddlers, and infants from the “mass grave” uncovered behind the Bon Secours sisters’ home and convent in County Galway, Ireland, and to call on St. Patrick’s Parade Committee President and Director, Dr. John Lahey, and Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan to ask marchers to express their solidarity with the deceased babies and their families with an outward gesture or ritual which respects and memorializes the deceased children and their families

When
Sunday, March 12, 2017 at from 10:00 AM until Noon

Where
On the public sidewalk outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue and East 50th Street, Manhattan, NYC, 10022

Who
Members of Road to Recovery, Inc., a non-profit charity that assists victims of sexual abuse and their families, including its co-founder and President, Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D.; victim/survivors of clergy and religious sexual abuse; concerned Catholics and citizens

Why
The recent unearthing of what officials called “significant quantities of human remains” in a mass grave located behind the former St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland, is horrific, outrageous, and unacceptable. Further disturbing information indicated that the remains were located in a chamber that was part of or very near to a septic tank. It is believed that the remains of upwards of 8,000 babies will be uncovered in mass graves located at Catholic facilities for women and babies throughout Ireland. In light of this astounding and troubling information, clergy and religious abuse victims and their supporters will call upon leaders of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City, the largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in the world, to “tone down” the 2017 parade celebration by expressing their compassion for the victims and their families through a public gesture during the parade and recommending the scheduling of memorial services in Catholic parishes and institutions throughout the Archdiocese of New York and the United States of America.

Contact
Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., Road to Recovery, Inc. – 862-368-2800 – roberthoatson@gmail.com

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ITALIA
Il Giornale Italiano

[Taranto. Bride and priest are caught making love before her marriage to boyfriend Massimo. She had been in a relationship with the priest for two years. The shouts could be heard up to inside the church.]

Alla fine non gli è rimasto altro che confessare, queste le parole di Roberta fidanzata da 10 anni con Massimo e beccata da quest’ultimo, pochi minuti prima delle nozze, mentre faceva l’amore con il parroco che avrebbe dovuto sposarli: “Ho avuto una relazione con Padre Giuseppe (ndr: tutti i nomi che usiamo sono di fantasia, i protagonisti hanno chiesto di non divulgare le loro identità) per due anni, lui mi capisce come nessuno, io lo amo ma lui ama Dio”

La storia di Padre Giuseppe non è l’unica a scuotere il mondo della Chiesa in questo ultimo periodo. Claudia, che ha raccontato di avere avuto una relazione con un prete per ben due anni. La relazione è iniziata gradualmente. La donna aveva appena litigato con il suo futuro marito e il suo rapporto stava passando un periodo di profonda crisi. Aveva così trovato un supporto nel suo sacerdote che all’inizio la consolava con teneri abbracci. Ma questi, con il passare del tempo, sono diventati sempre più profondi e alla fine si sono trasformati in rapporti completi.

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IRELAND
Clare Champion

KILRUSH historian Rita McCarthy, who investigated the operation of the County Clare Nursery on the Cooraclare road in the town, believes it is unlikely that any babies are buried on or close to the site.

It follows revelations of the discovery of human remains at the site of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway.

The nursery in Kilrush is one of the mother and baby homes nationwide that is part of the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation, which was established on February 17, 2015 and is chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy. The home in Kilrush was operated by Clare County Council from 1922-1932.

Ms McCarthy told The Clare Champion that she could not yet reveal details of her contribution to the report, which is likely to be published in 2018.

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IRELAND
IrishCentral

796 babies and toddlers died in the Tuam Mother and Baby home between the years of 1925 and 1960, after horrific neglect and lack of basic care. The home was run by the Bon Secours sisters. The name Bon Secours means “Good Help,” the very opposite of what was provided.

Now we are publishing all their names, those tiny humans whose lives were not worth a piece of dirt to those charged with caring for them, or to the men who fathered and abandoned them. By naming we wish to give them a moment of recognition, no longer just a name on a death certificate.

The sentiment towards the out of wedlock kids was best summarized by a medical doctor:

“A great many people are always asking what is the good of keeping these children alive? I quite agree that it would be a great deal kinder to strangle these children at birth than to put them out to nurse.” — Doctor Ella Webb, June 18, 1924, speaking about illegitimate children in care in Ireland at the time

Elaine Byrne, a columnist with the Sunday Business Post in Ireland, discovered the quote above as she researched how up to 800 children were allowed to die by the Bon Secours sisters in Tuam, County Galway.

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GUAM
The Guam Daily Post

Mindy Aguon | For The Guam Daily Post

Two lawsuits filed in the Superior Court last week not only seek monetary damages determined during a jury trial, but a court order imposing a number of conditions on the Archdiocese of Agana and the Boy Scouts of America to prevent sexual abuse from happening.

Attorney Anthony C. Perez and off-island law firms James, Vernon & Weeks and Rosenberg McKay Hoffman represent two clients who came forward alleging they were repeatedly sexually abused by former San Isidro Catholic Church priest, Father Louis Brouillard, in the 1970s.

Anthony Ray Mantanona and Michael Chargualaf, through their attorneys, have asked for an unspecified amount of monetary damages for the gross negligence of the two entities as well as the severe and permanent injuries, emotional distress and mental anguish caused by the abuse to be determined during a jury trial.

Ensuring the protection of future children

The lawsuits also seek equitable relief asking the court to order the Archdiocese of Agana and the Boy Scouts of America to do the following:

* Post on the home page of their websites, the names of all known members of the Archdiocese and Boy Scouts of America who are identified in the complaint or are otherwise known as sexual abusers;
* Establish a toll-free number and website where anonymous abuse complaints can be made;
* Adopt a whistleblower policy concerning the method by which a report concerning abuse within the Archdiocese and Boy Scouts of America can be made;
* Make the archbishop or bishop on Guam available upon reasonable notice to have a private conference with any survivor of sexual abuse perpetrated by a priest, educational, religious or other agent of the Archdiocese;
* Send letters of apology to the plaintiff taking responsibility for the abuse; and
* Ensure any future settlement related to sexual abuse entered into by the Archdiocese and Boy Scouts of America does not contain any confidentiality provision except at the written request of the abuse victim.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Times-Tribune

BY PETER CAMERON, STAFF WRITER / PUBLISHED: MARCH 11, 2017

A New Jersey priest who kept a Wayne County apartment he called his “day off place” pleaded guilty Friday to downloading child pornography there.

The Rev. Kevin A. Gugliotta, 55, of Mahwah, New Jersey, pleaded guilty to dissemination of photos/film of child sex acts, a felony, Wayne County District Attorney Janine Edwards announced Friday.

He faces a maximum of seven years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 8. The priest remains locked up in the Wayne County Correctional Facility.

Law enforcement officers arrested the priest in October. He downloaded child pornography, then uploaded files on 20 separate occasions to the website chatstep.com in the summer of 2016 from his apartment at 108 Third St., Gouldsboro, in Lehigh Twp., Edwards said.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Colm Keena

The Christian Brothers rejected a Government proposal that playing fields associated with their schools be transferred to a trust they had established but with the proviso that they could not be sold without the State’s permission.

It emerged on Thursday that a 2009 proposal from the congregation, made in the wake of the Ryan Report on abuse in religious run institutions, had been withdrawn in 2015.

The 2009 offer was for the transfer of playing fields that had an estimated value at the time of €127 million.

The congregation’s offer was that the land be placed in a joint trust established by the State and the Edmund Rice Schools Trust (ERST), a body established in 2008 by the brothers and into which schools with a value of €400 million have been settled.

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AUSTRALIA
The Courier

Melissa Cunningham
@MeljCunningham

11 Mar 2017

Rob Walsh’s soul has been broken.

His brothers Damien and Noel Walsh, and cousin Martin Walsh were all sexually abused by Catholic Clergy.

In the years following, each of them suicided.

“The church destroyed my family unit, it broke our souls,” he says his eyes filling up with tears.

“I was once told you could break a man and you can. But how do you put that man back together?”

Noel, 19, died in a single car crash which Mr Walsh later determined by talking to police and doctors was suicide.

Martin suicided at the age of 22, shortly after finishing his carpentry apprenticeship.

Damien was 46 when he was found dead in his garage.

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ITALY
AOL

[with video]

Byline: Patrick Baldwin

Some sex scandals are popping up in the Pope’s backyard. There are claims of orgies, prostitution, and porn in some Italian parishes. This all comes out as Pope Francis is demanding higher standards for men of the cloth.

In Naples, one priest is suspended. The story is that he may have hosted orgies and hired prostitutes online.

Then in the northern city of Padua, a priest could be defrock for what looks to be his swinging lifestyle. One report says he had up to 30 lovers.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Times

Sean O’Neil, Chief Reporter
March 11 2017
The Times

Britain’s largest public inquiry could seek access to the royal archives after hearing evidence that they hold material relevant to investigations into child abuse cover-ups.

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) — which has declared that “no one, no matter how apparently powerful, will be allowed to obstruct our inquiries” — believes that the archives contain evidence about Fairbridge, a charity with high-level royal connections which was heavily involved in child migration schemes.

Thousands of children suffered harsh physical punishment and sexual assaults at remote farm schools run by Fairbridge in Western Australia, which were visited by members of the royal family.

Documents disclosed at the inquiry show that Queen Elizabeth, mother of the present Queen, intervened in 1951 in the case of a woman seeking the return of her foster daughter from Fairbridge. Missing links in the chain of correspondence are believed to be in the royal archives at Windsor.

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IRELAND
The Journal

LAST TUESDAY IN Leader’s questions, Enda Kenny said, “no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care”.

After numerous reports since the 90s, after the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, the McAleese Report, and the subsequent redress schemes, this is what the Taoiseach had to contribute around the deplorable events that are being uncovered.

The Taoiseach and various other high profile government politicians have made similar remarks in relation to the financial crisis, and the subsequent recession in Ireland, that it was our fault that we partied too hard.

Here, we have it all over again: it’s our fault that children were incarcerated in these institutions.
Revisionism of our horrible history

Not only is this statement a complete revisionism of our very recent murky history of institutionalised welfare, but it completely lets the Catholic Church and the state off the hook.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Olivia Kelleher

The true picture of what happened in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork may be difficult to hear but it needs to come out, the Bishop of Cloyne, William Crean said yesterday.

In an interview with Cork’s Red FM, Dr Crean said the story of what happened at the home should be told.

“This is part of our national story in the 20th century. It is only unfolding slowly. The truth may be very difficult. But it is best we have the truth in relation to it,” he said.

In 1922 the Sacred Heart Home in Bessborough, Co Cork, managed by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, was opened. Similar homes were set up by them in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, and Castlepollard, Co Westmeath, in the 1930s.

Following the discovery of human remains in a mass grave on the grounds of the mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway, there have been calls for similar investigations to take place in other facilities. The Mother and Baby Homes Commission says there is no decision to carry out any excavations at Bessborough.

June Goulding, a midwife who worked at Bessborough from 1951, described conditions there in The Light in the Window.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY DARAGH SMALL
11 MAR 2017

A woman told a protest on Friday night that she could have been one of the Tuam cess pit babies.

Speaking at the Bon Secours Hospital in Galway, Bernie Kerridge, 59, said her turmoil extends far beyond last Friday when the nation learned of the extent of the tragedy.

The grim discovery of 796 infants dumped in a septic tank at the former mother and baby home in Co Galway was confirmed last week.

Born in 1957, Bernie lived at the hellhole for 11 months before her adoption and her mother was sent to the US.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Saturday, March 11, 2017

By Noel Baker
Senior Reporter

Minister for Children Katherine Zappone says she will know within weeks how a proposed broadening of the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes will look, as she noted: “The dead do not lie.”

Her pledge to widen the scope of the terms of reference of the inquiry came as her ministerial colleague John Halligan said old age should not diminish accountability in the Tuam mother and baby home scandal, arguing that any surviving Bon Secours nuns who ever worked at the home should be questioned by gardaí.

Ms Zappone said she has seen grown men cry in her presence in recent weeks regarding revelations from the past, as she suggested a way could be found that would entitle survivors of abuse — not just those who were resident in mother and baby homes — to tell their stories.

Appearing on Today with Sean O’Rourke on RTÉ radio, she said the country is trying to come to terms with “a really dark period in our history” and she wants to explore options regarding the terms of reference.

“It will be a number of weeks, I expect,” said Ms Zappone of the likely timeframe in deciding on a model, having previously cited tribunals and commissions in South Africa, Argentina, and Chile.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Saturday, March 11, 2017

By Conall Ó Fátharta
Irish Examiner Reporter

The Tuam mother and baby home should not be treated as an individual scandal, but as part of a national trafficking network that commodified people, says Conall Ó Fátharta.

“This may prove to be a scandal that dwarfs other, more recent issues with the Church and State…”

There’s that word, “scandal”, again. As a nation, we don’t tire of hearing it.

That time it was used by senior management in the HSE, in 2012, in relation to the contents of an archive of the Tuam mother and baby home, two years before the Tuam babies scandal broke. It wasn’t the first time the word was used in relation to mother and baby homes and the horrors they hold.

Seventy years earlier, the same word was used by parliamentary secretary to the then minister for local government and public health, Dr Con Ward, in relation to an 82% infant death rate at the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home. That rate had been reported to state inspectors.

Two things are instructive. Not only has the State known for decades about this issue, but it is impossible to look at Tuam, or mother and baby homes, in isolation. Yet, that is exactly how this issue is playing out.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Eilish O’Regan
March 11 2017

Peter Mulryan (73) discovered he had a sister only two years ago – and now his greatest wish is that she is still alive so they can make up for decades of lost time.

Mr Mulryan, from Derrymullen in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, is now ill with cancer and said he had no access to files about Marian Bridget Mulryan.

It is thanks to Catherine Corless, the Tuam historian, that he found out his sister was listed among those who had died at just nine months of age and was buried in the nearby grounds.

He has a birth record, a death certificate and the cause of death, convulsions.

But because the records are so unreliable he clings to the hope that she may have been adopted and that is why he desperately needs to see her file.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Shane Phelan
March 11 2017

The religious order at the centre of the Tuam babies burial scandal has been paid €43.5m over the past 10 years by the private hospital group it runs.

Accounts for Bon Secours Health System Ltd reveal the payments were made to Bon Secours Sisters Ireland in respect of the leasing of buildings and interest on loans advanced by the order.

The payments mean that, unlike many other religious orders in Ireland, the Bon Secours Sisters are in rude financial health.

However, the order has refused to say what it does with the money paid to it by the hospital group.

Its finances have come under sharp focus in recent days, with calls made in the Dáil and the Seanad for the order’s resources to be made available to survivors of the Tuam home and relatives of those who died.

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IRELAND
Irish Sun

Our columnist Rebecca also gives her guide to the IFTAs and those who took to the streets on International Women’s Day to protest the 8th Amendment

By Rebecca Barker
11th March 2017

THE empty plot belies the truth of the horrors it hides.

Situated quietly in humdrum suburbia, the former site of the Bon Secours Sisters home for unmarried mothers was officially exposed as a mass grave for babies this week.

A single plaque on the wall outside reveals the heartbreak of the local community in Tuam, horrified at the tragedies that once unfolded in their midst.

This week, the results of the excavation dig at the Galway site were finally made available by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation — and it revealed that up to 800 babies were buried there from 1925 to 1961.

The dig report makes for uncomfortable reading. It reveals “significant quantities of human remains aged from 35 foetal weeks to three years” were discovered in what appeared to be a septic tank at the State-funded, Church-run home. Although the institution was demolished in the 1970s, it was only the tireless work of locals such as historian Catherine Corless who brought the mass grave to the attention of the world.

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IRELAND
Crux

Charles Collins March 10, 2017
EDITOR

The Vatican’s representative to Ireland, New York native Archbishop Charles Brown, is being transferred to Albania after five years of service. He is credited with repairing the relationship between the two states after the leader of the Irish government accused the Vatican of ‘dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism’ after revelations of clerical sexual abuse.

ROME – The Vatican’s representative to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown, is being transferred to Albania after five years of mending ties between the two states.

It’s hard to overestimate the intensity of the crisis that gripped Vatican-Ireland relations when Pope Benedict XVI appointed Brown, then an official at the Vatican’s doctrine office, to the post in 2012.

Michael Kelly, the editor of The Irish Catholic weekly newspaper, told Crux diplomatic ties at the time were “at an all-time low.”

The previous Vatican ambassador to the country, Italian Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, had been accused by the government of not cooperating with official investigations into the clerical sexual abuse of children. In 2011, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny famously told the nation’s parliament this showed the “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”

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