ABUSE TRACKER

MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

By Martine Powers
Globe Staff
November 18, 2012

While watching the morning news recently, Jerry Sypek learned that the Boy Scouts of America had released its so-called perversion lists.

Then he heard one of the names on the list: Paul A. Hightower, accused in the documents of assaulting one scout and masturbating in front of others at troop meetings.

“I almost choked on my coffee,” said Sypek, 50. When Sypek was an orphan in a Jamaica Plain children’s home between 1968 and 1971, he was abused by a former seminary student by the same name. Decades later, he settled a claim with the Catholic Church. “I was horrified. I thought to myself, ‘This is not the same guy.’ ”

But it was. Hightower died in 1994.

“It brought back some really hard memories for me,” Sypek said. “When you have a name that’s so familiar to you come up in the news, it’s like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ You think you’re going to be OK, but you’re not.” …

For David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the release of the Boy Scouts files was heartening — it is important for abuses to be uncovered and documented, he said — but he was also saddened.

“I wanted to believe desperately that the disclosures wouldn’t be as damning as, in fact, they are,” said Clohessy, who was abused by a Catholic priest for four to five years, ending when he was 16 years old.

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NEW MEXICO
ABQ Journal

By Rene Romo / Journal South Reporteron Sun, Nov 18, 2012

LAS CRUCES – Federal court records show that the cash-strapped Diocese of Las Cruces lent its former contract attorney $385,000, but the money will not be easily recovered, because the attorney died in August, and his widow filed for bankruptcy protection a short while later.

A diocese attorney, however, disputes that the religious organization lent money to its former general counsel, the late Daniel Dolan.

Instead, what the bankruptcy case filed by Dolan’s widow, Linda, “lists as a loan to Mr. Dolan appears to be a loan to an entirely separate entity that the Diocese viewed as a land investment,” diocese attorney David McNeill Jr., said in an emailed response to Journal questions.

However, in a different part of the email, McNeill wrote that the money was advanced to Dolan. He said, “That matter is still under investigation.”

McNeill added that Bishop Ricardo Ramirez “had no knowledge of that transaction until recently and did not approve it.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
Mirror

Jimmy Savile abused schoolgirls in the vestry of a Catholic cathedral, new ­testimony claims.

In an appalling new low, the ­disgraced star is said to have lain in wait at a weekly Mass attended by girls aged between five and nine.

An ex-pupil of the school involved, who wishes to remain anonymous, says Savile – given a papal knighthood by the Pope in 1990 – was banned from the cathedral in his home city of Leeds over claims he molested girls there.

The woman says pupils at her nearby primary school, now closed, were told by teachers not to sit near Savile, who always arrived before them when they visited ­Leeds ­Cathedral in the 1960s. She says there were ­rumours at the time that the DJ, whose flat was nearby, abused a young girl in the vestry only yards from unsuspecting priests.

“I remember it so very clearly,” she says. “As we trooped in he would be waiting. He would turn and grin. We were told to sit away from him, because of talk he had taken a girl into the vestry. Despite that, teachers and priests let him stay.

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VATICAN CITY
NEWS.com.au

WHEN Pope Benedict XVI announced last month he was transferring his respected sex crimes prosecutor to Malta to become a bishop, Vatican watchers questioned whether the Holy See’s tough line on clerical abuse was going soft – and if another outspoken cleric was being punished for doing his job too well.

After all, several senior Vatican officials who ran afoul of the Vatican’s entrenched ways have recently been transferred in face-saving “promote and remove” moves as the Vatican deals with the fallout from a high-profile criminal trial over leaked papal documents, a mixed report card on its financial transparency and its controversial crackdown on American nuns.

But in an interview on the eve of his departure, Bishop-elect Charles Scicluna insisted he wasn’t the latest casualty in the Vatican’s turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues.

Rather, he said, his promotion to auxiliary bishop in his native Malta was simply that – “a very good” promotion – and more critically, that his hardline stance against sex abuse would remain because it’s Benedict’s stance as well.

“This is policy,” he said. “It’s not Scicluna. It’s the Pope. And this will remain.”

Besides, he said laughing over tea at a cafe on Rome’s posh Piazza Farnese, “If you want to silence someone, you don’t make him a bishop.”

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MALTA
Malta Independent

When Pope Benedict XVI announced last month he was transferring his respected sex crimes prosecutor to Malta to become a bishop, Vatican watchers immediately questioned whether the Holy See’s tough line on clerical abuse was going soft — and if another outspoken cleric was being punished for doing his job too well.

After all, several senior Vatican officials who ran afoul of the Vatican’s entrenched ways have recently been transferred in face-saving “promote and remove” moves as the Vatican deals with the fallout from a high-profile criminal trial over leaked papal documents, a mixed report card on its financial transparency and its controversial crackdown on American nuns.

But in an interview with the Associated Press on the eve of his departure, Bishop-elect Charles Scicluna insisted he wasn’t the latest casualty in the Vatican’s turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues. Rather, he said, his promotion to auxiliary bishop in his native Malta was simply that — “a very good” promotion — and more critically, that his hardline stance against sex abuse would remain because it’s Benedict’s stance as well.

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SAN JOSE (CA)
KTVU

KTVU And Wires

SAN JOSE, Calif. —

A Catholic bishop issued an apology Saturday to parents and community members after a registered sex offender was issued a letter allowing him to attend an elementary school festival last month.

Bishop Patrick McGrath, head of the Diocese of San Jose, said that it was a “mistake” that allowed Mark Christopher Gurries to attend and volunteer at a Saint Frances Cabrini Parish festival on Oct. 6.

“Our policy is clear: no one who has been found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor or vulnerable adult can be hired as an employee or allowed to volunteer in any activity that involves children, young people, or vulnerable adults,” McGrath wrote.

“I am deeply troubled and I apologize to you that this policy was not followed,” he said.

By state law, Gurries, as a registered sex offender, is only allowed on a school property around children if he can produce written permission from a school administrator, according to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. Registered sex offenders who walk onto a school property without authorization when children are present are subject to arrest for a misdemeanor.

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AUSTRALIA
The Examiner

By CALLA WAHLQUIST
Nov. 18, 2012

THE church organisation that ran Burnie’s Marist Regional College when students were sexually abused is preparing to be called before the royal commission, the head of the Marist Fathers has said.

“I’m expecting the royal commission to be held all over Australia, and that when the Tasmanian part of it is held there will be a requirement for the Marist Fathers to participate,” Marist provincial Paul Cooney said.

“Certainly, we will participate in any way that we are asked to.”

Two Marist priests who taught at the school around the 1970s were charged in 2004 with sexually abusing students in their rooms at the school. Both men were convicted and have served time in jail.

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MALTA/CANADA
Malta Independent

Sunday, 18 November 2012

One of the two paedophile priests whose prison sentences were confirmed by the Appeals Court last Tuesday is still wanted in Essex County, Ontario to face sexual abuse charges.

Defrocked priest Godwin Scerri fled back to Malta from Ontario 20 years ago. Windsorstar.com, the website of Ontario daily newspaper Windsor Star, reported this week that, in 1993, a 22-year-old man had told Ontario Provincial Police that Scerri had abused him between 1983 – when he was 12 years old – and 1987 in the town of Emeryville and on Pelee Island, both in Essex County, Ontario.

Scerri had worked as a priest in Ontario from 1981 to 1991. He served as an associate pastor of St William’s Church, Emeryville, from 1981 to 1987 and then as pastor from 1987 to 1991.

He was arrested by Ontario Provincial Police in June 1993 on charges of sexual assault and gross indecency but fled to Malta before the case went to trial.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

Alan Howe
From:Herald Sun
November 19, 2012

THE London newspaper shouted “It was The Sun wot won it” the morning after the slim, unlikely and widely untipped Conservative victory in Britain’s 1992 elections.

The Sun had robustly campaigned for the Tories and was boldly taking the credit for their unexpected win.

I thought of that amusing headline last week when Catholic Cardinal George Pell curiously blamed the media for the pressure that last week led Prime Minister Julia Gillard to call a royal commission into child sexual abuse.

But it’s not “the Herald Sun wot won it”. Persistently unavoidable reports in this newspaper and others, and on radio and television, merely reinforced the fact that such an inquiry was needed, and inevitable.

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

Another extremely important essay by Harvard-trained former Wall Street lawyer Jerry Slevin. Jerry argues that “it is the right time for President Obama to act” to protect children from childhood sexual abuse, as the Catholic hierarchy clearly remains intent on stonewalling, diverting, and covering up. What follows is Jerry’s essay:

This year, 2012, has been crucial in the horrible history of organized child sex abuse in the USA, especially in the Catholic Church. After over more than a quarter century of mainly Vatican diversions, distractions and/or deceptions, experts at a public Vatican abuse symposium in February estimated here that so far there have been over 100,000 young victims of priest child sex abuse in the USA alone, with no end in sight.

These abuse survivors and their families usually bear the painful psychological and other adverse effects of these sexual assaults for the remainder of their lives, often at great costs to society at large. Outrageously, most priest sexual predators and almost all predator-protecting bishops in the USA have so far escaped any accountability for their crimes, mainly as a result of the Catholic hierarchy’s political and media clout, as well as the lack of fortitude of most US political leaders and media executives and reporters.

This pressing and worsening problem is a national one and cannot be resolved adequately at the local state, county or city level only, since the bishops’ political clout has generally been very effective at controlling local lawmakers and prosecutors, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, most recently in Philadelphia, as noted here. While private lawyers for abuse survivors have caused some US bishops and their dioceses significant financial pain, the bishops often appear to settle the lawsuits before all of the stark details of the bishops’ cover-up misconduct reach the public record.

Private civil lawyers’ main objective in abuse cases generally is to get maximum payments for their abused clients, and not full disclosure for citizens of bishops’ misconduct.

With only rare exceptions, most US media organizations lack the staff, budgets and “appetite” for covering priest child sexual abuse cases consistently and in the detail often required. Unfortunately, there does not yet exist any national organization of lay Catholics that comes even remotely close to presenting a credible challenge to the US bishops’ political, financial and media clout.

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NEW MEXICO
Westport News

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — An Albuquerque man has settled a suit he filed against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and a Catholic ministry group that helps troubled priests over molestation he claims he suffered at the hands of a priest beginning in the mid-1960s.

The attorney representing Clifford Esquibel tells the Albuquerque Journal (http://bit.ly/QP7TXD ) the diocese and the Servants of the Paraclete settled the case for an undisclosed amount.

Esquibel alleges the Rev. John George Weisenborn sexually molested him when Esquibel was a seventh-grade altar boy at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Albuquerque.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

The Secretariat of State’s computer technician, Paolo Sciarpelletti, is appealing against the Vatican tribunal’s sentence

Giacomo Galeazzi
Vatican City

He risks dismissal, has two children and will not accept being called a poison pen letter writer. Paolo Sciarpelletti, the Secretariat of State’s computer technician who was tried for his involvement in the Vatican document leak scandal, has presented an appeal against the sentence handed down from the Vatican tribunal. Sciarpelletti was sentenced to four months in prison but the court that granted extenuation reduced this period to two. The sentence was suspended for five years.

Sciarpelletti’s lawyer had stated that the defence would be appeal against the sentence because a suspension put his client at risk of being dismissed from his position. Sources close the Sciarpelletti say he had rejected jobs offering him 10 thousand Euros a month just to serve the Holy Father. Now, it’s back to the courtroom for a new chapter in the Vatileaks legal battle. Claudio Sciarpelletti set up the Vatican’s cloud system so the delicate nature of the documents handled makes the computer technician’s trial a very “sensitive” event.

Unlike the Pope’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, Sciarpelletti has decided to fight. He presented his appeal Tuesday, at the end of the three day deadline established by the Vatican Code of Penal Procedure. The reasons for the court’s decision will be published in the next few weeks. The Vatican Promoter of Justice, Nicola Picardi sentenced Sciarpelletti on charged of “obstructing the search for the truth” regarding the theft and publication of confidential letters belonging to the Pope, obstructing the course of justice.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

November 18, 2012

Peter FitzSimons

Amid all Cardinal George Pell’s bluster about the forthcoming royal commission, it is clear he does not have the first clue as to what is happening here.

Allow me, Cardinal, to spell it out. While you are free to worship whatever god you choose, it is now clear that generations of Australian children have been interfered with by your sex-maddened priests and, just as is happening all over the world, your church is now going to be called to account for both these actions and its appalling cover-ups.

As to those who, outrageously, support Cardinal Pell in his statement that ”the seal of the Confessional is inviolable” – as in all Australians should obey the laws requiring the reporting of sexual abuse, except the very group identified as being most responsible for that abuse – give yourselves an uppercut.

To be intellectually consistent on this, you would have to also support the imposition of the even more appalling sharia for those who worship Allah.

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IRELAND
WA Today (Australia)

November 18, 2012

What angers people most is the cover-up, writes Karen Kissane from Dublin.

MARIE Collins was 13 and in Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children when she was abused. It was the hospital chaplain, a Catholic priest. He went to jail for it, many years later, like so many of his colleagues in Ireland, but only after decades of misery for Ms Collins.

”I never connected his abuse with the church,” she says. ”I thought it was somehow my fault and that I was a bad person who had brought it on myself. I had years of depression and agoraphobia that included nine admissions to psychiatric wards.”

As a young adult, anxious that other children not be hurt as she had, she told a priest in her parish. ”He told me it was probably my fault, that I must have led the poor man on, but that I was forgiven and I could go away and forget about it.”

Ms Collins did go away, into more years of silence and depression. The misery did not lift until after her attacker, Father Paul McGennis, was jailed in 1997 over offences involving her and another child he abused 18 years after Collins. He was later convicted of having raped a third girl, 24 years after he attacked Ms Collins.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler

It’s open season on Catholicism. In Ireland and in Australia, public opinion is being whipped into frenzy in crusades against Church teachings. In both cases the arguments are thoroughly irrational.

•In Ireland, Savita Halappanavar died a horrible, painful, needless death. But rather than mourning her death, and demanding a full accounting of where the doctors went wrong, pundits are blaming the tragedy on teachings of the Catholic Church. We really don’t know, at this point, what caused her death. But one thing is quite clear already: it was not due to Catholic teaching, nor to Catholic influence on Ireland’s laws.

•In Australia, there are angry demands for Catholic priests to break the confessional seal. This campaign is fueled by the notion that the seal has protected perpetrators of sexual abuse. There is zero evidence—zero—to support that notion. And there is ample evidence that the campaign against the Catholic Church is tinged by political motives.

Let’s examine each case rationally.

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UNITED STATES
Hitfix

Interview: Alex Gibney on exposing the Catholic Church and giving voice to the deaf in ‘Mea Maxima Culpa’

By Guy Lodge Friday, Nov 16, 2012

From misplaced questions to accidental transcription errors, interview fumbles are obviously to be avoided under any circumstances, but you particularly want to be on your game when the subject is one of America’s preeminent documentarians – someone whose own profession is built on a level of journalistic expertise. So you can imagine my mortification when my iPhone recently took it upon itself to wipe its own memory clean – deleting, among other things, all aural evidence of my face-to-face conversation with Alex Gibney at last month’s London Film Festival.

The prolific filmmaker, an Oscar-winner in 2007 for his devastating legalized-torture study “Taxi to the Dark Side,” was in town for the European premiere of his superb new film “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” which would win him the festival’s Best Documentary award the very next day. The film, which hits US theaters today, is not the first to examine the horrific history of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, but it is arguably the most penetrating, methodically tracing a dense network of crime and cover-up all the way from Milwaukee to the Vatican itself. It could well earn Gibney a deserved third Oscar nod.

Speaking over the phone from his New York office earlier this week, Gibney casually waves off my apologies for having to restage the interview. “Trust me, I’ve been there,” he says with a light laugh, his crisp, deliberate voice sounding rather less exhausted than it did in the bar of London’s Mayfair Hotel a month ago. It’s hard to imagine interviews – or any information, for that matter – slipping through the director’s fingers, so keen and diligent is his filmmaking style across a broad range of subjects, from the fall of Enron to the fizz of Hunter S. Thompson. “Mea Maxima Culpa” is among his most perspicacious works: weaving a profoundly moving story of human heroism through a tough-minded analysis of a global scandal, he carves out new angles in a story he admits initially fearing had already been adequately exposed.

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MINNESOTA
Inforum

By: Erik Burgess , INFORUM

BARNESVILLE, Minn. – The teenager who was not confirmed at the Catholic church here after he publicly supported same-sex marriage was not the only student who was denied the religious sacrament for backing gay marriage, the church’s priest said in a letter made public Friday.

In the letter, addressed to the parish of Assumption Church at 307 Front St. N., the Rev. Gary LaMoine says “a couple of candidates chose not to enter into full communion with the Catholic community because of their disagreement with the teaching of the Church concerning marriage.”

LaMoine also apologizes in the letter for the actions of 17-year-old Lennon Cihak’s family, who went public Wednesday with their claims that LaMoine denied their son confirmation after he posted a pro same-sex marriage photo on Facebook last month.

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NEW MEXICO
ABQ Journal

By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Journal Staff Writer on Sat, Nov 17, 2012

An Albuquerque man who filed a lawsuit alleging he was sexually abused as a child by a Roman Catholic priest has reached a “mutually agreeable” settlement with the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the Servants of the Paraclete, his attorney said Friday.

Clifford Esquibel filed the lawsuit in October 2011, alleging the Rev. John George Weisenborn sexually molested him beginning in 1966 or 1967 when Esquibel was a seventh-grade altar boy at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Albuquerque.

The abuse continued until Esquibel was a 15-year-old student at Albuquerque High School, the lawsuit said.

Court records show that Weisenborn, who is now deceased, had lived since 1964 at Via Coeli, a treatment facility for priests in Jemez Springs operated by the Servants of the Paraclete.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

ABC breakfast radio presenter Eoin Cameron has urged all victims of child abuse to tell their stories to the royal commission.

Mr Cameron was repeatedly raped and sexually abused by a Marist Brother while he was student at a Catholic school in South Australia in the 1960s.

He says not a day goes by where he is not haunted by the memories of the abuse but he is prepared to give evidence to help ensure the full extent of institutional child abuse is exposed.

He has told the ABC’s 7:30WA he understands why many victims may feel reluctant to speak out.

“Now the Royal Commission has been called, it’s the opportunity for people not perhaps to go through something as stressful as I did,” he said.

“It’s a chance for them to tell their story, but already I’m hearing from people, I couldn’t, I want to but it would kill my Mum and Dad.”

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AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury

By PETER NEWELL
Nov. 17, 2012

When the sun’s first rays creep over the horizon this morning and gently kiss, warm and illuminate the Illawarra coastline, they may be on a special mission.

First, they will touch the Pacific Ocean, and then its foaming surf and the beaches on to which it cascades.

Seconds later they will make landfall, bringing the birth of another day to all, and to two places in particular – the Bulli and Lakeside Kanahooka cemeteries. There lie at rest two special souls and, after political events this week, their headstones deserve to be bathed in sunshine.

Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if both these grave sites seem to have a particular sparkle about them today – a sort of celestial salute to good men, if you like.

Bulli is the resting place of the earthly remains of Peter Hugh Cullen, former Illawarra Mercury editor and, I’m proud to say, my mate. At Kanahooka rests Father Maurie Crocker, a man of great courage who saw evil flourishing and felt it his duty to do something about it while others turned a blind eye.

Although no longer here, years ago each played his own particular role in this week’s announcement by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard of a wide-ranging royal commission into paedophilia across the country. It has been a long time coming, but I am sure each of them would cheer its arrival with gusto.

Peter and Maurie tackled this evil abuse of children in the Illawarra, and its cover-up, when it was not fashionable in some circles to expose such matters – back in 1993. I was the Mercury’s general manager at the time, having been its editor previously with Peter as my deputy, so our relationship was close.

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UTAH
Standard-Examiner

By Loretta Park
Standard-Examiner staff

FARMINGTON — A Centerville man facing child sex abuse charges has a felony arraignment hearing set for Dec. 4.

Timothy William Bothell, 43, appeared in 2nd District Court on Friday. He is charged with two first-degree felony counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child and four counts of Class A misdemeanor charges of lewdness involving a child.

Bothell served on a local Stake High Council for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was also employed by the LDS Church at the time of his arrest in August, police said.

According to court documents the abuse happened between Dec. 1, 2011, and Aug. 9, 2012.

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NEW YORK
Playbill

By Andrew Gans
16 Nov 2012

Theatre for the New City will present a reading of Frank J. Avella’s Vatican Falls, a play “set against the backdrop of the Catholic sex abuse scandal,” Dec. 3 at 7 PM.

Directed by Laura Caparrotti, the reading will feature the talents of Francesco Andolfi, Carlotta Brentan, Drew Bruck, Matthew Crooks, Joshua Dixon, Cali Gilman, Kalen J. Hall, Salvatore Infantino, Maggie LaMonica, Devon Talbott and Rob Ventre. Alexander Haynes will read the stage directions.

Based on factual material, Vatican Falls, according to press notes, “follows the life of one survivor who struggles with understanding how those closest to him could damage him the deepest. The multi-genre, non-linear play probes the conflicting feelings involved in most sexual abuse situations and dares to confront the truth about the ever-growing scandal and the Church’s complicity in it.”

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CALIFORNIA
Mercury News

By Mark Gomez
mgomez@mercurynews.commercurynews.com

SAN JOSE — Melanie Borrelli was home for the weekend, enjoying the annual festival at her old school, when she saw something that alarmed her. It was a familiar face connected with a horrible rumor.

The 19-year-old college sophomore recognized the man working a sound booth as Mark Gurries, who — she had heard — had been convicted of molesting a girl she knew. Borrelli took out her smartphone, Googled his name and found his mug shot on the Megan’s Law website.

She couldn’t believe it. Here was a registered sex offender working at a parish festival with hundreds of children around, including Borrelli’s two younger sisters. Melanie Borrelli found her mom.

“What is he doing here?” she asked her mom, pointing at Gurries and showing her the mug shot.

Parents in the Saint Frances Cabrini Catholic Parish are still waiting for answers to that question first posed Oct. 6 by Melanie Borrelli, a former student at the parish’s Catholic elementary school in San Jose. She and others were even more incredulous that night when, they said, parish priest Father Lieu Vu told them Gurries — convicted in 2010 of molesting a young relative — had a right to be there. In fact, he possessed a letter from the church giving him explicit permission to be a volunteer.

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CANADA
London Free Press

By Randy Richmond, The London Free Press

Friday, November 16, 2012

A bishop of the Old Roman Catholic Church has waded into the debate about whether a Londoner with a criminal past is a priest.

Terry Mertick is indeed “a priest in good standing,” Bishop Gilles Tremblay said in a news release Friday.

“Father Terry Mertick is a validly ordained priest under my episcopal jurisdiction here in Montreal P.Q.,” the statement reads.

The Old Roman Catholic Church officially dates to 1870 and exists apart from the Roman Catholic Church, Tremblay said in his statement.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of London issued a news release Thursday that said Mertick was impersonating a priest and conducting services at area funeral homes.

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WASHINGTON
Kirkland Reporter

November 16, 2012

A child sex abuse claim, which involved a Kirkland church, has been settled. A trial was scheduled to begin against the Seattle Archdiocese next Monday but the parish district settled for $635,000 on Thursday.

Former youth minister Jim Funnell at St. John Vianney Church in Kirkland allegedly sexually abused the plaintiff, identified by his initials D.E., in the mid-1980s for more than one year. It is said others were abused as well.

D.E. was living in Kirkland at the time of the abuse but now resides in Bothell.

Funnell was hired, which the plaintiff claims, during the time when former Seattle Archbishop Raymond Haunthausen and other Catholic bishops were collaborating on how to address the emerging sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church.

However, the Archdiocese failed to adequately warn its employees and timely adopt the policies regarding child sex abuse, and Funnell slipped through the cracks because church officials failed to conduct a proper background check, said the victim.

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UNITED STATES
Voice from the Desert

[Bob Hoatson reflects on last night’s election results]

Tom Doyle

When I first saw Bob’s reflections on the election joined with his reflections on VOTF I was struck by how much on target Bob is with his thoughts on both. I suggested that his thoughts get as wide a circulation as possible.

The one aspect of the election campaign that irritated me the most was the clumsy and insulting intrusion of the U.S. Bishops. They viewed the campaign and the office of president pretty much the way they view everything: an entity subordinate to them and an entity that must submit to their scrutiny and their demands. For as long as anyone can remember the bishops have held themselves out to be the official, divinely instituted arbiters and interpreters of moral law, theology and the meaning of the scriptures. Whether their interpretation was true mattered little. If they said it was so that was it! In their way of thinking it is always been better to be right than to be true!

Well, they said what was true about a number of issues over the centuries and in time, usually much time, they were proven wrong and had to admit it. The clarion example is Galilleo who waited over three centuries for posthumous vindication and even then the mitered wizards led by the pope could not come out and simply say “we were wrong.”

The bishops’ collective efforts to unseat the president were an embarrassment to many Catholics who had come to the conclusion that they are adults and can make electoral choices on their own.

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UNITED STATES
The Wrap

By Sharon Waxman
Follow @sharonwaxman

Alex Gibney is ready to take on the Pope in his new documentary, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” which opens this weekend.

Gibney, who has taken on hot topics from lobbyist Jack Abramoff to biking champion Lance Armstrong to Enron, digs into a new aspect of the sexual-abuse scandal in which deaf children in Catholic boarding schools were preyed upon by pedophile priests.

One of those children, now grown, has sued the Pope. The film raises the tantalizing question of whether private individuals can sue the Vatican, which is a sovereign country.

“So you can understand the magnitude of this scandal, it’s a concerted systematic cover-up of childhood sexual abuse that goes all the way to top of Vatican,” he told me.

He said that the sins of the Wisconsin priest at the deaf school, Lawrence Murphy, “leads you on a journey, like the film ‘Chinatown,’ from Milwaukee to Ireland all the way up to the top of the Vatican, to the Pope himself.”

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

CARDINAL George Pell looked more like a politician than a priest this week, ducking and weaving and spinning his answers to lay blame everywhere but in his own backyard.

It’s been that refusal of the church and its hierarchy to deal properly and openly with decades of accusations that has led to the widespread public cynicism and criticism it now faces.

Its official response has been minimalist and reluctant, hidden in legalese and spin, all aimed at protecting the reputation of the church first, and helping the victim second.

Pell’s public performance shows nothing has changed, and that’s not only a sad indictment on the church (not its people, who do good things every day) but a hurtful and unwise approach before the royal commission.

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UNITED STATES
dotCommonweal

November 16, 2012

Posted by Eric Bugyis

Over at The Dish, Andrew Sullivan praises a new HBO documentary, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” by Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) on the perpetration and cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church that traces the corruption all the way to the Pope. None of this, I think, will be news to many of us who have been following this horrifying story for more than a decade, but Sullivan offers an interesting comment on how the loss of moral credibility among the hierarchy has created two parallel churches:

One feature of this last election was the complete failure of the Vatican hierarchs to dictate the vote to the flock. American Catholics voted for Obama over Romney. The docile fools in dresses – from Dolan to Chaput – were ignored as they now routinely are, and should be. They actually think they still have moral authority. But moral authority has to be earned with each generation, and the corruption in the Vatican is so deep and so rotten and so incapable of self-reflection it has effectively created two Catholic churches in America: those few in the pews who still listen to the bishops and those who exist almost in a parallel church, focused on their own parish, their own priest, and their own faith, which remains, for many of us, undimmed.

I have also found the idea of inhabiting a parallel Catholic Church to be one way of sustaining my own faith through the dark time of scandal, pastoral malfeasance, and political cynicism that continues to undermine the hierarchical Church. The wonderful community at my local parish and the excellent priests that serve us have kept me coming back every week in spite of the continual heartbreak that comes from seeing certain bishops and their friends take the public stage with a militant defensiveness, a hunger for power, and a litigiousness that seems to be the very antithesis of the Gospel’s message of self-sacrifice, humility, and love. Now more than ever, I find that spending Sunday mornings in prayer with my spouse and our friends a the Church of Loretto is essential to sustaining a spiritual life away from the daily silliness that has become the public witness of institutional Catholicism.

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UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast

[with video]

Andrew Sullivan

Earlier this week, I was privileged to attend a screening of Alex Gibney’s latest piece of documentary brilliance, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.” It’s released today. To be honest I want to see it one more time before writing a length about it. It’s about the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis – and the criminal conspiracy reaching right to the current Pope that will one day surely bring the whole house of cards down, so that the church can be rebuilt amid the ruins created by deeply sick and psychologically crippled men at its core. No one is more implicated in covering up this institutionalization of sexual abuse and secrecy than the man who controlled and oversaw every single case of clerical sex abuse in the world from 2001 onwards: Pope Benedict XVI, who knows more than anyone else on the planet about the horrifying psycho-sexual truth beneath the ermined, bejewelled veneer.

One feature of this last election was the complete failure of the Vatican hierarchs to dictate the vote to the flock. American Catholics voted for Obama over Romney. The docile fools in dresses – from Dolan to Chaput – were ignored as they now routinely are, and should be. They actually think they still have moral authority. But moral authority has to be earned with each generation, and the corruption in the Vatican is so deep and so rotten and so incapable of self-reflection it has effectively created two Catholic churches in America: those few in the pews who still listen to the bishops and those who exist almost in a parallel church, focused on their own parish, their own priest, and their own faith, which remains, for many of us, undimmed.

But every now and again, that parallel church actually encounters – and cannot elide – the hierarchy. In Minnesota, where a third of the population is Catholic, the hierarchy insisted that the state amend its constitution to keep gay couples out of civil society and civil marriage. The hierarchy failed – as miserably as they failed in their trumped up “war on religion” nonsense. The Amendment didn’t pass. You cannot be exposed as an institution that is responsible for covering up the rape and torture of thousands of children and have any moral authority when it comes to the constitutional equality of gay citizens or the contraceptives that 99 percent of Catholic American women use at some point.

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UNITED STATES
Associated Baptist Press

By Bob Allen

A network of Reformed church plants accused in a class-action lawsuit of covering up sexual abuse of children appealed to a First Amendment defense in a statement Nov. 14.

Sovereign Grace Ministries, which recently relocated from Maryland to Louisville, Ky., in the wake of recent internal strife, initially declined comment until receiving a copy of the lawsuit filed Oct. 17 in Montgomery County, Md.

An “updated” statement by Tommy Hill, Sovereign Grace’s director of administration, said the organization could not comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit, but upon review “it appears the complaint contains a number of misleading allegations, as well as considerable mischaracterizations of intent.”

Hill said the lawsuit, which does not allege child abuse by any current or former pastor involved with the network of about 90 churches, involved “biblical and spiritual direction” given by request of those seeking counsel.

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SCHWEIZ
Tages Anzeiger

Von Eva Waiblinger

Die Historikerin Francisca Loetz untersuchte Fälle sexueller Gewalt in Zürich von 1500 bis 1850. Männer hatten damals das Recht, ihre Sexualität auszuleben. Für Frauen zählte vor Gericht einzig die Ehre.

Überlandstrasse. Ein Zeuge hört Schreie und beobachtet, wie Jakob A. (24) mit offenem Hosenladen Reissaus nimmt. Im Strassengraben findet der Zeuge dann die junge Barbara U. (17): wimmernd, mit zerzausten Haaren und zerrissenen Kleidern. Der Fall kommt vor Gericht. Die Zürcher Richter erachten es als erwiesen, dass Jakob A. die Frau vergewaltigt hat, sehen jedoch von einer Bestrafung des Angeklagten ab, wenn dieser Barbara U. am darauffolgenden Samstag ehelicht. Barbara U. muss ihren Peiniger heiraten. Ein empörend ungerechtes Verdikt – nach heutigem Empfinden. Nicht so im Jahr 1656, als das Zürcher Gericht dieses Urteil fällte. Damals sah die Gesellschaft ein solches Urteil als angemessen und sinnvoll an.

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MISSOURI
Missourinet

November 16, 2012 By Jessica Machetta

A former Kansas City catholic priest linked to several sexual abuse incidents has died. John Tulipana, 66, had been banned from the ministry in 1994. The Kansas City Diocese settled two complaints against him that year. The diocese in 2008 paid $10 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 47 people who had complained Tulipana and other priests had abused them in the 1970s.

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MIAMI (FL)
CBS Miami

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – The Miami Archdiocese again finds itself the target of a child abuse lawsuit, this time involving an accused serial molester already being held in the Broward County jail in a criminal case.

According to CBS 4 news partner The Miami Herald, a lawsuit alleges Fr. Neil Doherty drugged and sexually molested Dennis Montero almost three decades ago as the priest “blessed him” and told the then 15-year-old “his job was to share God’s love.’’

“He drugged me repeatedly and raped me repeatedly. This guy is a monster,” Montero, 43, said Thursday. “I ended up punishing myself with drugs and alcohol to deal with the pain.’’

Doherty, 69, already named in more than two dozen sex-abuse lawsuits, is in jail awaiting trial on a charge of sexually assaulting a minor in Broward County.

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UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches

By Elizabeth Drescher

For all Il Papa’s social media encouragement the last few years, the Roman Catholic Church continues to struggle with digital ministry practice, particularly where new media intersects the church’s medieval sacramental structure.

In 2011, a new smartphone app aimed to support preparation for and the practice of confession ended up generating more confusion than contrition when a not particularly social design invited people to conclude that absolution was granted by way of the Confession app itself rather than, according to Catholic teaching, through the mediation of the priest.

No wonder Pope Benedict XVI’s Message for World Communications Day earlier this year highlighted silence and listening—the heart of Christian practices of contemplation—by way of encouraging the development of “a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.” And, we might add, actions.

Blog a bit, tweet a bit, share your favorite liturgical recipes on Facebook if you like, the Holy Father seemed to be saying to the Catholic faithful, but once in a while, for the love of God, zip it.

All in all, not a bad idea, but I suspect the silence His Holiness had in mind had nothing to do with the kind of creepy, panoptical Facebook surveillance that led the Rev. Gary LaMoine of Assumption Church in Barnesville, Minnesota to prevent 17-year-old Lennon Cihak from receiving the sacrament of confirmation, a rite of passage usually administered to Catholic teenagers to “perfect the work of baptism” (the first of the sacraments, in Roman Catholic teaching) and mark their maturity as Catholic Christians. Likewise, the boy’s family members have been prevented from receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion at the church.

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PROVIDENCE (RI)
Seattle PI

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A Connecticut man has sued the Legion of Christ, accusing the disgraced Roman Catholic order of using “predatory” means to persuade his father to donate his retirement savings.

The suit filed in federal court in Rhode Island seeks to recoup some $1 million of James Boa-Teh (bo-AH’-teh) Chu’s savings and $10 million in damages. Chu was a Yale University professor who died in 2009.

Paul Chu’s lawsuit says his father’s health was declining when Legion representatives convinced him to donate his savings.

A Legion spokesman denies the claim.

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AUSTRALIA
The Standard

By PETER COLLINS
Nov. 17,

THE chairman of a national council of Catholic priests has revealed how he worked and lived with priests later convicted of child abuse who had kept their dark perversions secret from other clergy.

Father Eugene McKinnon, who was raised and served in the south-west, said the offenders had kept that part of their lives hidden until confronted by outside authorities.

“I knew three of the paedophile priests,” he said.

“I lived in the same parish presbytery with a bloke who was later jailed, but I didn’t pick up on what he was doing.

“You could eat and talk with him and you never knew there was another part of his life.

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GEORGIA
Savannah Morning News

By Bryan County Now

A priest who once worked at Holy Cross Church in Pembroke, Fr. Robert Poandl, was indicted by federal authorities on child sex crimes Thursday.

According to the Associated Press the Rev. Robert Poandl, of the Cincinnati-based Glenmary Home Missioners, voluntarily surrendered to authorities after he learned of the charges and was in Butler County Jail in southwest Ohio following an order by a federal magistrate judge that he be taken into custody.

The indictment against Poandl, opened in Cincinnati federal court on Wednesday, accused the priest of taking a 10-year-old boy to West Virginia for sex in 1991.

A statement released by Glenmary, said Poandl was serving as pastor of Glenmary’s missions in Claxton, Pembroke and Sand Hill until Feb. 11 of this year when he was relieved of his ministerial duties following an allegation of sexual misconduct.

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CALIFORNIA
Santa Monica Mirror

Posted Nov. 15, 2012

Brenton Garen / Editor-in-Chief

Former Santa Monica St. Anne’s Church priest Rafael Venegas pleaded to one count of misdemeanor battery and one count of furnishing alcohol to a minor last Friday, Nov. 9.

Venegas was sentenced to one day in jail, 364 days of probation, 160 hours of community service, and counseling through the archdiocese, which must contain a segment dealing with sexual compulsion.

The sentencing stems from a Santa Monica Police Department investigation that began on July 1, 2012.

A 20-year-old woman, who was not a parishioner of St. Anne’s, reported that a sexual assault involving Venegas occurred on the property of St. Anne’s Parish at 2017 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica in September 2011.

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

EXCLUSIVE Gary Adshead, The West Australian
Updated November 17, 2012

A mother who discovered 18 years after her teenage son committed suicide that he had been molested by an Anglican priest in Gosnells will ask the national royal commission into child sex abuse to investigate the case.

David Dossett was 13 in 1976 when he overdosed on sleeping tablets, leaving his mother Margaret baffled until detectives with evidence about the crimes of Rev. Michael Roderick Painter knocked on her door in 1994. Mrs Dossett has spoken publicly for the first time about her son’s suicide and her belief that Painter abused many children before taking his life.

She described the heartache of finding out that the priest, who prayed for her son while he lay dying in hospital and later conducted his funeral service, was responsible for David’s death.

“I’d wish I’d had the strength to confront Michael Painter and say, ‘What have you done to my son’,” Mrs Dossett said. “But I didn’t have that strength. It is my big regret.”

Painter killed himself four months after police officers told Mrs Dossett that entries in his diaries would result in the priest being charged with molesting her son between 1974 and 1976.

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

Gary Adshead, The West Australian
Updated November 17, 2012

Reverend Michael Painter didn’t stay long after laying 13-year-old David Dossett to rest during a small but gut-wrenching funeral service at Karrakatta in 1976.

The boy’s mother Margaret assumed the family priest, who she says had taken David on youth group trips, found it too upsetting.

Almost two decades later she learnt the real reason Painter disappeared early on that terrible day. He was a shame- ridden paedophile who robbed David of his innocence and drove him to suicide.

Mrs Dossett’s memory of the circumstances surrounding David’s death was vivid.

She knew the names of the constables who were at the bush site in Thornlie where David was found at 4.50pm on August 12, 1976, having been lying unconscious and out of sight all day.

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

Andrew Tillett Canberra, The West Australian

The head of the Catholic Church in Perth warns that forcing priests to report sex offenders could be counterproductive and still put children at risk.

Archbishop Timothy Costelloe told _The Weekend West _ yesterday that the confidentiality of the confession box may be the only way of getting predators to admit and deal with their crimes.

In the wake of Julia Gillard announcing a national royal commission this week into child sex abuse, a raft of politicians – including the Prime Minister, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and Premier Colin Barnett – said priests had a responsibility to pass on claims of child sex abuse to the authorities.

In WA, priests are not bound by the same mandatory reporting requirements as teachers, doctors, nurses and police.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By JOANNE McCARTHY
Nov. 17, 2012

IT’S the investigation that has everything – a defrocked priest, a former Newcastle lord mayor, spying allegations, and questions about the professional standards of a professional standards director.

Newcastle Anglican Diocese is keeping tight-lipped about a complaint involving its professional standards director Michael Elliott and his alleged attempts to view a service organised by a defrocked priest.

The diocese has confirmed it received a complaint after Mr Elliott was asked to leave the enclosed backyard of a unit for vulnerable people, including domestic violence victims, on October 26.

The unit complex overlooks a former church building in the Newcastle area.

Mr Elliott is alleged to have identified himself when challenged, and to have told a complex employee he was looking for a vantage point to observe a service organised by defrocked Newcastle priest John Gumbley.

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AUSTRALIA
Geelong Advertiser

Mandy Squires | November 17th, 2012

GEELONG priest Kevin Dillon says a public rally against the handling of Catholic Church abuse claims could help send a message to the church’s leaders.

Ordinary Catholics should consider letting the “blind and deaf” church hierarchy know they do not agree with the way abuse claims have been handled and want a new way forward, Father Dillon of St Mary’s Basilica said.

A rally would also show support to abuse victims, he said.

“Maybe what we need is a march up Bourke St like we had for Jill Meagher a few weeks ago, to say to church leaders we want a different approach,” Father Dillon said.

“We want people who have been violated and had their lives ruined to be looked after and we’re sick and tired of this business of being told how good it (the Catholic Church’s own system for handling abuse claims) is, when it hasn’t been able to produce one victim to actually say that.”

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CONNECTICUT
Patch

By Paul Petrone

After his lawyer cited a need to look further into his medical records, today Fr. Dennis Carey’s case was continued again until January 7 by Judge Susan B. Handy.

Carey, the former head paster of Waterford’s St. Paul in Chains Rectory, was arrested in July on a charge of first-degree possession of child pornography after police allegedly found more than 300 files of child pornography on Carey’s computers inside the rectory. Carey has since said he wants help for his addiction to child pornography and has spent time in a mental health institution.

Today he appeared in New London Superior Court with his lawyer, Ron Stevens. His appearance lasted less than 30 seconds, with Handy saying the state had no opposition to Stevens’ request for more time and rescheduled his court date for January 7.

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NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand Herald

By Catherine Masters , Greg Ansley

5:30 AM Saturday Nov 17, 2012

Calls mount for New Zealand involvement in a top-level Australian inquiry into the widespread sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and other authority figures. Greg Ansley and Catherine Masters report

Former priest Denis McAlinden was defrocked following sexual abuse allegations involving minors in Australia. He spent six months in Tokomaru Bay’s church. Photo / Supplied

The Catholic church in Tokomaru Bay, Gisborne, is like many in small-town New Zealand – a picture of safety and innocence.

It’s hard to imagine that the pretty little wooden chapel with the blue roof has been caught up in a top-level inquiry into the sexual abuse of children, which was launched in Australia but is likely to extend to this country.

Among the practices to be investigated is that instead of prosecuting paedophile priests, the Catholic church transferred them from diocese to diocese – sometimes shipping them across the Tasman to New Zealand and vice versa.

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MISSOURI
KCTV

Posted: Nov 15, 2012

By Laura McCallister, Multimedia Producer
By Betsy Webster, News Reporter

MONITEAU COUNTY, MO (KCTV) –
A Missouri church is facing criticism from within its own ranks over a pastor accused of child sex crimes who refuses to step down.

Pastor Travis Smith has been exonerated of two child sex crimes cases, and now charged in two more.

Baptist leaders are concerned, while his congregation is steadfast in their support.

In several small mid-Missouri towns surrounding the county seat of California, MO, Smith’s name can invoke the response, “Say no more.”

Before being pastor at the First Baptist Church in Stover, MO, Smith was youth pastor at Pilot Grove Baptist Church.

“The whole thing just made me sick. The whole thing was sickening,” said a woman who didn’t want to reveal her identity.

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UTAH
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by Barbara Dorris on November 16, 2012

A West Valley City minister has been removed for failing to quickly report allegations of child abuse.

We are grateful for this move. Too often, those who abuse kids get away because church officials refuse to or delay reporting allegations. When predators are brought to justice, those who enabled and protected them get off scot free, and allowed to remain in their positions. Only when those who enable and cover up child sex abuse are punished for their actions will the tide begin to turn against the child sex abuse epidemic.

We hope that Rev. Eddie Kelemini, who has stepped into the position left vacant by Rev. Havili Mone’s ouster, will be a friend to victims and an advocate for those who have been hurt by the church. We urge Rev. Kelemini to search within his church for others who may be suffering in silence and use every resource at his disposal to help them heal and seek justice.

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CLEVELAND (OH0)
Fox 8

[with video]

November 14, 2012, by Bill Sheil

A FOX 8 I-Team investigation looks into how the Cleveland Catholic Diocese has handled one particular priest.

The priest took a leave of absence ten years ago, just after the priest sex abuse scandal exploded into public view.

The FOX 8 I-Team’s Bill Sheil tells you what the priest is doing now.

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OHIO
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on November 16, 2012

Cleveland’s Catholic bishop is restoring to ministry a priest who “groomed” a teenager and tried to abuse him.

In a nine minute televised investigative report, based largely on “hundreds of pages of documents from the Lake County prosecutor,” Fox 8 investigative reporter Bill Sheil reports that Bishop Richard Lennon is putting Fr. Jeffrey M. Weaver back on the job for the first time in a decade.

Read the story.

Leaders of a support group called SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, are blasting the move as “reckless, callous and deceitful.”

According to the records released by prosecutors, in 1996, Fr. Weaver

–“bought the teenager a large number of alcoholic drinks,”
–“then tried to French kiss him” while victim pushed him away in the Immaculate Conception rectory,
–“rubbed his legs above the knee, approaching his penis one time,”
–“locked his legs together over the victim’s legs, saying ‘isn’t this nice,’” and
–“put the victim’s hands on his (the priest’s) legs.”

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WASHINGTON
Sky Valley Chronicle

November 16, 2012

(SEATTLE, WA) — The Seattle Archdiocese has decided to settle a 1980’s sex abuse lawsuit for $635,000 payable to the man who said he was victimized by a former lay youth minister.

Rolfe Eckmann alleged he was abused in the mid-80s by Jim Funnell, a former youth minister at Saint John Vianney Catholic Church in Kirkland.

In the lawsuit he filed Eckmann contended the Archdiocese hired Funnell without a background check while at the same time the church was also implementing its sex abuse prevention policies.

In 1989, Funnell was charged with sexually assaulting a different boy and was fired from his job. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

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UNITED KINGDOM
EADT 24

Friday, November 16, 2012

A RETIRED priest from Suffolk who sexually abused teenagers will not be sentenced today because of administrative reasons.

Father John Haley Dossor had been due to receive his punishment after pleading guilty at an earlier hearing to six indecent assaults against two boys aged between 13 and 17.

The 71-year-old, of Kirton, near Felixstowe, had denied a further nine charges relating to attacks on men and boys and they will remain on file.

But the hearing at Norwich Crown Court could not take place.

Dossor will be sentenced at a date yet to be confirmed.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

November 17, 2012

Mike Carlton

Grave of mien, choosing each word with studied care, every inch a prince of Rome, Cardinal George Pell defied the accusers.

The sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests had been exaggerated, he told a news conference in Sydney on Tuesday. There was a “press campaign” against the church, with “general smears that we are covering up and moving people around”.

“We object to being described as the only cab on the rank … because there is a persistent press campaign focused largely on us, that does not mean we are largely the principal culprits.”

With those few sentences, Australia’s most senior Catholic churchman flung aside any lingering shred of moral authority attached either to his person or his office as the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney. There were one or two perfunctory remarks about “shame” delivered in that familiar treacly baritone, but that was it. Strip away the apostolic airs and he could have been a flack for James Hardie assuring the world that the dangers of the company’s asbestos products had been rather overblown.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

November 17, 2012

Chrissie Foster

I COULD never stand to live in a world without justice and truth: at last there will be a platform for both. Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of a royal commission on child sexual abuse has brought to an end the cries from victims and victim supporters. Of course, there have been many tears this week. More will be shed. But the royal commission is a cause for celebration.

For my family, the struggle to achieve this breakthrough began 16 years ago, on March 26, 1996. This was the day my daughter Emma, after almost a year of starving her 13-year-old body to an emaciated 41 kilograms, numerous self-harming horrors and attempts to take her own life, disclosed that our parish priest had sexually assaulted her. Not once, but on many occasions over her primary school years.

Fifteen months later more horror and heartbreak surfaced through a half-finished suicide note from our second daughter, Katie. She had hidden the note in a shoebox. It was written in her very neatest handwriting. Katie had been another victim of our parish priest.

There was no cure for my much-loved daughters. The pain never leaves. After years of subsequent torment, Emma took her own life at the age of 26. Katie, while drunk after binge drinking, was hit by a car in 1999 (she was 15) and still receives 24-hour care as a result of her injuries.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

JAMIE WALKER
From:The Australian
November 17, 2012

THE spiritual leader of Australia’s 3.5 million Anglicans, Phillip Aspinall, believes that priests may be able to report child abuse revealed during the rite of confession without breaking the seal of the confessional, putting him at odds with Catholics.

The Anglican Primate says the sanctity of the confessional should be examined by the royal commission into child sexual abuse called this week by Julia Gillard, which he regards as being a decade overdue.

Dr Aspinall’s predecessor as Archbishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth – who lost his job as governor-general after a scandal erupted over his handling of sex-abuse cases in the diocese – also backed the inquiry.

Dr Hollingworth warned yesterday that the abuse of children was “more widespread than previously thought”, and welcomed the royal commission as an important national initiative and a means to help victims.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

PETER CRAVEN
From:The Australian
November 17, 2012

IT’S fortunate that when Julia Gillard announced on Monday that she would hold a royal commission into child abuse, she emphasised it would not confine itself to any one religious institution, or to religious institutions at all: government childcare, non-profit private bodies such as the Scouts – all would be scrutinised.

If the process was going to take years, then fair enough, in the Prime Minister’s view – there could (and should) be no shortcuts in this business.

It was an appropriate way to announce a royal commission, because the immediate provocation for one was that there had been more reports of abuse involving the Catholic Church.

They were hellish reports: of Catholic brothers committing pack rapes of children in orphanages, of offending priests being posted to new parishes where they offended again.

Premier Ted Baillieu in Victoria has an investigation under way and his NSW counterpart Barry O’Farrell has announced one too. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, independent senator Nick Xenophon and independent federal MP Tony Windsor had all called for a royal commission.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent

Tom Pugh

Friday 16 November 2012

Police investigating allegations of sex offences against boys and young men by a retired Church of England bishop said seven more people have come forward claiming they were abused.

The Rt Rev Peter Ball, 80, was arrested at his home near Langport, Somerset, on Tuesday on suspicion of sex offences against eight boys and young men aged from 12 to their early 20s in East Sussex and elsewhere in the late 1970s and 1990s, sources said.

Since his arrest, Sussex Police said a further seven people have come forward making allegations of abuse against them.

A number of people have also stepped forward with potentially useful information, although not alleging that offences had been committed against them.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Friday November 16 2012

AN ELDERLY priest has been charged with sexually assaulting a teen over an eight-year period two decades ago.

Fr Vincent Mercer (66) of Black Abbey, Kilkenny, was remanded on bail after being charged before Cork District Court with a total of 39 counts of sexual assault.

Fr Mercer faces 39 charges of sexual assault against a juvenile at various locations in Cork and Limerick between January 1, 1986 and February 22, 1994.

The juvenile was aged between 11 and 17 over this period.

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UNITED KINGDOM
EADT 24

Friday, November 16, 2012

A RETIRED priest from Suffolk who sexually abused teenagers is due to be sentenced.

Father John Haley Dossor pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to six indecent assaults against two boys aged between 13 and 17.

The 71-year-old, of Kirton, near Felixstowe, had denied a further nine charges relating to attacks on men and boys and they will remain on file.

He will be sentenced at Norwich Crown Court and has been warned he could be jailed.

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MIAMI (FL)
Miami Herald

By Audra D.S. Burch
aburch@miamiherald.com

The Miami Archdiocese faces another child abuse lawsuit involving an accused serial molester already being held in the Broward County jail in a criminal case.

In a lawsuit, Fr. Neil Doherty is accused of drugging and sexually molesting Dennis Montero almost three decades ago as the priest “blessed him” and told the then 15-year-old “his job was to share God’s love.’’

“He drugged me repeatedly and raped me repeatedly. This guy is a monster,” Montero, 43, said Thursday. “I ended up punishing myself with drugs and alcohol to deal with the pain.’’

Doherty, 69, already named in more than two dozen sex-abuse lawsuits, is in jail awaiting trial on a charge of sexually assaulting a minor in Broward County.

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UNITED STATES
Reuters

By Andrea Burzynski

NEW YORK | Fri Nov 16, 2012

(Reuters) – Four deaf Wisconsin men were some of the first to seek justice after suffering childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and a new documentary about the Catholic Church’s poor handling of such cases stemming from the Vatican seeks to make their voices heard.

“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” explores the impact of the Roman Catholic Church’s protocol as dictated from the Vatican for dealing with pedophile priests. It opens in U.S. cinemas on November 16, and will air on cable channel HBO in February.

Though American media coverage about child sex abuse by clergy has been extensive since a slew of cases came to light in Boston in 2002, Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney wanted to connect individual stories with what he sees as systemic failures stemming from the top of the church.

“A lot of individual stories had been done about clerical sex abuse, but I hadn’t seen one that really connected the individual stories with the larger cover-up by the Vatican, so that was important,” Gibney told Reuters in an interview.

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MAINE
Bangor Daily News

By Julia Bayly, BDN Staff

FORT KENT, Maine — Members of St. John Vianney Parish could have their former spiritual leader back in time for Christmas following word Thursday from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland that the Rev. James Nadeau is returning after a 7-month voluntary leave of absence.

Nadeau stepped down from his position as pastor of the St.John Valley parish in the wake of a Maine attorney general’s office investigation into possible embezzlement of parish funds.

Earlier this month, that office decided to not pursue criminal charges against Nadeau, citing lack of evidence supporting the allegations which had been brought by an unidentified third party.

Nadeau met for two hours in Portland Thursday afternoon with Bishop Richard J. Malone, Apostolic administrator of the diocese, according to Dave Guthro, communications director with the diocese.

Guthro declined to provide further details about the investigation, but said Thursday’s meeting between Malone and Nadeau “went very well. The two men wanted to keep that meeting a private conversation between Father Nadeau and the Bishop [and] it sounded like it went well with no rancor.”

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UNITED STATES
The Star-Ledger

By Stephen Whitty/The Star-Ledger

Alex Gibney’s new film begins with dark shots of Gothic architecture, ominous figures moving through murky shadows and, in the background, faintly chanted Latin. It feels a bit like a monster movie.

It is, too.

Sadly, though, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” is a documentary about real-life horrors – the sexual abuse (and coverups) that have tortured countless innocents, bedeviled the Catholic Church and caused many to question their faith.

The Summit-based documentarian, always a careful filmmaker, begins by focusing on a single, albeit monstrous case – a priest who, for decades, abused boys at a Wisconsin boarding school for the deaf.

But then, it slowly widens its gaze – to see similar horrors taking place in Ireland, in Italy, in Latin America. And to uncover a pattern of deceit that both denied the victims help and practically ensured their abusers could continue the assaults.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

By Robert Patrick rpatrick@post-dispatch.com

ST. LOUIS  •  An advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse praised on Thursday the extradition order that will send a former University City man to Australia to face child sexual abuse charges.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests called U.S. Magistrate Judge Nannette Baker’s extradition order last month a “win for victims everywhere,” and urged any victims of David Kramer to come forward to police.

Australian authorities claim Kramer fondled or otherwise indecently assaulted four male students, ages 10 and 11, who attended the school where Kramer taught. The abuse was alleged to have occurred from 1989-92, while Kramer was teaching at a school in St. Kilda, a Melbourne suburb.

Officials charged Kramer last December, months before he was released from a Missouri prison after serving a seven-year sentence for sexual misconduct and statutory sodomy. Prosecutors said he fondled a 12-year-old boy and masturbated in front of him in an apartment in University City. Kramer pleaded guilty in 2008.

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OHIO/WEST VIRGINIA
WLWT

[with video]

CINCINNATI —
A federal grand jury has indicted a Fairfield priest with transportation of a minor across state lines for illicit purposes.

A grand jury in West Virginia indicts a Cincinnati priest on child sex charges.
More

The indictment, issued Wednesday, said 71-year-old Robert Poandl, known as “Father Bob,” took a 10-year-old boy to West Virginia in 1991 and sexually assaulted him there. …

“I was yelling hooray for the victims and for kids,” said Judy Jones, associate director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “Hopefully they can’t be harmed anymore by this predator.”

Jones said Poandl was indicted in this same case two years ago but the charges were dismissed.

Glenmary’s president issued this statement saying, “We have just learned of these charges today, and we are working to fully comply with the subpoena and cooperate with investigators.”

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AUSTRALIA
ABC – PM

TONY EASTLEY: The Federal Government’s Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse may have been sparked by incidents within the Catholic Church but it’s not the only organisation that will be subject to scrutiny.

Many people who were abused in foster care or at boys’ and girls’ homes also hope the Royal Commission will bring some recognition of what they went through.

The Care Leavers Australia Network hopes that compensation will be considered.

A warning: Timothy McDonald’s report contains material that some listeners might find distressing.

TIMOTHY MCDONALD: Jeffrey Myers says he suffered horrific abuse as a child at the Royalston Boys Home in Glebe in inner Sydney.

He’s in his 70s now and the abuse happened decades ago, but he still has a hard time talking about it.

JEFFREY MYERS: Well I will go as far as saying that there was penetration by objects in my body. That’s about as far as I’ll go mate, as far as the torture side of it was concerned. And I did black out.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

Emily Portelli and Shannon Deery
From:Herald Sun
November 16, 2012

A FORMER priest who allegedly drugged then raped students at a Catholic boys’ school will face the charges against him at trial.

David Rapson, 59, allegedly abused seven boys between 1973 and 1990 at various schools including Salesian College Rupertswood, in Sunbury.

Magistrate Gregory McNamara today committed Rapson to stand trial after a four-day hearing in which previous students gave evidence about the alleged offences.

“I’m satisfied there is evidence of sufficient weight to support convictions in relation to all of these charges,” Mr McNamara said.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

Jamie Walker, Queensland Bureau Chief
From:The Australian
November 16, 2012

ANGLICAN Primate Phillip Aspinall says the planned national royal commission into child sex abuse should have been called a decade ago, when he first approached then prime minister John Howard to set up such an inquiry.

In a statement today strongly backing the inquiry announced this week by Julia Gillard, the spiritual leader of the country’s 3.6 million Anglicans said it offered a historic opportunity to protect children and called for bipartisan support from MPs to make it well-resourced, independent and free from political agendas.

Dr Aspinall, the Archbishop of Brisbane, also reminded the Prime Minister that “all victims of child sex abuse” would be looking to the royal commission for answers and validation, including the vast majority who were harmed in family settings.

“Of the nearly 3.6 million Australians who call themselves Anglican, statistically, one in four women and one in eight men are victims of abuse, so it is something that affects our church on many levels,” he said.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

ABC
Updated November 16, 2012

Anglican Church Primate Phillip Aspinall said the royal commission into child sex abuse would be an historic opportunity to protect children.

Archbishop Aspinall, visiting Adelaide for a meeting of the General Synod standing committee, said he approached then-prime minister John Howard a decade ago about abuse within institutions such as the church, but nothing was done.

“I thought it was worth doing 10 years ago and I approached the prime minister. At the time he declined. I approached the state premier in Queensland, he declined so the church did what we could in Brisbane. I welcome the fact that we’re taking a more comprehensive approach,” he said.

He urged the commission’s terms of reference be full and fearless and that it be properly resourced.

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AUSTRALIA
Goulburn Post

By ANTONY DUBBER
Nov. 16, 2012

THE Administrator of the Canberra/Goulburn Catholic Archdiocese has come out in support of a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse.

Monsignor John Woods is also calling for meaningful recommendations on a possibly long-running inquiry.

He told the Post that child abuse was a ‘cancer’ that needed to be addressed not only in the Catholic Church but across a broad spectrum of society.

Msgr Woods said the Royal Commission could run for a number of years, as was the case in Ireland, when the church there carried out a thorough and all-encompassing investigation which took nine years.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

Adam Walters, 7News Sydney
Updated November 16, 2012

EXCLUSIVE: If you thought the Catholic Church has been literally paying dearly for the sins of its clergy, you’d be mistaken.

A new scandal is brewing for the Catholic Church with claims victims of sexual abuse are being paid with funds provided by school fees.

Seven News can reveal parents, and taxpayers, are bankrolling the church’s own insurance company which pays out victims’ compensation.

The victims’ support group Broken Rites says parents of Catholic school children, and taxpayers, are effectively bankrolling massive compensation pay-outs for sexual abuse.

“The Catholic Church has paid mega-millions to the victims. It doesn’t like doing this, it tries to evade it when it can,” Bernard Barrett from Broken Rites said.

He said the church minimises the financial impact of abuse, as parents pay fees to schools, which in turn pay premiums to Catholic Church Insurance Limited.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Advertiser

Editorial

THIS week’s announcement of a royal commission into child sex abuse is both welcome and long overdue.

Such abuse is one of the most abhorrent crimes our society must deal with, the implications of its prevalence changing lives forever – in some cases, bringing them to a premature end.

There must be no debate about the cost or the time this commission takes – this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle one of the most confronting issues facing our society.

Tuesday’s press conference by Cardinal George Pell shed some light on the church’s likely approach, saying he expected all within to co-operate fully with the inquiry. Not that the church would have much option.

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AUSTRALIA
Bega District News

By Ben Smyth
Nov. 16, 2012.

A BEGA Valley man who claims he was sexually abused by a Catholic brother as an 11-year-old has spoken out for the first time about his ordeal.

On the condition of anonymity, he shared his story with the BDN as news of a royal commission into child sex abuse was announced by Prime Minster Julia Gillard earlier this week.

John (not his real name) attended Marcellin College at Randwick in Sydney from 1957 to 1965 and said his schooling, particularly between 1960 and 1963, was a nightmare he has tried to forget.

“I feel very nervous about saying anything too specific…as a victim I have enormous difficulties with trust,” John said.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

November 17, 2012

Jack Waterford

Julia Gillard’s decision to go for a royal commission into institutional sex abuse of children may have involved a calculation that it had more capacity to hurt the other side of politics than her own. That might be summarised with the observations that Australia’s most visible Catholic, George Cardinal Pell, is a close friend, mentor and counsellor of the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, and no one can remember Pell wittingly doing Labor a favour – at least since 1955 – or missing an opportunity to benefit the Coalition.

Pell is not, of course, a sexual abuser of children, nor any sort of apologist for it. Nor is Abbott. But Pell’s embattled, defensive and sometimes angry reaction to criticism of the church’s response to the epidemic of child abuse – including his suggestion this week that the media were beating up on the church – could hardly have better symbolised a common suspicion that the leadership of the church was slow to act once it realised it had a big problem, failed to reach out properly to victims, and in certain respects still fails to ”get it”. Pell, when on the front foot on this subject, as opposed to Catholic issues he would prefer to be talking about, is a public relations disaster for the church.

And, some tacticians might think, the well-known reluctance of Pell to take a backward step or a back seat when under attack might accentuate the disaster at times in the political cycle when it matters. The Catholic Church may have a lot of adherents, even generally loyal ones, but it has only limited moral capital in the bank, and expending it on defending the indefensible is pretty dumb.

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AUSTRALIA
WA Today

November 17, 2012

Richard Baker, Nick McKenzie

THE Australian Catholic Church holds thousands of pages of documents containing the psycho-sexual profiles of dozens of clergy accused of sexually abusing children and vulnerable adults.

The profiles, often sent to bishops, were created as part of the church’s little-known 1997-2008 rehabilitation program for those it described as ”sexual boundary violators”.

It is understood none of the clergy treated under the multimillion-dollar Encompass Australasia program run from Sydney’s Wesley Private Hospital was referred to police.

This was despite senior church figures being aware of serious abuse allegations – or in some cases, admissions – that led to clergy being sent for treatment.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

[Church funding paedophiles’ legal defence]

November 17, 2012

Rick Feneley, Paul Bibby, Barney Zwartz, Jane Lee, Daniel Lane

Members of the small parish were furious. Word had gone around that money from the Christmas collection had been used to help pay the legal costs of a local priest accused of repeatedly raping an altar boy. It was December 2004. Father James Patrick Fletcher, 64, had just been found guilty of multiple counts of anal and oral penetration of ”Desmond”, who was 13 when the attacks had started in 1990 in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese. Fletcher would die one year into his 10-year maximum jail sentence.

But The Newcastle Herald soon began to question how his defence had been financed. According to the victim support group Broken Rites, legal experts had estimated his costs for the 11-day trial, including for the services of a prominent QC, exceeded $200,000. The Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, the Most Reverend Michael Malone, said Fletcher had made use of a ”loan facility”. He also admitted that one local priest had ”donated” part of the parish’s Christmas collection to help pay Fletcher’s lawyers. Not that this priest had told his parishioners or sought their permission. It was the secrecy that really angered the faithful.

As Fairfax Media revealed on Friday, at least two Catholic orders – the Christian Brothers and Marist Fathers – have continued to fund the legal defences of clergy as they went to trial for the second, third and even fourth times for the sexual abuse of children. It is the perception that churches have shielded their own – and that even police have turned a blind eye – that largely motivated the Prime Minister this week to announce the biggest inquiry into child abuse in Australia’s history.

Only on Tuesday, the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, stressed that his archdiocese did not pay for the defence of clergy accused of child abuse. But as Pell also made clear, he is not the boss of the Catholic Church in Australia. He is the nation’s only cardinal, making him Australia’s most influential Catholic. It gives him moral authority to speak out. But different orders have their own authority.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

November 17, 2012

Cardinal George Pell

To the surprise of some, the Catholic bishops of Australia welcomed the Prime Minister’s announcement of a royal commission into child sexual abuse.

Australians believe in justice and there is a strong feeling that justice has been denied to victims of sexual abuse. Justice is also owed to the individuals and institutions working to prevent sexual abuse and helping victims and their families.

I welcome the royal commission because it will help victims and help to clear the air. Victims have an absolute right to justice and I am pleased that they have welcomed the royal commission.

It might be helpful to clarify some important points from last week.

Some proposed an inquiry into only the Catholic Church. I opposed this for the simple reason that there is no evidence to suggest abuse is confined to the Catholic Church. I welcome the fact that the commission will consider the problem more broadly across all Australian institutions. If we are serious about tackling this scourge in our society, this is the right thing to do.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

November 17, 2012

Ross Peake

George Pell now has the unlikely mantle of The Great Uniter.

He has unexpectedly drawn federal politicians from all parties together for a meeting of minds, in revulsion and disgust against his views.

The nation’s leading atheist Julia Gillard is joined by the conservative Catholic Opposition Leader in opposing the cardinal as he clings to the notion that the law of the Vatican overrides the law of this land. Why should a priest who is told of sex abuse not be required to report this to police?

And many Australians would just see Pell as an embarrassment, noting his quick dismissal of the row over child sex abuse as a media ”beat-up”.

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BELIZE
The Guardian

Written by Shane D. William
Thursday, 15 November 2012

Last week, an eleven-year-old girl from Frank’s Eddy Village summoned the courage to tell her mother that she was being sexually abused by the pastor of their church, 46-year-old Julio Cesar Garcia. According to the mother, the child spoke of two occasions when Garcia pressured her into having sex. The first time was actually inside the church on October 28th. The second time was at the pastor’s home on November 1st. The mother was devastated by the news. She took the child to a doctor, who confirmed that the child was carnally known. The mother then reported the incident to police and Garcia was arrested and charged with two counts of unlawful carnal knowledge. He appeared in the Belmopan Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday, November 7th, where the charges were read against him. Due to the nature of the offense, bail was not granted, and he was remanded to the Belize Central Prison until his next court appearance on January 25th, 2013.

For the eleven-year-old, Garcia’s arrest should have been the start of the recovery process. Unfortunately, that is far from the case. Garcia’s arrest caused other victims to come forward. At least two other mothers claimed that their daughters reported sexual advancements by Garcia to them. The scandal made headlines on the local television stations and Garcia was exposed as a “Predator Amongst the Flock”. The church’s parent organization, the Baptist Association, issued a press release disassociating itself from Garcia, claiming that he had never been a Baptist pastor. Those familiar with the Baptist denomination explained that it is common practice to have church leaders, who are not ordained pastors, sothe association’s statement was in no way a disassociation. However, it did act as the final nail in the forearm of the crucified Garcia. He had been jailed, publicly humiliated and labeled as a predator. Some would say deservingly so. Undeservingly though, is that where Garcia’s suffering had come full circle the victim and her family’s suffering was just beginning.

The Guardian spoke to the victim’s mother on Monday, November 12th. She said that since the story was made public, life has been difficult for her family. She said, “I won’t say any names. Some people are just looking at me and some of them are mad saying that this is a lie. The God that I serve, he knows that I am not lying…” The mother said that her family has been receiving more cold shoulders than expressions of support or even sympathy. The incident was not enough to shake her faith in God, and she still attended church this past Sunday. She said that by the way they watched her, she knows they are upset. As hard as it has been for the mother, it is nothing compared to what the child experiences on a daily basis. “They tease her at school,” the mother said as her eyes fill and her voice cracked. She knows that life will never be the same for her daughter and family. They have become like lepers – outcasts in the tiny village they call home. And as the child continues to suffer from pain in her womb, it is the pain in her heart that is unbearable. She suffers greatly because instead of providing a healing environment, her community has chosen to ridicule and scratch the wounds. Instead of moving on from being abused twice, she now has to cope with abuse on a daily basis.

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UTAH
The Salt Lake Tribune

By Pamela Manson and Bob Mims
The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Nov 15 2012

The pastor of the Tongan United Methodist Church in West Valley City has been removed from his position for failing to promptly report that young boys had been sexually abused by an older boy in the congregation, according to a letter written by a Denver church official.

The Rev. Havili Mone was suspended in August while officials investigated complaints against him. Bishop Elaine Stanovsky wrote in a letter dated Nov. 11 that when Mone first heard reports about the offenses, he “acted to heal the harm of abuse in a way that did not fulfill the expectations of The United Methodist Church and fell short of the professional standards for clergy in the United States.”

Stanovsky had installed the Rev. Eddie Kelemeni, who is retired and lives in Hawaii, to fill in at the church, at 1553 W. Crystal Ave. (2590 South). She said in her letter that he will complete his time as interim pastor Nov. 30 and that a new pastor soon will be appointed.

The letter was sent Tuesday to church leaders with instructions to distribute it to members of the congregation, according to the Rev. Steve Goodier, a church superintendent.

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UTAH
The Republic

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 15, 2012

SALT LAKE CITY — The pastor of a West Valley church has been removed for failing to promptly report claims that young boys had been sexually abused by an older boy in the congregation.

Bishop Elaine Stanofsky said in a letter that she intended to end the appointment of the Rev. Havili Mone from the Tongan United Methodist Church, effective Thursday.

Sgt. Mike Powell of West Valley City says the alleged incidents occurred at the church and that the primary suspect is a 16-year-old boy. Powell stressed that Mone is not a suspect in the abuse cases, but has been investigated for failure to report the abuse.

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CALIFORNIA
ChicoER

By RYAN OLSON-Staff Writer chicoer.com
Posted: 11/16/2012

OROVILLE — A former associate pastor of a Chico church charged in a child sex abuse case has pleaded no contest to a lesser count.

Jesse Daniel Ruhl, formerly of Pleasant Valley Baptist Church, pleaded no contest Wednesday to an added misdemeanor count of engaging in lewd conduct in a public place, according to his attorney, Philip Heithecker.

Ruhl had initially been charged in Butte County Superior Court with a misdemeanor count of child molestation for the reported relationship with a then-16-year-old girl. The girl and her parents were members of the church where Ruhl was a music teacher, but the girl was reportedly being home-schooled at the time of the offense.

The prosecution had alleged the relationship between Ruhl and the girl became more intimate in October 2010 when they exchanged 20-30 text messages. For about two to three months, they reportedly met several times per week at their residences and in public places.

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SEATTLE (WA)
Patch

By Greg Johnston

The Archdiocese of Seattle has settled a child sexual abuse lawsuit that had been scheduled for trial on Monday allegedly involving a former youth minister at Kirkland’s St. John Vianney Church.

The victim’s attorney, Michael T. Pfau, issued a news release about the settlement, for $635,000, on Thursday, and the archdiocese confirmed it for Kirkland Patch.

The news release said the victim, identified only by his initials, D.E., was sexually abused in the mid-1980s by the youth minister, and claimed the archdiocese hired the youth minister without a proper background check. It said a proper check would probably have found similar involvement with youth previously in New Orleans and “multiple concerns about boundary issues with children. One of them rejected him from being a campus minister because of those concerns.”

The youth minister was identified in the release as Jim Funnell, and the archdiocese confirmed that he did work at St. John Vianney in the mid-80s. The release said Funnell later was charged and pleaded guilty to a charge of child abuse

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AUSTRALIA
Anglican Diocese of Melbourne

16/11/2012

By Primate’s office media release

The Primate of the Anglican Church said today that the royal commission called by Prime Minister Julia Gillard offered an historic opportunity to protect Australian children.

Brisbane’s Archbishop Phillip Aspinall commended the Prime Minister for her decision to establish a royal commission. He also urged that the commission’s terms of reference should be full and fearless and called for the commission to properly resourced.

He said a truly federal process was warranted given child sexual abuse crosses State and territory borders, infecting all places where child live, learn and play, including churches, schools, sporting clubs and families.

Archbishop Aspinall acknowledged that the royal commission would address shameful failings on the part of institutions, including churches. But a comprehensive, independent examination would also give ordinary Australians a chance to see for themselves the results of a decade-plus reform process instituted across many Anglican dioceses.

In Archbishop Aspinall’s Brisbane diocese, every allegation of child sexual abuse is reported to police, the diocese assists police, victims of historic abuse have been actively sought out, multiple times, via media calls and advertising.

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AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury

[Bishop Igham’s statement]

Wollongong’s Catholic bishop says the diocese will fully co-operate with a Royal Commission inquiry into the sexual abuse of children.

In a statement to be read at churches across the diocese on Sunday, Bishop Peter Ingham described this as one of the saddest periods in his priesthood.

He welcomed the Royal Commission, which will investigate child sexual abuse and the responses of institutions, including churches and government and not-for-profit organisations.

‘‘Hopefully, it will shine a light on the progress we have made in recent years as well as highlight areas in which we can improve our practice,’’ he said.

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 15, 2012

The Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Roman Catholic priest in Wisconsin who died in 1998, appears in old photographs and home movies as an energetic, round-faced man with a warm, friendly, efficient manner. Even without the sinister music that shadows these glimpses of Father Murphy’s benign, banal public activities in the ’50s and ’60s, the viewer of “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” Alex Gibney’s new documentary, will suspect that there’s something terrible lurking under the surface.

There was a time, not long ago, when a priest’s devotion to children would elicit a smile of approval rather than a shudder of suspicion and dread. The revelation early in the movie that Father Murphy, who was for many years in charge of a boarding school for the deaf, systematically molested youngsters in his care — scores if not hundreds over the years — is sickening but not especially surprising. A decade of reporting and advocacy has made stories like his distressingly familiar.

“Mea Maxima Culpa” is not the first documentary to present the testimony of victims or to expose the failure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in dealing with widespread sexual abuse by priests. Kirby Dick’s “Twist of Faith” (2004) and Amy Berg’s “Deliver Us From Evil” (2006) are both important predecessors that link intimate crimes with institutional failures. But the prolific Mr. Gibney, whose other films include “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” is something of a specialist in the corruptions of power. And he doggedly updates the larger story here, connecting dots that lead, in a trail of denial and cover-up, from the rural Midwest to the Vatican.

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AUSTRALIA
Latrobe Valley Express

By Louis Nelson
Nov. 15, 2012

The Catholic Church is investigating fresh allegations of sexual abuse by a priest within Gippsland; however, if current church protocols stand, the allegations may never be made public.

While Catholic diocese of Sale’s Bishop Christopher Prowse would give no further details of the investigation into the priest, who was now deceased, he said he was confident the church could respond to the victim’s claims appropriately.

In welcoming Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of a royal commission into child sex abuse in an interview with The Express on Tuesday, Bishop Prowse defended the church’s tradition of handling sexual abuse allegations in-house.

This comes amid growing calls for the Catholic Church to adopt mandatory reporting of abuse allegations to police, something Bishop Prowse said the church would oppose in the context of allegations being made within confession.

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FLORIDA
Sun Sentinel

By James D. Davis, Staff writer

November 16, 2012

The Rev. Neil Doherty, currently in Broward County jail awaiting trial on a range of abuse-related charges, was named Thursday in a new $5 million lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Miami.

The suit says Doherty, 69, formerly a pastor at St. Vincent Catholic Church in Margate, sexually abused a 15-year-old Miami-Dade County boy for 18 months starting around 1984, allegedly plying him with drugs, wine and money. Doherty is not named as a defendant.

Attorney Jeff Herman, who filed the suit in the Miami-Dade County’s 11th Judicial Circuit Court on Thursday morning, said the archdiocese allowed Doherty access to children even after learning of other sexual abuse accusations.

“For years, the archdiocese knew he was abusing boys,” Herman said in a telephone interview. “Instead of protecting them, they protected him.”

Archdiocesan spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said she couldn’t comment directly until she had seen the lawsuit. And Doherty’s attorney, J. David Bogenschutz of Fort Lauderdale, did not return two calls for comment on Thursday.

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NEW YORK
New York Post

By FARRAN SMITH NEHME
November 16, 2012

MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD
Strong, deeply moving. Running time: 107 minutes. Not rated (explicit discussion of sexual abuse). At the Film Forum, Houston and Varick streets.

Public revulsion over the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is already so widespread that a filmmaker bold enough to retell this tragedy had better be purposeful about it — and Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) definitely is that.

“Mea Maxima Culpa” is a fire-breathing set of theses nailed on the Vatican’s door.

Gibney structures the film with care, beginning with the depredations of one Father Lawrence Murphy at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. The priest abused the men in the film when they were schoolboys in the 1950s and ’60s, favoring with horrendous cunning the ones whose parents couldn’t speak to their sons in sign language.

As the boys grew into men they began to communicate with one another, and eventually became some of the first to go public, in the 1970s, with accusations against a priest.

From this group Gibney spirals outward, to those who tried — and failed — to get Murphy away from the school, to the higher-ups who protected the church’s image but not the victims, across the ocean to similar cases in Ireland and Italy, and finally to the Vatican itself. The film builds to a ringing demand that the church open completely its archives on sexual abuse.

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OHIO/WEST VIRGINIA
NECN

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A Roman Catholic priest accused of taking a 10-year-old boy to West Virginia for sex more than two decades ago was jailed on Thursday.

The Rev. Robert Poandl, of the Cincinnati-based Glenmary Home Missioners, was in Butler County Jail in southwest Ohio following an order by a federal magistrate judge that he be taken into custody.

Poandl voluntarily surrendered to the FBI after learning of the charge, Glenmary said in a statement. An indictment in Cincinnati federal court on Wednesday accused Poandl of taking the boy on Aug. 3, 1991, but didn’t list specifics.

A statement from Glenmary Home Missioners, a society of priests and brothers who say they’re dedicated to establishing a Catholic presence in rural areas and small towns, said the indictment is related to a June 2009 accusation of sexual misconduct with a minor in Spencer, W.Va.

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AUSTRALIA
The Standard

By Mark Russell
Nov. 16, 2012

A former Catholic priest has today been committed to stand trial on child sex abuse charges.

Magistrate Greg McNamara late this afternoon found there was sufficient evidence to convict David Rapson, 59, and ordered him to stand trial in the County Court.

Rapson, who told the magistrate he was “not guilty” of all the charges against him, was released on bail to appear in the County Court on December 11 for a directions hearing. His trial will be held in August next year.

Rapson is charged with one count of rape, five counts of indecent assault, four counts of indecently assaulting a child under 16, and one count of gross indecency from 1973 to 1990.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

Police investigating allegations of sex abuse against a former bishop and a retired priest say 10 more people have alleged they were victims.

The Rt Rev Peter Ball, 80, a former Church of England bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, was arrested on suspicion of abusing eight boys and men.

He was arrested on Tuesday at his home in Somerset, over allegations relating the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Retired Church of England priest Vickery House, 67, was also arrested.

Police said since the arrests 10 more people had come forward alleging sexual offences were committed against them, seven by the former bishop and three by the former priest.

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AUSTRALIA
The Courier

CARDINAL George Pell this week argued the Catholic Church had been unfairly targeted by the media in regard to allegations of sexual abuse.

While it is true that the Prime Minister has announced a broad-based inquiry beyond any single denomination or organisation, it is fact that the church has been central to the issue in the past 50 years.

In Ballarat, this reality is stark.

The notable irony of Cardinal Pell’s press conference this week was the time he spent explaining the steps the Catholic Church had taken in Australia to repair the wrongs of the past.

Cardinal Pell detailed the inquiries, reports and documents which proved, he said, that the church was acting pro-actively to stamp out abuse and help in the healing process.

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UNITED STATES
Salon

Pick of the week: Alex Gibney’s “Mea Maxima Culpa” follows the scandal from one Wisconsin school to the pope’s desk

By Andrew O’Hehir

You can’t argue that Alex Gibney’s “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” is the definitive treatment of the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. This problem goes so deep into church history, and its implications are so broad, that no single book or film or series of newspaper articles can encompass it all. But by beginning with one of the earliest and most infamous of documented cases in the United States — the abuse of perhaps 200 deaf boys at a Wisconsin boarding school by a priest named Lawrence Murphy — the Oscar-winning Gibney (director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and several other films) is able to suggest answers to certain very big questions.

Ever since the clerical abuse scandal began to break open in the early 2000s, with wave after wave of disturbing revelations and a groundbreaking investigative series in the Boston Globe, certain issues have remained shrouded in mystery. How much did the Vatican hierarchy know about the widespread rape and sexual abuse of children by men who were designated as the earthly representatives of Jesus Christ, and what did they do about it? Was the scandal really limited to the United States and other “Anglo-Saxon” countries, as many Catholics outside North America maintained? Were there few documented cases prior to the 1960s because they did not exist, or because they had been successfully squelched? Of course it was tempting to assume or infer answers to those questions, especially when faced with the world’s largest, oldest and most secretive religious organization, but journalists are supposed to hew to a higher standard than guesswork.

It won’t surprise anyone who’s been following this story over the past decade or so to learn that the partial answers emerging from “Mea Maxima Culpa” pretty much amount to the worst-case scenario on all those questions. While it became Vatican policy early in the scandal to blame the American bishops for their inadequate response to the crisis (and many of them indeed behaved disgracefully), the best evidence now indicates that the hierarchy in Rome heard about virtually every case, and that from 2001 onward most if not all of them went straight to the desk of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

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AUSTRALIA
The Recorder

By Bevan Shields
Nov. 16, 2012

A NOTORIOUS child sex offender, the former priest Brian Spillane, has launched a bid to quash his conviction by claiming he faced an unfair trial.

Spillane, a former chaplain at Bathurst’s St Stanislaus College, was sentenced to nine years in prison earlier this year for abusing three girls, one as young as eight, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Fairfax Regional Media can reveal Spillane’s lawyer, Greg Walsh, has prepared a series of documents outlining why the conviction should be overturned. The case will be heard in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal in April next year, around the same time the Royal Commission into child sex abuse will be lifting the lid on decades of crime and cover-up.

Spillane’s defence lawyer, Greg Walsh, this week claimed Spillane, 69, was wrongly convicted.

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AUSTRALIA
New Zealand Herald

By Sarah Joseph

Friday Nov 16, 2012

In response to the cascade of accusations and evidence of systemic and decades-long child abuse, the Australian Government finally announced a royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse on Monday.

One possible recommendation is being mooted, that priests be obliged to report any knowledge of child sex abuse to police.

Such an obligation would undoubtedly enhance protection of the rights of children. It would also interfere with the freedom of religion of priests if they are compelled to reveal information conveyed during formal “confessions”. In this clash of rights, which should prevail?

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BOSTON (MA)
Washington Post

By G. Jeffrey Macdonald| Religion News Service,

Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley on Thursday (Nov. 15) launched an ambitious, five-year plan to consolidate local parish leadership and reinvigorate an archdiocese rocked by scandal, declining Mass attendance and a chronic shortage of priests.

Starting with a first phase in January, O’Malley’s “Disciples in Mission” initiative will reorganize the archdiocese’s 288 parishes into 135 “collaboratives,” or clusters of two or three parishes headed by a single pastor. Assistant pastors and other staff from local parishes will be reoriented to serve entire collaboratives. By 2016, every parish will be part of a collaborative.

The shift marks the latest major change for the 1.8 million Catholics in and around Boston, who grieved 69 parish closures in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Clustering parishes under shared leadership is now crucial, organizers say, in order to carry out the “New Evangelization” encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI.

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UNITED STATES
WSIU

By Mark Jenkins

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God documents the claims made by four deaf men who accused a Catholic priest of sexual abuse — and in chronicling the response of the church, details the role the current pope played in such scandals earlier in his career.

By the time Father Lawrence Murphy died in 1998, it’s alleged, he had sexually abused more than 200 children. Many of them must have seemed ideal victims: Students at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1974, they possessed limited ability to communicate with others. Commonly in that period, the boarding school’s pupils had hearing parents who didn’t know American Sign Language.

These boys, largely unable to speak, are more than metaphors for all of the voiceless children whose sexual assaults are chronicled in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. In 1972, three of them became the first known victims of a pederast priest to accuse their attacker publicly.

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OHIO/WEST VIRGINIA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on November 15, 2012

We are grateful to this brave victim for cooperating with law enforcement authorities and trying to protect other kids from horrific child sex crimes by this predator priest.

Fr. Poandl is a shrewd child molester. But even cunning criminals are sometimes caught.

Still, this is not the time for complacency. Accused Catholic clerics usually get top notch defense lawyers. Sometimes, they walk free by exploiting legal technicalities. And sometimes, they get lenient sentences because other victims, witnesses and whistleblowers stay silent.

So we beg anyone who saw, suspected or suffered Fr. Poandl’s crimes to speak up, get help, call police, expose wrongdoing, protect kids and start healing.

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MIAMI (FL)
WSVN

MIAMI (WSVN) – A South Florida priest who is awaiting trial on sexual abuse, is now facing new accusations.

Dennis Montero, who did not want to show his face on camera, is speaking out and claims Father Neil Doherty drugged and raped him when he was a child.

Montero explained why he stayed silent until now. “Being raped by a man is not something you tell your friends or your mom or anybody else. That’s not something you do. At least, not where I came from,” said Montero.

In a recently filed lawsuit, Montero and his attorney claimed Father Doherty used drugs, alcohol and money to take advantage of a young boy from a poor family.

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