Abuse Tracker

KENTUCKY
AFP

WASHINGTON — A US lawyer has filed a legal motion to have Pope Benedict XVI questioned over the child sex scandal that is rocking the Roman Catholic church, he told AFP Wednesday.

Lawyer William McMurry filed a motion in a Kentucky court Tuesday seeking to take sworn testimony from the pope on what the Vatican knew about the long-running scandal of predator priests.

The motion, a copy of which was sent to AFP, says Benedict was aware of clergy sex abuse in the United States and that he "discouraged prosecution of accused clergy and encouraged secrecy to protect the reputation of the Church" in the 24 years that he led the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

Pique Newsmagazine

By Jesse Ferreras

Satan is taking names at Hell's VIP party. Next to pass the velvet rope is Pope Benedict XVI.

The New York Times reported last week that Joseph Ratzinger was once in a position to stop the sexual abuse of children at a Wisconsin school for the deaf. Evidence abounds that a case of abuse once came before him and he did nothing to address it.

Father Lawrence Murphy took up a position as chaplain at St. John's School for the Deaf in 1950. The first reports of his abuse came as early as 1955, when they were reported to David Walsh, chaplain of the deaf in Chicago from 1955 to 1963. They were reported to the Archbishop of Milwaukee, who said Murphy first denied, then admitted to the abuse.

SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
San Francisco Bay Guardian

Cardinal William Levada, former archbishop of San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, has penned a caustic response to recent New York Times articles and editorials that were critical of how the church and Pope Benedict XVI have handled sexual abuse cases involving priests over the years, calling the coverage “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.”

This bold, Spiro Agnew-like counterattack on the press during a time of mounting evidence of a covered-up pedophilia epidemic in the church is all the more notable given that Levada is the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an office then-Cardinal Ratzinger held before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, helping to place that office in charge of all reports of pedophiliac priests, a move that critics have charged was made to shield the church from criticism.

KENTUCKY
AOL News

Dana Kennedy

(March 31) -- Developments in a Kentucky court case suggest that the Vatican will seek to shield Pope Benedict XVI and the church from liability in the worldwide clerical sex abuse crisis by distancing itself from individual dioceses.

In legal documents filed in U.S. District Court in Louisville last week, the Vatican claims that as the head of a sovereign state, the Vatican City, the pope is immune from prosecution. The papers further assert that American bishops are not employed by the Holy See.

The Vatican will also likely deny that a 1962 church decree about clergy and the reporting of clerical pedophilia is a "smoking gun" that led to a worldwide cover-up of sexual crimes.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
WUWM

By Marti Mikkelson
March 31, 2010 | WUWM | Milwaukee, WI

An advocacy group for victims of clergy abuse says former Milwaukee District Attorney E. Michael McCann knew that a priest was molesting boys, and didn't file charges. Peter Isely, of the group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, says the Rev. Lawrence Murphy admitted to the Archdiocese in 1958 that he was assaulting kids at the School for the Deaf in St. Francis. He says students brought their cases to McCann in 1974 and claims the district attorney helped the Archdiocese cover up the scandal.

"The church and him shared in my opinion a common understanding that priests don't get prosecuted," Isely says.

SOUTH AFRICA
Times LIVE

Mar 31, 2010

Fr Chris Townsend, Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference:

THE crisis facing the Roman Catholic Church around the world is grave. It points to two major failures: a failure to protect the vulnerable and a failure of leadership.

The Catholic Church in southern Africa has had a process in place for the past 15 years to deal with complaints of sexual abuse of minors by church personnel.

In all our efforts, particularly in the past five years, those responsible for dealing with such complaints have a clear process that ensures these two major failings are minimised.

I do not claim the process is perfect, but it is under constant review and revision to ensure accusations of cover-ups and the double abuse of victims doesn't happen.

UNITED STATES
The Wall Street Journal

By Ashby Jones
On Monday, we blogged an Associated Press story on Jeff Anderson, the man behind many of the suits filed against members of the Catholic Church over allegations of sexual abuse by priests and other church leaders.

Today, it seems, it’s the Vatican’s turn. An AP story takes a look at the Holy See’s planned legal defense. The specific goal of the defense: to keep the pope from having to be deposed in a lawsuit going on in Kentucky.

According to the AP, Vatican lawyers plan to argue:

that the pope has immunity as a head of state;
that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican,
that a 1962 document is not the “smoking gun” that provides proof of a cover-up.

UNITED STATES
NPR

[with audio]

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

While the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal unfolds in Europe, the Catholic Church in the U.S. is under renewed scrutiny.

In the wake of its own scandal almost a decade ago, the U.S. church says it has reformed its policies for handling sexual abuse allegations and will remove from ministry every priest who is credibly accused of abuse.

But some of those priests are now being quietly reinstated. ...

Swearingen's case is not an isolated one, says Anne Barrett Doyle, who works with the watchdog group BishopAccountability.org. She says that recently, bishops have started quietly returning to ministry priests who previously have been accused of abuse.

"I think they feel that the crisis has died down in the public mind," she says. "Therefore, they have some confidence that if they go ahead and reinstate these priests, that they'll get very little backlash."

NEW YORK
New York Daily News

Wednesday, March 31st 2010

It has become an increasingly prevailing belief that as a cardinal, before he ascended to the papacy, Pope Benedict enabled a pedophile priest to do enormous harm. This is false.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd took the accusations against the Pope, whose given name is Joseph Ratzinger, to their most extreme. She wrote:

"Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed 'God's Rottweiler' when he was the church's enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys."

NEW YORK
Catholic News Agency

New York City, N.Y., Mar 31, 2010 / 02:33 pm (CNA).- Reacting to the slew of articles from media outlets attempting to incriminate Pope Benedict in past clerical sex abuse cases, the New York Daily News published an editorial today calling for a fair analysis of the facts about the Pope’s involvement with such cases.

Using extremely direct diction, the Daily News’ editorial states that “with certainty,” the belief that Pope Benedict enabled a pedophile priest to inflict great harm is “false.”

The editorial then refers to a recent column by the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, stating that she “took the accusations against the Pope, whose given name is Joseph Ratzinger, to their most extreme.”

ITALY
WBUR (United States)

By Sylvia Poggioli
March 31, 2010

As the faithful fill churches during Holy Week, a wave of clerical sex abuse revelations is sweeping Europe. The latest allegations come from Italy, just outside Vatican walls.

As the scandal mounts, Pope Benedict XVI is under increasing pressure to give a more forceful response to the most serious crisis of his papacy.

Following weeks of media coverage of sex abuse by priests in the United States, Ireland and Germany, three deaf men from Italy appeared on national TV last week.

IRELAND
The New York Times

[with video]

By ROBERT MACKEY

Nearly two decades after the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” to protest what she said was the Vatican’s responsibility for child abuse, she has called on fellow Irish Catholics to boycott the church until Pope Benedict XVI makes “a full confession” and agrees to “a full criminal investigation” of the church’s role in concealing the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy.

First in a statement on her Web site, then in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post and in interviews with The Los Angeles Times, the BBC and CNN, Ms. O’Connor rejected the pope’s pastoral letter to the Irish people as “an insult” and suggested that “the goodhearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this” could force the Vatican into giving a more complete account of its role by employing a tactic with Irish roots: a boycott.

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Marci Hamilton

In the last several weeks, Germany and Brazil have been added to the already lengthy list of countries where there is irrefutable evidence of childhood sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy. The Pope, whose previous role in the Vatican made him the primary policymaker on this issue, has even been implicated in the persistent, global pattern of abuse -- most recently in a case involving hundreds of deaf boys in Wisconsin. Moreover, there now appears to be overwhelming evidence that Benedict, as the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was aware of hundreds -- if not thousands -- of other especially heinous cases of abusive priests who were allowed to continue pastoring despite proof of their horrific actions and went on to victimize more children. And, in 2001, in what many are now calling nothing short of an obstruction of justice, he issued a definitive letter requiring that the handling of child sexual abuse issues be under the "pontifical secret."

Yet, the Pope's responses lag well behind the world's demands for accountability; last weekend, as the crisis continued to spiral across Europe, he offered a written apology in response to the months-long crisis in Ireland. Yet, he remains mute on Germany, his own home country, and on Brazil, where the evidence of abuse has been caught on tape. The Catholic system, though, does not permit the Pope to be removed from office without his assent. So if countries are to protect their children, they will have to take action on their own.

DENMARK
The Canadian Press

By Richard Steed (CP)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Denmark's Catholic Church will launch an investigation next week into claims of clerical abuse dating back several decades, a spokesman said Wednesday.

The move comes after the church came under pressure from media and human rights groups to revisit allegations of sexual abuse that had not been reported to police.

Claims that priests sexually abused children at Catholic institutions have swept across Europe, including in the small Catholic communities in the Nordic countries, which are predominantly Lutheran.

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Jason Linkins

In case you missed it, the novel defense of the Catholic Church being mounted by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League over the whole matter of Vatican officials covering up the crimes of a Wisconsin priest who molested upwards of 200 deaf boys is to blame the gays. Wow: first the gays get blamed for the massacre at Srebrenica, now this!

Here's the relevant quote from Donohue, from a full-page ad taken out in the New York Times:

The Times continues to editorialize about the "pedophilia crisis," when all along it's been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.

UNITED STATES
Raw Story

By Daniel Tencer
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

The head of the influential Catholic League says that the priest who allegedly sexually abused 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin did not engage in pedophilia because 'the vast majority of the victims [were] post-pubescent."

Bill Donohue made the argument during a raucous debate on Larry King Live Tuesday night, during which he repeatedly pointed the finger to homosexuality -- rather than pedophilia -- as the cause of the church's sex abuse problems.

"You've got to get your facts straight," Donohue said, addressing sex abuse victim Thomas Roberts. "I'm sorry. If I'm the only one that's going to deal with facts tonight then that'll be it. The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That's not pedophilia, buddy. That's homosexuality."

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Channel 3000

MILWAUKEE -- The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is renewing its claims that Milwaukee prosecutors should have charged a priest accused of sexually assaulting hundreds of deaf boys between 1950 and 1974.

The man who was the prosecutor at the time says he had no choice. E. Michael McCann said the crimes were reported after the six-year statute of limitations had lapsed.

But SNAP spokesman Peter Isely disagreed Wednesday. He said one victim found a letter he says he submitted to McCann's office in 1974. It details abuse from four years earlier.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Channel 3000

MILWAUKEE -- The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is renewing its claims that Milwaukee prosecutors should have charged a priest accused of sexually assaulting hundreds of deaf boys between 1950 and 1974.

The man who was the prosecutor at the time says he had no choice. E. Michael McCann said the crimes were reported after the six-year statute of limitations had lapsed.

But SNAP spokesman Peter Isely disagreed Wednesday. He said one victim found a letter he says he submitted to McCann's office in 1974. It details abuse from four years earlier.

AOL News

Dana Kennedy

(March 30) -- To many, the charismatic Pope John Paul II represented much that is lacking in the dour, scholarly Pope Benedict XVI, who was once nicknamed "the Rottweiler" and is under worldwide siege for the child sex abuse scandals sweeping the Roman Catholic Church.

But even as more questions swirl around Benedict and his alleged role in the cover-ups of pedophile priests, John Paul's stellar reputation is suddenly taking a subtle beating.

A miracle ascribed to John Paul that is a prerequisite for his canonization has been questioned, and one of church's highest-ranking officials has said that John Paul ignored Benedict's pleas to mount a full investigation into sex abuse accusations against the archbishop of Vienna.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
TBO

By GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A newly released letter to then-Pope Paul VI indicates the Vatican was aware of clergy abuse in the U.S. nearly five decades ago.

In the 1963 letter released Wednesday, the head of a Roman Catholic order that oversaw treatment of pedophile priests tells the pope he recommends removing pedophile priests from active ministry.

The letter is a summary of the Rev. Gerald M.C. Fitzgerald's thoughts on problem priests that appears to have been requested by the pope after Fitzgerald's 1963 visit to the Vatican. Fitzgerald headed the New Mexico-based Servants of the Holy Paracletes.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Cardinal Mahony Blogs LA

While I have no personal information on some of the specific allegations against our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, when he served the Church of Munich in Germany, I am able to assert without hesitation the action steps which he undertook in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when he served as Prefect of that Congregation.

Beginning in that dark year of 2002, the then Cardinal Ratzinger responded quickly and affirmatively to all of our requests for assistance here in the United States.

Recall that Canon 1324, par. 4, states that in Canon Law a minor is a person under the age of 16 years. However, in the civil laws of the United States, a minor is deemed to be a person under the age of 18 years. After we brought this gap to the attention of Cardinal Ratzinger, the canonical age was also raised to 18 years to accommodate civil law in our country and in other countries.

UNITED STATES
KCRW

{with audio]

The worldwide scandal of pedophile priests has reached into the Vatican. Lay Catholics are asking the Pope himself to reveal what he knew, when he knew it and how he responded. We look at the details in the context of 2000 years of institutional history. Also, the Obama Administration clears way for expanded offshore drilling, and a committee of Parliament says the Special Relationship between Britain and the US is a thing of the past.

CALIFORNIA
Contra Costa Times

Sandra Emerson, Staff Writer

UPLAND - A priest formerly assigned to St. Anthony's Church in Upland recently started work at an Air Force base in Arizona, causing some to rehash complaints of the past.

He has been released within the past week due to contractual restrictions, according to an Air Force spokesman, not because of present or past complaints.

The Rev. Charles Schultz resigned from the Diocese of San Bernardino in June after parishioners filed complaints with the Upland Police Department and the diocese's human- resources department.

IRELAND
The Irish Times

Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor in Armagh

Cardinal Sean Brady has expressed support for the concept of a national inquiry into clerical child sex abuse, according to survivors of clerical abuse and their representatives who met him in Armagh City today.

The victims and the representatives variously said that the meetings were useful, frank, positive and at times "emotional" and "uncomfortable". Various views were expressed during and after the meetings at the Catholic primate's residence beside St Patrick's Cathedral with some maintaining he should resign and others saying he is now a "lame duck Cardinal".

Cardinal Brady requested the meetings following from the continuing disclosures about clerical abuse, the recent pastoral letter about the abuse from Pope Benedict XVI and from the criticism of the primate's failure to notify the Gardai of allegations of sex abuse against two children made to him when he was a priest in 1975.

UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Statement by Peter Isely, Midwest Director of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (414-429-7259)

America's bishops have joined the "circle the wagons" chorus, more intent on protecting prelates' reputations than on protecting children's safety.

Instead of exposing predators and helping victims, America's bishops busy themselves with self-congratulations and public relations. They tout their plentiful but largely ineffective policies, panels and procedures which were adopted as public relations moves. Since 2002, they have done little but water down and increasingly ignore their pledges of greater openness, confident that 'the wave has crested' and they have little to fear from more victims, lawsuits, prosecutions or media exposes.

Once again, bishops still refuse to use the words "bishop" or "cover up" when talking about a crisis caused by bishops covering up. This statement, like so many others, tries to minimize this crisis, blaming only the predators and ignoring their corrupt supervisors.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

What
Holding signs and child hood photos at a sidewalk news conference, clergy sex abuse victims will release a dozen pages of once secret church records proving that the Pope and other top Catholic officials – in Rome and here - knew much about pedophile priests even decades ago. ...

When
Wednesday, March 31 at 11:00 a.m.

Where
Outside Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St. (at N. Grand Ave.) in Los Angeles ...

Why
Newly released records, including letters to the Vatican in the 1960s, show a Catholic official admitting a “tremendous problem” of predator priests. The documents prove that almost 50 years ago, top church staff knew how widespread and incorrigible pedophiles are. They severely undercut recent claims by the Pope’s defenders that he and others in the church hierarchy mishandled cases because they were “on a learning curve.”

UNITED STATES
Bay Windows

by Rev. Irene Monroe
Bay Windows Contributor
Wednesday Mar 31, 2010

Who among us would not flinch at the thought of a "holy man" preying on children instead of praying with them?

What faith can anyone have in a Church that says it stands on the teachings of Jesus, yet violates his biblical mandate stated in Mark 10:14: "Let the children come to me; do not try to stop them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."

When you have a pope more invested in doctrinal debates than personal suffering, and he’s more invested in exerting his ecclesiastical power and defrocking dissident theologians than his priestly flock of sex predators, then it’s easy to comprehend why the pleas and petitions for decades from Catholic parishioners -- worldwide -- to Pope Benedict XVI to do something never happened.

GERMANY
Mail (United Kingdom)

By Allan Hall
Last updated at 8:06 PM on 31st March 2010

The Catholic Church abuse scandal in Germany moved closer to the Vatican today with claims of violence against both boys and girls committed by a friend and ally of Pope Benedict XVI.

Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg - appointed by the pope in 2005 - is accused of the systematic beating of children in his care when he oversaw a Catholic orphanage 30 years ago.

The Bishop, a controversial figure who tried to explain away rampant paedophilia in the Church by claiming the sexual liberation movement must share a 'significant' part of the blame, is accused of using a carpet beater on the bare behinds of victims as he screamed: 'Satan is in you and I must drive him out.'

VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI sees the clerical abuse crisis as a "test for him and the church."

The Vatican spokseman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, told The Associated Press on Wednesday the pontiff is holding up well physically but is enduring a Holy Week of "penitence and humility."

ITALY
Washington Post

By FRANCES D'EMILIO
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

ROME -- Italy's foreign minister has rushed to Pope Benedict XVI's defense, while Italian newspapers labeled foreign media reports as "attacks" for questioning what the pontiff might have known about pedophile clergy.

Europe has been rocked in recent months by a flood of allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, leading some rank-and-file Catholics to question the traditional chummy relationship between the Vatican and Italian institutions.

VATICAN CITY
The New York Times

By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 31, 2010

ROME — The head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office sought Wednesday to rebut criticism that top Vatican officials, including the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI, had mishandled the case of a Wisconsin priest who sexually abused scores of deaf boys.

In a statement posted on the Vatican’s Web site, Cardinal William J. Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, criticized an article in The New York Times that raised questions about why the Vatican had not defrocked the priest, Father Lawrence C. Murphy, despite calls for action on his case from American bishops.

“It seems to me, on the other hand, that we owe Pope Benedict a great debt of gratitude for introducing the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors,” Cardinal Levada wrote in the lengthy statement.

Meanwhile, I hope you’ve had a chance to read the devastating expose of the media’s methods by the canonical judge in charge of the Wisconsin case, which I reproduced in a blog post yesterday.

ITALY
Catholic News Agency

Rome, Italy, Mar 31, 2010 / 11:47 am (CNA).- Noted Italian exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, commented this week that the recent defamatory reporting on Pope Benedict XVI, especially by the New York Times, was “prompted by the devil.”

Speaking to News Mediaset in Italy, the 85-year-old exorcist noted that the devil is behind “the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI regarding some pedophilia cases.”

“There is no doubt about it. Because he is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to ‘grab hold’ of him.”

UNITED STATES
Catholic San Francisco

The New York Times and Pope Benedict XVI:
how it looks to an American in the Vatican

By Cardinal William J. Levada
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

In our melting pot of peoples, languages and backgrounds, Americans are not noted as examples of “high” culture. But we can take pride as a rule in our passion for fairness. In the Vatican where I currently work, my colleagues – whether fellow cardinals at meetings or officials in my office – come from many different countries, continents and cultures. As I write this response today (March 26, 2010) I have had to admit to them that I am not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness.

I say this because today’s Times presents both a lengthy article by Laurie Goodstein, a senior columnist, headlined “Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest,” and an accompanying editorial entitled “The Pope and the Pedophilia Scandal,” in which the editors call the Goodstein article a disturbing report (emphasis in original) as a basis for their own charges against the Pope. Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.

INDONESIA
Jakarta Globe

More than seven million Indonesians are preparing to mark the Easter season, considered by many as the holiest period in the Catholic calendar.

Pope Benedict XVI opened Holy Week on Sunday amid a raging crisis facing not only the church but the pope himself over his handling of cases of pedophile priests when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. ...

“The impact can be seen in the behavior of our priests. This has become a matter for reflection and a test of our commitment to serve,” he said.

“A lot of people from the communion have also asked us about this issue. This has seen the priests reflect on themselves, to make sure that they do not betray their people’s trust.”

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Patrick McIlheran of the Journal Sentinel
March 31, 2010

Did the Vatican protect an old molesting priest? The canonical judge trying the priest says no.

The claim is that the man now Pope Benedict XVI in the 1990s "refused" to defrock the notorious Father Lawrence Murphy, who molested boys from the 1950s to 1974 at a school for the deaf in St. Francis.

This is the basis of the New York Times story of scandal over the past week. This is what made one protester in Milwaukee say the other day that "We're finally able to get it where we believe it belongs, and that's at the Vatican doorstep."

VATICAN CITY
Forbes

By NICOLE WINFIELD , 03.31.10

VATICAN CITY -- Swiss bishops urge victims of clerical abuse to file criminal complaints and are considering creating a national registry for pedophile priests. Danish bishops launch an investigation into decades-old claims. Austria's senior bishop celebrates a Holy Week Mass of repentance.

A week after Pope Benedict XVI excoriated Irish bishops for gross errors of judgment in handling cases of priests who sexually abuse children, European bishops are admitting to mistakes, reaching out to victims and promising to act quickly when they learn about abuse cases.

IRELAND
Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference

As part of an ongoing series of meetings between survivors of sexual abuse by clergy and Catholic Church representatives, Cardinal Seán Brady, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, today held meetings with survivors of abuse and with groups representing survivors.

The following meetings took place separately in Cardinal Brady’s home in Armagh:

9.30 am Mr John Kelly, Mr Patrick Walsh and Ms Marie Seo of Irish SOCA

11.30 am Mrs Marie and Mr Raymond Collins

3.00 pm Mr Michael O’Brien, Right to Peace and Mr Christopher Heaphy of Right of Place

GERMANY
Telegraph (United Kingdom)

By Allan Hall in Berlin and Nick Pisa in Rome

Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg is facing claims he flogged and hit former pupils at a Catholic orphanage in Germany 30 years ago.

The Bishop, who was appointed by the Pope in 2005, is a controversial figure who has tried to explain paedophilia in the Church by claiming the sexual liberation movement must share a "significant" part of the blame.

He is accused of using a carpet beater on the bare skin of boys and girls as he screamed: "Satan is in you and I must drive him out."

UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Anne M. Burke

In this excerpt of her March 23, 2010 talk at St. Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne M. Burke, who served on the National Review Board responding to the U.S. sex abuse scandal, lambasts those church officials who continue to betray the gospel by their untruthfulness in the clergy sex abuse scandals.

Forty years ago the Swiss theologian Hans Küng published his remarkable reflection on the future of the church called Truthfulness. Küng lamented that the exciting participation of the laity in the dialogue that was once so promising had come to be simply disregarded. He asked some pointed questions in light of the political maneuvering at the time by those opposed to artificial methods to prevent conception.

Truthfulness was Küng's look into the world that was yet to be, the one you and I are presently living in. He posited what was his deepest hope-an "unshakable hope," he called it-that the Catholic Church would emerge renewed even from the post-conciliar crisis.

I believe Küng and I appear to have come to the same point of conclusion, though largely from very different journeys. The conclusion is this: "Truthfulness is the future of the Church."

IRELAND
The Times (United Kingdom)

Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

Survivors of sex abuse at the hands of Roman Catholic clergy told the head of the Church in Ireland today that he was a "lame duck cardinal" and should resign.

Overturning a centuries-old tradition of deference towards the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, victims confronted Cardinal Seán Brady with their stark judgment during a face-to-face meeting at his residence in Armagh.

They spared him most of the details of the torture they suffered at the hands of priests, including rape and beatings with metal straps that they had been forced to manufacture themselves in workshops.

AlterNet

March 31, 2010

Amy Goodman

Editor's Note: The Vatican has denied a series of media reports alleging that Pope Benedict, before being elected pontiff, may have looked the other way in cases of abuse in his native Germany and in the United States. Last week, the Vatican strongly defended its decision not to defrock the Wisconsin-based priest Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused some 200 deaf boys in the 1950s and ’60s. The National Catholic Reporter, perhaps the US's most influential Catholic publication, published a line-in-the-sand editorial saying the Pope must be ready to answer questions and called the scandal “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history":

The Holy Father needs to directly answer questions, in a credible forum, about his role -- as archbishop of Munich (1977-82), as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1982-2005), and as pope (2005-present) -- in the mismanagement of the clergy sex abuse crisis.

TYLER (TX)
Tyler Morning Telegraph

By MELISSA CROWE
Staff Writer

A Catholic Tyler bishop is urging his congregation to speak out against sexual abuse crimes.

Last week, Bishop Rev. Alvaro Corrada, of the Catholic Diocese of Tyler, issued a statement on his Web site concerning Cincinnati-based priest Father Robert Poandl's indictment on sexual abuse charges.

About a week ago, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) asked bishops, who are not Vatican employees, to use their diocesan Web sites, newspapers, employees, parish Web sites and parish bulletins to urge sexual abuse victims and witnesses to speak out against the crime.

UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the latest falsehoods being told about the pope:

Much of the accusation against Pope Benedict XVI in the case of Wisconsin priest Fr. Lawrence Murphy rests on his alleged disinterest in pushing for Murphy to be defrocked. Contradicting this smear is the judge in the Murphy trial and the New York Times itself. ...

I challenge anyone to produce a single piece of evidence that the pope did anything wrong.

GERMANY
Spiegel

Von Carsten Volkery

Als konservative Reizfigur provoziert er seit Jahren, Mitschuld für den Kindesmissbrauch in der Kirche suchte er in der sexuellen Revolution. Nun erheben ehemalige Heimkinder Vorwürfe gegen den Augsburger Bischof Mixa - er soll sie als Pfarrer geprügelt haben.

In der katholischen Kirche spielt der Augsburger Bischof Walter Mixa seit Jahren die Rolle des Enfant Terrible. Er gefällt sich darin, gegen die Mehrheitsmeinung und liberale Tendenzen anzugehen. Es überraschte daher niemanden, als er kürzlich die Mitschuld für den Kindesmissbrauch in der Kirche ganz außerhalb des Klerus suchte.

Die "sogenannte sexuelle Revolution", verkündete Mixa, sei daran "sicher nicht unschuldig". Das klang so, als sei vor 1968 in der Kirche alles mit rechten Dingen zugegangen. Dabei zählen die fünfziger Jahre zu den dunkelsten Kapiteln in der Missbrauchssaga. Es war eine typische Mixa-Provokation, der gewünschte Proteststurm folgte auf dem Fuß. Selbst die "Bild"-Zeitung erklärte: "Murks, Herr Mixa".

[summary]

As a conservative figure, Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg has blamed child abuse in the church on the sexual revolution. Charges have now been brought against him by former children in care that he beat them when he was a pastor.

GERMANY
Sueddeutsche

Von Stefan Mayr
Die Vorwürfe gegen Bischof Mixa reißen nicht ab. Eine weitere Betroffene meldet sich in der Süddeutschen Zeitung zu Wort und berichtet von brutalen Misshandlungen. Auch Klosterschwestern sollen daran beteiligt gewesen sein.

[summary]

A group of people who as children were in care have accused Augssburg Bishop Walter Mixa of corporal punishment. Jutta Stadler of Pfaffenhofen confirmed on Wednesday in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the accusation were included in an affivdavit. One person said the bishops gave full force in the face.

Six sworn statements say that Mixa had beaten them during his time as pastor in the Schrobenhausen children's home.

UNITED STATES
Washington Post

Terry McKiernan

[See also the original version of this column with links to dozens of key articles and documents.]

Last week was a remarkable time for victims of abuse by Catholic clergy and for the Vatican. The week will be remembered as the moment when a crisis that had gained notoriety in several countries, starting with the U.S. in 1985, suddenly emerged as a global issue and reached the Pope himself, with implications that I'll discuss below. By Saturday, March 27, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi, S.J., acknowledged that the way the church deals with sexual abuse "is crucial for her moral credibility." Lombardi was referring to these developments:

▪ March 21: Embattled Irish primate Cardinal Sean Brady released Benedict's letter to the Irish people, who gave it a mixed reception.

▪ March 24: The Munich and Freising archdiocese announced it had informed police that Rev. Peter Hullermann (welcomed to the archdiocese by then-Archbishop Ratzinger in 1980 after allegations, and convicted of child abuse in 1986) had been accused of sexually abusing a boy in 1998; the alleged abuse is recent enough to prosecute.

GERMANY
Deutsche Welle

According to allegations published Wednesday in a German newspaper, leading Catholic bishop Walter Mixa physically abused children in a church orphanage three decades ago. The bishop's office has denied the accusations.

The German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung published a report on its website on Wednesday alleging that Bishop Walter Mixa had "slapped, punched or spanked the behinds of boys and girls who had misbehaved" at an orphanage in the southern town of Schrobenhausen in the 1970s.

The newspaper said three women and two men had given statements under oath that Mixa had beaten them repeatedly.

ST. LOUIS (MO)
KMOX

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) -- St. Louis Catholic priest could spend more than 6 years behind bars after being caught in federal sting operation last summer.

Father James Grady pleaded guilty this morning to possessing child porn.

Investigators say they found more than 100 images of girls between the ages of 7 and 17 on his computer, along with search terms consistent with child porn.

ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Globe-Democrat

James Patrick Grady pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography Wednesday according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors gave the following account of the investigation:

•According to court documents, James Patrick Grady was employed as the pastor at St. Rafael’s Parish in St. Louis. Grady was provided with a computer by the Archdiocese of St. Louis, but requested that parish members obtain a laptop computer for his personal usage. The parish purchased him a Toshiba laptop computer.

•On July 29, 2009, law enforcement officers and agents were involved in an undercover operation investigating subjects who attempt to purchase children, or their services, for commercial sex in the Eastern District of Missouri. The same day, officers received an e-mail in response to an Internet advertisement that had been placed by law enforcement working in the undercover capacity. The advertisement indicated that young females of an indeterminate age were available. The e-mail was from James Patrick Grady, seeking more information regarding the ad, and was informed that there were two females. In the course of the e-mails, Grady received a digitally morphed photograph of a 16-year old female. Grady inquired about the cost of the child depicted and was given a price for a half hour and for one hour. Grady indicated that he wanted a half hour and was told that the girl was 16 years old. He indicated that was fine and set up a meeting. Upon arriving at the agreed upon location, Grady met an undercover officer, and asked to see the girls. Grady was subsequently arrested by the FBI, St. Louis County Police and the Maryland Heights Police. After his arrest, Grady admitted that he intended to have sex with the girl.

ST. LOUIS (MO)
KSDK

KSDK -- A St. Louis priest pled guilty to possessing child pornography on Wednesday morning, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Father James Patrick Grady will be sentenced June 25.

According to court documents, while Father Grady was priest at St. Raphael Parish in St. Louis, the parish purchased him a laptop computer.

KENTUCKY
Louisville Mojo

A historic, if misguided, legal landmark is unfolding before our eyes: for the first time in history, a U.S. court will decide whether The Vatican and The Pope can be held liable for negligence in the growing nationwide priest abuse scandal.

The case against Pope Benedict XVI was filed in Louisville by William McMurry, with three men claiming to have been abused by priests in Kentucky. They also claim that the Pope and Vatican officials did nothing about it, and maintain this makes them legally liable.

Don't expect the case to go very far, however. The notion that a man sitting in Rome can be held personally responsible for the acts of men he's never met doing scurrilous things in Kentucky is pretty ridiculous, and not likely to hold up in court. The leader of a religion cannot keep in check his millions of followers any more than the CEO of a global corporation can keep tabs on the day-to-day doings of its blue-collar workers in plants around the world.

MIAMI (FL)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO
The Associated Press

MIAMI — Lawyers representing an alleged victim of sex abuse claim the Vatican instructed church officials in Florida to shelter a priest from Cuba who was later accused of pedophilia.

Attorney Jessica Arbour, who represents an alleged victim of the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio, released a 1968 letter from the Vatican to the Archdiocese of Miami, stating the cleric had been forced to leave Cuba "because of serious difficulties of a moral nature (homosexuality)."

GERMANY
Monsters and Critics

Augsburg, Germany - A German Catholic bishop was accused Wednesday of administering corporal punishment to children 30 years ago as a scandal over sex abuse and violence grew in the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI.

The office of Walter Mixa, bishop of Augsburg, vehemently denied the claims that he spanked and slapped children in an orphanage in the southern town of Schrobenhausen while he was a junior priest.

Many German Catholics have been embittered at revelations that Catholic clergy groped, fondled or thrashed children in hundreds of cases between the 1950s and the 1980s. In a few cases, it has emerged that priests were convicted of rape.

UNITED STATES
Washington Post

This Catholic's View

By Thomas J. Reese, S.J.

Like most bishops, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, did not understand the sexual abuse crisis when it first appeared. He underestimated its extent and scope.

But over time, he grew in understanding as he watched what was happening in the United States and as he learned from reports from the American bishops. He got it faster than other Vatican officials, including Pope John Paul II. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was forced to read the files on these priests when bishops asked for their dismissal from the priesthood.

As a Vatican official, he supported the American bishops when in 2002 they adopted a zero tolerance rule so that no abusive priest could be returned to ministry. He also condemned the abuse and expressed sorrow when he visited the United States in 2008, the high point of which was his meeting with victims of abuse.

UNITED STATES
Washington Post

Rajan Zed

Q:Should Pope Benedict XVI be held responsible for the escalating scandals over clerical sexual abuse in Europe? Should he be investigated for cases of abuse that occurred under his watch as archbishop of Munich or as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer? Should the pope resign?

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI should urgently come up with a White Paper on the reportedly mushrooming global sex scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church, which is unprecedented and shocking.

This authoritative Paper should honestly address the reported worldwide sexual abuse crisis the Church is facing; and then list the solutions, action program and implementation schedule. A monitoring body should also be established for future.

UNITED STATES
St. Louis Globe-Democrat

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

PRINCETON, N.J., March 31 (UPI) -- Pope Benedict's favorable rating has dropped sharply in the United States over his handling of clergy sex abuse cases in Europe, a poll suggested.

The pope's favorable rating dropped from 63 percent in a Gallup poll taken two years ago to 40 percent in a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

The pontiff's rating deteriorated about equally among Roman Catholics and non-Roman Catholics interviewed for the poll, Gallup said.

AUSTRIA
Austrian Independent

Vienna Archbishop Christoph Cardinal Schönborn will preside at a "day of repentance" service today (Weds) in the wake of revelations of numerous cases of violence and sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy.

His office said yesterday that the service at 7pm at Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral would constitute "an acknowledgement of guilt in the name of the Church."

The office added that members of some organisations critical of Schönborn, such as "We are the Church," had been invited to attend it.

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Jerry Chautin

Do you have the propensity to molest young boys? What about girls? If you become a messenger of God, will you exploit your powers to fulfill your sexual fantasies? Can you handle celibacy without having affairs with your parishioners?

In a pre-employment test for the priesthood, these questions will need to be answered. The questions will be cloaked with ambiguities so that the applicant will not be sure what the questions mean. The tester will gain insight to personal characteristics of the job applicant applying to enter the clergy. Unsuitable candidates will be disqualified.

Abuse by Catholic priests is continuing to capture the headlines. Psychological testing is needed to screen out would-be priests and other candidates for religious or spiritual leadership, regardless of their faith.

UNITED STATES
WLWT

CINCINNATI -- Three men who claim they were abused by priests are asking for the pope to be held accountable for their ordeal.

The men filed a lawsuit in 2004, accusing the Vatican of negligence.

Attorneys want to question the pope under oath about the rampant sex abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church.

CALIFORNIA
Manly & Stewart

March 31, 2010 | By John Manly
Incredibly, Cardinal Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese issued a statement today lauding Pope Benedict for his work in allegedly protecting victims from sexually abusive priests.

It’s incredible that the Cardinal who presided over the largest known number of pedophile priests in the United States would be qualified to issue statements regarding proper behavior in preventing child molestation.

The Pope’s misdeeds and inaction - while a Bishop in Germany, and later as a Senior Vatican Official acting as the gate keeper for abusive priests - are well documented. The fact that the Pope must rely on a man so thoroughly discredited as Roger Mahony, acutely demonstrates the desperate position he finds himself in now that the Pope’s misdeeds and crimes have come to light.

BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe

By Lisa Wangsness
Globe Staff / March 31, 2010

Cardinal Sean O’Malley directly addressed the sex abuse scandal in Europe in his Holy Week homily to priests yesterday, telling local clergy that “the crisis that keeps coming back at us’’ underscores the need for priests to “live a life of holiness.’’ He thanked the priests for their sacrifice and service but urged them to work on living more balanced and prayerful lives.

O’Malley spoke to hundreds of priests gathered at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End in the midst of the most sacred week of the church year, and at a time when the worldwide church is confronting anew the crisis that first roiled the American church, beginning with the Boston Archdiocese, eight years ago.

In Europe, Pope Benedict XVI has been under harsh attack for his own role in a case involving an abusive priest in the early 1980s, when he was an archbishop in Germany, as well as for his recent handling of the sex abuse scandal in the Irish church.

IRELAND
Leinster Express

By Staff Reporter
CATHOLICS from Parishes across the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin gathered in Portarlington and Carlow last week to discuss the recent Papal Letter from Pope Benedict XVI on clerical sex abuse and to hear the views of Baroness Nuala O'Loan, former ombudsman for the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

The meeting at Mount St Annes, Portarlington was held alongside a gathering at the Carlow Cathedral Parish Centre. In Diocesan statement, there was discussion at the meetings of the Vatican and its role in the ongoing scandal but also criticism of the "cover up" mentality. Some questioned why the meetings had not been more widely advertised and there were calls for further meetings in every parish.

The Diocese said the people spoke of their own hurt and lack of trust, of their disappointment with aspects of the church's handling of child abuse, The statement said a number of speakers congratulated Bishop Jim Moriarty on the position he adopted when offering his resignation after the publication of the Murphy report. The bishop’s letter of resignation has yet to be accepted by the Pope.

UNITED STATES
USA Today

Isn't nuance annoying? It's so pesky to say on the one hand/one the other or he did X but he also did Y, or the context of such-and-such is so-and-so, which might alter your perceptions. All that information has a way of messing up neat answers. And so it is with examining Pope Benedict XVI and the global sexual abuse crisis.

He faces unrelenting criticism for failing to rid the priest ranks of predators for decades, for choosing treatment, silence and respect for accused priests' reputations, and the Church's, over the safety and spiritual treasures of children and teens, and for failing to hold bishops' feet to the fire on the jobs they are appointed to do -- to preach teach and govern.

Reckless remarks are flying (see Sally Quinn equating the Pope to Nixon enmeshed in Watergate). Anger mounts as demonstrations are planned by victims (today in California aimed at Cardinal Roger Mahony). Also in Los Angeles, the LA. Times profiled Jeffrey Anderson, the victims advocate who has been trying for more than a decade to establish in U.S. courts that blame for the ongoing abuse epidemic goes all the way to the Vatican.

PORTLAND (OR)
The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

Date: May 1, 2010
Time: 10:30 AM to 1PM
Where: Elizabeth Goeke’s home
in Portland, Oregon (call for directions to get there)

Join us for brunch and an informal conversation on healing the wounds of abuse.

Brunch Panel:
Dr. Jaime Romo was sexually abused by a priest as a boy. He later studied to be a priest at St. John Seminary, dropping out before being ordained. He went on the be a teacher, a school administrator, and then a professor of education at a Catholic university. When his own sons reached the age he was when he was abused, memories of the his long buried abuse began to surface, throwing him into a personal and professional crisis. He became a member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, leading leaflettings and press conferences about church policies relative to abuse.

GERMANY
Earth Times

Augsburg, Germany - The office of a leading conservative Catholic bishop in Germany, Walter Mixa of Augsburg, denied on Wednesday allegations that he had slapped or spanked children in a church orphanage three decades ago.

A newspaper had earlier in the day quoted former residents with claims that the clergyman gave them corporal punishment for misbehaviour while he was parish priest of the southern town of Schrobenhausen.

Mixa is the first of Germany's 27 bishops to have to face an allegation that he personally abused children. Germany has already been rocked by allegations that priests sexually abused hundreds of children in their care.

GERMANY
Toronto Sun

BERLIN — A German newspaper says three women and two men are claiming they were physically abused at a Roman Catholic orphanage by a priest who is now a bishop.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung said Wednesday it has obtained affidavits the five self-described victims had prepared claiming that Walter Mixa struck them with his fists or instruments such as sticks, carpet beaters or wooden spoons in the 1970s and 1980s when he was a priest at the orphanage in Schrobenhausen.

UNITED STATES
American Magazine

Posted at: 2010-03-31 08
Author: Michael Sean Winters

It is one of the most confounding conundrums faced by anyone in the public spotlight: How to defend without being defensive? How to correct critical details without the appearance of nitpicking? Finally, how to deal with the media – which is the only way most people will come to know of the controversy in question – when that media is in a feeding frenzy?

Let me start with this important caveat. I do not – and no one at the Vatican should – blame the media for the current controversy surrounding the sexual abuse of minors by clergy, and most especially, the role of Pope Benedict, in his earlier positions of authority, in perpetuating the culture that covered-up that sexual abuse. I will go further and say, thank God for the Boston Globe and National Catholic Reporter and other media outlets that covered the scandal. Otherwise, we might never have had the explosion in Boston which caused the U.S. bishops to get serious and crackdown on pedophilia and set about creating safe environment for children. The bishops had ignored earlier, internal warnings about the nature and extent of the crisis. Only when the Globe sunk its teeth into the story develop the kind of momentum that made it unstoppable. To be clear, the crisis in Catholicism did not begin when the Globe covered the story. The crisis was the on-going cover-up of serial child abusers. The reporting in NCR and the Globe were nothing more than the provocation needed to get the bishops to being the painful surgery of removing the cancer.

GERMANY
The Times (United Kingdom)

Roger Boyes, Berlin
One of the Pope's closest conservative allies in Germany, Bishop Walter Mixa, has been accused of brutally beating and flogging children in his care.

The Bishop of Augsburg, 68, denies the claims by five former pupils at a Catholic-run orphanage and care facility. But they will be a source of deep embarrassment and concern in the Vatican: Bishop Mixa is part of a conservative axis in Pope Benedict XVI's native Bavaria that has always backed the pontiff in his most controversial decisions, from criticising the violence of Islam in Regensburg cathedral, to rehabilitating the Holocaust-sceptic Bishop Richard Williamson.

Although there are no accusations of sexual abuse at the home – where the bishop was a visiting priest in the 1970s and 1980s – it is clear that Mr Mixa is in trouble.

UNITED STATES
Vatican Radio

(31 Mar 10 - RV) The judge who presided over the Church Court that was trying Fr. Lawrence Murphy on charges he abused deaf boys in the confessional, Fr. Thomas Brundage, has written an article in the archdiocesan newspaper of Anchorage, Alaska, where he is currently stationed. The article is critical of the New York Times’ reporting of the Fr Murphy case, and seeks to set the record straight. Chris Altieri reached Fr. Brundage by phone this (Wednesday) morning and asked him about the trial, which began in the mid 1990’s on the explicit authorization of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI was head at the time.

Fr. Brundage: From 1996 until 1998, the trial lasted about eighteen (18) months, and concluded with Fr. Murphy’s death.

Chris Altieri: - And at any time during that trial, did you have any pressure whatsoever from Rome to abey the proceedings, to suspend them, to push this under the rug - anything like that?

AUSTRALIA
The Age

BARNEY ZWARTZ
April 1, 2010

IT'S only a quarter over, but mark down 2010 as a bad year for the Vatican. A steady drip of revelations of sexual abuse by clergy and cover-ups by bishops has become a flow, then a torrent.

Hundreds of new allegations are emerging in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, and the stain is spreading right to the top, with serious accusations being levelled against Pope Benedict XVI himself.

Once dismissed as merely an Anglo-Saxon disease, or a hostile media campaign, the avalanche is catastrophic for the Roman Catholic hierarchy's already battered credibility and moral authority.

SWITZERLAND
Taiwan News

Top Swiss Catholic clergymen say they underestimated the problem of sexual abuse and are now telling victims to consider criminal complaints.

The Swiss Bishops' Conference said Wednesday it was "ashamed" by the number of sexual abuses cases and apologized for "errors." They have previously cited about 60 people claiming to be victims and said they "underestimated the magnitude of the situation."

The bishops are split over the idea of a blacklist of pedophile priests.

AUSTRALIA
The Age

BARNEY ZWARTZ
April 1, 2010

THE Catholic Church has a turbulent future as probably a much smaller church in the West, with a ''vast amount'' of sexual abuse cases yet to emerge, according to a retired Australian bishop.

''The church is not going to fold up its tent and disappear, but there could be very dramatic changes'' as a result of the clergy abuse crisis, said Bishop Geoffrey Robinson.

The Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, blamed a failure of leadership and a lack of courage for the crisis and warned that while Australia had learnt its lessons, the difficulties for the church in many countries were still coming.

ITALY
KPCC (United States)

Sylvia Poggioli | NPR

Allegations of child abuse by Catholic priests have emerged in Italy. Three men say they were abused as boys at a Catholic school for the deaf. They say no action has been taken against the priests - even though they reported the cases more than a year ago. Pope Benedict is under pressure to make a full response to abuse charges in Europe and the U.S.

As the faithful fill churches during Holy Week, a wave of clerical sex abuse revelations is sweeping Europe. The latest allegations come from Italy, just outside Vatican walls.

As the scandal mounts, Pope Benedict XVI is under increasing pressure to give a more forceful response to the most serious crisis of his papacy.

IRELAND
Express (United Kingdom)

Wednesday March 31,2010
Outspoken singer SINEAD O'CONNOR has vowed to "stand up and defend" the Pope if allegations of sexual abuse within the Catholic church are proved false.

The Nothing Compares 2 U hitmaker was one of the first celebrities to address the issue of child abuse in the church, and has previously urged Pope Benedict XVI to resign over reports the Vatican covered up the scandal for decades.

O'Connor admits the reputation of church leaders has been destroyed by the allegations and insists she would support the pontiff if he's innocent.

PHILIPPINES
Inquirer

THIS MUST BE THE BLEAKEST HOLY THURSDAY at the Vatican in many decades. An unholy shroud of suspicion has enveloped the Holy See, threatening to suffocate even the papacy itself. An Associated Press story Wednesday drew a forbidding global picture: “As the faithful fill churches this Holy Week, many Roman Catholics around the world are finding their relationship to the church painfully tested by new revelations of clerical abuse and suggestions [that Pope] Benedict himself may have helped cover up cases in Germany and the US.”

We should point out that these new revelations about insufficient institutional responses to allegations of sexual abuse by predatory priests have had perhaps less impact on the Church in the Philippines (and, the AP story suggests, in Poland too, another staunchly Catholic country). Indeed, the AP story itself recognizes that many of the Catholic faithful who are aware of the latest iteration of a long-running scandal aren’t necessarily thinking of leaving the Church. It quotes Linda Faust, of Greendale, Wisconsin, as saying, rather pungently, “At this point in my life I wouldn’t leave the Church for somebody else’s sins.”

VATICAN CITY
The New York Times

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Conservative Catholic university students rushed to Pope Benedict's defense on Wednesday, attacking journalists who have written about the sexual abuse of children by priests as "sowers of mistrust."

The some 4,000 students from around the world, in Rome for a convention, handed the beleaguered pope a letter of support during his weekly general audience in St Peter's Square.

In his address, the pope made no direct reference to the scandal sweeping the church but said priests should always send a message of "hope, reconciliation and peace."

GERMANY
The Local

Published: 31 Mar 10
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100331-26229.html

Five people have accused Germany's controversial Catholic Bishop Walter Mixa of physically abusing them while they were at a children’s home north of Munich in the 1970s and 1980s.

Three women and two men claimed that Mixa hit them on multiple occasions while they were at the St. Josef children’s home in Schrobenhausen, daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Wednesday, citing statements declared under oath by the alleged victims.

Their descriptions of the abuse include slaps to the face, punches to their upper arms, and spankings with a carpet beater, the paper said.

But the Augsburg diocese called the accusations “absurd, untrue, and obviously invented to defame the bishop.”

GERMANY
Catholic Culture

March 31, 2010
Three women and two men who were former residents of a Catholic children’s home have accused Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg of physically abusing them in the 1970s and 1980s. Calling the allegations “absurd, untrue, and obviously invented to defame the bishop,” a diocesan spokesman said that the diocese reserved the right to take press charges or file a civil suit against the accusers.

The nation’s justice minister criticized Bishop Mixa in February after he attributed the abuse scandal in part to the sexual revolution. Bishop Mixa also serves as the bishop of the nation’s military.

GERMANY
Catholic Culture

March 31, 2010
Three women and two men who were former residents of a Catholic children’s home have accused Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg of physically abusing them in the 1970s and 1980s. Calling the allegations “absurd, untrue, and obviously invented to defame the bishop,” a diocesan spokesman said that the diocese reserved the right to take press charges or file a civil suit against the accusers.

The nation’s justice minister criticized Bishop Mixa in February after he attributed the abuse scandal in part to the sexual revolution. Bishop Mixa also serves as the bishop of the nation’s military.

UNITED STATES
GetReligion

Posted by Mollie

It appears that ace Vatican reporter John Allen isn’t the only person who noted problems with the New York Times’ recent attempt to link Pope Benedict XVI to a particularly sickening story of priest abuse.

We looked at Allen’s critique already. The Times said the fact that only 20 percent of abuse cases went to trial was a mark of “inaction” by the office Benedict oversaw when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. But Allen said that most Vatican observers would say that allowing bishops to handle cases instead of sending them all to trial was much more favorable to the victims. Allen summed up his take on the situation in a new op-ed for the Times:

After being elected pope, Benedict made the abuse cases a priority. One of his first acts was to discipline two high-profile clerics against whom sex abuse allegations had been hanging around for decades, but had previously been protected at the highest levels.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Catholic News Agency

Los Angeles, Calif., Mar 31, 2010 / 06:27 am (CNA).- Responding to controversial media reports about Pope Benedict’s handling of abusive clergy, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, has praised “without hesitation” the future Pope’s quick and helpful response to allegations in the California archdiocese.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the future pontiff responded “quickly and affirmatively” to all requests for assistance from prelates in the United States during the year 2002 with reports about the American sexual abuse scandal.

Cardinal Ratzinger and the CDF responded “swiftly” and advised how to proceed in cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Cardinal Mahony wrote on his blog.

MIAMI (FL)
Washington Post

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

MIAMI -- A South Florida law firm is implicating the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI in its handling of a priest accused of sexually abusing children.

Jessica Arbour, an attorney representing one of the alleged victims, says documents show the Vatican was aware of Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio's misconduct as early as 1968.

UNITED STATES
Rome Reports

[with video]

Romereports.com March 31, 2010.

Some 80 dioceses in the United States have taken a simple step to prevent sexual abuse cases. They’ve published this document on their websites in an effort to prevent abuse.

Dioceses like the ones in New York City, Brooklyn, Iowa, Dallas and Philadelphia have made the ‘Model Code of Pastoral Conduct’, readily available. You can download it for free from the website www.virtus.org. The National Catholic Risk Retention Group created the website to prevent sexual abuse in the Church.

This 13-page document, outlines the code of conduct for the diocese to prevent abuse in parishes and schools. It refers to priests, deacons, pastoral ministers, administrators and volunteers who work there.

Center for Research on Globalization

by Mike Whitney

Pope Benedict should do everyone a favor and resign. By hanging on, he's just making matters worse. Who does he think he's fooling anyway? Everyone knows that he was involved in the sex-scandal cover up. Does he really think that a few papal apologies will make a difference? He was in charge and knew everything that was going on. That makes him responsible. His best option now is to "man up" and face the consequences. He needs to arrange a press conference, tell the truth, and resign. End of story.

It's clear that the problem isn't going to go away. In the last week, three more incidents have surfaced adding more fuel to the fire. In Wisconsin, Father Lawrence Murphy abused as many as 200 boys at a Milwaukee school for the deaf. One of the victims, Arthur Budzinski, has been all over TV telling his story and blaming the pope. It's pretty heart-wrenching stuff, too. According to Budzinski's daughter Gigi:

"The pope knew about this. He was the one who handled the sex abuse cases. So, I think he should be accountable, because he did nothing."

KENTUCKY
FOX 41

[with video]

By Bennett Haeberle WDRB-TV Fox 41 News

Vatican attorneys are working to protect Pope Benedict XVI from being deposed in a Kentucky lawsuit that claims the Vatican and its clergy were responsible for covering up cases of priest sex abuse.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Louisville in 2004, claims the pontiff "has extensive knowledge" and was "intimately and uniquely tied to the issue of child sexual abuse by the clergy."

The class-action litigation has been ongoing for years, but stalled until recently.

VERMONT
Bennington Banner

Tuesday March 30, 2010

It has been a long and, for Catholics, frequently excruciating eight years since the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal broke in the U.S. in early 2002.

A similar firestorm over the abuse of children by priests, and the hierarchy’s failure to stop it, is now engulfing the church in Ireland and in Germany. Moreover, Pope Benedict XVI himself is now under fire, the fact having emerged that when he was archbishop of Munich in 1980, a known pedophile priest came to his diocese and was assigned to parish work. Whether then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger knew about this decision or not, it happened while he was in charge.

However, a sense of the overall arc of the abuse scandal seems necessary to gain perspective. First, the Catholic Church has made great strides in its handling of abuse cases. The vast majority of cases at issue over the last eight years, both in the U.S., and now in Europe, took place before the 1990s. Church officials long ago discarded the misguided notions that pedophilia can be successfully "cured" with therapy and that Christian forgiveness means allowing abusive priests to continue in ministry.

INDIA
Mid-Day

By: Bobby Anthony Date: 2010-03-31

Even as Good Friday approaches, Catholics in Mumbai have begun reacting to Western media reports about allegations against Pope Benedict XVI and his brother, which accuse them of protecting priests involved in child
sex abuse.

"I don't deny that there are cases of paedophile priests. But there has been no attempt to shield any such priest. We live in the age of legal activism and openness, and it would be a generalisation to say that Catholics are asking the Pope to step down, which is not fair," said Fr Anthony Charanghat, director, Catholic Communication Centre.

"You must also understand that the global porn industry is responsible for blowing these reports out of proportion. They have been trying to demonise the Catholic clergy, since the Church has been fighting them," he added.

WISCONSIN
WBAY

By Matt Smith

During the most holy week of the Christian year, a cloud of sin hangs over the Catholic Church. Tuesday night, Milwaukee's archbishop publicly addressed the alleged sex abuse cover-up extending from Wisconsin to the Vatican.

The late Father Lawrence Murphy is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Last week, a victims advocacy group called SNAP said it has documentation that Vatican leaders, including Pope Benedict when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, stopped a church trial against Father Murphy.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The comments below were shared by Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki Tuesday night at the end of the Chrism Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist.

Dear Friends,

This Lent throughout the archdiocese, we celebrated a Season of Mercy, acknowledging our sinfulness and our need to reconcile with our God. This Season of Mercy is a stark recognition of the presence of sin in our world, in our Church, amongst our people, and, yes, within priests and bishops. That sin has never been more present to us as a Church than through the sin and crime of clergy sexual abuse.

As a bishop, a priest, and as a man of faith, I apologize to anyone who has been a victim of clergy sexual abuse. This crime, this sin, this horror, should never occur, especially by a priest. Those who committed these crimes and those, including some bishops, who didn’t do everything in their power to stop it, go against everything the Church and the priesthood represent. For those actions, I offer my sincere apology.

UNITED STATES
The Providence Journal

It has been nearly a decade since widespread allegations of sexual abuse by priests rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. Now similar allegations are sweeping Europe. And new evidence suggests that, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger shielded a U.S. priest from accusations that he molested some 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin.

So far, the pope has taken only modest steps to try to calm the mounting outrage. In Ireland, where last year two scathing government reports revealed decades of abuse, he issued a letter of apology. And last week, he accepted the resignation of one bishop, John Magee. Yet Bishop Magee will keep his title as head of the Diocese of Coyne, in southern Ireland, and is likely to continue with pastoral work. At least four other bishops have reportedly offered to resign, but the pope is resisting accepting their resignations.

Meanwhile, in Germany, hundreds of alleged victims have come forward since a news report centering on a Jesuit high school was published in January. In one 1980 case, an accused priest was ordered by Archbishop Ratzinger to undergo treatment. He returned to work and allegedly molested more children. The Vatican contends the pope was unaware of this development at the time.

The Daily Beast

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

The Catholic Church’s move to open a hotline to report sex abuse has infuriated victims who say it’s another ploy to keep the church’s darkest secrets under lock and key.

The Roman Catholic Church is the last place victims of predator priests should turn to. That, according to victims, is how the church got into this mess in the first place. And it’s why victims’ groups are outraged by a new church-sponsored hotline for victims to report alleged crimes.

“Victims should tell loved ones and police first,” said David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP. “Calling the church should be a last resort.”

MALTA
Times of Malta

Cynthia Busuttil

A total of 84 allegations of child abuse, involving forty-five Maltese priests, were reported to a Church response team over the last 11 years, The Times reports today.

The response team was set up in 1999 and receives reports from both the Maltese and Gozitan dioceses, a spokesman for the Curia said.

He would not divulge the nature of the cases, saying the response team's work was carried out in confidence.

MINNESOTA
Winona Daily News

By Jerome Christenson | jchristenson@winonadailynews.com | Posted: Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Just when I thought it was safe to go to communion, my church is making me uncomfortable again.

Just in time for Easter the sorry legacy of pedophile priests has resurfaced. This time international attention is focused on Milwaukee and Munich, on what did the pope know and when did he know it?

Most people I know aren't so rude as to ask how I can be part of an organization that has harbored and protected predatory pedophiles. I don't have to be so polite with myself, especially after I learned, some years ago, that as I entered adolescence one such notorious priest was assigned to a parish and parish school just blocks from my home. My friends and schoolmates served him as altar boys. More than that, I can't know for sure, but there but for the grace of God ...

UNITED STATES
Irish Central

by Father TIm

My friends:

The Catholic Church's "defenders of the fake" have begun their expected counterattack to those pesky critics who still don't believe -- despite Pope Benedict sending them a letter -- that the Church's leadership (if that's the right word) is serious about putting pedophile priests behind bars along with the conspiratorial clergy who covered up their heinous crimes.

In my adopted hometown of New York City, the Church's defensive lineup was especially pathetic, and even comical.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, leader of some of the city's Catholics, used his Palm Sunday performance to compare Benedict to Jesus Christ, a hysterical analogy that may in fact become blasphemous if the Pope is found to have been complicit in cover-ups himself.

UNITED STATES
The Tribune-Democrat

Pedro Vega
For The Tribune-Democrat

— For the past several years now, I have sat back and waited during the Lent and Easter seasons for the inevitable eruptions of sensational reports, purported exposés and clever reinterpretations of traditional Christian teachings. This year, would it be a new documentary concerning the discovery of the corpse of Jesus? Would it be another shallow, runaway bestseller such as “The Da Vinci Code”?

Nope. This year’s Easter surprise has been the relentless attacks against the Catholic Church in general, and Pope Benedict XVI in particular, from critics both outside and inside the Church. Who they are and what they say reveal a lot of what they want.

But before we go into that, let’s reaffirm what is accepted by all: This injury is largely self-inflicted. Years of negligent handling of sexual abuse allegations have brought us here. As Pope Benedict recently told the Irish bishops:

“It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. Serious mistakes were made in responding to allegations … it must be admitted that grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred. All this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness.”

LUBBOCK (TX)
Avalanche Journal

By Kellie Bramlet | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Protesters in London demanded the Pope's resignation and some in Switzerland called for a registry of pedophile priests, The Associated Press reported, but Catholic leaders in Lubbock are carrying on as usual.

"We are much bigger and much stronger and much more multidimensional than this one terrible problem that has plagued the Church," said Monsignor David Cruz, pastor of Our Lady of Grace Church. "We cannot let this one issue define who we are."

Cruz said he's spoken with individual members about the recent allegations that Pope Benedict XVI knew of some of the incidents of sexual abuse committed by clergy members while he served as the archbishop of Munich, but Cruz hasn't addressed the whole congregation regarding the issue.

MINNESOTA
Winona Daily News

By Kathy Redig / Winona | Posted: Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Roman Catholic Womenpriests stand in solidarity with victims of clergy sex abuse throughout Europe and around the world who were sexually assaulted by Catholic clergy.

The growing number of allegations of sexual abuse in Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands indicate that the cover-up of crimes against children and youth in the Catholic Church goes all the way to the pope and the Vatican.

In the U.S., the sex abuse scandal has destroyed the lives of victims and their families, bankrupted some dioceses and cost the church more than $2 billion.

IRELAND
Irish Independent

By TOM BRADY

Wednesday March 31 2010

A NEW sexual crime management unit is being set up within An Garda Siochana to oversee inquiries by members of the force into allegations and complaints of abuse.

The move was announced yesterday by Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy at the annual conference of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors in Galway. He said the unit would regularly evaluate investigations into child sexual abuse, child neglect and other sexual offences to ensure they were being dealt with properly and brought to a prompt conclusion.

The team, which is being established within the existing domestic violence and sexual assault investigation unit, will also focus on assisting and training gardai around the country in carrying out inquiries into abuse and promote international standards.

CANADA
National Post

Charles Lewis, National Post
Published: Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Roman Catholics should not try to minimize the crisis facing the Church by making reference to the small percentage of abusive priests in their midst or by dismissing reports about the scandal as media exaggeration, Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, said yesterday.

"We cannot escape the horror of this by pointing out that almost all priests serve faithfully -- though that fact is a grace that gives joy to the Catholic people," Archbishop Collins said in a homily.

"But even one priest gone wrong causes immense harm, and throughout the world priests have done unspeakable evil."

CANADA
Windsor Star

By Sandy Cameron, Windsor Star

March 31, 2010 I would think most people might find the Pope's letter of apology absolutely unacceptable. Sorry, it just doesn't cut it. It can be a part of it but the major message should have been: "We take full responsibility and this will not be tolerated."

In his letter, the Pope didn't specifically insist that cases of child sexual abuse be reported to the police by the church. These crimes are decades past being left to the Catholic Church to police itself.

The Pope is the person with the ultimate power in his church. More than anyone, he could -- even at this very late stage -- start protecting children from these monsters.

UNTIED STATES
Los Angeles Times

By Tim Rutten

March 31, 2010

One of the decisions confronting Pope Benedict XVI as he struggles to contain an abuse scandal whose tendrils now appear to extend into the Vatican may have a particular resonance in the United States.

That decision involves what to do about a wealthy and influential order, the Legionaries of Christ, and the worldwide lay movement it operates, Regnum Christi. The former includes 800 priests and the latter as many as 75,000 members. Around the globe, the Legionaries operate 120 seminaries, universities, schools and Catholic newspapers. Their ability to recruit future priests in an era of declining vocations has impressed the Vatican; today 2,600 are preparing for ordination in their seminaries.

The Legionaries were founded in Mexico in 1941 by a seminarian, Marcial Maciel, who went on to lead what quickly became the church's fastest-growing religious order and one of its most powerful. That power came from the socially well-connected Maciel's ability to raise astonishing sums of money, and from his insistence on unquestioning loyalty to papal authority.

UNITED STATES
The Daily Bruin

By Jordan Manalastas

March 31, 2010

It is now Holy Week. In four days, hymns will harmonize, priests will pray, and congregations will congregate to commemorate the most glorious Sunday among the same old, same old: the yearly resurrection of their god. But Catholic churches from Los Angeles to the Vatican have more important things to worry about than Mass turnout or incense supplies. In light of a resurgence in sex scandals among the clergy, the Church must face the repercussions of her ignoble failure of accountability.

Regardless, parishioners across the globe continue to abide. As one Milwaukee Catholic told Wisconsin ABC News, the scandal “hasn’t shaken my faith in the whole institution.” But the institution, dear reader, is exactly the problem.

The Church’s habit of concealing molestation cases and reassigning guilty priests to other parishes – a trend implicating countless priests, bishops and even the Pope – reveals a profound flaw in the system itself. This goes beyond the actions of individual priests and the reckless bishops who enable them. The root of this evil is the Church’s insistence on private self-policing, an asinine opacity that completely disregards the law, the victims and the safety of their communities.

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
Trinidad and Tobago's Newsday

By CECILY ASSON Wednesday, March 31 2010

Chairman of the Social Justice Commission Leela Ramdeen on Monday joined Roman Catholic priest Fr Kenneth Assing in mourning for a church that has been “disfigured” by mounting allegations of sex abuse made against several priests.

“The actions of a few have tarnished an entire church when in fact there are millions of Catholics around the world doing good work,” Ramdeen, an attorney, told Newsday.

“We have been betrayed by those who have been put in a position of trust.”

Religion Dispatches

By Anne Eggebroten
March 31, 2010

In the midst of the worst crisis to hit Roman Catholicism in centuries, it is clear that the all-male rule of the Church has failed.

A flock of newly-mitred Cardinals, 2007 This week is unprecedented in the two-thousand-year history of the Christian church. Instead of focusing on the last week of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, Christians are listening to horrific accounts of priestly sexual abuse of children and wondering whether Pope Benedict XVI will take decisive action to cleanse the church.

Probably he will not. After all, he will be 83 years old on April 16, and he just doesn’t get it. His focus has been purity of doctrine, not the purity of those who say Mass and administer the church.

In the US, he has approved an on-going investigation of nuns whose social activism ranges from anti-war activity to challenging the Roman Catholic ban on contraception, married priests, women priests, and acceptance of same-sex relationships. But there’s no investigation of the reasons why widespread sexual activity by priests persists, whether it be child sexual abuse, affairs with parishioners, or “marriages” surrounded by a conspiracy of silence.

UNITED STATES
The Cornell Daily Sun

March 31, 2010
By Mike Wacker

In the wake of the horrendous sex abuse scandal which has afflicted the Catholic Church, criticism of Catholicism in its current form has exploded. Certainly much of the criticism comes with good reason, but simultaneously, one can sense that some critics seem to have a few other motivating factors behind their critiques of the Catholic Church, factors unrelated to the scandal itself.

Sun columnist Peter Finocchiaro ‘10 and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd have both written on this scandal. Given the topic of these columns, you would expect that if you removed any content not directly related to the sex abuse scandal from them, the columns would contain almost nothing. But instead of nothing, you would find a laundry list of complaints about Catholic doctrines or beliefs, complaints often made outside the context of a sex abuse scandal.

I myself am Lutheran, and for those of you vaguely familiar with the Reformation, you would know I have my own disagreements with Catholicism, including a few but not all of the items on that laundry list. Yet the sex abuse scandal should not become an excuse for any of us to renew our disagreements with Catholicism.

UNITED STATES
New America Media

New America Media, Commentary, Blase Bonpane, Posted: Mar 31, 2010

More than 40 years ago I, was automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church for "attempting marriage." Our “attempted marriage” was conducted at my parents’ home with four priests presiding together with my bride, the former Sister Maura Killene of Maryknoll who had served in Southern Chile. We have now celebrated four decades together and now have two children and five grandchildren. There is nothing “attempted” about it. It is a wonderful marriage followed by a life of full-time work for justice and peace.

The excommunication has never upset me, mostly because of the guidance of my mother who had admonished me to “take it with a grain of salt.” This was her comment on many ecclesiastical directives, including celibacy. She was very disturbed that I went off to the seminary to become a priest in the first place.

Blase Bonpane”Why don’t they marry? It’s not normal,” she insisted. Both of her parents were born in Italy and they had a wonderful understanding of the irrationality of Canon Law. That’s right. They loved their church and were very comfortable criticizing it and even making fun of it. But as is becoming increasingly clear amid almost daily revelations of sexual abuse among the clergy, much of church behavior is really not funny.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
CNN

(CNN) -- The archbishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, apologized repeatedly Tuesday night for the way his archdiocese handled an abusive priest and he defended the Vatican which has come under fire for not disciplining or defrocking the man.

UNITED STATES
Mail (United Kingdom)

Pope has immunity as head of state

1962 document does not provide proof of cover-up

The Vatican has revealed its three-point defence against an American lawsuit seeking to have the Pope deposed over claims of sexual abuse and cover-ups in the Catholic Church.

The Kentucky case is the first in the U.S. to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Catholic Culture

Apologizing to victims of clerical abuse, Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee said in his March 30 Chrism Mass homily that Milwaukee bishops-- implicitly Archbishop William Cousins (1958-77) and Archbishop Rembert Weakland (1977-2002)-- were at fault in the handling of Father Lawrence Murphy’s abuse of deaf children.

“As a bishop, a priest, and as a man of faith, I apologize to anyone who has been a victim of clergy sexual abuse,” Archbishop Listecki said. “This crime, this sin, this horror, should never occur, especially by a priest. Those who committed these crimes and those, including some bishops, who didn’t do everything in their power to stop it, go against everything the Church and the priesthood represent. For those actions, I offer my sincere apology.”

UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 30, 2010
WASHINGTON

It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.

Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.

The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.

CANADA
Toronto Star

Raveena Aulakh
Staff reporter

Minutes after warning more than 200 priests that there will always be among them those who will betray the innocent, the archbishop of Toronto strongly defended the Pope’s actions during the most serious crisis facing the Roman Catholic Church in decades.

“This is the man who has done so much. He’s led the way,” Archbishop Thomas Collins told reporters in a courtyard of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. “Of all the people to become the target of attacks in this, the Pope ... good grief.”

Earlier, Collins addressed the congregation at a mass for priests where they renewed their commitment to the church.

IRELAND
Leinster Express

By Staff Reporter
A PRIEST who challenged the handling of child clerical abuse within the Catholic Church as far back the 1990s will be among a list of high profile speakers set to speak about their work and how their faith guides them at the Solemn Novena in Graiguecullen in the coming weeks.

The fourth Solemn Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help begins on Monday, April 12 and will run for nine consecutive Monday nights to June 7 at St Clare’s Parish Church Graiguecullen.

Perhaps the most challenging speaker will be Fr Kevin Hearty, a priest in Belmullet, Co Mayo who is a former editor of church’s pastoral and liturgical resource magazine Intercom. He will speak on April 26. Fr Hegarty was moved out of his job as editor after he raised questions over the handling of clerical child sexual abuse.

BRAZIL
NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands)

Published: 31 March 2010

Brazil is the biggest Catholic country in the world, but accusations of sexual abuse by its clergy are few and don’t get much attention.

By Philip de Wit in Rio de Janeiro

In Arapiraca, a town in the Brazilian state of Alagoas, an unlikely DVD was a bestseller this month: a sex tape showing a 82-year-old priest, Luiz Marques Barbosa, in bed with a 19-year-old altar boy. The images are hard to bear for the people of Arapiraca, who worshiped the priest and even named a school after him.

On March 11, Brazilian TV first aired the sordid pictures of Barbosa. On the programme, former altar boys accused him and two other priests from Arapiraca of sexually abusing them from age 12 onward. Other altar boys from the same parish soon came forward with similar accusations.

The incident has led to great indignation in Arapiraca, where the suspected priests were known as extremely conservative and puritan. Congregants wept openly on TV. The local police has even put a special team on the case. But, contrary to many European countries, the revelations have not led to a stream of complaints over paedophilia within the Catholic Church.

SWITZERLAND
Times LIVE (South Africa)

Mar 31, 2010 11:54 AM | By Sapa

Swiss Roman Catholic bishops admit hat they underestimated the extent of sexual abuse by the clergy and called on any victims to seek prosecution.

"We humbly admit that we underestimated the extent of the situation," the Swiss bishop's conference said in a statement.

"Those in charge of the diocese and religious orders made mistakes."

IRELAND
Waterford Today

Bishop William Lee issues statement regarding his handling of child sexual abuse complaints

Statement of Bishop William Lee issued by the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore Communications office, St. John's Pastoral Centre, John's Hill, Waterford:

"In December 1993, a few months after my ordination as Bishop of Waterford & Lismore, I received complaints of child sexual abuse against a priest of the Diocese. This was the first case of such a nature that I had ever dealt with.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
News Buzz

By Marie Rohde
An international firestorm raged last week after lawyers released documents linking the cover up of sexual abuse of children in Wisconsin to Pope Benedict XVI. Yet, there is still far more to the story: an extraordinary tale of how countless officials failed to pursue legal charges against the abusive priest, Father Lawrence Murphy. Among these officials were Archbishop Rembert Weakland and his two predecessors as archbishop, former Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann and his deputy prosecutor, William Gardner, and St. Francis Police.

All knew about the allegations that Murphy abused boys who were students at the St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, as NewsBuzz found in reviewing records released by St. Paul lawyer Jeffrey Anderson. Anderson has represented victims in this and other clergy abuse cases.

Some 200 men have by now accused Murphy of sexually abusing them. Critics have charged that church officials seemed more concerned about protecting the church and the priest from dishonor.

CANADA
CBC News

Edmonton's Roman Catholic archbishop held a rare news conference Tuesday to say Canada's bishops strongly support Pope Benedict XVI — who has come under fire lately over allegations he covered up sex abuse within the Roman Catholic Church.

Archbishop Richard Smith said he and his fellow Canadian bishops have sent a letter to the Vatican offering the "absolute support and confidence of ... all the bishops of Canada in the clear and decisive leadership of the Holy Father at this time."

Last Friday, Canada’s top Roman Catholic cardinal, Quebec City Archbishop Marc Ouellet, denounced allegations that Pope Benedict XVI covered up cases of sexual abuse committed by priests.

VATICAN CITY
The New York Times

By RACHEL DONADIO and DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: March 30, 2010

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has been ramping up its defense of how Pope Benedict XVI and the church have handled a growing sexual abuse scandal. But deflecting criticism has proved challenging for this papacy, which has been defined by missteps and difficulties in conveying its message.

Even as the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, has said that the crisis has threatened the “moral credibility” of the church, he acknowledged in an interview this week that he had not personally discussed the abuse crisis with the pope, a fact he attributed to the structure of the Vatican’s communications apparatus.

“The pope has never avoided the problems of the church,” Father Lombardi said of the sexual abuse issue in an interview on Monday. “He has always expressed his very deep pain and his very deep awareness of the seriousness of what has happened.”

ROME
Zenit

ROME, MARCH 30, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's letter to the Church in Ireland regarding sexual abuse of minors is a "real step forward" in combatting an abominable evil, according to the retired theologian of the pontifical household.

Cardinal Georges Cottier spoke to La Repubblica last week about the Pope's efforts to stop sexual abuse in the Church. He pointed to the Holy Father's "courage" and "firm condemnation."

Regarding the cases of abuse in Ireland, the cardinal contended that oftentimes things were handled too quickly.

VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post staff writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Tuesday dismissed any notion that Pope Benedict XVI should take personal responsibility for the child sexual abuse scandal rocking the church, defending his management of such cases and vowing that the crisis would not interrupt what historians view as his conservative agenda for Catholics around the world.

The defense of the pope, outlined in an interview Tuesday by the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's official spokesman, came as the church hierarchy is launching a public relations blitz in the United States and Europe to ease Catholic anger and bolster the pope's image in sermons and interviews ahead of Easter Sunday.

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, for instance, this week publicly countered accusations that Benedict turned a blind eye to abuse scandals when, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he headed a powerful Vatican office in charge of disciplinary action of the clergy between 1981 and 2005. Schoenborn said that Ratzinger in 1995 pressed for a special investigation into the former archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, for allegedly molesting young monks. That push, Schoenborn said, was blocked by aides to then-Pope John Paul II.

CANADA
iNews 880

The Archbishop of Edmonton is speaking out after new allegations of sexual abuse among the clergy of the Catholic church re-surfaced in Germany and Ireland.

Archbishop Richard Smith broached the subject last night with Edmonton leaders of the Catholic church, and met again with reporters this afternoon. "Somehow the Pope was involved in the culture of secrecy - all of these different things that you hear out there, that's the impression. I just want to state, categorically, that is not the case. That would be false information. This is a Pope that is addressing this with complete determination and resolution."

SAN ANGELO (TX)
Standard-Times

By Michael Kelly
Posted March 30, 2010

SAN ANGELO, Texas — The San Angelo Catholic diocese is in compliance with all directives of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, according to the 2009 annual report on the charter's implementation, the diocese said in an announcement Friday.

The audit was conducted by the Gavin Group of Boston in September, the diocese said. The diocese was commended in the report for conducting safe environment workshops for children, employees and parents and conducting background checks on personnel.

Bishop Michael Pfeifer organized task forces and supported community efforts to protect children throughout the diocese, the announcement said.

NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

Wednesday, 31 March 2010

A Co Tyrone parish priest who was stood down while child safety concerns are investigated has gone to ground.

Fr Sean McEvoy left the parochial house in Aughnacloy at the weekend, and attempts to contact him yesterday were unsuccessful.

Fr McEvoy has been parish priest of Aghaloo for the last six years, and yesterday people in the border community spoke of their shock at the news.

VATICAN CITY
The Indpendent (United Kingdom)

[This is a 2001 article but it pre-dates the Tracker and was not previously posted.]

By Frances Kennedy in Rome

Wednesday, 21 March 2001

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.

Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus.

Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.

ALBANY (NY)
CBS 6

March 30, 2010 7:21 PM
Alexandra Field
ALBANY -- As the latest sex scandal rocks the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany is fighting to put an end to sex crimes in the Church.

It's an initiative that started eight years ago under order of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In 2002, the bishops signed the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Soon after, the Albany diocese developed a plan to meet the goals of the charter. It's a dual approach aimed at educating young people and training the adults who work for them.

Since the start of the program, the diocese's sexual assault education programs have reached about 35,000 kids a year both in their parishes and schools. John Soja, Assistant Superintendent for Administrative SErvices for Catholic schools says the program is helping the diocese meet goals. " The awareness level and the transperency that is more prevalent nowadays...makes it more comfortable for kids to raise these types of issues and seek help when needed," says Soja.

NEW YORK
Outcome

NEW YORK CITY — Truth Wins Out today harshly condemned the Catholic League and its President Bill Donohue for its full-page New York Times ad in which the organization served as an enabler for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and sought to deflect blame for the crisis by smearing the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

The offensive ad sought to exonerate the Pope and other priests of blame who are ensnared in a widening sexual abuse scandal that reaches across the globe. Instead of offering an apology for sinful behavior, the Catholic League served as apologists and used the ad to try to deflect the crisis by attacking gay priests.

"This was a disgraceful ad and an unconscionable attempt to smear gay and lesbian people," said Truth Wins Out's Executive Director Wayne Besen. "Clearly, the Catholic League is more interested in finding scapegoats than solutions."

AUSTRALIA
ABC News

Child sex abuse victims of New South Wales Hunter Valley Catholic priests say a full-scale probe into the church's handling of abuse cases will further help the healing process.

Dozens of boys claim to have been abused by members of the clergy in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese since the 1970s.

Several priests have been convicted and others are still before the courts.

A senior Hunter police office believes a wider investigation like a royal commission is warranted.

WISCONSIN
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Nancy Ettenheim

Posted: March 30, 2010 6:39 p.m. |(0) Comments

As can be expected, the Child Victims Act has generated a lot of heat, both from sexual abuse survivors and from the church. (In this column, I refer to "the church" to mean all religious denominations.) I strongly support the bill and believe it is long overdue.

The church loudly complains that the legislation treats it unfairly, essentially holding it to a higher standard than others. My position is that religious organizations and individuals should and must be held to a higher standard of behavior as well as consequences because they already claim that position for themselves in many ways.

Why? My answer is threefold and resides in the nature of the victim, the perpetrator and the seriousness of child sexual abuse.

DENVER (CO)
The Colorado Independent

By John Tomasic 3/30/10

The Archdiocese of Denver has responded to international reports of sexual abuse and cover up by the Catholic Church in three countries by posting a paragraph on its website not about sexual abuse or coverup or administrative responsibility but about what it calls a “media frenzy.” Archbishop Chaput, the U.S. representative on a special team appointed to investigate a high-profile pedophile priest this year, has yet to address the scandals directly. His office failed to return messages yesterday.

If the comment threads at the Catholic websites he is sending readers to are any measure, though, Chaput’s or the archdiocese’s paragraph critiquing the media will fail to satisfy the restive flock, which seems to be looking for leaders to confront the issue instead of dodging it.

Chaput is not shy to speak in the public sphere on controversial issues. Indeed he has written a book arguing that it is a Catholic obligation to do so. Chaput was one of the loudest Catholic voices in opposing health reform. He went to Texas recently (Texas!) and critiqued Pres. John Kennedy’s reading of Catholicism as a non-controlling factor in his approach to public policy.

Washington Post

By Henri Boulad
Egyptian Jesuit

Holy Father,
I dare to speak directly to you for my heart bleeds upon seeing the abyss into which our Church is falling. Hopefully, you will forgive the filial frankness, inspired by the liberty of the children of God to which St. Paul invites us and for my impassioned love for the Church.
I will be pleased also that you forgive the alarmist tone of this letter for I know that little time remains and that the situation remains dire. Let me first tell you a little about myself. I am an Egyptian Lebanese Jesuit of the Melkiterite. I will soon turn 78. For the last 3 years, I have been the rector of the Jesuit school in Cairo. I have also carried out the following responsibilities: superior of the Jesuits in Alexandria, regional superior of the Jesuits in Egypt, professor of theology in El Cairo, director of Caritas-Egypt, and vice president of Caritas International for the Middle East and North Africa.

I am well acquainted with the Catholic hierarchy of Egypt having participated over many years in meetings as president of superiors of the religious orders of Egypt. I have very close relations with each one of them, some of whom are my former students. I also personally know Pope Chenouda III, whom I saw frequently. As far as the Catholic hierarchy of Europe goes, I had the opportunity to meet personally with some of its members such as Cardinal Koening, Cardinal Schonborn, Cardinal Daneels, Cardinal Martini, Archbishop Kothgasser, Bishops Kapellari and Kung, other Austrian bishops and bishops of other European countries. These encounters occurred during my annual trips to give conferences throughout Europe, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, France, Belgium, etc. During these visits, I spoke and engaged with diverse audiences and the media (newspapers, radio, television, etc.) I did the same in Egypt and the Near East.

UNITED STATES
True/Slant

David Knowles

The inevitable has happened. A lawsuit in Kentucky is attempting to have Pope Benedict XVI deposed in a criminal proceeding looking into his role in the ever-widening pedophilia scandal currently rocking the Catholic Church.

The case was filed in 2004 in Kentucky by three men who claim they were abused by priests and claim negligence by the Vatican. Their attorney, William McMurry, is seeking class-action status for the case, saying there are thousands of victims across the country.

ST. LOUIS (MO)
KMOX

Fred Bodimer Reporting
flbodimer@cbs.com

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) -- St. Louisian Barbara Dorris, the National Outreach Director for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, concluded her European tour Tuesday with a stop in London.

At a news conference outside Westminster Cathedral, Dorris and another SNAP leader Barbara Blaine announced the creation of a new permanent SNAP chapter titled "SNAP England."

"We also called on the Archbishop here to make a national registry of priests and clergy members who have been credibly accused of abuse," said Dorris. "And to open his files to law enforcement."

Straight

By Mike Cowie

"Indifference is the essence of inhumanity"
—George Bernard Shaw

Hey, did you hear the news? The Vatican sex abuse scandal isn't really about the tens of thousands of little kids who've been raped and abused in all sorts of disturbing ways over the years by their friendly neighborhood clergymen. No, it seems the real issue, at least according to the Vatican and Pope Benedict himself, is the strength and resolve of the Church to not be intimidated by such "petty gossip".

And, yes, "petty gossip" is indeed the term the Pope used to refer to all of this. It's not clear whether he was referring to the Church's systemic worldwide sheltering and protection of habitual child rapists or just the allegations of his own personal involvement in at least two cases of coverups in the year's before he became Pope, but, either way, it's terrific to see him standing up for the true victims in all of this: the poor maligned leaders of the Catholic Church, himself included.

His exact words, reverberating with indignation for justice not yet achieved, referred to "the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion".

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Today's TMJ

By Tom Murray
MILWAUKEE – Marquette’s Daniel Maguire, a religious ethics professor, knows what he has to say goes against what leaders at his university want to hear.

"I met the Pope when he was a Cardinal and he made it clear he did not agree with me on everything,” Maguire told TODAY’S TMJ4 reporter Tom Murray.

Maguire, a former priest, is calling for Pope Benedict to step down.

"That is for two clear reasons,” he said. “Number one, the crime. Number two, the cover up."

NEW JERSEY
Daily Record

By JAMES AHEARN
RECORD COLUMNIST

THE ESCALATING scandal in the Roman Catholic Church about sex abuses by rogue priests is rooted in two church doctrines.

The first is that sinners can obtain absolution in the confessional, with the admonition that they go forth and sin no more. Some mend their ways. Some don’t. The plight of a victim is treated as a separate matter.

The second tenet is that scandalous information about the church must be kept secret.

NEW YORK
Beliefnet

Deacon Greg Kandra

That's how Brooklyn's Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio describes the recent coverage of the pope, in his homily at tonight's Chrism Mass.

From the press release:
In his homily to the priests and people of the Diocese of Brooklyn, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, called upon the priests and people of the Diocese of Brooklyn to stand up with him and "besiege The New York Times. Send a message loud and clear that the Pope, our Church, and bishops and our priests will no longer be the personal punching bag of The New York Times."

Bishop DiMarzio's spirited defense of the Holy Father was based on the decision of The New York Times editors to, "Omit significant facts," and ignore the reality that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Ratzinger headed up, did not have competency over Canonical Trials in 1996. Moreover, Bishop DiMarzio continued "...the priest in question, Father Murphy was in the midst of a Canonical Trial. He died before a verdict was rendered."

LOUISIANA
Daily Comet

John DeSantis
Senior Staff Writer

THIBODAUX — As the world follows allegations that the pope ignored alarms concerning priests accused of sex abuse, two cases with local ties continue creeping through the courts.

Attorneys representing accusers in the local cases say their clients met a “conspiracy of silence” similar to allegations now leveled against Pope Benedict XVI and other high-ranking church officials concerning cases in Germany, Ireland and the U.S.

“Failure to take appropriate action against these priests, failure to weed them out of the ministry, it’s all part of that conspiracy,” said Roger Stetter, one of the attorneys for 24-year-old Jared Ribardi, who accuses the Rev. Etienne LeBlanc, former pastor of Annunziata Catholic Church in Houma, of molesting him.

UGANDA
The New Vision

Tuesday, 30th March, 2010

Opiyo Oloya

AS Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter, trouble is brewing about the Vatican’s handling of allegations of sex abuses involving Catholic priests.

At the heart of the scandal is the Catholic Church’s unwillingness to confront the issues of sexual abuse in a forthright manner as Jesus would have. Now, because of that failure, there are growing calls for Pope Benedict XVI to resign.

That is not going to happen. But the Vatican needs to come clean about what Pope Benedict XVI knew and when. The questions surround several cases of alleged sex abuses that the pope handled when he was still known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. While not all alleged sexual abuses by priests happened under Cardinal Ratzinger’s watch, those raising the most hackles happened during his tenure as the archbishop of Munich, and later as the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Serene Jones

As a Protestant, and as the President of a seminary known for its commitment to progressive theology, my reaction is deeply divided about the sexual abuse crisis that is currently shaking the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and the United States. Watching the disturbing details of cover-ups by clergy -- even those at the highest levels -- unfold during Holy Week, of all times, I can't decide whether to cry out in despair or be ever-so-slightly optimistic that real changes may result from this tragedy. Most days, I feel both.

Tears come easily when I think of the abuse and the horrifying realization that some within the church clearly believe that protecting priests is more important than safeguarding children. When I think of Jesus suffering during Holy Week, it is the broken bodies of children, betrayed by their own religious leaders, that come to mind. They bear the crosses of the church's abuses of power.

That said, I also weep because this latest sex scandal adds to our distrust of religious leadership in general and keeps us from remembering all the good work the Roman Catholic church does for the poor, hungry, and homeless, and has done for many decades. I am personally indebted to countless nuns and priests I've encountered over the years, who patiently taught me what it means to "stand with the least of these." In the twentieth century, especially, it was Roman Catholics rather than liberal, so-called "Main Line" Protestants who more often found spiritual grounds for social justice.

UNITED STATES
The New York Times

Ross Douthot

Reproduced below is a chart from the John Jay Report on sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood, commissioned by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, showing the number of credible accusations of abuse across the last half-century. It’s part of the basis for my column’s claim that something in the moral/cultural/theological climate of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged a spike in sexual abuse, and also for my assertion that we’ve since seen the church come to grips with the problem, at least in the United States.

It’s important to note that most of these incidents were reported in the 1990s and 2000s, years after they took place. This raises the question of whether the low numbers for the 1950s reflect a real difference between the rate of abuse in the Eisenhower era and the rate in the decades that followed, or whether it’s just that fewer of the victims from the ’50s have come forward with their stories, because of advanced age, greater shame, etc.

There’s no way to be completely certain about this, and clearly there was abuse in the church, and horrid cover-ups as well, going back decades and centuries and more. But the John Jay data suggest that something significant really did shift, and escalate, in the years around the sexual revolution.

UNITED STATES
Catholic News Agency

Anchorage, Alaska, Mar 30, 2010 / 04:43 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Reports in the New York Times and other media about a Wisconsin priest who sexually abused deaf children have been “sloppy and inaccurate,” the then-judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee has said. Correcting the public record, he said the claim Pope Benedict XVI was involved in the case is “a huge leap of logic.”

Fr. Thomas Brundage, JLC, former judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, wrote in Anchorage, Alaska’s Catholic Anchor about the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy, a principal of St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee.

About 200 former students have said they were molested by Fr. Murphy, sometimes even in the confessional. Outlets such as the Associated Press claim that the priest was “spared a defrocking in the mid-1990s” because he was allegedly “protected by the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,” who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Slate

By Juliet Lapidos
Posted Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI continues to face criticism over a 2001 letter he sent advising bishops to forward cases of sexual abuse to the Vatican, rather than suggesting they call the police. Meanwhile, allegations of Catholic priests molesting children have surfaced by the hundreds in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and the United States. Do the legal systems in those countries allow people to keep mum if they know about a crime?

Sometimes. Generally speaking, the rules are more strict in the United States than in Europe. All states plus the District of Columbia have statutes identifying "mandated reporters" with a "duty to report" suspected child abuse; usually these are professionals who come in frequent contact with kids, including social workers, teachers, physicians, mental health professionals, and law enforcement officers. More than 20 states specifically mention that members of the clergy count as "mandated reporters." Reporting laws often recognize clergy-penitent confidentiality, yet this privilege is interpreted narrowly in a child-abuse context—so if a priest learns of abuse outside the context of confession or counseling, he can be held liable for keeping that information to himself. Canada (which had its own pedophile priest scandal in the 1980s) has laws very comparable to ours. And according to the U.S. Embassy in Italy, Italian law requires any citizen who suspects child abuse to notify law enforcement. But Germany, the Netherlands, and Ireland do not mandate reporting.

UNITED STATES
Newsweek

By The Rev. Richard P. McBrien | Newsweek Web Exclusive

The child sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic priesthood—and the worldwide cover-up that seems, at least indirectly, to have involved Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he was elevated to the papacy—has embarrassed the Catholic Church and angered parishioners. It's a good bet Pope Benedict XVI won't resign under pressure; it's not his style and, more importantly, nobody can compel him. But that doesn't mean the scandal will simply go away. Benedict brought a clearly conservative moral agenda to the Vatican, and he has gone about implementing it slowly. Yet until he comes clean on what he knew—and fires bishops who mishandled abuse cases—his changes are likely to stall or fail altogether.

The pope's ideas about the church include his belief that interpreters of Vatican II overly weakened the church's teachings on salvation outside the church (that is, they relaxed the message that only Catholic dogma can lead to salvation), ecumenical relations with other Christian communities, abortion, homosexuality, and contraception, for example. There is already an air of widespread indifference, if not outright opposition, to some of Benedict's objections, such as those related to human sexuality and reproduction.

WISCONSIN
WISN

MILWAUKEE -- Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki is set to publicly address the recent allegations of a cover-up of priest sex abuse in the archdiocese.

The speech comes at a tough time for the Catholic faith, as allegations of abuse cross the globe and enflame even the pope.

Listecki will speak following Mass Tuesday night at St. John's Cathedral.

VATICAN CITY
Houston Chronicle

By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press Writer
March 30, 2010

VATICAN CITY — Dragged deeper than ever into the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican is launching a legal defense that the church hopes will shield the pope from a lawsuit in Kentucky seeking to have him deposed.

Court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren't employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the "smoking gun" that provides proof of a cover-up.

The Holy See is trying to fend off the first U.S. case to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children.

UNITED STATES
Canada.com

Agence France-Presse
March 30, 2010 5:03 PM

WASHINGTON - The Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI came under fire in the United States Tuesday for allegedly covering up for another predator priest and doing nothing to remove him from ministry.

Documents sent to AFP by lawyers representing a man who claims he was sexually abused as a teen by Father Ernesto Garcia Rubio claim the Papal Nuncio — the Vatican ambassador to the U.S. — asked the church in Miami to protect Garcia after he moved there from Cuba in 1968 after "serious difficulties of a moral nature."

"He was in ministry here in Miami for about 30 years and during that time we know of about a dozen victims that he abused," said Jessica Arbour, an attorney for the unnamed victim and five others who are suing the archdiocese of Miami for alleged abuse between 1977 and 1987.

UNITED KINGDOM
Reuters

The diocese of Westminster could not immediately be reached for comment.

SNAP says it has already been contacted by 45 victims in England looking for help and expects many more to come forward once proper support is in place.

UNITED STATES
Irish Central

By ANTOINETTE KELLY, IrishCentral.com

The Catholic League says the ongoing Church abuse scandal is a homosexual crisis.

President Bill Donohoe singles out The New York Times for allegedly getting the story wrong saying, "The Times continues to editorialize about the pedophilia crisis while all along it's been a homosexual crisis."

Donohoe took out an ad in the op-ed section of The New York Times Tuesday to broadcast his anti-gay message.

UNITED STATES
Media Bistro

By Kiran Aditham on Mar 30, 2010

In light of the global shitstorm that's surrounded the Vatican, Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church following sexual abuse allegations from Wisconsin to Miami to Germany, Catholic League president Bill Donohue (left) is rushing to the defense of his religious brethren with a quarter-page ad in today's New York Times (below).

NEW ZEALAND
The Dominion Post

Bishop Peter J Cullinane responds to claims the Catholic Church has lost its moral authority over sex-abuse scandals.

New Zealand's Catholic bishops make no excuse whatever for sexual crimes or for errors of judgment in dealing with them. Wrong is wrong.

Like other bishops around the world, the New Zealand bishops feel nothing but shame that such crimes have been committed here or anywhere, and sadness at the slowness of the Church, everywhere, to appreciate the irremediable nature of some not all kinds of sexual offending.

The claim that the Church has lost its moral authority in your editorial refers especially to recent allegations of mismanagement by the Pope. Unfortunately, some media are still disseminating inaccuracies and misleading reports.

UNITED STATES
NBC Chicago

By MARY ANN AHERN

Chicago's Francis Cardinal George and other U.S. Bishops on Tuesday praised Pope Benedict for his leadership as others question the pontiff's moral credibility in the midst of the current priest sex abuse crisis.

"We know from our experience how Pope Benedict is deeply concerned for those who have been harmed by sexual abuse and how he has strengthened the Church’s response to victims and supported our efforts to deal with perpetrators," George, as the President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement.

"We continue to intensify our efforts to provide safe environments for children in our parishes and schools. Further, we work with others in our communities to address the prevalence of sexual abuse in the larger society."

WISCONSIN
WTMJ

By Jay Sorgi
MILWAUKEE - Another major player has come forward to give his perspective in a church sex abuse scandal that has linked the case of an abusive priest from Milwaukee to the man who is now Pope.

Fr. Thomas Brundage, who was judicial vicar for the Milwaukee Archdiocese at the time of the case (1996-98), explains that a number of complications extended the length of the case to a point where it could not be completed before the priest accused of child sex abuse, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, passed away.

He also contends that current Pope Benedict XVI had no role in the case, despite recent media reports to the contrary.

UNITED STATES
Mediaite

by Michael Triplett | 4:27 pm, March 30th, 2010

Professional angry-Catholic Bill Donohue at the Catholic League is convinced that the New York Times is harassing the Pope and Catholics and he took out an ad in the paper to underscore the point. But it is likely conservative columnist Ross Douthat the folks churning out the reporting on the new scandals that allegedly implicate Pope Benedict XVI are probably more concerned about.

Donahue’s quarter-page ad says the paper is refusing to properly cover what he calls a “homosexual crisis” and that the paper is trying to undermine the church “[b]ecause of issues like abortion, gay marriage and women’s ordination. That’s what’s really driving them mad, and that’s why they are on the hunt.”

The paper’s new revelations about the Pope’s alleged involvement in not moving forward with charges against a pedophile priest in Wisconsin and reinstating a pedophile priest in Munich have been fodder for the paper’s editorial pages, with more than five editorial, op-eds, and columns over the past week.

UNITED STATES
Dallas Voice

March 30th, 2010
Below is a scan of an ad that ran in today’s issue of The New York Times. The ad was paid for by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and it ran on the Times’ op-ed page.

Apparently, the Catholic League is unhappy with the Times’ recent coverage of yet another sex scandal in the Catholic Church, this was reaching as high, possibly, as Pope Benedict, with some charging that the pope — back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger — participated in a cover-up of at least one instance of a priest being accused of molesting a child. So the Catholic League ran this ad that, in essence, blames the gays.

MIAMI (FL)
United Press International

MIAMI, March 30 (UPI) -- The Archdiocese of Miami and the Vatican knew a South Florida priest had "serious difficulties of a moral nature," lawyers for alleged abuse victims say.

Jessica Arbour and Stuart Mermelstein are representing men who say they were abused as children by the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio, The Miami Herald reports. They say Luigi Raimondi, then the apostolic delegate to Washington, warned Archbishop Coleman Carroll in a secret letter in 1968 that Garcia-Rubio had been "forced to leave Cuba because of serious difficulties of a moral nature," or homosexuality.

"It was a longstanding and well-known secret that the Vatican and Archdiocese of Miami knew exactly what Ernesto Garcia-Rubio was capable of," Arbour said Monday.

UNITED STATES
Irish Central

by Cahir O'Doherty

Bill Donohue is at it again. Today he took out a quarter page ad in The New York Times to defend the Church and Pope Benedict from the seemingly endless glut of sexual abuse stories rocking the Church around the world.

For Donohue, the real scandal doesn't appear to be the abuse; it seems to be what he calls a sustained press campaign against the church. If that's true then the abuse was not the problem, the rape, the shaming, the enforced silence; only the revelation of it.

Donohue, the leader of the Catholic League, an organization fellow Irish American Kathy Griffin called “one man in a room in front of a computer,” is switching the goalposts in his effort to defend the Catholic Church from the international, decades long sex abuse crisis it did little or nothing to prevent.

UNITED STATES
ProPublica

by Marian Wang, ProPublica - March 30, 2010

Earlier this month, the Vatican denounced what it viewed as a campaign against the pope:

“It’s rather clear that in recent days there have been people who have searched—with notable tenacity in Regensberg and Munich—for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the question of the abuses,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio. “To any objective observer, it’s clear that these attempts have failed.”

Observers, in addition to taking in the Vatican’s statement, may want to take a look at what documents are out there, especially since documents—more than statements, accusations or denials—have historically proven useful for revealing the awareness of abuses up the institutional hierarchy. So we’ve compiled a list of documents that have so far been cited in reporting on ties between Cardinal Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict XVI—on the subject of sexual abuse.

Blogger News Network

Posted on March 30th, 2010 by Hugh McNichol

Perhaps it is the right time for all Catholics worldwide to garner support for the bashing the secular press is giving to Pope Benedict XVI. As the visible head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict is an easy target for the secular press and collective media that has any type of anti-Catholic grudge that offers at opportunity at sensationalism. Some secular journalists are waging a ad hominem attack against the Pope as a larger delivery method of anti-Catholic rhetoric.

The personal attacks aimed at Benedict XVI are not justified and reflect a growing and pervasive attempt to discredit the activities of good priests, bishops and religious of both sexes that faithfully serve the world’s Catholic faithful without any involvement in scandals. While there are quite a few examples of sexual abuse that are surfacing throughout the Catholic world, most of the reported cases are extremely dated and quite frankly old. When these cases are considered, Catholics and indeed all observers need to ask why the allegations of abuse were unreported for decades by scores of allegedly abused victims.

MALTA
Times of Malta

As Malta prepares for Pope Benedict XVI's visit on April 17 and 18, he faces increasing scrutiny over cases of sexual abuse by priests. Could this taint the Pope's image in the eyes of Maltese Catholics? Will it affect the enthusiastic welcome he is expected to receive from the people? By Cynthia Busuttil and Claudia Calleja.

The sex abuse scandal rocking the Roman Catholic Church is not expected to overshadow the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Malta next month.

The Vatican last week attacked what it called an "ignoble attempt" to smear the Pope himself with allegations that, while still a cardinal, he had some part in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. Protestors in London have gone so far as to demand his resignation.

Sociologist Rev. Joe Inguanez is one of those who believe the impact of the allegations will not be widespread in Malta, an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

MSNBC

[with video]

WARSAW, Poland - An Austrian priest avoids mention of Pope Benedict XVI in his Masses. A Philadelphia woman stops going to confession, saying she now sees priests as more flawed than herself. British protesters call for the pontiff to resign.

As the faithful fill churches this Holy Week, many Roman Catholics around the world are finding their relationship to the church painfully tested by new revelations of clerical abuse and suggestions Benedict himself may have helped cover up cases in Germany and the U.S.

There are fears that for those whose commitment is already wavering, the scandal could be the final blow, and a growing chorus is clamoring for the church to embrace full transparency, take a hard line against pedophiles, and reconsider the rule of priestly celibacy.

VATICAN CITY
Spiegel (Germany)

By Alexander Smoltczyk

The case of an American priest who abused deaf children for years has shaken the Vatican. Detailed information about the sexual misconduct of the Rev. Lawrence Murphy went across the desk of Cardinal Ratzinger prior to his papacy. Abuse allegations in Italy are also putting the Catholic Church in an increasingly tough spot.

It is late on a Thursday evening at the Vatican and it is already beginning to look like Easter. St. Peter's Square is brightly lit, and groups attending a world youth forum are in high spirits as they sing and clap to celebrate their pope, clad in immaculate white, who has just spoken about the "Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin," behaving "as if nothing at all had happened."

These are the words of Peter Isely. Standing on a street corner one block away from the spectacle, he is determined to spoil the pope's festival of redemption. Isely has come to Rome all the way from Milwaukee, in the US state of Wisconsin. He is a 49-year-old psychotherapist with a buzz cut and a question that has been on his mind since he was 13: "Why is my church the only institution where pedophiles continue to be employed?"

UNITED STATES
Earned Media

SAN FRANCISCO, March 30 /Christian Newswire/ -- As nearly one billion Catholics enter Holy Week, their chief shepherd faces attacks in newspapers, blogs, twitter posts, and television and radio news. Unfortunately, the primary news sources repeatedly fail to report accurate timelines and crucial details. The impression is left that Pope Benedict XVI is part of the problem, rather than leading the way to solving it. Consequently, concerned Catholics and others are agitated and confused.

Pope Benedict's former student speaks out in support of the Pope and responds to the lack of responsible journalism on this story.

"Benedict the XVI is only infallible as an authoritative teacher of the Faith, not as an administrator. He certainly may have made some mistakes, even serious ones, in the 33 years since he was first made a bishop. But there is no evidence for the ones he's being blamed for in the media; for those who know the facts, the evidence leads to just the opposite conclusion. Like the Master he serves, he's also, after 33 years, being publically scourged, this time with words," Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio says.

Reader Supported News

By John Cory, Reader Supported News
28 March 2010

My views on child abuse and child molestation are harsh and unforgiving and forged by the fires of my own childhood. I give no quarter on this issue.

I have no kind words or forgiving thoughts for the Catholic hierarchy or their enablers, which brings me to Bill Donohue's article on the CNN Opinion web site. You can read what he says here but I'll give you my version:

Child abuse and molestation is bad but this stuff happened a long time ago and times were different then and besides everyone does it including churches, schools, businesses and even the Jews. This is all about picking on the Catholic Church for headlines.

UNITED STATES
Bishop.Accountability.org

By Bill Donohue
Catholic League
Advertisement in the New York Times
March 30, 2010

[This ad was scanned from the print edition of the New York Times by BishopAccountability.org. See also an image of the ad with a PDF. Donohue is discussing Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys, by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, March 24, 2010, with the documents posted on the web to accompany the article. See also For Years, Deaf Boys Tried to Tell of Priest’s Abuse, by Laurie Goodstein and David Callender, New York Times, March 26, 2010.]

Recent accusations against the Vatican deserve a response.

• Fr. Lawrence Murphy apparently began his predatory behavior in Wisconsin in the 1950s, yet the victims' families never contacted the police until the mid-1970s. After an investigation, the case was dropped.

• The Vatican did not learn of the case until 1996.

• Cardinal Ratzinger, now the pope, was the head of the office that was contacted. There is no evidence that he knew of it. But even if he did, he would have had to allow for an investigation. While the inquiry was proceeding, Murphy died.

UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org

This links to a copy of the advertisement from the Catholic League.

National Review

[Fr. Raymond J. de Souza]

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.

Before addressing the false substance of the story, the following circumstances are worthy of note:

• The New York Times story had two sources. First, lawyers who currently have a civil suit pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. One of the lawyers, Jeffrey Anderson, also has cases in the United States Supreme Court pending against the Holy See. He has a direct financial interest in the matter being reported.

INDIA
BBC News

A Hindu holy man in India has denied any wrongdoing, days after video emerged apparently showing him engaging in sexual acts with two women.

A spokesman for Nithyananda Swami said he was at the Kumbh Mela festival and would soon "clear the air".

In a video released on Sunday, the guru said he had done nothing illegal and the scandal was "a false campaign".

UNITED STATES
Leon J. Podles: Dialogue

Now that he has made a public statement, I feel I can now reveal what Cardinal Schönborn told me two years ago.

I know him a little, and I sent him my book Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. We met in San Diego, and I asked him what he thought of the book, especially the section on his predecessor, Cardinal Groër. I wondered whether I had understood all the German sources correctly.

Schönborn said the situation was worse than I knew. Groër had molested almost every student he had come into contact with for decades. After Groër was accused of this abuse, John Paul II continued to receive Groër socially in the Vatican, and tens of thousands of Austrians were resigning from the Church in protest.

Schönborn in person pleaded with John Paul to make a statement about Groër. John Paul replied that he would like to, but “they won’t let me.”

IRELAND
Donegal Democrat

A spokesperson for the Bishop of Clogher said this week he had not been made aware of any allegations against de-frocked priest Jeremiah McGrath.

The spokesperson told a reporter from The Irish News that the Bishop, whose diocese includes parts of south Donegal, that once the PSNI informed the bishop of claims against McGrath, he co-operated fully with the investigations.

McGrath, who was born in Kerry, served as parish priest in the Fermanagh town of Roslea. He was convicted at Liverpool Crown Court in 2007 for assisting and facilitating the rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by his lover, convicted rapist Billy Adams

MILWAUKEE (WI)
WTMJ

By Tom Murray

MILWAUKEE - Archbishop Jerome Listecki plans to address the latest developments in the clergy abuse scandal during the Tuesday evening Chrism Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. Representatives from every parish in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee are expected to be in attendance.

Listecki defends the Pope's handling of clergy abuse cases.

"This Pope really did recognize that response and was on the forefront of reparation," Listecki told TODAY'S TMJ4 reporter Tom Murray.

UNITED STATES
The Atlantic

The ever-widening scandal over Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of Church sex abuse cases has an eerily familiar ring: it's unfolding in much the same way that Watergate played out for Richard Nixon. Each day brings new revelations, to which the Pope and his supporters respond with carefully crafted explanations and pointed counterattacks.

Is this Watergate with holy water? Here’s a look at some of the ways in which Pope Benedict XVI has found himself caught up in a scandal of Nixonian proportions…

What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?

During the Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker famously posed the question that came to define the case against Richard Nixon: "What did the President know and when did he know it?" There’s ample evidence that Nixon had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. So the crucial question became, What did Nixon do once he found out about White House involvement in the crime?

AUSTRIA
Austrian Independent

There have been 566 reports of various kinds of abuse by clergy at the Catholic Church’s ombudsman’s offices this year, it was reported today (Tues).

Vienna archdiocese has had the highest number, 174, followed by Innsbruck diocese with 115. More than half of them can no longer be prosecuted because of the statute of limitations.

Cases of sexual abuse constitute 27 per cent of these, cases of violence 26 per cent. More than half of them require further investigation, according to the media.

UNITED STATES
San Francisco Examiner

Online Opinion Editor
03/30/10

Over at Catholic Anchor, the ecclesiastical judge in the case of the Wisconsin priest who molested hundreds of deaf children is speaking out. His long piece on what really happened there suggests that there has been much sloppy reporting attempting to establish a tenuous link between the horrific case of Father Lawrence Murphy and Pope Benedict, decades after Murphy sexually abused scores of deaf children.

This short excerpt won’t be enough to catch you up on the case if you haven’t been following it, but if you have, then I think it’s worth reading:

[I]n a letter from [Milwaukee] Archbishop Weakland to then-secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone on August 19, 1998, Archbishop Weakland stated that he had instructed me to abate the proceedings against Father Murphy. Father Murphy, however, died two days later and the fact is that on the day that Father Murphy died, he was still the defendant in a church criminal trial. No one seems to be aware of this. Had I been asked to abate this trial, I most certainly would have insisted that an appeal be made to the supreme court of the church, or Pope John Paul II if necessary. That process would have taken months if not longer.

ORANGE COUNTY (CA)
Orange Juice

Within Roman Catholic theology there is a dogma of Papal infallibility under which the faithful believe that the Pope is protected from the possibility of error when “making a statement on faith or morals”. Well appearently if we are to believe the ever increasingly pious Matt Cunningham he has “Jerbal infallibility”.

Cunningham who is best know for his outing the names of Catholic Church sexual abuse victims in order to intimidate them and scare other victims from coming forward continues to tell anyone that will listen it was just a simple mistake on his part. In “Jerbal’s” sick mind it was “no harm, no foul”. Unfortunately the victims feel much differently about his actions.

CONNECTICUT
NBC Connecticut

By a vote of 23 to 20, the state's Judiciary Committee voted on Monday to eliminate the statute of limitations in civil cases involving child sexual abuse.

The committee sent the bill, on a 23-20 vote, to the House of Representatives for further action.

The proposal is a direct result of the case involving the late Dr. George Reardon. He died in 1998, but in 2007 a worker renovating his former West Hartford home found thousands of slides and hundreds of movie reels of child pornography. Nearly 150 lawsuits have been filed against St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where Reardon worked.

UNITED STATES
Healing and Spirituality

Dr. Jaime Romo

Mar 29th, 2010

An ancient Vedic text says, “You are your deepest driving desire. As is your desire, so is your will as is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny. Therefore, your desires can become your destiny.”

If we really want healing and an end to sexual abuse, it requires us to shift, in some small and big ways: different words, thoughts, actions to connect us to what we really really want.

When I was finishing my doctoral studies, people asked me what I wanted to accomplish with my dissertation. I answered as many in the same position answered, after having gone through a six year process of learning and then applying my own ideas; after working with sometimes challenging or harsh feedback about whether I really knew what I was talking about. I said that I wanted my dissertation to change the world.

CANADA
Toronto Star

As Roman Catholics reel from the latest child abuse scandals, Pope Benedict's every word is being scrutinized for a sign that he gets it. That the Vatican truly grasps how appalled Catholics are by the victims' anguish and the cover-ups. And that Rome will do better.

By that standard, Benedict's Palm Sunday homily was a missed opportunity. Rather than face the latest crisis head on, and the pain and the need for reform, he came across as defensive. He said faith provides "the courage that does not let itself be intimidated by the gossip of dominant opinions." He also extolled "the loyalty that stands with the other even when the situation makes it difficult."

Surely the abuse scandal is more than "gossip," to be stifled by the church reflexively closing ranks. That is how this crisis grew.

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: March 30, 2010

Milwaukee advocates for victims of clergy sex abuse called on Pope Benedict XVI and Catholic Church officials Monday to curtail what they see as verbal attacks on victims in the wake of the abuse scandal enveloping the Vatican.

In a protest organized by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, victims stood on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist holding handmade signs saying "stop attacking us" and "I'm not 'petty gossip' " - references to quotes by Benedict and others since last week's revelation that the Vatican failed to remove a Wisconsin priest who is believed to have molested as many as 200 deaf boys over decades.

"Hundreds and hundreds of wounded victims are finding the courage to speak up," said victim Mary Guentner.

"They should be praised  . . .  and instead they're being vilified."

UNITED STATES
NPR

by Kenneth Briggs

Kenneth Briggs writes for the National Catholic Reporter. He's a professor at Lafayette College professor and a former New York Times religion editor.

The predicament that surrounds Pope Benedict XVI has cast suspicion on his behavior without yet delivering a clear-cut verdict. The unanswered questions related to whether he covered up priests who were child abusers are troubling enough to paralyze his papacy, even though the power of his office cannot be diminished. But he has been convicted of nothing. Fairness dictates that he remain pope until or unless he is judged guilty.

My proposal, therefore, is that Benedict take a leave of absence until his case is cleared one way or another. He should ask for a full investigation by both secular and church agencies and step aside until the results are in. If he fails to clear his name, he would be honor bound to resign. A refusal to invite such tough scrutiny would be widely seen as admission of wrongdoing. Otherwise, he could return with a clean slate.

ITALY
RTE News

Italy's Roman Catholic Church says it will help to bring paedophile priests to justice after the country's bishops ruled that it was right to do so under Canon law.

The Italian conference of bishops stressed concern for the victims of sexual abuse and their families as they met in Rome to address the widening scandal embroiling the Church in Europe and the US.

'The key to searching for the truth is to enforce the procedures and penal rules of Canon law with rigour and transparency,' the episcopal conference said in a statement after the talks.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
California Catholic Daily

(Editor’s Note: The following is from a Sunday, March 28, entry from the website “Cardinal Roger Mahony Blogs L.A.” under the heading, “Thank you, Cardinal Ratzinger.”)

While I have no personal information on some of the specific allegations against our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, when he served the Church of Munich in Germany, I am able to assert without hesitation the action steps which he undertook in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when he served as Prefect of that Congregation.

Beginning in that dark year of 2002, the then Cardinal Ratzinger responded quickly and affirmatively to all of our requests for assistance here in the United States.

Recall that Canon 1324, par. 4, states that in Canon Law a minor is a person under the age of 16 years. However, in the civil laws of the United States, a minor is deemed to be a person under the age of 18 years. After we brought this gap to the attention of Cardinal Ratzinger, the canonical age was also raised to 18 years to accommodate civil law in our country and in other countries.

BOSTON (MA)
New York Daily News

By Michael O'Keeffe
Daily News Sports Writer

Tuesday, March 30th 2010

Bob Oliva, the former Christ the King Regional High School boys basketball coach, will be arraigned April 12 in Suffolk (Mass.) Superior Court in Boston on sex abuse charges.

Oliva, the influential former coach who won four CHSAA Class AA intersectional titles and coached Lamar Odom and Jayson Williams before they became NBA stars, was indicted last week by a Massachusetts grand jury on two counts of rape of a child. He could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors say Oliva raped a 14-year-old boy at the Boston Sheraton during a visit to Massachusetts in 1976 to attend a Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader at Fenway Park.

UNITED STATES
NPR

by David Clohessy

David Clohessy is the director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests

If the Pope were to resign (highly unlikely), it would no doubt bring short-term comfort to tens of thousands of deeply wounded and still suffering clergy-sex-abuse victims across the globe. It would also provide some hope for millions of Catholics who desperately want to believe that their church hierarchy is capable of reform. It might temporarily scare and deter others who have, are or might be reckless, callous or deceitful regarding child safety.

But there's plenty it would not do. It wouldn't end centuries of secrecy in an ancient, rigid, self-perpetuating, all-male monarchy. It wouldn't unearth volumes of carefully-concealed church records that contain names of predator priests and complicit bishops, some or many of whom are still in parishes and chanceries across the globe. It wouldn't strengthen efforts to reform archaic, predator-friendly laws that enable corrupt employers to hire and shield offenders while jeopardizing kids.

UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

By Damian Thompson

Fr Thomas Brundage, the former Archdiocese of Milwaukee Judicial Vicar who presided over the canonical criminal case of the Wisconsin child abuser Fr Lawrence Murphy, has broken his silence to give a devastating account of the scandal – and of the behaviour of The New York Times, which resurrected the story.

It looks as if the media were in such a hurry to to blame the Pope for this wretched business that not one news organisation contacted Fr Brundage. As a result, crucial details were unreported.

Moreover, Fr Brundage – who seems to have shown admirable tenacity in pursuing the loathsome Fr Murphy – claims that a document of questionable provenance was quoted authoritatively by the media as a source for his own opinions. At the very least, The New York Times and many other organisations have some explaining to do. They must be held to account for the way they pursued this story, which led to hysterical attacks on Benedict XVI.

UNITED STATES
Catholic Anchor

By Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JLC
For CatholicAnchor.org

To provide context to this article, I was the Judicial Vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee from 1995-2003. During those years, I presided over four canonical criminal cases, one of which involved Father Lawrence Murphy. Two of the four men died during the process. God alone will judge these men.

To put some parameters on the following remarks, I am writing this article with the express knowledge and consent of Archbishop Roger Schwietz, OMI, the Archbishop of Anchorage, where I currently serve. Archbishop Schwietz is also the publisher of the Catholic Anchor newspaper.

I will limit my comments, because of judicial oaths I have taken as a canon lawyer and as an ecclesiastical judge. However, since my name and comments in the matter of the Father Murphy case have been liberally and often inaccurately quoted in the New York Times and in more than 100 other newspapers and on-line periodicals, I feel a freedom to tell part of the story of Father Murphy’s trial from ground zero.

UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

Guy Walters

With the Roman Catholic Church now supposedly responsible for every evil on the planet, it came as no surprise to read in the Jerusalem Post that the Vatican “aided” Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina. This accusation is made annually by hacks eager to do their bit of pontiff-baiting, but unfortunately for them, it is complete tosh. Yes, members of the Catholic Church certainly helped Eichmann escape, but there is no evidence that suggests that the Vatican as an institution helped Nazis on their way to South America and the Middle East (an often overlooked retirement destination for pensioned fascists). This distinction between individuals and an institution is an important one to make – one bent copper does not make a corrupt police force.

Like all institutions, the Catholic Church has its share of rotten apples, and historians are fairly knowledgeable about the ones who helped Eichmann. These include the members of the St Raphael Community in Bavaria, and a Franciscan called Edoardo Dömöter in Genoa. Some, such as Simon Wiesenthal, supposed that Eichmann went to Rome to receive the assistance of Bishop Alois Hudal, but this is nonsense. I’ve looked through Hudal’s archives in Rome, and although names such as Franz Stangl and Erich Priebke pop up, there is no mention of Eichmann or of his alias, Riccardo Klement.

CONNECTICUT
The Hartford Courant

By ARIELLE LEVIN BECKER

March 30, 2010

HARTFORD — - A proposal to change the statute of limitations for civil lawsuits in child sexual abuse cases cleared the judiciary committee by a 23-20 vote Monday but only after lawmakers revised it to maintain some restrictions on those currently barred from suing.

Under current law, victims of child sexual abuse have until they turn 48 — 30 years after they turn 18 — to file lawsuits. The original proposal, inspired in part by pending sexual abuse lawsuits involving St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, would have eliminated the statute of limitations for civil cases involving child sexual abuse, assault or exploitation.

But after a public hearing during which victims of sexual abuse supported the change and representatives of the Roman Catholic Church opposed it, lawmakers changed the proposal, allowing victims 48 and older to sue only if they can clear certain hurdles.

CANADA
Telegraph-Journal

BRUCE BARTLETT
Telegraph-Journal

SAINT JOHN - While officials in the Catholic church are fighting allegations that the cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests leads to the very highest levels, a grassroots group remains committed to fighting for changes from within.

This evening, members of the Catholic Network for Women's Equality will gather for a purple stole vigil outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Waterloo Street. Inside, the annual mass of the holy chrism, a celebration of the institution of the priesthood, will be taking place as part of the week leading up to Easter. The vigil begins at 6 p.m.

"We've had a purple stole vigil since 2003," said Cathy Holtmann, a spokeswoman for the network in New Brunswick.

UNITED STATES
America Magazine

At its deepest level, the sexual abuse crisis, and most especially the manner in which the hierarchy has responded to it, entails profound cultural issues. Yesterday, I looked at two issues that were proximate to the crisis, but today I would like to look at a couple of issues that are more deeply ingrained in the culture of the Church and the habits of its leaders.

In his book The Difference God Makes, Cardinal Francis George writes of our contemporary American culture: "Everything is possible, but nothing can be forgiven." He contrasts this with what a faithful, Catholic culture would demand. "Faith, by contrast, says that many things cannot be done," Cardinal George writes. "But, in the end, everything can be forgiven." This profound difference between the ecclesiastical culture and the mainstream culture informed the sexual abuse crisis from start to finish. And, I should add, the Church owes no one an apology for believing that God’s mercy can reach to all man’s sins, even the sins of the pedophiles. But, the promise of God’s mercy became something to hide behind, instead of an invitation to repentance. The bishops imagined themselves in the role of the father in the story of the Prodigal, welcoming back their errant priests, getting them counseling and therapy, and returning them to their prior status, as if what the priests had done was only a sin and not also a crime.

OREGON
Oregon Faith Report

March 30, 2010

Faith Report News Note:

An Oregon sex abuse case could uncover a secret Boy Scout file of Scout leader sexual abusers. Some have labeled the records as the “Perversion Files”. A Portland lawyer, Kelly Clark, has obtained over 1,000 of these records. Because the Mormon Church was a charter organization, they are also named in the case.

KVAL reports more on the story,“At the start of the Oregon trial, attorney Kelly Clark recited the Boy Scout oath and the promise to obey Scout law to be “trustworthy.” Then he presented six boxes of documents that he said will show “how the Boy Scouts of America broke that oath.” He held up file folder after file folder he said contained reports of abuse from around the country, telling the jury the efforts to keep them secret may have actually set back efforts to prevent child abuse nationally. “The Boy Scouts of America ignored clear warning signs that Boy Scouts were being abused,” Clark said

UNITED STATES
Sacramento Bee

By TIM RUTTEN
Los Angeles Times
Published: Tuesday, Mar. 30, 2010

This has been a tough Lent for the Roman Catholic Church. Its seemingly endless sexual abuse scandal finally has seeped into the papal apartments, and the Vatican's response to this week's revelations suggests that far too little has been learned from this squalid affair.

Until now, Pope Benedict XVI had seemed to be taking a far more forthright approach to the problem than his predecessor, John Paul II, most recently in a blistering "pastoral letter" to the entire Irish church.

Last week, however, the New York Times published a pair of stories suggesting that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - the future Pope Benedict - participated in precisely the sort of secrecy and administrative negligence that has been at the root of this scandal.

The 300 News Daily

Hindus want Pope to urgently come up with a white paper on reportedly mushrooming global sex scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church, which they called “unprecedented and shocking”.

Acclaimed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that this authoritative paper should truthfully address the reported worldwide sexual abuse crisis the Church was facing; and then list the solutions, action program and implementation schedule. A monitoring body should also be established for future.

Zed, who is president of Universal Society of Hinduism, further said that instead of church officials pointing fingers at the “hostile media”, consumerism, and secularism; His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI should publicly acknowledge the reported past mistakes of the Church on this issue, apologize, and clarify his personal role in the crisis.

UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

A U.S. Catholic interview
Judge Anne M. Burke reviewed her years monitoring the U.S. church's response to the clergy sex abuse crisis.

As the wife of a veteran Chicago alderman, Judge Anne M. Burke has seen her share of political intrigue up close. But not even Chicago politics, she says, adequately prepared her for the "medieval, certainly Byzantine machinations" she encountered during the two and a half years she served on the National Review Board.

The U.S. bishops appointed this 13-member board of lay Catholics at the height of the clergy sex abuse crisis to oversee their compliance with the reforms they had pledged to institute. But many of the bishops, it seems, were surprised when the board took its job seriously and went to work. Accustomed to having laypeople only give them advice they could choose to follow or ignore, some bishops were taken aback when the board publicly called them to task for foot-dragging or for efforts to obstruct or circumvent agreed-upon processes.

NEW ZEALAND
3 News

Destiny Church Taranaki pastors Lee and Robyn Edmonds have quit their roles amid allegations of sexual misconduct against two family members.

In a statement issued by the church today, spokesman Richard Lewis said "management" had accepted the couple's offer to stand down and would be looking into the circumstances of both cases.

One of the matters, against a 29-year-old man, is already before the courts. He is next due to appear in New Plymouth District Court in May. The other allegation is against a woman.

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Wayne Trujillo

Earlier this month, a Boulder Catholic school created a stir when it expelled a student whose parents are lesbians because, according to the Denver Archdiocese, the parents are "living in open discord with Catholic teaching." After reading the recent New York Times report about the latest set of revelations involving Catholic priests, children and cover-ups that allegedly extend to the top tiers of the Vatican, which drew a quick and indignant response from Rome, it seems to me that the Catholic hierarchy should be quicker to kick out wayward priests rather than children. Or is the operative word "open"? Those errant priests, while not exactly conducting themselves in exactly a saintly manner, were living in "closed" discord with Catholic teaching. The whole affair seems like a canonical refrain of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Much of the anger directed toward the Catholic Church over these scandals, aside from travesty of the pedophilia within its midst on an international scale, are its largely static and secretive responses when informed by its members of the problems.

IRELAND
The Irish Times

PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent

ARCHBISHOP DIARMUID Martin has been strongly criticised by a former spokesman for his predecessor as Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, over his handling of the clerical sex abuse issue.

The criticism by Eddie Shaw, who was spokesman for Cardinal Connell from September 2002 to October 2003, is contained in a book, The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish Catholicism?, launched yesterday.

In the book Mr Shaw criticises what he claims is Archbishop Martin’s failure to support the auxiliary bishops of his diocese in the fall-out from the Murphy report.

IRELAND
The Irish Times

GORDON DEEGAN

THE BISHOP of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh has confirmed that he has met 70-80 victims of sex abuse during his time as bishop.

Dr Walsh said the victims were abused by the religious and clergy and also lay people, inside and outside the diocese.

“I do believe that I tried every time to treat every victim with respect and kindness and sympathy and I do have a sense of their dreadful pain,” he said in an interview.

CONNECTICUT
The Hartford Courant

By Christopher Keating on March 29, 2010

The judiciary committee narrowly approved a controversial bill Monday that would eliminate the statute of limitations for civil lawsuits in cases of sexual abuse.

The measure was approved, 23 to 20, on a topic that divided both Republicans and Democrats.

Currently, the law allows lawsuits by those up to the age of 48, which is 30 years after reaching the age of 18. If adopted into law, Connecticut would become the fourth state in the nation to eliminate the statute.

CALIFORNIA
The Desert Sun

Nicole C. Brambila • The Desert Sun • March 30, 2010

In the wake of reports Pope Benedict XVI once shuffled a priest accused of child sex abuse while archbishop in Germany, local diocesan officials offer papal support while victims say the latest scandal to rock the Catholic Church is “the tip of the iceberg.”

“It's always painful for us as Catholics to reflect on this issue,” said John Andrews, spokesman for the San Bernardino Diocese that also includes Riverside County.

“Our prayers go out to the victims of this terrible crime. And, of course, we're also praying for the pope,” he said Monday.

INDIA
Mangalorean

By Fr Adolf Washington

Bangalore March 30, 2010: Faith has been under attack after recent reports of child abuse by priests of the Roman Catholic Church. Jeff Anderson, a US-based lawyer, filed thousands of suits against the Church since 1983, following up cases of sexual abuse.

The New York Times has started a series of investigative articles into the abuses, even claiming that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was then Archbishop of Munich, and became Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, failed to act in time against priests accused of sexually abusing children in their care.

Archbishop Dr. Bernard Moras of the Archdiocese of Bangalore answers a volley of questions from the media (DNA) on the impact of these developments on the local Church.

UNITED STATES
Christian Newswire

Contact: Dr. Leon Podles, 443-824-4550, leepodles@gmail.com; http://podles.org

BALTIMORE, March 30 /Christian Newswire/ -- Dr. Leon J. Podles, author of Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, ended that book with the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI and his promise to clean up the filth in the Church. In his book, which explored the deep roots of the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, Podles pulled no punches in describing the horrors of that abuse. He traced the enabling of abuse back to the failures of the clergy and its narcissistic culture of clericalism.

As president of Crossland Foundation Podles has collected and reviewed tens of thousands of pages that document sexual abuse in every diocese in the United States and numerous cases throughout the world. His background as a retired federal investigator has given him the ability to skillfully analyze these cases. On his website http://podles.org, he documents numerous case studies of abusers and murderers who were protected by the hierarchy and provides frequent blog commentary on the crisis.

As a major Catholic donor, Podles endowed the Chair of Catholic Studies at McGill University in Canada and has watched $3 billion paid in settlements to victims and unknown hundreds of millions paid out to attorneys defending the hierarchy. As a board member of the pontifical International Theological Institute in Austria he has continued his support of Catholic education.

UNITED STATES
The Daily Caller

By John Rossomando 03/30/10

Few things have been more disgusting than the countless priestly sex abuse cases that have been publicized around the globe in recent weeks or the Catholic Church’s mishandling of these crimes.

But the bid by liberal Catholics and their allies in the establishment press to exploit these scandals for political gain has been just as outrageous.

Instead of merely expressing righteous anger with the apparent cover-ups, the establishment press has returned to lecturing the Church on how it could have prevented these scandals had it ordained married men or women to the priesthood.

AUSTRALIA
Insights

Easter Sunday night on Dateline, 8.30 pm on SBS ONE, host George Negus will be interviewing Father Tom Doyle about the sex scandal involving the Catholic Church.

Father Doyle is a Washington DC priest who, since 1984, has been trying to get the Church to face up to its faults in regard to sexual abuse.

WALES
Western Mail

Mar 30 2010 by Steve Dube, Western Mail

“PETTY gossip” will not intimidate His Holiness, who urges all of us to resist such a temptation. He even claims that it needs “courage” to resist the siren call that he and others covered up sexual shenanigans by men in cassocks. Alas, Pope Benedict’s reaction is the opposite of courage, and another nail in the body of the church he leads.

Some of us with an intimate past relationship of a wholly innocent nature with the Roman Catholic Church can confess that we have been taken in by such gossip, and it didn’t seem petty at the time.

As for intimidation, that definitely came from elsewhere, and it invariably ensured silence. To be precise, it came from many “brothers” in the religious order that made up most of the staff at my school more than 40 years ago.

TEXAS
Amarillo.com

This must be a time of agony for the Catholic church.

Locally, we endure the loss of Bishop Emeritus L.T. Matthiesen, who passed away last week. I was privileged to have been acquainted with Bishop Matt for the past dozen years, and I have even received mail from him about my writing.

Every once in a while he agreed with me, and when he didn't he was articulate, knowledgeable, sincere and reasonable. He was what I'm sure many would call an elitist, being as he was intelligent, educated and wise, but to me he was a force of God from the moment we met.

I miss him.

In point of fact, Bishop Matthiesen was to me a persuasive argument in favor of a married clergy. He was, in every sense of the word, a father. The world is less for not having more children raised by him.

CANADA
The Globe and Mail

A mistaken application of the Christian theological concept of scandal has tended to tempt the Roman Catholic Church into cover-ups, which have compounded the abundantly justified outrage over the sexual abuse of children by priests.

The Catholic Church is not like a business corporation or a government department that happens to be inept in its public-relations strategy. Its purposes and principles are different, and its seriously held ideas are complex enough that its leaders can become entangled and misapply them.

Whether Pope Benedict XVI, in his previous or present functions, has been at fault in these matters is a question of fact that may or may not be sorted out in due course.

The Vancouver Sun

By Tom Heneghan, Reuters

The sex abuse scandals lashing the Vatican have led to calls for an end to priestly celibacy, a cleanout of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the resignation of Pope Benedict, but the pope seems unlikely to alter his approach.

The demands, widely aired in the media, are so far removed from the way Benedict works that abuse victims and other critics who raise them seem bound to be disappointed.

The sex abuse saga, while shameful enough to make Benedict issue several apologies to victims, has many aspects that apparently convince him he can continue to tackle the problem quietly but firmly, without undue fanfare.

Religion Dispatches

By Anthea Butler
March 30, 2010

When Pope Benedict refers to the ever-growing scandal threatening the Church as "petty gossip of dominant opinion" he shows, for all his theological learning, a shocking disregard for both his flock and for the moral standing of the institution he heads. Is it curtains for the Church as we know it?

In June of 2009, Pope Benedict XVI declared “The Year of the Priest,” and in his homily at the vespers marking the opening day, he spoke the following words:

How can we forget, in this regard, that nothing causes more suffering for the Church, the Body of Christ, than the sins of her pastors, especially the sins of those who become “thieves and robbers” of the sheep (cf. Jn 10:1 ff.), lead them astray by their own private teachings, or ensnare them in the toils of sin and death? Dear priests, the summons to conversion and to trust in God’s mercy also applies to us; we too must humbly, sincerely and unceasingly implore the heart of Jesus to preserve us from the terrifying risk of endangering the very people we are obliged to save.

Religion Dispatches

By Randall Balmer
March 30, 2010

In the midst of new developments in the Catholic sex abuse scandal and in light of last year’s surprise invitation from the Pope to conservative Episcopalians, a new invitation is extended to disheartened Catholics.

I have no authority whatsoever to speak for my Church, nor would I presume to do so. But as an Episcopal priest, I call on my ecclesiastical superiors to make a special overture to Roman Catholics who are disgruntled by the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church; scandals that increasingly point to the complicity of the man in charge of the Vatican, Benedict XVI.

My reference here, of course, is to the declaration last fall by the very same Benedict seeking to lure conservative Anglicans and Episcopalians to the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican sensed an opening, especially with those Episcopalians (and former Episcopalians) who were still fuming over the consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire, the refusal of the Episcopal Church to foreswear same-sex marriages, and the ordination of gays and lesbians and even (still!) the ordination of women.

CANADA
Calgary Herald

By Bishop Fred Henry, For The Calgary Herald

March 30, 2010

(This is a pastoral letter that was sent to all of Calgary's Catholic parishes).

In the Liturgy of the Hours for Passion (Palm) Sunday, part of a Sermon by St. Andrew of Crete reads: "Let us go together to meet Christ on the Mount of Olives ... In his humility Christ entered the dark regions of our fallen world ... his love for humanity will never rest until he has restored our earthbound nature from glory to glory, and made it one with his own in heaven."

These are not easy times. Priests and people feel battered and scattered by the seemingly relentless media campaign about child sexual abuse in the Church. We, too, have entered into the dark regions of our fallen world. This is a painful, emptying and humbling experience.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his Pastoral Letter to Catholics in Ireland, has expressed his dismay at the sexual abuse of young people by Church representatives and the way this was addressed by local bishops and religious superiors. He speaks of his closeness in prayer to the whole Irish Catholic community at this painful time and he proposes a path of healing, renewal and reparation.

VATICAN CITY
Edmonton Journal (Canada)

A leading Vatican prelate on Monday rejected any link between the requirement of celibacy for priests and the spate of pedophilia scandals rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

"Celibacy has nothing to do with the sexual abuse of minors," Cardinal Walter Kasper said, as calls for the church to rethink the tradition grow.

"Pedophilia has no connection with the very old tradition that prevents priests from marrying," the German cardinal said in an interview with the Italian daily La Stampa published Monday.

GERMANY
Deutsche Welle

After a torrent of sex abuse allegations, Germany's Catholic Church is opening a nationwide hotline to deal with the clerical sex abuse scandal.

In response to a growing number of sex abuse allegations, the Catholic Church in Germany is launching a nationwide telephone hotline this Tuesday to offer support and counseling to those impacted by the scandal.

The hotline is the church's response to a spate of revelations of sexual abuse and physical cruelty by clerics and parochial school teachers in recent months. So far more than 150 cases of sexual abuse in Catholic institutions in Germany have been reported.

UNITED STATES
Politics Daily

Jason Berry
Contributor

Pope Benedict faces an epic scandal as victims of clerical sex abuse in Ireland, Western Europe and America raise the issue of justice denied by secret tribunals that allowed predators to remain priests. Yet an editorial in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, scored the media for "an ignoble attempt to strike at Pope Benedict and his closest aides at any cost."

Benedict is grappling with an unfinished crisis that drew media coverage in America in 1992; victims' lawsuits revealed bishops who had sheltered predators from prosecution. By 1994 the coverage had ebbed. Then, in 2002, The Boston Globe gained access to voluminous documents, exposing a vast clergy sexual underground. Pope John Paul II called the American cardinals to Rome for an emergency conference. In June, the U.S. bishops enacted a youth protection charter. Lay review boards would comb clergy files and probe new accusations. Bishops began weeding out sex offenders.

The Vatican drew the line, however, at giving these review boards the authority to investigate bishops. That decision has come back to haunt the church.

GERMANY
BBC News

[with video]

The Roman Catholic Church in Germany is launching a telephone hotline for victims of sexual abuse.

The helpline will be run from the western city of Trier.

Its bishop has been appointed to handle any allegations made against clergy.

UNITED STATES
dotCommonweal

March 29, 2010

Posted by Paul Moses

George Weigel’s column on the First Things blog summarizes the case being made in many quarters that The New York Times has been biased in its recent coverage of Pope Benedict’s handling of cases of clergy sexual abuse. He writes:

“… the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line.”

UNITED STATES
First Things

Mar 29, 2010
George Weigel
The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Belleville News-Democrat

By VANESSA GERA - Associated Press Writer

WARSAW, Poland -- An Austrian priest avoids mention of Pope Benedict XVI in his Masses. A Philadelphia woman stops going to confession, saying she now sees priests as more flawed than herself. British protesters call for the pontiff to resign.

As the faithful fill churches this Holy Week, many Roman Catholics around the world are finding their relationship to the church painfully tested by new revelations of clerical abuse and suggestions Benedict himself may have helped cover up cases in Germany and the U.S.

AUSTRIA
Austrian Independent

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn’s announcement that Waltraud Klasnic will head a commission dealing with victims of Catholic Church abuse and violence has been met with harsh criticism.

Schönborn said in a TV interview on Sunday that the former Styrian People’s Party (ÖVP) governor will head a special commission checking on all claims and reports of sexual abuse and violence by Catholic Church clergy.

Parish priest Rudolf Schermann, who published Catholic magazine Kirche In, said yesterday (Mon): "I would have preferred an objective atheist."

GERMANY
Earth Times

Berlin - Germany's Catholic church set up a telephone hotline for sexual abuse victims on Tuesday, after several hundred reports of widespread mistreatment by priests emerged in recent months, dating back to the 1950s.

Three days a week, trained advisors and therapists will now be available to answer calls to the free telephone number, set up by the Catholic church.

"With this offer we want to encourage victims to contact us, irrespective of whether these are old or current cases," said the bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, who has been appointed by the church to investigate sex abuse complaints.

MIAMI (FL)
News & Observer

By JAY WEAVER - McClatchy Newspapers
MIAMI -- The Archdiocese of Miami, along with top Vatican authorities, knew as far back as 1968 that the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio, a priest later defrocked amid child sex-abuse allegations, had a troubled past in Cuba before transferring to South Florida, lawyers representing victims claimed Monday.

The lawyers say the Vatican's role is similar to what is alleged in the scandal now unfolding in Wisconsin, where top Catholic officials are accused of failing to defrock a priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys in a long career that paralleled the Miami cleric's. Pope Benedict XVI was in charge of the Vatican office that reviewed such cases when he served as Cardinal Ratzinger.

"It was a longstanding and well-known secret that the Vatican and Archdiocese of Miami knew exactly what Ernesto Garcia-Rubio was capable of," said attorney Jessica Arbour, who with lawyer Stuart Mermelstein, has filed several suits against the archdiocese involving Garcia-Rubio

VATICAN CITY
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Eric Reguly

The nightmare day for the Vatican press office came last Thursday, when a report alleged that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, declined to defrock a priest who had been one of the American church’s most aggressive and perverted pedophiles – he went after deaf boys.

Published in The New York Times, the report left Father Ciro Benedettini, the Vatican’s amiable deputy press secretary, and chief spokesman Father Frederico Lombardi frazzled. “It’s been a difficult and frustrating week,” Father Benedettini said from his cluttered office within metres of St. Peter’s Square and the papal apartments that overlook it.

The report, coming only days after the Pope's apology to the victims of abuse in Ireland, triggered a genuine credibility crisis within the Catholic Church and left the Vatican press office struggling to salvage the Pope’s reputation. Father Benedettini, 64, can’t remember having been so busy. To prove the point, he clicked onto the electronic service used by the Vatican to monitor Vatican- and Pope-related stories. There were more than 2,200 new stories yesterday morning alone. Most, probably, were about the scandals.

UNITED STATES
Catholic News Agency

Washington D.C., Mar 29, 2010 / 02:46 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In an article published on Monday, noted Catholic scholar George Weigel condemned the recent media treatment of Pope Benedict XVI, particularly by the New York Times, as part of a larger agenda to take “the Church down” and discredit its moral authority. Weigel also praised the Holy Father's “determination to root out” what the Pontiff previously called “filth in the Church.”

Weigel began his First Things article by arguing that the media has recently portrayed the Catholic Church as “the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young,” when in fact, it is “by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today.

WISCONSIN
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Patrick McIlheran of the Journal Sentinel
March 29, 2010

Father Raymond d'Souza pointed out a little oddity at National Review the other day:

American demonstrators were in Rome on exactly the day the New York Times published its story claiming that then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, helped shield a pervert who'd been a priest in Milwaukee. "One might ask," writes d'Souza, "how American activists would happen to be in Rome distributing the very documents referred to that day in the New York Times. The appearance here is one of a coordinated campaign, rather than disinterested reporting."

UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

Monday, March 29, 2010
By Bryan Cones
Every day brings another headline on the sex abuse crisis unfolding in Europe and echoing again stateside. And every time the hierarchy is responding in the absolute worst way possible.

Consider this from Archbishop Timothy Dolan's Palm Sunday homily, according to the New York Post: The pope is suffering "the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob and scourging at the pillar" and is "now being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo." Dolan goes ot credit the pope with the progress the U.S. church has made on its own crisis--credit that should be going to the National Lay Review Board, which struggled mightily, at times against the bishops' opposition, to enforce compliance with the Dallas Charter. (You can read our January 2005 interview with Justice Anne Burke, who once chaired the review board, for some background.)

The Vatican's defense in its conduct in the case of a Milwaukee priest who abused between 100 and 200 children is no more helpful, in effect amounting to an argument that the Holy See didn't know about the case until long after the abuse took place. And a homily by the preacher of the papal household, Raniero Cantalamessa, ends up sounding almost deranged in its narcissistic lamentation about "the present moment of serious hardship we priests of the Catholic Church are experiencing."

UNITED STATES
The Salt Lake Tribuen

Cal Thomas

God knows -- and He does -- Protestants shouldn't be throwing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for the scandals involving the abuse of children by some priests. Protestants have a blemished history of how they have handled their own scandals involving extramarital sex, misappropriated funds and arrogant behavior.

The hall of shame in the last century includes Aimee Semple McPherson (an alleged affair with her radio engineer, Kenneth Ormiston), Garner Ted Armstrong ( Hustler magazine carried a story in September of 1978 called "In Bed with Garner Ted Armstrong -- America's Promiscuous Preacher," which detailed gambling, adultery and the alleged rape of a young stewardess who worked on his private jet), Jim Bakker (sex with his secretary), Jimmy Swaggart (sex with a prostitute) and Ted Haggard (sex with a man), among too many others.

The difference between them and what is happening in the Catholic Church is that the sex -- though still sinful -- was (with the exception of Armstrong's alleged crime) between consenting adults. Those swindled or otherwise deprived of their money were old enough to have known better.

SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
KGO

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Protesters in San Francisco on Monday called on Pope Benedict XVI to confront the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Members of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, demonstrated outside the offices of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

SNAP's protest comes as Benedict faces calls to resign over his handling of abuse cases while the pope served as a bishop in his native Germany.

GERMANY
YouTube

[video presentation]

SNAP = Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests Schutzgemeinschaft für die Opfer von geilen Pfaffen Frauenfeindlich = kinderfeindlich!

Mar. 29, 2010
By Sr. Maureen Paul Turlish

I had been out of the loop, as it were, since Monday, March 22, when I left for Alabama to attend the 26th annual symposium on child abuse sponsored by the National Children's Advocacy Center headquartered in Huntsville. I made the mistake of not taking my laptop, thinking that I could check my e-mail on the hotel's computer. That did not work out.

As a result, I couldn't open my e-mail, couldn't read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Tablet of London, or even National Catholic Reporter.

I was in the dark until early afternoon Thursday while I waited for my connecting flight from Washington to Philadelphia. That was when I caught some news from CNN and I realized that that sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy was all over the news..

What a difference a week makes!

NEW YORK
Voice from the Desert

Statement by David Clohessy, Executive Director of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314-566-9790)

Dolan’s comments yesterday hurt the church he loves, hurt abuse victims, and hurt himself. He showed a callousness and narrowness that ill-befits the head of a religious institution. His intent may be to “circle the wagons.” The effect, however, will be to harm the children, because by demeaning, insulting and ignoring wounded victims and suffering children, Dolan perpetuates the culture of sexual secrecy and clerical entitlement that leads to more devastation.

The Pope isn’t a victim here. He’s the most powerful monarch in the world’s largest monarchy. His distressing track record on clergy sex crimes and cover ups is finally being examined with some rigor. To compare his situation now to the suffering of Christ is over the top. And it suggests that victims who find the courage to speak up and report unspeakable crimes are somehow hurting the pontiff. (The truth is that these brave victims are helping the church, not hurting it.)

Voice from the Desert

By James A. Turcotte, U.E.

Foreword

Let me make it clear, right from the start, that I am an 83-year-old Roman Catholic, dedicated to the Faith. I am one of eleven children raised by honest, sincere parents who taught us to be people of integrity.

My concern is that the Vatican hierarchy appears to be pushing the effort to canonize the late John Paul II. In fact, there is insufficient evidence to warrant this honour.

The claims of a potential cure of a nun from Parkinson’s Disease through John Paul’s intercession as well as other minor claims, has raised many questions by the laity about the one-sidedness of the evidence. The lure to sainthood is based on the former pope’s display of charisma and holiness during his world tours. However, there is no sign of an investigation into his behind-the-scenes activities that would further support or deny the claim for this very serious matter.

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Patrick Condon

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Jeff Anderson has filed thousands of lawsuits alleging sex abuse by priests and won tens of millions of dollars for his clients, but he has had a bigger goal in mind for nearly two decades. He wants to bring his career-long legal crusade against misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church right to the top.

He would love to question Pope Benedict XVI himself under oath. Though that is extremely unlikely given that the pope is a head of state, documents Anderson has unearthed have the potential to take a scandal that has plagued dozens of dioceses around the world and place it at the doorstep of Vatican leadership.

The documents, which became publicly known in the past week after Anderson shared them with The New York Times, show that a Vatican office led by the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, halted a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 boys at a school for the deaf.

UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh
Director of Media Relations, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Holy Week is time when Catholics worldwide feel the pain of dying in Christ.

It comes this year as media reports bring up heartrending, often previously published, stories with a new twist - how the Vatican handled the cases. Efforts to link stories to culpable inaction by Pope Benedict XVI cause reasonable people anguish given all that the pope has tried to do to address this crisis.

Since 2002, the church in the United States has had a policy of zero tolerance, which means a priest or deacon who has admitted to or been found guilty of sexually abusing a minor can no longer engage in public ministry. Likewise, the church has developed screenings and processes to ensure that the children in its schools and religious formation programs today are not subject to abusive behavior, whether by a cleric or lay person. This has solved one problem by excising child abusers from parishes and dioceses.

UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent

Tuesday, 30 March 2010

I've been trying to resist the temptation to take satisfaction in the current embarrassments of the Catholic Church. Why? Well, one obvious reason would be that those embarrassments arise out of the suffering of children – and it would be far better if the occasions for the Catholic hierarchy's current confusion and disgrace had never occurred in the first place.

Another reason would be that I can't quite share the zeal in opposition of some of my fellow-atheists – whose sincere indignation on behalf of abused children has sometimes appeared to be mixed with an opportunistic loathing of clerics in general. And though I share their distaste for the institutional Church – and for the real-world effects of some of its dogmas – it seemed to me unseemly to crow, to say "we told you so", when there was real sorrow in this story – both for the victims of abusing priests and for disillusioned believers.

This self-denying ordinance got a lot harder over the weekend though, after an address from the Pope in which he appeared to dismiss recent criticism of him and his church as the "petty gossip of dominant opinion". I still find myself murmuring those first two words in tones of incredulity. Petty gossip. At a time when the Church is being found guilty of covering up real crimes and facilitating fresh ones, at a time when contrition would seem to be the only morally decent tone to adopt, he talks of how religious faith gives one the courage not to be intimidated by "petty gossip".

MALTA
Malta Today

As Malta prepares to welcome Pope Benedict XVI next week, revelations of child abuse cover-ups have plunged the Vatican into its deepest crisis in centuries. RAPHAEL VASSALLO on the scandal that dare not speak its name

With the Church now facing unprecedented levels of hostility over child abuse allegations, it is difficult to remember a time when priests and bishops were still accorded the respect we now reserve for visiting royalty.

And yet it was only a few years ago that public genuflection before the Archbishop was deemed an almost compulsory obeisance – as was the custom of kneeling to kiss a Monsignor’s ring.
Today, those who remember a time when it was ‘sinful’ to eat meat on a Friday – among countless other insignificant trivialities – find themselves having to digest the news that the same Catholic Church, having exacted such high moral standards from others, had all along been aware of far more immoral and reprehensible activities conducted by members of its own clergy... and not only did it fail abjectly to curb the abuse itself, but in some respects, it appears to have even abetted it.

WISCONSIN
Green Bay Press-Gazette

By Carrie Antlfinger • The Associated Press • March 29, 2010

MILWAUKEE — A man who says he was among some 200 deaf boys allegedly molested by a priest in Wisconsin said Monday the Vatican’s defensive responses to revelations about the case make him feel like he did when he was 12, when no one would listen to him about the abuse.

Arthur Budzinski, 61, said at a news conference outside the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist that Pope Benedict XVI is trying to protect himself against criticism of his handling of the Wisconsin case against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy. Murphy was accused of molesting some 200 boys at the St. John’s School for the Deaf outside Milwaukee from 1950 to 1975. He never was defrocked.

“It’s 2010. I’m not trying to hurt the pope,” Budzinski said. “The pope should do something. I’m just telling my story. That’s all I’m doing,” said his 26-year-old daughter Gigi Budzinski, who interpreted his sign language.

UNITED STATES
Voice of the Faithful

Good Friday is a day of sorrow for the Catholic Church. On this solemn day, we stand in solidarity with victims of clergy abuse and, as Pope Benedict requested of the faithful in Ireland, we too devote our penances for the healing and renewal of the Church. We call on our pastoral leaders to say “Stop the Hiding; Start the Healing.”

• The revelations emerging from Europe these past weeks demonstrate that all the cases have not been resolved, that some priest offenders are still serving. It is long past time to open the files on sex abuse.
• An apology is not enough. The secrecy and oaths of silence must end. The structures that favor deceptions and cover-ups must fall away in favor of the transparency and accountability essential for healing and rebuilding our Church.

WHEN AND WHERE

New York City
- St. Patrick's Cathedral, 12pm - 3pm

Boston
- Cathedral of the Holy Cross, 12pm - 3pm

Chicago
- Holy Name Cathedral, 3pm

Washington, D.C.
- Cathedral of St. Matthew, 12pm – 1pm

EUROPE
BBC News

Gavin Hewitt | 13:07 UK time, Monday, 29 March 2010

I was in Ghent at the weekend and dropped in on Saint Bavo's monumental cathedral. It was Palm Sunday. The place bursts with Gothic extravagance; its soaring brick roof testifying to another era and the muscular confidence of the Catholic Church. By the time I was there the service was over and people, clutching fronds or sprigs of green, were embracing each other.

It was a peaceful ritual that belies the storm battering the Church. Across Europe, there is now a torrent of allegations against predatory priests and the abuse of children. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands people are emerging, with their often buried stories, and pointing their fingers at priests and bishops. One Catholic paper opined that this scandal was the "largest in centuries" to trouble the Church.

The questions facing the Vatican are these: Was its priority protecting vulnerable children or guarding the reputation of the Church? Were children systematically abused at Catholic schools and were paedophile priests shipped out to other parishes rather than being prosecuted?

BRIDGEPORT (CT)
YouTube

[video presentation]

(WTNH) -- The beginning of Holy Week for Catholics has been marred by fresh allegations against Pope Benedict. Bridgeport Bishop William Lori is speaking out in his defense.

UNITED STATES
USA Today

Pope Benedict XVI's ratings with Americans in general and U.S. Catholics in particular have fallen sharply in the wake of daily news stories on the global clerical sexual abuse epidemic.

Those with a favorable view of him fell from 63% of adults -- his personal best in the USA in April 2008, when he visited New York and Washington D.C. -- to 40%, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup survey of 1,033 adults conducted March 26-28. Among Catholics surveyed, the drop was also steep -- from 81% favorable to 61%.

In parallel, his unfavorable ratings climbed from 15% in 2009 to 35% last weekend overall. Catholics in particular also viewed him more critically, with unfavorable rating rising from 12% two years ago to 25% now.

UNITED STATES
Associated Baptist Press

By David Gushee
Monday, March 29, 2010

(ABP) -- The child-sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church has resurfaced with a vengeance, with events in Ireland, Germany, and the United States having been the subjects of recent reporting. A particularly nauseating case involves a Wisconsin priest who is accused of molesting at least one young boy in the confessional, perhaps the holiest and most trusted space in Catholic life. As one who grew up Catholic, I know exactly what that sacred space is supposed to mean.

Today I write as a Baptist ethicist and minister with no desire to condemn the Catholic Church. Indeed, I want to suggest in this column that three of the four main factors that have fueled this scandal are just as relevant in Baptist or other Protestant settings.

First, this scandal has been fueled by imbalances of power between laity and clergy, and especially between children and adults. When a child is sexually abused by the most-trusted authority figure in a church, he or she begins from a position of total powerlessness. He or she starts off with the voicelessness of every child in a world where the rules are set by adults. He or she lives in a context in which adults are far more likely to be believed than children. And if he or she does somehow develop the capacity to articulate the abuse, the complaint must eventually be made to the very institution led by the child’s abuser. The victim will need a significant infusion of power arrayed in solidarity with him or her from other adults -- such as parents, lay leaders in the congregation, lawyers, or the civil authorities -- to start leveling the imbalance of power.

Catholic Culture

With a media assault on Pope Benedict XVI reaching a frenzied level, reporters for dozens of major newspapers and wire services placed responsibility for sex-abuse cases at the Vatican, despite the clear evidence that diocesan bishops have been responsible for disciplinary failures.

An AP story claimed that only 20% of reported abuse cases result in full canonical trials. The truth is that in most cases, disciplinary measures are imposed without a full trial. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), then-Cardinal Ratzinger pressed for vigorous action and authorized diocesan bishops to proceed with their own disciplinary action.

A Reuters story rehearsed the now-familiar charges against the Pope, and only after 18 paragraphs did the reporter mention a vigorous defense by Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. During his years at CDF, the Austrian cardinal said, Cardinal Ratzinger pushed Pope John Paul II to conduct a full inquiry into charges against another Austrian prelate, the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer.

VATICAN CITY
Reuters

(Reuters) - The sex abuse scandals lashing the Vatican have led to calls for an end to priestly celibacy, a cleanout of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the resignation of Pope Benedict, but the pope seems unlikely to alter his approach.

The demands, widely aired in the media, are so far removed from the way Benedict works that abuse victims and other critics who raise them seem bound to be disappointed.

The sex abuse saga, while shameful enough to make Benedict issue several apologies to victims, has many aspects that apparently convince him he can continue to tackle the problem quietly but firmly, without undue fanfare.

"He will plod along undeterred," said Rev. Vincent Twomey, an Irish theologian who has known the pope for 37 years. "He takes note of things, but he's not a magician. He works steadily ... I think he'll weather the storm."

UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

Rev. Debra Haffner

The latest revelations about sexual abuse against children by Roman Catholic priests are nothing short of revolting. The story of Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused more than 200 deaf boys in Milwaukee over decades, despite the boys' speaking out and calling for help, should outrage us all. The new revelations from Germany and other European countries add to the understanding that the prevalence of pedophile priests are, in the words of my colleague, Dan Maguire, "a global Catholic Church pandemic."

"It went up to the Pope," a formerly Roman Catholic friend said to me yesterday, with tears in her eyes. "How is it possible that people knew and didn't stop it?" Unfortunately, the answer is that the Catholic hierarchy did know, and chose to transfer the priests rather than address the crimes they were committing against children.

Yes, crimes. In the secular world, the offending priests and their superiors would be held criminally accountable for their behavior. It is not enough for the Pope to apologize, as he did to victims last week. It is unconscionable when Catholic apologists try to explain away the church's inaction as a relic of another time, when people didn't talk as much about sexual abuse. We are talking now - and learning, to our dismay, how widespread sexual abuse in faith communities really is.

NEW YORK
News Inferno

Religious leaders in New York State continue to fight a proposed child abuse law that would temporarily lift the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging the sexual abuse of children. According to The New York Times, opposition to the law, known as the Child Victims Act, is being led by the Catholic Church, and a loose coalition that includes leaders of the Hasidic and Sephardic Jewish institutions in Brooklyn.

The impetus for the Child Victims Act was the Roman Catholic Church child sexual abuse scandal that has rocked New York, as well as much of the country, over the past decade. Because of the current statute of limitations, hundreds of claims filed in recent years against Catholic priests and dioceses in New York have been dismissed.

Currently, the deadline for bringing such a lawsuit in New York is 5 years after a victim turns 18. The Child Victims Act would give victims a one-year exemption from the statute of limitations. Regardless of how long ago the alleged abuse occurred, they could file suit in civil court. At the year’s end, time limits on such claims would be restored, but with a wider window: Instead of a five-year period after turning 18, victims would have 10 years to file claims.