Month: May 2013

ROME
GlobalPost

Jason Berry
May 30, 2013

Analysis: In his candid speeches and sermons, the new pope “forges a moral vocabulary on economics” to remind church leaders — and followers — of their responsibility to the poor.

“The globalization that makes everything uniform is essentially imperialist and instrumentally liberal, but it is not human. In the end, it is a way to enslave nations.”

Those blunt words from spoken by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2010 speak to the plight of millions who are jobless in Spain and Greece, their economies yoked to a European Union bank system meshed with globalized finance.

The statement appeared in On Heaven and Earth, a dialogue book with Buenos Aires Rabbi Abraham Skorka, which is now available in English.

In the two months since the cardinals’ conclave in Rome elected the little-known Argentine and the first Jesuit pope, Francis has taken to his pastoral role as Bishop of Rome. Refusing to live in the Apostolic Palace, he has made his home in a religious hotel in Vatican City, and he has replaced the pope’s golden throne with a wooden chair. He has dispensed with the ornate red stole with filigrees of gold that Pope Benedict wore, instead presenting himself in white, wearing a metal cross without the customary papal jewels and regalia. Benedict wore red shoes; Francis’s are black and workmanlike.

This pope has also fashioned a symbolic language of shaming, and the candor in his statements and sermons aim to remind the clerical establishment — accustomed to lordly status — of the church’s core commitment to the poor. He has yet to make major personnel changes in a Roman Curia whose scandals riveted media coverage at the conclave, yet his rhetoric is that of a world leader endorsing purgative change.

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UNITED STATES
Kelly Clark – O’Donnell, Clark and Crew, LLP

I learned yesterday of the passing of Rev. Andrew Greeley, 85, a Chicago priest, sociologist, newspaper columnist, and novelist. Greeley was one of the first American priests to speak out publicly against the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church. While I didn’t always agree with him, his insights and advocacy for abuse survivors and the marginalized will be an important part of his legacy.

As a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Greeley often tangled with his bosses at the Chancery, particularly Cardinal John Cody. His writings concerning the sexual abuse of minors remain prescient and the institutional Church was slow to heed the warnings contained in Greeley’s commentary. Father Greeley was not afraid of the hierarchy or the court of popular opinion. He was one of the earliest supporters of the survivor advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

His novels remain widely read and his newspaper columns for the Chicago Sun-Times reflect a liberal political bent reflective of his upbringing in Chicago and the times in which he lived and ministered as a priest.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler May 31, 2013

Matt Abbott reminds readers on the Renew America site that in his book Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest–published in 1999, well before the sex-abuse scandal reached its peak—the late Father Andrew Greeley made a sensational charge. Some priests in the Chicago area were involved in a “ring of predators,” Father Greeley charged. And not only that:

They are a dangerous group. There is reason to believe that they are responsible for at least one murder and may perhaps have been involved in the murder of the murderer.

The irrepressible Father Greeley said that he personally was not afraid of this nefarious crowd. Why?

They know that I have in safekeeping information which would implicate them. I am more of a threat to them dead than alive.

Now Father Greeley is dead. Is he a threat to that cabal? Will the information that he claimed to have withheld come to light after his death? Or was he exaggerating things: either the extent of a conspiracy among child-molesters, or the importance of his own evidence against them, or both?

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CALIFORNIA
The Wall Street Journal

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
May 30, 2013

Democrats and the tort bar target the Catholic Church.

Democrats have a supermajority in the California legislature, and one fear is that they’ll use it to punish their political enemies. Consider the bill moving fast in the legislature to suspend California’s statute of limitations on child sex abuse torts and expose nonprofits to unlimited litigation.

The main targets are two liberal betes noires:the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church, which is still paying off debts from claims filed in 2003 when the legislature suspended the statute of limitations for a year. Nearly 1,000 claims were subsequently filed against the Church, which resulted in damage awards of $1.2 billion. Attorneys in many cases skimmed off more than half in fees.

The claims gusher has since dried up, so lawyers want the legislature to open it again next year. This is necessary, attorneys say, because some adult victims need decades to make a “causal connection” between their childhood abuse and psychological afflictions.

Helping the plaintiffs make these connections will be lawyers like Irwin Zalkin, who thanks to a 2007 settlement with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles have got their hands on 30,000 pages of unredacted files that concern efforts to conceal clergy abuses. Mr. Zalkin is lobbying the legislature to scrap the statute of limitations.

Under current law, plaintiffs can file claims against individuals or non-government employers until they’re 26 years old, or alternatively, three years from whenever they discover or “reasonably should have discovered” that their psychological problems were caused by childhood sex abuse.

Democrats now want to give adults who exceed this statute of limitations another chance to file claims next year. All those claims thrown out after the 2003 window because they were stale would also be fair game. This sets up a minefield for nonprofits that aren’t insured against such claims.

Mr. Zalkin told the legislature that nonprofits needn’t worry because most insurers covered claims during the one-year suspension in 2003. However, those claims spiked nonprofit liabilities, so many now self-insure. A couple of stale claims now could bankrupt small, self-insured nonprofits and inflate premiums for commercially insured institutions.

That is why the proposal would exempt government entities including city recreational leagues, public schools and state universities. In other words, private USC or Stanford could be sued if a Jerry Sandusky molested kids in their locker-rooms, but UC-Berkeley and UCLA couldn’t be held liable.

Another kicker: The one-year suspension wouldn’t apply to claims against the actual perpetrators of abuse. So a teacher who committed a heinous abuse 15 years ago couldn’t be sued. But if the abuse occurred at a Catholic school, the Church could be hit up. Public unions wanted immunity for their members, and attorneys figured this was a small concession.

Statutes of limitations exist to protect defendants from miscarriages of justice since witnesses and evidence can disappear with time. Plaintiffs attorneys who claim to be seeking justice for victims are merely seeking to line their own pockets by exploiting public sympathies for victims of horrific abuses. The ultimate victims of this legal shakedown will be nonprofits in California and the people they serve.

The bill squeaked through the Senate this week. Governor Jerry Brown says he’s going to exert some adult supervision on his party, and this would be a good issue to start.

A version of this article appeared May 31, 2013, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sacramento’s Nonprofit Shakedown.

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UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: A California Province Jesuit ordained in 1956, Burke taught high school in Phoenix AZ, Los Angeles CA and San Jose CA until his placement at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos CA in 1978. In 2000 Burke admitted to a superior that he had engaged in “sexual misconduct” with a mentally disabled adult male who worked as a dishwasher at the Jesuit Center. The Jesuits had been notified of sexual misconduct at the Center in 1995, but did nothing. Police launched an investigation in 1997 when a local shopkeeper, who had befriended this Burke victim and another mentally disabled adult male Sacred Heart worker, reported that the two men told her they had been abused there by priests. The men were too afraid to speak, so the investigation was closed. Due to the persistence of the shopkeeper, the investigation was re-opened in 2000, and the two men disclosed the abuse. The sexual abuse by Burke occurred over at least a five year period, and included sodomy. In 2002 Burke pleaded guilty to committing a lewd act on a dependent adult, and was sentenced to two years in state prison. He died at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center February 27, 2009.

Ordained: 1956
Died: Feb. 27, 2009

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Dominican Today

UPDATE Santiago.- The Office of the Archbishop of Santiago on Friday announced the suspension of the priest Gil Wojciech (Alberto), accused of sexually abusing of minors.

It said they received a missive notifying the suspension of the priest native of Poland, from the Superior de la Delegation of the Caribbean, of the order of priests the Miguelitas.

FIEL. The Santiago Province Office of the Prosecutor has launched an investigation into the sexual assault allegations against Polish Catholic priest Gil Wojciech (Alberto) , 36, of three minors residents of Juncalito, Janico township (north-central).

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CHICAGO (IL)
NBC Chicago

By Mary Ann Ahern | Friday, May 31, 2013

Funeral arrangements have been scheduled for Rev. Andrew Greeley who passed away this week at age 85.

Greeley’s wake begins at noon through 7 p.m. Wednesday at Christ the King Parish, his first parish at 9235 S. Hamilton Ave., in Chicago followed by a 7 p.m. mass.

The prolific priest, sociologist and long-time NBC analyst who wrote best-selling novels and a weekly newspaper column was remembered as a genuine Chicagoan and a dedicated servant of the church with a prophetic voice.

“Our hearts are heavy with grief,” his family said in a statement, “but we find hope in the promise of Heaven that our uncle spent his life proclaiming to us, his friends, his parishioners and his many fans. He resides now with the Lord of the Dance, and that dance will go on.”

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CALIFORNIA
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on May 31, 2013

MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael D’Antonio is coming to the west coast to talk about his new blockbuster MORTAL SINS.

D’Antonio and a panel of experts—including local-area advocates and survivors—will present a gripping discussion on the clergy sex abuse crisis in the United States.
Publishers Weekly calls MORTAL SINS “The definitive history of the Catholic Church’s ‘most severe crisis since the Reformation’” and Booklist hails the book as a ”gripping and affecting to the last word.” This is a MUST SEE event.
All dates are free and open to the public.

SAN DIEGO, CA
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 7 pm
Alliant University, Green Hall
Co-sponsored by IVAT, the Institute on Violence Abuse and Trauma
Panelists will include church expert A.W. Richard Sipe, attorney Irwin Zalkin, former priest/now advocate Patrick Wall, and others.

FULLERTON, CA
June 27, 2013 at 7 pm
Fullerton Public Library – Presented as a part of Gustavo’s Awesome Lecture Series
Panelists will include attorney Jeffrey Anderson, Patrick Wall, and Joelle Casteix

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Saturday, June 29 at 2:30 pm
Mission Cultural Center Theater
Panelists will include Bay Area survivor Tim Lennon, attorney Jeff Anderson, and Patrick Wall

SEATTLE, WA
Sunday, June 30 at 7:30 pm
Town Hall Seattle
Panelists will include Seattle-area survivor Mary Dispenza, attorney Jeff Anderson, and Patrick Wall.

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REPUBLICA DOMINICANA
Diario Digital

SANTIAGO.-La Fiscalía de este Distrito Judicial investiga la denuncia de agresión sexual de un sacerdote católico polaco contra tres adolescentes residentes en la comunidad de Juncalito en el municipio de Jánico.

Una fuente del Ministerio Público informó esta mañana que las investigaciones contra el cura Alberto Gil Nojache, de 36 años la realizan fiscales adjuntos de la Unidad de Violencia de Genero.

Mientras tanto, residentes en ese paraje, perteneciente al municipio serrano de Jánico, negaron esta mañana que planifiquen atacar el templo religioso de allí, aunque dijeron que no aceptarán que el sacerdote oficie misas allí, hasta tanto el asunto sea aclarado

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Dominican Today

Santiago.- The Santiago Province Office of the Prosecutor has launched an investigation into the sexual assault allegations against Polish Catholic priest Alberto Gil Nojache, 36, by three minors residents of Juncalito, Janico township (north-central).

A Justice Ministry source quoted by elnacional.com.do Friday morning said the Domestic Violence Unit investigates the allegation against the priest ??.

Meanwhile, residents of the village in the Central Mountains affirmed they’ll not accept another priest in their town until the case is clarified.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

30 MAY 2013

As recently as the 1980s, new-born babies were being forcibly taken from their mothers and given up for adoption by nuns in Northern Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. That’s the allegation I have now heard from a number of women, who were forced into the laundries in Belfast and Newry after they became pregnant.

If true, it is just the most heartbreaking of a whole range of human rights violations alleged by the forgotten women of Northern Ireland’s Magdalene laundries.

The publicity surrounding the publication of Martin McAleese’s report into Magdalene Laundries in the Republic has prompted a number of women who were in similar institutions in Northern Ireland to approach Amnesty International.

Like their counterparts in the Republic, they appear to have suffered a range of serious human rights abuses including inhuman and degrading treatment, arbitrary deprivation of liberty and forced labour.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

STUART RINTOUL From: The Australian June 01, 2013

MELBOURNE Archbishop Denis Hart says “community safety” should be given priority in any decision to parole one of Australia’s worst pedophiles, former priest Gerald Ridsdsale, who could be freed from jail within a month.

Asked what the church’s position was on Ridsdale’s release and what support the church would give him if he he was parolled, Archbishop Hart said: “I think the community will look very carefully at what he’s done, what is best all over, because I think safety in the community has to be a priority.”

Archbishop Hart did not go so far as to say he opposed Ridsdale’s release, saying: “I’d leave that to the authorities, I think.”

Ballarat Bishop Paul Bird said that as a defrocked priest of the Ballarat diocese, the diocese had no obligation to provide Ridsdale with any support and had no intention of doing so.

“When we first heard the possibility of his release that question came up and that is clearly our policy,” Bishop Bird told The Weekend Australian.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

June 1, 2013

Chris Goddard

There are 80 lights in the five chandeliers in the Committee Room of the Parliament of Victoria. The windows, ornate mirrors and high ceiling give a sense of light and space. The darkness created by the rape of children, however, is inescapable.

This is where the Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations has been sitting. The committee and its members have grown in stature. They have attempted to illuminate the shadowy world of criminal priests and their accomplices, and to give hope to surviving victims.

It was in this room that Cardinal George Pell spent all last Monday afternoon, for the first time subject to the glare of accountability. Pell was greeted by the committee chairwoman, Georgie Crozier: ”I welcome your eminence.” A survivor muttered: ”I have waited 30 years for this.” Pell introduced his support team, the business manager, lawyer, secretary and media adviser: ”All of them married people with children”, he adds, as if this was central to their job descriptions.

Crozier stressed at the very start that ”the evidence is quite clear, the criminal sexual abuse of children occurred under the watch of the Catholic Church and it was covered up … these facts are not in dispute”.

The battle over words such as ”power” and their meanings, over actions and inaction and their consequences, started immediately. Pell acknowledged that he is one of the better known public faces of the Catholic Church in Australia, but stressed that he had ”very, very limited” powers. Pell attempted to underline the limitations of his authority: ”I am not the Catholic Prime Minister of Australia”, he insisted, although no one had suggested he was. The cardinal explained that, in spite of all his titles, the Catholic Church is ”an interesting example of a flat organisation”. The chairwoman disagreed, stating that ”many witnesses” had described the church as ”a structure of convenience”.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

June 1

[Bishop Robinson’s petition site]

Barney Zwartz

The bishop who designed Australia’s Catholic clergy sex abuse response wants a ”Catholic spring”, a people-power movement to force the Vatican to tackle the abuse crisis at its source.

Retired Sydney bishop Geoffrey Robinson has launched a petition for ordinary Catholics to seek another global church council like the 1960s reforming Vatican II council. But at ”Vatican III”, he says, there must be as many lay people as bishops to make sure the hard questions get asked.

He believes that only a ”Catholic spring” like the revolutions that ended the Marcos regime in the Philippines, totalitarian governments in the Arab world and communism in eastern Europe will move the Vatican to make the changes that are needed.

Bishop Robinson, 75, was the architect of the Towards Healing protocol introduced in every diocese except Melbourne in 1996. Abused as a child, he headed the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference professional standards committee for a decade until he retired in 2004 because he was so disillusioned.

On Tuesday, his new book For Christ’s Sake: End Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church … for Good, will be launched in an inner-Sydney church. The petition, at www.change.org/forchristssake, was opened in Australia a fortnight ago without any publicity, and already has more than 10,000 signatures. Backed by two other progressive Australian bishops, the recently retired Pat Power of Canberra and Bill Morris of Toowoomba, it will be launched in Europe and the US soon.

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MINNESOTA
Post-Bulletin

Posted: Friday, May 31, 2013

In a resounding display of bipartisanship, the Minnesota Legislature has allowed childhood sexual abuse victims a chance to seek justice that was once denied.

The Child Victims Act, which passed the Senate unanimously and the House by an overwhelming 123-3 vote, lifts the civil statute of limitations that prevented anyone 24 or older from filing a lawsuit over sexual abuse that occurred while they were children.

That gave childhood sexual abuse victims just a six-year window to file a civil lawsuit after becoming an adult. The six-year limit is the same time frame that applies to fraud and product liability lawsuits. We strongly believe that childhood victims — who take years, often decades, to come to terms with the sexual abuse they suffered — deserve more consideration than that.

Most Minnesotans agree. A survey by the National Center for Victims for Crime found that 63 percent of Minnesota residents believe child sex-abuse victims should, at any time, be able to sue their abuser or the organization that employed them.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

June 1, 2013

Michael Inman, Peter Jean and Christopher Knaus

A Canberra Catholic priest has been charged over historical acts of indecency on a child in the 1990s.

Father Edward Evans, 83, of Braddon, will face the ACT Magistrates Court next week to answer allegations he groped the girl, aged between 10 and 16 years, three times.

The elderly priest has pledged to fight the charges.

The three offences allegedly occurred between 1995 and 1997 at Father’s Evans’ Braddon home, according to police.

Father Evans has a long association with Canberra’s German Catholic community. He has worked as a German-language chaplain for the German community in Canberra, and represents the country’s Catholic mission.

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VATICAN CITY
Huffington Post

AP

VATICAN CITY — The head of the Vatican bank says his main priority is to clean up the bank’s reputation, saying the institution hasn’t served the pope well enough but still provides valuable services to the Holy See and its clients.

Ernst von Freyberg was named president of the Institute for Religious Works in February, replacing Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who was ousted by the bank’s board last May.

His appointment was part of efforts to shed the bank’s image as a secretive tax haven linked to scandals.

In an interview Friday with Vatican Radio, Von Freyberg said he had hired a leading anti-money laundering consultancy and a New York law firm to ensure that the bank complied with anti-money laundering and anti-terror financing standards. He also hired some public relations experts.

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VATICAN CITY
RTE News

The Vatican bank is checking the account of every client including Holy See employees.

It’s new President said it’s part of a campaign to root out any money laundering.

Ernst von Freyberg’s predecessor was dismissed for poor management, and the Vatican’s financial watchdog said last week it was investigating six possible attempts to use the Holy See to launder money in 2012.

In an interview published in Corriere della Sera, Freyberg said the Institute for Works and Religion – the bank’s formal name – was reviewing each of 18,900 clients to verify their right to an account and bare any suspicious aspects.

The IOR was combing through about 1,000 accounts a month, he said, to pinpoint owners and who has signature authority.

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VATICAN CITY
euronews

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican bank is checking the account of every client including Holy See employees, its new chief said, in a campaign to root out any money-laundering at an institution prone to scandals for decades.

Ernst von Freyberg’s predecessor was dismissed for poor management, and the Vatican’s financial watchdog said last week it was investigating six possible attempts to use the Holy See to launder money in 2012.

In an interview published in Corriere della Sera on Friday, Freyberg said the Institute for Works and Religion – the bank’s formal name – was reviewing each of 18,900 clients to verify their right to an account and bare any suspicious aspects.

The IOR was combing through about 1,000 accounts a month, he said, to pinpoint owners and who has signature authority.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

May 31, 2013

IN evidence at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse on Monday this week, Cardinal George Pell talked about “gossips” and how he wasn’t one.

If he had been, and if other Catholic Church leaders had been “gossips”, maybe they “would have realised earlier just how widespread this awful business was”, he said, referring to the Church’s child sex abuse crisis.

He seemed to be saying that if only the cardinal and a few brother bishops had had a nice old chin-wag in the tearoom after formal proceedings at, say, the twice-yearly Australian Bishops Conferences, the Catholic Church might have acted much sooner to arrest a national tragedy.

If only they’d traded the latest rumours about priests A, B and C and their tendency to invite young children to their private quarters with the doors shut at odd times, maybe the penny might have dropped, Pell seemed to be saying.

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UNITED STATES
NJ.com

By NJ Voices Guest Blogger/For NJ.com
on May 31, 2013

By Bill Donohue

The anger that practicing Catholics feel when they hear stories about priestly sexual abuse is palpable. The anger is directed at the offending priests and his enabling bishop. Fortunately, this a problem that is practically nonexistent in the Catholic church today. The numbers don’t lie.

The timeline for the lion’s share of abuse cases is not in doubt: the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. This was when the sexual revolution hit our culture like a tidal wave, engulfing even Catholic seminaries; it ended soon after the discovery of AIDS in 1981.

Here’s the good news: According to the Annual Reports on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, prepared by CARA, a Georgetown University research institute, over the past 10 years, the average number of credible accusations made annually against approximately 40,000 priests has been in the single digits. In the 2012 Annual Report, there was a total of six. Too bad there was a media blackout of this story.

There is no organization in the nation today that has less of a problem with sexual abuse of minors than the Catholic church. But one would never know that by listening to late-night talk show hosts, and the likes of Bill Maher. They would have the audience believe that nothing has changed. To top things off, the media often fail to adequately report on this problem in the non-Catholic population.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph

DAVID HURLEY HERALD SUN MAY 31, 2013

MELBOURNE Archbishop Denis Hart has called for a new law to require all Catholic dioceses in Victoria to report to authorities allegations of sexual misconduct by priests.

Archbishop Hart said Victoria should consider adopting the system used in NSW.

Speaking at a gathering of religious leaders in Melbourne, the Archbishop also pledged to ensure no new cases of child sex abuse would emerge from the Catholic Church under his leadership.

Discussing a change to the law, Archbishop Hart said it would give the community “effective oversight” of the church’s processes.

He said: “The NSW Ombudsman Act imposes reporting requirements on organisations that work with children in that state.

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SCOTLAND
BBC News

By Robert Pigott
Religious affairs correspondent, BBC News

At first glance the retirement after more than three decades of service of Joseph Devine as the Roman Catholic Bishop of Motherwell is a routine event.

Bishop Devine tendered his resignation last year, in line with Church convention, at the age of 75.

But his replacement by an administrator, appointed by the Vatican, rather than a permanent replacement is the latest sign that all is not well in the Scottish Catholic Church.

Bishop Devine has stayed in post, despite ill health, for 10 months beyond his 75th birthday, and might have expected to hand over to a younger successor with the calibre to lead a diocese in challenging times.

Instead a fourth vacancy has been created in a church with only eight dioceses.

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SCOTLAND
Daily Record

By Chris Clements

31 May 2013

A MAN who says he was molested by priests yesterday welcomed news that a ­Catholic bishop who called him a fantasist has retired.

Pat McEwan, 63, was branded an alcoholic and accused of “living in a fantasy world” by Bishop Joseph Devine after he came forward with ­allegations that he was raped as a boy between 1958 and 1961.

Pat said he was elated that the senior churchman had quit.

He added: “I’m delighted that he is gone. But his claim that I’m a fantasist is still there.

“He lacks compassion and is a very arrogant man. I do think his leaving now has a lot to do with my case.”

The bishop tendered his resignation last August when he turned 75 but he was asked to remain as the church looked for his replacement.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

AAP

A Victorian bishop say the Catholic Church will give no support to an ex-priest jailed for child sex abuse, Gerald Ridsdale, if he is released on parole.

The Catholic Church will give no support to a former priest jailed over child sex abuse if he is released next month, a Victorian bishop says.

Former Victorian Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale is eligible for parole from late next month after serving a long prison sentence for abusing 30 boys between 1961 and 1987.

Ballarat Bishop Paul Bird said the church was under no obligation to provide support and would not be providing support to Ridsdale, as he was laicised in 1993.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Lancashire Evening Post

The diocese of Lancaster has spoken out after it was reported a retired schoolteacher made two confessions to priests that he had sexually abused children – years before being brought to justice.

John Davis, 75, of Fensway, Hutton, was sentenced to six years in prison at Preston Crown Court after pleading guilty to nine counts of indecent assault on several young girls.

After the case one of his victims said: ““I think it is absolutely disgusting that somehow he feels he can speak to a priest and that makes it all right.”

Adding: “I will have to live with this till the day I die. To me it is typical of the Catholic church and I feel utterly let down.”

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

The chairman of the National Review Board, a lay body that advises the US bishops in combating clerical sexual abuse, has disputed a 2011 John Jay College of Criminal Justice study that found no link between homosexuality and clerical abuse.

A journalist said to Al Notzon III, who is ending his term as chairman in June:

While the majority of clergy sex-abuse victims are post-pubescent boys, the researchers who completed the second John Jay Report concluded that same-sex attraction was not a significant factor in the crisis.

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UNITED STATES
Renew America

By Matt C. Abbott

Father Andrew Greeley has died at the age of 85.

I’ve mentioned him a number of times in this column over the last several years. I was no fan of his, to say the least. He even sent me a cryptic email a while back.

Out of Christian charity, we should pray for his soul. But I do want to remind readers of the following excerpts in Father Greeley’s non-fiction book Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest – something he never (to my knowledge) revealed while living:

[Next comes a passage from the book discussing a “ring of predators” among clergy in Chicago.]

From Catholic World News (May 29):
The chairman of the National Review Board, a lay body that advises the U.S. bishops in combating clerical sexual abuse, has disputed a 2011 John Jay College of Criminal Justice study that found no link between homosexuality and clerical abuse.

A journalist said to Al Notzon III, who is ending his term as chairman in June: ‘While the majority of clergy sex-abuse victims are post-pubescent boys, the researchers who completed the second John Jay Report concluded that same-sex attraction was not a significant factor in the crisis.’

Notzon replied: ‘The majority of victims are still post-pubescent males … When you hire an independent researcher [group], they reach their own conclusions. I don’t agree with their conclusion in this instance – when 83% of cases are male on male.’

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AUSTRALIA
Bay Post

The Royal Commission into child sex abuse hasn’t even begun but it is already obvious how much the political and social landscape has shifted, and how exposed some institutions may be as a result.

This week’s appearance at the Victorian child sex abuse inquiry by Catholic Cardinal George Pell was especially revealing.

Gone was the bluster and confidence of the past, and in its place was a subdued church leader who appeared uncharacteristically uncertain.

True, his critics wasted no time writing off his apologies and contrition as “a cynical exercise in damage control”, but that overlooks the extraordinary reality that the church has, at last, been put on the spot by a more powerful secular authority and forced to face some hard facts.

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UNITED STATES
Stop Baptist Predators

Christa Brown

I’ll be facilitating a yoga session at the annual SNAP Conference in Washington D.C. this summer. If you can, please come join me!

Who: Survivors of clergy sex abuse
What: SNAP conference 2013
When: July 26-28, 2013
Where: Washington D.C.

SNAP, the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, is the largest international support group for women and men who were sexually abused by religious authority figures – i.e., by priests, preachers, ministers, deacons, nuns and others. It is a nonprofit organization that is independent of any religious group and that carries no connections to any church or denominational entity.

The conference takes place from Friday July 26 to Sunday July 28, and the yoga session will be one of the breakout events at the conference. It will be a come-as-you-are chair yoga session that anyone can participate in even if they’ve never done yoga before. No mat needed. So come one, come all!

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

PATRICK CARLYON HERALD SUN MAY 27, 2013

CARDINAL George Pell was told that Hell awaits him after he finished four hours of evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into child abuse yesterday.

He didn’t seem fazed: he has, after all, had almost two decades to perfect his explanation for what he describes as the Catholic Church’s “imperfect” response to paedophile priests.

Cardinal Pell played chess as a kid. Through the afternoon he struck the pose of a master pondering his next move – elbows on the arms of his chair, fingers steepled in front of him.

Yet his opening play was the obvious one, a thoroughly modern tact adopted by corporations keen to be seen to accepting responsibility for perceived wrongdoings.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

SHANNON DEERY From: Herald Sun May 31, 2013

FORMER Salesian College Rupertswood principal Frank Klep has been charged with raping students after alleged victims came forward.

Police have charged the former principal with 20 new offences.

The 69-year-old former priest is now facing 31 charges of sexual abuse of boys between 1974 and 1984.

He appeared at the Melbourne Magistrates Court for a brief administrative hearing this morning.

The new charges include two counts of rape of a child under the age of 14 and a child under the age of 16.

The Salesians have previously denied allegations they moved Klep to Samoa after investigations into sex assault allegations began.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

May 31, 2013

Fresh charges have been laid against a former Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing boys after new complainants came forward, a Melbourne court has heard.

Former Rupertswood College principal, Frank Gerard Klep, 69, of Burwood, appeared for a committal mention on Friday facing 31 charges of sexual abuse against 11 victims.

Klep’s lawyer Tony Hargreaves told Melbourne Magistrates Court he would need more time to prepare his client’s case after the new charges emerged.

“There’s a raft of new complainants and serious charges,” Mr Hargreaves said.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) The Vatican’s Institute for Religious Works, known by the acronym of its Italian title IOR, is not a bank. It neither lends money nor makes direct investments and all of its clients are named.

The mission of its newly appointed president, Ernst von Freyberg, is to restore its reputation as a transparent financial institution in line with international norms at the service of the Holy Father and its 19 thousand customers worldwide, most of whom are nuns and clergy. He believes communication is a key part of this mission and members of the Church and the society at large must be informed of the IOR’s activities.

In an interview with Vatican Radio’s Fr. Bernd Hagenkord S.J., von Freyberg dispels some myths about the IOR and reveals the challenges facing the institute, which has attracted keen media attention in recent years. And he confesses to having a ‘dream’: “My dream is a very clear one. My dream is that our reputation is such that people don’t think of us any more, when they think about the Vatican, but that they listen to what the Pope says.”

My first question: Do you like your job, coming from Frankfurt down to Rome, working inside the Vatican?

“It is a great privilege to work here; it is the most inspiring environment you can imagine: working at the Vatican. And it is a great challenge to serve the pope in re-establishing the reputation of this institute.”

What did you imagine your work to be, prior to starting here?

“Different from what it is. When I came here I thought I would need to focus on what is normally described as cleaning out and dealing with improper deposits. There is – until now – nothing I can detect. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything, but it means that it is not our biggest issue.
Our biggest issue is our reputation. Our work – my work – is much more communication than originally thought. And it is much more communication inside the Church. We haven’t done enough of that in the past. It starts a home, with our own employees, with those who work for the Church in Rome, with those in the Church around the world. To them we owe first of all transparency and a good explication of what we do and how we try to serve.”

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VATICAN CITY
Financial Times

By Guy Dinmore and Rachel Sanderson in Vatican City

On his last full day of a troubled papacy, Benedict XVI bade farewell to his household staff lining up in the Vatican, greeting cleaners, drivers and gardeners, before stopping to exchange just a few words with a newly arrived fellow German.

“I got a rosary. He wished me strength,” recalls Ernst von Freyberg, who two weeks earlier had been named head of the Vatican bank in the Pope’s last major appointment before his historic abdication in February.

Mr von Freyberg will need plenty of prayer and strength as he sets out to rescue the scandal-torn reputation of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), as the bank is formally known, and help bring the Holy See in line with international financial norms, particularly in combating money laundering.
But what comes across in a lengthy interview in his office, adjacent to the medieval bastion housing the bank, is a Teutonic thoroughness that the lawyer and financier has applied in 25 years of managing in Germany’s Mittelstand, its backbone of small and medium enterprises.

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VATICAN CITY
The New York Times

By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: May 30, 2013

VATICAN CITY — From the cheerful ease with which the newly minted president of the Vatican Bank fielded questions on a recent morning, it could be easy to forget how the bank has long been a mystery wrapped in an enigma, tangled up in some of the most opaque scandals in Italy.

“Our mission is to serve and shine,” the bank’s president, Ernst von Freyberg, said with a smile. “Our first pillar is transparency.” He spoke from an office in the medieval tower that houses the bank inside the Vatican, beneath a painting depicting the Gospel lesson, “Render unto Caesar, what is Caesar’s, and to God, what is God’s.”

Appointed in February by Pope Benedict XVI in one of his last acts before retiring, Mr. von Freyberg, 54, a German aristocrat, industrialist and Roman Catholic with a friendly manner and a subtle sense of self-irony, will have a lot of shining to do.

After the ouster of the previous president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, in a boardroom coup last year, Mr. von Freyberg was brought in with the help of an outside headhunting firm — revolutionary by the standards of the insular Vatican — and is the bank’s first non-Italian president since its founding in 1942.

In recent years, the Vatican Bank has been under increasing pressure from European officials and the Bank of Italy to shed its reputation as an offshore haven and bring its practices in line with European norms to curb money-laundering and terrorist-financing as a condition for using the euro. Until it is deemed fully compliant, the Vatican will face higher costs and difficulties in finding banks to do business with it.

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BELGIUM
The Tablet (UK)

30 May 2013

The country’s highest appeals court ruled on Tuesday that evidence seized in police searches of church offices, its sexual abuse commission and the flat of Cardinal Godfried Danneels in June 2010 could not be used to prosecute the Church for covering up the abuse scandal.

The Cour de Cassation ruling came after lower courts had issued contradictory rulings on the legality of the searches, which included a bizarre visit to the crypt of Mechelen cathedral to search the tomb of a deceased cardinal for documents wrongly said to be hidden there.

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AUSTRALIA
Courier Mail

AAP

MELBOURNE Archbishop Denis Hart has pledged to ensure no new cases of child sex abuse emerge from the Catholic Church.

He says this commitment is shared by all bishops and religious leaders.

“I take responsibility for ensuring there is no re-emergence of child sexual abuse in the church,” Archbishop Hart said on Friday.

“I speak on behalf of my fellow bishops and religious institute leaders when I say that we all share this commitment.”

Speaking at a gathering of religious leaders in Melbourne, Archbishop Hart reiterated his apology to victims of clergy abuse and his faith in the church’s processes for dealing with abuse in the archdiocese, the Melbourne Response.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, says the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s were a major factor in the large number of child sex offenders within the church.

The Archbishop was speaking at a special diocesan leadership luncheon today as a follow-up to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into institutionalised child abuse.

Citing research conducted in the United States, Archbishop Hart said a number of organisational, psychological and situational factors led to a high rate of offending amongst priests ordained prior to the 1970’s.

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TEXAS/VIRGINIA
NBC 12

By Rachel DePompa

RICHMOND, VA (WWBT) –
Geronimo “Pastor G” Aguilar of the Richmond Outreach Center is out of a Texas jail after posting $200,000 bond, according to Tarrant County District Attorney’s office.

A bond hearing set for Friday at his attorney’s request has been canceled. Prosecutors have six months, under Texas law, to present the case to a Grand Jury.

Prosecutors in Texas charged Aguilar with seven felony counts in two child sex abuse cases dating back to 1996. Four of the counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child under 14, are first degree felonies that could carry life in prison.

Texas authorities took over custody of Aguilar from the Richmond Sheriff’s Office Friday morning. Aguilar temporarily stepped down from his positions as President of the Board and Pastor at the Richmond Outreach Center last week due to the charges.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Samantha Donovan

One of Australia’s most notorious paedophile priests, Gerald Ridsdale, is being interviewed by detectives about more abuse allegations.

AM understands Victorian police successfully applied for permission to interview 79-year-old Ridsdale yesterday.

He is currently in jail for the abuse of dozens of children between the 1960s and the 1980s.

In 1994 he pleaded guilty to more than 40 charges of sexual abuse involving 21 children. He was convicted again 12 years later over charges involving 10 boys.

Stephen Woods was a 14-year-old schoolboy when Ridsdale raped him.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Fresh charges have been laid against a former Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing boys after new complainants came forward, a Melbourne court has heard.

Former Rupertswood College principal, Frank Gerard Klep, 69, of Burwood, appeared for a committal mention on Friday facing 31 charges of sexual abuse against 11 victims.

Klep’s lawyer Tony Hargreaves told Melbourne Magistrates Court he would need more time to prepare his client’s case after the new charges emerged.

“There’s a raft of new complainants and serious charges,” Mr Hargreaves said.

Magistrate Gerard Lethbridge adjourned the matter to July 5 and extended Klep’s bail.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By court reporter Sarah Farnsworth

Police have laid new charges of child sexual abuse against former Catholic priest Frank Klep.

The former principal of the Salesian College Rupertswood faced the Melbourne Magistrates Court today on 31 charges.

The 69-year-old is accused of abusing 11 boys between 1974 and 1984.

He was initially facing six charges of indecent assault, which were laid in February.

The new charges include 29 counts of indecent assault and two counts of rape of a child under the age of 14, and a child under the age of 16.

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MINNESOTA
Press TV (Iran)

A Minneapolis-St. Paul man has stepped forward to file the first lawsuit of sexual abuse by a priest since Gov. Mark Dayton (DFL) signed the Child Victims Act into law.

The 51-year-old man who has chosen to remain anonymous filed the law suit against ex-priest Thomas Adamson on Wednesday alleging multiple incidents of sexual abuse in the 70s, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.

“He was suffering in the shadows. There are going to be many more [suits] to come, as they should. Now is the time for reckoning,” said St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson who is representing the plaintiff.

In the past, the statute of limitations on sex prevented adults over 24 to sue for childhood abuse. Now that the statute is lifted by The Child Victims Act, adults can sue for any abuse during their past including the school or church.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

Melbourne’s Archbishop Denis Hart has made a commitment to ensure no more cases of child sex abuse emerge from the Catholic Church.

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart has pledged to prevent any new cases of child sex abuse emerging from the Catholic Church, saying it has been “hit like a brick” by the scandal.

He said the church had had trouble coming to terms with the horror of so many priests and religious offending, but it was resolute in its commitment to addressing it.

“I take responsibility for ensuring there is no re-emergence of child sexual abuse in the church, that victims are treated fairly and compassionately, and that offenders are removed from contact with children,” Archbishop Hart said on Friday.

“I speak on behalf of my fellow bishops and religious institute leaders when I say that we all share this commitment.”

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

Daniel Fogarty and Genevieve Gannon, AAP
May 31, 2013

Cardinal George Pell hopes and prays that the worst of the sexual abuse scandal is behind the Catholic Church.

He says the church is making recompense for the decades of abuse and there have been very few recent cases.

Victims and advocates disagree and say recent revelations are just the tip of the iceberg.

For Stephen Woods, who endured sexual abuse at the hands of pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale, Cardinal Pell’s evidence to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry on Monday did nothing other than demonstrate that Australia’s most senior Catholic and other church hierarchy still don’t get it.

Mr Woods, like many fellow victims and advocates, believes that only new leadership and a change of attitude can bring real healing.

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SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland

Martin Williams
Senior News Reporter

Bishop of Motherwell Joe Devine submitted his resignation having turned 75 last year, but had continued in his role until replacements were found.

It has been claimed appointments were held up in the wake of the scandal involving Cardinal Keith O’Brien.

It is understood Bishop Devine’s departure means that of the eight dioceses in Scotland, only three have full-time bishops in post who are not waiting to leave – in Glasgow, Oban and Aberdeen. …

Last month Bishop Devine backed down from moves to sanction a serving priest over claims the Church had covered up a culture of sexual bullying.

He issued a notice stating no action would be taken against Father Matthew Despard, who alleged sexual misconduct had been rife for decades in seminaries training teenage priests.

Father Despard, parish priest of St John Ogilvie’s in High Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, had written a book on the allegations.

The book names serving priests and claims senior figures in the Church refused to confront abuse and bullying complaints.

Last month, Bishop Devine’s office was hit by allegations questioning how he handled abuse cases.

Alan Draper, a former child protection consultant for the Scottish Catholic Church, claimed he had stopped working for Bishop Devine because his advice was consistently ignored.

In March, after revelations Mr Draper knew of 20 abuse cases where no action was taken, the Church issued a statement dismissing his remarks.

It said the number of cases reported in Scotland each year was “small” and “have only very rarely involved a member of the clergy”.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Wirral News

Priest suspended by Church of England after arrest on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children

Joe Thomas, Liverpool Echo

A VICAR was suspended from his duties in a Merseyside parish after being arrested in a child porn probe.

Reverend Ian Hughes was questioned by police after being arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

The Church of England confirmed Rev Hughes was suspended as soon as they were made aware of his arrest.

Known for his facial piercings, Rev Hughes was Priest-in-Charge of Wirral parishes Poulton and Seacombe.

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

Andrew M. Greeley, iconoclastic priest and author, dies at 85

By Joe Holley, Thursday, May 30, 11:41 AM E-mail the writer
The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, an iconoclastic priest and sociologist who irked the Catholic hierarchy by writing best-selling novels that featured churchly misdeeds and graphic sex, died May 29 at his home in Chicago. He was 85.

His publicist, June Rosner, confirmed his death to the Associated Press. Father Greeley had reportedly sustained a traumatic brain injury and skull fracture in 2008 after his jacket was caught in the door of a taxicab.

Ordained in 1954, Father Greeley served for a decade as a parish priest in Chicago before being assigned by the church to work full time as a writer, researcher and teacher. …

He outraged defenders of conventional Catholic doctrine with his outspoken belief that sex is a sacrament and an expression of God’s love rather than a sin, when it is not a means of procreation.

In his 1986 memoir, “Confessions of a Parish Priest,” Father Greeley wrote: “I suspect Catholic historians of the future will describe the Church’s obsession with sex and particularly with an attempt to deny the pleasures of sex to married men and women as a chapter in our history comparable to the Inquisition and the Crusades.”

Father Greeley began writing about the sexual abuse of minors in the mid-1980s and repeatedly castigated bishops for failing to stop abuse by the clergy and covering up for pedophile priests. Fellow priests told him the rumors were untrue and, even if they were, he shouldn’t be airing dirty laundry. …

He kept writing about the burgeoning scandal for the next two decades, both in his long-running syndicated newspaper column and in such books as “The Priestly Sins” (2004), a novel that tells the story of a young cleric whose career is nearly destroyed when he witnesses and reports the sexual abuse of a boy by a fellow priest.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Calgary Herald

BY DON BABWIN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO — The Rev. Andrew Greeley, an outspoken Roman Catholic priest, bestselling author and longtime Chicago newspaper columnist who criticized the hierarchy of his own church over the child sex abuse scandal, has died. He was 85.

His longtime publicist, June Rosner, said Greeley died Wednesday night at his Chicago home.

Greeley was the author of more than 50 bestselling novels, many of them international mystery thrillers, and dozens of non-fiction works. His writing was translated into 12 languages and his career spanned five decades. His novels include The Cardinal Sins, White Smoke, The Priestly Sins and Angel Light. His many non-fiction works include The Catholic Revolution and Priests: A Calling in Crisis. …

“Sometimes I think that we as priests and bishops have done everything we possibly could to drive away the laity during the last 20 years,” Greeley wrote in his book Catholic Contributions: Sociology and Policy, published in 1987.

Greeley also had said neither the church nor government was willing to do much about priests who sexually abuse children.

“The sexually maladjusted priest has been able to abuse the children of the laity and thus far be reasonably secure from punishment,” Greeley told a lay Catholic group in 1992.

During a news conference in 1987, Greeley said that if he were heading a church fundraising campaign, he would admit to church members that “we’ve really goofed. People are resentful over what they take to be the insensitivity of church leaders — particularly on matters relating to sex.”

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GERMANY
Beatrice Daily Sun

A Catholic seminary in Germany says it is investigating claims that trainee priests made anti-Semitic jokes, played far-right music and gave Nazi salutes.

The head of the seminary in Wuerzburg, Herbert Baumann, says a probe was launched as soon as the allegations surfaced earlier this month.

They were first reported by German news agency epd, which didn’t cite its sources.

Baumann said Wednesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he wouldn’t tolerate anti-Semitic behavior at the seminary.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

The Catholic Church has released the names of 29 Melbourne priests it says are guilty of sexually abusing children.

The release of the list follows evidence by Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart last week to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse.

During that hearing he admitted that the church paid compensation to victims of at least 50 Melbourne priests.

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UNITED STATES
Associated Baptist Press

By Bob Allen

An activist who advocated for victims during the Roman Catholic sexual-abuse scandal in the United States in 2002 says evangelical leaders publicly rallying behind a minister accused in a lawsuit of covering up sex crimes against children sends the wrong message to abuse victims everywhere.

David Clohessy, national director of SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests – said May 28 that religious leaders voicing support for embattled Pastor C.J. Mahaney, named in a lawsuit recently thrown out of a Maryland court for legal reasons, ought to be ashamed.

“It’s dreadfully hurtful to child sex-abuse victims when people in authority publicly back accused wrongdoers,” said Clohessy, one of just four abuse survivors to testify before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at their historic meeting in Dallas in 2002. “And it hinders criminal investigations, because it intimidates victims, witnesses and whistleblowers into staying silent.”

Clohessy weighed in after public statements by friends of Mahaney, including Southern Baptist seminary president Albert Mohler and Washington pastor Mark Dever, vouching for the former Sovereign Grace Ministries president’s personal integrity.

“Support Rev. Mahaney if you must,” Clohessy pleaded. “But do so privately in ways that don’t further harm, depress and scare other child sex-abuse victims into keeping silent and thus helping child predators escape detection and prosecution.”

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UNITED STATES
New York Daily News

BY CORKY SIEMASZKO / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2013

The Rev. Andrew Greeley, the outspoken Catholic priest and newspaper columnist who ripped his own church for covering up the child sex abuse scandal, died Wednesday. He was 85.

Greeley died in his sleep at his Chicago apartment in the swanky John Hancock Center, his spokeswoman June Rosner said.

The popular priest had been in declining health for last five years after fracturing his skull in a freak accident when his jacket snagged on a taxi cab door and he was pulled to the pavement.

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UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport

According to a tip received by TheMediaReport.com, Barbara Blaine, the founder and president of the anti-Catholic group SNAP, has admitted that she wrote a letter on behalf of a Louisiana psychologist, Dr. Steve Taylor, who was arrested and jailed on charges of possessing over 100 images of kiddie porn.

In 2009, when the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners was considering revoking the license of Dr. Taylor following his arrest for child pornography, Blaine wrote a letter to the board and explained that Taylor had founded a local chapter of SNAP and had done extensive work for the group. She then begged that the board “refrain from taking any action on this case until Dr. Taylor’s guilt or innocence is determined in a court of law.”

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AUSTRALIA
Damaso Times

05/30/20130

CATHOLIC clergy commit six times as much abuse as those in the rest of the churches combined, ”and that’s a conservative figure”, a child protection expert says. Patrick Parkinson, a Sydney University law professor, told the state inquiry into how the churches handle sex abuse yesterday that the figures for the Catholic Church were strikingly out of proportion.

He proposed a 12-month amnesty from charges of perverting the course of justice if the church opened all its files on offenders alive and dead, but said those involved in cover-ups would have to resign.

Earlier, Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton set the inquiry’s opening day alight with more broadsides against the Catholic Church’s systemic obstruction of police inquiries over five decades.

He said police had statistics for sexual offences by clergy and church workers since January 1956, uncovering ”shocking” figures: 2110 offences against 519 victims, overwhelmingly perpetrated by Catholic priests and mostly against boys aged 11 or 12. But in all that time the church had not reported a single crime to police.

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BELGIUM
National Catholic Reporter

Jonathan Luxmoore Catholic News Service | May. 30, 2013

OXFORD, ENGLAND The Belgian Catholic bishops’ conference has welcomed judicial condemnation of a 2010 police raid on the cathedral and residence of Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Mechelen-Brussels.

On Tuesday, Belgium’s Court of Cassation condemned the June 24, 2010, raid, during which documents were seized and the tombs of two cardinals were pried open. The raid occurred during a bishops’ plenary meeting, and the bishops were held all day as police confiscated cellphones, documents and computers.

In its ruling, which is final under Belgian law, the court said the “legally unjustified” raid was ordered by a judge on the basis of a single witness’ testimony. The court ordered the return of all seized material to the church.

“We are satisfied with this definitive judgment,” said Jesuit Fr. Tommy Scholtes, spokesman for the Brussels-based bishops’ conference. “But the raid’s illegality was only one aspect of the many problems we still face, and the church must await further developments.”

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By PETER STEINFELS
Published: May 30, 2013

Andrew M. Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest and a prolific writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, controversial novels and no-holds-barred newspaper columns regularly challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism, was found dead on his Thursday at his home in Chicago. He was 85.

He died in his sleep, said his niece, Laura Durkin. Father Greeley had been in poor health since suffering a traumatic brain injury in 2008.

Father Greeley was exuberantly combative. He could be scathing about the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops; at one point he described them as “morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt” and called for the retirement of “a considerable number of mitered birdbrains” if the church wanted “to salvage American Catholicism.”

But he could be equally critical of secular intellectuals, whom he accused of being prejudiced against religion, and reform-minded Catholics, who he said had a weakness for political or cultural fads.

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UNITED STATES
Patrick J. Wall

MAY 30, 2013

GOD OR GOAT is one of the many child porn titles that Jesuit priest Gary Uhlenkott, S.J. at Gonzaga University allegedly purchased—discovered this week as a part of a federal sting operation on the Spokane campus and at the priest’s home.

For the dozen advocates and attorneys who battled for nearly a decade to combat the child abusers in the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, this news from Spokane is sickening, but not surprising.

Why? After five years of investigating 45 Jesuit child molesters in the Diocese of Fairbanks, I was shocked at the indifference and lack of action amongst the hierarchy. We discovered in case after case that the Father General, his American assistants in the Roman Jesuit curia, the Jesuit Conference in Washington D.C., the Provincials in Portland, the Socius in Portland, the Presidents at Gonzaga, and the Presidents at Seattle University all knew they had dozens of child molesters in the Province and chose to remain silent.

The lesson from Father Gary Uhlenkott S.J. and Gonzaga is that the crimes against children and the culture of Jesuitical indifference continue in the Society of Jesus. Despite uncovering that President Father John P. Leary, S.J. of Gonzaga was removed in 1969 for child abuse, the Oregon Province filed for bankruptcy protection 2009 to protect itself from hundreds of child abuse victims. Despite being certified by Praesidium, NOTHING has changed in the Society of Jesus.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Reuters

May 30, 2013

(Spokeswoman says Greeley died early Thursday morning, not Wednesday night, paragraph three)

By Mary Wisniewski

May 30 (Reuters) – Father Andrew M. Greeley, an outspoken Roman Catholic priest who wrote more than 50 novels and was a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times until he suffered a brain injury in 2008, died at the age of 85 in his Chicago home, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

“Father Andrew Greeley was the most influential American Catholic sociologist of the 20th century,” said Father Tom Reese, a senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter. “He was the first to show how Humanae Vitae, the encyclical on birth control by Pope Paul VI, split the church and made the laity question church authority.”

Greeley died in his sleep early Thursday morning, according to his spokeswoman, June Rosner.

A proponent of reform within the Catholic Church, Greeley also wrote more than 100 works of non-fiction, including “Priests: A Calling in Crisis” and “The Catholic Revolution: New Wine in Old Wineskins and the Second Vatican Council.”

“He was first and foremost a parish priest … his parish were the people who read his columns and his books,” said his niece, Laura Durkin. “He was a priest and he loved the church.”

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UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week

03/28/13
David Cheifetz
Special To The Jewish Week

My name is David Cheifetz and I am a victim of childhood sex abuse in a Jewish institution.

There. I have said it. After more than 30 years I have shared the dark secret that has haunted my soul.

I was 13 years old, attending sleep-away camp at Camp Dora Golding, an all-boys Orthodox camp that some of you still send your sons to. I was befriended by a 28-year-old member of the rabbinic staff. Over the course of a week he sexually abused me repeatedly. When the activity was exposed, I was summoned to the camp director’s office and forced to confront the assailant. Then I was summarily sent home, as if it were I who had committed the crime. The camp never even told my parents why I was being sent home. They were just advised to pick me up at the Greyhound terminal at New York’s Port Authority.

I do not know if the perpetrator was ever fired; to the best of my knowledge he was never reported to legal authorities. I understand that he went on to a long career in Jewish education, and based on whispers on the Internet, probably continued targeting young Jewish boys within the walls of Jewish educational institutions. [Camp Dora Golding officials did not respond to repeated attempts for comment on the author’s allegations.]

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

POSTED BY DAVID CLOHESSY ON MAY 30, 2013

We extend our deepest sympathies to the family of Fr. Andrew Greeley. We agree with them that the church is a better place because of him.

Decades ago, Fr. Greeley made the first substantial donation to SNAP. He was one of the first to publicly address the church’s on-going clergy sex abuse and cover up crisis. His columns about the scandal gave hope to many victims and prodded many journalists to begin covering it.

He was criticized and ridiculed when, in 1993, he wrote in a magazine article that roughly 100,000 US kids had been molested by priests. (Last year, according to mainstream media accounts, church abuse experts made the same estimate in a Vatican meeting.)

We don’t agree with everything Fr. Greeley said or did. But we are grateful to him for his support, compassion and courage over the last three decades.

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SCOTLAND
Scotsman

By CRAIG BROWN
Published on 30/05/201

THE disgraced Cardinal Keith O’Brien has been praised by the Pope’s representative in UK as having done “a lot of good” during his career.

Papal Nuncio Antonio Mennini has said that despite having mistakes he had also made a positive contribution on the Catholic Church’s behalf.

His comments came as he made the surprise announcement that bishops would be appointed to three of the four currently vacant dioceses.

Speaking during a visit to the Diocese of Motherwell, where he told clergy that the resignation of Bishop Joseph Devine had now been accepted, Archbishop Mennini said: “In some respect, we can recognise that the cardinal, not withstanding his mistake, did a lot of good work for the church.”

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CHICAGO (IL)
Los Angeles Times

By Elaine Woo
May 30, 2013

The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, the irrepressible Roman Catholic priest whose broad talents drove him to prominence as a sociologist, novelist, newspaper columnist and voluble church critic, has died. He was 85.

The controversial cleric died in his sleep early Thursday at his Chicago home, said his niece, Laura Durkin.

“He was first and foremost a priest,” Durkin said. “His parish was his readers and his fans. That’s how he looked at it. He wrote books expressing God’s love for us.”

Greeley was a self-styled maverick whose Renaissance impulses defied a conventional definition of the priestly vocation. A sociology professor at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, he wrote nearly 100 scholarly books, most of which were based on his groundbreaking research on the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. He turned his sociological and theological reflections into fiction and, starting with “The Cardinal Sins” in 1981, became a bestselling novelist with more than 60 titles to his credit.

A self-described “loud-mouthed Irish priest” (“And may they carve it on my gravestone!” he quipped), he was outspoken in his criticism of church policies that he considered out of step with the times, including the Vatican’s stances on birth control, divorce and the ordination of women. He had harsh words about the U.S. church’s mishandling of sexual abuse by priests. He once tarred American bishops as “mitred pinheads.”

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

John L. Allen Jr. | May. 30, 2013

APPRECIATION

Fr. Andrew Greeley, an eminent sociologist of religion who also happened to be probably the best-selling priest-novelist of all time and the Catholic church’s most prominent in-house critic, died Wednesday in Chicago. He was 85.

Over the course of a career that generated a staggering 72 nonfiction books and 66 novels, Greeley became the voice of the liberal American Catholicism of his generation — critical, but deeply loyal. Greeley could be too Catholic for both some on the secular left and the most embittered of the church’s dissidents, as well as too outspokenly liberal for the Catholic establishment, but he was always a compelling and commercially successful player on the American stage.

Born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Ill., in 1928, Greeley was ordained a priest of the Chicago archdiocese in 1954. He earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1962. Buoyed by both the Kennedy-era New Frontier and the reforming spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Greeley’s early sociological work focused on the emancipation of American Catholics into the country’s political and cultural mainstream.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

By The Associated Press

Published: Thursday, May 30, 2013

CHICAGO — The Rev. Andrew Greeley, an outspoken Roman Catholic priest, best-selling author and longtime Chicago newspaper columnist who even criticized the hierarchy of his own church over the child sex abuse scandal, has died. He was 85.

His longtime publicist, June Rosner, said Greeley died Wednesday night at his Chicago home.

Greeley was the author of more than 50 best-selling novels, many of them international mystery thrillers, and dozens of nonfiction works. His writing was translated into 12 languages and his career spanned five decades.

The Chicago-area native wrote a weekly column that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers on the relationship between religion and politics. He was a contributor to the New York Times, National Catholic Reporter and other publications.

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CHICAGO (IL)
WGN

By Trevor Jensen and Margaret Ramirez
Chicago Tribune

Rev. Andrew Greeley, the outspoken Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist known for his deeply researched academic appraisals and sometimes scathing critiques of his church, died Wednesday night, several years after fracturing his skull in a freakish fall in Rosemont.

Rev. Greeley died in his sleep at his apartment at the John Hancock Center, according to his spokeswoman, June Rosner. He was 85.

Rosner said Rev. Greeley had been in poor health since an accident on Nov. 7, 2008. He was at Advocate Lutheran General Medical Center when a piece of his clothing apparently got caught in the door of a departing taxi and he was thrown to the pavement.

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CONNECTICUT
The Day

By Karen Florin
Publication: theday.com

Published 05/29/2013

Former Waterford pastor Dennis Carey, charged last year with possession of hundreds of images of child pornography, has died.

Carey suffered a massive stroke earlier this spring and died of cardiac arrest on May 20, according to his attorney, Ronald F. Stevens. He was 66.

Stevens said Carey had several serious health conditions and that his criminal case in New London Superior Court had been on hold. On Friday, Stevens said he plans to present Carey’s death certificate to the court and ask that the charges be dismissed.

“It’s really a sad thing, to end his life this way,” Stevens said.

Carey had resigned from Waterford’s St. Paul in Chains Church a year ago after state and local police served a search warrant on the rectory, where Carey lived, and seized computers they said contained hundreds of images of child pornography. Following Carey’s arrest, Bishop Michael R. Cote wrote to parishioners of the Diocese of Norwich that he has started the process of dismissing Carey from the church.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

AAP May 31, 2013

THE Catholic Church has released the names of 29 Melbourne priests it acknowledges were guilty of sexually abusing children.

The ABC reported last night that of the 59 priests whose victims had been paid compensation, the church had named 29, including repeat offenders Desmond Gannon and Michael Glennon. It would not name the other half, some of whom it said had died before the allegations were made and had not had a chance to defend themselves.

Victorian police, meanwhile, are interviewing one of Australia’s worst pedophile priests over new abuse allegations.

Gerald Ridsdale is eligible for parole from late next month after serving a long prison sentence for abusing 30 boys between 1961 and 1987.

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IRELAND
Impartial Reporter

Meadhbh Monahan • Published 30 May 2013

Parish priest of Rosslea, Canon John McCabe, has taken a “temporary leave of absence” from his ministry due to a child abuse allegation from “some years ago.”

Parishioners who attended weekend Masses in St. Tierney’s Church reported hearing gasps of shock when Canon Larry Duffy (parish priest of Clones) read out a letter on behalf of Bishop Liam McDaid. It said that “your parish priest” (i.e. Canon John McCabe) has requested a leave of absence while the allegation is investigated.

A spokesman from the Clogher Diocese has told The Impartial Reporter: “The Diocese of Clogher has been informed of a child safeguarding allegation in relation to a priest of the Diocese. The allegation relates to some years ago. The allegation has been reported to the civil authorities and all procedures laid down by the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland are being observed. The priest involved has been granted temporary leave of absence from priestly ministry while the matter is being investigated.”

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments as follows:

We are releasing a booklet today that I wrote, Myths of the Magdalene Laundries, that debunks the conventional wisdom about these Catholic-run facilities in Ireland. Based on the McAleese Report, the Irish government study that was released in February, the booklet examines the origins of the many myths that have surfaced about the laundries.

Virtually all the horror stories that have been told—nuns cruelly torturing and sexually abusing “fallen” women—are lies. Worse, Irish officials, such as the current prime minister, Enda Kenny, continue to misinform the public, even in the face of indisputable evidence. Media outlets, the BBC and the New York Times, in particular, refuse to discuss the McAleese Report, leaving the impression that the falsehoods told by Peter Mullan in his propaganda film, “The Magdalene Sisters,” offers an accurate picture of what happened.

Copies are being widely distributed to the media, Irish historical societies, Irish fraternal and sororal groups, the clergy—including all the bishops—and those who made a donation to cover the costs of publishing and distributing the booklet.

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AUSTRALIA
Government News

Published on Thu, 30/05/2013

By Julian Bajkowski

It would have to qualify as the toughest call centre and counselling contracts in Australia.

After months of behind the scenes preparations, the federal Attorney General’s Department on Thursday morning started officially looking for staff to pick-up the phone to answer the some of the hardest calls thousands of Australians will ever make in their lives – dialling the number to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Although exact details remain firmly and necessarily under wraps, AG’s has issued a request for tender for Call Intake and Support Services for the long awaited official inquiry that seeks to give some acknowledgement and closure to the scores of people whose childhoods and lives were shattered by crimes that many believe were persistently covered-up by churches and authorities.

The gravity and magnitude of the task ahead is underscored by call for a service provider that can provide staff that can field the calls, provide information to callers, capture crucial information and also refer clients to “related services and other sources of assistance.”

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SCOTLAND
BBC News

The Roman Catholic Church has announced that the Bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, is standing down.

Bishop Devine had initially tendered his resignation on his 75th birthday last August but was told to continue in office until a successor was found.

The Diocese of Motherwell said he would be replaced with an administrator.

His resignation follows the dismissal of Cardinal Keith O’Brien as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh after he admitted improper sexual conduct.

Gerry O’Brien, a spokesman for Bishop Devine said “this does not relate in any way, shape or form” to criticism of the way the bishop had handled allegations of sexual abuse within the church.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

The Catholic Church has released the names of 29 Melbourne priests who it acknowledges are guilty of sexually abusing children.

The church revealed the names of 29 of those priests on Thursday, including repeat offenders Desmond Gannon and Michael Glennon.

However, it says it will not name the remaining 30 priests because several were dead when allegations were made and they did not have a chance to respond.

The church is also withholding the names of priests who were not charged after police investigations. …

Priests named by Catholic Church:

Anthony Bongiorno, John Byrne, Peter Chalk, David Daniel, Bernard Day, Anthony Eames, Nazareno Fasciale, Desmond Gannon, Michael Glennon, Jack Gubbels, Barry Gwillim, Penn Jones, Bernie Mackin, Terry Merivale, Syd Morey, John O’Callaghan, Kevin O’Donnell, Tom O’Keefe, Paul Pavlou, Dominic Phillips, Ronald Pickering, Terrence Pidoto, Victor Rubeo, Peter Searson, Ray Whitehouse.

The ABC has chosen not to publish the names of four priests for legal reasons.
Last week the Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, told Victoria’s child abuse inquiry the church had paid compensation to the victims of 59 priests who had worked in the archdiocese.

The church revealed the names of 29 of those priests on Thursday, including repeat offenders Desmond Gannon and Michael Glennon.

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AUSTRALIA
International Business Times

By Vittorio Hernandez | May 30, 2013

In a belated show of remorse over the cover up of clergy sexual abuse of children, the Catholic Church in Australia release the names of 29 Melbourne priests who are guilty of sexually abusing children.

The 29 are just the tip of the iceberg because there are 30 more priest accused of similar offenses, but their names were withheld since some were already dead when accusations were made against them, giving the priests no chance to respond.

However, guilty or not, the church paid compensation to all the victims of these 59 priests who had been part of the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Archbishop Denis Hart admitted last week to the child abuse inquiry initiated by the state of Victoria.

ABC published the list but withheld the name of four priests in the group of 30 for legal reasons. The 26 others are: Anthony Bongiorno, John Byrne, Peter Chalk, David Daniel, Bernard Day, Anthony Eames, Nazareno Fasciale, Desmond Gannon, Michael Glennon, Jack Gubbels, Barry Gwillim, Penn Jones, Bernie Mackin, Terry Merivale, Syd Morey, John O’Callaghan, Kevin O’Donnell, Tom O’Keefe, Paul Pavlou, Dominic Phillips, Ronald Pickering, Terence Pidoto, Victor Rubeo, Peter Searson and Ray Whitehouse.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

SARAH MAC DONALD – 30 MAY 2013

The Catholic diocese of Dublin has paid out €1.5m in abuse settlements and legal costs over the past year.

In its latest update, the Child Safeguarding and Protection Service (CSPS) for the diocese says settlement costs for child sexual abuse by priests in Dublin have so far cost €17.9m. Of this sum, €12.5m covers settlements while €5.4 was spent on legal costs for both sides.

Over the past 12 months, the CSPS was notified of suspicions about two priests who were not previously the subject of complaints. One of priests is now deceased, while the other is not in ministry.

Within child safeguarding there are different categorisations of information with different thresholds designated for a concern or suspicion or allegation.

A suspicion is considered to be at the lower end of the spectrum of disclosure and could for example constitute third hand information. All suspicions or allegations made to the CSPS are reported to the Gardaí and HSE.

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UNITED STATES
Sojourners

by Catherine Woodiwiss 05-28-2013

IN 2002, Anne Barrett Doyle’s church involvement took a radical turn. The Boston Globe had just launched a series investigating rampant abuse among clergy in Boston’s Archdiocese, and the Catholic woman found herself protesting something for the first time in her life: her own Church.

“I was just pulled into this story, inextricably, with a force I didn’t understand,” Boston-based Barrett Doyle said.

This pull led her to help form Bishop Accountability, a clearinghouse that works to create and maintain a public record of clergy abuse in the Catholic Church. To date, the group maintains extensive paper trails (“over one million pages,” said Barrett Doyle), on reported sex abuse scandals around the country.

Nearly a decade would pass before Barrett Doyle realized her agitated response — an accusation against the church, in defense of the faith — was shared by many in leadership. The change came in 2012, when a priest sent her documents on a incident he’d brought to light in the 1990s.

“This man spoke out against abuse, and his career was altered forever by it,” Barrett Doyle said. “He’d done a wonderful thing, and his story was totally forgotten. He’d had no contact from other priests since. He was alone.”

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Blowing the whistle on clergy sex abuse

UNITED STATES
Lexology

Constantine Cannon LLP
Gordon Schnell

USA
May 24 2013

They are the Catholic Whistleblowers. At least that is the name this small, but growing band of renegade priests and nuns are calling themselves. They even have a formal website, beseeching “whistleblowers, supporters, and everyone who cares about transparency and honesty in the Catholic Church” to join them in their recently launched crusade. Their objective is plain and simple. Support victims of clergy sex abuse. Encourage Church insiders to do more to expose and root out the abuse that stubbornly persists. And ultimately, rouse the Catholic Church to take a more aggressive stand against this horrific scourge. To many, the Church does more to protect the perpetrators of this pestilence than it does the victims.

As their first official act of business, these modern day saints — who risk rankling their colleagues and superiors in an institution not known for tolerating internal dissent — are taking it straight to the top. They have appealed directly to Pope Francis himself. In a letter they recently sent him, the whistleblower group makes several recommendations to help remedy what they view as this ongoing crisis and scandal and the irreparable damage it is causing to the Church’s reputation: (i) create and support a group of clergy, lay professionals and abuse victims to serve as an intermediary between the Church and the victims; (ii) require complete transparency on clergy abuse and revoke any explicit or implicit oaths or pledges of secrecy within the Church; (iii) require zero tolerance and remove all clergy who have committed clergy abuse; (iv) remove all Church leaders who have facilitated or concealed clergy abuse; and (v) provide restitution and reparation to any victims of clergy abuse.

To bring their point home with some Biblical gusto, the whistleblowers compare themselves to the poor disfigured beggar who refused to be silenced when seeking some divine intervention:

The beggar was shunned by the apostles who attempted to silence him, to hide his hideous disfigurement from the Lord as if he might disfigure the one who created him. The beggar refused to be cast into silence for he knew his healing could only come from the dispenser of the divine mercy. Like this poor disfigured beggar we call out to you from the side of the road . . . . Please, Pope Francis, do not pass us by.

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WALTHAM (MA)
BishopAccountability.org

May 29, 2013

We share with you this week two developments that give us hope:

1) Our new database of whistleblower priests and nuns – more than 50 remarkable individuals who chose not to stay silent about sexual abuse or its cover-up. Many have experienced retaliation in some form, from defamation to stalled careers to social isolation. We hope our preservation of their stories and photographs will raise awareness of their contributions and will help other witnesses find the courage to come forward. Read the whistleblowers’ profiles.

2) The formation of Catholic Whistleblowers, the first group of priests and nuns dedicated to standing publicly with survivors and helping other Catholic church insiders who have witnessed wrongdoing. BishopAccountability.org is honored to have played a role in the emergence of this group. Last year, we contacted some of the whistleblowers we were researching and were stunned to learn that many were still shunned or marginalized by their fellow priests and nuns and church supervisors. We convened a small number of whistleblowers in conference calls last fall. The group grew and soon began meeting on its own. In January, the members decided to transition from private support to public activism, articulating a mission of service to survivors, future whistleblowers, and the church.

The New York Times broke the story of Catholic Whistleblowers last week.

Click here to see the group’s website – please contact them and show your support.

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NEW JERSEY
U.S. Catholic

By Scott Alessi

After the latest chapter in the sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey–which saw a priest who had been ordered by the prosecutor to be kept away from children somehow end up being involved in youth ministry in another diocese–someone had to take the blame. In an editorial last month, Newark, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger called for Archbishop John J. Myers to step down after this latest failing. And in a poll today on NJ.com, as of this writing, 89 percent of respondents agree that Myers should resign. So guess who takes the fall?

If you guessed the archbishop, you haven’t been paying close attention. Instead of admitting fault and stepping aside, Myers denied that he was to blame and instead pointed the finger at his vicar general, Msgr. John Doran, who has resigned as a result.

Of course, we don’t really know how much Myers knew about the actions of Father Michael Fugee, nor do we know how much blame Doran actually deserves for what happened. But Myers has come out and said there are “vulnerabilities in our own systems” and that the failings of the archdiocese need to be addressed. Yet he stops short of admitting these problems–and things like Fugee being given the position of co-director of the office of continuing education and ongoing formation of priests in the Newark archdiocese–happened on his watch. Nor does Myers’ account of the shortcomings of their efforts to protect children include even a hint of an apology.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph

DOUG CONWAY, AAP SENIOR CORRESPONDENT AAP MAY 30, 2013

GOD chose George Pell before Richmond Football Club could. But is the former ruckman now a religious tiger who has been forced to change his stripes a little?

Australia’s most senior Catholic churchman had a professional Aussie Rules contract in his bag in his last year at school.

He was also toying with life as a lawyer or doctor.

But faith inexorably pulled him away, and instead the 18-year-old country boy from Ballarat entered Melbourne’s Corpus Christi Seminary in 1960.

“I had fought against it for a long time,” he once said. “But I suspected and became convinced that God was calling me to do his work. I’ve never regretted it, though I still marvel that I made the leap and gave it a go.”

Cardinal Pell’s faith must have been sorely tested as he confronted perhaps the most pernicious evil lurking beneath the surface of Australian society for decades – the sexual abuse of children by priests in his church, including one he had shared a residence with.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

May 30, 2013

Jared Lynch

Police have interviewed convicted paedophile Catholic priest Gerard Ridsdale after more people came forward with allegations of abuse.

It is understood detectives from Taskforce Sano interviewed Ridsdale, 79, on Thursday afternoon.
The investigation comes as the Adult Parole Board told victims in a letter that Ridsdale could be released as soon as June 29.

Ridsdale was convicted of abusing more than 30 victims. But a woman whose sons were abused by him said the paedophile’s sister told her he had confessed to raping or molesting hundreds of children.

Victoria Police spokeswoman Natalie Webster confirmed detectives applied to Melbourne Magistrates Court to interview a 79-year-old Victorian man, ”in relation to historical child sexual abuse matters … in the 1960s and ’70s,

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AUSTRALIA
Facing the Truth

Summary Statement – St John of God – 29 April 2013
Summary Statement – Salesians of Don Bosco – 29 April 2013 – For full statement, see Salesians of Don Bosco website.
Summary Statement – Bishop Bird – 29 April 2013 – For full statement, see Diocese of Ballarat website.
Summary Statement – Christian Brothers – 3 May 2013 – For full statement, see the Christian Brothers’ website.
Summary Statement – Towards Healing – 3 May 2013
Statement – Stephen Elder Catholic Education Commission Victoria, Catholic Education in the Archdiocese of Melbourne – 3 May 2013
Summary Statement – Archbishop Hart – 20 May 2013
Closing Statement – Archbishop Hart – 20 May 2013

Right of reply

The Archbishop of Melbourne’s right of reply to Victoria Police and Br Barry Coldrey are available here.

The Independent Commissioner’s right of reply is available here.

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AUSTRALIA
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne

Tuesday 21 May 2013

ARCHBISHOP Denis Hart appeared yesterday, 20 May 2013, at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Non-Government Organisations. A summary of Archbishop Denis Hart’s statement to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry can be read at the Facing the Truth website. Read the Archbishop’s Summary Statement here.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

ABC
Updated May 30, 2013

The Catholic Church has released the names of 29 Melbourne priests who it acknowledges are guilty of sexually abusing children.

Last week the Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart told Victoria’s child abuse inquiry the church had paid compensation to the victims of 59 priests who had worked in the archdiocese.

The church revealed the names of 29 of those priests on Thursday, including repeat offenders Desmond Gannon and Michael Glennon.

However, it says it will not name the remaining 30 priests because several were dead when allegations were made and they did not have a chance to respond.

The church is also withholding the names of priests who were not charged after police investigations.

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WASHINGTON
KHQ

[with video]

By Alex Rozier, KHQ Local News Reporter

FROM ALEX ROZIER: I’ve obtained the search warrant showing that the feds are investigating Gonzaga Jesuit Priest Rev. Gary Uhlenkott for connection to child porn. Rev. Uhlenkott has been a priest for more than 25 years, but the warrant shows child porn purchases over a three year span. Rev. Uhlenkott’s purchases, according to the warrant, totaled more than $1600.

The Feds raided his apartment at Gonzaga and his office located in the building where he teaches music. According to the warrant Rev. Uhlenkott purchased “at least 29 separate orders of at least 62 items” containing child porn.

Gonzaga University officials said in a statement “we are deeply concerned to learn of the contents of the search warrant.”

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Dan Cox

A police whistleblower says news the New South Wales Government is reviewing his barrister’s funding undermines the inquiry he sparked into child sexual abuse within the Hunter Valley’s Catholic Church.

The Special Commission is underway in Newcastle looking into Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox’s claims that he was told to stop investigating allegations of abuse by two priests.

The second part of the inquiry is set to start late next month.

Peter Fox says his barrister Mark Cohen has received an email from the Attorney General’s department requesting a meeting next week about his funding.

To be saying at this late stage…you may even have to represent yourself…undermines the entire inquiry itself.

“We’re probably only receiving funding that is minute compared to other Government departments that are represented, such as the NSW Police,” he said.

“To throw an additional headache at us, halfway through this inquiry when we’re about to launch into what I consider the more important aspect – that is the church’s involvement in these matters – rings really big alarm bells for me as to what is going on within the ranks of the Government and the Attorney General’s department.”

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CANADA
Victoria News

By Kyle Slavin – Victoria News

The former Saanich priest who was found guilty earlier this year of touching a young person for a sexual purpose will learn his fate in July.

A date for Phil Jacobs’ final court appearance was set Wednesday. He will appear in B.C. Supreme Court in Victoria for sentencing on July 19.

Justice Miriam Gropper handed down her guilty verdict on Feb. 25.

The guilty charge stems from a witness testimony regarding tutoring sessions at Jacobs’ house on the grounds of St. Joseph the Worker Parish on Burnside Road West. The witness said he ended up in a position of laying on the couch with his legs over Jacobs’ lap.

During testimony in December, the young man told the court that Jacobs’ right hand would slide up and down the witness’s left thigh over his pants – “he went from my knee to my groin back and forth … the back of his hand touched my genitals.”

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AUSTRALIA
Change.org

Petition by
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson

Sexual abuse within the Catholic Church has been nothing short of an epidemic of catastrophic proportions. The devastation of victims, the ruination of priests and religious, the damage to a major world religion and its faithful are horrendous and incalculable.

Australian Bishops – Geoffrey Robinson, Bill Morris and Pat Power call on the new Pope to seize the opportunity of his appointment to not only sweep the Church clean but to put His /God’s house in order for all time.

ROYAL COMMISSION WILL NOT PREVENT SEXUAL ABUSE FROM HAPPENING – FOR GOOD.

Bishop Robinson identifies three major tasks to be performed in eradicating sexual abuse from the Church: identifying and removing all offenders; reaching out to, and assisting, all victims and survivors; and identifying and overcoming the causes of both abuse and the poor response to abuse by the Church’s hierarchy. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is investigating the first two of these tasks however it does not have the scope or power to make the changes necessary to ensure that systemic sexual abuse NEVER happens again in the Catholic Church.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Wirral Globe

An unconventional Wirral vicar known for his facial piercings has been arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

Reverend Ian Hughes, 45, was quizzed by police as word of his arrest spread through his parish in Wallasey.

The Church of England confirmed Rev Hughes was Priest-in-Charge of St Paul’s in Seacombe and St Luke’s in Poulton, which closed last year.

The congregation moved into the nearby community rooms at Park Primary School on Love Lane and Rev Hughes held service there each Sunday.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Liverpool Echo

A vicar was suspended from his duties in a Merseyside parish after being arrested in a child porn probe.

Reverend Ian Hughes was questioned by police after being arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

The Church of England confirmed Rev Hughes was suspended as soon as they were made aware of his arrest.

Known for his facial piercings, Rev Hughes was Priest-in-Charge of Wirral parishes Poulton and Seacombe.

He is thought to have left his home in Brougham Road since his arrest last week, although a dog – thought to be his pet husky – could be heard at the property last night.

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MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

By Richard Chin
rchin@pioneerpress.com
Posted: 05/29/2013

A 51-year-old Twin Cities man alleges that he was sexually abused nearly 40 years ago by a priest who had a pattern of molesting children, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Ramsey County District Court.

The lawsuit, which also named the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona as defendants, accuses former priest Thomas Adamson of sexual battery and accuses the archdiocese and diocese of being a public nuisance for refusing to release the names of 46 “credibly accused child-molesting priests.”

“Our kids remain at great peril because we do not know who these offenders are and they do,” said Jeff Anderson, attorney for the plaintiff in the lawsuit identified only as “Doe 1.”

The lawsuit seeks a court order to require the archdiocese and diocese to release names of the accused priests “so kids in our community and across Minnesota can be better protected,” Anderson said at a news conference Wednesday.

According to Anderson, the lawsuit was the first filed in Minnesota under a law approved this year by the Legislature and signed last week by Gov. Mark Dayton that lifts a six-year civil statute of limitations for victims of childhood sexual abuse.

The lawsuit alleges that Adamson, while working at St. Thomas Aquinas parish in St. Paul Park, “engaged in unpermitted sexual contact” in 1976 and 1977 with Doe 1, who was a teenage altar boy.

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MINNESOTA
Winona Daily News

[the lawsuit]

By Jerome Christenson | jchristenson@winonadailynews.com

A suit seeking at least $50,000 in damages and release of a list of priests “credibly accused” of molesting children was filed Wednesday against the Diocese of Winona, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and Thomas Adamson, a former priest in both.

The suit, filed in Ramsey County District Court, was brought on behalf of a 51-year-old anonymous plaintiff. The plaintiff claims that between 1976 and 1977 “Adamson engaged in unpermitted sexual contact” with the plaintiff while he was assigned to St. Thomas Aquinas parish in St. Paul Park.

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Jeff Anderson, announced the suit at a news conference Wednesday in St. Paul, where he said the suit seeks to rectify “the repeated abuse and sordid saga of cover-up by both dioceses of the abuse by Thomas Adamson.”

“The suit seeks something much more than accountability and a day in court,” he said in a recording of the conference posted online, adding that it hopes to require the diocese and archdiocese to “come clean and come forth with the lists of credibly accused offenders that they have and continue to hold secret.”

The Diocese of Winona declined to comment Wednesday but released a three-paragraph statement that said that it “is committed to the protection of children and the safe environment of our parishes and schools,” and that it “works vigorously and has taken extraordinary measures to ensure that all of the schools, parishes and programs administered in the Diocese” adhere to the Church’s Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Police are interviewing one of Australia’s worst paedophile priests over new abuse allegations.

Former Victorian Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale is eligible for parole from late next month after serving a long prison sentence for abusing 30 boys between 1961 and 1987.

Police interviewed the 79-year-old on Thursday afternoon over historical child sex abuse matters allegedly committed in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was working as a Catholic priest.

They were given permission to conduct the interview by a magistrate.

No further charges have been laid at this time, police said.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

[with video]

GENEVIEVE GANNON, ANTHONY DOWSLEY From: Herald Sun May 30, 2013

ONE of Australia’s worst paedophile priests has been interviewed by police over new abuse claims.

Former Victorian Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale, who is eligible for parole next month after serving a jail sentence for abusing 30 boys between 1961 and 1987, was interviewed yesterday afternoon in prison.

The allegations relate to historical child sex abuse matters allegedly committed in the 1960s and ’70s, when he was working as a Catholic priest.

A magistrate allowed detectives to conduct the interview.

It comes after the Herald Sun revealed in March Ridsdale could be freed from jail next month.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

BY ANNA MAGUIRE – 30 MAY 2013

Excluding people who suffered clerical child abuse in Magdalene laundries and the community from a State inquiry will create “second-class victims”, it has been claimed.

Victims groups and abuse survivors have appealed to the Executive to hear their “truth” and extend the remit of the inquiry into historical institutional abuse.

In a research paper published yesterday, Amnesty International said a State inquiry into historical institutional abuse in Northern Ireland ignores people who were “molested in churches, church halls, private homes and other locations outside children’s institutions”.

It also does not take into account women who suffered abuse at the hands of religious orders in Magdalene laundry-type institutions.

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IRELAND
Women’s e-News

By Claire Mc Cormack
WeNews correspondent
Thursday, May 30, 2013

When I interviewed two Irish nuns in February it was the first time any member of religious orders that ran the abusive Magdalene Laundries spoke publically. Yet, months later, reconciliation with victims appears to be far off.

DUBLIN (WOMENSENEWS)– The sit-down interview took place over two nights, behind the walls of the convent where they both live.

On the first night, Sister B opened the gates and directed me to her apartment where Sister A was waiting. I didn’t meet any other members of their religious order as I walked through the convent.

As I positioned my Dictaphone for my story for The God Slot, a program on Ireland’s National Public Service Broadcaster, RTÉ Radio 1, the nuns looked at the recording equipment with suspicion. But they didn’t back out.

It was Feb. 11, almost a week after the publication of the McAleese Report, a damning publication linking the Irish State with the incarceration of over 2,500 women between 1922 and 1996 and failing to supervise their care. In reality this number is likely to be much higher but many records did not survive.

I was there so that Irish nuns, for the first time, could comment on a long-simmering scandal over subject matter that has drawn high-profile attention, including the 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters.

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MINNESOTA
KAAL

A civil lawsuit filed Wednesday by a man who claims he was sexually abused by priest nearly 40 years ago is the first to be brought since the Minnesota Legislature loosened the statute of limitations on such crimes, attorneys for the accuser said.

The lawsuit was filed in Ramsey County court on behalf of the 51-year-old Twin Cities man, identified only as “Doe 1,” and seeks at least $50,000 in damages.

The lawsuit, which also named the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona as defendants, accuses former priest Thomas Adamson of sexual battery and accuses the archdiocese and diocese of being a public nuisance for refusing to release the names of 46 “credibly accused child molesting priests.”

“Our kids remain at great peril because we do not know who these offenders are, and they do,” said Jeff Anderson, St. Paul lawyer for the plaintiff.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

ABC
May 30, 2013

Victorian detectives have applied to question convicted paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale about more allegations of child sexual abuse.

The 79-year-old is serving a prison sentence for abusing children between the 1960s and 1980s, but he will soon be eligible for parole.

They want to interview Ridsdale about allegations of abuse in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Catholic Church has decided not to publicly release the full list of Melbourne priests it acknowledges have sexually abused children.

Last week the Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart told Victoria’s child abuse inquiry the church had paid compensation to the victims of 59 priests who had worked in the archdiocese.

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MINNESOTA
Fox 9

[with video]

by Tom Lyden

ST. PAUL, Minn. (KMSP) –
Minnesota may be on the verge of a big game change when it comes to lawsuits brought forward by those who were sexually abused as children thanks to a recent exemption to the statute of limitations.

“Give this kid and his family a trial,” urged attorney Jeff Anderson.

From his ornate office in St. Paul, Anderson has been taking on the nation’s most-respected institutions over allegations of sexual abuse of children. On Tuesday, he was focused on the Boy Scouts of America.

Anderson is currently trying to convince a judge that the Boy Scouts should be held civilly liable for Peter Stibal, who is serving 14 years in prison for molesting boys. Anderson discovered the organization even kept a file on Stibal and 1,400 other scout leaders — the so-called “perversion files.”

“They clearly had red flags that Stibal was an offender before he abused this child,” Anderson said.

On Wednesday, Anderson will take on the Catholic Church yet again, including Father Thomas Adamson. The archdiocese admits the priest abused children, but many of the cases were outside the statute of limitations — until last Friday, that is.

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