Documenting the Catholic Sexual Abuse and Financial Crisis – Data on bishops, priests, brothers, nuns, Pope Francis, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Sunday, April 20, 2025
ABUSE TRACKER
A digest of links to media coverage of clergy abuse. For recent coverage listed in this blog, read the full article in the newspaper or other media source by clicking “Read original article.” For earlier coverage, click the title to read the original article.
A former Montclair woman who has settled with the Catholic Church over sex abuse allegations spoke out Monday about her alleged abuse by her family’s priest, saying the response by the Newark Archdiocese was “despicable.”
Danielle Polemeni said she was sexually abused by the Rev. Mitch Walters at ages 13 and 14 in her Upper Montclair home and on an eighth-grade class trip to the Poconos, while she was a part of St. Cassian’s Parish and the school in Upper Montclair.
She was among five plaintiffs who won a total of $400,000 in in a July settlement that was announced Monday by their attorney, Mitch Garabedian. A sixth case is still in court, he said.
Defendants included the Newark Archdiocese, Walters, St. Cassian’s Parish and St. Cassian’s School in Montclair, and, in one lawsuit, St. John Nepomucene Church in Guttenberg, where Walters also served.
Now a mother and educator living in Ohio, Polemeni said she wants victims to know “you are not alone and this is not your fault. It’s never too late to speak your voice and to get support and look for healing.”
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Seven former McQuaid Jesuit High School teachers were identified Tuesday as having been accused of sexually abusing minors during their careers. At least one of the priests engaged in sexual misconduct while on faculty at the Brighton secondary school in the mid-1960’s.
The revelation came in a list of accused priests released Tuesday morning by the Jesuit province that covers the northeastern United States.
A list of the accused abusers and their tenure at McQuaid:
Cornelius Carr, 1960-1964
Thomas Denny, 1978-1979
Roy Drake, 1957-1960
John Farrand, 1955-1957
Leonard Riforgiato, 1964-1966
William Scanlon, 1964-1967
Robert Voelkle, 1962-1969
Two of the priests, Carr and Drake, had been previously identified as having been accused of abuse at other schools. Carr was principal of the school. Drake was a math and science teacher.
But the Jesuit list Tuesday included five more names of priests who spent time at McQuaid and engaged in abusive behavior. None of the five appear to have been publicly identified as abusers before Tuesday.
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It was last month when Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan unveiled that the Catholic Church in Illinois had received allegations against at least 500 unnamed priests and clergy members. That’s 500 more than the already identified 185 clergy members that have been “credibly” accused of sexual abuse against children as determined by the six dioceses in the state of Illinois.
Peoria Diocese fast stats
144,669 — Total Catholics
162 — Catholic parishes
298 — Total priests
11,872 — Total students in Catholic schools
21,778 — Total students under Catholic instruction
26 — Illinois counties in the Diocese
1,492,335 — Total population in Diocese
Source: Catholic Diocese of Peoria
“Because I know that the Church has too often ignored survivors of clergy sexual assault, I want to share the initial findings from our work,” Madigan said. “While the findings are preliminary, they demonstrate the need for and importance of continuing this investigation.”
The Illinois Attorney General’s office began its investigation into the Catholic Church in August following the news of the child sexual abuse scandal in Pennsylvania. The four month investigation resulted in each Illinois diocese — Chicago, Joliet, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield and Belleville — publishing a list of the priests that have been “credibly” accused of sexual abuse in their respective diocese. Two of the diocese already had lists available before the investigation.
But there are still hundreds of priests yet to be identified through accusations spanning decades.
“The investigation has revealed that allegations frequently have not been adequately investigated by the dioceses or not investigated at all. In many cases, the Church failed to notify law enforcement authorities or Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) of allegations of child sexual abuse,” the Attorney General’s office stated in a press release. “Among the common reasons the dioceses have provided for not investigating an allegation is that the priest or clergy member was deceased or had already resigned at the time the allegation of child sexual abuse was first reported to the diocese.”
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Hoping to contribute to healing from the pain and anger caused by clergy sex abuse and the lack of accountability and transparency on the part of church leadership, I am making public a list of any Jesuit in the USA Northeast Province who has had a credible allegation of abuse against a minor or vulnerable adult since 1950. The USA Northeast Province is composed of what were separate Provinces at various periods over the past seventy years: Buffalo in the 1960s; New England and New York separately until 2014. This list includes Jesuits who belonged to any of those Provinces.
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[Bishop of Astorga investigates new case against priest imprisoned for having abused in two schools]
MADRID (SPAIN)
El País
January 14, 2019
By Julio Núñez
El sacerdote Ramos Gordón ya cumple una condena de 10 años de apartamiento en un monasterio por pederastia en dos centros de León y Zamora en los años ochenta
El sacerdote José Manuel Ramos Gordón volverá a ser investigado por tercera vez por un supuesto delito de abusos sexuales a un menor en el colegio Juan XXIII de Puebla de Sanabria (Zamora) entre 1979 y 1985. Así lo ha confirmado este lunes la diócesis de Astorga después de que este domingo EL PAÍS y varios medios locales publicasen que una nueva supuesta víctima había escrito una carta al obispo de Astorga y presidente de la comisión antipederastia de la Conferencia Episcopal Española, José Antonio Menéndez, denunciando los hechos. Ramos Gordón ya fue investigado, juzgado y condenado entre 2015 y 2018 en dos ocasiones: la primera por abusar de tres menores en el seminario menor de La Bañeza (León) entre 1989 y 1990 y la segunda por agredir sexualmente de otro menor en el colegio Juan XXIII en los años ochenta, centro donde también estudió el nuevo denunciante.
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[Pope opens criminal trial against 7 Spanish clergy members accused in Chile’s abuse scandal]
SANTIAGO (CHILE)
El País
January 15, 2019
By Rocío Montes
El Papa abre un proceso penal en el Vaticano contra los maristas chilenos, que desembolsaron partidas millonarias para silenciar a sus víctimas
La Fiscalía chilena tiene a siete españoles imputados por abusos y violación a menores en la mayor causa de pederastia que se investiga dentro de la Iglesia chilena —la de los hermanos maristas—, un proceso que está en el centro de las preocupaciones del Vaticano. El papa Francisco ha ordenado abrir una “causa penal” ante la Congregación para la Doctrina de la Fe en el Vaticano por inacción de la orden, que no ha impuesto ninguna sanción desde que concluyó la primera parte de sus indagaciones sobre las décadas de pederastia en su seno.
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Father Charles “Queen of Apostles Catholic Church, the pastor facing a felony charge of sexual assault of a child under 16 years of age, is due in court Tuesday, Jan. 15. Father Chuck Hanel served at Queen of Apostles Catholic Church in Pewaukee. He’s accused of inappropriately touching a 13-year-old girl during confession.
According to the criminal complaint, the alleged crime in this case happened on Dec. 17, 2017. The alleged victim, who was 13 years old at the time, told authorities that while attending Reconciliation at Queen of Apostles, Father Hanel had inappropriate contact with her in a confessional. The girl told investigators that “she feels Fr. Hanel looks at her in a different way than the other girls…making her feel uncomfortable.”
The complaint indicates Father Hanel had been on a scheduled church sabbatical from January through April of this year. When hearing of the priest’s return to the parish, the alleged victim expressed outward anxiety. She eventually told her parents what had happened in December. She said “Father Hanel was ‘creepy’ and ‘weird'” — and “I want to go to a different church.”
The girl’s parents immediately informed a visiting priest at the parish about the accusations. That priest reported the matter to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department and Waukesha County’s Child Protective Services Unit.
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Late last week, ABC News announced that the disgraced ’80s-era televangelist — who in recent years has been broadcasting and selling dehydrated food buckets from a church and condo development near Branson — would be the subject of a special two-hour episode of its “20/20” broadcast.
The Bakker episode is set to air Friday at 8 p.m. Springfield time.
In a promotional trailer posted to Facebook and Twitter late Jan. 11, ABC showcased what appears to be a sensational report promising new information about Bakker’s activities three decades ago.
An unidentified voice on the trailer calls Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, “the Kardashians of the gospel.”
Another unidentified voice states, “The fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker was a huge story.”
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As the scandal of clerical child sex abuse emerges in other countries across the world the Catholic Church response in each has been exactly as it was in Ireland decades ago, Dublin abuse survivor Marie Collins has said.
“The church reaction is a mirror image of what we were hearing here in Ireland 30 years ago. I spoke recently with someone from Poland where the crisis is just now breaking. There the bishops are saying it is ‘enemies of the church’ who are behind it. It is an aggressive ‘media with an anti-church agenda’, all very familiar and an absolutely disgraceful attitude in 2019,” she said.
“The experience from those countries where the abuse crisis has been faced is not being used to bring universal policies into place for the countries where it has yet to occur,” she said.
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“For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.”
I guess this quote from my new homeboy Martin Luther is as good a place as any to break the news to my parents that I’ve left the Roman Catholic Church, at the ripe old age of 52, in favor of a faith often nicknamed “Catholic lite.”
Even the most fervent patron of the Holy See must give the devil his due: he has built a basilica rivaling St. Peter’s on church property in recent months. Cardinals and bishops are falling faster than Halloween candy prices in November after almost weekly revelations that they presided over the practice of pedophile priests raping countless children in their care for decades.
It has become impossible to see the church I grew up in through the lenses of rage and disgust that I’ve been wearing into His house lately..
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A Jacksonville man who was convicted seven years ago in a high-profile church sex scandal will once again go before a judge.
Authorities say 53-year-old Darrell Moore may have violated his sex-offender probation by being in contact with one of his victims, who is now an adult, at the Greater Refuge Temple, where records show he originally committed inappropriate acts with victims when they were still minors.
Moore is the son-in-law of the pastor of the church, which News4Jax was told has welcomed Moore since his release from prison.
But when Moore, who is still on probation, allegedly showed up at Greater Refuge Temple one day when one of the victims was already present, it may have violated his probation.
Shirly Roberts is the whistleblower who in 2010 reported allegations of inappropriate behavior against Moore toward children inside Greater Refuge Temple. She is now a former church member and a retired state probation officer who is speaking out on behalf of one of the victims.
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By summoning the leaders of the world’s bishops’ conferences and top representatives of religious orders to the Vatican in February to address the sex abuse crisis and the protection of minors, Pope Francis is sending a message that the need for safeguarding young people is a global issue.
Even though the media attention and public fallout for the church’s failings have focused on a small group of nations, abuse experts and victims know that does not mean the rest of the world is immune from the scandal of abuse or can delay taking action to ensure the safety of all church members.
While Catholic leaders in some countries might not recognize it as a global issue, Vatican offices that receive abuse allegations have a “clear idea about what is the situation now because allegations come from all parts of the world,” said Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
He also serves as president of the Center for the Protection of Minors at the Pontifical Gregorian University and a member of the organizing committee for the February meeting.=
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Former Town of Mount Royal priest, Brian Boucher, was found guilty of sexual assault, sexual interference and sexual touching on Tuesday, according to The Montreal Gazette. Judge Patricia Compagnone said Boucher’s testimony lacked credibility while the victim’s testimony was believable. He will be sentenced in March.
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The Catholic Church is in serious and deepening crisis, primarily as a result of grave sins and failed leadership involving clergy sexual misconduct. This tragedy is most recently exemplified by the alleged abusive, long-standing behavior of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In order for the church in the United States to determine and learn from how it failed to address McCarrick’s decades of alleged misconduct, new guidelines and procedures must be established and implemented for investigating him and any high-ranking church leader.
For the last five years, the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese has grappled with this challenge, having had to investigate its former Archbishop John Nienstedt for alleged personal sexual misconduct and failed leadership involving abuse by other clergy.
Many painful lessons were learned from that investigation, which was prematurely terminated and never resumed. Egregious clergy abuse by an archdiocesan priest and the failed leadership that permitted that abuse to occur ultimately led to criminal charges being filed against the archdiocese and Nienstedt’s abrupt resignation. Those lessons should be examined and heeded by every American cardinal, archbishop and bishop to avoid their repetition elsewhere.
I write as a lifelong, faithful Catholic who was raised by devout parents and educated in parochial schools for 12 years and benefited from a Jesuit college education; I also raised four children in the Catholic faith. For 20 years, I served as a federal prosecutor in Minnesota, specializing in white collar crime, and supervising hundreds of investigations of alleged misconduct, abuse of power, and/or concealment of wrongdoing by business leaders, government officials, lawyers and other professionals. For the past 10 years, I have taught at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, starting with ethical leadership courses and more recently, teaching courses on how to conduct investigations.
Based on my many years of supervising and teaching how to do complex investigations, and having closely followed the investigation of Nienstedt and conduct related to it, I have identified 10 of the most important lessons to be learned from the initial success and then ultimate failures surrounding that investigation.
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Santa Rosa has became the fourth Bay Area diocese to release a list of names of priests involved in child sexual abuse or credibly accused of such crimes.
Bishop Robert Vasa spoke at a press conference Monday following Saturday’s release of its list of clergy involved in the scandal that has rocked not just the Bay Area, but the country. “I feel tremendous sadness and grief and shame,” said Vasa.
Vasa vowed to prevent sexual abuse moving forward.”This is a wakeup call that says, ‘No, we need to redouble our efforts re-inform the people in the pews that we continue to be serious about this,’” he said.
Santa Rosa is now the fourth of six Bay Area dioceses to release its list of abusers and accused abusers. That now leaves San Francisco and Sacramento as the only one ones that haven’t. Both dioceses say they’ve hired an outside investigator to go through documents before releasing names – or anything at all.
It’s a move that has many upset, including attorney Mike Reck who represents victims of clergy sex abuse. Beck is suing for the release of what the San Francisco Archdiocese knows about sex abuse among its ranks. Launching its own investigation, he says, falls far short.
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According to an Italian historian who presides over a monthly Vatican magazine on women, both women and clerical sexual abuse are problems that will continue to dog Pope Francis until they’re resolved.
“[A] question arises, that of women who are nonexistent and invisible in the eyes of ecclesiastical hierarchies, accustomed to taking their service for granted,” Lucetta Scaraffia wrote in a recent op-ed for the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “Today religious [women] no longer accept shameful conditions of exploitation and humiliation.”
According to Scaraffia, during the first years of his pontificate, Francis led a revolution in the life of the Church, which in previous years had focused too much on bioethics. She called those issues “difficult and risky to face, and before which the Church, whose position always seemed very rigid, didn’t always succeed in presenting herself as a defender of the weak.”
In the piece published on Monday, Scaraffia also wrote that Francis put the poor back at the center of the Church’s core concerns, represented mainly by migrants, but also the “inhabitants of the most miserable areas of the third world, oppressed by misery and ecological disasters.”
He also extended the “mercy of the Church to those who, after [the end of their first] marriage, had formed a new family, as well as women who asked for forgiveness for the sin of abortion, and who until [the pope’s] providential intervention had to go to a bishop to obtain absolution.”
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*This is part 2 of a special report on accusations of abuse in the Diocese of Lafayette.
he existence of a list of accused priests was first confirmed in 2004 by then-Bishop Michael Jarrell, as the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis gained national attention.
“We’re dealing with it in a forthright manner and admitting our faults and mistakes,” Jarrell said in a 2004 interview with KATC. “We’re striving to do all that we can in the future.”
Jarrell’s tenure began at a time when the church promised reform on clergy sex abuse, but under his leadership, there are questions if that promise was kept.
In uncovering our list, KATC found at least three cases in Jarrell’s time as bishop, where the diocese was aware of complaints against living priests; there is no record police were notified, until only recently in one of them.
Gerard Smit was accused of sexual abuse in Lafayette, Calcasieu and St. Landry parishes. Records obtained by KATC, including his personnel file with the diocese, show one of his accusers, Roy Touchet, complained at least three times.
“No one believed us, because the priests were almighty, the bishops were almighty, the cardinals knew about it,” Touchet said. “They just didn’t want to do anything. They just covered them up.”
Louisiana State Police only got involved in 2015, when Touchet filed a formal complaint.
Next, a lawsuit against Father Marshall Larriviere in 2003. Larriviere was accused of sexual abuse in the 1960’s at St. Mary Magdalen Church in Abbeville. The case was settled in 2004. There is no record law enforcement was notified.
Msgr. Robie Robichaux was placed on leave in October 2018, after two women came forward accusing him of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers; the initial accuser went to the diocese in both 1994 and 2004. Despite her accusations, Robichaux was allowed to stay in ministry, work in schools, and was even promoted within the diocese to the post of judicial vicar.
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The Archdiocese of Los Angeles confirmed Monday that Father Joseph Dunne was accused of sexual misconduct of a female minor in January 1993 while he was still at Our Lady of Perpetual Help (OLPH) in Newhall.
“Her parents immediately reported the matter to the school, Archdiocese and law enforcement,” said a statement from the Archdiocese.
Dunne was employed by OLPH “without permission from or notification to the Archdiocese” from summer of 1992 until the allegations arose in January 1993, when he was removed from the parish.
“Fr. Dunne was instructed to remain in residence without ministering during the law enforcement investigation. The Archdiocese also reported the incident to law enforcement and cooperated in the investigation,” said the statement.
Law enforcement did not press charges, according to the Archdiocese.
After receiving the allegation in 1993, church officials contacted the Archdiocese of Glasgow and learned that there had been previous allegations of misconduct.
Dunne was expected to return to Glasgow, but Archdiocese files contain no information concerning his departure.
The current whereabouts of Dunne is unknown, according to church officials.
These allegations have been brought to light months after similar sexual abuse accusations of four other priests at OLPH.
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Twenty-one people affiliated with the Catholic Church, including two archbishops, one bishop, priests and others, have been accused in the nearly 200 child sex abuse lawsuits filed since 2016 in local and federal courts on Guam.
The local church, however, has not yet released its list of clergy members with “credible allegations” of child sex abuse.
Archbishop Michael Jude Byrnes in late 2017 said the archdiocese would work on such a list as an important part of the Archdioces of Agana’s policy of protecting children, but no timeline was given.
Concerned Catholics of Guam President David Sablan said releasing that list would help rebuild trust in the church.
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Opus Dei has a reputation as perhaps the most buttoned-down, by-the-book group in the Catholic Church, so when the Washington Post reported last week that it had paid nearly a million dollars to settle a sexual misconduct allegation against one of its most prominent priests, it set off shockwaves and raised new questions about the Church’s response to the clerical abuse crisis.
From his post at the influential Catholic Information Center (CIC) on K Street in the early 2000s, Father C.J. McCloskey was responsible for bringing some of the country’s most prominent conservatives into the Catholic Church, among them now Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback; Larry Kudlow, who currently serves as the Director of the National Economic Council; former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; and one-time Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork.
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A London lawyer wants the public to know where two ousted priests worked and faced allegations of sexual misconduct in the Diocese of London. Both Fr. Moe Charbonneau and Fr. Andy Dwyer have since been banned from ministering in the diocese but the organization has refused to divulge where the allegations were made.
“If they’re going to be transparent as has been the almost global demand upon the Catholic church then they need to give these details,” said Rob Talach, partner at Beckett Personal Injuries Lawyers in London.
But, the diocese maintains to reveal the locations of the allegations could lead to identifying the victims.
“We can only follow our own policy which is in place to safeguard the privacy of the people involved,” said Nelson Couto, communications officer with the Diocese of London.
He said, the diocese has released the list of where the priests served over the years, but not the specifics of where or when “…because those sorts of things can lead to people jumping to conclusions.”
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The Catholic Church will never succeed in putting its clergy abuse scandals behind it as long as it insists on finding ways to avoid full responsibility. The latest example is the absence of The Rev. Richard J. Ahern on the Springfield Diocese’s list of clergy who sexually abused young people even though he clearly belongs there.
The Rev. Ahern served churches all over the Diocese, including Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Fenn Street in Pittsfield, a church that was closed about a decade ago. Court records document his abuse of children in the diocese and a long list of allegations against him were unresolved when he died in 2001. In 1986, he was banned from the diocese in its entirety, as is documented in a letter from the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers in May of 1986, according to a report by Larry Parnass in Sunday’s Eagle.
According to Diocese spokesman Mark Dupont, an accused priest may not have made the diocese’s list if he died before credible allegations were made against him. The Rev. Ahern died well after those allegations were made, as the letter banning him from the diocese because of his actions 15 years before he died attests. Another reason would be if the priest worked for a religious order rather than the diocese itself.
The Rev. Ahern was indeed a member of the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers, but as a member of that order he served churches of the Springfield Diocese, including one in Pittsfield. Attempting to evade full responsibility for the behavior of priests through technicalities or semantics — what clergy abuse survivor and victim advocate Olan Horne of Chester called “the walnut game” in The Eagle — has been a Catholic Church strategy for decades and it has arguably done as much or more harm to the church than have the actions of pedophile priests.
It is clear from documents uncovered by Mr. Parnass that the Stigmatines followed a familiar Catholic Church pattern in its dealings with the Reverend Ahern. He was sent for therapy, shuttled from parish to parish and assigned duties that would limit his involvement with children. Nothing in the correspondence included in The Eagle story indicates any concern or compassion on the part of the Stigmatines for his young victims. He was eventually welcomed into retirement — in a message accompanied by the warning that he steer clear of the Springfield Diocese.
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Editor’s note: The Diocese of Sioux City issued the following statement on Jan. 4 in response to abuse allegations from a victims survivor group.
The Diocese of Sioux City would first like to apologize to all victims of abuse by members of the clergy. We are working to do everything we can to help victims who come forward. We want to help them feel a sense of justice and healing. The Diocese of Sioux City continues to express sorrow for and to apologize to the victims of sexual misconduct by members of our clergy. We again encourage all victims, if you have not reported past or present abuse, to please come forward. The Victims Assistance hotline number is (866) 435-4397 or (712) 279-5610.
As an update to all victims and our community at large, we are diligently working on the release of a list of clergy, who have substantiated allegations of sexual misconduct with minors against them. We sincerely hope this will help victims in their healing. Coordinating this list has taken longer than we expected as we review all our records carefully. Taking into account advice received in our meeting with the Attorney General for the State of Iowa in early December and counsel provided by dioceses that have already released lists, we have made progress on our list and have a draft.
While we initially indicated that the list would be released in 2018, completing the list is requiring additional time for our research to be thorough and reporting to be correct. Our Diocesan Review Board and its subcommittees are having ongoing meetings to complete and release the list. We appreciate your patience.
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The Diocese of Santa Rosa has released the names of priests accused of abusing children.
Bishop Robert F. Vasa on Saturday said the goal in releasing the names of accused priests and deacons who served in Santa Rosa is “to give to all the victims of clerical sexual abuse the assurance that they have been heard and the Church is very much concerned for their well-being and healing.”
The bishop said Monday he hopes this weekend’s release of names of nearly 40 priests accused of sexual abuse brings healing to their victims.
Monday’s news conference started with a prayer.
“Lead us not into temptation.”
It comes two days after the Santa Rosa Diocese released this list of 39 names of priests considered credibly accused of sexual abuse.
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The Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, a group representing survivors of Catholic priest sexual abuse, is blasting Cardinal Donald Wuerl.
He asked for “understanding” this weekend after a Washington Post report exposed that he lied about knowing about abuse while he was Pittsburgh’s bishop.
According to the Catholic News Agency, Wuerl wrote a letter to priests in Washington, D.C., this weekend, saying that he approrpriately handled sexual misconduct allegations against Archbishop Theodore McCarrick in 2004, while both men served in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.
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I have been a very strong Catholic, active in the parishes I belonged to — two parishes for a total of 70 years.
Not too long after Vatican II, I had what I thought was a crisis of faith and faltered in active participation. I remained infrequent in participation for several years, but slowly found my way back with the help of an associate priest at St. Mary’s Cathedral.
I became an integral part of my parish and a strong advocate of Catholic education because of the incredible experience my children had primarily at Cathedral High School. I will remain forever grateful for my education and that of my children.
Several months ago, my active participation in the church came to a sudden end.
At first, I thought I was experiencing another crisis of faith. As time passed and as I struggled with the void created by the end of active participation, I sorted through this latest estrangement and began to recognize that it was not a crisis of faith. I also began to appreciate that years ago it was not a crisis of faith. My faith remains strong, vibrant and an essential part of my being.
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“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” – Ephesians 5:11
The Diocese of Santa Rosa made public Saturday the names of 39 Catholic clergy believed to have sexually abused about 100 children since the diocese founding in 1962.
Bishop Robert F. Vasa, writing extensively in this month’s issue of the North Coast Catholic newsletter, published Jan. 12, described the abuse as “very real trauma which the evil actions of priests and bishops have caused in the lives of thousands of young people in our nation.”
In most cases involving the Santa Rosa diocese, he points out, the abuses occurred decades ago, though the most recent were as late as 2006 and 2008. Fourteen of the 39 names were accused of crimes prior to joining the Santa Rosa diocese; 25 are now deceased; and none currently serve the diocese.
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The lawyer celebrated for going after predatory Roman Catholic clergymen in Boston accused the Archdiocese of Newark on Monday of using a blame-the-victim strategy to protect a New Jersey priest who allegedly abused five boys and a girl decades ago.
Mitchell Garabedian, whose efforts were dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight,” launched the broadside after announcing that five of the alleged victims of the Rev. Michael “Mitch” Walters had settled their civil lawsuits against the Catholic Church for $400,000. The sixth case against Walters is still in court, he said.
Archdiocesan lawyers cited the “doctrine of contributory negligence” to argue that “these children were at fault when they were sexually abused,” Garabedian said at a press conference in West Orange, New Jersey.
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The head of the largest Roman Catholic diocese in New Mexico has pledged to open sealed records related to priest child sexual abuse cases as victims, attorneys and others push for more transparency.
Archbishop of Santa Fe John C. Wester agreed to the disclosure as he and two other top church officials were questioned last week under oath as part of bankruptcy court proceedings. The Albuquerque Journal reports the public meeting included victims whose claims are now intertwined with the archdiocese’s pending bankruptcy reorganization.
While the archdiocese already has paid more than $50 million to settle sex abuse claims, Wester contends it cannot sustain the financial impact of continued litigation.
Most of the questions posed by three members of the creditors’ committee at the meeting focused on illuminating what has historically been a dark, secret legal reckoning of child sexual abuse inflicted for decades by dozens of clergy members in New Mexico.
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[Monsignor Ramos after Pope’s meeting with Episcopal Conference: “He made several suggestions”]
CHILE
La Tercera
January 14, 2019
La representación estuvo encabezada por Ricardo Ezzati y el motivo era dar a conocer a Francisco “el caminar recorrido por la Iglesia en Chile” desde el encuentro que se tuvo en mayo de 2018.
En la ciudad del Vaticano, el Papa Francisco sostuvo una audiencia que duró cerca de una hora, con un grupo de integrantes de la Conferencia Episcopal de Chile, encabezados por el cardenal Ricardo Ezzati.
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[Doubts left by the Chilean bishops’ meeting with the Pope in Rome]
CHILE
La Tercera
January 14, 2019
By María José Navarrete
La cita se llevó a cabo este lunes y asistieron los cinco miembros del comité permanente de la Conferencia Episcopal.
A las 11.00 horas de este lunes en Roma (7.00 de la mañana en Chile), los cinco obispos que conforman el comité permanente de la Conferencia Episcopal (Cech), compuesto por su presidente, Santiago Silva; el vicepresidente, René Rebolledo; el secretario general, Fernando Ramos; el arzobispo de Santiago, Ricardo Ezzati, y el obispo de San Bernardo, Juan Ignacio González, ingresaron a la biblioteca privada del Palacio Apostólico.
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[After a new trip to the Vatican: a timeline of the last eight months in the Chilean Catholic Church crisis]
CHILE
Emol
January 14, 2019
By José Manuel Vilches and Tomás Molina
Los obispos fueron recibidos esta jornada por el Papa y dieron cuenta del “caminar recorrido” desde el encuentro de mayo, con la incertidumbre sobre el futuro de Ricardo Ezzati como telón de fondo.
Los últimos ocho meses de crisis en la Iglesia chilena
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[VIDEO Chilean Bishops after meeting with Pope: “It was a necessary dialogue”]
CHILE
T13
January 14, 2019
El Papa Francisco recibió a los miembros de la Conferencia Episcopal en su biblioteca privada, y luego almorzó con ellos para concluir el diálogo.
Asegurando que fue “un diálogo preciso”, el secretario general de la Conferencia Episcopal, Fernando Ramos, se refirió a la reunión privada que sostuvieron los miembros permanentes de la conferencia con el Papa Francisco este lunes en Roma.
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The woman still remembers the staircase leading to the Rev. Vincent P. Mooney’s office at Canisius High School.
She first climbed those stairs nearly 60 years ago when she was a young schoolgirl at the old Mount St. Joseph’s Academy.
“It was after my father’s death and I wasn’t handling it very well, and a nun at the school was sympathetic and she wanted to help me,” the woman said. “So she hooked me up with this Jesuit priest at Canisius High School.”
But Mooney was no ordinary priest. He was the Canisius president for most of the 1960s and 1970s and was a member of the well-known Jesuit religious order that runs Canisius high school and college.
His second-floor office where the 16-year-old poured her heart out doubled as a confessional, where after years of grooming, Fr. Mooney invited the young woman to confess her sins.
“He heard my confession, and as I got up from the kneeler and he came around from the other side, he attacked me,” she said. “He was over 6 feet tall, a large man, and I was only 5-foot-3 and completely shocked and not comprehending what was going on.”
Terrified, she says she escaped and burst down the stairs and into the parking lot, adjusting her skirt and blouse along the way.
“I felt him on top of me and I felt constricted and after everything was over, I just got up and I ran — I just ran,” she said. “I was catching a bus at the corner to go home, and I was just in agony, wondering, ‘Why? Why?’”
The woman is now 75, lives in Hamburg and asked that her name be withheld because her family does not know the details of her story. 7 Eyewitness News does not identify sex crime victims without their permission.
“I never told anyone,” she said. “You just didn’t discuss things like that.”
Fr. Vincent Mooney SJ
Pregnancy almost killed her
But the sexual assault was only the beginning of the woman’s nightmare.
Within a few months, she says she learned she was pregnant with Fr. Mooney’s child.
“The shame was immense,” she said, and she had to tell her mother.
But her mother never learned that Mooney was the father. Neither did Mooney, who died in 1981.
Although it was illegal in the late 1960s, she said her mother insisted she have an abortion.
“I hemorrhaged, I started bleeding out and it almost killed me,” she said.
A doctor at Sister’s Hospital was able to save her life.
“That’s when I decided I wanted to live,” she said. “I wanted to fight back and make something of myself.”
She forged a path that can be uncommon for victims of such heinous crimes. She went on to build a 30-year career as a researcher at the University at Buffalo and Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
She has a son and three grandchildren, a spotless home, a gentle laugh and a perfect smile.
But the pain of those early days has never left the deep recesses of her mind.
“It influences every aspect of your life,” she said. “You don’t trust a lot of people, especially men. You’re constantly reminded and you feel worthless, and its agony.”
She found a measure of healing by watching TV news this year, when investigative news stories revealed the decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by priests in the Diocese of Buffalo.
“I was watching TV one night and they had on the news this story about the Catholic Church and the exposure of too many — way too many — priests,” she said. “I knew I was a victim but I didn’t realize how many victims were involved. It struck me that I could finally make a phone call, reach out and talk to someone concerning what happened to me way back when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and the abuse that I had endured.”
The woman contacted the Diocese of Buffalo, which passed her along to the Jesuit religious order. A lawyer for the Jesuits asked her to come to New York City to give a statement, but eventually agreed to a meeting in Buffalo.
Church representatives asked her to come to a meeting at — of all places — Canisius High School.
“When I got to the reception area, I saw the area where one of Fr. Mooney’s offices used to be,” she said.
Fr. Mooney Named Canisius High President
Jesuits paid settlement
The woman told her story and the two men said they believed her, which was a relief, she said. She was not planning on asking for compensation until the lawyer for the Jesuits, at the end of the meeting, asked her, “Well, what do you expect to get out of this?”
Floored by the remark, she asked for a settlement, and the Jesuits agreed to $12,500. After learning more details about the pregnancy and the abortion, the Jesuits offered an additional $15,000. She began receiving counseling through Catholic Charities, which has helped, she said.
“I didn’t contact them for money,” she said. “I contacted them for support, for me and for others.”
Mike Gabriele, a spokesman for the Jesuits, confirmed the woman’s story and called the situation “horrific,” adding that “there are no words to truly assuage the heinous nature of this abuse.”
He confirmed the meeting at Canisius but said, “the Jesuits were unaware that the abuse happened there at the time.”
As a girl, she once dreamed of becoming a Catholic nun.
“I wanted a career in the church, and he took that from me,” she said.
She remains a woman of faith but said her ties to the Catholic Church as an institution have been “obliterated.”
“I didn’t lose my faith,” she said. “I still believed in the tenets of the church, I believed in God, I believed in Christ, but I couldn’t share that with anybody. I couldn’t go to church every Sunday and pretend that nothing had happened. I had to stay away.”
Records obtained by the 7 Eyewitness News I-Team from inside the Diocese of Buffalo chancery confirm that Auxiliary Bishop Edward M. Grosz received the woman’s report in April. But Mooney’s name was not on a list of abusive priests the diocese put out in November.
“The priest’s name was not included on the list in November because it was the only claim the diocese had received against that priest, and the claim was unable to be investigated before the priest had died,” diocese spokeswoman Kathy Spangler said in an email.
In response, the woman who said she was victimized by Fr. Mooney said, “That’s definitely minimizing it. If a person comes forward, and explains their situation, one should be enough to put the individual’s name on the list. They have no right to privacy. The church made them private. That’s not correct. That’s an abuse and a cover up of criminal activity.”
A spokeswoman for Canisius High School declined to comment to the I-Team or provide more information about Fr. Mooney’s history.
Jesuits will name more abusers
The Jesuit religious order has released lists of abusive priests in every area of the country and will release a list for its Northeast Province, which includes Buffalo, on Tuesday. The Jesuit spokesman confirmed Mooney will be included on that list.
Church records show Mooney served at Canisius from 1958-75 and was appointed president and rector in 1968, according to church records and archives of the Buffalo Courier-Express. He was the moderator of the Western New York Sodality Union, a role that allowed him to lead retreats for young women, according to news articles.
In 1976, he was transferred to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., where he lived until his death in 1981.
The woman believes other religious orders should take a cue from the Jesuits and finally release the names and assignments of priests who perpetrated crimes. An estimated one-third of American priests belong to religious orders like the Jesuits, Franciscans and Oblates.
“It should be exposed to the light and not hidden away in these little communities, in certain Catholic conclaves,” she said.
Above all, she wants victims to know that it is OK to come forward and speak of the abuse, no matter how many years have passed.
“You’re always alone until you expose them,” she said. “You’re always alone until you name what the problem is. If things like this happen to you, please, find someone, contact someone. Contact me if you need to. Contact other people that have been abused. You just need to get it out there and you have to be honest with who injured you, who abused you. I thought I was the only one. But looking back, obviously there had to be more than just me.”
Fall From Grace is an ongoing investigation by 7 Eyewitness News Chief Investigator Charlie Specht into the history of sexual abuse and its coverup within the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.
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WHEN ALLEGATIONS came to light last year of sexual abuse and inappropriate conduct involving children and seminarians by Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who succeeded Mr. McCarrick as leader of the Washington archdiocese, expressed shock and denied prior knowledge. Now it turns out Mr. Wuerl was presented in 2004 with an account of Mr. McCarrick’s alleged misconduct, which he relayed to the Vatican. Then: nothing.
In the ongoing tsunami of revelations about the Catholic Church’s willful blindness, conspiracy of silence and moral bankruptcy on clergy sex abuse, this particular revelation may count as little more than a droplet — although it does involve two of the highest-ranking and most prominent American prelates. However, it also encapsulates characteristics that continue to dog the church nearly two decades after the scandal burst into the open: callousness directed at victims; an insistence on denial and hairsplitting; and the hierarchy’s preference for treating allegations as internal matters, as if the world’s 1.2 billion lay Catholics were an irrelevance.
In response to the revelation that Mr. Wuerl was fully aware of, and handled, an allegation from a former priest about Mr. McCarrick’s misconduct more than 14 years ago, the Washington archdiocese issued a statement suggesting that his previous flat denials were merely “imprecise.” Those previous statements referred only to sexual abuse of a minor, the archdiocese said.
In fact, the cardinal’s comments last summer were unequivocal. In response to a broad question about “long-standing rumors or innuendos” posed by a reporter for the archdiocesan newspaper Catholic Standard, he said, “I had not heard them” before or during his tenure in Washington. That was untrue.
As it happens, Mr. Wuerl, then-bishop of Pittsburgh, not only was presented with allegations of Mr. McCarrick’s misconduct by a former priest named Robert Ciolek. To his credit, he also swiftly brought that information to the Vatican’s attention in a meeting with the pope’s ambassador in Washington at the time, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo.
Yet Mr. McCarrick remained as archbishop of Washington for nearly two more years and suffered no discipline until last year, when the allegations against him were reported. At that point, the Holy See removed him from ministry; his final punishment is now being weighed in Rome.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wuerl, though forced to resign as archbishop last fall following revelations by a Pennsylvania grand jury that he had mishandled numerous clergy sex abuse cases in Pittsburgh, continues to oversee the Washington archdiocese pending appointment of a successor.
Understandably, Mr. Ciolek is outraged that Mr. Wuerl, having known of his allegations for years, denied knowledge of them last year. “It’s as if I don’t exist,” he told The Post’s Michelle Boorstein.
Pope Francis himself has displayed a gaping blind spot on the issue of clergy sex abuse, at times condemning it and taking resolute action, at other times directing contempt and lip service at victims. He has convened a meeting of top bishops in Rome next month. Actions and policies, not ringing declarations, will be the measure of the church’s success in grappling with a scandal that has shamed it.
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Bishop Robert F. Vasa of the Diocese of Santa Rosa describes the statement he released over the weekend of the thirty-eight names accused of abuse of children, the articles of what the church has done over the past few decades in relation to these cases, and the invitation to victims to come forward. He also speaks to the status of the Catholic Church today, whether he has heard from any of the people from SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) and how they can prevent these types of abuse in the future:
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Fifteen years after acknowledging it exists, and months after promising its release, the Diocese of Lafayette still has not released a list of priests who have faced credible accusations of sexual abuse involving children. KATC Investigates is breaking that silence, and releasing its own list.
In Louisiana, both the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux have followed through on a pledge of transparency, joining more than 70 dioceses and Catholic religious organizations across the country who have released their lists.
Just last week the Diocese in Lafayette said they are still examining the past 50 years of files and will release their list when they’re finished.
The “list” was first acknowledged by the Diocese of Lafayette in February 2004 by former Bishop Michael Jarrell; our reporters have been requesting the diocese disclose those names since then. They refused until last fall, when Bishop Douglas Deshotel joined other dioceses in the state in making the pledge to release them.
KATC believes the public has waited long enough, and has a right to know, so we are releasing the list of priests with credible accusations we’ve assembled following years of pouring over public records and media reports, using all the investigative techniques we know.
KATC Investigates started by putting together a list of priests and church employees who have been accused of sexual abuse. Our producers and reporters then scoured thousands of pages of documents – all public records – to find support for these accusations in the form of criminal charges, civil suit settlements, diocese statements and court case evidence. Some of those records are recent, some decades old.
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A reverend who once served at Saint Ignatius in Yardley has been placed on administrative leave following new allegations he sexually abused a minor several decades ago, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia announced this week.
Reverend Monsignor Joseph L. Logrip, 73, served at Saint Ignatius 1972-1974. Law enforcement is now involved in the investigation, and the Archdiocese said it will cooperate fully with authorities.
While on administrative leave he will not be able to exercise his ministry public, present himself publicly as a priest, or be present in any parishes or schools, the Archdiocese said.
Logrip is one of three priests whose status was recently reviewed by The Archdiocesan Office of Investigations, which conducts internal investigations following allegations of misconduct.
In 2014, the same board recommended that Monsignor Logrip was suitable for ministry based on an unsubstantiated allegation of sexual abuse of a minor. Since that time, he has served as a Chaplain at Camilla Hall retirement home, and as a weekend assistant at Saint Peter Parish in West Brandwyine.
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Five alleged victims who say they were sexually abused by a New Jersey priest settled their lawsuits against the Catholic Church for a total of $400,000 — and a sixth cases against him is still in court, an attorney said.
The Rev. Michael “Mitch” Walters was accused of molesting both boys and girls at St. Cassian Church and school in Montclair and St. John Nepomucene Parish in Guttenberg in the 1980s and 1990s. He denied the accusations and was removed from ministry in 2016.
Five lawsuits against Walters were settled in July after the cases went to mediation, said Mitchell Garabedian, the Boston-based attorney for the alleged victims. Garabedian, who was portrayed by Stanley Tucci in the 2015 film “Spotlight,” is known for representing victims in cases against the Catholic Church.
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Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s former top diplomat to the United States, released a public letter on Sunday calling on accused sex-abuser Archbishop Theodore McCarrick — a power player in the U.S. church — to “confess and repent” of his “sins, crimes and sacrileges, and do so publicly” because “your eternal salvation is at stake.”
“As has been reported as news by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the accusations against you for crimes against minors and abuses against seminarians are going to be examined and judged very soon with an administrative procedure,” said Archbishop Vigano in his Jan. 13 letter.
“No matter what decision the supreme authority of the Church takes in your case, what really matters and what has saddened those who love you and pray for you is the fact that throughout these months you haven’t given any sign of repentance,” wrote Vigano. “I am among those who are praying for your conversion, that you may repent and ask pardon of your victims and the Church.”
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Santa Rosa Bishop Robert F. Vasa on Saturday disclosed the names of 39 priests and deacons with ties to the diocese who church leaders say committed child sexual abuse or were credibly accused of such crimes, a disclosure that marks the most comprehensive acknowledgment to date of the decades-long scope of the clergy abuse scandal in the local Catholic church.
Two former Sonoma Valley priests are on the list: Francisco Xavier Ochoa and John Crews.
Francisco Xavier Ochoa
Francisco Xavier Ochoa was an assistant pastor at St. Francis Solano Church on West Napa Street in the 1980s and again from 2000 to 2006.
Ochoa died in Mexico in 2009 at age 71. He fled the U.S. for Mexico in 2006 several days after a meeting with the Santa Rosa Diocese in which he admitted that he offered a boy $100 to strip dance in front of him and that he had kissed other boys on the lips.
After the meeting, Ochoa was removed from his duties, but the diocese delayed in reporting the allegations to authorities. A subsequent police investigation revealed that Ochoa had allegedly molested multiple children from different families.https://newsletter.sonomanews.com/framed/single/a3adc18b5cb65f9d29d5f908b3bdadc1?pref=sit_daily&hideImage=1&padCopy=0&fid=1819
In documents disclosed after a warrant was issued for Ochoa’s arrest, investigators said that the priest also brought a 15-year-old boy – now an adult – from Mexico and installed him in his diocese-owned residence where the two engaged in regular, sometimes violent, sex.
‘If (the victim) refused to cooperate with Ochoa, Ochoa would violently rape him,’ wrote Sonoma County Sheriff’s Detective Ruben Martinez in 2006. The victim estimated Ochoa had sex with him two to three times a week for approximately one year. He told authorities that he did not know how to get Ochoa to stop.
The Santa Rosa Diocese was sued by families of Ochoa’s victims and in September 2007 the diocese settled the case for $5 million.
John Crews
John Crews resigned as executive director of the Hanna Boys Center in 2013 following an allegation of sexual misconduct with a boy in the 1970s, prior to his arrival in Sonoma in 1984.
His resignation, which shocked Sonoma residents at the time, stemmed from a complaint brought by relatives of the alleged victim, who is deceased.
At the time of Crews’ resignation, Vasa said that the diocese followed church and legal requirements in Crews’ case and he described Crews, who was 67 at the time, as handling the resignation ‘very graciously.’
Crews was allowed to remain a priest in the diocese until he retired, but would ‘not serve in any other public ministry,’ the bishop said.
Prior to his work at the Hanna center, Crews served as a parish priest at St. Sebastian Church in Sebastopol and St. Joseph Church in Cotati, and also served briefly as an administrator at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa.
Vasa said at the time of Crews’ resignation that no other allegations against Crews were contained in diocese records.
Crews did not admit to any misconduct, according to Hanna officials, contacted about the case in 2013.
The investigation
Vasa’s list, made public to about 140,000 parishioners as well as the media over the weekend, includes many well-known names long public due to high-profile molestation cases as well as several previously unknown — most of them accused for offenses committed several decades ago.
At least 23 of those on the list are deceased.
None are serving in public ministry in the Santa Rosa Diocese, Vasa was quoted as telling the North Coast Catholic newspaper last week.
About 17 people included on the list served in the Santa Rosa Diocese at some point but had accusations lodged against them elsewhere, Vasa said.
But the bishop said a search of the records indicated about 25 priests were accused of abusing about 100 children during service to the Santa Rosa Diocese from its founding in 1962 to the present — ‘a shocking number’ that, in part, inspired release of most of the names, he wrote in the diocesan newsletter.
He noted that four priests — Gary Timmons, Don Kimball, Austin Peter Keegan and Francisco Xavier Ochoa (of Sonoma) — were responsible for 63 known victims. Kimball and Ochoa are deceased, according to the church.
‘My primary goal in releasing the names of accused priests and deacons who served in Santa Rosa in this public fashion is to give to all the victims of clerical sexual abuse the assurance that they have been heard and that the Church is very much concerned for their well-being and healing,’ Vasa wrote. ‘It is my deepest prayer and hope that this release of names in a consolidated fashion says to any of you who are victims, we have heard you, we believe you, we affirm you in your trauma and we want to help with a healing process.’
Melanie Sakoda, national secretary and Bay Area spokeswoman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said she found seven names on the list she had never seen associated with clergy abuse before and was pleased, as well, to see member of Catholic orders, which have been omitted by other dioceses, on Vasa’s list.
‘I think it was more complete than I suspected it was going to be,’ she said.
She said SNAP still believes Santa Rosa and other dioceses should also be accounting for nuns, teachers and others besides priests who serve within the world of the Catholic church and its schools and institutions, ‘but he did a good job.’
In contrast, an attorney with Jeff Anderson and Associates, a Minnesota-based law firm that has taken on the Catholic Church nationally, called the list ‘a deflection,’ released under pressure from the whole of society, as well as parishioners and his own clients.
Michael Reck, whose firm represents a Ventura County man and clergy-abuse survivor who has sued every Catholic diocese in California, said, ‘Yes, this is a good list.’ But ‘the focus on dead perpetrators,’ he said, ‘leaves out the hierarchy that covered this up, that moved them around.’
The list of 39 clergymen includes the well-known names of predatory priests whose behavior came to light beginning in the mid-1990s during a rash of civil and criminal cases that exposed the sprawling North Coast diocese as a focal point of the Catholic abuse scandal several years before widespread misdeeds erupted nationwide.
The diocese has since paid out more than $29 million in legal settlements to childhood victims of at least 10 priests since the 1990s, about $12 million of it covered by insurance, Vasa said.
‘Sadly, we have had sexual abuse events as late as 2006 and 2008 and I find that most troubling,’ Vasa said in his written statement accompanying the disclosure, which was also published in Spanish. ‘However, the vast majority of the abuses occurred decades ago. This is not complete proof that the Church is making progress in eliminating this great tragedy, but I find this to be a sign of hope.’
Vasa has said he spent weeks combing the internet and aggregated lists for names and information that might allow him to issue the fullest possible report to his parishioners, in collaboration with members of the Diocesan Review Board established in 2002.
The diocese also is urging any church abuse victims to contact the diocesan Victim Assistance Coordinator, Julie Sparacio, at 707-566-3308, or P.O. Box 1297, Santa Rosa, CA 95402.
You can reach Mary Callahan at mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com or Lorna Sheridan at lorna.sheridan@sonomanews.com.
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The clergy sex abuse crisis is redefining the role and position of many people in the “locus” of the faith that is the Church — hierarchical leaders, clergy and laity, activists, journalists, the police, lawyers, judges and politicians.
Also included are theologians and all those who work on behalf of the Church as professional intellectuals, even those who are not technically on its payroll.
So, after the terrible summer of 2018 (from revelations in June about former cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the release in August of the Pennsylvania grand jury report) I decided to begin 2019 with a new theology course for university undergraduates titled, “History and ecclesiology of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.”
The easy part was putting together the reading list and course assignments. Thanks to the individual and collective efforts of scholars, a “canon” of texts is starting to emerge, such as one published in Daily Theology.
The more difficult task was to prepare for all the expected and unexpected questions that are likely to be raised by a course that deals with a developing and disturbing story — or stories — such as the abuse crisis in the Church.I have come up with ten questions or issues that are characteristics of the present crisis. Surely there are more, but this is a start. I hope they help provide some perspective on what it means to do scholarship on this phenomenon.The first question concerns methodology: what kind of sources are to be used in this course?
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The desire to protect children from abuse, both sexual and physical, has led many states to designate certain classes of people as mandatory reporters, even threatening them with jail time if they fail to report abuse.
These laws vary from state to state in terms of who are listed as mandatory reporters and what they are required to report. Mandatory reporters have included teachers, nurses, doctors, child welfare officials and police. Even psychologists and psychiatrists, who normally must respect the confidentiality of what they are told by their patients, have sometimes been covered.
Because of the failure of Catholic bishops in the past to report abusive priests to authorities, states are now also including Catholic clergy as mandatory reporters.
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The retired Vatican diplomat who accused Pope Francis of turning a blind eye to the alleged sexual misconduct of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick is begging the American to publicly repent for his crimes for the good of the Catholic Church.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano wrote a letter to McCarrick that was published Monday on an Italian blog, Vigano’s way of communicating after he went into hiding following his bombshell accusations against the pope in August.
In the letter, Vigano noted the Vatican is expected to shortly deliver its verdict against McCarrick after gathering testimony from at least three men who accused him of misconduct.
The McCarrick scandal has thrown the U.S. and Vatican hierarchy into crisis since it was apparently an open secret that the powerful retired archbishop of Washington slept with seminarians.
Vigano wrote that a public show of repentance would be a “gift” to the church to help it heal from the sex abuse crisis.
“Time is running out but you can confess and repent of your sins, crimes and sacrileges, and do so publicly,” Vigano wrote. While saying McCarrick’s own eternal salvation was at stake, Vigano also said the credibility of the church was also in the balance.
“A public repentance on your part would bring a significant measure of healing to a gravely wounded and suffering church,” Vigano wrote. “Are you willing to offer her that gift?”
The McCarrick scandal erupted just before a grand jury in Pennsylvania accused some 300 priests of abusing more than 1,000 children over seven decades, while superiors largely stood by. The combined scandal, plus Francis’ own missteps in handling abuse cases, has created a crisis of confidence in the Catholic hierarchy.
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[New abuse complaint lodged against priest Ramos Gordón]
MADRID (SPAIN)
El País
January 13, 2019
By Julio Núñez
Una supuesta víctima acusa al clérigo pederasta por hechos ocurridos en los años ochenta en el colegio Juan XXIII de Puebla de Sanabria, en Zamora
Una nueva víctima ha denunciado al sacerdote José Manuel Ramos Gordón por abusos sexuales entre 1979 y 1985, cuando el exalumno tenía entre 11 y 16 años. Los hechos tenían lugar en el colegio zamorano Juan XXIII de Puebla de Sanabria, de noche, cuando los niños ya estaban durmiendo. La acusación llegó a través de una carta certificada el pasado jueves al obispo de Astorga y presidente de la comisión antipederastia de la Conferencia Episcopal Española José Antonio Menéndez. Sin embargo, la diócesis todavía no ha hecho ninguna declaración al respecto.
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On the front page of today’s Charlotte Observer: a headline reading, “PRIESTS ACCUSED OF SEX ABUSE,” with a notice that the Catholic diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, still has not released names of priests credibly accused of child sex abuse. The headline points readers to an article inside the front section of the paper that appeared several days ago in the online copy of the paper, but is being published in the print-media copy for the first time for today’s Sunday edition.
The article, entitled “Why hasn’t Charlotte Catholic diocese released list of priests accused of sex abuse?,” by Tim Funk, reports a series of evasive statements by diocesan spokesman David Hains, one of which is that survivors would be harmed by having this information in the public sphere. To which SNAP’s David Clohessy replies, in a word, “Baloney”:
As for Hains’ claim that releasing a list might “re-traumatize” victims, the former leader of a national group that represents the victims of clergy sex abuse had a one-word reaction: “Baloney.”
“The overwhelming majority of survivors WANT this info out there,” David Clohessy, who is still active in the St. Louis-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, wrote in an email to the Observer.
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La representación estuvo encabezada por Ricardo Ezzati y el motivo era dar a conocer a Francisco “el caminar recorrido por la Iglesia en Chile” desde el encuentro que se tuvo en mayo de 2018.
En la ciudad del Vaticano, el Papa Francisco sostuvo una audiencia que duró cerca de una hora, con un grupo de integrantes de la Conferencia Episcopal de Chile, encabezados por el cardenal Ricardo Ezzati.
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[Today’s meeting between Pope and Chilean bishops generates split opinions among church observers]
SANTIAGO (CHILE)
Emol
January 13, 2019
By Pía Larrondo
La audiencia, que fue solicitada por los prelados en noviembre, será a puertas cerradas y se enmarcará dentro de la próxima cita que se va a realizar en febrero en Roma con los presidentes de las conferencias episcopales.
Hoy se reunirán los obispos chilenos que forman parte del comité permanente de la Conferencia Episcopal con el Papa Francisco en Roma. La finalidad de la cita, según los obispos, es “dar a conocer al pontífice el caminar recorrido por la Iglesia en Chile desde el encuentro que conferencia episcopal sostuvo con él en mayo, en el vaticano”.
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[Pope receives Chilean Church leaders, Ezzati and Silva arrive accused of cover up]
CHILE
BioBioChile
January 14, 2019
By Matías Vega and Patricia Mayorga
Este lunes los 5 obispos del Consejo Permanente de la Conferencia Episcopal (Cech), entre ellos el arzobispo de Santiago, Ricardo Ezzati, se reunieron de manera privada con el papa Francisco en el Vaticano. Dos de los religiosos llegaron a Roma en medio de casos en los que son imputados por encubrimiento, particularmente el presidente de la Conferencia Episcopal, Santiago Silva (quien declaró el 29 de octubre ante tribunales) y el mismo Ezzati (quien declaró el 3 de octubre). Junto a ellos llegaron también el vicepresidente René Rebolledo, el obispo de San Bernardo, Juan Ignacio González y el secretario general, Fernando Ramos.
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[James Hamilton: “Ezzati must, and probably, will be in jail”]
CHILE
La Tercera
January 13, 2019
El médico, víctima del sacerdote Fernando Karadima, indicó no tener muchas expectativas sobre la reunión de este lunes de los Obispos chilenos con el Papa Francisco.
Esta noche, en entrevista con CNN, el médico James Hamilton, víctima de abusos del sacerdote Fernando Karadima se refirió a la situación que atraviesa la Iglesia Católica chilena, a propósito de la reunión que sostendrán este lunes miembros del comité permanente de la Conferencia episcopal con el Papa Francisco. En este sentido, Hamilton señaló no tener demasiadas expectativas.
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A public inquiry has refused to publish evidence that could shed light on an allegation that Michael Gove intervened in a child sexual abuse investigation.
He has been accused of trying, during his time as education secretary, to find out about an investigation into a priest suspected of abusing a boy at a boarding school.
The accusation has been made by two witnesses who have testified to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
The environment secretary has denied the allegation, saying it was inconceivable that he would have done so. IICSA has looked at the allegation, but said there was insufficient evidence to come to a conclusion about its veracity.
The inquiry has refused a request from the Guardian to make public the evidence, such as witness statements that it had gathered about the allegation. It has published some of the evidence, but not all.
In a statement, IICSA said : “All witness statements and evidence relied upon by the panel were published on the inquiry’s website.” Asked why some witness statements were published, and others were not, the inquiry said: “Evidence which is not relevant is not used or published”.
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Vermont’s Catholic Bishop is holding town hall meetings at churches throughout the state this month in an effort to increase transparency amid mounting pressure on the church to respond to sexual abuse claims around the country.
Bishop Christopher Coyne said the goal is to listen to people and to discuss how to regain trust among parishioners when attendance is declining.
“As many people that are leaving, it is going to take even longer to get them back,” Coyne said at the first meeting at St. Mary’s Church in St. Albans on Thursday.
The other meetings planned include on Jan. 22 at Holy Family Church in Essex Junction; Jan 23 at St. Theresa’s Church in Orleans; Jan 29 at Christ the King Church in Rutland; and Jan. 31 at St. John Vianney Church in South Burlington.
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A former papal representative to the U.S. has written an open letter to Archbishop Theodore McCarrick that urges the archbishop to repent publicly of the sexual abuse and misconduct of which he stands accused.
“You, paradoxically, have at your disposal an immense offer of great hope for you from the Lord Jesus; you are in a position to do great good for the Church. In fact, you are now in a position to do something that has become more important for the Church than all of the good things you did for her throughout your entire life,” wrote Archbishop Carlo Vigano in a Jan. 13 letter to McCarrick.
“A public repentance on your part would bring a significant measure of healing to a gravely wounded and suffering Church. Are you willing to offer her that gift? Christ died for us all when we were still sinners (Rom. 5: 8). He only asks that we respond by repenting and doing the good that we are given to do.”
McCarrick, 88, has been accused in recent months of sexually abusing at least two adolescent boys, and of engaging for decades in coercive sexual behavior toward priests and seminarians. The allegations were first made public in June 2018, when the Archdiocese of New York reported that it deemed credible an allegation that McCarrick sexually abused a teenage boy in the 1970s, while serving as a New York priest.
In July 2018, Pope Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals.
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Two Philadelphia-area priests, the Rev. John F. Meyers and the Rev. Raymond W. Smart, have been found to be “not suitable for ministry” after church officials investigated claims that they had sexually abused a minor in the 1980s, the Philadelphia Archdiocese announced Sunday.
And a third priest, Msgr. Joseph L. Logrip, who had been cleared of sexual-abuse allegations in a high-profile investigation following a 2011 grand jury report, has been placed on administrative leave following a new claim that he, too, sexually abused a minor in the early 1980s. The archdiocese has referred that allegation to law enforcement.
The news comes six months after a damning Pennsylvania grand jury report found that Roman Catholic leaders in Pennsylvania had covered up decades of child sex abuse dating to the 1940s involving hundreds of priests and more than 1,000 victims. The U.S. Justice Department has launched its own investigation.
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Nearly 10 years after a precedent-setting agreement with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester ended, state prosecutors report few recent incidents of clergy sex abuse in New Hampshire.
“We have not seen a flood of complaints that other jurisdictions have seen since we had our own settlement agreements and the audits that went on,” said Deputy Attorney General Jane Young.
“This could be because we’ve already gone through this process before; it’s hard to know.”
The past year has been a devastating one for the Catholic Church in America, with a federal investigation and probes in at least 14 states and the District of Columbia.
Nearly all of this sprang from a grand jury in Pennsylvania last August that produced an 800-page report alleging 1,000 incidents of sexual molestation by more than 300 priests in six different dioceses.
Following those allegations, attorneys general in Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, Virginia and Washington, D.C., launched their own criminal investigations into the church.
At the dawn of 2019, Pope Francis issued a stern message to U.S. Catholic leaders while they were gathering for a spiritual retreat on the topic at the Mundelein Seminary in Illinois.
“The church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them,” Francis wrote in a letter that mixed compassionate encouragement and blunt criticism.
Pope Francis wrote that blame-shifting by church leaders had led to mistrust and pain among the church’s followers.
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The Holy See, or the Vatican, has been named as a defendant in a clergy sex abuse lawsuit filed on Monday in local court against Archbishop Anthony S. Apuron by his own nephew.
Mark Mafnas Apuron’s Jan. 14, 2019 lawsuit in the Superior Court of Guam is similar to the lawsuit he filed in federal court last year against his uncle.
Mark Apuron’s two lawsuits accuse Archbishop Apuron of raping him when he was a teen, about 15 or 16 years old, around 1989 or 1990, in the bathroom of the Archdiocese of Agana Chancery Office.
Previous lawsuits against the archbishop alleged that he raped or sexually abused minor altar boys when he was still the parish priest in Agat in the 1970s.
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Archbishop of Santa Fe John C. Wester agreed to open sealed state court lawsuits in priest child sexual abuse cases and pay therapy bills for survivors during an extraordinary public meeting with several victims whose claims are now intertwined with the archdiocese’s pending bankruptcy reorganization.
It was also revealed during the meeting last week that the Archdiocese of Santa Fe continues to pay thousands of dollars a year to assist two priests who have been credibly accused of molesting children.
Most of the questions posed by three members of the creditors’ committee at the meeting focused on shedding light on what has historically been a dark, secret legal reckoning of the child sexual abuse inflicted for decades by at least 79 current or former Catholic priests in the archdiocese.
Wester has said the archdiocese has paid millions of dollars in settlements to victims so far, but cannot sustain the financial impact of continued litigation.
The meeting Thursday in Albuquerque provided an initial forum for the U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee, abuse survivors on the creditors’ committee and a lawyer for the three dozen victims who have pending lawsuits against the diocese to ask about the archdiocese’s Chapter 11 petition filed Dec. 3.
Wester and two other top archdiocesan officials were questioned under oath for about three hours.
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A Catholic priest says hundreds across Savannah believe he’s accused of sexually abusing children. Now Pastor Joseph Smith (Father Joe) — who serves at Saint Joseph’s Hospital — wants to set the record straight.
Pastor Joseph Smith was one of 16 clergymen named by the Bishop as someone with credible accusations against them. According to a release from November, the clergymen are accused of sexually abusing children.
The named Pastor Smith served in Savannah from 1924 until his death in 1952. It’s not the same Pastor Smith serving now.
“I was ready to retire. I was ready to hang it up,” said Father Joe in Savannah. “I’d rather be remembered for what I have done and not for what I haven’t.”
That’s why people gathered Sunday to remember Father Joe’s two decades of service and to take a picture, so you know his face is not a criminal one.
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This story is part of KHOU 11 Investigates’ series “Unforgivable.” Parts may contain graphic descriptions of sexual assault. If you or a loved one have experienced sexual abuse, get help through the free and confidential National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-HOPE).
There was a time when Monica Deanda Baez was a little girl that she prayed to God to let her die.
In her family’s modest home in northeast Houston, she would climb on top of the toilet and scream out the bathroom window to God, to whomever — to whatever — would listen.
“I would beg God,” Baez said. “Please let me die, ‘cause I don’t want him to do this to me anymore.”
Baez, now 53, said for years she was sexually abused by her family’s priest. It was only later she learned that her older sister, Elodia Flores, and three of their siblings also said they suffered the same abuse by the same priest.
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The disclosure of sex abuse scandals that besieged the Buffalo Diocese and its parishioners for decades has dominated water cooler talk and reporting in Western New York for almost a year now.
The issue has hit home for a lot of people as the Diocese, under pressure, has released the names of 80 confirmed abusers and the press reports that the real number of accused priests and nuns is 111. With numbers that great, names that well-known, and abuses having taken place in communities large and small, everyone in WNY, it seems, has some sort of connection to an accuser, an accused, or a church where it happened.
There’s been a lot of handwringing over this. Everyone has wondered the following: How did the community not know this was happening? How could trusted and beloved people and churches hide, even allow, this? How does the Church attempt to make the abused whole again?
It’s been rare, though, that I’ve heard this question posed: How do we prevent this from happening again?
The scandals should be a wakeup call not only for the Catholic Church, but every Church and every organization that serves youth — as well the parents who entrust their sons and daughters to them. That would run the gamut from paid to volunteer, schools to day cares, little leagues to varsity sports teams, theme parks to summer camps, and music clubs to scout troops.
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A Jefferson County family wants to introduce a bill during the 2019 legislative session, which begins Monday, making clergy mandated reporters of child abuse.
Lori Cook said she was called to action after learning her son had been sexually abused by two other boys. The abuse started in October 2017 and continued until her son, who is now 12, came forward about two months later.
“As a mother you don’t know how to prepare yourself to deal with a situation like this and to see the fear in my son’s eyes,” she said.
The Cook family alleges the abuse began at Eagle Rock Church in Lawrence and that they brought it to the church’s attention as soon as they found out.
“We decided our best course, because we trusted them, was to go to our pastor,” Cook said. “So we called him immediately and said we needed to come in.”
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With the sun dipping below the trees on a late November afternoon, Carol LaBonte stood outside the black wrought-iron gates of Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Spring with a sign that read “Jesus Weeps.”
Although her seven children left the nest decades ago, she still finds herself protecting them. That’s what she was doing on this afternoon, joined by a group of others gathered outside the church with signs reading “Your pastor has secrets” and “Protect children not abusers.”
“It’s been all these years that the truth has not come out,” LaBonte said, now silver-haired and a cane resting by her side. “The pastor is still the pastor and abuser of my son.”
The priest, Rev. John Keller, has been at Prince of Peace for nearly 20 years. But there was a time in the mid-1980s he was the associate pastor at another church just a few miles away, Christ the Good Shepherd, where the LaBontes were parishioners and heavily involved in the church. LaBonte’s late husband, Stephen, was a deacon.
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A priest has been put on administrative leave after new allegations surfaced he sexually abused a minor in the early 1980s, the Philadelphia Archdiocese announced Sunday.
Church officials also announced that it had found two other priests unsuitable for ministry “based on substantiated allegations that they sexually abused minors in the early 1980s.”
The announcements come amid increased scrutiny of the Roman Catholic church’s handling of abuse allegations, after the release of a grand jury report in August 2018 detailing more than 1,000 cases of child sexual abuse at the hands of 301 clergy in six other Pennsylvania archdioceses. That grand jury report did not cover the Philadelphia Archdiocese.
The Rev. Msgr. Joseph Logrip, 73, was previously investigated by the archdiocese following a 2011 grand jury report. The allegations against him were never made public, and local prosecutors declined to press charges.
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Está imputado por los delitos de abuso sexual gravemente ultrajante contra dos menores.
Dentro de la grilla de los juicios más resonantes que se ventilarán este año en Salta también está previsto llevar al banquillo de los acusados al conocido cura Rubén Agustín Rosa Torino. El fundador del instituto religioso Hermanos Discípulos de Jesús de San Juan Bautista, está imputado por los delitos de “abuso sexual gravemente ultrajante y abuso sexual simple”, agravado por ser ministro de culto reconocido.
Rosa Torino fue denunciado por dos exseminaristas de su congregación. Por este hecho el religioso estuvo detenido entre diciembre de 2016 y agosto de 2017, pero luego fue liberado por un Tribunal de Impugnación por considerar que no había peligro de fuga, como lo había sostenido la jueza de primera instancia.
En la resolución de imputación la fiscal Luján Sodero Calvet señaló que las víctimas fueron sometidas a actos de “tocamientos libidinosos” en zonas íntimas. En ese sentido remarcó que dado el “rol de padre fundador” del citado instituto, las pruebas colectadas en la causa demuestran que los damnificados no pudieron prestar “de ningún modo su consentimiento libre y voluntario a los abusos sexuales denunciados”.
Para la fiscal quedó claro que el acusado gozaba de “ascendencia” sobre los miembros de la congregación que dirigía y que se “tornaba imposible para estos, en ese estado de clara vulnerabilidad, resistirse o negarse, máxime teniendo en cuenta las premisas que se impartían en esa orden religiosa y el evidente estado de sumisión en el que se desarrollaba el vínculo entre Rosa Torino y los hermanos de la congregación encabezado por el acusado”. La fiscal sostuvo que los resultados de los estudios psicológicos practicados a los denunciantes “fueron determinantes” en cuanto al padecimiento de las víctimas, como así también respecto al perfil del acusado.
Sodero explicó que para poder establecer lo sucedido en la orden religiosa que dirigía Rosa Torino se realizaron numerosas diligencias, entre ellas varias inspecciones oculares en las instalaciones del Instituto San Juan Bautista, además de pericias sobre un teléfono celular, pendrive, computadoras, cámaras filmadoras y otros dispositivos digitales secuestrados en el marco de la causa.
Las fuentes consultadas señalaron que dentro del calendario judicial del año también podría ser exjuiciado el excura Emilio Lamas, quien a partir mediados del año pasado ocupó gran parte de las crónicas policiales. Lamas fue expulsado del clero por las denuncias de abusos que habría cometido durante su paso por la iglesia de Rosario de Lerma hace más de 20 años.
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The U.S. bishops, having completed their weeklong retreat outside Chicago, now have some urgent business to attend to as they prepare for the meetings at the Vatican next month — meetings that will draw the heads of Catholic bishops’ conferences from around the world.
Our hope and prayer is that our Church leaders are now able to view the tumultuous events of 2018, which are sure to proceed to their next phase in 2019, with clarity, purpose and the determination to act decisively.
Justice demands it.
Pope Francis, in his letter of exhortation, and St. John Paul, in Pastores Gregis (The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World), have provided them a road map. Clarity and purpose are both vital to begin the renewal and purification of the Church.
I believe a great good can come from this tragic chapter in the Church’s history, as long as our leaders believe the Church is Christ’s visible instrument on earth and publicly acknowledge and repent of their own shortcomings. In this, they will stand tall as shepherds with a will and heart for guiding their flocks through these turbulent times.
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ALLEGATIONS of abuse have been made 126 times against Catholic priests in Scotland over the last 70 years, according to church documents.
However, the vast majority were not reported to police for years and only a fraction of those cases have ever been prosecuted.
Now campaigners are calling on Catholic Church leaders to publicly name all those who have had allegations made against them following the lead of the church leaders in the United States.
They have spoken out as we reveal how a Catholic priest accused of abuse in Scotland, where he had been moved around five parishes, was sacked only to find a new post in Los Angeles where he was later accused again.
The allegations made against Joseph Dunne in Scotland in 1988 were only reported to police in 2013 – 25 years after he was sacked.
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In 1976, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh took a 13-year-old boy on a trip to Super Bowl X in Miami.
Instead of enjoying a fun trip to watch the Steelers play the Cowboys for the NFL championship, the boy endured what he later described as a “week of hell.”
The priest, the Rev. Thomas M. O’Donnell, forced the boy, Martin Nasiadka, now 56, to share a bed with him and repeatedly sexually assaulted him over several days.
Mr. Nasiadka made those allegations against Father O’Donnell in one of two lawsuits filed Friday by attorney George Kontos in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.
Both lawsuits name the Pittsburgh diocese, Bishop David Zubik and Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the former Pittsburgh bishop, as defendants, alleging that diocesan officials knew about predator priests and covered for them instead of protecting their victims. State law prohibits people from suing individual priests, the lawsuit says.
A spokesman for Cardinal Wuerl in Washington, D.C., said he could not comment “as we are not aware of the filings.” The Pittsburgh diocese did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Nasiadka met Father O’Donnell in 1975 at Annunciation Catholic School/Church in Perry South when he was 12 years old, according to the lawsuit
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The names of 14 priests accused of sexual misconduct involving children have been released by the Diocese of Houma-Thibodeaux.
News 10 spoke to local residents about what they think of this recently released list.
One person, who wished to remain anonymous, said they believe other dioceses should follow suit, “I think for the damage that’s been done to these people’s lives, you know, the church should cooperate as much as it can and release those names as well.”
Another resident, Adrian King, believes it’s the public’s right to know, “That’s something that should be a matter of public record. Especially for all of the Catholic parishioners to just be aware. I mean, we have a predator list for when someone non-clergy is convicted of a crime, then it’s published. So I think we have a right to know, just in general.”
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The grand jury report that was released last summer detailing decades of child sexual abuse by priests in six of Pennsylvania’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses was shocking, to be sure, but it was also a necessary spur for justice to be delivered to hundreds of victims around the commonwealth, and a victory for openness and transparency – one area where the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has decidedly fallen short for many years.
The grand jury investigation has been beneficial to Pennsylvania and, as a report earlier this month by the Associated Press found, it has had a salutary effect across the United States. In the five months since the grand jury findings came to light, 105 of the nation’s 187 dioceses have said that they will identify priests who have been accused of sexually abusing children. In addition, close to 20 civil or criminal investigations have been set in motion.
Alas, in some cases it is far too late for justice to be rendered. The AP found that more than 60 percent of the accused priests have died, and the statute of limitations has run out in many of the cases where priests are still alive. This largely repeats the state of play in Pennsylvania, where only two of the 301 priests identified have been charged, and some of the incidents that filled the grand jury report happened decades ago.
Still, victim advocates point to many positive outcomes, even if a guilty verdict against an abuser is not one of them. Dioceses either have set up compensation funds or will face increasing demands to do so. Priests who had been removed from the ministry but were allowed to take on other jobs where they could have contact with children could now lose those positions.
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The Jesuit governing body that oversees the Northeast, including Maine, will release on Tuesday a list of priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor dating back to 1950.
The list from the USA Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Roman Catholic Church commonly referred to as the Jesuits, is likely to include names that already have been public, such as priests who have been criminally charged. But it also could include the names of priests who have never been named publicly.
“I think for a number of reasons, this province is going to have particular interest from many people because of the influence of the Jesuits on the East Coast, from New York up through New England,” said Robert Hoatson, a former priest who now runs a New Jersey-based nonprofit called Road to Recovery that advocates for church abuse victims.
Last month, the other four U.S. provinces released their own lists of credibly accused priests – defined as instances where a preponderance of evidence suggested that the allegation is more likely true than not. Those lists totaled 237 names and included information about whether the priests had one or multiple victims, where they were assigned when the alleged abuse occurred and where they are now. Many are deceased.
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A longtime Chicago-area priest was removed from his Lake View church on Saturday after being accused of sexually abusing a minor nearly 40 years ago while serving at a south suburban parish.
Cardinal Blase Cupich asked the Rev. Patrick Lee, pastor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish, to “step aside” as authorities investigate the claim made against him this week, according to a statement from the Archdiocese of Chicago.
The alleged abuse happened in 1979 while Lee was assigned to St. Christopher Parish in Midlothian, Cupich said in the statement.
Church leaders have forwarded the complaint to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, Cupich said.
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The Rev. Richard J. Ahern isn’t on the Springfield diocese’s list of clergy who sexually abused young people. But the priest, who served in Pittsfield, died in 2001 with a stack of allegations against him.
A decade after Ahern ended his ministry in Berkshire County, the priest’s own religious order prohibited him from hearing confessions from children, sent him to weekly therapy sessions and barred him from the diocese that includes Pittsfield and is now overseen by The Most Rev. Mitchell T. Rozanski.
“This means, then, Dick — that you are not to visit the diocese of Springfield at all,” an official with the Stigmatine Fathers and Brothers wrote in a private letter to Ahern in May 1986.
But Ahern’s sexual assaults, further documented in court filings and media accounts, did not lead the Springfield diocese to publish his name as an abusive cleric on its website.
Though Ahern served churches in Pittsfield, Agawam, Feeding Hills and West Springfield, the diocese says that, technically, he wasn’t their priest.
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The key accuser in the sex abuse case against ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has met with New York City prosecutors, evidence that the scandal that has convulsed the papacy is now part of the broader U.S. law enforcement investigation into sex abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church.
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James Grein gave testimony last month to Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Sara Sullivan, who is investigating a broad range of issues related to clergy abuse and the systematic cover-up by church superiors, Grein’s attorney, Patrick Noaker, told The Associated Press.
The development is significant, given that the Vatican investigation against McCarrick has already created a credibility crisis for the Catholic hierarchy including Pope Francis, since it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick slept with adult seminarians. Grein’s testimony, however, includes allegations that McCarrick, a former family friend, also groomed and abused him starting when he was 11.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office launched a hotline last year and invited victims to report even decades-old sex abuse, saying it would pursue “any and all investigative leads” to ensure justice.
Grein met with Sullivan before Christmas after filing a compensation claim with the New York City archdiocese alleging that McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, first exposed himself when Grein was 11 and continued abusing him for some two decades, including during confession, Noaker said. The church’s compensation procedures require that victims notify the district attorney of their allegations, which Grein did on Nov. 1.
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Diocese of Santa Rosa Releases Names of Priests Accused of Sexual Abuse and Misconduct
The Diocese of Santa Rosa on Saturday released a list of priests and bishops who have been accused of sexual abuse and misconduct.
In a news release, Bishop Robert F. Vasa said he wants to express “sincere sorrow that so many have been subjected to the evil actions of priests and bishops.” His primary goal in releasing the names is to give victims of sexual abuse the assurance that they have been heard in the church, he said.
President Again Threatens to Withhold Calif. FEMA Funding Over Forest Management
“It is my deepest prayer and hope that this release of names in a consolidated fashion says to any of you who are victims, we have heard you, we believe you, we affirm you in your trauma and we want to help with a healing process,” Vasa said.
The majority of the accusations occured decades ago, the bishop said, but some incidents occured as late as 2006 and 2008.
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Peter Steinfels at Commonweal has a long article that needed to be written. It’s 11,700 words (none are wasted) on the sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — specifically, on the Pennsylvania grand-jury report released last summer. The heinousness of the sexual crimes and misconduct described therein has been amply noted by just about everyone who has commented on the report. It was noted by the authors of the report itself, and not just noted but drummed loudly, while they glossed over masses of detail that didn’t fit their story about Catholic bishops. The sum of the evidence in their 1,356-page document belies their broad-brush, monochromatic characterization of the problem, Steinfels contends:
I believe that the grand jury could have reached precise, accurate, informing, and hard-hitting findings about what different church leaders did and did not do, what was regularly done in some places and some decades and not in others. . . .
Instead the report chose a tack more suited to our hyperbolic, bumper-sticker, post-truth environment. . . . Imagine, at least for a moment, that a declamation like “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all” came from one of our elected or televised demagogues. Would one really dismiss any fact-finding as uncalled for?
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The proportion of US Catholics who regard priests as honest and ethical has plummeted to a record low of fewer than one in three, according to a survey.
The fall of 18 percentage points between 2017 and 2018 is attributed to the last year’s scandals over clerical sexual abuse.
Fewer than half of the Catholics surveyed by Gallup said they had confidence in organised religion, a drop of eight percentage points over the period.
The poll was conducted four months after the publication of a scathing grand jury report into sexual abuse and its cover-up by Catholic priests and bishops in Pennsylvania.
An investigation found that at least 300 priests had abused about 1,000 children and vulnerable adults over 70 years, and that their superiors had either stood by or in some cases actively covered up criminal acts.
Since the publication of the Pennsylvania report, at least 13 US states have opened formal investigations and some senior Catholics, including the archbishop of Washington, have resigned.
Positive views about the honest and ethical standards of clergy have almost halved in a decade, from 61% to 31%, but the most recent figures show the largest annual fall.
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That’s how many Catholics — on both left and right — have to feel right now, after the daily meteor shower of news about falling stars in their church. All of this was, logically enough, the backdrop to the very open-ended, wide-ranging discussions in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast” (click here to tune that in).
One minute, and it’s new revelations linked to the wide, wide world of ex-cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick. In the latest chapter of this drama, there were revelations at the Catholic News Agency and in the Washington Post that — forget all of his previous denials — Washington, D.C., Cardinal Donald Wuerl did know about the rumors swirling around McCarrick and his abusive relationships with boys and seminarians.
Want to guess which of these newsrooms dared to note that this fact was a key element of the infamous expose letters released by the Vatican’s former U.S. ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano? You got it. It was a branch of the alternative Catholic press (must-read Clemente Lisi post here) connecting those controversial dots — again.
Then, on the other doctrinal side of the fence, there were the revelations about Father C.J. McCloskey, a popular conservative apologist from Opus Dei. Here’s how Phil Lawler of CatholicCulture.org opened a post entitled “A bad day’s lament.”
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The trial of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin and five other senior Catholic officials ended in Lyon on Jan. 10 after four days that shook the French Church.“Thanks to Alexandre [Hezez] for having been the first to lodge a complaint, thanks for having freed the spoken word and for having allowed me to hear Christian [Burdet]. This was overwhelming for me. I am not the same man as I was before. Thanks for having shaken the Church. Changes must be made. This must not stop here.”These were the serious words spoken by Bishop Emmanuel Gobilliard as he looked into the eyes of François Devaux, a plaintiff and founder of La Parole Libérée (Freed Speech) association, during a break in proceedings.
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Congratulations and best wishes to Sen. Tom O’Mara as he begins his fifth term as state senator from the New York 58th. We wish him the very best for a successful and productive legislation session.
We also urge him to right a great wrong. Senator O’Mara must end his opposition against and vote for a Child Victims Act that would extend the statute of limitations for actions against child molesters to age 28 in criminal cases and age 50 for civil suits, including a one-year window for victims to sue for restitution for acts that have passed the statute of limitations. Under the current law, victims can press charges only up to the age of 23.
The sordid history of powerful institutions covering up the actions of child molesters is well known. In 2004, an official Catholic Church commission reported that 4,000 priests had sexually assaulted at least 10,000 children over five decades in the U.S. Bishop Salvatore Matano needs to release the names of pedophile priests who served in the Diocese of Rochester, which includes Elmira and Ithaca, but clergy in the Catholic Church are not the only authorities dealing with incidents of abuse. Over 30 now-adult victims of the Horace Mann School located in the Bronx reported incidents of molestation when they were enrolled at the elite private academy. Numerous other New York state institutions whose employees came into unlawful contact with children also need to come clean about any history of molestation.
To its credit, the NY state assembly has responded vigorously to the revelations. For the past several sessions, it has passed a version of the Child Victims Act. The Republican-led State Senate, however, bowed to the demands of the NY state Catholic Conference and refused to advance the bill in its house. In one debate, held in Ithaca in 2016, Senator O’Mara unapologetically stated that the Catholic Church’s position on the bill explained his opposition to it. https://ithacavoice.com/2016/10/state-senate-candidates-omara-danks-burke-debate-issues-ithaca/
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[“It’s good news:” Marists welcome Vatican involvement in abuse investigation]
SANTIAGO (CHILE)
Emol
January 12, 2019
By Tamara Cerna
Las autoridades de la Congregación en Roma solicitaron una reunión para tener más detalles del proceso y alcances de la decisión del Papa Francisco.
A través de un comunicado, la Congregación de los Hermanos Maristas valoró la decisión del Papa Francisco de intervenir en las indagatorias por abuso que llevaban adelante. Ayer, el vocero de la Conferencia Episcopal de Chile, Jaime Coiro, confirmó la decisión de Sumo Pontífice de promover un proceso penal en la Congregación para la Doctrina de la Fe en relación a las denuncias presentadas contra algunos religiosos.
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[Chile’s Episcopal Conference reveals what’s on the agenda for reserved appointment with the Pope]
CHILE
BioBioChile
January 11, 2019
By Matías Vega
La Conferencia Episcopal dio luces este viernes sobre los temas que serán tratados en la reunión que sostendrán los 5 obispos que conforman el comité permanente de dicha organización clerical y el papa Francisco.
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[Chilean bishops prepare for meeting with Pope and question the presence of two who are under investigation]
CHILE
BioBioChile
January 11, 2019
By María José Villarroel and Nicole Martínez
El lunes los obispos del Consejo Permanente de la Conferencia Episcopal (Cech) se reunirán -en un encuentro reservado- con el Papa Francisco, para entregar avances sobre el manejo de los casos de abusos sexuales. Primero, eso sí, el fin de semana llegarán a Portugal a la Fundación Acton, instancia para el estudio de la religión, la libertad y la economía donde realizarían un curso.
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[Marist Case: Pope Francisco informs Chilean whistleblowers that ecclesiastical criminal proceedings will be opened]
CHILE
La Tercera
January 11, 2019
By Angelica Baeza
Isaac Givovich, uno de los denunciantes en el caso, se mostró satisfecho y contento por la decisión adoptada por el Vaticano. La información fue confirmada por el portavoz de la Conferencia Episcopal.
La Congregación para la Doctrina de la Fe dispuso acompañar pastoralmente a las víctimas del llamado “Caso Maristas”, pero además, el mismo Papa Francisco dispuso que se promueva un proceso penal ante la Congregación para la Doctrina de la Fe, una vez terminadas las investigaciones generadas a partir de las denuncias por abuso sexual.
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[Netflix will premiere documentary series about abuses in the Spanish Church]
MADRID (SPAIN)
El País
January 10, 2019
El periodista Albert Solé es el creador de ‘Examen de conciencia’, disponible a partir del 25 de enero
Netflix estrenará el 25 de enero la serie documental de tres episodios Examen de conciencia, sobre los abusos en la Iglesia española. La serie está dirigida por el periodita Albert Solé, ganador de un premio Goya por el documental Bucarest, la memoria perdida. La serie explora a través de testimonios de víctimas, periodistas, expertos y religiosos, casos de abusos sexuales en instituciones de la Iglesia católica española.
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[Film will recount how clergy abuse victims came together in France]
LYON (FRANCE)
El País
January 11, 2019
By Silvia Ayuso
Una película contará próximamente la historia de esta organización que ha sentado a un cardenal en el banquillo
“Me decía mon garçon, mi niño, esto es un secreto, no hay que contárselo a nadie. Luego me quitaba el pantalón y me acariciaba”. “Me decía que le siguiera al último piso. Cada vez, yo iba dócilmente. Sentía su respiración jadeante. En mi cerebro de niño, el interruptor se apagaba. Duró tres años”. Los testimonios de los tocamientos, felaciones o masturbaciones a los que les sometió el cura Bernard Preynat desde finales de los años 70 hasta 1990, cuando eran chavales de 10 o 12 años que pertenecían al grupo scout de ese sacerdote, enmudecieron a la abarrotada sala del tribunal de Lyon donde ocho de sus víctimas declararon en un juicio con el que reclaman responsabilidades a la Iglesia que protegió a ese religioso durante décadas.
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This is a heartfelt appeal to Sedalia area Catholics and citizens who have information or suspicions about a priest who was expelled by mid-Missouri church officials and accused of sexually inappropriate actions with a girl.
While his church supervisors claim he’s no threat to kids, we are highly skeptical.
Following a familiar pattern in these cases, since the allegations against Fr. Deusdedit Mulokozi (or Fr. Deo, as he’s known) were reported to Sedalia law enforcement, he’s been moved three times.
First, he was sent to Kansas City, then to a Catholic treatment center in Texas and then to Tanzania where he is now working among the even more vulnerable people: unsuspecting Catholics in a developing nation with a less vigorous criminal system and an even more secretive church hierarchy.
To be fair, in our criminal justice system, everyone’s entitled to be presumed innocent. But to be honest and prudent, reasonable people should not assume Fr. Deo is innocent.
First, even Catholic officials admit that very few allegations of sexual misconduct against priests are false. A Boston-based research and archive group, BishopAccountability, says that fewer than 2 percent of sexual abuse allegations appear to be false. And a report commissioned by U.S. bishops and conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concluded that 2.5 percent are false.
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A 14-year-old document in the archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh contradicts Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s claim to have known nothing until last year of rumored sexual misconduct claims against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — the man he would replace as archbishop of Washington.
In fact, then-Bishop Wuerl knew of more than rumors.
In November 2004, a former priest came to Pittsburgh from New Jersey and presented a formal statement to the independent review board that handles accusations against the diocese’s priests. In it, he identified then-Cardinal McCarrick as having committed sexual misconduct against him as an adult.
Then-Bishop Wuerl learned about the allegation immediately and, within days, reported it directly to the Vatican ambassador to the United States, the Diocese of Pittsburgh has confirmed.
The former priest, Robert Ciolek, said by phone Friday that when he saw the 2004 Wuerl memo in a December 2018 review of his case file at the Pittsburgh diocese, his first reaction was: “My God, he actually did share this with the papal nuncio. He did the right thing.”
But Mr. Ciolek said Cardinal Wuerl is undercutting that record by “lying” since then about what he knew and when.
“All that is diminished by the fact that he spent the last five months denying any knowledge” of allegations against Archbishop McCarrick, he said.
Mr. Ciolek also questioned whether Cardinal Wuerl, after becoming Washington archbishop in 2006, ever followed up with the Vatican about the status of any investigation, or took any steps to safeguard other seminarians in the proximity of his predecessor.
“Now that we know you knew, what did you do about it?” Mr. Ciolek asked rhetorically.
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Donal McKeown (68) grew up in Randalstown. He has a brother, James, and sisters Mary and Teresa. As children, they played with neighbours from other Churches.
His first 11 years were spent in a house with a water pump in the yard, and there was no electricity until he was 10.
His father, James, was a watchmaker, and his mother, Rose, a primary school teacher, though she could not work always, because she was married and had four small children.
There was a strong sense of community and of being part of a large family network – his father was one of 13 children and his mother was one of eight. As a young man, Donal McKeown played Gaelic football and hurling with Creggan Kickhams, near Randalstown.
He has run a number of marathons, one in 1982 as part of a 48-strong parish team raising funds for a new church building, and another in 2001 to raise money for a new minibus for St Malachy’s College, where he had been principal in Belfast. He also took part in the Belfast-Dublin Maracycle in 1996.
“My studies at Queen’s University in German and Italian gave me a chance to travel in Germany from 1970 to 71. In my last two years at Queen’s, I was the Belfast correspondent for a German news agency,” he says.
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In a “dynamic and fast-changing” society, the Church in India must embrace “flexibility” in pastoral ministry, according to one bishop in the country.
“Evangelization demands creativity and innovation. God is ever new and ancient,” said Bishop Thomas Dabre of Poona at the beginning of this week’s plenary meeting of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI).
(The CCBI is the National Episcopal Conference for the Latin rite Catholics, while the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, or CBCI, is the national conference including all the country’s bishops, including those belonging to the Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara eastern rites.)
The theme of the Jan. 7-14 meeting in Chennai is “The Joy of the Gospel” based on Pope Francis’s 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. They have been looking at developing action plans to revitalize the outreach of the Church in India at the diocesan and parish level.
Although considered one of the most religious countries in the world, Dabre said the same secularizing tendency which has affected Western countries is also happening in India.
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Readers may recall that I wrote a couple columns in 2018 about the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal. As a Catholic school survivor of the late 1950s and early 1960s, I wasn’t surprised to learn that most of the abuses occurred between 1960 and 1980. I suspect that many — if not most — of the priests and bishops involved in these scandals came up through the largely-discarded high-school seminary system of the past.
Thinking they had — or may have had — a vocation, these 13- or 14-year-old boys agreed to be semi-cloistered at a time when many young boys are still unsure about their sexuality. Some may have thought that their disinterest in the opposite sex, or disinterest in sex in general, was a sign of their election — an indication that they had been called to the celibate life. Others probably overestimated their ability to suppress the sex drive as they matured. And some, as we now know, later realized they were sexually attracted to children. The high-school seminaries were schools for scandal, and I am still waiting for an enterprising investigative journalist to determine how many of the abusers did begin to prepare for the priesthood at high-school seminaries.
What brought this to mind was an AP report reprinted recently in the Sun (Jan. 2) about how the Vatican stepped in at the 11th hour to stop the U.S. Conference of American Bishops from voting at their November meeting on a “code of conduct for bishops” and on the creation of a lay-led sex-abuse commission. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a Vatican official, ordered the American bishops to await the guidance that will presumably come out of a “global summit” Pope Francis intends to hold next month on “preventing sex abuse by priests.”
I can understand why the Vatican would not want American bishops to preempt the Pope on this issue. I can further understand that the Church needs to formulate a set of consistent and coherent policies regarding sex abuse. And for better or worse, as the article reminded readers, “The Holy See alone has exclusive authority to investigate and discipline problem bishops.” But, aside from disregarding abuse survivors’ demands for decisive and swift action, what bothers me about the Vatican’s delay is something that has bothered me from my earliest experience with the Church — the tendency to couch controversial decisions, doctrines, and dogmas in grandiloquent language.
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As dozens of Catholic dioceses across the country have released lists of priests who have been credibly accused of child sex abuse, the Charlotte diocese remains undecided about whether to join what its spokesman calls the “stampede.”
But North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein tells The Charlotte Observer the Charlotte diocese should follow the lead of others, for transparency’s sake. The Raleigh diocese published its list in October.
Charlotte diocese spokesman David Hains says publishing a list might further harm victims. David Clohessy with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests called that claim “baloney.”
Stein doesn’t have the same powers as attorney generals in states like Pennsylvania where investigations of the Catholic Church are underway. He hopes to convince the legislature to broaden the investigative grand jury statute.
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A former Louisville priest found guilty of sexual abuse has been denied an appeal.
In 2016, Father Joseph Hemmerle was convicted in Meade County on one count of inappropriate touching. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
The charge comes from an incident in 1973 where Hemmerle molested a 10-year-old boy at the summer camp he was attending, Camp Tall Tree.
Hemmerle was the camp’s director. According to the appeal, Hemmerle routinely treated campers with poison ivy reactions.
The victim, Michael Norris, testified at Hemmerle’s trial that he was exposed to poison ivy when playing in the woods. He developed an extensive skin rash and sought treatment from Hemmerle.
“I’m now 56 so I live with this every single day, it’s something that never goes away,” Norris said. “Child sexual abuse is a horrible thing but at the hands of the clergy it’s even worse.”
Hemmerle allegedly demanded Norris undress inside his private cabin. He was accused of molesting and performing oral sex on the victim.
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Houma-Thibodeaux is the third diocese across South Louisiana to release a list of priests credibly accused of child sex abuse. Bishop Shelton Fabre released the list with 14 names on Jan. 11.
In the Houma-Thibodaux area, Allyce Himel said there was always rumors running throughout the Catholic schools about inappropriate behavior.
“There was a lot of talk about it, but nothing really was done,” she said.
She says now that there’s a list of 14 names released to the public of priests credibly accused of child sex abuse, she’s glad the truth is getting out there.
“It’s horrible. It’s horrible, and like we were saying glad their names are out because it should be known,” said Himel.
Of the 14 names, none are currently in ministry. Eight are still alive: Lawrence Cavell, Alexander Francisco, Etienne LeBlanc, Gerald Prinz, Gerard Kinane, Ramon Luce and Daniel Poche. The eighth living priest, Patrick Kujawa, is incarcerated.
The whereabouts of two other priests, Dac Nguyen and Carlos Melendez, are unknown.
FOX 8 tried to reach those on the list, either by phone or in person, but was unsuccessful.
Gerald Prinz is not a new name. He was also included on the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ list of credibly accused released in November. According to our partners at NOLA.com | The Times Picayune, an anonymous plaintiff sued Prinz in 1995, claiming the priest abused him in the 1970s at St. Gregory Barbarigo Parish in Houma and St. Louis Parish in Bayou Blue.
When reached at his home, a man who identified himself as Prinz’s brother answered the door.
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By Ramon Antonio Vargas, John Simerman and Della Hasselle
The Catholic Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux on Friday identified 14 priests who have admitted or are suspected by church officials of a wide range of sexual misconduct with minors, from possession of child pornography to rape.
Bishop Shelton Fabre’s disclosure marked the third time in as many months that a diocese or religious order has published what amounts to an official church roster of alleged abusers in Louisiana ministries.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans released a similar list of 57 disgraced clergymen in early November, while the Jesuit order that oversees priests and other order members in Louisiana released its own list of 42 names last month, including 19 who worked in the New Orleans area.
The disclosures are part of a nationwide reckoning by Catholic leaders attempting to restore trust with parishioners whose faith in the church has been strained by a sexual abuse scandal well into its second decade.
The latest wave of the scandal hit the U.S. with the July release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that identified hundreds of credibly accused Catholic priests and thousands of victims there — revealing a problem many times larger in scope than previously documented.
Four of the names revealed Friday by the Houma-Thibodaux diocese had previously appeared on the list published by the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Several other priests named on Friday’s list were subjects of earlier news accounts about their alleged crimes against children and teens.
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Finally, child victims of pedophile priests, rabbis and scoutmasters will be allowed to seek justice.
Gov. Cuomo announced Friday he will for the second year in a row include language to create the Child Victims Act in the state budget he will propose on Tuesday.
But unlike last year, the Republicans are no longer in control of the Senate to block the measure and the Democrats in each chamber have made the issue a top priority.
“There has been a degradation of justice for childhood sexual assault survivors who have suffered for decades by the authority figures they trusted most,” Cuomo said. “That ends this year with the enactment of the Child Victims Act to provide survivors with a long-overdue path to justice.”
Legislative bill sponsors, including in the Assembly, which passed similar bills the past two years, say it could be taken up by the Legislature even before the budget is finalized in the spring.
“It’s not a matter of if we pass the Child Victims Act, it’s when we pass the Child Victims Act, said Senate bill sponsor Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan). “It’s possible the Legislature could act before the budget.”
Assembly bill sponsor Linda Rosenthal agrees, noting the budget isn’t due to be adopted until the end of March.
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Former Irish president Mary McAleese has revealed how Pope John Paul refused to shake her hand when they met and shook her husband’s hand, instead, asking him “would you not prefer to be the president of Ireland instead of your wife?”
McAleese recalled she quickly interjected: “You would never have done that to a male president. I’m the elected president of Ireland whether you like it or not.”
McAleese was speaking at an event hosted by the Irish American Partnership in Boston.
Disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law also tried to intimidate her stating, “I’m sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as president,” she recalled when they met.
Law brought her to a room where a female right-wing lawyer and theologian Mary Ann Glendon was waiting and tried to brief her on why only men should have positions of power in the Catholic Church.
Read more: Former Irish president Mary McAleese brands Catholic Church “empire of misogyny”
Pope Benedict XVI meets U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon during a private audience at the Vatican on February 29, 2008. (OSSERVATORE ROMANO/AFP/Getty Images)4
Pope Benedict XVI meets U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon during a private audience at the Vatican on February 29, 2008. (OSSERVATORE ROMANO/AFP/Getty Images)
She said: “His remarks were utterly inappropriate and unwelcome.
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A priest at a Catholic parish in Collingswood, Camden County, abruptly announced his retirement this week and revealed that he had asked to be removed from ministry due to an accusation of sexual abuse — one that a diocesan review board deemed to be credible more than 15 years ago.
The Rev. John D. Bohrer’s decision to resign as administrator of St. Teresa of Calcutta Parish appears to have been prompted by the Camden Diocese’s plan to release a list this year of all its priests who have ever been credibly accused of abuse.
But questions remained as to how Bohrer, 74, had retained his post for years after his accusers’ claims were substantiated in a diocese that has a zero-tolerance policy for clergy misconduct.
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Next month, more than a hundred Catholic bishops are expected to meet in Rome for a gathering dedicated to the sexual abuse crisis. In a letter released by the Vatican from the conference’s steering committee, bishops were urged to meet with survivors of abuse. Committee members say the Church’s credibility is at stake.
The upcoming conference comes as the Catholic Church continues to grapple with the fallout of the crisis.
Some bishops have released names of priests in their dioceses who’ve been credibly accused of child abuse. Dr. Anastasiya Zavyalova says it’s a small step in the right direction. She’s an expert on reputation management from Rice University and has been studying allegations against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for more than a decade.
In 2005, a grand jury issued a report finding leaders concealed sexual abuse by priests there for four decades. Zavayalova has been examining how parishioners reacted to the archdiocese releasing names of the priests involved.
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The Episcopal Church, lifting a statute of limitations on reporting sexual abuse by clerics, has created a three-year window when any allegation of misconduct at any time can be brought forward to church authorities.
“In short, you do not have to wonder if the allegation comes from long ago,” the Rt. Rev. Greg Rickel, Episcopal Bishop of Olympia, has written in a pastoral letter to be read in parishes and missions across Western Washington.
The General Convention of the church, meeting in Austin, Texas, last summer, passed a resolution amending church canons (laws) and suspending the statute of limitations on reporting misconduct. It created a three-year period, starting Jan. 1, 2019 and lasting through Dec. 31, 2021.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.
“You used your position as a man of the cloth to deceive young boys,” victim says of Rev. David Poulson, sentenced in Jefferson County Court.
Rev. David L. Poulson, a former priest in the Catholic Diocese of Erie who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two boys, was ordered to spend up to 14 years in state prison Friday at his sentencing in Jefferson County Court.
Poulson, 65, received the sentence of two and one half to 14 years of incarceration from Jefferson County President Judge John H. Foradora. The sentence was more than what the prosecution requested.
“These were children who trusted you,” Foradora told Poulson. “These were faithful parents who thought their children would be safe with a priest.”
Foradora quoted from Mark 10:13-16, in which Jesus says the kingdom of God belongs “to the little children.” Fordora also quoted from the Gospel verses in which Jesus said that anyone who would cause a child to stumble would be better off being thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck.
Fordora also criticized retired Erie Catholic Bishop Donald W. Trautman, whom the judge said left Poulson in ministry. Poulson was forced to resign in February under Bishop Lawrence Persico, who took over as bishop of the 13-county diocese in October 2012.
“I just can’t figure out how anyone in a position of authority would have done that,” Foradora said. “The public was potentially at risk for eight years because of the bishop’s actions.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.
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