ABUSE TRACKER

ILLINOIS
America

Judith Valente
March 09, 2017

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke has a message for Vatican overseers of clergy sex abuse cases: make all clergy abuse oversight boards lay members only.

Mrs. Burke, who is from Chicago, was an interim chair of the National Review Board that investigated allegations of clergy sexual abuse in the United States and oversaw church compliance with reforms called for in the bishops’ Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Commenting on the resignation earlier this month of Marie Collins, the only clergy abuse survivor serving on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, she said, “Why would you do something so drastic as step down? It is because you have been so frustrated.”

Ms. Collins, who is from Ireland, resigned in protest, citing a “lack of cooperation” on the part of the Roman curia. Ms. Collins reportedly was concerned that Vatican officials were not responding to letters from sex abuse victims and were blocking efforts to censure bishops who failed to respond adequately to abuse allegations.

According to Mrs. Burke, Ms. Collins’ complaints “mirror” concerns she and other members of the National Review Board raised in the early years of the abuse scandal. “The whole thing spoke to me of ‘nothing’s changed.’”

Mrs. Burke said she was not opposed to clergy serving as liaisons to sex abuse review boards, but that decision-making should rest with lay members who have the independence to investigate and issue findings and recommendations.

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NORTH CAROLINA
WFAE

[with audio]

By GREG COLLARD & THE ASSOCIATED PRESS • 13 HOURS AGO

Two prosecutors are gone from the Catawba County District Attorney’s office following allegations that they derailed criminal investigations into abuse by leaders of a church they attend.

In announcing the shakeup, District Attorney David Learner says he “cannot allow the integrity of the office to be called into question.”

The move comes after the Associated Press reported that nine former members of a church in Spindale called “Word of Faith Fellowship” said that assistant prosecutors Frank Webster and Chris Back helped derail a social services investigation into child abuse in 2015. They also said Whaley warned congregants to lie to investigators about abuse incidents.

In addition, the ex-members said that Webster and Back provided legal advice and participated in a mock trial of four church members charged with harassing a former church member. Webster is the son-in-law of Word of Faith’s leader, Jane Whaley.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Longview News-Journal

By Mitch Weiss and Jeffery Collins
March 11, 2017

A district attorney has asked the state to investigate two assistant prosecutors after an Associated Press story that quoted former congregants of a North Carolina church as saying the men derailed criminal probes into allegations of abuse by sect leaders.

David Learner said Wednesday that he wants the State Bureau of Investigation to look into the accusations against his employees, who are members of the evangelical Word of Faith Fellowship church.

The AP story, released Monday, cited nine former Word of Faith members who said Frank Webster and Chris Back provided legal advice, helped at strategy sessions and participated in a mock trial for four congregants charged with harassing a former member.

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

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NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press

BY MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — It was the most dreaded place on the Word of Faith Fellowship grounds – a one-story, four-room structure that former members of the sect say was reserved for the most brutal physical and emotional punishment.

Called the Lower Building, the former storage facility was used to house those deemed to be the worst sinners, according to Associated Press interviews with 43 former members of the evangelical church.

And it was there, tucked away in a wooded area behind the sect’s sanctuary, that the beatings were especially prolonged, violent and often focused on sexual behavior, according to many of those speaking out.

Former members recounted dozens of vicious assaults, including one in which a mentally handicapped man was repeatedly punched in his face as he begged for help. Those interviewed also recalled elementary school-age boys placed in the make-shift penitentiary with teens and adults – and felons from the church’s prison ministry.

“No one wanted to be sent to the Lower Building. No one,” said Rick Cooper, 61, who said he was held captive there for a year. “It was a prison without bars.”

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NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press

BY MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — She looks like a successful businesswoman, with her neatly coifed blonde hair, St. John business suit, flashy diamond rings and jewelry dangling from her wrist. And she has devoted followers – an entourage – that hang on her every word and carry out her orders without question.

But Jane Whaley isn’t the chief executive officer of a large corporation. Instead, she’s the 77-year-old leader of a 750-member evangelical church called Word of Faith Fellowship – one that dozens of former members say encourages congregants to violently attack family and friends to beat out imaginary devils they believe are destroying their lives.

So who is Jane Whaley?

Her father owned a plumbing repair company, and her mother was a homemaker. She had two brothers and grew up in a rural North Carolina community in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains during the heart of the Jim Crow era.

After graduating from college, she taught math at a high school and met a deeply religious man from Florence, South Carolina, who would become her husband: Sam Whaley. They had one child and, in the mid-1970s, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, so her husband could attend a Bible school. They also traveled the world, preaching the “word of God,” friends said.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press

BY MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — When it comes to relationships, marriage and sex, Word of Faith Fellowship members must follow strict and unusual rules – or risk severe punishment, former members say.

Some of the edicts:

– Congregants need permission from leader Jane Whaley and other ministers to get married, and it then can take months – or even a year – before the newlyweds are allowed to have sex.

– No one is allowed to date without permission, and most relationships and marriages are arranged by Whaley and ministers.

– On their wedding night, couples are permitted only a “godly peck on the cheek.” When they get in bed together, they must roll over and go to sleep.

– For all married couples, love-making is limited to 30 minutes, no foreplay is allowed, the lights must be turned off and only the missionary position is sanctioned.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press

BY MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — Newcomers to the Word of Faith Fellowship live by a list of strict rules for daily life, which sect leader Jane Whaley says God revealed to her, former members say. They include:

– Followers are banned from celebrating birthdays and religious or secular holidays, including Christmas, Easter and the Fourth of July.

– Congregants are prohibited from watching television and movies, reading newspapers, or eating in restaurants that play music or serve alcohol.

– Men and women must swim with shirts covering their upper bodies and cannot take the extra clothing off in public – not even in their own backyards.

– Men cannot grow beards.

– Followers are not allowed to enroll in college without permission and, if permission is granted, can attend only alongside other members so their behavior can be monitored. Whaley also picks their majors, and they must work for the church or a business owned by church leaders once they leave school.

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NORTH CAROLINA
WSPA

By Brianna Smith
Published: March 8, 2017

The Burke County District Attorney has asked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations to investigate abuse claims and allegations listed in an Associated Press Article against a Western North Carolina church.

For 18 months, the Associated Press investigated the Word of Faith Fellowship church in Spindale, North Carolina. The reporters talked to 43 members who had left the church, who described years of mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

In a second article, the Associated Press outlined potential cover ups by two employees of the Burke County District Attorney’s Office, Chris Beck and Frank Webster. Both Back and Webster are ministers within the WFF church.

The article detailed that Back and Webster provided legal advice, helped at strategy sessions and participated in a mock trial for four congregants charged with harassing a former member.

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NORTH CAROLINA
WSPA

NEWTON, NC – Two assistant attorneys for North Carolina’s 25 District are no longer working there after an Associated Press investigation outlined potential cover ups of abuse allegations against the Word of Faith Fellowship Church in Spindale.

The news comes after District Attorney David Learner asked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations to investigate the allegations listed in the article.

“On Monday, March 6, The Associated Press released a story containing allegations against two Assistant District Attorneys employed by me in the 25th Judicial District. On Tuesday, March 7, I requested that the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into The Associated Press allegations.”

The attorneys are Assistant District Attorney Frank Webster and Assistant District Attorney Chris Back.

Both men are ministers within the church, according to the Associated Press.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Journal (Ireland)

A FORMER VICAR who abused a choir boy in the UK more than 35 years ago has been jailed for four years today, after his victim gave evidence using eye-tracking technology that turned his blinks into words.

At Bournemouth Crown Court today, 78-year-old Cyril Rowe was found guilty of three counts of indecent assault, which took place at a church in Tower Hamlets, East London, between 1979 and 1981.

The 47-year-old victim, who was only a child at the time the assaults took place, was now suffering from motor neurone disease.

His failing health meant that he could not speak or write.

Despite this, with the help of an intermediary and eye-tracking technology which monitored his blinking, the court heard descriptions from the victim on how Rowe would lock the church door, pin him down and sexually abuse him before apologising and giving him £1.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Mirror

BY ABIGAIL O’LEARY
10 MAR 2017

An ex-vicar has been jailed for sexual abuse of a choirboy after a disabled victim gave evidence using eye-tracking technology for the first time in British legal history.

Victim Michael Kelsick gave evidence to the court from a hospice by blinking when asked questions.

Sadly, Michael died of motor neurone disease in a hospice before hearing his 78-year-old abuser had been found guilty.

Cyril Rowe was sentenced to four years at Bournemouth Crown Court after being convicted of three counts of indecent assault at a Tower Hamlets church in the late 1970s.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY JAMES WARD
10 MAR 2017

Education Minister Richard Bruton said he will pile “moral pressure” on Church groups to see out their side of the child abuse redress scheme.

Figures released on Thursday showed that the 18 Catholic organisations concerned with the €1.6 billion compensation scheme for survivors have paid just 13% of the amount.

Under a 2002 deal struck by Fianna Fail, the Church and State agreed to a 50:50 shouldering of the responsibility – but so far religious groups have forked out only €209 million of an anticipated €760m.

That deal exonerated the Church from any court action being taken against them, but Minister Bruton insists they must deliver on their promises.

He said: “There is an issue here about taking responsibility. These were institutions where sexual abuse was endemic.

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IRELAND
BBC News

Irish religious orders have defended their contribution towards compensating abuse victims, after a report said millions of euros are yet to be paid.

A financial redress scheme was set up after a 2009 inquiry into the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children in Catholic-run schools and homes.

The cost of the inquiry and redress is estimated at 1.5bn euros (£1.3bn).

Catholic orders agreed to pay almost one quarter of the bill, but an audit report said they have paid only 13%.

Two orders who promised to pay the most – the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers – have fallen short by tens of millions of euros, according to the report.

But the brothers said the figures were out of date while the nuns said the audit did not take account of the fall in the value of properties they sold to meet the bill.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
The Irish News

ALLISON MORRIS
11 March, 2017

A CAMPAIGNER for victims of State and Church child abuse has said many are in “dangerously, deep despair” over the political crisis which is delaying the implementation of recommendations made in the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) report, published earlier this year.

The HIA investigated physical, emotional and sexual abuse between 1922 and 1995 and found systemic wrongdoing at most of the 22 homes it considered.

Margaret McGuckin, of Savia (Survivors and Victims of Institutional Abuse) said some elderly victims now regretting taking part in the lengthy inquiry, feeling they “relived the trauma” of their childhood only to be let down by the current political impasse.

Recommendations for redress, made by retired judge Sir Anthony Hart, included financial compensation of up to £100,000 that would be paid partly by the Stormont Executive and partly by the Church or organisations responsible for running the institutions named in the report.

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UNITED STATES
The Guardian (UK)

Sophia Tewa
Saturday 11 March 2017

Of his eight siblings, Michael Young was the most zealous street missionary. As a child growing up in Monterrey, Mexico, he preached up to 10 hours a day, three to four days each week. He spoke to strangers on the streets and often went door-to-door. He’d ask them, in broken Spanish, if they wished to go to heaven. If they said yes, he would pray for them. If they said no, he would ask for at least a donation to The Family International, a church formerly known as the sex cult The Children of God.

Young’s parents, devout American missionaries who moved to Mexico in 1998, told him that such work was his destiny and duty. The alternative was an afterlife spent in the slums of heaven, a place only slightly better than hell.

When he was eight years old, in 2000, Young’s family moved to Texas and started their missionary work anew in mini-malls and Walmart parking lots, handing out theological tracts about the imminent apocalypse that would soon wipe out the unbelievers.

Young says he was happy. “I was spiritual in a way that was kind of very obsessive and very determined,” he says.

But Young was unaware that his parents’ church was labelled as a sect by the FBI and hounded by child abuse allegations. In a 1974 report, The New York attorney general’s office had also called the Children of God a “cult”. The group’s practices drew investigations from the FBI and Interpol, which were on the hunt for its leader, David Berg. One anonymous informant spoke of rape, incarceration, kidnapping and incest inside the group.

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CANADA
Ottawa Sun

ANDREW DUFFY

FIRST POSTED: FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2017

Ottawa police have laid four new charges against a retired Catholic priest in connection with alleged sexual assaults at two local churches in the 1960s.

Rev. Barry McGrory, 82, has been charged with two counts of indecent assault on a male, and two counts of gross indecency.

The incidents — two complainants are involved — are alleged to have occurred at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Alta Vista Drive, and St. Philip Parish in Richmond.

McGrory was first arrested in November in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy in the 1960s.
A pre-trial conference is scheduled for later this month on those charges.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Independent

Harriet Agerholm @HarrietAgerholm

A retired vicar who abused a choirboy more than 35 years ago has been jailed for four years after his victim gave evidence through eye-tracking technology that translated his blinks into words.

Cyril Ashton Rowe, 78, was convicted at Bournemouth Crown Court in February of three counts of indecent assault against the same victim between 1979 and 1981. He was sentenced at the same court to four years in prison.

His victim – who was abused between the ages of nine and 11 – died of motor neurone disease on the day the verdict was returned.

He died before he could be informed of the jury’s conclusion, although he had achieved his dying wish of giving evidence against Rowe, the Crown Prosecution service said in a statement

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ROME
Catholic Culture

March 10, 2017

A member of the Pope’s special commission on sexual abuse has indicated that it is an open question how Chuch leaders will respond to the problem.

In an interview with Katholisch.de, Father Hans Zollner said: “The question remains if those responsible in the Church will actively pursue the topic out of self-motivation, or only when scandals become public.”

The Jesuit priest was reacting to the resignation of another commission member, Marie Collins, who had complained that the group’s work has been thwarted by resistance from the Roman Curia. Father Zollner said that although he did not think the Curia in particular were opposed to the commission’s work, he did find that Church officials generally find the topic “deeply terrible and frightening.”

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Editorial

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

It has been a harrowing week. The images that haunt us are of the bodies of hundreds of babies and toddlers buried in a dishonoured grave in the mother and baby home in Tuam, of “Grace” and other children with disabilities suffering years of abuse in a so-called foster home in the southeast, of three beautiful little children and a young mother consumed in an accidental blaze at a facility for victims of domestic violence in Dublin.

Each of these stories is distressing enough in itself. Coming at the same time, though, they are even more disturbing. For they strip away a layer of illusion with which we have comforted ourselves when confronted with dark truths about our society’s appalling treatment of vulnerable and marginalised children: that was then, this is now. We can no longer assure ourselves that all the horror is in the past and that we live in an entirely new Ireland.

In some respects, we have no right to be shocked by the Tuam story. It is, of course, appalling to think of all of those lovely human beings who did not matter enough during their short lives to be given proper care and who did not matter enough in death to be given a decent burial, even by a church that pretended to believe that every individual was equal in the sight of God and that every life was sacred. But the mother and baby homes were not a secret, and they were not isolated institutions. On the contrary, they were part of what we must acknowledge as a massive system of coercive confinement to which Irish society consigned its unwanted people, its human set-aside.

An empire of repression

The mother and baby home in Tuam was part of an empire of repression that had highly visible outposts in every major Irish town, encompassing industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mental hospitals. The Catholic Church bears an enormous responsibility for the systematic cruelty and at times the savage violence of much of this system. It promulgated and imposed a twisted idea of sexuality that used shame as a weapon of power and used women and their children as the living exemplars of that shame. The church has never fully faced up to the consequences of this distortion. That it has contributed just €192 million of the €1.5 billion cost so far of the redress scheme for victims of institutional abuse speaks for itself.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY KATHY ARMSTRONG
10 MAR 2017

There are more children buried at mass graves at mother and baby homes nationwide, Catherine Corless claimed last night.

The historian’s meticulous research led to the discovery of the remains of up to 800 children at a septic tank at a home that was run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam, Co Galway.

She said: “I think there are many mass graves across Ireland at mother and baby homes.

“But I suppose Tuam felt a little bit worse, because it was in a sewage area.”

She added: “I’ve always said even one child buried unknown is wrong, very wrong.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Simon Brouder
March 11 2017

There has been a call for the bodies of women formerly incarcerated in Tralee’s Magdalene laundry to be exhumed and re-interred in a public cemetery.

The Magdalene Asylum operated in Tralee from 1856 until 1910, with hundreds of young Kerry women passing through the facility in that time.

An unknown number of these women died while in the Asylum and they are buried in a single plot in a small walled off cemetery on the old Mercy Convent site in Balloonagh.

At Monday’s meeting of the Tralee Municipal District council, Cllr Toireasa Ferris called for these women to be exhumed and re-interred in a public graveyard as was the case with the boys who died while imprisoned at the CBS-run St Joseph’s Industrial School.

Cllr Ferris said re-interring the women – many of whom remain unidentified to this day – was the right thing to do.

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IRELAND
The Journal

CATHERINE CORLESS, THE local historian who helped uncover the substantial remains at the Tuam mother and baby home through her work appeared on The Late Late Show on RTÉ this evening.

She told the story about how she managed to uncover evidence about the remains of babies at the Tuam home, and how the week following the revelations has been.

She began: “I didn’t really expect such an influx of media. I kept with it, I kept answering people and talking to people. Like back in 2014, I did the same thing again. I just facilitated people. It was just something to get the story out again.

I was hoping and hoping that they would come to the truth. It’s wonderful that the truth has come out. Every scrap of research I had done said that the children were buried on the home grounds.

She talked about how she had noticed children from the home as a child, and later researched the topic in later life.

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CANADA
CBC News

By Joe Lofaro, CBC News Posted: Mar 10, 2017

Ottawa police have laid more criminal charges against a former Ottawa priest who was already facing allegations of sexual abuse involving a minor.

Police said Friday they have laid four new charges against William Barry McGrory, 83, in relation to two new male complainants. The incidents happened in the 1960s at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church and St. Philips Church in Richmond, according to police.

McGrory was charged with two counts each of indecent assault and gross indecency, which were Criminal Code offences in place at the time.

Last November, Ottawa police laid four historical sex offences against the former priest after a man came forward with an allegation he was sexually assaulted when he was 15. At the time, McGrory was living in Toronto, but police said he used to be a priest with the Archdiocese of Ottawa.

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CANADA
Ottawa Citizen

ANDREW DUFFY, OTTAWA CITIZEN

Ottawa police have laid four new charges against a retired Catholic priest in connection with alleged sexual assaults at two local churches in the 1960s.

Rev. Barry McGrory, 82, has been charged with two counts of indecent assault on a male, and two counts of gross indecency.

The incidents involved two victims and are alleged to have occurred at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Alta Vista Drive, and St. Philip Parish in Richmond.

McGrory was first arrested in November and charged with two counts of gross indecency and two counts of indecent assault in connection with offences alleged to have occurred in the 1960s.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WNEP

BY DAN RATCHFORD

GOULDSBORO — A Roman Catholic priest from New Jersey pleaded guilty in Wayne County to having child pornography.

Investigators say child pornography was found last summer on a computer at a home Fr. Kevin Gugliotta was staying at in Gouldsboro.

Fr. Gugliotta, 55, is a priest in the Archdiocese of Newark. He faces seven years in prison and will have register as a sex offender.

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INDIA
The Indian Express

Written by Shaju Philip | Kottiyoor | Updated: March 11, 2017

OVER A dozen photographs of various Catholic saints adorn a weather-beaten wall of this small, three-room, tiled house on a hill at Kottiyoor in Kannur. “Children are a gift from God,’’ reads a Biblical verse scribbled over one image. This is the home of the girl who delivered a baby last month after being raped, allegedly by a priest at the local parish. Where a grieving mother laments the “disgrace” that has tainted the family. And where a heart-broken father had to falsely admit that he had raped his own daughter to “protect the priest and the Church” in what is now being described as the worst sex scandal in the history of Kerala’s Catholic establishment

Last week, police arrested Fr Robin Vadakkuncheril, 48, of Mananthavady diocese, on charges of raping the minor in his parish at St Sebastian’s Church in Kottiyoor. On Thursday, a court in Thalassery allowed police custody of the accused through the weekend.

But at this home on a hill, that’s of little consolation to the middle-aged couple and their five minor children. “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,’’ says the father, a farm labourer.

“But I realised the seriousness of the crime after police arrested me as the rapist of my own daughter. They told me that I would be jailed for several years. That was when I revealed the name of the priest,’’ he says. “Robin paid the hospital bill of Rs 30,000 for the delivery and promised to do any penance for his sin. But he betrayed my daughter by trying to escape from India,” says the father, before denying allegations that the family had accepted money from the priest to hush up the rape.

The mother of the girl insists that there was little to suspect in the priest’s behaviour. “On most occasions, there would be women at the parsonage. Those women, once recruited by the priest to study abroad, used to call him ‘papa’. There had been no warning about the priest’s conduct. But unfortunately, our daughter has become a victim,’’ she says.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone has said it will be a number of weeks before her department has finished looking at what other institutions and that she hopes men come forward to testify in any investigations.

She said the shocking revelations have forced Ireland to confront a dark period of our past.
“As the poet laureate Anne Enright says ‘the dead do not lie’ and we are, all of the people in Ireland, throughout the country and internationally as well, trying to come to terms with what does this actually mean for our country,” she said.

“It’s an uncovering and a challenge for us to face, maybe in a new way, a really dark period in our history,” she said.

Ms Zappone’s department is currently undertaking a scoping exercise to extend the terms of reference of the commission to look at other settings where pregnant women and their children were sent.

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IRELAND
Connacht Tribune

Galway Bay fm newsroom – Approximately 40 people have gathered at the entrance to the Bon Secours Hospital in Renmore this evening in protest over the Tuam babies’ scandal.

The white ribbon protest is being organised by People Before Profit Galway, which claims that the institutional structure which involved the Bons Secours order, state agencies and the Catholic Church is to blame.

The event comes one week to the day that the Commission of Investigation confirmed the discovery of a significant number of babies and childrens’ remains at the Athenry road site in Tuam.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Lorna Siggins

The decision on the future of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home burial site is “too big” for the coroner to make on his own, former Galway county mayor Peter Roche has said.

The Fine Gael councillor also says there should be no exhumation at the site. He has suggested instead that the site where up to 800 infants may be buried should be dedicated in their name, but that there should be widespread consultation with affected families and other stakeholders before any final decision is taken.

Cllr Roche told The Irish Times he believes Archbishop of Tuam Dr Michael Neary “may have been premature” in suggesting reinterment, given certain views about the role of the Catholic Church.

“It is also regrettable that the coroner has been charged as the only person who can take the next step,” Cllr Roche said. “It shouldn’t be left to him when there are so many people whose views need to be taken into account.

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Child and Family Agency Tusla has confirmed that all records it has about the mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway, have been given to the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.

Last week, the Commission confirmed that significant quantities of human remains had been found in an underground structure on the former site of the home.

The Bon Secours order operated the facility in Tuam from 1925 until 1961. When the home closed, all records relating to its operation were given to Galway County Council.

Over the last 50 years, the records have been held at various stages by the council, the Western Health Board, the Health Service Executive and most recently, Tusla.

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PENNSYLVANIA
US News

HONESDALE, Pa. (AP) — A Roman Catholic priest from New Jersey has pleaded guilty in Pennsylvania to uploading child pornography to an internet chat room.

The Rev. Kevin Gugliotta of Mahwah pleaded guilty to dissemination of child pornography. He faces up to seven years in prison when he’s sentenced June 8 in Wayne County, Pennsylvania.

District Attorney Janine Edwards said Friday that Gugliotta downloaded child pornography to a personal laptop from his second home in Gouldsboro. The 55-year-old priest then uploaded the files to a chat room on 20 separate occasions last summer. The site alerted law enforcement.

Gugliotta was parochial vicar at Holy Spirit Church in Union, New Jersey. Newark Archbishop John J. Myers removed Gugliotta from ministry.

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UNITED STATES
Frum Follies

Purim is fun. Purim is drinking. Purim has people coming and going in all sorts of places. Purim means too many kids who are not sufficiently supervised.

Purim is paradise [pardes and the English paradise are Persian words] for sex abusers. They themselves may be less inhibited while under the influence. Giving alcohol to younger boys can make them less resistant to influence and to abuse. Afterwards, the offender can claim it was silliness, not as claimed, abuse. I have heard too many stories of abuse that happened on Purim, typically involving older boys or young men with teens. Similar stories also happen other times of the year in Chabad with its ubiquitous vodka. That elixir of kiruv (outreach) knocks down boundaries and restraints.

Parents need to monitor settings where kids are, or be sure some other responsible adult is monitoring. They also need to regulate alcohol use. I am not puritanical about alcohol for under-age kids on Purim. But it becomes dangerous beyond limited quantities.

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MEXIKO
NPLA

[A Mexican priest accused of sexually abusing minors was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison.]

(Oaxaca-Stadt, 10. März 2017, npl).- Ein Geistlicher im südmexikanischen Bundesstaat Oaxaca wurde Ende Februar zu 16 Jahren und sechs Monaten Haft verurteilt. Bereits im Januar befand ihn ein Gericht für schuldig, sich sexuell an Minderjährigen vergangen zu haben. Während seiner Zeit als Gemeindepfarrer soll Gerardo Silvestre Hernández in dem indigenen Dorf Villa Alta Jungen im Alter zwischen elf und 13 Jahren in die Kirche eingeladen, betrunken gemacht und zu sexuellen Handlungen verführt haben.

Die Kinderschutzvereinigung Foni (Foro Oaxaqueño de la Niñez) geht davon aus, dass Silvestre Hernández auch in anderen Gemeinden Minderjährige sexuell missbraucht hat. Somit kann die Anzahl der Opfer weit über hundert liegen. Vom Erzbischof Oaxacas fordert Foni deshalb eine offizielle Entschuldigung und Wiedergutmachung gegenüber den Opfern. Denn in den indigenen Gemeinden Südmexikos wiegt die Tat des Geistlichen doppelt schwer. Dort gilt der Pfarrer neben dem Lehrer als die höchste moralische Autorität des Dorfes.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Main Post

Sieben Jahre lang war Professor Klaus Laubenthal der externe Missbrauchsbeauftragte der Diözese Würzburg. Nun hört der Ordinarius für Kriminologie und Strafrecht an der Juristischen Fakultät der Universität Würzburg sowie Richter am Oberlandesgericht Bamberg auf.

Klaus Laubenthal hat laut Angaben des Bistums Bischof Friedhelm Hofmann und Generalvikar Thomas Keßler am Mittwoch schriftlich mitgeteilt, dass er auf eigenen Wunsch zum 18. März seine Tätigkeit als Ansprechpartner für Opfer sexuellen Missbrauchs beendet. Gründe für seine Entscheidung habe er nicht genannt.

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DEUTSCHLAND
BR

[Klaus Laubenthal ofthe spokesman of the Diocese of Würzburg is giving up his duties. Since 2010, the jurist and professor of criminology and criminal law has taken care of the abuse allegations in the diocese.]

Auf eigenen Wunsch beendet Klaus Laubenthal seine Tätigkeit als Missbrauchsbeauftragter und Ansprechpartner für Opfer sexuellen Missbrauchs im Bistum Würzburg. Gründe für seine Entscheidung nannte Laubenthal nicht. Bischof Hofmann dankte Laubenthal für den Einsatz als Missbrauchsbeauftragter. Bis zur Ernennung eines Nachfolgers ist die stellvertretende Missbrauchsbeauftragte Dr. Claudia Gehring Ansprechpartnerin.

Experte in Sachen Sexualstrafrecht

Bundesjustizminister Heiko Maas berief Laubenthal 2015 in die neu eingesetzte “Kommission zur Reform des Sexualstrafrechts”. Das Gebiet der Sexualkriminalität gehört zu Laubenthals wissenschaftlichen Forschungsschwerpunkten. Der 62-Jährige hat ein Handbuch zu Sexualstraftaten verfasst.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Bistum Wurzburg

[The External Abuse Commissioner of the diocese of Würzburg will resign from 18 March 2017 – thanks to the bishop and the vicar general.]

Externer Missbrauchsbeauftragter der Diözese Würzburg gibt Aufgabe zum 18. März 2017 ab – Dank des Bischofs und des Generalvikars für Einsatz

Würzburg (POW) Nach sieben Jahren als Missbrauchsbeauftragter der Diözese Würzburg beendet Professor Dr. Klaus Laubenthal (62) auf eigenen Wunsch seine Tätigkeit als Missbrauchsbeauftragter zum 18. März 2017. Das teilte er Bischof Dr. Friedhelm Hofmann und Generalvikar Thomas Keßler in einem Schreiben vom 8. März 2017 mit. Der Ordinarius für Kriminologie und Strafrecht an der Juristischen Fakultät der Universität Würzburg hatte die Aufgabe des Ansprechpartners für Opfer sexuellen Missbrauchs am 19. März 2010 übernommen. Gründe für seine Entscheidung nannte Laubenthal in dem Brief nicht. Bischof Hofmann und Generalvikar Keßler danken Laubenthal für den Einsatz als Missbrauchsbeauftragter. Bis zur Ernennung eines Nachfolgers ist die stellvertretende Missbrauchsbeauftragte Dr. Claudia Gehring Ansprechpartnerin.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY PAT FLANAGAN
10 MAR 2017

The horrors of the Tuam cesspit cast a long shadow over any International Women’s Day celebrations.

And the Taoiseach added to the gloom by appearing to defend the nuns who may have dumped the bodies of up to 800 children in a disused sewer.

Enda had another one of his “we all partied” moments by claiming “no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children” adding “we gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care, and so on”.

What Enda is saying is how could anyone possibly know when women were incarcerated in these homes their babies would end up in a septic tank or be sold to rich Yanks?

He seems to be suggesting there is some affliction affecting the Irish psyche which prevents us from seeing horrors that are taking place in plain sight.

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IRELAND
The Journal

THE ORGANISATION REPRESENTING the anatomy departments of Irish medical schools has commented on the remains of hundreds of “unclaimed infants” previously being used by the facilities for study pruposes.

Yesterday, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone told the Dáil:

“We must accept that between 1940 and 1965 a recorded 474 so-called unclaimed infant remains were transferred from mother and baby homes to medical schools in Irish universities.”

The Anatomical Committee of the Irish Medical Schools (ACIMS) said it is “very conscious of the distress experienced by the families involved”.

In a statement to TheJournal.ie, the ACIMS said: “We have always attempted to the utmost of our ability to assist any individuals or families who have made enquiries about the transfer of family members’ remains.

“All Irish anatomy departments gave full cooperation to the government’s Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters since it was first established. Helplines were established and all queries thoroughly investigated.

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NEW YORK
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: John C. Albino was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, ordained in 1990. He was assigned as an assistant to parishes in Manhattan, Beacon, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

In a June 2001 lawsuit Albino was accused, along with three Carmelite priests, of sexually abusing a teenage boy during 1996-1998 at St. Simon Rock in the Bronx. The boy was working as a secretary at the parish. The priests allegedly gave the boy money in exchange for sexual favors and had him watch them perform group masturbation. They also were said to have threatened to harm the boy if he told. Albino reportedly was sent to treatment and removed from ministry. The lawsuit, which was against the Carmelite Order and St. Simon Stock parish, resulted in a settlement.

Ordained: 1990

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Taoiseach has been urged by survivors of institutional abuse to seek an immediate papal intervention to break the deadlock between Catholic religious orders and the State over the Church’s contribution to redressing the wrongs done to residents of their institutions.

The call from the advocacy group, Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, says the Catholic Church religious orders which are signatories to the 2002 Indemnity Agreement with the State have reneged on their promises to pay their fair share towards the State’s redress process.

Irish SOCA made its plea for Pope Francis to break the impasse concerning abuse in a statement this afternoon.

“Enda Kenny should travel to Rome as soon as practical and demand a comprehensive and honourable settlement of all matters connected with the child abuse scandals which implicate the servants of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland.

“These matters have dragged on for too long.”

Accusing the religious bodies of being “entirely without honour”, SOCA says the only power on earth to which they are likely to respond is Pope Francis.

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IRELAND
Wickow News

A former Wicklow priest has been convicted of orally raping a child in his parish ten years ago.

63-year-old Denis Nolan is already serving a lengthy sentence for sexually abusing a different child six years ago while serving as parish priest in Rathnew.

Yesterday a jury found him guilty on six counts of oral rape, defilement and sexual assault in his home between 2005 and 2006, the victim was age between 10 an 11 at the time.

The trial heard Nolan had befriended the boy and starting to invade his personal space plus he made comments of a sexual nature.

Nolan had told the boy to go home and “Google gay porn” and told him it was a natural thing.

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IRELAND
Galway Independent

A white ribbon protest outside the Bon Secours Hospital in Galway is scheduled to take place this evening following the Tuam babies scandal.

People Before Profit Galway are asking people to gather outside the hospital in Renmore at 5.30pm and walk the outside walls of the hospital.

In a statement the organisation said, “The unusually high level of deaths in the Tuam Mother & Baby Home was not caused by a few bad individuals. It arose from an institutional structure that involved the Bon Secours Order, state agents and the Catholic Church.”

PBP Galway have outlined a number of demands including: that the Bon Secours Health Systems fund the creation of a memorial to their victims; that the Bon Secours order re-consider the existence of their order; produce an audit of illegal adoptions that involved a bounty payment on Irish babies; scrap the ‘Congregational Indemnity Agreement‘ with the Conference of Religious in Ireland, which was then representing 18 religious orders; and end control of primary schools by the Catholic Church.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Midwife wrote that women giving birth at Bessborough denied pain relief and stitches

Olivia Kelleher

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

Dr Crean said details of the goings on at Bessborough, in Blackrock, should be heard as “this is part of our national story”.

“It is only unfolding slowly. The truth may be very difficult. But it is best that we have the truth in relation to it,” he told Cork’s Red FM. “ Whatever is required in that regard will serve us well in the long term even though, in the shorter term, it might be difficult.”

The Sacred Heart Home in Bessborough, managed by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, opened in 1922. Similar homes were established by the same order in Roscrea and Castlepollard in the 1930s.

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IRELAND
Amnesty International

Amnesty International has welcomed the support of the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland for its call for an inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes in Northern Ireland.

Eamon Martin, Archbishop of Armagh and the Primate of All Ireland, voiced his support for Amnesty’s call for an inquiry, saying many in the church and society were “ashamed” and that he now wanted to “establish the truth, the whole truth about what happened”.

Amnesty first called on the Northern Ireland Executive to set up an inquiry into the homes four years ago and repeated the call last week following the discovery of a significant quantity of human remains in a decommissioned sewage chamber at a Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Programme Director, said:

“Amnesty welcomes the Archbishop’s support for an inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes in Northern Ireland, something that we and victims have been requesting for many years.

“It is regrettable that Northern Ireland government ministers previously failed to establish an inquiry. But following the discoveries at Tuam, a wider inquiry under way in the Republic, and now the Archbishop’s support, there is a momentum to discover the truth about what happened in such homes north of the border.

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IRELAND
Connacht Tribune

The Tuam babies’ investigation has been likened to the Nazi war crimes trials of the 1940s.

Junior Minister John Halligan this afternoon released a statement, in which he says old age should not diminish accountability in the Tuam mother and baby home scandal.

He’s calling on Gardai to question any surviving Bon Secours nuns who ever worked at the home, to establish whether a criminal investigation is warranted.

Minister Halligan says the Tuam discovery is ‘potentially the tip of an iceberg’.

He says as was the case with the Nazi war crimes trials, if an individual has been an accessory to a crime then they should be held accountable, regardless of how many years have passed

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TEXAS
Dallas Morning News

Sarah Mervosh, Breaking News Enterprise reporter

Updated at 4:59 pm.: Revised to include comments from Baylor University and a Title IX expert

Sexual assault victims at Baylor University have until the spring of 2018 to sue if they believe the school had lax and discriminatory policies that put them at a greater risk of being raped, a U.S. district judge ruled Tuesday.

The decision came as part of an order that allows the largest Title IX lawsuit against Baylor to go forward. Both sides will now be able to request evidence and call witnesses to give testimony out of court, a much-anticipated stage in the legal process for critics who continue to accuse Baylor of being secretive in its handling of the sexual assault scandal.

In some cases, Judge Robert Pitman decided, the two-year statute of limitations should not be measured from when an assault was reported, but from when the public first learned of Baylor’s widespread failure to properly respond to sexual assault cases last spring.

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TEXAS
New York Times

By MARC TRACY and DAN BARRY
MARCH 9, 2017

With spring in the Texas air, some Baylor University students were navigating the social challenges of another off-campus party, chatting and dancing while trying not to spill their drinks. Amid the swirl, a petite freshman named Jasmin Hernandez lost sight of her friends.

Then Tevin Elliott, a 20-year-old Baylor football player dating someone she knew, appeared. Earlier he had been pouring hard liquor for Ms. Hernandez and other underage students; now he was insisting that her friends had gone outside. When Ms. Hernandez expressed doubts, she said, he began pulling her by the wrist toward the door, telling her they had gone outside.

But the farther they strayed into the darkness, the more she argued that her friends were back at the party, and that they should return. Without a word, she later said in a lawsuit, the 6-foot-3, 250-pound linebacker picked up the 5-3 freshman and made his violent intentions clear.

Panicking, Ms. Hernandez told him that she was sorry if she gave him the wrong impression; that they should just go back to the house and forget this ever happened; that she was, in fact, gay. He acted as though he did not hear.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on accusations made on March 7 by Ireland’s Prime Minister, Enda Kenny:

The insanity over the “mass grave” story in Tuam has now reached a fever pitch. The Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, says that the Bon Secours Sisters took the babies of unwed mothers and “sold them, trafficked them [and] starved them.”

That is a serious charge, and serious accusations demand serious evidence. He provided none. Kenny offered not one scintilla of evidence to back up his fantastic story. Not surprisingly, he found a kindred soul in the U.S. in Niall O’Dowd of Irish Central; he quoted his remarks with relish the next day.

Here is what Kenny said on March 7: “No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care.” That is all true. But then he goes on to say that the nuns sold the children, trafficked them, and starved them.

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UNITED STATES/IRELAND
IrishCentral

John Fay @AmericanIreland March 10, 2017

Editor’s Note: It’s now just one week since “significant human remains” were discovered on the land of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home where it’s believed that up to 796 infants are buried in a mass grave inside sewerage tanks. As Ireland begins to face the reality of the cruelty and neglect that children and young women suffered throughout the last century while imprisoned in these state and church run institutions we recall an Irish priest living in American who spoke out about the “cruelty, ignorance and neglect of their duties in high places” over 60 years ago.

Monsignor Edward Joseph Flanagan, founder of Boys Town made famous by the Spencer Tracy movie, was a lone voice in condemning Ireland’s industrial schools back in the 1940s and how orphans and those born outside marriage generally were treated. He was viciously castigated by church and government for doing so.

His treatment at the hands of clergy and politicians makes it very clear both powerful arms of the state were determined to stick to secrets and lies and cover-ups when it came to the mistreatment of youths and babies.

When he arrived back in America after a 1946 trip to Ireland he let it be known he was appalled by the abuse of children in institutions he saw. Though he mainly focused on the industrial schools which worked young children to the bone, he widely criticized the entire range of Catholic institutions that dealt so viciously with the most vulnerable of Irish children.

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SPAIN
The Local

The parish priest from the Galician town of Cuntis has apologised for his “misguided” carnival costume which saw him posing on a float as the Playboy founder along with men dressed as Playboy bunnies.

Juan Carlos Martínez, 40, provoked more than raised eyebrows when he joined the town’s carnival festivities last week and posed on a float dressed as the legendary lothario, complete with dressing gown, captain’s cap and cigar.

At his sides were two rather delectable companions: Two men decked in black leotards over stockings and a barely-there netting skirt and topped off with bunny ears over colourful wigs. Presumably they also had white cottontails pinned to their backsides.

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CANADA
Metro

By: Kristy Kirkup The Canadian Press Published on Thu Mar 09 2017

OTTAWA — Conservative MPs distanced themselves from one of their own Thursday after a Tory senator suggested there were positive aspects to Canada’s residential school system.

Caucus members, including Tory indigenous affairs critic Cathy McLeod, made it clear they do not support or agree with Sen. Lynn Beyak, appointed to the upper chamber by former prime minister Stephen Harper.

On Wednesday, Beyak told the Senate that the government-funded, church-operated schools where indigenous children endured widespread sexual and physical abuse were not all bad.

“I speak partly for the record, but mostly in memory of the kindly and well-intentioned men and women and their descendants — perhaps some of us here in this chamber — whose remarkable works, good deeds and historical tales in the residential schools go unacknowledged for the most part and are overshadowed by negative reports,” she said.

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FLORIDA
The Daily Beast

Fred Laster’s siblings told police about the last man seen with him, but nothing happened for the next 23 years. Now authorities and a mom say Ron Hyde may be more than a murderer.

KELLY WEILL
KATIE ZAVADSKI
03.10.17

A woman and her dog were the first to find the headless torso.

The duo stumbled upon the remains in a gas station dumpster in Jacksonville, Florida, on a Sunday morning in June 1994. The body’s head, legs, and hands were missing. Two bloodstained kitchen knives were wrapped in nearby plastic bags. A mattress topper, rubber gloves, bath mats, and a bloodied flannel shirt were also inside.

It was a “mannequin or something, but looks like a real person,” the dog-walker told the station mechanic, he later recalled. Another witness who had visited the gas station earlier told police that he had seen a shiny sports car backed up to the dumpster, with its trunk open.

The body was fresh, investigators found, and had been washed of blood and fingerprints, and while the lower extremities had been cut away with a knife, the male genitals were intact. Forensics experts ruled the death a homicide and said the victim was likely between 14 and 17 years old.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

By Elaine Loughlin
Political Reporter

The Government has come under pressure to carry out excavations at the site of Bessborough Mother and Baby Home where hundreds of infants died.

Calls have been made in the Dáil to carry out examinations at the Cork site in the wake of the revelations of mass burial chambers at the Tuam facility.

AAA-PBP TD Mick Barry said 470 infants and 10 women had died between 1934 and 1953 at Bessborough. He claimed the nuns took a “business decision” not to give each child a marked grave as it would make a bad impression on Americans visiting to adopt babies from the home.

He told the Dáil that of 180 babies born over one year, 100 died. “One in five of those who died in the 1934 to 1953 period died of marasmus, that is, severe malnutrition.”

Mr Barry gave graphic accounts of “a house of pain” where mothers in childbirth were “denied pain relief and women who suffered vaginal tearing in childbirth were refused stitching as punishment for their sins”.

During statements on the commission of inquiry into mother and baby homes he said he had been contacted by a survivor of the home who expressed his “strong opinion” that not all of the babies were buried in the “tiny” angels burial plot at Bessborough.

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IRELAND
Clare Champion

BISHOP of Killaloe Fintan Monahan has expressed “shock” and “sorrow” at the discovery of human remains at the site of the former mother and baby home in Tuam. He served as a priest in the Tuam diocese and as diocesan secretary from 2005 to 2006.

The find came at the conclusion of test excavations at the site. They were carried out at the behest of the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation, which was established on February 17, 2015 and is chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy. The commission has been asked to establish the circumstances for the entry of single women into mother and baby homes and the living conditions they experienced there. It has also been asked to examine mortality among mothers and children who lived in these institutions.

“The reports that have emerged over the past few years have made for me such sad, shocking, disappointing and sorrowful reading. The level of shock and sadness among the general population also has been widespread. We are all overwhelmed by the revelations and even a generation or two later it is impossible to comprehend the great hurt and sorrow that resulted from this system. It really is inexplicable, in the light of the gospel, that is at the heart of all our callings, irrespective of the time we live in,” Bishop Monahan told The Clare Champion.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Friday, March 10, 2017 Elaine Loughlin

The Government is looking at methods of justice used in post-apartheid South Africa and after Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile to address the mother and baby home scandal here.

Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone has confirmed she is looking at introducing a “transitional justice” system here as a way of dealing with the victims and relatives of those who were sent to institutions.

This could include a truth commission as used in South Africa from 1996, or, as suggested by Ms Zappone in the Dáil, could be based on the Museums of Memory in Argentina and Chile.

Ms Zappone also confirmed she will publish the interim report into mother and baby homes by the end of this month. It comes after numerous calls in the Dáil to make public the commission’s second interim report which has been with the minister since September.

During Dáil statements on the scandal of the Tuam mother and baby home, Ms Zappone said she acknowledged the calls for an expansion of the terms of reference to cover all institutions, agencies and individuals involved with unmarried women and their children. She promised to announce the detail of a scoping exercise to see if all institutions could be included in the inquiry in the coming weeks: “What happened in Tuam is part of a larger picture.”

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IRELAND
Mayo Advertiser

Noel Campbell

In a little under five years time, Ireland will roll out the red commemoration carpets for a year long celebration to mark the centenary of the Irish Free State. In the decades preceding the independent state, unionist politicians and their constituents vigorously, and even militantly, opposed any form of self-determination for Ireland as they believed Home Rule under a Catholic majority would mean Rome rule. The fears of those unionists were realised. The Free State, like the British state before it, inadequately supervised Catholic institutions tasked with caring for sections of Irish society and thereby put at risk the very children of the nation that independence was destined to cherish. The Free State’s successors were equally culpable of neglect as each fed its own citizens to an ultra conservative, practically unregulated, system of 250 Church-run industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages, hostels and homes from the 1920s up until the 1990s. Since the 1990s, criminal cases and inquiries have established that thousands of children were abused by hundreds of priests and several Catholic religious orders were found to have participated in or concealed child abuse.

The utterly disturbing find of 796 human remains on the grounds of the mother and baby home run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam raises questions of that order of nuns and the State, which surely require answering through a Garda investigation. Questions too need to be asked in Mayo. In the 1920s, unmarried mothers and their babies were housed in the Mayo County Home in Castlebar. They were isolated from other ‘inmates’ and occupied with work for little reward. In 1926, debate at a sitting of the Poor Law Commission turned to congestion at the County Home and how the inmate numbers could be reduced. It was suggested that the 41 unmarried mothers could be removed to another institution. Men like Dr PD Daly immediately fought this suggestion as replacing the cheap labour supplied by the unmarried mothers with extra staff members would cost the ratepayers. Instead, the removal of 51 children and 12 unmarried mothers from the County Home was put forward. Management at the County Home were aware of the stern, if not hostile, reputation of some institutions. On the reporting of two troublesome unmarried mothers to a Mayo County Board of Health meeting by the matron of the County Home, the meeting decided to experiment and send one of them to the Magdalene Home in Galway to teach her discipline. Should she refuse, she was to be prosecuted.

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IRELAND
Irish Sun

By Eoghan McDermott
10th March 2017

POLITICIANS on all sides have condemned the grim discovery of an unmarked grave of children at the Tuam mother and baby home.

Enda Kenny made a speech to the Dail on Wednesday which did not pull any punches, calling the home a “chamber of horrors”.

The speech was up there with previous heavy-hitters from Enda such as his powerful speech on the Magdalene Laundries and his landmark speech on the Cloyne Report.

The latter criticised the Vatican for attempting to frustrate the inquiry into the rape of children to protect its power and reputation.

However, there have also been some concerns that what he said did not go far enough on this occasion.

Brid Smith, the People Before Profit TD, has said the Government should look again at a 2002 deal between the Church and State which gave the Church a €128million indemnity.

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IRELAND
IrishCentral

Niall O’Dowd @niallodowd March 10, 2017

Up to 800 small children and babies whose only sin was to be born to mothers out of wedlock were very likely buried in a mass grave that was once a septic tank in Tuam, Co. Galway.

The commission reporting on the Tuam babies scandal found incontrovertible evidence of large numbers of bodies there — and they were not Famine graves as some have tried to claim.

The commission confirmed to the press on Friday that they had indeed found “significant human remains,” and that the human remains, after carbon testing, dated from the era in which the mother and baby home had operated in the town from 1926 to 1961.

Tuam may be only the tip of the iceberg. Across the country such mother and baby homes, all long closed, are now under scrutiny for similar mass deaths. It is already clear Tuam was not an isolated occurrence.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Mick Heaney

How many angels can dance on the head of the pin? Once upon a time this was the pressing question that supposedly preoccupied the finest minds of the church. Of course, things have moved on. When would-be defenders of the faith want to play hair-splitting word games these days the question is about how many infant bodies constitute a mass grave.

As the country reels, again, at revelations about the human remains discovered on the site of Tuam’s mother-and-baby home Sean Moncrieff (Newstalk, weekdays) hears from a man who seeks to put the whole business in perspective. Bill Donohue, president of the US-based Catholic League, says that the coverage of the Tuam home is, you guessed it, fake news.
The basis for this staggering assertion is the statement that the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation had uncovered “significant” quantities of remains.

Donohue insists that “significant” differs from “huge”, a metric that presumably might permit the use of the term “mass grave” in news reports. This egregious misuse of words outrages him more than the idea of dead children being tossed into the ground with no trace of dignity: “The big story, which is a lie, is that there’s no such thing as a mass grave.”

Donohue, holding forth in the blowhard manner so beloved of American right-wing talkshow hosts, offers little evidence. He dismissively “deals with” Catherine Corless, the local historian who first uncovered the scandal, asking why she says 800 children are interred on the Tuam grounds. Moncrieff replies that she uncovered the death certificates but nobody knew where they were buried. “That’s exactly my point,” Donohue says triumphantly. “She didn’t find a mass grave.”

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IRELAND
The Journal

JUNIOR MINISTER JOHN Halligan has called on the gardaí to question the surviving Bon Secour nuns who worked in the Tuam mother and baby home.

“Age should not diminish responsibility,” said the Independent Alliance TD.

Last Friday, amateur historian Catherine Corless was vindicated by the commission’s confirmation that a significant number of children’s bodies were found at the Tuam site in a structure which appears to be “related to the treatment/containment of sewerage and/or wastewater”.

In 2014, when the revelations first hit the headlines, a statement from high-profile Irish PR representative Terry Prone, on behalf of the Bon Secours order, said the “overwhelming majority of the surviving Sisters of Bon Secours in Ireland are over eighty. The handful (literally) still in active ministry are in their seventies”.

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RHODE ISLAND
Associated Press

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A Rhode Island pastor charged with molesting a child has been removed as the head of the Providence Republican Party.

Roy D. Bolden Jr., of the Legions of Christ Ministries, was arraigned Wednesday on child molestation and sexual assault charges. Police say a 21-year-old man reported that Bolden began molesting him when he was 12 years old, and the abuse went on for years.

Rhode Island Republican Party chairman Brandon Bell says the allegations have taken him and the state party’s central committee by surprise.

The 33-year-old Bolden was elected to a four-year term as chairman of the Providence Republican City Committee in 2015.

Bell says that while Bolden is entitled to the presumption of innocence, he has been removed as chairman.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)

Christopher Knaus and Australian Associated Press
Friday 10 March 2017

The Uniting church has been subject to about 2,500 allegations of child sexual abuse in its 40-year history, the royal commission has heard.

The child abuse royal commission also heard that there were 1,006 alleged perpetrators of abuse within the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but the congregation did not report a single one to police.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, the inquiry heard, were still refusing to change a second century biblical rule requiring two witnesses to prove wrongdoing.

The royal commission returned to its examination of the Uniting church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Friday, seeking to understand how each had reformed its handling of child protection and abuse complaints.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

AAP

More than 2500 incidents of child sexual abuse have occurred in Uniting Church institutions in Australia, leading to $17.5 million in compensation payments to victims.

Australia’s third largest Christian denomination has apologised to victims abused over the last 40 years in the Uniting Church or in its three predecessors.

Church data released by the child sex abuse royal commission reveals there have been 2504 incidents or allegations of child sexual abuse at an institution or place of worship since the church was established in 1977.

The church has paid $17.5 million to settle 255 abuse claims, counsel assisting the commission Angus Stewart SC said on Friday.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Rachel Browne

Uniting Church institutions, including schools and foster homes, have been the subject of more than 2500 allegations or incidents of child sexual abuse over the past 40 years, a royal commission has heard.

New analysis released by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse shows there have been 2504 incidents, allegations or claims of paedophilia involving Uniting Church institutions since 1977.

Counsel assisting the commission Angus Stewart SC told the inquiry 255 people have made claims against the church, which has paid $17.5 million in settling child sexual abuse cases.

The inquiry heard the church has not had time to confirm the commission’s analysis of the data.

The inquiry heard 91 people who have attended the commission’s private sessions reported they were allegedly abused in Uniting Church institutions, with the majority relating to schools or out-of-home care providers.

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IRELAND
The Journal

I don’t want to see them bankrupted. They could solve this issue honourably and with dignity by handing over the keys to the properties used for educational purposes to the Irish government, to the Irish people.

[It would be] as a public token of their remorse and their sympathy with the victims and the relatives of the victims of this terrible period in Irish history.

THAT’S WHAT FORMER education minister Ruairi Quinn said today in response to a report that shows less than 14% of the total costs of the child abuse scandal has been paid by religious institutions.

The Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy, meanwhile, have defended the amounts they’ve paid in compensation for child abuse and investigation costs after coming under fire because of the contents of the report by the Comptroller & Auditor General, published yesterday.

The report showed that €209 million had been paid by religious institutions for their role in institutional child abuse. Current costs to the State – including an inquiry, a survivor redress scheme and related survivor supports – add up to €1.5 billion.

But because of the fall in the value of properties used as payment to the state, as well as the rising costs of the inquiry, the religious institutions responsible aren’t paying half anymore, and the State no longer has the legal authority to change the amount because of a deal made back in 2002.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Nicole Chettle and Michelle Brown

The Uniting Church in Australia has apologised to children sexually abused in its congregations and institutions, while Jehovah’s Witness seniors have defended their two-witness rule and shunning of victims.

The statement from the president of the church’s General Assembly Stuart McMillan came during evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Mr McMillan said “we are, and I am deeply sorry that we didn’t protect and care in accordance with our Christian values for those children”.

“… I want to acknowledge the impact that it’s had in the lives of those young people, and to say I’m truly sorry.”

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Ronan McGreevy

The Minister of Education has said the approach taken by religious orders to redress for people abused in religious institutions suggested the “protection of the institution had far greater authority than protection of the children”.

Richard Bruton described the €219 million contribution by the Catholic Church to the redress bill as a “far cry” from the 50 per cent share it agreed to contribute when a deal was done with the State in 2002.

Then the orders agreed to contribute €128 million as part of an estimated redress bill of €256 million.

The original figure was a gross underestimation of the actual cost which has spiralled to €1.5 billion.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Mr Bruton said it remained the Government’s belief that an “equitable share out bearing in mind the responsibility would be 50:50 and we are a far cry from that”.

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JAMAICA
The Guardian (UK)

Kate Chappell in Kingston
Friday 10 March 2017

Early one Sunday in January, a group of women arrived at a church in the rolling, green hills of rural Jamaica. They were not there to worship, but to show support for a young victim of sexual abuse: a 15-year-old girl, who had allegedly been raped by the church’s pastor a few weeks earlier.

The 14 activists entered the church and sat in silence, but angry words broke out when they were approached by a different pastor; the confrontation culminated with him being struck in the head by a tambourine.

The incident marked the beginnings of the Tambourine Army, a new organization to fight gender-based violence across the Caribbean, which this weekend will mark its arrival with a protest in Kingston. In what is believed to be the largest-ever protest against gender-based violence in the region, similar marches will be held in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, the Bahamas and Guyana.

“We want to change the culture we have of assigning blame and shame to survivors,” says Latoya Nugent, co-founder of the Tambourine Army. “We want to place it at the feet of perpetrators and change the current narrative.”

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INDIA
Merinews

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) expressed concern over reports that on February 27, a Christian priest in Kerala, Mr Robin Vadakkancherry, was arrested on charges of raping a minor-girl.

The incident came to light when the Childline (1098), the crisis helpline for children in distress in India was informed of the rape. The survivor got pregnant and last month, she gave birth in a Church-run hospital in Kerala.
In Focus

It has been reported that hospital staff and the nuns working at the institution tried to cover up the crime and shield the priest. It has also been reported that the accused and the Church tried to conceal details of the newborn from the authorities. The cover-up by Church authorities is apparent as the police have booked 8 people, including 5 nuns and the doctor, of the hospital where the survivor gave birth.

AHRC said that this is not the first time that the Church has been in the centre of a storm of sexual abuse and cover-up allegations. In 2015, another priest, Mr Edwin Figarez, was accused of raping a teenage girl and the priest was suspended by the diocese.

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ILLINOIS
KMOV

[with video]

By Dan Greenwald, Online News Producer

ST. CLAIR COUNTY, Ill. (KMOV.com) –
Some Illinois lawmakers are pushing to end the statute of limitations on child sex crimes.

Under current state law, sexual offenses against children must be reported within 20 years of the survivor turning 18-years-old.

One woman told News 4 the existing law allowed a priest to get away with raping her many decades ago.

“Father said I was an evil child, that he had been sent by God to save my soul. He raped me. I was only 6-years-old, had no idea what happened, had no words for it,” said victim Barbara Dorris.

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GUAM
KUAM

By Krystal Paco

Two more former altar boys have surfaced with allegations of clergy sex abuse. Michael Chargualaf and Anthony Ray C. Mantanona both allege they were sexually molested multiple times by Father Louis Brouillard who was a priest at San Isidro Church in Malojoloj.

They mark the 27th and 28th plaintiffs to file suit.

It was the mid-1970s. Mantanona was only 8 or 9 years old. Chargualaf was a little older, around 13. Both were altar boys at San Isidro Church in Malojojo. Both were forced to quit after multiple incidents of sex abuse by parish priest, Father Louis Brouillard.

Mantanona and Chargualaf filed their civil suits with the Superior Court of Guam late Thursday afternoon. Both men are represented by Attorney Anthony C. Perez.

Court filings provide graphic details to what happened behind closed doors on church grounds. For Chargualaf, the abuse started on his first day. He had arrived early for mass to meet Brouillard who walked around the rectory with an open robe, his naked body underneath. As a teen he was forced to perform oral sex and receive oral sex from the priest who would tell him “Don’t be afraid. This is OK.” and “Doesn’t that feel good?”

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

Haidee V Eugenio , heugenio@guampdn.com March 9, 2017

Another law firm that has been working with U.S.-based attorneys Thursday filed two clergy sex abuse lawsuits in local court, one of which also names the Boy Scouts of America as a defendant, as well as with the Archdiocese of Agana.

Former altar boys Michael Chargualaf and Anthony Ray C. Mantanona are the 27th and 28th persons to file clergy sex abuse lawsuits on Guam.

The two former altar boys said in their complaints filed in the Superior Court of Guam that former island priest Louis Brouillard repeatedly sexually abused them when Brouillard was parish priest at San Isidro Church in Malojloj in the 1970s. But Brouillard wasn’t a named defendant.

Brouillard also allegedly abused Chargualaf during Boy Scouts activities. Brouillard was a scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts of America Aloha Council Chamorro District.

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

Haidee V Eugenio , heugenio@guampdn.com
March 10, 2017

Lujan to file more lawsuits in next few weeks

U.S. District Court of Guam Magistrate Judge Joaquin V.E. Manibusan on Friday afternoon approved a joint request by attorneys for the Archdiocese of Agana and at least 25 former altar boys to consolidate all of the clergy sex abuse cases filed in federal court.

Attorney John C. Terlaje, counsel for the archdiocese, and attorney David Lujan, counsel for 25 former altar boys, also jointly asked for, and were granted, a second extension for the archdiocese to respond to the lawsuits.

The filing deadline was March 10. Manibusan approved another extension up to April 10 for the archdiocese to respond to the 25 cases filed by Lujan’s clients, and any new cases filed before April 10.

Lujan told Terlaje that he intends to file “several new civil cases in this court in the next few weeks,” the attorneys stated in their joint stipulation, approved by the judge.

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IRELAND
The Irish Catholic

by Greg Daly
March 9, 2017

Leading child protection campaigner Marie Collins has challenged claims by the head of the Vatican department responsible for dealing with allegations of clerical abuse.

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), had rejected claims by Mrs Collins that members of the CDF had obstructed proposals for reform recommended by the Vatican’s child protection commission, from which Mrs Collins resigned last month.

Interviewed by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra, Cardinal Müller rejected suggestions that the congregation has resisted the work of the commission, saying: “One of our collaborators is part of it. I can affirm that in these last years there’s been permanent contact.”

Mrs Collins, however, told The Irish Catholic it has been almost two years since any member of the CDF has been involved with the commission. “There’s no member of the CDF on the commission,” she said, continuing, “There hasn’t been for nearly two years. There was a member who stopped attending immediately after the accountability tribunal was announced, and then officially resigned last year.”

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

Two senior members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia will face a royal commission that found the organisation does not adequately protect children from being sexually abused.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses maintain they act on any allegation of child sex abuse, despite the child abuse royal commission finding they have not reported a single one of 1006 alleged perpetrators to police.

Its November 2016 report said the organisation wrongly relies on a two-witness rule with 2000-year-old biblical origins when handling complaints.

The commission will on Friday again hear from Jehovah’s Witness Australian branch committee member Terrence O’Brien and Rodney Spinks, who advises church elders on how to handle child sex abuse cases.

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IRELAND
RTE News

Owners of the largest Catholic institutions where children were abused while in State care have defended their contributions to the €1.5 billion bill for paying redress to survivors.

The Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy were responding to yesterday’s report by the State’s auditor that the eighteen Catholic entities concerned had paid about 13% of the cost and to criticism by the Minister for Education Richard Bruton.

The Minister had stated that the Church’s progress towards shouldering its promised one quarter share of the redress bill had gone into reverse.

In a statement the Christian Brothers’ leader, Brother Edmund Garvey, said the audit report’s 14 month-old figures do not take account of the congregations’ more recent €14m cash payment.

Brother Garvey also highlighted playing fields worth “well over €100m” that are almost ready to be transferred to the Edmund Rice Schools Trust.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Rachel Browne

Three decades ago Jodi*’s family were searching for a better life for themselves and their four children, well away from the gritty inner-city high rise apartment they called home.

The family packed up their belongings and moved to rural Victoria where they planned to start anew.

Then one morning a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on the door to spread the word of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. That was when Jodi’s nightmare began.

“These nice people were promising a community with no drugs, no alcohol and no crime – it sounded very appealing,” said Jodi, who asked that her name be withheld.

“They love bomb you. They sell you this vision of a perfect community. It is anything but. It’s indoctrination. It’s a cult, it really is. But they convince you it’s a religion.”

The Jehovah’s Witness church and its overarching body, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, came to the attention of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Sexual Abuse with a 2015 case study hearing more than 1000 allegations of paedophilia had been made against the organisation over 60 years yet not one complaint was reported to police.

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JAMAICA
Loop

The sexual abuse case against 64-year-old Moravian pastor, Rupert Clarke, has been sent to the Circuit Court.

Reverend Clarke, with two counts of having sex with someone under the age of 16 years hanging over his head, appeared in the St Elizabeth Parish Court on Wednesday, during which the order was made.

The transfer was made after the prosecution obtained an instrument from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Clarke’s attorney sought to have the case remain in the St Elizabeth Parish Court, at least until the case file is completed, but the presiding judge denied the application.

The case will now be next mentioned on March 30 in the next session of the St Elizabeth Circuit Court.

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INDIA
Times of India

KANNUR: Fr Robin Vadakkancheril, accused of raping a minor girl, was sent to police custody for four days by the Thalassery additional district sessions court on Thursday.

Police had said the priest, who has been arrested under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, needed to be questioned further in the case. The case pertains to the rape and impregnation of a minor girl near Kottiyoor in Kannur.

Police suspect a conspiracy was hatched to hush up the incident with the help of authorities at Christu Raj Hospital and some members of the Wayanad Child Welfare Committee (CWC), among others. Police said the new-born baby was shifted to the Holy Infant Mary’s Foundling Home in Wayanad on February 7 and that the documents related to the age of the girl were tampered. The CWC signed the order on February 20 without any verifying the documents, police added.

Wayanad CWC chairman Thomas Joseph Therakam and member Betty Jose have been expelled from their posts and have been named as accused in the case. They had moved for anticipatory bail in Wayanad additional district sessions court but withdrew their pleas on Thursday after the court said the case was in the jurisdiction of Thalassery additional district sessions court. Sources said they were planning to move the HC. However, they have been still absconding and police said search was on to arrest them along with other accused.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

Shannon Deery, Herald Sun
March 9, 2017

CATHOLIC priest Gerald Ridsdale looks set to plead guilty to dozens of child sex charges, a court has heard.

The 82-year-old was charged with 36 child sex offences in January, and police have since served him with two additional charges.

He appeared at the Melbourne Magistrates Court via videolink today where magistrate Johanna Metcalf was told the case was close to resolving.

It means Ridsdale’s alleged victims will be spared the ordeal of giving evidence to prove their claims.

But he will almost certainly be given a discounted sentence if he enters a plea of guilty, particularly at such an early stage.

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NEW YORK
Legislative Gazette

Written by KALEB H. SMITH, assistant editor on March 9, 2017

Advocates for the Child Victims Act have once more called upon state legislators to pass reforms to the statute of limitation for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

This week in Albany, those advocates were joined by Senator Brad Hoylman, D-Manhattan, and Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, D-Manhattan, in a heart-to-heart discussion with the press, where survivors recounted their experience with sexual assault.

Rosenthal is optimistic since her bill was introduced much sooner than the assembly bill last year containing similar reforms. The support of Hoylman in the Senate, as well as governor’s support, add to her positive outlook on the future of the bill.

“Now all signs are positive around us,” said Rosenthal, “the governor has stated his desire to pass this law. Certainly the senator is working very hard to get it done in the senate. I’m working very hard in the assembly, we just introduced a bill a couple weeks ago.”

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Colm Keena

An offer from the Christian Brothers to transfer land worth €127 million to the State as part of its contribution towards redress for people abused in institutions it ran was “withdrawn”, according to a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General.

The offer was made in 2009 in response to the Ryan report, which detailed decades of abuse suffered by children in institutions run by religious orders.

In total, €353 million in cash and property was offered by 18 congregations. Approximately one-third of this was to come from the Christian Brothers.

Eight of the report’s chapters were devoted to the brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys in the State during the years concerned.

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OREGON
KVAL

EUGENE, Ore. – A Eugene priest was sentenced to three years of probation and 90 days in jail Thursday for hiring a teenage girl for sex, according to the Lane County District Attorney’s Office.

Erik Hasselman, chief deputy district attorney, said Daniel MacKay was sentenced to 30 days in jail for each of his three counts of prostitution behavior, totaling 90 days.

MacKay was found guilty on three counts of prostitution March 4.

MacKay must also participate in a program in Multnomah County to address his prostitution behavior.

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ITALIA
Rete L’Abuso

Ore di lavoro frenetico. Sotto la lente date, luoghi, protagonisti, screenshot, chat. Lo scottante dossier che accusa alcuni religiosi di aver preso parte a festini hot con minori comincia a prendere forma. Pezzi di un puzzle da mettere insieme, che tessera dopo tessera si consolida nelle due indagini parallele della Curia arcivescovile di Pozzuoli e della Procura di Napoli. Il cerchio, intorno al prete della diocesi di Pozzuoli che sarebbe coinvolto insieme ad altri religiosi di alto rango in abusi su minori, comincia a stringersi. Il dossier inoltrato ai magistrati dall’associazione Meter, da 25 anni in prima fila nella lotta alla pedofilia, contiene elementi di sicuro interesse investigativo.

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INDIA
The Hindu

He should be produced before the court on March 13

The Additional District and Sessions Court at Thalassery on Thursday granted to the police the custody of Robin Vadakkancheril, the main accused in the case of rape of a minor girl at Kottiyoor here.

Considering the plea of the police officers investigating the case, the court ordered the granting of four-day custody of Vadakkancheril to the police for questioning him. The accused should be produced before the court on March 13.

The police said the accused would be questioned to gather more details on his alleged collusion with others to cover up the incident. Vadakkancheril was the parish vicar of St. Sebastian Church, Neendunoki, at Kottiyoor in the district. After his arrest on March 27, he was removed from the post of vicar by the Mananthavady diocese.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Pocono Record

By Andrew Scott
Pocono Record Writer

Former New Jersey priest Kevin A. Gugliotta, 55, of Manahwkin, N.J., is scheduled to enter a plea Friday in Wayne County Court after being charged with having child pornography, said the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office.

Between July 9 and Aug. 29, multiple files containing child porn were uploaded to Gugliotta’s computer, an affidavit states. Charged with 20 counts of disseminating images of sexual acts involving children and 20 counts of child porn, Gugliotta as of Thursday was in Wayne County Prison in lieu of $50,000 bail, which had been reduced from $1 million bail.

After receiving a tip Aug. 9, Monroe County District Attorney’s Office Detective Brian Webbe conducted a lengthy investigation that revealed a file containing child porn had been uploaded to a computer traced to a Third Street apartment in Gouldsboro, Lehigh Township, Wayne County. Webbe then contacted Lehigh Township police and the Wayne County District Attorney’s Office.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m. Sept. 29, authorities executed a search warrant at the apartment. No one was home and there were no electronic devices there at the time, but authorities learned Gugliotta had been there several times a week.

Authorities were given Gugliotta’s phone number and tracked him to a church in Union County, N.J. Authorities contacted Gugliotta and tried getting him to return to the apartment, using a ruse so that he wouldn’t become suspicious and destroy evidence.

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AUSTRALIA
Bay 93.9

Rebecca McDonald / 10 March 2017

A former Apollo Bay priest will be back in court today on dozens of sex abuse charges. 82-year-old Gerald Ridsdale is accused of 36 offences against 11 children between the 1960s and 80s.

The former Catholic priest is expected to face the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court via video link on the charges of rape, assault and indecent assault.

The alleged offending took place in seven Victorian towns including Ocean Grove, Ballarat and Mortlake.

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OREGON
KXL

By Grant McHill

Mar 9

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) – A Eugene priest found guilty of prostitution for paying a 17-year-old girl to have sex with him has been sentenced to three months in jail.

The Register-Guard reports Daniel MacKay was given a 90-day jail sentence Thursday. The judge said he would be eligible to serve 60 of those days in an alternative program, such as community service.

MacKay is accused of paying the teen for sex acts on several occasions last summer after she posted online prostitution advertisements.

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IRELAND
Westmeath Examiner

The nuns who ran the mother and baby home in Castlepollard should be “locked up” for their role in the systemic mistreatment of thousands of women and their children, a former resident has said.

In an interview with the Westmeath Examiner yesterday, Paul Redmond, who was born at the mother and baby home in Castlepollard and is the chairperson of the Coalition of the Mother and Baby Home Survivors, said that although he knows that it won’t happen, he would “love” to see the nuns who ran the mother and baby homes imprisoned for the remainder of their years.

“I would love to see the guards kick in the doors of the convents and see them brought out in their wheelchairs in chains,” he said.

“I was one of three or four people who went to the gardaí about the high mortality rates in the homes, but there is nothing the gardaí can do.

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IRELAND
Reuters

By Estelle Shirbon | TUAM, IRELAND

Catherine Corless has been haunted all her life by childhood memories of the skinny children from the local Catholic home for unmarried mothers and their babies in the small cathedral town of Tuam in the west of Ireland.

Known locally as the home babies, the children lived in secrecy behind the dark, high walls of the home run by nuns from the Bon Secours order. Some of them attended the same school as Corless, but they were kept apart from the other children.

Once, egged on by classmates, Corless played a trick on one of the home babies, handing over what looked like a sweet but was in fact only an empty wrapper.

“I’m so sorry for that. It’s stuck me with, that memory. It was only later I thought ‘that poor child never got a sweet, they would have loved a sweet’,” Corless told Reuters in an interview at her home in the countryside outside Tuam.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Cormac McQuinn
March 9 2017

THE €1.5bn cost of the the child abuse inquiry and redress scheme has hugely exceeded original estimates, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) has found.

It was originally forecast that the redress scheme for survivors of institutional child abuse would cost €250m.

That spiraled to an estimated €1.25bn.

A summary of the report states that “government policy is that the congregations who ran the institutions would share equal liability of the €1.52 billion cost of redress i.e. contribute €760 million” and that “Total contributions offered to date are €406 million less than this.”

The report found that at the end of 2015 Religious congregations had only paid €192m.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

A Dáil debate on the Tuam babies’ scandal was delayed by 10 minutes this morning after not enough TDs showed up.

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IRELAND
Today FM

WRITTEN BY: GAVAN REILLY

A Dáil debate on the discovery of human remains at the mother and baby homes in Tuam was delayed – because not enough TDs showed up.

The Dail was only able to get going at 10:10am – ten minutes late – when a 20th TD showed up and allowed business to begin.

However, after the morning prayer and the debate began, the attendance quickly reduced back to 12.

The poor attendance is partly explained by the fact that four other Oireachtas committees were meeting at the same time, which would have lowered the numbers available to be in the Dáil chamber.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Religious orders which ran institutions where children were abused have paid just 13% of the bill for a long-running inquiry, redress and compensation, the state’s financial watchdog has found.

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, known as the Ryan inquiry, and the Redress Board cost a total of 1.5 billion euro (£1.3 billion) by the end of 2015, according to the Comptroller & Auditor General (C&AG).

In the dying days of the government in 2002 then education minister Michael Woods arranged a controversial indemnity deal with 18 religious orders that they would hand over property, cash and assets worth 128 million euro (£111 million) to cover some of the costs.

The C&AG said 21 million euro (£18 million) of this was left to be transferred to the State at the end of 2015.

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IRELAND
Shemazing

by Sarah Magliocco

A debate on the Tuam babies scandal was scheduled to kick off at 10am this morning, however the debate was delayed as not enough TDs showed up for the meeting.

Oireachtas rules state that 20 of the 158 elected TDs must be present for a debate to occur, meaning the meeting started behind schedule as the Dáil waited for others to show up.

Once the debate began, Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone issued an apology to the victims of the scandal, and told TDs she will consider including all residential Irish institutions in the current inquiry.

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IRELAND
RTE News

Minister for Children Katherine Zappone has referred in the Dáil to the 474 so-called “unclaimed infant remains” which were transferred from mother-and-baby homes to medical schools in Irish universities between 1940 and 1965.

The minister also announced that she is about to begin discussions with advocates, historians and other experts who have studied a model of inquiry used by countries like Chile and Argentina to try to come to terms with a range of large-scale past abuses.

Minister Zappone said an interim report from the commission investigating mother and baby homes will be published by the end of the month.

During a special Dáil debate on the Tuam babies, the minister acknowledged the calls made since Friday for an expansion of the terms of reference to cover all institutions, agencies and individuals that were involved with Ireland’s unmarried mothers and their children.

She said she wanted to offer solidarity and a personal apology for the wrongs that were done to those affected.

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IRELAND
TV3 – Xpose’

In today’s Loose Women, Coleen Nolan confessed she is worried her long-lost half-sister might have been born in the mother and baby home in Tuam, where the remains of up to 800 babies and toddlers were found buried in a mass grave.

As Coleen explained, she was in her late twenties when she discovered her dad had fathered a child with another woman while still married to her mum.

She never met her half-sister, who was born in Ireland.

“I always wondered why she didn’t get in touch and I thought: she could have been one of those babies,” Coleen said.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
BBC News

The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland has backed a call by Amnesty International for an inquiry into mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland.

The call came after “significant human remains” were found at the site of a former home in the Republic of Ireland.

The home was run by the Bon Secours order of nuns in Tuam, County Galway.

The bodies ranged from premature babies to three year olds.

The discovery was made as part of an investigation into claims by a local historian that up to 800 babies and young children died at the home and were buried in unmarked graves.

Amnesty International has said that archaeological surveys should be carried out at all former mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland.

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IRELAND
BBC News

The remains of 474 infants were transferred from mother-and-baby homes to medical schools over 25 years, the Irish minister for children has said.

The minister, Katherine Zappone, revealed the figure as she addressed the Dáil (Irish parliament).
She made a statement following last week’s revelation that “significant quantities” of human remains had been found at one of the homes in Tuam.

Ms Zappone said the Tuam discovery “confirmed what we had all feared”.

The minister also paid tribute to the “tireless” County Galway historian Catherine Corless, whose personal research led to the inquiry and an excavation of site.

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