ABUSE TRACKER

WISCONSIN
SNAP Wisconsin

Lawsuit against Green Bay diocese moving forward; Case involves infamous child predator John Patrick Feeney

The Appleton Post Crescent reports that attempts at mediating a civil lawsuit filed against the Green Bay diocese have failed. The lawsuit was filed by two brothers, Todd and Troy Merryfield, who were sexually assaulted as children by Fr. John Patrick Feeney, one of the Green Bay diocese’s most notorious sex offenders.

Feeney was convicted in 2003 of sexually assaulting the Merryfield brothers and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released in November after serving less than 8 years of his sentence.

The civil trial is scheduled to begin on May 14th.

Feeney had a long history of sexual misconduct in the Green Bay diocese, and church officials knew about it. In his first 14 years as a priest he was assigned to 14 different parishes, a staggering number of transfers for a diocesan priest.

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NEW JERSEY
Patch

By Michael Daigle

Two brothers who grew up on the campus of the Delbarton School where their father was a teacher filed a lawsuit Tuesday, claiming the Catholic school and St. Mary’s Abbey failed to stop alleged sexual abuse.

The brothers, listed in the suit only by the initials “T.C” and “W.C.,” claim they were sexually abused by Rev. Luke Travers, who served as Delbarton headmaster from 1999 to 2007, and was removed last year from an administrative post of a Virginia Catholic school when other allegations of sexual abuse surfaced, and the Rev. Justin Caputo, who until recently was assigned to Notre Dame of Mt. Carmel Parish in Cedar Knolls.

Travers and Caputo are under strict restrictions at St. Mary’s, which means they are accompanied by a fellow priest everywhere they travel and can have no contact with students.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by Tom Gallagher on Mar. 20, 2012 NCR Today

You know it’s bad when a major bank tells you it does not want your business and closes your account. So it happened to the Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR). JP Morgan Chase’s Milan branch communicated the move in a recent letter, according to Italy’s leading financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore.

Reuters reports the following:

JP Morgan Chase is closing the Vatican bank’s account with an Italian branch of the U.S. banking giant because of concerns about a lack of transparency at the Holy See’s financial institution, Italian newspapers reported.

The move is a blow to the Vatican’s drive to have its bank included in Europe’s “white list” of states that comply with international standards against tax fraud and money-laundering.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 –

The Vatican was accused today of not accepting responsibility for its role in the cover-up of the sex abuse of children in Ireland.

Campaigners for survivors of clerical abuse criticised a recommendation from Rome to separate trainee Catholic priests from ordinary students in universities, claiming it would segregate seminaries from the real world.

A new report on the clerical abuse crisis in Ireland found while guidelines to protect children against paedophile priests are being followed, measures must be taken to ensure trainees are properly prepared for the role.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

VATICAN CITY
Los Angeles Times

REPORTING FROM ROME -– In a report summarizing the results of an internal investigation of Irish dioceses and seminaries, the Vatican on Tuesday acknowledged “with a great sense of pain and shame” that minors and young people had been abused by the very figures they trusted most.

The investigation, or Apostolic Visitation, was ordered by Pope Benedict XVI in response to the widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests in Ireland and subsequent coverup that had been detailed in at least two damning reports commissioned by the Irish government.

The Vatican said that in issuing the eight-page summary, “The Holy See re-echoes the sense of dismay and betrayal which the Holy Father expressed in his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland regarding the sinful and criminal acts that were at the root of this particular crisis.”

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NEW JERSEY
Observer-Tribune

By PHIL GARBER, Managing Editor

MENDHAM TWP. ‑ Two former residents who were sexually abused by a former priest at St. Joseph Church when they were youths, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday claiming they were also victimized by two monks at the Delbarton School in Morris Township in the 1970s.

The suit was filed in Superior Court in Morristown by attorney Gregory Gianforcaro of Phillipsburg on behalf of William and Thomas Crane, twins who are now 46 and living on the west coast.

An advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse also said he has spoken with six other former students who claim they also were victimized by the two monks, the Rev. Justin Capato and the Rev. Luke Travers, a former headmaster.

A spokesman for St. Mary’s Abbey, which runs Delbarton, said an internal review board is investigating claims against Travers and Capato.

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BRIDGEPORT (CT)
The Hartford Courant

By DANIELA ALTIMARI, JEAN MARBELLA, MARY GAIL HARE
The Hartford Courant

1:51 p.m. EDT, March 20, 2012
Bishop William E. Lori of the Diocese of Bridgeport is being introduced Tuesday as the 16th Archbishop of Baltimore.

He was chosen by Pope Benedict XVI to replace CardinalEdwin O’Brien, who was archbishop from October 2007 to August 2011 before leaving to become the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.

Lori is to become the 16th Archbishop of Baltimore on May 16. He was scheduled to be introduced at a news conference at the Baltimore Basilica.

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UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

By Bryan Cones

Legal action taken by two Missouri dioceses against the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests is starting to gain traction in the media–op-eds here and here–beginning with a New York Times story by Laurie Goodstein, which quoted the ever-ready-to-talk Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, saying that the U.S. bishops were acting “collectively” against SNAP: “I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys,” he said. Bishops’ spokesperson Sister Mary Ann Walsh says that there has been no such meeting.

(Side note: Why does Bill Donohue get to speak for the church without correction from the bishops on anything he wants, while Sister Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association gets criticized from none other than N.Y. Cardinal Timothy Dolan for expressing her own “Catholic” opinion about health care reform and the contraceptive mandate? Discuss.)

Donohue aside, it is clear that lawyers for the dioceses of Kansas City-St. Joseph and St. Louis have taken aggressive legal action–what some call a fishing expedition–against SNAP, seeking discovery of years of internal documents. Already hit with $50,000 in legal bills, SNAP is looking for donations and fears being forced to shut down. (You can read SNAP’s David Clohessy here on the matter.)

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald, has said legislation to put child protection guidelines on a statutory footing is being finalised and would leave no doubt over the responsibilities of organisations and individuals.

She was responding to the publication of a report by the Vatican on the sexual abuse of children in the Irish Catholic Church.

The report, which was compiled following visits here by teams of Vatican-appointed foreign church-leaders, has acknowledged failures and said lessons have been learned.

Christine Buckley, an abuse survivor, said she would have liked to have seen an apology to victims, as well as more detail than a summary report.

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By FRANK BRUNI

In today’s column I wrote about Rick Santorum and American Catholicism and the church’s child sexual abuse crisis, and I wanted to circle back to that last item in this post, which is also a postscript.

I mentioned a support group for victims that’s under fire from church lawyers. That group is run by a man named David Clohessy, and if you want to understand just how much pain the crisis has caused Catholics, along with some of the ways it has tested families and challenged Catholics’ faith, his story is an instructive, heartbreaking one.

I told it in some detail in The Times’s Sunday magazine a decade ago, and provide the link here. I still vividly remember sitting with him and interviewing him, just as I still vividly remember sitting with and interviewing many people with recollections of sexual abuse by priests. Sexual abuse by any trusted adult is a shattering thing; sexual abuse by a priest or minister or other religious cleric upends a child’s every assumption about who’s safe and who’s not; where moral leadership can be found; what it means for a person to wear a badge of authority or the vestments of holiness. It says that nothing and no one is really safe.

One of the reasons the Catholic church’s child sexual abuse crisis has received so much attention over so many years isn’t, as some Catholic leaders have contended, primarily because there’s an anti-Catholic and anti-religious bias in secular society, and that nonreligious journalists are thrilling to the opportunity to humiliate the church. (Journalists thrill to malfeasance in all walks and corners of life.) It’s because of the magnitude of the violation of trust at work here. Before parents realized they should be as skeptical of a priest’s attention to their child as to anyone else’s, priests had special access to children. And priests certainly had special sway over them.

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UNITED STATES
Minnesota SNAP

[note: This is satire.]

By Vinnie Nauheimer

St. Peter, “What is that smell?”
“Its pope Benedict XVI, Jesus,” said St. Peter
But he’s not supposed to die for another couple of minutes.
I know Jesus, but his cologne always gets there five minutes before he does!

As philosophers remind us, in every piece of humor is some truth. What possible truths could be associated with an 84 year old pontiff having a custom blended scent made for him to wear as has recently been reported in the Italian press? Maybe the toilet water in the Vatican is backing up or maybe the stench of the rotting empire is too much to bear. Then again, maybe this is what happened:

The Story of how Sexual Abuse Became Policy

In the beginning there was clerical sexual abuse and then came all the hierarchal excuses for it. The excuses were nonsense and without merit. And darkness fell over the church, the victims and their families. And the victims, their families and the laity spoke among themselves telling each other, “This is a crock of shit and it stinks to high heaven.”

So the families went to the monsignor and said, “Clergy abuse is a bunch of crap and we can’t stand the stench!” And the monsignor went to the bishop and said to them, “Clerical abuse is like a container of excrement and a very strong one at that. The laity can’t stand it! The strong smell is driving people to leave the church.”

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY | Tue Mar 20, 2012

(Reuters) – A Vatican report on the sexual abuse of Irish children by Catholic clergy accused Ireland’s religious leaders of negligence and called for more reforms there to avoid a similarly “shameful” scandal in the future.

Irish bishops assured Vatican investigators that they would promptly notify civil authorities of new sexual abuse cases and would make changes to Catholic education and seminary life.

“With a great sense of pain and shame, it must be acknowledged that within the Christian community innocent young people were abused by clerics and religious (nuns) to whose care they had been entrusted,” the report, released on Tuesday, said. “Those who should have exercised diligence often failed to do so effectively.”

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IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

The Vatican has been accused of not accepting responsibility for its role in the cover-up of the sex abuse of children in Ireland.

Campaigners for survivors of clerical abuse criticised a recommendation from Rome to separate trainee Catholic priests from ordinary students in universities, claiming it would segregate seminaries from the real world.

A new report on the clerical abuse crisis in Ireland found while guidelines to protect children against paedophile priests are being followed, measures must be taken to ensure trainees are properly prepared for the role.

Child protection classes will be introduced for seminaries, who should also have separate living quarters to focus on prayer and finding their priestly identity, it said.

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IRELAND
Breaking News

One in Four has said the Vatican is still not accepting responsibility for the purposeful cover-ups of clerical child sex abuse.

The support group said the findings of the Apostolic Visitation to Ireland, publisged today, failed to address the Holy See’s role in protecting abusive priests at the expense of children.

The visitation team appointed by Pope Benedict said that while excellent efforts were being made to improve safety measures, more work was required.

It recommended devoting more time to listening to and supporting victims and recommended audits to monitor the implementation of guidelines.

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IRELAND
Irish Central

By
BERNIE MALONE,
IrishCentral Staff Writer

Published Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The Vatican has released a report, published on Rome Reports, which was ordered by Pope Benedict XVI in the wake of the Murphy and Ryan inquiries into clerical sex abuse in Ireland.

The inquiry was carried out by the Apostolic Visitation to Ireland. It involved teams visiting all four Catholic archdioceses, seminaries and religious congregations.

The report acknowledges progress made by the Irish bishops in protecting children along with the “open wounds” left in the Catholic community. The bishops are fulfilling their promise to report new cases, however, it also commented on the profound lack of trust among the congregation and laid this blame on those priests who failed to report abuse in the past.

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CLEVELAND (OH)
WTAM

Colleen O’Neill, Newsradio WTAM 1100

(Cleveland)- A Texas resident has purchased a billboard in Cleveland to get the message out about reopening 13 Northeast Ohio churches.

Elaine Andrews Carroll who attended St. Wendelin’s Church when she was a child has put a message on a billboard on Carnegie Avenue near E. 13th Street. It reads, “Bishop of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, reopen our church doors! Restore our parishes! Now!.”

Carroll says this isn’t to harass anyone but she wanted to make a statement. “We’re not giving up, we know in our hearts and souls this is wrong. These churches were wrongly closed, they need to be reopened.”

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BALTIMORE (MD)
Catholic News Agency

By Benjamin Mann

Baltimore, Md., Mar 20, 2012 / 10:36 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Benedict XVI appointed Bishop William E. Lori, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ committee on religious freedom, as the 16th Archbishop of Baltimore on March 20.

“The very thought of serving and leading the nation’s ‘Premier See’ fills me with joy and also with profound gratitude, first and foremost to the Lord who shepherds his people in love,” said Bishop Lori, referring to the long-standing national primacy of the first Catholic diocese established in the U.S.

Archbishop-designate Lori’s installation will take place May 16 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. In an announcement from the Baltimore archdiocese, the new archbishop-designate thanked the Pope for entrusting him with leadership of the “great and historic” local Church.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the decision by JPMorgan Chase to close the Vatican bank account because of alleged lack of transparency:

JPMorgan Chase is an expert in secrecy. Last November, it was reported that the bank, one of the biggest traders of credit derivatives, told their shareholders that they had sold protection on more than $5 trillion of debt. So who benefited? Such economic losers as Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. According to Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, the stockholders were kept ignorant. “As concerns mount that those countries may not be creditworthy, investors are being kept in the dark about how much risk U.S. banks face from a default.”

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UNITED STATES
Freethinker (United Kingdom)

THE shrill voice of Catholic outrage in the US – Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights – has reportedly declared a “no more Mr Nice Guy” policy in relation to payouts to victims of clerical sexual abuse.

According to the New York Times, the Church is planning to turn the tables on the advocacy group, SNAP, which has long supported victims of paedophile priests, by demanding that the group discloses more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The ghastly Donohue said targeting the network was justified because:

Bill Donohue

SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group:

The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

CHARLIE TAYLOR

The Vatican is still not accepting responsibility for its role in creating the culture of cover-ups of the sexual abuse of children, it was claimed today.

One in Four, which supports survivors of abuse, expressed disappointment over the Vatican’s failure to acknowledge that its interventions in the abuse scandal had allowed church leaders to to ignore guidelines and to protect the Church at the expense of the safety of children.

“While we welcome the findings of the Visitation that the Irish Church now has good child protection practices in place we feel it is a lost opportunity to address the role played by the Vatican in perpetuating the policy of protecting abusive priests at the expense of children,” said executive director Maeve Lewis.

The organisation backed the recommendation that the Church devote more time to listening to abuse survivors and attending to their needs. However, she said One in Four had noticed a hardening of attitude on the part of church authorities the question of compensation for victims.

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VATICAN CITY
The New York Times

[the report]

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: March 20, 2012

VATICAN CITY — The Catholic Church in Ireland has made “excellent” progress in addressing a sexual abuse scandal and reporting new abuse cases directly to the Vatican, but would-be priests need better screening and training, according to a summary of a nearly yearlong investigation issued by the Vatican on Tuesday.

The summary also noted that there was evidence of “dissent” from church teaching among priests, religious and lay people, a “serious situation” it said should not be tolerated.

The investigation — an Apostolic Visitation, in Vatican parlance — was announced by Pope Benedict XVI in March 2010. Four high-ranking prelates chosen by the pope conducted the inquiry last year, including Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, who investigated Irish seminaries and religious institutions, and Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, who examined the Dublin Diocese.

The investigation was part of the Vatican’s response to a series of scathing reports by the Irish government that found cases of sexual abuse by priests and evidence of a widespread cover-up.

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VATICAN CITY
Chicago Tribune

March 20 (Reuters) – VATICAN CITY, March 20 (Reuters) – A Vatican report on the sexual abuse of Irish children by Catholic clergy accused Ireland’s religious leaders of negligence and called for more reforms there to avoid a similarly “shameful” scandal in the future.

There have been a series of reports on allegations of child abuse by priests and members of religious orders. Here are some details of their findings:

* OCTOBER 2005:

— An inquiry was set up following the resignation in 2002 of the Bishop of Ferns, Brendan Comiskey, when it emerged he had been aware of the activities of an abusive priest in the
diocese, but failed to protect the victims. The priest, Father Sean Fortune, committed suicide in 1999 after he was charged with multiple sex offences.

— The 270-page report detailed the Church’s handling of 100 allegations of abuse against 21 priests in the diocese of Ferns in County Wexford dating back to the mid-1960s. Among the
allegations were accusations of rape.

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by Barbara Dorris on March 20, 2012

Whenever church officials are promoted, we always hope for the best. We hope that church officials will bring in an outsider who has not been involved in an institution that has been marred by cover-ups, or that a priest is promoted instead of a monsignor or fellow bishop. Today, when a Jesuit priest Fr. Thomas Smolich was tapped to head the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, church officials did exactly the opposite of what we hope for. They elevated a man with a horrific record on child sex abuse and who has been allegedly involved in many cover ups.

Smolich, who has worked as President of the Jesuit Conference of the United States since 2006, has a history rife with excusals of predator priests. In 2002, Smolich was working as the Provincial for the California province of the Jesuits. When Angel Crisostomo Mariano was sued in civil court for abusing a mentally disabled man, Smolich denied knowing much about Mariano at all, despite the fact that, at that point, Smolich had been roommates with Mariano for two years.

Beyond living with credibly accused predator priests, Smolich has housed other convicted and accused predators at the Sacred Heart Center in Los Gatos, CA where these predators have been able to mix with vulnerable adults, in some cases abusing them. Fr. James Chevedden was wheelchair-bound and living at Sacred Heart when he was abused by serial predator Br. Charles Leonard Connor.

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UNITED STATES
Conference of Major Superiors of Men

SILVER SPRING, MD (March 19, 2012). The Conference of Major Superiors of Men (CMSM)
announced today that the Right Rev. Giles P. Hayes, OSB, Abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey in
Morristown, NJ, has resigned as the conference president for reasons of health. In accord with the statutes of the conference, the Very Rev. Thomas H. Smolich, SJ, CMSM Vice President, assumed the office of president of CMSM. The membership of CMSM will elect a new president for a two‐year term at the next assembly of the conference.

At the recent semi‐annual meeting, the CMSM National Board of Directors chose Sacred Heart Brother Ronald Talbot, SC, present Secretary/Treasurer, to serve as Vice President of the conference until the next assembly.

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IRELAND
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by Barbara Dorris on March 20, 2012

These recommendations, not surprisingly, are another tired, ineffective re-hash of the promises made by US bishops a decade ago, promises that have had little impact on this crisis.

No institution can police itself, especially not an ancient, rigid, secretive all male monarchy with a horrific history of ignoring and concealing child sex crimes. “Internal” reports or inquiries or recommendations by such institutions are nearly meaningless. They’re more about trying to restore a battered public image and the confidence of pained parishioners than about genuine reform.

During or after devastating clergy sex crimes and cover ups, Catholic officials will promise the sun, moon and stars to parishioners and the public, hoping to “turn the page” and deflect attention from the painful present to an allegedly more promising future. But wishing or pledging reform doesn’t create reform.

Only decisive action creates reform. And when it comes to this on-going, heinous scandal, decisive action by the church hierarchy seems to be forever lacking.

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ILLINOIS
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel

March 20, 2012

A Lake Geneva Catholic priest who spent most of his career in the Vatican diplomatic corps, has been tapped to lead the Diocese of Rockford, Ill., Pope Benedict XVI announced Tuesday morning.

Monsignor David Malloy, 56, pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish and former general secretary of the Washington-based U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, will succeed 76-year-old Bishop Thomas Doran.

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which includes Lake Geneva, announced the appointment on its website Tuesday morning, with Archbishop Jerome Listecki calling it a loss for the archdiocese but “a gain for the faithful of Rockford.”

“Our prayers and good wishes go with him as he responds to his new call.”

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NEW YORK
Catholic League

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:

Sexual abuse of students in the New York City schools is exploding, yet New York State Assemblywoman Margaret Markey turns a blind eye to it. She recently introduced legislation, as she does annually, that exclusively targets private schools for cases of abuse that occurred a long time ago. The cover story in today’s New York Daily News reads, “Record 14 School Staff Busted Already: Readin’ Writin’ & Rikers.” It details crimes ranging from sexual abuse to assault (Rikers is a jail).

To his credit, New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott is cracking down. He reviewed 250 employee records dating to 2000 and is seeking to oust the guilty. But Walcott doesn’t have time to deal with old cases—he’s got an epidemic on his hands right now. For example, after a school aide was arrested February 10 for molesting a boy (boys are frequently the victims these days), we learned that he got a slap on the wrist for offensive sexual behavior in 2006.

Sexual molesters in the schools are not always given a mere oral reprimand—they are simply moved to another school. It happens so often in the public schools that it is called “passing the trash.” Last month, the New York Times did a story on Walcott’s efforts. “In two of the cases,” it reported, “the teacher or teacher’s aide had been found to have acted inappropriately with students at previous schools, but had been able to transfer. Education officials acknowledged on Friday that they had failed to notify the principals of the new schools of the earlier accusations.”

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VATICAN CITY
International Business Times

By Oliver Tree

March 20, 2012

The Vatican bank is facing a possible money-laundering scandal after it emerged JP Morgan was closing one of its accounts due to a lack of information about the source of deposits, Italian newspapers report.

The bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR in Italian), reportedly failed to provide a Milan affiliate of JP Morgan with details about payments into the account, in which €1.8 billion has been deposited in the last 18 months.

earlier this month the bank was listed by the U.S. State Department as being potentially vulnerable to money-laundering, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported.

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IRELAND
New Ross Standard

Tuesday March 20 2012

Changes should be made to seminaries and admission criteria for would-be priests, a Vatican report on the child abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland has warned.

A probe into the handling of clerical sex abuse cases found that while guidelines to protect children against paedophile priests are being followed, academic programmes in seminaries should put more focus on the issue.

Senior churchmen were sent by Rome to investigate safeguarding procedures and protocols in the Catholic Church in Ireland after it was rocked by several reports which unveiled decades of abuse and cover-ups by church and state authorities.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Catholics4Change

March 20, 2012 by Susan Matthews

[The List Cardinal Bevilacqua Didn’t Want You to See]

The following 2004 testimony of Msgr. William J. Lynn in regard to a document dated Feb. 18, 1994 is admitted as evidence of conspiracy in the upcoming trial. Msgr. Molloy did not shred his copy as instructed by Cardinal Bevilacqua in 1994. It was recently recovered from a safe. It’s a good thing considering Msgr. Lynn’s faulty memory.

Q. And the first paragraph of this document reads: Father Beisel and I reviewed the 323 files that are presently stored in the secret archives. Attached is a list of priests who have been guilty of or accused of sexual misconduct with a minor according to the file material…

…Well, let me ask you this question then, Monsignor (Lynn): After you prepared this document, what action did you take as a result of having gone through the secret archive files? Did you make changes to anybody’s assignment? Did you say hey, we better take a look at this person because you know what, I realize that this person is in assignment and they have a history? Did you do anything like that after reviewing all of the secret files?

Msgr. Lynn: I – we may have.

Q. You don’t have any recollection of it?

Msgr. Lynn: I don’t.
….

Q. And this memo, apparently attached to it was the list of the priests; is that correct?

Msgr. Lynn: That’s right.

Q. And you can’t find that document?

Msgr. Lynn: I cannot.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., to be the new archbishop of Baltimore, and he also named new bishops for the dioceses of Rockford, Ill., and Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla.

The Vatican announced the appointments Tuesday.

Monsignor David Malloy, 56, who was general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2006 to 2011, has been named bishop of Rockford. He is currently pastor of St. Francis de Sales Church in Lake Geneva, Wis.

Fr. Gregory L. Parkes, vicar general of the Diocese of Orlando, Fla., and pastor of Corpus Christi Parish in Celebration, Fla., was named bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee. He will turn 48 April 2.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

“Paedophilia”, “obscurantism” and other issues are spurring hackers to take action against the Holy See

Alessandro Speciale
Vatican City

It seems to have become a habit: over the past few weeks, the Anonynous hacker group has targeted the Vatican website www.vatican.va three times, each time making it impossible to access for about an hour or so. The first attack took place on 3 March, the second – which also targeted Vatican Radio servers, hosted by a foreign provider and not by an internal Vatican provider – took place on 12 March an the third and apparently most brief attack took place today.

But why so much viciousness against the Vatican? It is hard to tell reading the communiqués sent by the group of computer pirates, published on the anon-news.blogspost.it website. The first time, the accusations against the Vatican took on the classical anti-clerical tone – from the killing of Italian philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake, to accusations of obscurantism. The second time Anonymous focused its accusations on the affairs discussed on Vatican Radio. The third time, the collective communiqué only made reference to the paedophilia scandal, denouncing the violence a priest allegedly shown against a girl who was a friend of one of the hackers.

In all three cases, Anonymous seems to have been unable to get into the Vatican server directly – although it supposedly managed to hack into the Vatican Radio servers, at least partially – also because, as the Holy See stated, on all three occasions when Vatican websites were attacked, traffic was quickly re-directed to other servers.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

[the report]

Two years ago exactly Benedict XVI ordered a Visitation of Irish dioceses, seminaries and religious houses in the wake of the sexual abuse of minors by priests and religious. Today, in Ireland, the Vatican will publish a summary of its findings

Gerard O’Connell
Rome

A summary of the findings of the Visitation to the Irish Church ordered by Pope Benedict XVI in the wake of the sexual-abuse of minors by priests’ scandal will be published today in Ireland.

The news was broken late on the night of March 19 by the Communications Office of the Irish Bishops’ Conference in an email to the media. It said a press conference would be held at Saint Patrick’s College Maynooth at 10.00 a.m. (Irish time) on March 20, to coincide with the publication of the “Summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland.” It announced that “senior members” of the Irish Bishops’ Conference and of the Conference of Religious of Ireland would attend.

The publication of the Visitation’s findings comes exactly two years after Pope Benedict first announced it in his Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, released by the Vatican on 20 March 2010.

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BALTIMORE (MD)
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on March 20, 2012

This is a callous choice and a terribly disappointing one for anyone who cares about kids.

Again, Pope Benedict elevates a corrupt cleric with a long and troubling track record of protecting predator priests and church secrets over innocent kids. As long as the Vatican keeps rewarding wrongdoers, wrongdoing will continue.

Lori has kept more secrets and more accused priests in ministry than most bishops. He pretends to be a reformer but his public relations and actual performance conflict.

Under Lori, the Bridgeport diocese

–kept Fr. Martin Ryan in a parish for nine years after he was accused, in 2002, of molesting a girl, despite having paid her a settlement. (He was suspended just last year after being accused of sexually harassing a woman.)

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FLORIDA
Fox 10

PENSACOLA, Fla. (WALA) – Pope Benedict XVI has named 48-year-old Father Gregory L. Parkes as the Bishop-elect of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee.

Bishop-elect Parkes has served the Orlando diocese as Vicar General and Chancellor for Canonical Affairs and as the pastor of Corpus Christi Parish in Celebration, Florida.

In addition to serving as vicar general and chancellor for canonical affairs for the Orlando diocese, Bishop-elect Parkes has also served at the diocesan level on the College of Consultors, the Finance Committee, the Priest Placement Board, the Presbyteral Council, and the Incardination Committee. He serves on the Board of Trustees of St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida.

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IRELAND
The Guardian (United Kingdom)

Henry McDonald in Dublin
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012

Every trainee Catholic priest in Ireland must attend child protection classes, the Vatican has recommended in a major report on how the church handled the republic’s clerical abuse scandals.

Vatican Radio released the findings of the Holy See’s widespread investigation into seminaries and dioceses across the island of Ireland. It was ordered directly by Pope Benedict XVI as Rome sought to address the child abuse crisis that has severely undermined its reputation and authority in the republic.

The apostolic visitation led by the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, noted that there had been some “progressive steps” towards reforming church structures and in particular the handling of allegations of child abuse. Several Irish judicial inquiries found the Catholic hierarchy had covered up allegations of abuse, often by moving accused priests to other dioceses or even out of the country.

The Vatican proposed new restrictions and vetting procedures on entrance to seminaries for priests, and new child protection training for all would-be clergy in Ireland.

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National Catholic Register

by Edward Pentin Tuesday, March 20, 2012

In an important news day from the Vatican today, Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., has been named as the new Archbishop of Baltimore. He replaces Cardinal Edwin O’Brien who last week took up his new post here in Rome as Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.

Bishop Lori was one of three appointments to U.S. dioceses announced today:

* Msgr. David Malloy, until now a priest of the diocese of Milwaukee and a former general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been appointed Bishop of Rockford, Ill., replacing Bishop Thomas Doran.
* Fr. Gregory Parkes, who has been serving as Chancellor and Vicar General of the Diocese of Orlando, is appointed Bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee, taking over from Bishop John Huston Ricard who stood down in March last year.

In Canada, Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, Archbishop of Montreal, has stood down and will be replaced by Archbishop Christian Lépine, until now an auxiliary bishop in Montreal.

Also published today was a summary of the Apostolic Visitation of Ireland. The document makes a series of observations and recommendations. In particular, it notes: “Among the pastoral priorities that have emerged most strongly is the need for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults; a broad and well-planned ongoing theological and spiritual formation for clergy, Religious and lay faithful; a new focus on the role of the laity, who are called to be engaged both within the Church and in bearing witness before society, in accordance with the social teachings of the Church.”

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VATICAN CITY
Fox News

Published March 20, 2012

Associated Press

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican said Tuesday that archdioceses in Ireland are making an “excellent” progress in efforts to implement norms to protect children in the wake of decades of pedophile priest scandals.

The Vatican released a summary of findings of its yearlong investigation ordered by Pope Benedict XVI after the uproar over widespread child abuse by priests and allegations of cover-ups by the church.

The Vatican said its investigators saw for themselves “how much the shortcomings of the past” caused an inadequate reaction “not least on the part of various bishops and religious superiors.”

It expressed a “great sense of pain and shame” that innocent young people were abused by priests and nuns “while those who should have exercised vigilance often failed to do so effectively.”

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IRELAND
Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference

[the report]

Background

On 19 March 2010, following a meeting in the Vatican with the bishops of Ireland, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI issued a Pastoral Letter to the Catholics in Ireland. The Pastoral Letter expressed his deep sorrow and regret regarding abuse perpetrated by priests and religious on victims “You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry” and addressed how such cases had been responded to in the past. The Pastoral Letter also announced a number of “concrete initiatives” including an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. The Apostolic Visitation was “intended to assist the local Church in her path of renewal.”

A press conference was held today in the Columba Centre, Saint Patrick’s College, Maynooth, to mark the publication of the Summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland. In attendance at the press conference were Cardinal Seán Brady, Primate of All Ireland and President of the Irish Bishops’ Conference; Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Primate of Ireland and Vice-President of the Irish Bishops’ Conference; the Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, His Excellency Archbishop Charles Brown; and, the Director General of the Conference of Religious of Ireland, Sister Marianne O’Connor. Please see below Cardinal Brady’s opening statement at the press conference:

Comments by Cardinal Brady:

On behalf of the Catholic community in Ireland I welcome the publication of the findings of the recent Apostolic Visitation. This visitation arose from the concrete initiatives proposed by His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI in his Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland of March 2010. We thank Pope Benedict, and those who collaborated in carrying out the Visitation of the four archdioceses, the religious congregations and seminaries. We acknowledge with gratitude all those who contributed to this important and historic initiative by meeting the visitors and making submissions to them. Special priority was given to meetings with survivors of abuse who were assured of the particular closeness of the Holy Father to them in this process. The Visitators also met with a broad representation of the Catholic faithful.

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IRELAND
UTV

A major new report from the Vatican into clerical abuse expresses a “great sense of pain and shame” and calls for the church to continue devoting time to victims.

Senior Catholic leaders visited Ireland in early 2011 to investigate the implications of child abuse in each of the four archdiocese.

Publishing their findings on Tuesday, the Apostolic Visitation said the scandals have “opened wounds” and led people to lose trust in their pastors.

They found that “innocent young people were abused by clerics and religious to whose care they had been entrusted, while those who should have exercised vigilance often failed to do so effectively.”

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 20 March 2012 (VIS) – The Holy Father:

– Appointed Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, U.S.A., as archbishop of Baltimore (area 12,430, population 3,119,000, Catholics 499,529, priests 543, permanent deacons 158, religious 1,249), U.S.A.

– Appointed Msgr. David J. Malloy of the clergy of the archdiocese of Milwaukee, U.S.A., pastor of the parish of St. Francis de Sales at Lake Geneva, as bishop of Rockford (area 16,717, population 1,665,000, Catholics 451,509, priests 288, permanent deacons 136, religious 184), U.S.A. The bishop-elect was born in Milwaukee in 1956 and ordained a priest in 1983. He studied in Rome then served for a number of years in the diplomatic service of the Holy See before becoming an official of the Prefecture of the Pontifical Household. From 2006 to 2011 he was secretary general of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He succeeds Bishop Thomas G. Doran, whose resignation from the pastoral care of the same diocese the Holy Father accepted, upon having reached the age limit.

– Appointed Bishop Christian Lepine, auxiliary of the archdiocese of Montreal, Canada, as metropolitan archbishop of the same archdiocese (area 1,103, population 2,574,000, Catholics 1,640,000, priests 1,163, permanent deacons 100, religious 4,158). He succeeds Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, whose resignation from the pastoral care of the same archdiocese the Holy Father accepted, upon having reached the age limit.

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BRIDGEPORT (CT)
CT Post

Bishop William E. Lori, who led the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocese through a burgeoning sexual abuse scandal left behind by his predecessor, has been named the 16th Archbishop of Baltimore.

Pope Benedict XVI made the announcement Tuesday.

Lori will succeed Cardinal Edwin O’Brien, who served as Baltimore’s 15th archbishop from October 2007 to August 2011 when he was named grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.

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CITTA DEL VATICANO
VIS

Città del Vaticano, 20 marzo 2012 (VIS).Dal 14 al 16 marzo si sono svolti in Vaticano alcuni incontri di lavoro fra le Autorità della Santa Sede e dello Stato della Città del Vaticano, e gli esperti del Moneyval, Divisione del Consiglio d’Europa che si occupa della valutazione dei sistemi antiriciclaggio dei Paesi Membri.

Un Comunicato, reso pubblico sabato 17 marzo, rende noto che: “Le riunioni, (…) hanno consentito di proseguire nella raccolta di informazioni sui passi compiuti nel processo di adeguamento agli standards internazionali in materia di prevenzione e contrasto del riciclaggio e del finanziamento del terrorismo, come l’adozione del Decreto N. CLIX del 25 gennaio 2012, (…) nonché la ratifica e l’adesione ad alcune Convenzioni internazionali rilevanti in materia. (…) La presente fase condurrà alla redazione di un rapporto, che, come era stato previsto, sarà esaminato dall’Assemblea Plenaria di Moneyval del luglio prossimo”.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 16 March 2012 (VIS) – The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has opened a new domain (www.doctrinafidei.va) within the official website of the Holy See. In this way, the congregation hopes to facilitate the consultation of its documents which, having the express approbation of the Holy Father, participate in his ordinary Magisterium as the Peter’s Successor. Attentive reception of these texts is important for all members of the faithful and in particular for those who are engaged in theological and pastoral work.

The major documents are available in eight languages: Latin, French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Polish. Certain documents are also available in Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, and Dutch. There is a general list of all the texts organised chronologically, and three subgroups of these texts, divided into doctrinal, disciplinary and sacramental documents.

The new domain also presents information on the Congregation’s series “Documenti e Studi”, which are individual printed volumes presenting a major document of the Congregation together with commentaries by noted theologians. There is also a description of the volumes containing the proceedings of various symposia organised by the Congregation in recent years, as well as speeches and other contributions by cardinal prefects.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 20 March 2012 (VIS) – Given below is a note released this morning by the Holy See Press Office concerning the summary of the findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland. It is, the English-language text reads, “a synthesis of the results of the Visitations to the four archdioceses, to religious institutes and to the Irish seminaries. It has been approved by the offices which conducted the Visitation and it also contains some further observations from the Holy See, in addition to those that the individual dicasteries communicated to the leaders of the respective archdioceses or institutes.

“There follows a list of some of the principal elements contained in the summary:

“(a) The Holy See reiterates the sense of dismay expressed by Pope Benedict XVI in his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland and the closeness that he has often manifested towards the victims of these sinful and criminal acts committed by priests and religious.

“(b) The Visitation, which was pastoral in nature, was able on the one hand to acknowledge the seriousness of the shortcomings that gave rise, in the past, not least on the part of various bishops and religious superiors, to an inadequate understanding of and reaction to the terrible phenomenon of the abuse of minors. On the other hand, it is clearly pointed out that, beginning in the 1990s, decisive progress has been made, leading to a greater awareness of the problem and profound changes in the way of addressing it. It is recommended that bishops and religious superiors keep up their commitment to welcoming and supporting victims of abuse.

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NEDERLAND
de Volkskrant

Een op de drie katholieke priesters heeft zoveel last van stress en psychologische problemen dat hij een burn-out oploopt. Voornaamste oorzaken zijn de toenemende werkdruk bij pastorale activiteiten en het besmeurde imago als gevolg van de vele schandalen van seksueel misbruik van minderjarigen door katholieke geestelijken.

Dit blijkt uit een onderzoek dat de Italiaanse pater en psychotherapeut Giuseppe Crea onlangs presenteerde op een congres met de opmerkelijke titel ‘Priesters op de divan’. Aanwezig op de bijeenkomst aan de Salesiaanse universiteit in Rome waren ruim tweehonderd geestelijken, psychologen, therapeuten en Vaticaan-watchers. Unaniem kwamen ze tot de conclusie dat het bepaald geen pretje is om anno 2012 priester in de katholieke kerk te zijn.

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UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Carl Siciliano

Cardinal Dolan, I write to you as the director of the Ali Forney Center, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to homeless LGBT youth. I am writing to you on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of LGBT youths who have been driven from their homes by parents unwilling or unable to accept their own children because they are gay. And I write to you as a member of the Archdiocese of New York who is deeply ashamed by the ways that his bishop contributes to the abuse and harm suffered by these youths.

I want you to understand how you, and other religious leaders who fight against the acceptance of LGBT people, are helping to create a national tragedy. As youths find the courage and integrity to be honest about who they are at younger ages, hundreds of thousands are being turned out of their homes and forced to survive alone on the streets by parents who cannot accept having a gay child. Parental rejection has become so prevalent that LGBT youths make up an astonishing 40 percent of the nation’s homeless youth population.

Do you know that a recent study of family rejection found that parents who identify themselves as “strongly religious” are much more likely to reject their LGBT children?

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DEUTSCHLAND
Katholisch

Bischof Ackermann verteidigt Leitlinien gegen Missbrauch

Bonn – Er hat einen Zusatz-Job, um den ihn keiner beneidet: Seit Februar 2010 ist der Trierer Bischof Stephan Ackermann Missbrauchsbeauftragter der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz. In einer der größten Krise der katholischen Kirche seit Jahrzehnten hat der damals 46-Jährige eine wichtige Position übernommen und die Aufgabe seither ziemlich souverän gelöst.

Doch jetzt hat Ackermann in seiner eigenen Diözese Probleme. Mitte März hatte der “Trierische Volksfreund” berichtet, dass ein 1995 wegen mehrerer Fälle sexuellen Missbrauchs zu zwei Jahren auf Bewährung verurteilter Priester im Saarland als Aushilfspfarrer eingesetzt werde. Er sei vor allem in der Krankenhausseelsorge tätig und feiere in einer Pfarrei heilige Messen, so der Bericht, den das Bistum bestätigte.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Braunschweiger Zeitung

Der Missbrauchsbeauftragte der Bundesregierung, Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, sagte, vier Monate nach dem Ende des Runden Tisches hätten die zuständigen Bundesministerien noch kein Konzept vorgelegt. «Vier Monate sind aus Sicht der Betroffenen eine sehr lange Zeit», sagte er. «Die Betroffenen drängen. Und das auch zu recht», sagte Rörig, der das Amt von Christine Bergmann übernommen hatte.

Der Runde Tisch hatte sich auf ein Maßnahmenpaket verständigt. Dabei geht es um schnelle Hilfen für Opfer, um Therapien und Entschädigungen, aber auch um Prävention. Ein zentraler Vorschlag besteht darin, ein Hilfesystem mit einer finanziellen Ausstattung von 100 Millionen Euro einzurichten, um Opfern zu helfen, für die kein anderer einspringt. Der Bund zeigte sich damals bereit, die Hälfte zu finanzieren. Die Länder sollen die andere Hälfte stemmen.

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GROSSBRITANNIEN
Moment Mal

UK: “ Priester und Gemeindemitglieder wurden aufgefordert, die Augen offen zu halten bei der Suche nach Kinderschändern innerhalb der Geistlichkeit der Gemeinschaft.

Der amtierende Bischof von Chichester, Reverend Mark Sowerby, warnte die Mitglieder des Klerus in der ganzen Grafschaft, wachsam zu sein und forderte auf, die Straftäter auszurotten.

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BELGIEN
Deredactie

Untersuchungsrichter Wim De Troy, der die Ermittlungen im Zusammenhang mit den sexuellen Missbrauchsfällen in der Katholischen Kirche leitete, gibt seinen Auftrag zurück. Für die Anwälte der Opfer ist dies ein schwerer Schlag.

Meldungen verschiedener belgischer Medien, nach denen Untersuchungsrichter Wim De Troy (Foto oben) bei Bundesjustizministerin Annemie Turtelboom (Open VLD) um eine Beendigung seines Mandats bitten werde, wurden inzwischen bestätigt.

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OSTERREICH
Skydaddy’s Blog

Anlässlich zweier Zivilklagen weist Altabt Kassian Lauterer darauf hin, dass er einen Pater seiner Abtei 1982 sofort aus dem Schuldienst entfernt habe, als er von Eltern über sexuellen Missbrauch informiert wurde. Im Fall eines anderen Paters blieb Abt Kassian allerdings jahrzehntelang untätig. Es handelt sich dabei um einen Fall, über den ich 2010 mehrfach berichtet habe.

Die österreichische Zisterzienserabtei Wettingen-Mehrerau am Bodensee, die auch ein Internat betreibt, sieht sich Zivilklagen von Missbrauchsopfern gegenüber, die bis März 1982 von einem Pater des Klosters missbraucht worden sein sollen. Der betreffende Pater war bereits 1967 wegen Missbrauchs von Minderjährigen verurteilt worden.

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DEUTSCHLAND
taz

Der Mann, der in der Öffentlichkeit das Gesicht der Kirche für Aufklärung und Prävention sexualisierter Gewalt ist, soll selbst Pädosexuelle beschäftigt haben.

von Christian Füller

Wer wissen will, wie man sexuelle Gewalt und Missbrauch nicht aufklärt, der muss sich wenden an: den Chefaufklärer der Katholischen Bischofskonferenz, Stephan Ackermann. Ackermann, der zugleich Trierer Bischof ist, musste sich von dem exzellent informierten Opferverein MissBit (Missbrauch im Bistum Trier) vorhalten lassen, dass er sieben Pädosexuelle beschäftigt.

Das ist für Ackermann und die katholische Kirche ein, freundlich gesagt, schwerer Rückschlag: Ist der Missbrauchsbeauftragte der Täterorganisation Kirche gar kein Aufklärer, sondern ein Pate der Pädophilen?

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DEUTSCHLAND
taz

Kommentar von Matthias Katsch

Vor zwei Jahren wurde von der Politik ein Runder Tisch eingesetzt, um auf Missbrauchsfälle in kirchlichen und anderen Institutionen zu reagieren. Zwei Jahre später ist klar: Das wichtigste Ziel wurde nicht erreicht. Klarheit und Wahrheit über das Ausmaß in der Katholischen Kirche zu erreichen.

Angesichts der Vorgänge im Bistum Trier, wo mehrere pädophile Priester weiter beschäftigt werden sollen, muss man sich fragen: Wie lange wollen es sich die von ihren Hirten gerne als Schäfchen bezeichneten zahlenden Mitglieder der Körperschaft öffentlichen Rechts noch gefallen lassen, dass ihr Ruf von uneinsichtigen oder überforderten Vertretern der Katholischen Kirche vollends ruiniert wird? Und wie lange will sich die Gesellschaft noch gefallen lassen, dass eine Institution sich in dieser Weise selbst aufklärt?

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NETHERLANDS
Daily Mail (United Kingdom)

By Jill Reilly

PUBLISHED: 07:39 EST, 20 March 2012

Shocking reports have emerged that reveal at least 10 males under the age of 21 were castrated ‘to get rid of homosexuality,’ in the 1950s by the Dutch Roman Catholic Church.

The findings are even more controversial as an official investigation into sexual abuse within the church published last year, did not include the shocking revelation, even though it had been reported.

The NRC Handelsblad, a daily evening newspaper in the Netherlands, newspaper identified a man Henk Heithuis as one of the young men who were castrated as well as nine other minors.

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BALTIMORE (MD)
The Baltimore Sun

[with video]

By Dean Jones Jr., The Baltimore Sun

7:31 a.m. EDT, March 20, 2012
Bishop William E. Lori, previously of the diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., was named as Cardinal Edwin O’Brien’s replacement as head of the Archdiocese of Baltimore by Pope Benedict XVI, the archdiocese announced Tuesday.

Lori, 60, becomes the 16th Archbishop of Baltimore. He replaces O’Brien, who served as archbishop from October 2007 to August 2011 before leaving the post to become the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.

Archbishop-designate Lori will be introduced at a news conference at 10:30 a.m. today at the Baltimore Basilica.

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BALTIMORE (MD)
WJZ

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Pope Benedict XVI named Bishop William E. Lori of the Diocese of Bridgeport, 60, as the 16th Archbishop of Baltimore.

He will succeed Edwin Cardinal O’Brien, who served as Baltimore’s 15th archbishop from October 2007 to August 2011.

O’Brien has served as Apostolic Administrator of the nation’s oldest Archdiocese since his appointment Aug. 29 as Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.

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NEW JERSEY
Patch

By JD Watson

Rev. John P. Bambrick, pastor of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Toms River, has requested and been granted a transfer by the Most Rev. David M. O’Connell, bishop of the Diocese of Trenton, Bambrick announced to parishioners on Sunday.

Rev. G. Scott Shaffer, pastor of St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church in Jackson, has accepted a transfer to become the 11th pastor of St. Joseph’s, the parish where he first served as a priest 20 years ago. …

Bambrick has had a notable career. He was widely hailed for his efforts at St. Thomas More in Manalapan, unifying his parish after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. A victim of sexual abuse at the age of 15 by a priest and mentor, Bambrick tracked down his abuser and arranged for him to be removed from the priesthood. Bambrick went on to confront other abusive priests, becoming a champion for the rights of the sexually abused.

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IRELAND
The Journal

A DELEGATION of high-ranking Catholic officials sent to Ireland by Pope Benedict to deal with the aftermath of successive abuse scandals has proposed a series of reforms to tackle the Church’s difficulty.

The findings of the Apostolic Visitation, led by the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, propose imposing new restrictions on admission to seminaries, and including new child protection classes in the academic programme for trainee priests.

The Visitation has also proposed reforming the structure of Ireland’s 26 Church dioceses “and their ability to respond adequately to the challenges of the New Evangelisation”.

A summary of their findings, issued this morning by Vatican Radio, also outlines the need for a new focus on the role of lay people in the affairs of the Church, and the need to harness “new Ecclesial movements” (such as the World Youth Day event) to better reach the young generation.

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Vatican has published its report on the child abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland.

It recommends that Irish diocesan authorities and those of religious institutes should continue to devote time to listening to victims and providing support for them and their families.

The findings are based on an apostolic visitation to the four archdioceses, religious congregations and seminaries.

The report found that the current guidelines on child protection were being followed.

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IRELAND
Newstalk

The Apostolic Visitation to Ireland says “excellent” efforts are being made by the clergy to implement and improve child protection measures.

However it also stresses that the Church should continue to examine and update the protection guidelines in place and to continue to provide support to clerical child sex abuse victims.

A summary of the findings of the 7 Visitations last year has been published by the Vatican but the full reports will not be released.

They were ordered by Pope Benedict XVI.

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IRELAND
The Journal

[the report]

CARDINAL SEÁN BRADY, head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, said he “welcomed” the findings of a panel appointed by the Vatican to visit the four Irish archdioceses to look at how they were responding to the child abuse scandal.

A summary of the findings of the ‘Apostolic Visitation’ was published today. It suggested that new restrictions be placed on admission to seminaries and made other recommendations which it felt would help the “renewal” of the Catholic Church in Ireland. It also proposed a restructuring of the 26 dioceses in the country.

The Irish Bishops’ Conference held a press conference on the publication this morning. It said it was grateful to those who had co-operated in their meetings with the Vatican-picked panel, including survivors of child abuse, religious congregations, seminaries and the four archdioceses.

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IRELAND
Galway News

March 20, 2012

The Archbishop of Tuam has described the Vatican report into the country’s four archdioceses as ‘hopeful’ and ‘positive’.

Archbishop Michael Neary was speaking ahead of the reports publication in Rome today.

The Vatican sent visitation teams to the archdiocese of Tuam, Cashel and Emly, Armagh and Dublin following the release of the Murphy report into clerical child sex abuse.

Canadian Archbishop Terence Prendergast and his assistant Fr.James Conn completed his third and final visit to the Tuam archdiocese last March.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

A delegation of senior Catholic Church officials sent to Ireland by Pope Benedict in the wake of a series of clerical sex abuse scandals has proposed a number of reforms to improve child protection.

A seven-page summation of the report by the apostolic visitation was published at the Columba Centre in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth this morning at a briefing attended by Cardinal Seán Brady, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin and papal nuncio to Ireland Archbishop Charles Brown.

The report was completed after seven teams of Vatican-appointed church leaders visited Ireland. The teams visited the four Irish Archdioceses, two seminaries and the male and female congregations.

The report said changes should be made to seminaries and admission criteria for would-be priests. It found that while guidelines to protect children are being followed, academic programmes in seminaries should put more focus on the issue.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

[the report]

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Changes should be made to seminaries and admission criteria for would-be priests, a Vatican report on the child abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland has warned.

A probe into the handling of clerical sex abuse cases found while guidelines to protect children against paedophile priests are being followed, academic programmes in seminaries should put more focus on the issue.

Senior churchmen were sent by Rome to investigate safeguarding procedures and protocols in the Catholic Church in Ireland after it was rocked by several reports which unveiled decades of abuse and cover-ups by church and state authorities.

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NETHERLANDS
Dutch News

The case of the young boy who was castrated while in the care of catholic priests does not stand alone. On Tuesday, Dagblad de Limburger wrote that in the fifties underage boys were castrated without their parents’ permission in psychiatric institutions in the provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg. So how common was this practice? The Volkskrant talked to two historians.

Nothing unusual

Psychiatrists, politicians, lawyers and doctors were all agreed that castration was the cure-all for what were considered sexual ills’, historian Theo van der Meer tells the paper. ‘It was nothing unusual’, fellow historian Marnix Koolhaas adds.

The boy who was castrated in 1956 after having been sexually abused by catholic priests was sent to a psychiatric institution. It was one of the places where men who were considered to be sexually deviant – the boy was allegedly homosexual – were castrated, a practice that was allowed to continue until the late sixties, the Volkskrant writes.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Lancashire Telegraph

A VICAR has been suspended after he was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an 11-year-old boy.

Rev Joe Fielder, 44, the priest-in-charge at St John’s Church in Baxenden, was arrested at the village Vicarage in Langford Street.

He has been suspended from his role at the church, which he has held for three years, while an internal church investigation is completed, diocese officials have confirmed.

Police said the alleged victim called police at 7.20am on Tuesday, February 7, to report an assault.

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BALTIMORE (MD)
The Catholic Review

[New Archbishop: Watch Live Press Conference at 10:30 AM]

By Jennifer Williams
jwilliams@CatholicReview.org

Pope Benedict XVI has named Bishop William Edward Lori, 60, of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., as the 16th archbishop of Baltimore. Archbishop Lori will be formally installed as head of the Premier See May 16.

Archbishop Lori succeeds Cardinal Edwin F. O’Brien, who took the helm of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 2007. Cardinal O’Brien was named grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher in August 2011 and continues to serve as apostolic administrator for the Baltimore archdiocese until his successor’s installation.

Archbishop Lori will be introduced to the Archdiocese of Baltimore by Cardinal O’Brien at a news conference today at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at 10:30 a.m.

Archbishop Lori, who hails from Louisville, Ken., was installed as the fourth bishop of the Bridgeport diocese in 2001. The Connecticut leader, who has a bachelor’s degree from St. Pius X Seminary in Kentucky, is acquainted with the Archdiocese of Baltimore, having earned a master’s degree from Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg in 1977.

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BALTIMORE (MD)
WBAL

BALTIMORE — Baltimore’s new archbishop will come from Connecticut, the Archdiocese of Baltimore confirmed to WBAL-TV 11 News.

William Edward Lori, who currently serves as bishop of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., will replace Cardinal Edwin O’Brien, who was elevated by the pope last month to serve in Rome.

Lori will be introduced during a news conference at 10:30 a.m. at the Baltimore Basilica. 11 News will carry it live on WBALTV.com and on WBAL Plus.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

Vatican says Irish church making progress in implementing norms to protect children

By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, March 20, 7:15 AM

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican says archdioceses in Ireland are making an “excellent” progress in efforts to implement norms to protect children in the wake of decades of pedophile priest scandals.

The Vatican on Tuesday released a summary of findings of its own yearlong investigation ordered by Pope Benedict XVI after the uproar over widespread child abuse by priests and allegations of cover up by the church.

The Vatican said its investigators saw for themselves “how much the shortcomings of the past” caused an inadequate reaction “not least on the part of various bishops and religious superiors.”

It expressed a “great sense of pain and shame.”

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

Now that the Apostolic Visitation to certain Dioceses, Seminaries and Religious Institutes in Ireland has been concluded, it is intended here, in accordance with what was stated in the Communiqué of 6 June 2011, to offer an overall synthesis indicating the results and the future prospects highlighted by the Visitation.

It should be borne in mind that the Visitation was pastoral in nature; the Holy Father’s intention was that it should “assist the local Church on her path of renewal” (Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland, 19 March 2010). It was not intended to replace or supersede the ordinary responsibility of Bishops and Religious Superiors, nor to interfere “with the ordinary activity of the local magistrates, nor with the activity of the Commissions of Investigation established by the Irish Parliament, nor with the work of any legislative authority, which has competence in the area of prevention of abuse of minors” (Communiqué of the Holy See Press Office, 12 November 2010).

In communicating this summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation, the Holy See re-echoes the sense of dismay and betrayal which the Holy Father expressed in his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland regarding the sinful and criminal acts that were at the root of this particular crisis.

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INDIA
IBN

Mumbai: Two 26-year-old men, who were promised jobs in Dubai by a priest and later sexually abused by him, have conducted a sting operation to bare the man of God in rather unbecoming circumstances. MiD DAY has a copy of the CD in which the priest — identified as Kanak Kubdiya, resident of Dadar — is allegedly seen sodomising one of the victims at the quarters of a temple in Shahpur, Thane. The two youths, whose identities have been concealed, have submitted the evidence to Indore police.

According to one of the victims — who hails from Surat in Gujarat — he was in the vocation of dressing up idols at temples. “I was contacted by Kubdiya and on December 1, 2011, I went along with him to Dadar where I dressed up the gods at a temple for 30 days. Kubdiya then offered me a similar position in Dubai and lured me with money. I agreed. However, he took me to Shahpur and sodomised me at a temple over several days,” he said.

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NEDERLAND
de Gelderlander

HARREVELD – Burgemeester Henk Heijman van Oost Gelre houdt vertrouwen in de commissie-Deetman, die onderzoek deed naar seksuseel misbruik in de katholieke kerk. De commissie zou een melding over castratie van jongens uit het internaat Harreveld terzijde hebben geschoven.

„Ik heb vertrouwen in Wim Deetman, ik ken hem van vroeger”, reageert de burgemeester van Oost Gelre, waartoe ook Harreveld behoort. „Deetman is geen man die dingen verdoezelt of in de doofpot stopt.”

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
CBS Philly

By Tony Hanson

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – While the unprecedented clergy abuse trial of former Monsignor William Lynn and two priests is set to begin Monday, the latest pre-trial hearing in the case makes clear the defendants won’t be the only ones on trial.

Two priests — one now defrocked — allegedly abused children, and Monsignor William Lynn is charged with endangering children by allowing these and other alleged predator priests to remain in ministry.

But, prosecutor Patrick Blessington said yesterday, they plan to present evidence showing there was “a diocese-wide policy that was criminal in nature.”

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service – Bolletino

The Summary of the findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland, published herewith, offers a synthesis of the results of the Visitations to the four Archdioceses, to Religious Institutes and to the Irish Seminaries. It has been approved by the Offices which conducted the Visitation and it also contains some further observations from the Holy See, in addition to those that the individual Dicasteries communicated to the leaders of the respective Archdioceses or Institutes:

Now that the Apostolic Visitation to certain Dioceses, Seminaries and Religious Institutes in Ireland has been concluded, it is intended here, in accordance with what was stated in the Communiqué of 6 June 2011, to offer an overall synthesis indicating the results and the future prospects highlighted by the Visitation.

It should be borne in mind that the Visitation was pastoral in nature; the Holy Father’s intention was that it should “assist the local Church on her path of renewal” (Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland, 19 March 2010). It was not intended to replace or supersede the ordinary responsibility of Bishops and Religious Superiors, nor to interfere “with the ordinary activity of the local magistrates, nor with the activity of the Commissions of Investigation established by the Irish Parliament, nor with the work of any legislative authority, which has competence in the area of prevention of abuse of minors” (Communiqué of the Holy See Press Office, 12 November 2010).

In communicating this summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation, the Holy See re-echoes the sense of dismay and betrayal which the Holy Father expressed in his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland regarding the sinful and criminal acts that were at the root of this particular crisis.

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IRELAND
Newstalk

A Vatican report which was ordered in the wake of the Murphy and Ryan reports into clerical child sex abuse is to be published this morning.

The inquiry was carried out by the Apostolic Visitation to Ireland.

It involved teams visiting all 4 Catholic archdioceses, seminaries and religious congregations.

The Irish bishops will give their reaction to the findings at a press conference in Maynooth later this morning.

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WISCONSIN
Post-Crescent

APPLETON — Attorneys say an attempt to settle the civil lawsuit brought by two sexual assault victims against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Green Bay was unsuccessful as a two-week jury trial draws near.

Outagamie County Judge Nancy Krueger held a motions hearing Monday in the lawsuit filed by brothers Todd and Troy Merryfield stemming from their childhood sexual abuse at the hands of former priest John Feeney.

Krueger considered sanctions Monday against Troy Merryfield for participating in a recent mediation session by telephone instead of in person. Krueger didn’t order sanctions, but asked attorneys to discuss the possibility of another mediation session.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Volksfreund

Darf ein ehemals vom Trierer Landgericht wegen Missbrauchs zu einer Bewährungsstrafe verurteilter Geistlicher noch Gottesdienste feiern und die Sakramente spenden? Nein, sagen Opferverbände und die katholische Jugendorganisation KSJ. Beim Bistum Trier sieht man dies offenbar anders: Der jetzt im Saarland tätige Pfarrer sei mit Einschränkungen einsetzbar, sagt ein Bischofssprecher.

Trier/Saarbrücken. “Zu seinen Aufgaben als Kooperator gehören Messfeiern, Taufen, Hochzeiten, Beerdigungen, die Mitarbeit in der Krankenhausseelsorge und in der Erwachsenenbildung.” So schrieb die Saarbrücker Zeitung vor genau zwei Jahren über den Geistlichen, als er in einer saarländischen Pfarrei offiziell vorgestellt wurde.

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BELGIE
De Standaard

Wim De Troy, de Brusselse onderzoeksrechter die bekend is van de Operatie Kelk, stapt op. Hij liet justitieminister Annemie Turtelboom weten dat hij zijn mandaat niet wil verlengen. De Troy leidde de voorbije jaren het onderzoek naar het seksueel misbruik in de Kerk. Dat schrijft Het Laatste Nieuws.

De Troy viel in de zomer van 2010 binnen in het aartsbisschoppelijk paleis in Mechelen, nam de computer van kardinaal Danneels mee en nam bij de commissie-Adriaenssens de dossiers rond honderden pedofiele geestelijken in beslag.

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BELGIE
De Morgen

Bij de huiszoekingen die gisteren zijn uitgevoerd op een 30-tal verschillende plaatsen in Oost- en West-Vlaanderen en Brabant, hebben speurders van de Brusselse federale gerechtelijke politie een kleine honderd persoonlijke dossiers van geestelijken in beslag genomen. Dat meldt het federaal parket.

De huiszoekingen en het gerechtelijk onderzoek van onderzoeksrechter De Troy lopen daarmee op hun eind. Voorlopig is er nog geen sprake van inverdenkingstellingen.

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BELGIE
Gazet van Antwerpen

Wim De Troy, de Brussels onderzoeksrechter bekend van Operatie Kelk, stapt op. Hij liet justitieminister Annemie Turtelboom weten dat hij zijn mandaat niet wil verlengen. De Troy leidde de voorbije jaren het onderzoek naar het seksueel misbruik in de Kerk.

De Troy viel in de zomer van 2010 binnen in het aartsbisschoppelijk paleis in Mechelen, nam de computer van kardinaal Danneels mee en nam bij de commissie-Adriaenssens de dossiers rond honderden pedofiele geestelijken in beslag.

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UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport

Dave Pierre

1 IT’S NOT ABOUT CATHOLIC PRIESTS

FACT: Catholic priests do not offend at a higher rate than clergy of other religious denominations or employees of other institutions that deal with youth.
Read more

2 STRANGE DAYS INDEED

FACT: The media’s frenzied Catholic priest sex abuse storyline stems only from a historical anomaly, as the vast majority of allegations occurred during a narrow band of time from the 1960s to the early 1980s. During this period the Church sent abusive priests to treatment, conforming to the then-prevailing societal view that offenders could be successfully rehabilitated but resulting in a high rate of recidivism.
Read more

3 YESTERDAY’S NEWS: CURRENT ACCUSATIONS AGAINST CATHOLIC PRIESTS ARE VERY RARE

FACT: Almost all accusations against Catholic priests date from decades ago, and indeed nearly half of all abuse accusations concern priests who are already dead. In an institution of 77 million people, contemporaneous accusations of abuse against Catholic clergy in the United States are very rare, recently averaging only 8.5 “credible” allegations per year.
Read more

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DEUTSCHLAND
Volksfreund

Der Trierer Bischof Stephan Ackermann hat am Montag Kritik an seinem Umgang mit Missbrauchstätern zurückgewiesen. Indirekt sprach sich Ackermann allerdings für eine Verschärfung der Leitlinien aus.

Trier. Als Papst Benedikt XVI. vor vier Jahren über den großen Teich in die Vereinigten Staaten flog, da äußerte er sich im Flieger über den Wolken zu den Missbrauchsfällen durch pädophile Priester. Er sei “tief beschämt”, sagte der Pontifex, “wir werden alles tun, dass dies in Zukunft nicht mehr passieren kann”. Und dann fügte der Papst einen Satz hinzu, der an Deutlichkeit eigentlich nichts vermissen lässt: “Wir werden Pädophile vom Priesterdienst absolut ausschließen.” Wenn der katholische Missbrauchsbeauftragte Stephan Ackermann sich an diesen Satz des Papstes halten würde, hätte der Trierer Bischof jetzt nicht so ein großes Problem. Denn seit dem Wochenende sorgt eine Spiegel-Geschichte für mächtig Aufsehen, in der von sieben pädophilen Priestern die Rede ist, die nach wie vor im Bistum eingesetzt würden.

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VATICAN CITY
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)

Thirty years after it was entangled in a scandal involving the mafia, money laundering and the mysterious death of the man nicknamed “God’s banker”, the Vatican bank faces fresh controversy.

By Nick Squires, Rome

9:01PM GMT 19 Mar 2012

The bank – formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion or IOR – has suffered the ignominy of having one of its accounts closed by JP Morgan after stone-walling requests for information.

The sanction came less than two weeks after the US State Department listed the Vatican as being potentially vulnerable to money laundering.

A Milan affiliate of JP Morgan said it will shut the account by the end of the month after revealing Vatican bankers had been “unable to respond” to requests for details about payments into the account.

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BALTIMORE (MD)
Washington Post

‘Standing Silent’ follows uncovering of sexual abuse in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community

By Emily Wax, Published: March 19

One by one the victims stood and described their alleged molesters: the Torah teacher, the rabbi, the ice cream truck driver, the man at the mikvah.

That meeting, held nearly six years ago in a small room in a synagogue in Pikes­ville, just outside Baltimore, went on for four hours. Seated in a circle with the other victims was Phil Jacobs, a Baltimore Jewish Times journalist. He was not there as a reporter. He was there because he, too, had experienced sexual abuse.

But after the meeting, a young man who knew Jacobs was a journalist approached and asked to be interviewed, to have his story told. That was the beginning of Jacobs’s effort to document sexual abuse in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community, bringing the harrowing experiences shared by the 18 victims in that room out into the open.

The first of his stories, “Today, Steve is 25” was published in February 2007, 10 months after the Pikes­ville meeting.

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BELGIE
Knack

Onderzoeksrechter Wim De Troy stopt met het onderzoek Operatie Kelk naar seksueel misbruik van kinderen in de Kerk. De Troy stapt op als onderzoeksrechter. Naar verluidt is hij de tegenwerking achter de schermen beu.

Wim De Troy, de Brussels onderzoeksrechter bekend van Operatie Kelk, stapt op. Hij liet justitieminister Annemie Turtelboom weten dat hij zijn mandaat niet wil verlengen. De Troy leidde de voorbije jaren het onderzoek naar het seksueel misbruik in de Kerk. Dat schrijft Het Laatste Nieuws.

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DEUTSCHLAND
taz

von Christian Füller

BERLIN taz | Der Nationale Beauftragte gegen sexuelle Gewalt Johannes Wilhelm Rörig ist erschrocken über die Vorgänge in der Katholischen Kirche. Es sei „sehr misslich“, dass Bischof Ackermann Pädosexuelle in seinem Bistum beschäftige, sagte Rörig der taz. Der Beauftragte drängt darauf, dass auch die Kirche bereit ist, mit der Bundesrepublik Deutschland einen Vertrag über Aufklärung und Prävention zu schließen.

Bischof Stephan Ackermann, in dessen Bistum sieben pädosexuelle Täter beschäftigt sind, ist nicht irgendwer. Er ist der Beauftragte der Katholischen Bischofskonferenz gegen sexuellen Missbrauch. Ackermann sagte am Montag in einem Radiointerview, „dass wir versuchen, mit den Tätern als Menschen und Priestern umzugehen – ohne das Verbrechen zu tolerieren“.

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WYOMING
Billings Gazette

By TOM MORTON Casper Star-Tribune | Posted: Monday, March 19, 2012

CASPER, Wyo. — The defendants in a federal civil lawsuit have denied a woman’s allegations that a deacon at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Casper imposed a sexual relationship on her, according to court documents filed last week. An attorney for the Diocese of Cheyenne also asserts the court cannot involve itself in the church’s personnel policies because of the First Amendment, and should dismiss the lawsuit.

Kathy Seeley, who now lives in Colorado, claimed the Rev. Michael Carr in 2002 referred her for grief counseling from Deacon Don Stewart, whose “vicious physical assaults and physical sexual relationship” caused physical and emotional damage, according to her complaint filed on Jan. 17.

The lawsuit also names two priests and two former bishops of the Diocese of Cheyenne.

“The other named defendants knew or should have known of this inappropriate and meretricious sexual relationship imposed upon plaintiff by Defendant Stewart in the course and scope of his employment,” according to the complaint filed by her attorneys, Traci Mears of Casper and William Fix of Jackson.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

A Vatican report ordered by Pope Benedict XVI in the wake of the Murphy and Ryan inquiries into clerical child sex abuse is to be published in Rome later.

The inquiry was carried out by the Apostolic Visitation to Ireland and involved teams visiting all four Catholic archdioceses, seminaries and religious congregations.

The Irish bishops will give their reaction to the findings at a press conference in Maynooth this morning.

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VATICAN CITY
BBC News

The Vatican will publish a report this morning on the Catholic child abuse scandals in Ireland.

It was compiled following visits to Ireland by teams of Vatican-appointed foreign church leaders.

It will also look at the church’s dealings with survivors of abuse and current child protection policies.

The report was promised two years ago by Pope Benedict XVI in his letter to Catholics in Ireland.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

A summation of the Vatican’s report into the handling of cases of clerical child sexual abuse in Ireland is to be published today.

The report was completed after seven teams of Vatican-appointed church leaders visited Ireland.

The teams visited the four Irish Archdioceses, two seminaries and the male and female congregations.

The visits followed Pope Benedict XVI’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland which was published two years ago today.

The letter came after the publication of the Murphy Report into clerical sexual abuse in November 2009. The report documented some 70-years of child abuse by a number of priests across the State.

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Vatican’s report on the child abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland is to be published in Rome this morning.

It was compiled following visits to Ireland by teams of Vatican-appointed foreign church leaders.

It is expected to impose greater orthodoxy on seminaries and a rationalisation of dioceses.

It will also report on the church’s dealings with survivors of abuse and current child protection policies.

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VATICAN CITY
Chiesa

VATICAN CITY, March 20, 2012 – “How a schism was born”: this is the title of an article that appeared recently in “L’Osservatore Romano” with the byline of the Bavarian cardinal Walter Brandmüller (in the photo). An article with an historical slant, but with explicit references to current events.

An article that from the very beginning recalls the anti-Roman movement “Los von Rom” that emerged in Austria between the 19th and 20th century, which “was able to drive about a hundred thousand Austrian Catholics to separate from the Church.”

This movement – the cardinal continues, coming up to the present – “was revived following Vatican Council II.” But not only that. “Similar tendencies seem to be reemerging from time to time in our days as well, in some of the appeals for disobedience toward the pope and the bishops..”

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IRELAND
The Journal

POPE BENEDICT XVI’S hand-picked team of high-ranking clerics will today publish their findings of a visit to Ireland following the fallout from the various clerical abuse scandals.

The Apostolic Visitation, led by the Archbishop of New York now-Cardinal Timothy Dolan, visited in 2010 after the Pope issued a letter to the people of Ireland expressing his dismay at the Murphy and Ryan reports into abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin and in residential institutions.

The pontiff had assigned six teams to visit all four of Ireland’s archdioceses, seminaries and other religious orders.

The report is expected to make the case for a rationalisation in the number of dioceses in Ireland (of which there are 26 at present), as well as imposing greater oversight on training seminaries.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer

March 19, 2012|By John P. Martin, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia fought Monday to keep private 12 documents that could reveal how its lawyers advised church leaders to handle claims that priests were molesting children.

The records include correspondence between the lawyers and Msgr. William J. Lynn, the church official criminally charged over his alleged role in responding to abuse allegations in the 1990s. Most concern the “development of policy” by the archdiocese, its attorney, Robert Welsh, said during a Common Pleas Court hearing.

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: March 19, 2012

If Catholicism is measured by obeisance to the pope, his cardinals and the letter of Vatican law, then Rick Santorum is the best Catholic to ever get this far in presidential politics.

He doesn’t just oppose abortion as a private matter of personal conscience. He has made that position a defining crusade. …

The Catholic hierarchy, meanwhile, keeps giving American Catholics fresh reasons for rebellion. As The Times’s Laurie Goodstein reported last week, lawyers for the church in Missouri have begun a campaign of intimidation against a support group for victims of sexually abusive priests: they’re trying to compel the group to release decades of internal documents.

This may be cunning legal strategy, but it’s lousy public relations and worse pastoral care. Which isn’t any surprise.

I’ve been monitoring and occasionally writing about the church’s child sex-abuse crisis since 1992, and most of church leaders’ apologies and instances of constructive outreach have come about reluctantly, belatedly or with a palpable sense from many bishops and cardinals that they were the aggrieved, victimized ones.

As they complained about excessive media attention, they frequently lost sight of its heinous root: a great many priests molested a great many children, who were especially vulnerable to them — and especially damaged by them — because they called themselves men of God. And for a great many years, church leaders actively concealed these crimes, which continued.

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Care2

by Paul Canning

This post was inspired by comment and information from Care2 members Rob and Jay B. They commented on a post about the latest scandalous push back by some Catholics against allegations of child abuse in Missouri.

Much has been written about child abuse and the Catholic Church. But other religions are also being criticized for failing to do enough to tackle the problem of those who abuse their positions of authority. This post covers just some recent examples.

In Indonesia, authorities are being accused of dragging their heels on the prosecution of Habib Hasan bin Jafar Assegaf, a popular Muslim cleric.

The alleged abuse took place about eight years ago but was only recently reported. The 11 men involved claimed in December that Habib told them when they were teenage children that he needed to touch them to remove evil spirits while giving them “healing treatments.”

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NETHERLANDS
Capital FM (Kenya)

ROTTERDAM, Mar 20 – Underage sexual abuse victims were castrated in Dutch Roman Catholic psychiatric wards in the 1950s, according to the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Castration was performed on young men who were thought to be homosexual, but also as a means of punishing those who blew the whistle on abusers, the paper quotes sources as saying.

NRC discovered proof of the forced castration of one young man and strong evidence that at least ten other abuse victims were subjected to the removal of their testicles.

The proof includes court documents, medical records, letters from lawyers and private correspondence.

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UNITED STATES
Holland Sentinel

By Marcia Meoli
Community columnist

Posted Mar 20, 2012

Holland —

The controversy surrounding regulations mandating coverage of birth control in health insurance demonstrates once again the persistence our culture wars and the manipulation of women’s issues. No one challenged the fact that the vast majority of American women, including Catholic women, use birth control. No one challenged the fact that birth control has become a matter of public health for women. No one claimed that any employer would have to pay directly for any birth control — it would only be paid by insurance companies.

When it comes to women, and specifically the independence of women to make decisions about their lives, our society cannot seem to act rationally.

There are any number of uses of health insurance to which an employer might have religious objections. How about an objection to all extramarital sexual activity or drug use? Should an employer be able to exclude coverage from sexually transmitted diseases by claiming that most of these come from promiscuous sexual activity? There are any number of issues that could arise, including restrictions on end-of-life decisions. …

Who started the debate? America’s Catholic bishops, with conservative enemies of President Obama only too happy to oblige in supporting them. The argument was really one of purity. The bishops did not want any of their money going to support birth control, over which they have a moral objection. Where was that purity when the bishops were faced with the horrible sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests? Pedophiles were kept on by American bishops for years, sometimes allowing further contact with children.

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NETHERLANDS
Calgary Herald

Agence France-Presse
March 20, 2012

Dutch lawmakers have called for a parliamentary debate after a media report that local Catholics castrated children in the 1950s to “cure” homosexuality, a party spokeswoman said Monday.

The call followed an NRC Han-delsblad newspaper investigation published Saturday that said at least a dozen children were castrated to “cure them of their sexual orientation.”

It focused on the case of a man named Henk Hethuis who, it said, was castrated by priests in 1956 after testifying in a police investigation about child abuse in a Catholic boarding school.

After he testified, Hethuis was taken to a Catholic psychiatric institution and was “castrated because of his homosexual behaviour,” the paper said.

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