ABUSE TRACKER

BUFFALO (NY)
The Buffalo News

August 18, 2018

News Editorial Board

If Pennsylvania can do it, why can’t New York? In the name of long-delayed justice and of helping/pushing the Catholic Church to fully confront the terrible sins it committed, the state needs to investigate the scope of child sexual abuse within the church and the hierarchy’s actions in covering it up.

In Pennsylvania, residents now have an insightful and intensely disturbing picture of abhorrent criminal conduct: the rampant sexual abuse of children by a significant minority of priests and, at least as shocking, the church’s determined efforts to persuade victims not to report the crimes and, unbelievably, police not to investigate them.

That’s called conspiracy. It’s also called evil.

The Pennsylvania report was produced by a grand jury created by the state attorney general. It uncovered child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over 70 years. It covered six of the state’s eight dioceses – the other two had been previously investigated – and found more than 1,000 identifiable victims. Bishops and other church leaders covered it up, the grand jury reported.

If anything, the issue is likely to be more prevalent in New York, a much larger state with a significantly higher proportion of Catholic residents – 31 percent to Pennsylvania’s 24 percent, according to www.worldatlas.com. New Yorkers of all faiths need to know what happened here.

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ROME (ITALY)
Crux

August 18, 2018

ByElise Harris

Pedro Salinas, author of the 2015 blockbuster book Half Monks, Half Soldiers, detailing years of allegations of physical, sexual and psychological abuse by members of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), is being sued by an archbishop that belongs to the group, who is charging the journalist with defamation.

Archbishop José Antonio Eguren Anselmi of Piura, was the subject of a Jan. 20 article on the website La Mula by Salinas titled “the Peruvian Juan Barros,” in which Salinas notes that Eguren Anselmi was a member of the “foundational generation” of the SCV, whose founder, Luis Fernando Figari, has been accused of abuses of power, conscience and sexuality.

Barros was the bishop of the Chilean Diocese of Osorno until June 11, when Pope Francis accepted his resignation following an investigation by Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna into clerical abuse in Chile, where Barros was accused of covering up the sexual abuse of Chilean priest Father Fernando Karadima.

In his January article, Salinas, himself a former member of the SCV, compares Eguren Anselmi to Barros, saying the archbishop was a close disciple of Figari, and as a member of the “foundational generation” – which included German Doig, who died in 2001 and was found guilty of sexual abuse – “knew everything” about their founder and what he did.

Salinas asserts that the first accusation against the SCV was made in the year 2000 by a journalist named Jose Enrique Escardo, and that the complaint was directed at Eguren Anselmi.

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STAUNTON (VA)
Staunton News Leader

August 18, 2018

By David Fritz

What’s a Catholic to do in the wake of the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report covering a half century of sexual abuse by priests and coverups by their superiors?

The complicated individual stories span decades. Some catalog the misdeeds of a single priest through an entire career. Too few stories cover one-and-done miscreants. Most were excused by bishops, shuffled between parishes or shipped across the country to offend again.

Individually, the details are horrific. Compiled, they’re devastating first and foremost for the grievous wrongs done to young people. But also in how they tainted the faith, the majority of the faithful – clergy and laypeople – and their works. They defame religion everywhere.

The first thing to do is get angry, suggests The Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit writer. Anger akin to Jesus’ when he drove the money changers from the temple. Martin urges embracing such anger as the way God can work through people.

And anger is easy. It’s out there. It’s flowing. We’ve had too much practice, as these stories have trickled out for decades now. We must make this an inflection point.

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TORONTO (CANADA)
CBC News

August 17, 2018

By Mark Gollom

Grand jury report also documents cases of abuse involving Pa. priests alleged to have occurred in Canada

In 1984, shortly after admitting to sexually molesting a 14-year-old child, Rev. John Connor of Pennsylvania was sent to a Toronto-area facility that helps clergy deal with addictions, mental-health issues and sexual disorders.

After eight months of treatment at the Southdown Institute, officials there warned the church that Connor should not be put in a position where he would have responsibility for adolescents. Yet the church seemed to ignore the institute’s advice, and would later assign Connor to a parish in Conshohocken, Pa., with a grade school and encourage him to “educate youth.”

These allegations are found in the more than 1,300 pages of an explosive grand jury report released Tuesday that claims hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania engaged in sexual abuse since the 1940s.

Of the victims, more than 1,000 were children, but that total could be thousands more, the grand jury concluded.

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LEHIGH COUNTY (PA)
WPVI

August 18, 2018

Following the unprecedented Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on sex abuse by priests, a university in Lehigh County is considering changing the names of two buildings named after two bishops named in the report.

A spokesperson for DeSales University tells Action News the buildings in question are the “Bishop Thomas J. Welsh Hall” and the “Bishop Joseph McShea Student Center.”

Both bishops are accused in the report of covering up abuse.

The university will discuss the removal of their names during the next board meeting in September.

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INDIANAPOLIS (IN)
Indianapolis Star

August 19, 2018

By Billy Kobin

Recent local and national headlines have given Catholics in the Indianapolis area plenty to think about.

First, there was the news that Shelly Fitzgerald, a popular guidance counselor at Roncalli High School for the past 15 years, is facing possible termination after church and school officials were presented with evidence of her 2014 marriage to a woman.

Then, in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a grand jury report accused more than 300 Catholic priests of sexually abusing more than 1,000 child victims. The report details a 70-year “systematic” coverup effort by the state’s church leaders. Five Catholic priests with ties to Indiana were named in the grand jury report.

For many Catholics, the events have created a certain amount of introspection about what might be described as the separation of church and faith. More specifically, some Catholics may lament the church’s positions in these instances, but their faith is unshaken.

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IRELAND
The Guardian

August 17, 2018

by Harriet Sherwood

Catholic priests in Ireland need to be missionaries in their own country to meet the challenges of a changing society, Eamon Martin, the most senior church figure in Ireland, has said ahead of the pope’s visit to Dublin next weekend.

“We are in mission territory in many ways as Catholics in Ireland,” Martin, who is archbishop of Armagh as well as primate of all Ireland, told the Guardian.

“Ireland was always renowned as a missionary country, sending priests all over the world to spread the Catholic faith. But there’s a need for mission here in Ireland now, a need for a new evangelisation.”

In the four decades since the last papal visit to Ireland, that of John Paul II in 1979, the country has seen a steep decline in the numbers of people attending mass and the moral authority of the church has been shattered by revelations of child sexual abuse and mistreatment of vulnerable women in the Magdalene Laundries.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
BBC News

August 16, 2018

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has released a grand jury report naming more than 300 clergymen accused of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

The document said hundreds of young boys and girls, as well as teenagers, were abused by clergy.

Along with the report, the office of the attorney general in Pennsylvania released this video with testimony from three victims.

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MIDLAND (MI)
Midland Daily News

August 18, 2018

Voice of the Faithful will meet Monday, Aug. 27, to listen to the stories of four people who were abused by priests. The meeting is set for 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Parish Church, 3516 E Monroe Road, Midland. All are welcome.

“Their stories are heart wrenching,” a VOTF press release states. “Let them be the motivation for our actions to stop sex abuse in the church.”

VOTF is a group of serious Catholics who are concerned about the church and its future. Its goals are to support survivors of clergy sex abuse, to support priests of integrity and to shape structural change within the Catholic church.

For more information, contact Norbert Bufka at 989-835-2832 or VOTF at http://www.votf.org

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

August 17, 2018

NCR Editorial Staff

Editor’s note: The following editorial was written and will appear in the Aug. 24-30 print issue of NCR, which went to press the day before Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, revealed that the bishops were inviting the Vatican to conduct an apostolic visitation to the country to lead a “full investigation” into questions surrounding Cardinal Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, that the bishops will take steps to create channels for easier reporting of abuse and misconduct by bishops, and that the bishops will push for better procedures under canon law to resolve complaints made against bishops.

We welcome yesterday’s announcement as a good first step in resolving the crisis that has enveloped the Catholic Church. Particularly encouraging is that the bishops have listed “substantial leadership by laity” as one of the criteria for meeting their goals. That, too, is a step along the way.

Cardinal DiNardo’s statement is addressed to “Brothers and Sisters in Christ” and ends this request: “Let me ask you to hold us to all of these resolutions.” The bishops should know that we will be watching.

With what we have learned about the abuse of minors and seminarians perpetuated by Theodore McCarrick and his parallel rise through the ranks of the church, coupled with the scathing grand jury report out of Pennsylvania that chronicles in vivid detail the rape of children and the culture of secrecy that enabled the abuse to continue for decades, what are Catholics feeling?

Anger and disgust don’t seem strong enough words. Revulsion? Horror? Betrayal?

The revelations of the last two months make undeniably clear that it is time for the laity to reclaim our ownership of this church. We are the body of Christ, we are the church. It is time that we demand that bishops claim their true vocations as servants to the people of God. And they must live that way.

At this time, it seems laity can do very little to effect the changes needed to bring about the solutions to the large issues that plague the church now — careerism, abuse of power, lack of transparency, no accountability. The fact is laypeople in our church today have little power.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Daily Beast

August 17, 2018

By Michael Daly

The monsignor who gambled and traveled on the Archdiocese’s dime remained behind bars as a grand jury reported on the crimes of his peers who preyed on children.

Rape and molest trusting young boys for half a century, but do not touch the Catholic Church’s money.

Therein lies the lesson offered in Pennsylvania by Father Francis Rogers and Monsignor William Dombrow.

Rogers’ decades of depredations were detailed in a grand jury report on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia made public in 2005, and which was finally followed this week by a similar grand jury report on six other dioceses in Pennsylvania.

“The Grand Jury will never be able to determine how many boys Father Francis P. Rogers raped and sexually abused in his more than 50 years as a priest,” noted the earlier report on sexual assault committed by an unholy host of priests. “Nor, probably, will we or anyone else be able to calculate the number of boys the Archdiocese could have saved from sexual abuse had it investigated potential victims rather than protecting itself from scandal and shielding this sexually abusive priest. We have learned of at least three victims who we believe would not have been abused had the Archdiocese taken decisive action when it learned of Fr. Rogers’ “familiarity” with boys. We find that the Archdiocese received a litany of verifiable reports beginning shortly after Fr. Rogers’ 1946 ordination and continuing for decades about his serious misconduct with, and abuse of, boys. ‘

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ROME (ITALY)
Daily Beast

August 17, 2018

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

Without Richard Serbin’s diligence and commitment, many of the atrocities committed by hundreds of Pennsylvania’s Catholic priests would never have come to light.

Richard Serbin remembers the day in 1987 when he met 19-year-old Michael Hutchinson. The skinny young man was in a mental health institution for criminals serving time for robbery and male prostitution. “I can remember that meeting very well,” said Serbin, who was 40 at the time and just getting his bearings in what he thought would be a career dedicated to civil cases against big corporations. “He was very hyper and he got all these candy bars from the vending machine. Then he told me what happened.”

Michael, it turns out, was very troubled. He had been sexually abused from just before his 11th birthday until he was 17 by Father Francis Luddy, a Catholic priest in the Pennsylvania diocese of Altoona-Johnstown who has since died.

Luddy, who was in his 40s at the time, was so close to the Hutchinson family he was also Michael’s godfather. He is one of 301 predator priests exposed in a sickening document released by a Pennsylvania grand jury on Tuesday. That document outlines alleged sexual crimes against more than 1,000 children over seven decades of stunning silence and cover ups across six dioceses in Pennsylvania.

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UNITED STATES
Daily Beast

August 18, 2018

By Candida Moss

One central dogma has protected the church through all kinds of clerical scandals.

The news of sex scandal in Pennsylvania is truly sickening. Thousands of victims, hundreds of predatory priests, and what can only be described as a systematic conspiracy to conceal the crimes of those accused. All of which raises the question: How can the Catholic Church survive such a scandal? In fact, in light of previous revelations about sex abuse, how has the church survived so far?

To be sure, church attendance and vocations (the number of men joining the priesthood) have fallen, but to the external observer the ability of priests to maintain authority is baffling. Protestant leaders have been destroyed by smaller scandals, so how does the Catholic Church escape? Given the New Testament’s focus on personal morality and ethics, how can church leaders maintain any kind of authority and status when so many are complicit? Is it just sheer size and economic health that has preserved the church so far?

This is not, unsurprisingly enough for any organization, the first time that the church has encountered scandal on a large scale. Of course there have always been individual priests who have embezzled funds, kept secret families on their estates, and even ordered hits on their ecclesiastical rivals. For the Borgias this was all very much business as usual. But the precedent for how to deal with a widespread crisis of confidence in church leadership was set even earlier: as part of a schism in the church that took place in late antique North Africa.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
The Associated Press

August 17, 2018

A Pennsylvania bishop named in a grand jury report on sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy says he has “profound remorse” and offers his “heartfelt apology” to the victims. Harrisburg Bishop Ronald Gainer spoke Friday at a Mass of forgiveness.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Religion News Service

August 15, 2018

By Thomas Reese

Awful, disgusting, horrifying, sickening — one runs out of adjectives in describing the actions of abusive priests chronicled in the just-released Pennsylvania grand jury report.

The report lists more than 300 priests accused of abuse in six of the state’s eight dioceses. If accused priests from the other two dioceses, dealt with by earlier grand juries, are added, it amounts to about 8 percent of the 5,000 priests who served in Pennsylvania during the 70-year period covered by the report.

The abuse of even one child is terrible, but that more than 1,000 children were abused in that timespan is appalling. Undoubtedly, there are more who have not yet come forward, and hopefully this report will encourage them to do so.

Just as disconcerting is the failure of many bishops in the early days of the crisis to respond appropriately to the abuse. The best you can say about them is that they should have known better.

Why did they not do better?

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NEW YORK (NY)
The Wall Street Journal

August 16, 2018

By C.C. Pecknold

A new grand-jury report on sex abuse shows the episcopate behaving like Judas.

A Pennsylvania grand jury this week published a 900-page report detailing sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by some 300 Roman Catholic priests over 70 years. The grand jury had spent two years gathering subpoenaed archives from Pennsylvania’s six dioceses. It sought not only to share the victims’ stories but to document an entrenched culture of coverup reaching the highest levels of the U.S. church.

Forensic accounts of priests raping the sons and daughters of Christ reminded me of Judas. On the way back from Mass on Wednesday, with the report on my mind, I asked my 14-year-old son what differentiated Judas’s single betrayal of Jesus and Peter’s threefold denial of Christ. Well-catechized, he simply replied “repentance.” His answer helped us have a frank discussion about sin in the Catholic Church, the human need for penitential disciplines and devotions, and God’s way of helping man triumph over the wickedness of the Devil.

Not even Dante in his “Inferno” imagined crimes as sacrilegiously perverse as those the report documents. In some cases priests used sacramental objects as props for their diabolical predations. While the majority of cases involve adolescent males, children as young as 7 were sexually abused by men trusted to represent Christ. Since most of the crimes occurred in the 1970s and ’80s, the accused are now dead or the statutes of limitations have run out. But the report notes: “The bishops weren’t just aware of what was going on; they were immersed in it. And they went to great lengths to keep it secret.” They must be held to account.

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NEWARK (NJ)
Catholic News Agency

August 17, 2018

By Ed Condon

Recent allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick include reports that he made sexual advances toward seminarians during his tenure as Bishop of Metuchen and Archbishop of Newark.

CNA recently spoke to six priests of the Archdiocese of Newark, and one priest member of a religious order who was a seminarian in New York in the early 1970s, while McCarrick was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

Citing archdiocesan policy and concerns about ecclesiastical repercussions for their candor, the priests agreed to speak to CNA only under the condition of anonymity. The priests spoke individually to CNA, and their accounts were compared for confirmation.

The religious priest who spoke to CNA said when he studied in a seminary in New York, McCarrick, who was then an aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York, would sometimes visit the seminary. The priest said that McCarrick’s reputation was already well established by this time.

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LATROBE (PA)
Tribune-Review

August 16, 2018

By Stephen Huba

Two days after the release of a bombshell report chronicling allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests across Pennsylvania — and decades after it removed many from ministry — Saint Vincent Archabbey in Unity on Thursday revealed the names of a dozen members it deemed to have been credibly accused of similar wrongdoing.

The list includes 11 Benedictine priests and one brother against whom “credible allegations” of child sexual abuse had been made to the archabbey since 1993. It was released, the archabbey said, in response to the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury report on 301 “predator priests” in six dioceses, including three archabbey members.

The members, all deceased, were: the Rev. Fidelis Lazar of the Pittsburgh diocese, the Rev. Giles Nealen of the Erie diocese, and the Rev. Charles Weber of the Greensburg diocese.

All but two of the 12 people named by the archabbey are dead. Many allegations stem from pastoral assignments taken by the Benedictines in other dioceses.

“The Archabbey Community is saddened by the behavior of those accused and extends its deep apology to any person who has been victimized by any member of the Archabbey Community,” Archabbot Douglas R. Nowicki said in a statement.

Below are the names and details released by the archabbey:

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BALTIMORE (MD)
The Baltimore Sun

August 17, 2018

By Pamela Wood

Following this week’s release of an exhaustive grand jury report in Pennsylvania documenting decades of child abuse by Catholic priests, there are calls for Maryland’s attorney general to take on a similar investigation.

A spokeswoman for Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said the office does not confirm or deny the existence of any investigations, and declined to comment further.

An investigation by the attorney general would be the first step before convening a grand jury to review potential findings.

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UNITED STATES
Patheos

August 16, 2018

By Michael Stone

New grand jury report reveals the Catholic Church has a seven step playbook they use to conceal the truth about priests raping children.

It is now common knowledge that the Catholic Church has been protecting and enabling predatory priests for decades if not centuries. In so doing the Catholic Church is responsible for the rape and sexually abuse of countless children.

But now a new grand jury report released by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court explains the policy and procedures the Catholic Church uses to cover-up, deny, and obfuscate the epidemic of sexual abuse and rape of children by Catholic clergy.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the Catholic Church’s seven step playbook for concealing the truth about priests raping and sexually abusing children. The seven steps in the “playbook” are:

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
PennLive

August 17, 2018

By Nancy Eshelman

Barry didn’t sleep well Tuesday night. The release of the grand jury report on sexual abuse by priests stirred decades-old memories. The boat. The school bus that served as a cabin. Motel rooms. Swimming nude at the CYO while two priests watched.

Priests Francis A. Bach and Joseph M. Pease co-owned a boat they kept in Goldsboro. Beginning in the mid-60s, Barry (not his real name) went there several times with other boys from school.

Barry remembers the school bus contained cots. He was not abused there, but suspects others were.

His abuse would come later.

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NEW YORK (NY)
The Center for Constitutional Rights

August 15, 2018

In the wake of the Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing widespread sexual violence across the state and cover-up by senior leaders of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania and the Vatican, survivors renewed calls for a federal investigation, which they requested in 2003 and again in 2014. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding an investigation and reiterating the facts of the nationwide crisis that has proven to be more pervasive with each passing year. The groups say it is the responsibility of the federal government to protect children in the future by conducting a thorough investigation and taking appropriate steps.

“If they had done what we asked in 2003, how many children would have been spared?” said Tim Lennon, President of SNAP’s Board of Directors.

“Despite all the evidence that thousands of children suffered needlessly to protect the image of the Catholic Church, federal officials have taken virtually no steps to probe or prevent these crimes or cover-ups or punish clerics who conceal or commit them,” said Peter Isely, who is now a founding member of End Clergy Abuse (ECAglobal.com), a new global organization of survivor leaders and human rights activists from five continents and 28 countries launched in Geneva in June. Isely authored the 2003 SNAP white paper and call for investigation to the DOJ. ECA is joining SNAP’s call today to the DOJ on behalf of survivors around the world.

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WASHINGTON (DC)
FOX 5 DC

August 18, 2018

By Cori Coffin

Two days after Cardinal Donald Wuerl sat down exclusively with FOX 5, others are coming forward to refute the Archbishop of Washington’s claims that he did everything he could to protect victims within the Catholic Church.

A growing number of people are also calling for Wuerl’s resignation, including David Lorenz, the Maryland director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
The Washington Post

August 18, 2018

By Marc A. Thiessen

In 1972, Pope Paul VI warned that “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God.” We see that smoke throughout the report from a Pennsylvania grand jury, which alleges that more than 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children in six Pennsylvania dioceses — including 99 priests from the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which was led for 18 years by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, now archbishop of Washington.

How bad was the abuse? The report notes that “during the course of this investigation, the Grand Jury uncovered a ring of predatory priests operating within the [Pittsburgh] Diocese who shared intelligence or information regarding victims as well as exchanging the victims amongst themselves. This ring also manufactured child pornography . . . [and] used whips, violence and sadism in raping their victims.” According to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, one victim, a boy named George, “was forced to stand on a bed in a rectory, strip naked and pose as Christ on the cross for the priests. They took photos of their victim, adding them to a collection of child pornography which they produced and shared on church grounds.” Abusing a child while mocking the Passion of Christ is truly diabolical.

Cardinal Wuerl, who served as the bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, did discipline some priests — and even went to the Vatican to fight an order that he reinstate one. But the grand jury also wrote that he reassigned other predator priests — including the one who “groomed” George and introduced him to the ring that photographed him. In at least one case, Cardinal Wuerl required a victim to sign a “confidentiality agreement” barring him from discussing his abuse with any third party as part of a settlement. That is a cover-up. In addition, the grand jury also wrote that under his leadership the diocese failed to report allegations of abuse to law enforcement, advocated for a convicted predator at sentencing, and then provided a $11,542.68 lump-sum payment to the disgraced priest after his release from prison.

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Reuters

August 18, 2018

By Padraic Halpin

The Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, withdrew on Saturday from next week’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin, the second senior cleric to pull out of the Roman Catholic event amid clerical sexual abuse scandals in the United States.

The meeting, a major congress held every three years, will be closed by Pope Francis during the first papal visit in almost 40 years to Ireland where a series of abuse scandals has also rocked the church’s standing in the once staunchly Catholic country.

The withdrawal from the Dublin event followed a bombshell grand jury report this week that detailed widespread abuse by hundreds of priests in Pennsylvania and a systematic cover-up campaign by their bishops over a 70-year period.

Wuerl, who was Bishop for the Diocese of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania from 1988 to 2006, has not himself been accused of any wrongdoing against children.

The report found that Wuerl notified the Vatican in 1989 of several priests who had been accused of sexually abusing children but that over subsequent years he granted requests by some to be reassigned to other parishes or to retire early, and in one case approved a loan to assist one such priest with personal debts.

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NEW YORK (NY)
New York Post

August 18, 2018

Post Editorial Board

Of all the horrors in the Pennsylvania grand-jury report on decades of abuse by Catholic priests, the greatest may be this: “Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected” — and “many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.”

The 1,400-page report covers decades of secret history for six of the state’s eight dioceses. It lists 300-plus priests who had engaged in abuse, mostly of boys but also of girls. The incomplete roster of victims runs more than 1,000.

Details include a child pornography ring, rape of a pre-teen girl in the hospital, sadistic “grooming,” a girl impregnated and then “helped” with an abortion and on and on and on.

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RANCAGUA (CHILE)
AFP

August 18, 2018

By Ana Fernandez

The prosecutor in charge of investigating a massive sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Chile said several bishops could face charges after he questions the Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago, Ricardo Ezzati, for the first time next week.

Prosecutor Emiliano Arias will on Tuesday take a statement from Ezzati, the head of the church in Chile, who has denied allegations that he covered up cases of abuse, including those by a top aide who was jailed earlier this year.

Other bishops “whose actions are being analyzed, could also be accused,” Arias told AFP in an interview at the Rancagua prosecutor’s office 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Santiago.

State prosecutors began investigating scores of abuse cases last month after outrage around the country over the church’s own probe into decades of abuse by priests, crimes over which it often failed to take any action or handed down too-lenient punishments. Now bishops and other priests accused of abuse in Chile will face the full force of secular law.

Arias said he will have to determine if Ezzati “fulfilled or failed to fulfill his obligations” to protect victims and enforce church regulations.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
90.5 WESA/NPR

August 18, 2018

By Kathleen Davis

The release of a massive grand jury report into sexual abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania is posing a challenge for priests who will address the report to their parishioners this weekend. The roughly 900-page report includes horrid reports of of “predator priests” that conducted “criminal and/or morally reprehensible conduct” — often covered up for decades.

In response, the Diocese of Pittsburgh has requested all their priests read a letter at weekend masses addressing the report. It reads, in part, “We cannot bury our heads in the sand. There were instances in the past when the Church acted in ways that did not respond effectively to victims.” The letter also outlines some ways the Diocese plans to improve how it addresses and reports abuse, including hiring a former state prosecutor to review their policies related to child protection.

Father Lou Vallone says the grand jury report has certainly been on the minds of people in his congregation. He is the priest at St. John of God, a gothic-style Catholic church in McKees Rocks, just outside of Pittsburgh. He’s been at the church for 15 years, but has been a priest in Western Pennsylvania for 45.

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LAKEVILLE (CT)
NBC New York

August 18, 2018

School officials said in a letter they’ve notified law enforcement and other authorities about the report’s findings

The Hotchkiss School, an elite boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut has found that seven former faculty members sexually abused students primarily during the 1970s and 1980s.

The school in Lakeville said in a report posted on its website late Friday that independent investigators found 16 students were subjected to unwanted contact from male faculty, including intercourse.

It also documents instances when former administrators failed to intervene when made aware of the sexual misconduct, which happened between 1969 and 1992.

School officials said in a letter they’ve notified law enforcement and other authorities about the report’s findings.

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ANNAPOLIS (MD)
The Washington Post

August 18, 2018

By Justin Wm. Moyer

A private school in Maryland has launched an investigation into allegations that a culture of sexual abuse flourished decades ago with administrators’ knowledge.

Multiple former students told The Washington Post they were groomed and sexually abused by teachers in the 1970s at Key School in Annapolis, and in some cases had intimate contact with adults that lasted years.

Two Baltimore lawyers are leading the investigation into the alleged misconduct at the school, which serves students from prekindergarten through 12th grade. Matthew Nespole, the current head of school, said in a statement this month that a February review of the allegations indicated former Key officials failed to protect students.

“It appears that members of the Key community neglected to respond appropriately to contemporaneous reports made by former students of faculty misconduct that includes the sexual victimization of students,” the statement said. “I offer my deepest sympathy to the victims and survivors and sincerely hope the investigation will help us begin the healing process.”

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DETROIT (MI)
Detroit Free Press

August 19, 2018

By David Jesse

When she heard Jordyn Wieber give a victim impact statement during Larry Nassar’s sentencing in January, Becca Bovine was struck by how Wieber was summing up exactly how Bovine felt.

So Bovine told her parents and husband by text that she had also been sexuallyassaulted by Nassar, but wasn’t ready to talk about it. She and her family later attended morevictim impact statements and Bovine, now an adult, made oneherself in Eaton County court proceedings.

Now she’s among more than 50 womento file new lawsuits against Nassar and his employers, including Michigan State University, since the original wave of lawsuits was settled by MSU in mid-May. MSU officials said in a court filing Friday they have been notified by several others that suits are coming.

Bovine has a simple message for others who are still holding abuse by Nassar secret.

“There are hundreds of other people who will support you,” she said.

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UNITED STATES
Fox News

August 18, 2018

By Amy Lieu

A former special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was arrested this week, accused of sexually assaulting one woman and twice raping another.

ICE said in a statement that John Jacob Olivas, 43, had worked for the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations unit in California and allegedly abused his position to convince the women to not report his “violent conduct,” the statement said.

The alleged crimes occurred in 2012, the statement said.

The indictment alleges that Olivas attempted to rape one victim in January 2012 after telling her that any effort to report his conduct would be futile because of his position as a federal law enforcement officer.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
KDKA

August 17, 2018

By Ralph Iannotti

The board of directors at a local high school is considering removing the name of Cardinal Wuerl from its title.

The new school year is beginning with big questions looming over Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School. Will the school undergo a name change because of an online petition to drop Cardinal Wuerl’s name?

Monsignor Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, told KDKA-TV News Friday night, “People were saying, take the name of Cardinal Wuerl off the high school; so, the bishop thought he should talk to some people about this.”

After the release earlier this week of a grand jury report involving clergy sex abuse statewide, and how then-bishop, now-Cardinal Wuerl allegedly mishandled complaints about abusive priests, an online petition to strip the the school of the Archbishop of Washington’s name has already garnered about 5,000 signatures. The organizers’ new goal is 7,500 signatures.

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IRELAND/PITTSBURGH (PA)
CBS Cleveland

August 2018

Caridnal Donald Wuerl has canceled his scheduled appearance at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, Ireland.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Daily Mail

August 17, 2018

By Hannah Parry

– A grand jury report revealed that hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania have molested more than 1,000 children
– It found that the church systematically covered up the abuse using ‘a playbook for concealing the truth’
– State AG Josh Shapiro said: ‘We saw Catholic priests weaponizing their faith… and all the while the bishops, the monsignors, the cardinals covered it up’
– The FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime found that the church used a number of techniques for avoiding bringing attention to assault claims
– Such as never using words such as rape in reference to such claims, but simply calling them ‘boundary issues’ or ‘inappropriate contact’
– Priests would be transferred to a new parish where no one knew his reputation or taken to a church-run institute for evaluation if claims mounted up

An FBI investigation has found that the Catholic church had a ‘playbook’ for covering up sex abuse crimes by its priests.

A grand jury report released Tuesday, revealed that hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania have molested more than 1,000 children and that senior church officials, including the now archbishop of Washington, D.C. covered up the abuse.

The report said the numbers of actual victims and abusers could be much higher.

It found that the church systematically covered up the abuse using ‘a playbook for concealing the truth.’

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DETROIT (MI)
Detroit Free Press

Aug. 19, 2018

Archbishop Allen Vigneron demonstrates that he does not fully understand the priest sex abuse problem.

By bringing up the spiritual and moral failings of the priests and bishops involved, his focus on breaking the vow of celibacy and not living within the call of chastity is off base. The sexual abuse of minors is a violent crime, one that steals innocence from a child and many times robs them of healthy sexual relationships as adults.

Why is it a more severe crime when the perpetrators are priests? By their authority within a parish these abusers grossly misuse power and trust. They also damage the victim’s image of God. God sides with the victims, of this I am sure. Yet, one can’t help but see how this would harm the victim’s ability to connect with a church community and sour the victim’s idea of a loving and compassionate God. Many victims struggle with depression and some have resorted to suicide.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Associated Press

August 17, 2018

By Marc Levy

Attorneys general around the U.S. have been largely silent this week about any plans to conduct an investigation like Pennsylvania’s that uncovered widespread child sexual abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses, although New York’s top prosecutor is an exception, saying she is exploring teaming up with the local district attorneys.

The comments by the New York attorney general’s office Friday come on the heels of a sweeping grand jury report that also accused a succession of bishops and other church leaders of helping to keep quiet allegations against 300 “predator priests” who had victimized more than 1,000 children.

Attorney General Barbara Underwood has directed her criminal division to reach out to local district attorneys to see if they can “establish a partnership on this issue,” her spokeswoman, Amy Spitalnick, said in statement. “Victims in New York deserve to be heard as well.”

In New York, the attorney general, unlike district attorneys, doesn’t have the power to convene grand juries to investigate such abuses. Two, in Westchester and Suffolk counties, already have.

Meanwhile, many state attorneys general have a narrow scope of investigative authority, unless a local prosecutor refers a case to them. That’s ultimately how Pennsylvania’s grand jury investigation began.

In 2013, a diocese’s settlement with 11 men who accused a Franciscan friar of sexually abusing them at a Catholic high school in northeast Ohio more than two decades earlier stoked complaints that the friar had abused boys at a Pennsylvania school in the late 1990s.

The friar, Stephen Baker, 62, killed himself shortly afterward, but the district attorney in Cambria County began investigating the matter before referring it to the state attorney general’s office.

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YORK (PA)
York Daily Record

August 17, 2018

By Anthony J. Machcinski

In a nearly 900-page grand jury report on abuse by priests in the Catholic dioceses of Pennsylvania, the name St. Luke’s Institute keeps appearing.

It was where Father Joseph Mueller was sent in April 1986 after he tried to pull down the pants of a teenager on multiple occasions, according to the report.

The Rev. Richard Terdine, too, was sent there after he allegedly patted the genital area of a boy and massaged his back.

In total, at least 30 priests were sent to St. Luke’s Institute, according to the report that goes back decades.

The report released Tuesday, which listed the names of 301 priests in six Catholic dioceses accused of child abuse, names psychiatric treatment centers as part of the issue of dealing with problem priests.

St. Luke’s isn’t the only place where priests were sent. Other mentioned treatment centers include St. John Vianney, a church-run facility in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, where at least 17 priests were sent, and Southdown Institute, a psychiatric facility in Canada where several others took sabbaticals.

The grand jury drew attention to treatment centers as part of the problem.

“(The dioceses) for an appearance of integrity, send priests for ‘evaluation’ at church-run psychiatric treatment centers,” the report states. “(The dioceses) allow these experts to ‘diagnose’ whether the priest was a pedophile, based largely on the priest’s ‘self-reports’,” and regardless of whether the priest had actually engaged in sexual contact with a child.”

Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for St. Luke’s, disagreed with that statement.

They are actually part of the solution,” Gibbs said. “(St. Luke’s) provided external information to the diocese so they could make the right steps… By sending people to treatment, you’re giving them treatment that will hopefully end the abuse.”

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NEW YORK (NY)
CBS News

By Jason Silverstein

August 17, 2018

Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic details about child sex abuse that may offend some readers. CBS News is choosing to publish these detailed accounts from the Grand Jury investigative report because the details are essential to understanding the scope of abuse. The report said the victims deserve to have the public know what happened to them. “We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this,” it said.

Sodomy with a crucifix. Child porn in parishes. A naked boy posing as Christ.

Those are just a few of the most disturbing allegations from the landmark grand jury report released this week detailing decades of child sex abuse from priests across Pennsylvania.

The scope of the two-year grand jury report is unprecedented: It identified more than 300 alleged predator priests and more than 1,000 child victims. It’s made more shocking by how extreme many of the allegations are.

Over nearly 1,400 pages, the report graphically describes one horror after another, with children being molested, beaten and raped. The report also lays out how priests used the Catholic faith to manipulate their victims, and how church officials buried the abuse for years.

The report said that nearly every case has passed the statute of limitations for prosecution, even when the priests confessed to their crimes. It recommends eliminating the statute and opening a two-year window for victims to file civil lawsuits now.

Here are some of the cases as they were described in the report.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Associated Press

August 18, 2018

By Natalie Pompilio

A Pennsylvania bishop named in a grand jury report on rampant sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy said Friday he has “profound remorse” and offers his “heartfelt apology” to the victims.

Speaking at a Mass of forgiveness, Harrisburg Bishop Ronald Gainer opened by reading the first paragraph of this week’s stunning report that said more than 300 predator priests had abused more than 1,000 children in six Pennsylvania dioceses. Forty-five of the priests named in the report served in the Harrisburg diocese.

The first paragraph of the nearly 900-page report said the grand jury knows the truth: that child sex abuse within the Catholic church happened everywhere.

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YORK (PA)
York Daily Record

August 17, 2018

By Brandie Kessler

The name of one accused priest from the Harrisburg diocese that was listed in the grand jury report released Tuesday was left off the list of names provided by the Harrisburg diocese earlier this month.

Matt Haverstick, the Harrisburg diocese’s attorney, said that the omission of James McLucas was not a mistake.

“This is not shenanigans by the diocese,” Haverstick said. “I don’t care what the grand jury report says.”

Haverstick said McLucas was not among the 72 names provided by the diocese because he did not sexually abuse a child.

“The report is not entirely accurate,” Haverstick said of the nearly 900-page grand jury presentment in which 301 priests are accused of sexually abusing children since the 1940s.

The grand jury report says McLucas was a priest in the Archdiocese of New York living in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, as the chaplain to a monastery in 2014. Elysburg is within the Diocese of Harrisburg’s territory.

“The head Mother of the Monastery called the Diocese of Harrisburg after finding out McLucas had sexually abused a 14 year old girl and continued a relationship with her into her adulthood,” the grand jury report says. “This was reported to the Archdiocese of New York in 2012.”

But Haverstick said a lawsuit filed by the woman who said McLucas abused her mentions nothing of McLucas abusing her when she was a child.

More: ‘Go home, be a good priest’: How 25 bishops in Pa. Catholic dioceses responded to sex abuse

More: List: Names, details of 301 Pa. priest sex abuse allegations in Catholic dioceses

The woman filed the lawsuit in New York in July 2012 when she was 26 years old,

The lawsuit indicates that beginning in July 2007 and continuing through December 2009, the woman was “sexually abused, attacked and harassed,” by McLucas.

At the time the sexual relations began, the woman was 20 years old, and McLucas was working for the Archdiocese of New York.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
Post-Gazette

August 17, 2018

By Anya Sostek

After months of delay, the grand jury report on child sex abuse among Pennsylvania clergy is out. And for some area priests, the process of consoling a stunned congregation is well underway.

In the days since the release of the report, priests have been addressing it in person, in bulletins and even on Twitter.

The Rev. Lou Vallone, pastor of St. John of God Parish in McKees Rocks and St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Crescent, said that he isn’t sure whether he will address the grand jury report in his Sunday homily. But he’s spent much of the week hearing from “devastated” members of his parishes.

“To be honest, our people are moving beyond anger into rage over this,” he said. “We can and must deal with anger, especially when it’s justified. When people ask me and talk to me, if somebody is enraged and just going over the top, I just absorb it. When they’re enraged, I just stand and absorb it.”

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FORT MYERS (FL)
News-Press

August 15, 2018

By Melanie Payne and Ryan Mills

Four priests with ties to Fort Myers, Naples and Port Charlotte were named in a Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing child sexual abuse by priests.

The four are among the more than 300 — including at least 16 with ties to Florida — who the report states were perpetrators, are being investigated for possible sexual misconduct or were involved in a cover-up of the scandal.

The report, released Tuesday, names the Rev. Robert J. Brague, who once served at St. Ann in Naples, the Rev. Timothy Sperber, who lives in Port Charlotte, and the Rev. Thomas M. O’Donnell, who lives in the Fort Myers area, as priests who engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior with minors but were protected by the Catholic Church.

The grand jury report also names the Rev. Sean Kerins, of Naples, as one of three cases under investigation by law enforcement. He is presumed innocent unless proved otherwise, according to the report.

Kerins, 28, who has family members living in Lee and Collier counties, is listed in the report as living in Naples. According to news reports, Kerins was placed on permanent leave by the Diocese of Erie after officials said they learned he had sent a series of inappropriate text messages to a student at Kennedy Catholic High School.

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WILMINGTON (DE)
News-Journal

August 16, 2018

By Xerxes Wilson

There are Delaware ties to three priests named in a sprawling Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing sexual abuse by hundreds of clergymen over 70 years.

At least two held positions at Salesianum School in Wilmington and another was employed at Archmere Academy in Claymont. Another is said to have molested adolescent brothers on a trip to Rehoboth Beach.

The report covers abuse and subsequent cover-ups within six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses. The abuse detailed about priests with local ties appears to have occurred outside their duties at Delaware schools though at least one of the priests was previously sued for sex abuse at Salesianum.

The late Father John McDevitt taught at Sallies in the 1980s. The grand jury report states that a man reported that he had kissed him in a confessional at a Pennsylvania High School that McDevitt taught at before his time at Salesianum.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
WTAE

August 17, 2018

By Paul Van Osdol

A Pittsburgh priest named in the state grand jury report on child sex abuse in six Catholic dioceses refused to answer questions about the allegations Friday.

WTAE reached the Rev. Richard Terdine at his condominium in Shadyside. Asked to respond to the grand jury report, Terdine said, “I’m going out of town for a week” and he would “rather not” do an interview.

The grand jury report says in 1988, Terdine was accused of abusing a 16-year-old boy in the rectory of St. Peter in McKeesport. The report says Terdine admitted to improperly touching the boy and also buying him pornography and condoms.

In 1990, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh removed Terdine from the parish and assigned him to work as a chaplain at UPMC hospitals.

The grand jury says that in 2003, the diocesan Ministerial Assessment Board recommended that Terdine not be assigned to any parish. The board’s report said that “given the possibility of the truth of averments made by the (victim), the moral integrity of the diocese cannot be jeopardized by any assignment of Father Terdine.”

Yet records show the diocese allowed Terdine to continue celebrating Mass at area churches, including St. James in Sewickley and Good Shepherd Church in Braddock.

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HARTFORD (CT)
Hartford Courant

August 17, 2018

By Dave Altimari

Henry J. Mansell, the retired Archbishop of Hartford, had a role in the 1985 transfer of a known pedophile priest from New York to Pennsylvania, where the priest then had inappropriate contact with school children, a grand jury report released this week reveals.

The report by a Pennsylvania grand jury detailing horrific incidents of child sex abuse by priests also includes other references to Connecticut — including a child pornography case and the treatment of two pedophile priests at the Institute of Living in Hartford. Institute officials previously have said they were unaware the Catholic Church was keeping abusive priests in the ministry after treatment in Hartford.

The nearly 1,400-page report released earlier this week alleged that Pennsylvania church officials covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years. The report, which covered six of the state’s eight Catholic dioceses, found more than 1,000 identifiable victims.

“I am not available for comment. The report does not suggest I did anything wrong,’’ Mansell said in a statement released Friday. “We agree with the Pope and the Bishops in the United States regarding what they have said about abuses against children and young people.”

The Pennsylvania grand jury report has stirred strong reaction among church officials in Connecticut, where tens of millions of dollars have been paid in settlements from abuse cases dating back decades. At this weekend’s Masses, priests are scheduled to read a letter from current Hartford Archbishop Leonard Blair that is critical of the way church leaders dealt with pedophile priests.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
The Diocese of Harrisburg

August 14, 2018

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg’s Bishop, Ronald W. Gainer, issued the following statement on the release of the Grand Jury Report on child sexual abuse:

“I read the Grand Jury Report on child sexual abuse with great sadness, for once again we read that innocent children were the victims of horrific acts committed against them. I am saddened because I know that behind every story is a child precious in God’s sight; a child who has been wounded by the sins of those who should have known better.

“As I stressed last week when we released information regarding our own internal review of child sexual abuse in the Harrisburg Diocese, I acknowledge the sinfulness of those who have harmed these survivors, as well as the action and inaction of those in Church leadership who failed to respond appropriately.

“In my own name, and in the name of the Diocesan Church of Harrisburg, I express our profound sorrow and apologize to the survivors of child sex abuse, the Catholic faithful and the general public for the abuses that took place and for those Church officials who failed to protect children.

“We will continue to make amends for the sins of our past, and offer prayers and support to all victims of these actions. We are committed to continuing and enhancing the positive changes made, to ensure these types of atrocities never occur again. Since the turn of the century, the Church has instituted policies that take clear and decisive action to prevent future abuse.

“I want children, parents, parishioners, students, staff, clergy and the public to know that our Churches and our schools are safe; there is nothing we take more seriously than the protection of those who walk through our doors. We send every and all complaints to the proper legal authorities. The safety and well-being of our children is too important not to take immediate and definitive action.”

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DALLAS (TX)
Dallas News

August 17, 2018

By Joshua J. Whitfield

Writing demands courage, otherwise it’s advertising.

Sometimes a writer doesn’t choose the subject; sometimes it’s shoved in one’s face. Sometimes, one either writes at one’s own risk or makes oneself comfortable with cowardice. Sometimes there’s no choice. Sometimes morality is clear.

As a priest, I appreciate the privilege of writing beyond my normal ecclesial ken. It’s why I write, because I believe both people like me and people unlike me should each have a voice. It’s where my earthly hope originates these days, from the idea that we can still talk to one another and listen.

Which is why I must write about the sex abuse scandals of my church, of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick as well as the damning revelations out of Pennsylvania. It was the eccentric Frenchman, Paul Claudel, who said (echoing Jesus) that, “It is not the mote from one’s neighbor’s eye that that house of God can be built, but with the beams one takes out of one’s own.” If I am to write and if you are to read, and if that’s ever to be meaningful, then clearly I must speak up here. Otherwise, as I said, I should become a comfortable coward and write nothing else.

Hence I confess my dizzying anger, my morose, almost morbid sadness about the whole damn thing. Not tainted, in that rhetorical self-serving way, with me playing the victim: I’m sad for the genuine victims, the uncountable innocents we’ve slaughtered. I’m angry for an incompetent church, incompetent leadership, for unvetted evil. It’s like the fourth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno: seeing so many tonsured heads, he asks an unsurprised Virgil, “Are all these clerics?” It’s an evil and an incompetence hard to exaggerate, which only the siloed and the foolish deny.

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UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle

August 17, 2018

By Betty Clermont

After the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report revealing decades of clerical sex abuse and cover up, yesterday a Vatican spokesman declared, “Victims should know that the Pope is on their side. Those who have suffered are his priority, and the Church wants to listen to them to root out this tragic horror that destroys the lives of the innocent.” REALLY???

– On at least five occasions, Pope Francis was personally informed about sexual predators and did nothing to stop them.

– Currently, officials in Chile are raiding Church offices for information on clerical sex abuse because Pope Francis refuses to provide that information.

– On July 24, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, head of the Church in Chile, was accused of covering up sexual abuse. He covered up clerical sex abuse for decades even before Pope Francis elevated him to cardinal in 2014. Ezzati remains in office.

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BOSTON (MA)
The Associated Press via The Miami Herald

August 17, 2018

By Will Graves

The pep talk was short and to the point, a reminder to reigning world gymnastics champion Morgan Hurd that all was not lost.

The 17-year-old had just fallen off the beam at the U.S. Classic last month, ending any serious chance she had at making a run at Simone Biles in the Olympic champion’s return to competition after a two-year break. In the moment, Hurd was frustrated.

And then Tom Forster came over. The newly appointed high-performance team coordinator for the embattled USA Gymnastics women’s elite program pulled Hurd aside and put things in perspective.

“He was like, ‘It’s OK because now is not your peak time anyways,'” Hurd said. “That was the exact mindset I had.”

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LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Guardian

August 16, 2018

By David Clohessy

Predator priests will only face justice when those they abused find the courage to speak up

“It’s all about the bishops.” That’s the single most damning line from a new, 1,300-page report, released by the Pennsylvania supreme court on Tuesday, which found that 300 predator priests in the state had abused more than 1,000 children since 1947. It’s the latest scandal in the Catholic church’s continuing child abuse crisis.

The two-year investigation, conducted by Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a dozen grand jurors, involved hundreds of interviews, and examined half a million pages of church records. The inquiry is the biggest US government investigation into child abuse inside the Catholic church.

The incidents of abuse are shocking and deeply disturbing. They include a minor who was impregnated by a priest who paid for her to have an abortion, as well as a priest who confessed to the rape of at least 15 boys. In one instance, a priest abused five sisters in one family, including an 18-month-old girl.

The investigation concluded that bishops “followed a playbook for concealing the truth” and while “priests were raping little boys and girls, [bishops] hid it all. For decades.” Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, noted that in some cases, “the cover up stretched all the way up to the Vatican” and that bishops “protected their institution at all costs”. Most disturbingly, jurors believe that, even today, bishops are working hard to protect themselves.

The report says that while 1,000 victims were discovered in this investigation, there are likely thousands more who have yet to step forward.

And that’s where my hope lies.

For nearly 30 years, I have been intimately involved in battling for the rights of those abused by the clergy as children. Four of the six kids in our family were sexually violated by our parish priest, Father John Whiteley. I sued him and his bishop, unsuccessfully, and went on to work full time with Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the world’s oldest and largest support group for victims.

The single most valuable truth I’ve learned is this: change only comes when victims speak out.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
WHYY

August 15, 2018

By Kevin McCorry

For years, Arthur Baselice Jr. has been in a self-imposed exile.

He doesn’t like leaving his house. He avoids large family gatherings. He frequently bursts into tears.

It’s been that way for more than a decade.

But the source of his pain began much earlier.

In the mid-1990s, his son, Arthur III, was given drugs and sexually abused by clergy at Archbishop Ryan High School in Northeast Philadelphia. His abusers included the principal, a Franciscan friar named Charles Newman.

The ordeal went on for years, and his son was emotionally ravaged by the experience. Arthur III eventually became hooked on heroin and died of an overdose in 2006 — leaving behind a young son and a hole in his father’s heart.

Arthur III’s abuse was not detailed in the two grand jury reports about Philadelphia clergy that came out in 2005 and 2011, but the archdiocese found the allegations credible and removed Newman from public ministry.

WHYY spoke with Baselice Jr. about his story in 2015.

Three years later, little has changed.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

August 15, 2018

By Patsy McGarry

Second US Cardinal due in Dublin criticised in report for concealment of clergy abuse

Cardinal Seán O’Malley, chair of the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors has announced he will not be attending the World Meeting of Families (WMoF) in Dublin later this month.

Archbishop of Boston Cardinal O’Malley was scheduled to chair a discussion on Safeguarding Children and Vulnerable Adults at the WMoF on Friday August 24th. The panel includes Dublin abuse survivor Marie Collins, who resigned from the Commission for the Protection of Minors last year in protest at the frustration of its work by Vatican officials.

Also on the panel is Barbara Thorp former head of the Boston archdiocese’s child protection office, the UK’s Baroness Prof Sheila Hollins, a former member of the Commission for the Protection of Minors, and Prof Gabriel Dy-Liacco from the Philippines a member of the current Commission for the Protection of Minors.

In a short statement today, the Boston archdiocese said that “though previously scheduled to moderate a panel presentation and discussion at the World Meeting of Families, important matters pertaining to the pastoral care of St John’s Seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston and the seminarians enrolled in the formation program there require the Cardinal’s personal attention and presence”.

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NEW YORK (NY)
Independent

August 14, 2018

By Lucy Anna Gray

In the fifth in our series on the lives of ordinary women behind extraordinary stories, this month’s Forgotten Women examines how terrifyingly deep the international crisis of violence against indigenous women runs

It is North America’s dark, open secret that native women are far more likely to be raped, and far more likely to be murdered.

No justice. That is the constant cry from friends and families of victims as countless cases are left unresolved and ignored.

Marita Growing Thunder, a 19-year-old murdered and missing indigenous women (MMIW) activist from Montana, has experienced this lack of justice – five times.

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UNITED STATES
Bloomberg

August 16, 2018

By Joe Nocera

One woman’s crisis of faith shows why dioceses across the U.S. are struggling.

My mother, Rosalie, grew up Irish Catholic in Providence, Rhode Island — with the emphasis on Catholic. She went to parochial grade school and Catholic high school. She never missed Sunday Mass. She said the rosary, memorized her catechism and prayed every night before bed. She was very devout.

Her own mother believed that if her children entered a religious order, God’s grace would shine down on her family. So after high school my mother dutifully entered the convent. It didn’t take her long to realize that she was ill-suited to being a nun, and that there were other ways to serve God. (When her parents drove her home from the convent, her mother told her to put her head down so the neighbors wouldn’t see her.)

My mother then got a job answering phones at the Providence Journal. There she found other religious-minded women, who became her lifelong friends. She met my father, who had recently left the monastery, at a meeting of something called the Third Order of St. Dominic, an organization for laypeople who were drawn to the teachings of the Dominican friars. For their honeymoon, my parents stayed at the Trapp Family Lodge 1 in Vermont. They went on to have nine children in 12 years. (Talk about God’s grace!) We Nocera kids also went to Catholic grade school, and on Sundays our family would march into St. Pius church two by two for the 10:15 Mass. The first two rows were unofficially reserved for us.

My father never stopped being devout. Late in his life, with his legs in bad shape, he still limped every day to the bus stop so he could get to a midday Mass downtown.

But Catholicism’s hold on my mother loosened over the years, the combination of reading Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and becoming a full-time college student at the age of 37, when my youngest brother was 11 months old. Still, she kept believing, even if she became more casual about practicing her religion.

Until, that is, 2002, when the Boston Globe published its extraordinary expose of the sexual abuse by priests, which had run rampant in the Boston archdiocese for decades. The horrendous tales of abuse, which wrecked the lives of so many people; the way predatory priests were quietly moved from parish to parish, where they found new victims; the complicity of Bernard Law, the archbishop, in covering it all up — my mother wasn’t just upset or disillusioned when she read the Globe’s stories. She felt utterly betrayed. One of the foundations of her life had been ripped away. How could she believe in anything a bishop or a priest said anymore? She couldn’t. From that point forward, she was done with Catholicism. Even worse, she was done with God.

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UNITED STATES
The Associated Press

August 16, 2018

By Denise Lavoie

Six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania joined the list this week of those around the U.S. that have been forced to face the ugly truth about child-molesting priests in their ranks.

But in dozens of other dioceses, there has been no reckoning, leading victims to wonder if the church will ever truly take responsibility or be held accountable.

“It happens everywhere, so it’s not really so much a question of where has it happened, but instead, where has word gotten out, where is information about it accessible?” said Terry McKiernan, founder of BishopAccountability.org, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit group that tracks clergy sexual abuse cases.

Since the crisis exploded in Boston in 2002, dioceses around the country have dealt with similar revelations of widespread sexual abuse, with many of them forced to come clean by aggressive plaintiffs’ attorneys, assertive prosecutors or relentless journalists.

In a few instances, namely in Tucson, Arizona, and Seattle, dioceses voluntarily named names.

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DES MOINES (IA)
Des Moines Register

August 16, 2018

By Shelby Fleig

Des Moines Bishop Richard Pates on Thursday called the child sex abuse by hundreds of Pennsylvania priests, detailed in a 900-page report made public this week, a “great moral failure.”

“There is no way that we can justify this, neither on the behalf of those who have committed the abuse among young people, nor the failure of our leadership in trying to protect them,” he said.

Pates joined the Vatican in publicly condemning the report’s findings of systematic abuse.

“Those acts were betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and faith,” Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said in a statement Thursday.

The product of a two-year grand jury investigation ordered by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, the report is one of the most comprehensive looks into such abuse by the Catholic church in history. In the report, at least 300 priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses are accused of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1940s.

The report also says the Catholic Church engaged in a “systematic cover-up’’ by moving abusive priests from one parish to another.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Fox News

August 15, 2018

As seen on The Story with Martha MacCallum

A man who said he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a retired western Pennsylvania priest spoke out to Martha MacCallum.

The interview came a day after the state attorney general announced a grand jury report on over one thousand similar cases over 70 years.

James Vansickle said he was sexually “groomed” and “attacked” by Father David Poulson when he was a teenager.

Poulson was arrested in March and charged with abusing two boys. He has not entered a plea and waived his right to a preliminary hearing in May.

Vansickle said he had a “long relationship of friendship” and mentorship with Poulson, a priest from Oil City, Pa.

He said that the abuse culminated in a “sexual attack” in a hotel room when he was 16 and traveling with a scholastic chess team.

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NEW YORK (NY)
Independent

August 16, 2018

By Chris Riotta

The Vatican has expressed ‘shame and sorrow’ after a report detailed decades of abuse in the Catholic Church

The Vatican has expressed “shame and sorrow” in its first response to a groundbreaking US Grand Jury report detailing decades of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The report accuses over 300 “predator” priests throughout Pennsylvania of abusing nearly 1,000 children — and the Church of conducting a systematic cover-up. However, the actual number of total abuses in those dioceses since 1947 may be far higher than the reported figure. “We believe that the real number of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward is in the thousands,” the grand jury noted in its lengthy report.

In the Vatican’s response, Pope Francis said he understands how “these crimes can shake the faith and spirit of believers,” vowing to “root out this tragic horror.”

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VATICAN CITY/BOSTON (MA)
Reuters

August 16, 2018

By Philip Pullella and Scott Malone

The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow” on Thursday over revelations that Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused about 1,000 people over seven decades, vowing to hold abusers and those who protected them accountable.

In a long statement that broke the Vatican’s silence over a damning U.S. grand jury report that has shaken the American Church, spokesman Greg Burke said the Holy See was taking the report “with great seriousness”.

He stressed the “need to comply” with civil law, including mandatory reporting of abuse against minors and said Pope Francis understands how “these crimes can shake the faith and spirit of believers” and that the pontiff wanted to “root out this tragic horror”.

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UNITED STATES
Verdict Justia

August 16, 2018

By Marci A. Hamilton

Attorney General Josh Shapiro issued an extraordinary grand jury report detailing sexual abuse going back 70 years in six Roman Catholic dioceses in the state of Pennsylvania. The report itself is nearly 900 pages while the responses appended add another 450 pages. Here it is. Pennsylvania now has the distinction of having every Catholic diocese subjected to a grand jury investigative report: Philadelphia, then Johnstown/Altoona, and now the rest of them. This monumental achievement fills in more details of arrogant and thoughtless bishops, craven pedophile priests, and a system that rewards the secrecy that endangers children. While we have seen this before, it’s still shocking to read just how impervious this institution has been to the suffering of little children.

It is curious that in the United States, the clergy sex abuse studies are only at the state level while other countries like Australia and Ireland have conducted studies sponsored by the national government. I posit that it is excessive timidity on the part of our elected representatives afraid of their shadows if they publicly criticize a religious organization—even for crimes against children. Thus, Members of Congress and the Presidents have been MIA when it comes to clergy sex abuse. They couldn’t wait to pass legislation to address the abuse of Olympic athletes, which happened this year not long after the Larry Nassar scandal broke, but there has yet to be a single hearing or even a speech by a national leader addressing let alone condemning the systemic sexual abuse of thousands of children across the United States.

The theme of the report buttresses what we have learned across the globe in the last 20 years: the Catholic hierarchy has callously covered up the criminal behavior of its in-house pedophile priests, endangering children in the process. And the facts are locked away in secret archives. We need to pause for a moment to reflect on the existence of these “secret archives.” When the bishops make the specious argument that they should not be liable for old claims because, as they love to say, “memories fade and witnesses disappear,” remember that their own files have the facts pristinely preserved—and utterly unavailable to the victims without the aid of the courts.

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YORK (PA)
York Daily Record

August 16, 2018

By Mike Argento

On July 17, 1990, Father Thomas Smith wrote to his bishop, Donald Trautman, thanking him for meeting with him and expressing appreciation for the bishop’s faith in him and his quest to return to the active ministry.

At the time, Smith, who had served at a number of churches in the Erie Diocese in northwestern Pennsylvania, was on leave of absence, his third such leave since being ordained as a Catholic priest in 1967.

His absences were termed, in diocese records, as “health leaves.”

The reality: Each of the leaves occurred after the church received reports that Smith had raped children, and the diocese responded by sending Smith to a church-run treatment facility, according to this week’s Pennsylvania grand jury report on the Catholic child sex scandal.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Philly.com

August 16, 2018

By Liz Navratil and Angela Couloumbis

The Vatican on Thursday called “criminal and morally reprehensible” the conduct of priests detailed this week in a blistering grand jury report on clergy sex abuse in Pennsylvania.

“Those acts were betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith,” a papal spokesperson said in a statement released two days after the nearly 900-page report was made public. “The church must learn hard lessons from its past, and there should be accountability for both abusers and those who permitted abuse to occur.”

Released in multiple languages, the statement did not quote Pope Francis directly, but said he “understands well how much these crimes can shake the faith and the spirit of believers, and reiterates the call to make every effort to create a safe environment for minors and vulnerable adults in the church and in all of society. Victims should know that the pope is on their side.”

The statement represented the first public reaction to the report from Rome, and comes as the Catholic Church has reeled from a fresh wave of clergy sex-abuse cases worldwide and questions over Francis’ response to them.

Five Chilean bishops have stepped down, and more have offered to join them, amid a widening scandal there about clergy sex abuse. And last month, the pontiff accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, who remained a top church leader despite claims that he had preyed on priests or seminarians.

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NEW YORK (NY)
The Associated Press

August 16, 2018

By David Crary

Responding to what it calls a “moral catastrophe,” the leading body of U.S. Catholic leaders said Thursday it would ask the Vatican to investigate the scandal involving a former cardinal who allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct with children and adult seminarians.

The request by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for an investigation into the actions of Theodore McCarrick came as the Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow” over a grand jury investigation this week that found rampant sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by about 300 priests is six Pennsylvania dioceses over a 70-year period. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said that victims should know “the pope is on their side.”

The Pennsylvania scandal and the damaging allegations about McCarrick — one of the most influential Catholics in the country — have engulfed the church in scandal reminiscent of what happened in Boston with clergy sex abuse in the 2000s.

The conference president, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, said a full investigation is necessary “to prevent a recurrence, and so help to protect minors, seminarians, and others who are vulnerable in the future.”

Using formal church terminology for high-level Vatican investigations, DiNardo said he would travel to Rome and ask the Vatican to conduct an “apostolic visitation” to address the McCarrick case, working in concert with a group of predominantly lay experts.

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UNITED STATES
Patheos

August 16, 2018

By Michael Stone

Catholic League president Bill Donohue defends predatory priests by claiming it’s not rape if the child isn’t penetrated.

In a bizarre, insensitive, and outrageous post, Bill Donohue, president of the very conservative Catholic League, attacked the recent grand jury report documenting the rape and sexual abuse of over a 1,000 children by hundreds of Catholic priests in Pennsylvania.

Donohue called the report released by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court an “obscene lie” while defending the Catholic Church and their deplorable record of covering up and enabling the rape and sexual abuse of children by predatory priests.

In his post titled “Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report Debunked,” Donohue desperately tries to minimize the findings of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and in so doing Donohue reveals the profound poverty of both his intellect and his character.

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UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

August 15, 2018

By Rebecca Shapiro

The Pennsylvania attorney general recently released a report on how the Catholic Church covered up decades of sexual abuse.

MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle grew emotional as she and co-host Ali Velshi discussed the Pennsylvania grand jury report revealing that the Catholic church had covered up 301 priests’ sex abuse crimes against more than 1,000 children over decades.

Ruhle, who said two of her children attend Catholic school, was visibly upset while introducing a video report and held back tears as she listened to Shaun Dougherty, a survivor, share his story.

“These guys are just like single guys trying to score on the weekend ― with children,” Dougherty said of the abusers. “They visit Niagara Falls. They take them on camping trips. They take them to the beach. They bring them here to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, take them to a Broadway show.”

Ruhle broke down as she listened to Dougherty, and she ended the segment lamenting how once-trusted institutions were failing people.

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BOSTON (MA)/NEW YORK (NY)
Reuters

August 15, 2018

By Scott Malone and Gabriella Borter

(Corrects figure in paragraph 20 to $600 million, not billion, in this August 15 story)

The latest revelation of widespread child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy has given impetus to efforts by legislators, including a Pennsylvania lawmaker who has said he was raped by a priest as a child, to make it easier to prosecute such cases.

State Representative Mark Rozzi, 47, said he has fought for years to give people who say they were sexually assaulted as children more time to report such crimes to police in Pennsylvania, one of 14 U.S. states considering bills to extend the statute of limitations for such offenses.

“We’re going to get what the victims want,” Rozzi said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, a day after a grand jury found that 301 priests had sexually abused about 1,000 children over the past 70 years in Pennsylvania.

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LAFAYETTE (LA)
The Acadian Advocate

August 16, 2018

By Ben Myers

A former priest named this week in the sweeping Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in Catholic Church was transferred to the Diocese of Lafayette in the 1990s.

Details concerning the transfer and other key points of Father John Bostwick’s tenure are sketchy, and the grand jury report leaves some to the imagination. Foremost among the unresolved questions are whether church officials knew about the allegations prior to the transfer.

What’s certain is that Bostwick transferred to Lafayette in 1992, and that he was removed in 1996 while serving as administrator at Assumption Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Franklin. Bostwick’s removal came just as sexual abuse allegations against him surfaced from the previous decade.

Three years before the transfer to Lafayette, Bishop Walter Sullivan of the Richmond, Virginia, diocese recommended that Bostwick receive psychological counseling. The recommendation came in a letter to the Diocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Bostwick was a member of the Diocese of Richmond but worked part time in Harrisburg from 1976 to 1990, according to the grand jury report. He refused to get counseling, but nonetheless received official permission to minister outside Richmond in 1990. He was transferred to Lafayette less than two years later.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
The Huffington Post

August 16, 2018

By Angelina Chapin

The church has a history of handling child abuse allegations internally ― which protects priests and endangers children.

One of the most damning findings from the recent grand jury investigation into widespread child sex abuse in Pennsylvania Catholic Church dioceses is how leaders covered up the misconduct. “It’s like a playbook for concealing the truth,” wrote the grand jury in its report, outlining seven tactics that church officials followed, such as using euphemisms for rape, shuffling predatory priests among dioceses and conducting bogus internal investigations.

While advocates said the Pennsylvania report is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind for any one state, bombshell reports of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church are hardly new. From the time The Boston Globe published a 2002 exposé on clergy sexual abuse, there have been many high-profile incidents, including an Australian cardinal charged with child sex offenses in 2017 and more recently, an investigation into rampant sex abuse in Chile’s Catholic Church.

Experts told HuffPost that sexual abuse continues in large part because the church ignores laws enacted to protect kids from harm. In particular, they said clergy regularly violate mandatory reporting laws, which require certain groups to inform child protective services or the police about suspected child abuse. But changing the church’s deeply rooted culture of silence and trust into one that holds itself accountable to law enforcement is a big task.

Sherryll Kraizer, the founder and director of the Coalition for Children, said the Catholic Church protects “pedophile priests” instead of children. “It’s a culture that they are struggling with giving up,” she said. “The law is clear, and the criminality is clear, and the sin is clear.”

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VATICAN CITY
Fox News

August 16, 2018

By Elizabeth Zwirz

The Vatican responded Thursday to the report of hundreds of Pennsylvania priests abusing children, saying in a statement: “There are two words that can express the feelings faced with these horrible crimes: shame and sorrow.”

“The abuses described in the report are criminal and morally reprehensible,” the statement read. “Those acts were betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith.”

More than 1,000 children were allegedly abused by more than 300 “predator priests” and church officials were accused of covering up the allegations, a grand jury’s report released Tuesday said.

“The Church must learn hard lessons from its past, and there should be accountability for both abusers and those who permitted abuse to occur,” the Vatican said.

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VATICAN CITY
The Associated Press

August 16, 2018

By Frances D’Emilio

The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow” Thursday over a scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report about clergy who raped and molested children in six dioceses in that state, calling the abuse “criminally and morally reprehensible” and says Pope Francis wants to eradicate “this tragic horror.”

In a written statement using uncharacteristically strong language for the Holy See even in matters like the long-running abuse scandals staining the U.S. church, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke sought to assure victims that “the pope is on their side.”

Pope Francis himself wasn’t quoted in the statement, and there was no mention of demands in the United States among some Roman Catholics for the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington.

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ORLANDO (FL)
Fox News

August 16, 2018

By Bradford Betz

An ex-priest from Pennsylvania, who sexually abused children, worked at Disney World for nearly 15 years, despite facing at least one allegation of sexually abusing a boy, a grand jury report revealed this week.

The report said the priest had applied for the Disney job with a positive reference from his Pennsylvania diocese.

Edward Ganster moved to the Orlando area to work at the Magic Kingdom after leaving the priesthood in 1990. An obituary in the Orlando Sentinel said Ganster died at age 71 in 2014.

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YORK (PA)
York Daily Record

August 16, 2018

By Candy Woodall

Decades before a grand jury report made them public, at least 40 Pennsylvania priests confessed to sex crimes against children, often without facing any legal or professional consequences.

Now many won’t ever have to face charges unless Pennsylvania changes state law to extend its statute of limitations. At present, child victims have until age 50 to pursue criminal charges, which requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict, and age 30 — 12 years after they turn 18 — to file a civil suit, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, which advocates for sexual-assault victims.

“There’s no doubt victims out there deserve some type of compensation for what happened to them,” said state Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat from Muhlenberg Township who was abused by a priest in the Allentown Diocese when he was a child. “There’s no doubt that the church has put the liability on the victims for way too long.”

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philly.com

August 15, 2018

By Jeremy Roebuck

Philadelphia wasn’t a focus of the landmark grand jury report that state Attorney General Josh Shapiro released Tuesday accusing hundreds of priests across Pennsylvania of sexual abuse involving more than 1,000 purported victims over decades. But it was inevitable there would be links to the state’s largest city and its only Roman Catholic archdiocese.

Some priests accused in the report had postings in the region during their careers. Some victims said they were abused here. And two towering figures in the history of the Philadelphia Archdiocese – the late Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua and his former aide Bishop Edward Cullen — played significant leadership roles in two of the dioceses investigated, either before or after they came to Philadelphia.

Read on for a summary of links to the Philadelphia and South Jersey region.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
CBS News

August 15, 2018

New details are emerging about how Catholic Church leaders protected priests accused of sex abuse for decades. Documents containing allegations and admissions of abuse were locked up. CBS News’ Nikki Battiste reports.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
FOX News

August 15, 2018

Tim Lennon, president of the board of directors of the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests, wants to see grand juries in every state and every diocese investigate reports of clergy abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
The Newcastle Herald

August 17, 2018

By Joanne McCarthy

CARDINAL George Pell supporters are being asked to contribute to his legal fund as he prepares to defend charges of historical child sexual offences.

Advertisements in the Catholic Weekly and Annals Australasia, published by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart as a “journal of Catholic culture”, have invited donations since at least March to “help pay Cardinal Pell’s legal fees”.

Donations are held in a trust account by Victorian legal firm Ferdinand Zito & Associates. Cardinal Pell has pleaded not guilty to sexual offences against children in the late 1990s when he was Archbishop of Melbourne. He is also accused of sexual offences in Ballarat in the 1970s when he was a priest

After Cardinal Pell was committed to stand trial in May the Catholic Weekly carried an article on its website saying: “When Cardinal Pell took leave from his role as Prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy to voluntarily return to Australia nearly 12 months ago to fight the charges, many supporters wanted to contribute to his legal costs.”

But not all Catholics are happy with the request.

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SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
The Sydney Morning Herald

August 16, 2018

By Angus Thompson

A children’s magistrate who sentenced a former private schoolboy over the rape of a 15-year-old girl at an eastern suburbs party has urged the teen to not let the crime “hold you back”.

The boy, who was 15 at the time of the sexual assault, has been sentenced to 20 months’ probation over the 2017 incident, which was filmed by a friend and widely distributed.

The boy pleaded guilty earlier this year to aggravated sexual assault and to disseminating child abuse material.

He was also sentenced to 18 months’ probation for distributing the disturbing video, an order that will be served at the same time as the larger probation period.

After delivering her sentence, magistrate Sue Duncombe told the boy that the sexual assault would not determine his future.

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COLUMBUS (OH)
WSYX/WTTE

August 16, 2018

By Tom Bosco

The Columbus Catholic Diocese will reach out to alumni of St. Charles Preparatory high school after a lawsuit was filed last month by a former student who said he was sexually abused by a now-deceased priest.

The plaintiff in the civil case accuses Monsignor Thomas Bennett of sexually abusing him six times while the student was a freshman. The incidents are alleged to have happened on school property.

The diocese said they had no sexual complaints or allegations against Bennett during his decades-long service. Bennett taught at St. Charles from 1963 until shortly before his death in 2008.

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VATICAN CITY
The Associated Press

August 16, 2018

The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow” Thursday over a scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report about clergy who raped and molested children in six dioceses in that state, calling the abuse “criminally and morally reprehensible” and says Pope Francis wants to eradicate “this tragic horror.”

In a written statement using uncharacteristically strong language for the Holy See even in matters like the long-running abuse scandals staining the U.S. church, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke sought to assure victims that “the pope is on their side.”

Pope Francis himself wasn’t quoted in the statement, and there was no mention of demands in the United States among some Roman Catholics for the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington.

The grand jury report made public this week accused the cardinal of helping to protect some molester priests while he was bishop of the Pennsylvania city of Pittsburgh. Wuerl has defended his actions in Pittsburgh while apologizing for the damage inflicted on victims.

Burke said the incidents of abuse graphically documented in the report were “betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith.”

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HARRISBURG (PA)
NBC News

August 14, 2018

By Daniella Silva

More than 1,000 child victims were identifiable from the church’s own records, according to the report.

A scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report released Tuesday reveals decades of child abuse allegations against more than 300 accused “predator priests” as well as claims that Roman Catholic Church leaders covered up the crimes and obstructed justice in order to avoid scandal.

More than 1,000 child victims were identifiable from the church’s own records, according to the report.

“We believe that the real number — of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward — is in the thousands,” the grand jury said.

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PHILADELPHIA
The Associated Press

August 15, 2018

By Claudia Lauer

A grand jury report documenting seven decades of child sexual abuse by hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania found that most of the bishops who served in the state during that period mishandled at least some of the allegations.

In some cases, they failed to pass accusations on to law enforcement and in others shuffled priests off to different parishes. The report alleged a systematic cover-up and concluded that church leaders “largely escaped public accountability.”

The grand jury was particularly critical of bishops who served after the church adopted sweeping reforms in 2002 to ensure the swift removal of any clerics who molested a child. A look at accusations against four of the more recent bishops cited in the report:

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

August 16, 2018

By Brian Roewe

Head of US bishops: ‘Failure of episcopal leadership’ caused ‘a moral catastrophe’

The head of the U.S. bishops said they will invite the Vatican to conduct an apostolic visitation to the country to lead a “full investigation” into questions still surrounding revelations of sexual abuse by former cardinal Archbishop Theodore McCarrick.

In addition, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said the bishops will take steps to create channels for easier reporting of abuse and misconduct by bishops, and will push for better procedures under canon law to resolve complaints made against bishops.

The statement from DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, came Aug. 16 as the church’s clergy sex abuse scandal has resurfaced in furious fashion.

Two days earlier, the Pennsylvania attorney general released a 1,300-page grand jury report documenting historical accounts of clergy sexual abuse in six dioceses of that state that documented the abuse of more than 1,000 children by 300-plus priests over 70 years, with the number of victims believed to be even higher.

That report followed the continued fallout from revelations in June of alleged sexual abuse of seminarians and young adults by McCarrick, once seen as an influential leader both within the church and in politics, having served as archbishop of Washington D.C. The accusations, which McCarrick has denied, led the 88-year-old retired prelate in late July to resign his place in the College of Cardinals.

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WASHINGTON (D.C)
Catholic News Agency

August 16, 2018

By Courtney Grogan

The U.S. bishops’ conference called for a Vatican-led investigation into allegations of sexual abuse and cover-ups surrounding Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, as well for new abuse reporting processes, and greater involvement of laity in addressing abuse concerns.

“We are faced with a spiritual crisis that requires not only spiritual conversion, but practical changes to avoid repeating the sins and failures of the past that are so evident in the recent report,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, in an Aug. 16 statement.

“Stronger protections against predators in the Church and anyone who would conceal them,” are needed, said DiNardo, “protections that will hold bishops to the highest standards of transparency and accountability.”

The bishops will invite the Vatican to conduct an official Apostolic Visitation to the United States to address questions surrounding Archbishop McCarrick, in consultation with the lay members of the National Review Board, DiNardo said.

Previously the U.S. bishops did not “make clear what avenue victims themselves should follow in reporting abuse or other sexual misconduct by bishops,” acknowledged DiNardo, who called for the development of “reliable third-party reporting mechanisms.”

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WASHINGTON (DC)
Catholic News Service

August 16, 2018

By Julie Asher

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Aug. 16 announced three key goals and a comprehensive plan to address the “moral catastrophe” of the new abuse scandal hitting the U.S. church.

The plan “will involve the laity, lay experts, the clergy and the Vatican,” Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston said. This plan will be presented to the full body of bishops at their general assembly meeting in Baltimore in November.

He said the “substantial involvement of the laity” from law enforcement, psychology and other disciplines will be essential to this process.

He also said that right now, it is clear that “one root cause” of this catastrophe “is the failure of episcopal leadership.”

In a lengthy letter addressed to all Catholics, Cardinal DiNardo laid out three goals just established by the bishops’ Executive Committee in a series of meetings held early the week of Aug. 13.

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UNITED STATES
The Associated Press

August 16, 2018

Madison Kocian and Kyla Ross watched nearly all the women with whom they won Olympic gold step forward, one by one, over the past 18 months to detail their abuse at the hands of disgraced former USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar.

In January, Nassar was sentenced to an effective life sentence after being convicted of federal child pornography and state sexual abuse charges. Kocian and Ross are now coming forward to help themselves heal and to send a message to victims of sexual abuse everywhere that there is no timetable on coming to grips with the trauma.

“Everyone copes in their own way,” said Ross, a member of the Fierce Five that stormed to gold at the 2012 Olympics.

“It doesn’t matter how old you are and what happens to you. I’ve come to the point in my life, this is something I want to share my story and move on,” Ross told The Associated Press.

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UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast

August 16, 2018

By Olivia Messer

Months after the serial sexual-abusing doctor was sentenced to life in prison, two more star Olympic athletes came forward to detail their abuse at his hands.

Olympic gold medalists Kyla Ross and Madison Kocian on Thursday came forward as the latest of the hundreds of athletes who fell victim to serial sexual abuser and former USA Gymnastics team physician Larry Nassar, who was sentenced in February to a maximum of 235 years in prison.

The gymnasts, who are now 21 and currently members of the NCAA champion UCLA gymnastics team, appeared on CBS This Morning to tell their stories of abuse.

“Being on national team for all those years, we were really silenced,” said Ross. “We didn’t really have a voice and say as athletes.”

“I’ve come to the point in my life this is something I want to share my story and move on,” she told The Associated Press. “We don’t want to be viewed as victims. This is something we have to grow through.”

Both women said they were moved after nearly 200 girls and women read victim-impact statements at two emotional sentencing hearings in January, in which the 54-year-old Nassar faced the survivors he had preyed on. More than 300 victims have come forward to accuse the former Michigan State physician who worked for decades with student-athletes.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
CNN

August 16, 2018

Analysis by Daniel Burke

In July, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote a personal letter to Pope Francis, warning him that “a comprehensive investigation” by his office had found “widespread sexual abuse of children and a systemic coverup by leaders of the Catholic Church.”

Shapiro says he never received a response.

The six Pennsylvania dioceses named in the scathing grand jury report received copies of the 800-page document in May, according to Crux News. Before the report was published on Tuesday, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, one of the Pope’s top allies and the former archbishop of Pittsburgh, had a detailed website prepared to defend himself against charges that he shielded abusive priests. (The website was removed on Thursday after an outcry from Catholics.)

So the idea that the Vatican was caught off guard by the explosive report or needs more time to process it is increasingly difficult to understand — as is the Pope’s silence on the matter. This is a pontiff, after all, who has chastised the media for ignoring the deaths of homeless people.
What’s the threshold of victims it would take for the Vatican to quickly respond to the grand jury report? 2,000 children? Or 3,000?

Is 1,000 children abused at the hands of Catholic clergy not enough to warrant a comment from their Holy Father?

Apparently not.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
Patheos

August 15, 2018

By Michael Stone

New grand jury report shows Catholic priests in Pittsburgh ran an extensive child porn ring where children were sexually exploited and groomed for abuse.

In a growing and horrific story out of Pennsylvania, a breathtaking grand jury report released by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court documents rampant and pervasive child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, listing more than 300 accused clergy and over a 1,000 confirmed child victims.

The report demonstrates that hundreds of “predator priests” sexually abused more than 1,000 children in Pennsylvania for decades — all the while being protected and enabled by Roman Catholic Church leaders.

In one particularly heinous episode documented in the report, a group of Catholic priests in Pittsburgh ran an extensive child porn ring where children were sexually exploited and groomed for abuse. Working together, the priests would select, target, and groom young teen boys to exploit.

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WASHINGTON (PA)
Observer-Reporter

August 15, 2018

By Barbara Miller

Priests at a gathering at a seminary swimming pool bragged about the boys they brought along, according to testimony before the statewide grand jury, and a former priest at St. Philip Neri, Donora, is alleged to have had inappropriate contact with at least eight young boys.

Those who came to the pool were the Rev. Bob Castelucci and another priest, friends of the Rev. Leo Burchianti, who was assigned to the Donora church in 1979 and 1980.

Burchianti, when discussing the allegations in 2007, corroborated their use of the pool and also said he had a sexual relationship with one victim’s mother for six to eight months, according to a grand jury summary.

A review of the allegations against priests who served in local parishes found that some of the abuse occurred while the priests were assigned here.

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TITUSVILLE (PA)
The Titusville Herald

August 15, 2018

By Sean P. Ray

A long-serving Monsignor at St. Titus Church was among the 301 Catholic priests named in a grand jury report about sexual abuse within the Pennsylvania Catholic Church.

The 887-page report, which was released Tuesday and made by 23 grand jurors, details several reports of abuse across six of Pennsylvania’s eight Dioceses, including the Diocese of Erie, which has Crawford and Venango counties within its coverage area.

A total of 41 “predator priests,” as they are called in the report, are named as operating in the Diocese of Erie. Among them was a priest who served more than two decades at St. Titus Church, in Titusville.

A report on Monsignor James P. Hopkins is given in the grand jury document. According to the report, a victim wrote a letter to Erie Bishop Donald Trautman on Aug. 3, 1993, in which she stated that Hopkins grabbed and kissed girls inappropriately.

The girl alleged that in 1945, she experienced personal abuse by Hopkins when she was 13-years of age, stating that Hopkins would, “grab our face in his hands, force us to look up, and then plant a sloppy kiss on our mouths. He would also grab us and pull us close, wrap his cape around us, and fondle us whenever he pleased.”

The Herald was unable to find record of a Monsignor James P. Hopkins in Herald archives. However, a Monsignor James F. Hopkins was named in multiple articles within the same time frame that James P. Hopkins would’ve been St. Titus’ pastor, possibly indicating a mistake in the report.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

August 15, 2018

By Andrew Goldstein

Former Pittsburgh resident Rich Westwood remembers attending a Catholic service in Florida a number of years ago when the priest began a homily about forgiving church leaders of sexual abuse.

Mr. Westwood walked out of the church and never came back.

“When the priest is up there talking about other priests and says nothing about the victims, that’s where I draw the line,” he said. “Unless you walked in my shoes for 40 some years, you don’t know what it’s like.”

Mr. Westwood, 59, who now lives in North Carolina, said Tuesday in a phone call to the Post-Gazette that the Rev. Ferdinand B. Demsher sexually assaulted him in the late 1960s and early 70s when he served as an altarboy at St. Mary of the Assumption in Lawrenceville.

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ST. MARYS (PA)
WJAC TV

August 14, 2018

By Sierra Darville

The Elk County Catholic School System issued a statement following the release of a grand jury’s report on a two-year sexual abuse investigation.

ECCSS President Sam MacDonald released a statement Tuesday afternoon saying that schools are working to create a safe environment for all of its students.

“Full transparency is the only path to healing for the victims,” MacDonald said.

According to the statement, the Diocese of Erie was the first diocese involved in the grand jury investigation to release a list of all “credibly accused priests, religious and lay employees.”

MacDonald states the some of the stories mentioned in the report apply directly to people assigned to churches and schools in Elk County.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
69 News

August 14, 2018

CHILD USA released a statement on the grand jury report on the clergy sex abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses.

“Attorney General Josh Shapiro has released a monumental report on the clergy sex abuse that has destroyed Pennsylvania children’s lives for decades,” said CEO and Academic Director of CHILD USA Professor Marci Hamilton.

Hamilton said the grand jury’s recommendations, which include eliminating the criminal statute of limitations, reviving expired civil statues of limitations, amending the state’s mandated reporting law so that repeated failures to report result in stiffer penalties and treating confidentiality agreements that impede disclosure of abuse to the police as obstruction of justice, are necessary to protect Pennsylvania children.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
News-Sentinel

August 16, 2018

By Kevin Leininger

On Oct. 14, 2002, I reported Michelle Bennett’s claim that the Rev. William Ehrman had sexually molested her repeatedly in the rectory of New Haven’s St. John the Baptist Church more than 50 years earlier when she was in the fourth grade. Less than one month later, then-Bishop John D’arcy attended mass and informed the congregation an investigation affirmed the credibility of Bennett’s story.

“Christ said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life,’ ” D’Arcy said. “The church is a place of truth, and you have a right to hear the truth.”

“Catholic” (with a small “c”) means “universal,” but there is a world of difference between the response by D’Arcy — who supposedly had been exiled to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend for blowing the whistle of pedophile priests in Boston — and the Roman Catholic Church’s corrupt response to abuse by six dioceses in Pennsylvania as outlined in a scathing new grand jury report.

The Pittsburgh-based investigation identified more than 1,000 victims of alleged sexual abuse, rape, impregnation, coerced abortion and other crimes against church and state, committed by 301 priests and lay teachers, and abuse of the trustingly innocent by the supposedly godly only begins to reflect the unimaginable human cost. As Bennett told me in 2002, “Catholic girls did as they were told. I accepted blame for what happened because priests were ‘God’s people’ and could do no wrong. Therefore, I was bad.”

But there will and should be an institutional cost for the actions and inactions by church leaders detailed in the 900-page document. According to the grand jury, the church leaders used euphemisms to conceal the truth (“Never say ‘rape,’ say ‘inappropriate contact’ “), assigned untrained clergy members to conduct investigations, concealed the real reasons for the transfer of abusive priests, often failed to notify authorities of abuse claims, and much more.

“The main thing was not to help children but to avoid ‘scandal,’ ” the grand jury concluded. “That is not our word, but theirs; it appears over and over again in the documents we recovered.”

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
KSDK

August 15, 2018

By Casey Nolen

As for the Archdiocese response to Lennon’s assertions, its offices were closed for a church holiday Wednesday but it’s expected leaders will comment on the Pennsylvania grand jury later in the week.

The leader of a national sex abuse survivors’ network says those shocking sex abuse allegations against Catholic priests in Pennsylvania could easily be found here in Missouri and Illinois.

Tim Lennon runs “SNAP” – Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests – and he’s also a survivor himself.

“I’m on a path,” says Lennon. “I feel like I’m doing exceptionally well but I can’t say I’m healed.”

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HARRISBURG (PA)
CNN

August 15, 2018

Shaun Dougherty talks to CNN’s New Day about being sexually abused by a parish priest who was also a teacher at his school, saying the church has a morality problem.

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SAN ANTONIO (TX)
KTSA News

August 15, 2018

By Kareem Dahab

KTSA radio host Trey Ware speaks with callers who are just as angry about the recent sex abuse scandal against children in Pennsylvania, and what can be done to stop it.

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CARMICHAELS (PA)
Observer-Reporter

August 15, 2018

By Mike Jones

A Roman Catholic priest now serving in Greene County said “nothing sexual occurred whatsoever” nearly four decades ago while wrestling with boys when he was a priest at Immaculate Conception Church in Washington.

The Rev. John Bauer forcefully pushed back against allegations of abuse years ago – along with providing alcohol to boys on a road trip to Ohio – as he addressed parishioners at the end of Wednesday morning Mass at St. Hugh Church near Carmichaels, where he is pastor.

“So, yesterday was a slow news day,” Bauer said just before ending the Mass. “If there was one scintilla of doubt of sexual abuse, I would have left the priesthood.”

Bauer was one of 301 men named in state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s grand jury report released Tuesday that investigators termed as “predator priests,” including 99 in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, where Greene County is located. The report states a man claimed Bauer wrestled with him and other boys at IC’s school wrestling room in the late 1970s or early 1980s, discussed masturbation in front of him and provided alcohol to three students while driving to Columbus, Ohio, for a wrestling tournament.

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BOCA RATON (FL)
Local10.com

August 15, 2018

By Tim Swift

Monsignor Thomas Benestad denies charges first alleged in 2011

A sweeping grand jury report on six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania released this week found that a retired Boca Raton priest was accused of sexually abusing a 9-year-old boy in the early 1980s.

Monsignor Thomas Benestad, 73, is mentioned as one of 19 offenders from Allentown Diocese identified by the grand jury. Benestad has served in a limited capacity at Ascension Church in Boca Raton since 2007.

Released Tuesday, the report found that about 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania molested more than 1,000 children since the 1940s. Senior Church officials are accused systematically covering up the complaints.

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