ABUSE TRACKER

SCOTLAND
Scottish Sunday Express

By PAUL GILBRIDE

PAEDOPHILES will “face the full force of the law” promised education secretary Angela Constance yesterday as she unveiled a landmark probe into historic child sex abuse.

Ms Constance told MSPs the statutory public inquiry would have the powers to force witnesses to give evidence.

She said abusers would be brought to justice where evidence of crimes was uncovered. The long-awaited move follows a string of scandals and claims of an Establishment paedophile ring.

Abuse in the Catholic Church and in children’s homes in Scotland is also likely to be investigated. Ms Constance said the full remit of the inquiry and who will lead it would be confirmed by the end of April. Consultation with abuse survivors will take place next month.

She said: “This parliament must always be on the side of victims of abuse. We must have the truth of what happened to them and how those organisations and individuals into whose care the children were entrusted, failed them so catastrophically.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

Two more former ministers accused of sexually abusing children 30 years ago in alleged Westminster paedophile ring

By JENNIFER SMITH FOR MAILONLINE

Another two former ministers have been accused of sexually abusing children in the 1980s as part of an alleged ring of Westminster paedophiles.

Their names were given to police investigating claims politicians routinely raped young boys and girls at a number of addresses in the capital 30 years ago.

MP John Mann, who handed a dossier of information to Scotland Yard, was approached by the two new politicians’ alleged victim last week.

They join 22 others named by Mann to police, six of whom are still in Parliament, the Sunday Times reports.

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SOUTH AFRICA
Business Standard

Press Trust of India

The South African Hindu Maha Sabha has announced plans to regulate Hindu priests in the country amid growing concerns over alleged exploitation and abuse by priests.

The South African Hindu Maha Sabha has asked all temples in the country to submit qualifications of the priests for consideration by its Priests’ Accreditation Committee, which will be accredited by the government-run South African Qualifications Authority.

“We have received reports of people posing as priests and duping people who put their trust and faith in them. It is this type of priest who taints the name of all Hindu priests, especially when their activities are highlighted in the media and even brought to court sometimes,” Sabha President Ashwin Trikamjee said.

He said the committee was established after receiving complaints of priests conducting rituals with naive devotees in questionable ways, charging exorbitant fees for ceremonies.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Observer

Observer editorial

On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis, “a pope for the poor”, the first Jesuit elected to the papacy, returned to what has become a recurring theme of his first two years in office – the venality of power and extreme wealth and the lessons wrenched from poverty. The light in the sky at the birth of Christ, he said in his address, was not seen by “the arrogant, the proud, by those who made laws according to their own personal measures”, but by “the unassuming”.

Some of the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Holy See, whom earlier in the week had been the recipients of the pope’s blistering attack on the 15 ailments that plague the Vatican, must, again, have felt the sting of criticism. On Monday, the 78-year-old had railed against the upper echelons of the church for being infected by careerism, backstabbing and hypocrisy. The pope criticised “the terrorism of gossip” that could “kill the reputation of our colleagues and brothers in cold blood ”. Officials, he said, suffered from “spiritual Alzheimer’s”, they were rivals and boastful, they sought worldly profit and had become hardened to others. His reception was frosty.

Pope Francis, born in Argentina of Italian heritage, is a man engaged with the world. He recently achieved a major coup, brokering the restoration of relations between the US and Cuba. At Davos, he chided the rich for neglecting the “frail, weak and vulnerable”. A neoliberal he isn’t. In Evangelii Gaudiium (The Joy of the Gospel), his first major work after he became pope, the pontiff wrote: “The worship of the ancient golden calf… has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy.”

On the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, 70 miles from the Tunisian coast, he demanded more action to save African refugees drowning in the seas in their quest for a better life. “In this globalised world,” he said, “we have fallen into globalised indifference.” …

The Vatican still has its scandals, most notably the incalculable hurt caused to tens of thousands by helping to cover up decades of child sexual abuse, but Pope Francis appears to be trying to bring transparency and accountability. He speaks on behalf of the poor but how much is he prepared to challenge the power of those, including the church, with an excess of influence and wealth?

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PHILIPPINES
Inquirer

Editorial

Sunday, December 28th, 2014

Pope Francis continues to shock and astound. The first Latin American pontiff, who has shaken up the Vatican and the worldwide Catholic congregation with the refreshingly casual, forthright approach he has brought to his centuries-old office, made headlines anew this week with a broadside that must have left many in his intended audience squirming in their chasubles.

The recipients of his strong words were not the usual bête noires of the Church he leads—the gays, divorcees, practitioners of contraception, peoples of other faiths and moral relativists of the world—but men closer to his backyard. His colleagues, in fact, in the Vatican, the august cardinals who run the Roman Curia, the governing body of the Catholic Church. To them, Pope Francis spoke not in the pious felicitations that had heretofore characterized the traditional pre-Christmas meeting between the Vatican bureaucrats and the Pope, but in words that clearly intended to cut through the banalities to get to the point.

In a stinging rundown of “15 diseases” that he said were eating away at the top hierarchy of the Church, the outspoken Pope outdid himself with a speech that brimmed with strikingly vivid, unapologetically straightforward language. The Curia—long the subject of scrutiny for its widely reported penchant for intrigue, infighting and disreputable activities, from the careerism of its officials to the irregularities attending its finances—was in danger of bringing the Church down not only with its internal rot, but also by its inability to recognize its errors, he warned. “A Curia that does not practice self-criticism, does not keep up to date, does not try to better itself, is an infirm body.”

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IRELAND
The Corkman

PUBLISHED 28/12/2014

A 71-year-old retired missionary priest from North Cork has been jailed for three years for sexually abusing two boys at a Co Cork boarding school where he taught in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Tadhg O Dalaigh, a native of Boherbue but with an address at Woodview, Mount Merrion Avenue, Dublin, pleaded guilty earlier this year to five counts of abusing one of the boys at Colaiste an Chroi Naofa in Carrignavar in 1982 and 1983

And in June, O Dalaigh, a member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, was convicted by a unanimous verdict of a jury following a two day trial at Cork Circuit Criminal Court of sexually assaulting a second boy at the school in 1979.

Last week, Judge Donagh McDonagh sentenced O Dalaigh to five years in jail with two years suspended for the abuse of the boy whose complaint went to trial while he imposed a three year concurrent sentence for the abuse of the other boy to which O’Dalaigh pleaded guilty.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Sunday Times

Peter Stanford Published: 28 December 2014

HERE is a lesson on keeping faith with voters for today’s politicians: when Pope Francis was elected by his fellow cardinals 21 months ago, they gave him a mandate to overhaul the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy that many feared had become more powerful than the pontiff.

The subject had come up time and again in the “general congregations”, the gatherings of cardinals before the vote to choose a new pope in 2013. Francis, they decided, was the man best placed to deliver.

Once in office, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, an outsider who had never worked in the curia, has been as good as his word and his reforms have been progressing purposefully since he took up residence in the Vatican.

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MALTA
Times of Malta

Sunday, December 28, 2014, 00:01 by Fr Joe Borg

The following was the reaction of Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, the former Vatican governor and foreign minister, to the Pope’s address to the Roman Curia earlier on last week, which quite naturally made the headlines: “To be honest, nothing like this has ever happened before.”

It is customary for the Pope to meet the officials of the Roman Curia at this time of year to exchange Christmas greetings. During this meeting the Pope addresses the gathered cardinals, bishops and monsignors about the state of the world, the main events and projections of the pontificate. Instead Francis spoke about the Curia, and, to boot, about the “illnesses we encounter most frequently in our life in the Curia”.

He listed 15 different illnesses or diseases. The news bulletin released by the Vatican Information Services minced no words when titling the report: “Francis: a Curia that is outdated, sclerotic or indifferent to others is an ailing body.”

The Pope, quite naturally, departed from tradition for a reason. He is fully conscious of two things: structural change without personal conversion leads to a cul-de-sac and his plan to radically reform the Roman Curia – a reform mandated by the cardinals during their pre-papal election meetings – is opposed by many high officials within the same Curia. Some express their dissent underhandedly while others, as is their right, do it publicly. Cardinal Leo Burke, who before his recent re-assignment was the prefect of the Church’s highest court, had said that there is a strong sense among many that the Church under Pope Francis “is like a ship without a rudder”.

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SOUTH CAROLINA
Greenville News

Lyn Riddle, lnriddle@greenvillenews.com December 27, 2014

Cathy Harris quickly read through the report criticizing Bob Jones University leaders for the way they handled reports of sexual assault and abuse.

Now she’s making her way through it again, deliberately this time, trying to sort it all out, letting herself feel all the emotions she tries hard to hold back.

Harris is one of the survivors of sexual assault who spoke with investigators from GRACE, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, which was paid by Bob Jones University to look into the school’s counseling practices.

GRACE’s two-year investigation found that counseling services were harmful, some students were dissuaded from making police reports, and sermons and classroom lectures made victims feel as if they had brought the abuse on themselves by what they wore or how they acted.

The report singled out Bob Jones III, the chancellor and former president, and Jim Berg, the former dean of students who counseled between 200 and 300 sexual abuse victims in 30 years. GRACE recommended personnel action against Jones and suggested that Berg not be allowed to counsel students, teach counseling and that his books on counseling be removed from the bookstore and online.

Jones and Berg could not be reached for comment.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Sun Chronicle

Posted: Sunday, December 28, 2014

BY DAVID LINTON SUN CHRONICLE STAFF

A former assistant pastor of an Attleboro church is now in prison and a former music teacher and guidance counselor in North Attleboro has a rape indictment pending against him in two shocking sex abuse cases this past year.

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Nichols, 48, was a trusted man of the cloth at Grace Baptist Church and a well-respected principal of Grace Baptist Christian Academy until his arrest Jan. 13 for molesting one of his seventh-grade female students.

He confessed to Pastor Jeff Bailey, who urged him to immediately turn himself in, and then admitted to his crimes when questioned by police. Nichols repeatedly indecently touched the girl, beginning in 2008 when she was only 13. He also made sexual comments to her, exposed himself to her and asked her to expose herself to him, prosecutors said after his arrest.

On Nov. 6, Nichols, a married father of three children whose wife was also a teacher at the school, was sentenced in Fall River Superior Court to a maximum 5-year prison term after pleading guilty.

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UNITED STATES
PopeCrimes& Vatican Evils.

Paris Arrow

December 25, 2014 Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all our friends and readers

Christmas Vatican Circus: Master of Deceits – Pope Francis embodies the 15 ailments – plus more secret Jesuit illnesses

In Christmas 2010, we wrote “The Devil’s Bowels smell like roses in the Vatican” http://jp2army.blogspot.ca/2010/12/devils-bowels-smell-like-roses-in.html . Last month we wrote (unknowingly, St. Michael inspired it to be a prelude to the 15 ailments speech), “Pope Francis points two finger at bishops and three fingers at himself when he says, ‘Bishops must not be vain careerists after power, honor’” http://pope-francis-con-christ.blogspot.ca/2014/11/pope-francis-points-two-finger-at.html

The Jesuit Master of Deceits Pope Francis is being praised by Vatican Pied Pipers worldwide for delivering his (hypocritical) scathing speech to his staff at the Vatican Curia – listing their 15 ailments – which are really ultimately about him as the first Jesuit Pope – especially the Vatican Mammon Beast’s sickness of “accumulating wealth and leading double lives which [is] existential schizophrenia.”

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UNITED STATES
Christian Today

Ruth Gledhill 28 December 2014

Mark Driscoll, former lead pastor of soon-to-be-defunct Mars Hill Church, has launched a new website, MarkDriscoll.org.

It contains Scripture reflections, writing and other blog posts going back to last summer and earlier.

In a Christmas welcome message on the site, an author described as markdriscoll.org writes of Driscoll in the third person. He says: “This website was built in response to requests from people wanting access to Pastor Mark Driscoll’s past and future Bible teaching. This is the only official resource from Pastor Mark Driscoll, and will soon be the exclusive home for content from Pastor Mark and his family.

“Our prayer is that these resources will help non-Christians meet Jesus and help Christians become more like Jesus – because as Pastor Mark says, ‘It’s all about Jesus!’

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GUAM
KUAM

by Jolene Toves

Guam – The Concerned Catholics of Guam organization will be holding a press conference on Monday.

The group will be issuing a response to Archbishop Anthony Apuron’s actions against Deacon Steve Martinez.

Martinez received a letter from the archbishop threatening censure until January 19th as well as accusing him of exciting hatred, inciting animosities against an ordinary and joining a group which is plotting against the church. In the letter Martinez was given the ultimatum to discontinue his involvement with the Concerned Catholics of Guam or face censure. The CCOG was formed to investigate all the recent controversies that have erupted within the local Catholic Church.

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OHIO
Star Beacon

Posted: Saturday, December 27, 2014 12:00 am
By DAVE DELUCA / ddeluca@starbeacon.com

GENEVA — Charges against a priest accused of assault and disorderly conduct against have been dropped.

Western County Court Judge David A. Schroeder ruled the charges against Fr. Robert M. Lanterman, pastor of Assumption Church be dismissed on Monday.

Lanterman was charged with one count of misdemeanor assault and one count of misdemeanor disorderly conduct on Sept. 19. The complainant in the case said Lanterman pushed and grabbed her and subjected her to verbal abuse in church after mass that day.

At a pretrial hearing on Dec. 10, the city of Geneva moved to dismiss the case. City Solicitor Lauren Gardner stated on the record that the city could not prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt, and therefore moved the court for dismissal.

The court allowed Valerie Ferrante, identified as the victim of the alleged assault, to address the court. She referred to the incident, stating she was “physically aggressed” by Lanterman, who she said was also verbally hostile toward her.

During her statement she also recited several sections of the rules of the Youngstown Diocese pertaining to child protection and standings of ministerial behavior. Lanterman’s attorney, William Bobulksy, objected and the court sustained the objection on the basis that church rules were irrelevant to this criminal proceeding.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Times

Francis Elliott Political Editor
December 23 2014

Theresa May should lift secrecy restrictions to encourage former police officers to provide information relating to allegations that paedophile rings operated in Westminster, a campaigning MP said yesterday.

John Mann said that more informants had come forward since he had handed a dossier naming 22 MPs and former MPs to detectives investigating allegations of historic child abuse.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Times

Richard Ford Home Correspondent
December 24 2014

A group of survivors of child abuse are pressing for the most senior female judge in England and Wales to chair the inquiry into historic sexual abuse.

The Home Office is trawling through more than 100 names put forward to be Theresa May’s third choice to chair the investigation. The home secretary has promised to find a way of involving survivors in her choice.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Los Angeles Times

By CHRISTINA BOYLE

The allegations about so-called VIP pedophiles involve prestigious London addresses, some of the highest-ranking members of Britain’s establishment and the suspected abuse of young boys in the 1970s and 1980s, including three who were slain.

Six members of Parliament have been implicated in the scandal, which threatens to expose a powerful political elite who may have raped and exploited juveniles for more than a decade and put their self-interests ahead of the protection of children.

John Mann, a member of Parliament, has presented Scotland Yard with a dossier that he said names 22 high-profile figures, including three serving in the House of Commons and three members of the House of Lords, who are believed to have been involved in a pedophile ring. There are no allegations that the six members of Parliament were involved in incidents in which children died.

The dossier includes the names of 14 Conservative politicians, five Labor politicians and three from other parties, Mann told reporters.

He also alleges that up to five pedophile rings were operational at the same time during the 1970s and 1980s, and that two whistle-blowers who knew about nefarious activities by members of Parliament met suspicious deaths.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Huffington Post

By Jack Sommers

A campaigning MP has called for the reinvestigation of the suspicious deaths more than 20 years ago of two whistleblowers who he believes had significant information relating to organised child abuse by a group with alleged links to Westminster.

Labour’s John Mann made the comments after he handed Scotland Yard a dossier that includes allegations about the involvement of 22 politicians – some of them apparently still serving – in paedophile rings.

He told Sky News: “What I want to see is both those suspicious deaths reinvestigated because what links them together was both were people who in essence were blowing the whistle on child abuse.”

One was council official Bulic Forsythe, whose body was found in a burning flat in 1993, and the other an unnamed Lambeth caretaker who died in a suspected arson attack a couple of years earlier.

The two men’s deaths were “undoubtedly linked to child abuse and potentially linked into the wider scandal”, Mr Mann added.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Lexology

Clyde & Co LLP
Judith Martin and Mary Coyles

United Kingdom
December 22 2014

Amidst wider claims of failings within Westminster and the Criminal Justice system, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, states that the new wider panel inquiry into historic child abuse will examine churches, the BBC and political parties.

The government is now facing increasing pressure about the viability of the inquiry in its current form. There is pressure for the inquiry to be disbanded and replaced with a more powerful body. Inevitably if this occurs there will be further delays and it remains to be seen what format the inquiry will ultimately take. The inquiry has previously faced controversy having already come under pressure and scrutiny with criticisms about potential conflicts of interest and that it is not fit for purpose. Fiona Wolfe, Lord Mayor of London, resigned in October amidst concerns and issues with her past links to Lord Brittan followed by the resignation of Baroness Butler-Sloss in July, owing to her late brother’s role as Attorney General during one of the relevant periods. It is fair to say that whoever is finally appointed as the Chair of the inquiry will have a challenging task ahead.

Despite the current challenges and controversy the Home Secretary appears to remain steadfast in her commitment to the inquiry and has confirmed the government’s willingness to consider, if necessary, an upgrade to a full public inquiry. She has also suggested the possibility of granting the inquiry statutory status at some point in the future. The Home Secretary reiterates that the “confidence of survivors is paramount.”

In the wake of the recent widespread, highly publicised and investigated activities of celebrities, MPs and priests it is likely that the government’s inquiry will be both long running and politically sensitive. The government has indicated that is unlikely that the inquiry will be completed before the next general election.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Liverpool Echo

Dec 27, 2014 By Helen Davies

A former Catholic school pupil who says he was sexually abused by a priest from Merseyside has fresh hope the truth will finally be exposed.

Home Secretary Theresa May revealed a troubled inquiry into child sexual abuse across the UK could be given extra powers, including the ability to force witnesses to give evidence.

The Sunday ECHO told earlier this year of how both a priest at the centre of a scandal at Mirfield junior seminary in Yorkshire and a former student there – one of those who made the allegations – came from Merseyside.

A group of 11 men settled out of court with the Verona Fathers, the Catholic order which ran the college, for payments totalling £120,000.

The order said the payouts are not an admission of liability but were made on a commercial basis following legal advice.

Gerry McLaughlin, who says he was abused by the late Father John Pinkman from Maghull, and a man from Liverpool who claims he was abused by another priest, have this week spoken of their optimism that tougher inquiry powers backed by Theresa May will mean former priests from the college could be made to appear before the Home Affairs Select Committee.

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CANADA
Durham Region

By Jacques Gallant

DURHAM — An Oshawa judge’s decision to sentence a man to house arrest for Internet child luring rather than jail because police publicly revealed his HIV status is the latest example of judges finding creative ways to manoeuvre around mandatory minimum sentences.

Former youth pastor Kris Gowdy was given two years less one day house arrest and three years probation last week by Ontario Court Justice Michael Block rather than the mandatory minimum sentence of one year in jail. Mr. Block found Durham Regional Police violated Mr. Gowdy’s constitutional rights when they indicated in a news release shortly after his arrest in August 2012 that he was HIV-positive.

The story of the “HIV-positive ex-youth pastor” made headlines around the world, causing significant emotional trauma to Gowdy, Mr. Block wrote in his decision.

“Mr. Gowdy had a right to make his own choices concerning the disclosure of his HIV status,” he wrote. “No doubt he would have chosen his own method and different timing if he ever determined to inform those near to him. Absent evidence of serious risk of transmission and rigorous compliance with statute, no one had the authority to make that decision for him.”

Avoiding mandatory jail time due to Charter of Rights and Freedoms violations first received widespread attention last month, when the approach was used by Toronto Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer.

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UNITED STATES
Legal Examiner

Posted by Mike Bryant
December 27, 2014

At times one of the defenses we will see in abuse cases is the confidentiality of penance, which is that things were said to other members of the clergy, but they are protected because they were as part of the sacrament of penance. There would be no duty of disclosure even under the strictest of first reporting laws. There would be no use of this information to show notice of the dangers that would have prevented future abuse. Not even a tip to those in present danger that they need to stay away.

The Huffington Post recently reported that Archbishop of York John Sentamu, Church of England’s No. 2 official ,

said that the Church of England must break the confidentiality of confession in cases where people disclosed the abuse of children. “If someone tells you a child has been abused, the confession doesn’t seem to me a cloak for hiding that business. How can you hear a confession about somebody abusing a child and the matter must be sealed up and you mustn’t talk about it?”

This is a intriguing suggestion and I can hear the immediate response that it would serve as a chilling of people confessing. It is an interesting comparison of the need to confess and find salvation vs. the confessed acts which involve the innocence of children. The statements followed an investigation into Anglican priest Robert Waddington as a serial sexual abuser of children in England and Australia for more than 50 years. Earlier this year, Anglicans in Australia backed a historic change that breaks the convention that the confidentiality of what a man or woman tells a priest during confession is inviolable.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

* Yes, probably not. Pope Francis is surely a remarkable person and is clearly giving it his best in his 79th year. Yet by now he must know what the ex-Pope’s quitting last year signified. Popes now cannot save BOTH the Catholic Church and the Vatican for the reasons discussed below. Francis appears to have chosen mainly to protect the Catholic hierarchy, a losing proposition, and likely has as a result set the stage for an accelerated division into various Church factions. The Catholic Church may survive as a “catch all label” for splintered groups, but its hierarchy is playing out its final act from many indications.

* This future outcome may seem too pessimistic for a purported “unchangeable 2,000 year old institution”. But is it? For reasons discussed below, it is more likely than not.

* The Catholic Church has changed and really changed a lot over two millennia, often due to external pressures. For example, in the 19th Century, Pope Pius IX and his Vatican allies were urged by many, including other rulers, to modernize and reform his declining medieval Papal States kingdom. The pope, in effect, imprudently refused to do so, and instead concentrated on being “declared infallible” by many intimidated bishops. He then quickly militarily lost to Italian troops (including many Catholic troops) a large portion of Italy that popes for centuries had ruled as unaccountable absolute monarchs. So too, a corrupt and imprudent Vatican refused to take Martin Luther’s call for needed reforms sufficiently seriously and lost a major part of the European Catholic Church mainly as a consequence. The Vatican can, does and will err, claims of infallibility notwithstanding!

* Pope Francis is quite old and yet is working non-stop. He appears, unfortunately, to be surrounded by some men who seem to be oblivious to the Vatican’s precarious position. Francis faces at least three major scandals involving priest child abuse, sexually repressive teachings and officials’ financial corruption, while his hierarchy debate arcane matters like “graduality” and most of the media focus on counting papal “tweets”.

* The scandal that has changed everything for the previously “untouchable” Vatican is the child abuse scandal. The pope clearly has not done nearly enough here. And his efforts to change the sexually repressive teachings are facing strong resistance from conservative Cardinals as discussed below. He is almost out of time. While the pope has made a start, in Rome at least, on curtailing his hierarchy’s financial corruption, he still has a long way to go. In New York, for example, even prominent conservative Catholics are complaining about Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s very expensive renovation of his NY mansion as discussed below.

* Pope Francis’ response to date on the most sensational scandal, the abuse cover up, seems to be mostly more of the same half measures used by his failed predecessors. Bishops are still not required under Church rules generally to report child abuse claims to the police, for example, and accused clerics are investigated secretively by other clerics mainly. The respected and informed Financial Times recently has even labeled the Vatican as “criminally slow” on curtailing child abuse and has also viewed the initial Synod on the Family as having been a “victory for conservatives” ! {My emphasis}

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MICHIGAN
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Saturday, December 27

Statement by Melanie Jula Sakoda of Moraga, California, Orthodox Director of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (925-708-6175, melanie.sakoda@gmail.com )

A former Orthodox subdeacon was recently sentenced to prison on one count of “Child Sexually Abusive Commercial Activity.” We are very grateful that Robert Aaron Mitchell will be kept away from children, at least for a while, and applaud all who contributed to this result.

[Third Judicial Court of Michigan]

Mitchell had an earlier conviction for child abduction in Illinois. Despite this 1998 conviction, he was made a Subdeacon by Archbishop Nathaniel Popp on March 2, 2003. According to Popp, Mitchell was stripped of the title of subdeacon more than 10 years later, on November 20, 2013, after allegations of sexual misconduct were substantiated by the Office for Review of Sexual Misconduct Allegations of the Orthodox Church in America.

[SNAP]

Dangerous predators like Mitchell can have many, many victims. We urge Orthodox officials to use all the resources at their disposal to reach out to those who may have been harmed by the former subdeacon. Anyone who either experienced, witnessed or suspected abuse by Mitchell should contact law enforcement, get help and begin healing.

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GUAM
Jungle Watch

Dear Most Reverend Archbishop Savio HON Tai-Fai, Your Excellency Archbishop Martin Krebs, and Reverend Father Nowak:

The people of Guam were made aware of your upcoming visit to our island (January 4- 10) by Archbishop Apuron’s news release of December 18, 2014.

While we are sure that you would have preferred a quieter context for your visit, now that your arrival is a matter of very public attention and in fact proudly (but falsely) trumpeted as a response to an invitation from Archbishop Apuron, please permit me to publicly share and document just a few of the matters at the heart of the ongoing and crippling division in the Archdiocese of Agana.

To assist you in your investigation (though Archbishop Apuron wants us to think you are just dropping by for coffee), I will attempt over the next few days to address and document as many of the following tragic items as possible. Most of these are already thoroughly documented throughout this blog but I will gather them together for easier reference.

Thank you for your attention to the war that rages in this archdiocese. We pray you will see what is at the root of it…or rather, WHO is at the root of it.

Here are a few of the items I intend to document for you:

1. The illegitimate removal of Fr. Paul Gofigan as pastor of Santa Barbara parish.
2. The defamation of Joseph Lastimoza and the subsequent persecution of his family for implying that he was guilty of a crime that he did not commit when labeling him a “danger to children”.
3. The slander and calumny of Fr. Paul Gofigan and Joseph Lastimoza by Archbishop Apuron by his implying to a group of clergy that Fr. Paul and Mr. Lastimoza were engaged in a homosexual relationship.
4. The public rejection of a magisterial instruction issued by the Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacrament as regards the manner in which the neocatechumenals distribute Holy Communion.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Joe Humphreys

Sat, Dec 27, 2014

TK Whitaker explored the possibility of getting the Holy See to invest in Ireland in the mid-1960s but was informed the Vatican was “disinclined” to put money into poor countries.

A newly released file documenting the Department of Foreign Affairs’ dealings with the Vatican bank includes a confidential letter in 1965 from Mr Whitaker, then secretary of the Department of Finance, seeking information on whether the Holy See would “consider investments in Irish government securities or in property development here. If this were so, it would provide considerable relief for us at the present time when we are short of capital,” he wrote.

It was agreed the Irish ambassador to the Vatican, Tom Commins, would make “some very discreet soundings”.

In a memo labelled “highly confidential”, Mr Commins said he had spoken to a “highly placed” member of the Vatican court who was also the director of one of Italy’s biggest banks.

Informed by such sources, Mr Commins wrote: “Vatican policy on investment is prompted and inspired, not only primarily, but exclusively, by considerations of (a) profit and (b) security.”

The Holy See’s operations were almost exclusively carried out on the New York, Zurich and Geneva exchanges and were confined to “top ranking” bonds, he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Patrick Logue

Sat, Dec 27, 2014

The list of most-read stories of 2014 on irishtimes.com tells us a little about what our readers like to consume, but it tells us more about media, social media and their global nature.

The list includes a viral story about a singing priest, a breaking-news report on the death of a celebrity, a report about the winner of an art competition, and an article that cut to the heart of a serious social issue of national and international interest. …

The second-most-read story of 2014 on irishtimes.com concerned what happened in at a mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway, where hundreds of children died between 1925 and 1961. The issue of how both lay people and clergy had treated Ireland’s most vulnerable citizens became the subject of a national debate and made headlines around the world.

Rosita Boland’s calm, analytical piece “Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story”, in June, became central to that debate, and it was widely shared during the summer. The article also attracted more than 600 reader comments.

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UNITED STATES
Toledo Blade

Editorial

Pope Francis is popular with millions of Catholics around the world who appreciate his humility, folksy style, and rejection of official splendor. He has fewer fans in the Vatican bureaucracy.

This week, he gathered the Curia — the cardinals, bishops, and priests who run the Vatican’s daily operations — and scolded the surprised and mortified throng.

Outlining 15 problems with the church’s top bureaucracy, Pope Francis accused the princes of the church of being more concerned with accumulating wealth and power than serving God and the ordinary people in the pews. Along with reform of the bureaucracy, he demanded spiritual reform. The stinging rebuke to the men who work directly under him was without historical precedent, some Vatican observers said.

Others speculated that Pope Francis’ fury was informed by the results of a secret investigation ordered by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, of backstabbing and infighting in the Vatican bureaucracy. After Pope Benedict’s butler leaked stolen documents that described the discord in 2012, the pope, now retired, wanted to understand the depths of the tension and corruption that surrounded him.

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ROME
irish Times

Paddy Agnew

When Ireland’s new Ambassador to the Holy See, Emma Madigan, was chatting to Pope Francis in the pontifical library the day she presented her diplomatic credentials last month, the pope at one point told her: “You know, before the conclave last year the bookmakers were quoting me at 25/1, and then look what happened.”

If Francis’s election in 2013 saw the triumph of a 25/1 shot, what price do we put on the rapid turnaround – even U-turnaround – in Irish-Vatican relations now as compared with three years ago? Those were the days when Taoiseach Enda Kenny, rightly in the opinion of many, accused the Holy See of being dominated by a culture of “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism”.

Rather than listen to evidence of clerical sex abuse with “St Benedict’s ear of the heart”, the Holy See had preferred to “parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer”, he said in a celebrated speech to the Dáil in July 2011.

When Madigan met Pope Francis last month there was no mention of those strained relations. A veil has been drawn over that awkward moment. But that is not to say that, from 2015, Irish relations with the Vatican will return to their genuflecting past.

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VATICAN CITY
New Zealand Herald

In 2013 Pope Francis had a lot to celebrate. Not only was he named Time magazine person of the year, but was also awarded the title of Esquire’s best-dressed man.

But the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics had a very eventful 2014 too. Here are nine of the most awesome things the first non-European pope in 1200 years did: …

7) Personally asked for forgiveness for the ‘evil’ of sexually abusive priests
Pope Francis pleaded for forgiveness for the “evil” of priests who sexually abused children, and promised to take an even stronger stand than before against Catholic abuse scandals. Vatican Radio quoted him as saying: “I feel compelled to personally take on all the evil that some priests — quite a few in number, [although] obviously not compared to the number of all priests — to personally ask for forgiveness for the damage they have done for having sexually abused children.”

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CANADA
Toronto Star

By: Jacques Gallant Staff Reporter, Published on Fri Dec 26 2014

An Oshawa judge’s decision to sentence a man to house arrest for Internet child luring rather than jail because police publicly revealed his HIV status is the latest example of judges finding creative ways to manoeuvre around mandatory minimum sentences.

Former youth pastor Kris Gowdy was given two years less one day house arrest and three years probation last week by Ontario Court Justice Michael Block rather than the mandatory minimum sentence of one year in jail. Block found Durham Regional Police violated Gowdy’s constitutional rights when they indicated in a news release shortly after his arrest in August 2012 that he was HIV-positive.

The story of the “HIV-positive ex-youth pastor” made headlines around the world, causing significant emotional trauma to Gowdy, Block wrote in his decision.

“Mr. Gowdy had a right to make his own choices concerning the disclosure of his HIV status,” he wrote. “No doubt he would have chosen his own method and different timing if he ever determined to inform those near to him. Absent evidence of serious risk of transmission and rigorous compliance with statute, no one had the authority to make that decision for him.”

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FLORIDA
WFSU

[with audio]

By SASCHA CORDNER

At least one lawmaker has followed through on an abuse survivor’s vow to make sure legislation was filed to allow young victims to use private recordings in sex abuse cases. It follows a recent Florida Supreme Court ruling that will now allow a man convicted of abusing his stepdaughter to get a new trial, after she taped an incriminating conversation without his consent.

The Case

The case revolves around a girl, who at 16, privately recorded a conversation between herself and her stepfather Richard McDade.

According to the court documents—while he didn’t use sexually explicit language, he “appeared to be asking her to have sex with him.” And, if she didn’t, he’d be “physically sick.” He also indicated that he was doing her a favor by not telling her mother, otherwise the victim would be taken back to Mexico.

And, reading from the brief, sex abuse survivor Lauren Book says there are so many other things wrong with this case, including the fact that McDade was an ice cream truck driver who had ready access to kids.

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UNITED STATES
Bend Bulletin

By Mark Oppenheimer / New York Times News Service
Published Dec 27, 2014

In October, Mark Driscoll, the evangelical pastor and best-selling author, resigned from Mars Hill, his Seattle megachurch. Last month, Mars Hill announced that it was dissolving its network of 13 satellite churches.

In the aftermath of his fall, Driscoll, who was known for his autocratic management style, his quashing of dissent and his unusually frank talk about how Christian wives can please their husbands in bed, had himself to blame. In resigning, Driscoll admitted his failings, citing his “past pride, anger and a domineering spirit.”

But Driscoll cannot take all the credit for his own downfall. For one thing, any faithful Christian would give Satan his due for leading Driscoll astray. Then there is the role played by World, an evangelical Christian newsmagazine that broke one of the most damaging stories about Driscoll. In March, World reported that $210,000 in Mars Hill church funds had gone to a marketing firm that promised to get “Real Marriage,” a book written by Driscoll and his wife, on best-seller lists.

World was not the only outlet to take on Driscoll. Blogger Warren Throckmorton, in particular, persistently chronicled concerns about Mars Hill for the website Patheos. But the story about best-seller lists was also not the first scoop for World, and Driscoll was not the first conservative Christian leader that the magazine had taken on.

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SLOVENIA
STA

Ljubljana, 27 December (STA) – The pre-Christmas address by Pope Francis to cardinals and bishops in the Apostolic Palace shocked even the veterans, as instead of wishing them all the best for Christmas and saying a nice word or two, the Pope uttered one of the most critical speeches of his pontificate, the daily Dnevnik says in a commentary on Saturday.

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UNITED STATES
The Wartburg Watch

“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And that which I can do, by the grace of God, I will do.” ~ Dwight L. Moody (Amy Smith’s favorite quote)

Many of our readers have been abused at the hands of authoritarian religious leaders. Others have been sexually abused by pastors and youth leaders who were supposedly God’s men. The evangelical church, until recently, has been able to cover up abusive behavior in church leadership by imposing some sort of made up spiritual crime. These include: do not speak ill of the church; don’t gossip; leave it up to the elders, etc.

The supposed goal seems to be to protect churches from having their dirty laundry aired before the public. Whoever thought this was a good idea obviously missed the Gospel-the real one. He is the Living Word of the Gospel who came to earth as a baby and grew up to die on the Cross for the sins of mankind. Honest believers know that men and women who profess the faith are still capable of sin against others because they understand why Jesus came.

because they supposedly understand the Gospel, church leaders should be the first to declare that sin has occurred in their midst. They should be the first to go to the police and report child sex abuse. They should be the first to comfort those who have been deeply wounded by abuse perpetrated by church leaders because they get it. They know they sin. Jesus said so. Instead, they hide it “under a bushel,” accuse outsiders of being sinners and hang sparkly lights around their congregation in an foolish attempt to hide the dark corners of sin and pain.

The lowly pew sitters are the object of public church discipline while church leaders are quietly moved aside or continue to embraced by others of the inner circle. Such stories include a seminary leader who divorced his wife and came out of the closet; a pastor who kept a paramour and, after a brief respite, is appointed to lead a ministry; pastors who never apologize to victims, and churches which hide behind lawyers over issues of sex abuse in their churches.

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NEVADA
Las Vegas Sun

By Cy Ryan
Friday, Dec. 26, 2014

CARSON CITY – The Nevada Supreme Court opens hearings in the new year with an appeal by the Catholic Church of a $500,000 judgment involving a priest who sexually molested a 13-year-old Las Vegas boy.

The jury verdict in Clark County in December 2012 is against the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, Wisc. for failing to notify Nevada officials of the past history of abuses by now defrocked priest John Feeney.

The Supreme Court has denied previous pretrial motions by the church and allowed the case to go to trial.

Feeney faced numerous allegations in Green Bay and was placed on an indefinite leave of absence. He ended up in Las Vegas where he served at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church. In the Nevada suit, he is accused of rubbing the genitals of the boy twice in 1984 and 1985. The suit was filed in 2008, 23 years after the incidents.

He was convicted of molesting two boys in Wisconsin in 2004 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released after eight years. But the Green Bay Diocese paid a $700,000 civil judgment.

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ARGENTINA
Radio Salta

El juez de Garantías, Diego Rodríguez Pipino, libró una orden de captura y detención contra el sacerdote italiano Alessandro De Rossi, imputado por el delito de abuso sexual agravado mientras cumplía funciones en la vicaría “María Medianera de todas las gracias” en el barrio Islas Malvinas de la ciudad.

Fuentes extraoficiales sostienen que el cura se encuentra en Roma por lo que la orden de captura internacional se extendió a la Policía Federal, Gendarmería, Cancillería, Policia de Seguridad Aeroportuaria e INTERPOL.

La Vicaria comprende: Bº Islas Malvinas, Bº S.Silvestre, Bº S.Maria, Bº Parque Oeste, Bº S.Isidro, Bº Roberto Romero.

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ARGENTINA
La Gacesta

[The international arrest warrant against priest Alessandro De Rossi shocked those who knew him closely in the Falkland Islands where he was at the vicarage. All interviewed in the neighborhood were surprised he was charged with aggravated sexual abuse. One youth said he never noticed anything unusual.]

El pedido de captura internacional contra el sacerdote Alessandro De Rossi conmocionó a quienes lo conocieron de cerca, en el barrio Islas Malvinas, donde se encuentra la vicaría de la que él se hizo cargo. Jóvenes que asistieron con él a la iglesia, vecinas del barrio y comerciantes de la zona con los que pudo dialogar LA GACETA expresaron, todos, sorpresa y también descreimiento ante la acusación de abuso sexual agravado.

Uno de los jóvenes, que se encontraba en la puerta de la Juegoteca, instalada por el mismo padre antes de partir de Salta, un año atrás, manifestó que jamás notó nada raro. Expresó que a la Juegoteca asistían unos 10 adolescentes, otros 12 jóvenes y varios menores de edad. Destacó, además, que los adolescentes se hacían cargo de cuidar a las criaturas más chicas, de cuatro años.

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VATICAN CITY
Financial Times

When Pope Francis moved out of the papal apartments into a priestly commune upon ascending to the throne of St Peter last year, he Fsaid it was not so much because they were a luxurious affront to his determination to make the Catholic Church once again an advocate for the poor. The papal suite was, he said, like an “inverted funnel”, keeping people whom he regards as the real church out of its aloof institutions.

That comment from the 78-year-old pontiff was an early sign of his determination to make the Church more open, inclusive and accountable. And that ambition was on full display again this week when he scolded members of the Vatican bureaucracy in a harshly worded Christmas greeting that listed “15 ills” weakening their mission — from narcissism to hypocrisy and even “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.

Pope Francis is giving his two-millennia-old institution the biggest shake-up since the Second Vatican Council convened by John XXIII in 1962-65. Vatican II tried to bring the Church into easier alignment with its modern flock, but its flames of reform flickered and died. Decades of papal intolerance ensued, with John Paul II and Benedict XVI enforcing narrow and defensive dogma. But Francis says the Church must now find a “new balance” or collapse “like a house of cards”. In particular, it cannot “insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive measures”.

His attempt to shift debate away from sexual morality might be seen as tactically astute after the avalanche of evidence of priests sexually abusing children in their care — a scandal the Vatican was criminally slow to address. Yet untold millions of Catholics have drifted away from the Church not just because of that but because its obsession with personal morality is so at variance with the lives they live. One of Pope Francis’s first actions was to replace Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Holy See, who said the media was responsible for the impression that the Church was obsessed with sex. Pietro Parolin, his replacement, promptly observed that celibate priests are a clerical tradition, not a doctrine.

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GUAM
Jungle Watch

A signed and stamped pdf copy can be accessed here.

December 17, 2014

Dear Archbishop Apuron,

These are undoubtedly trying times for the Catholic Church here in our island. I am writing to you because I continue to be saddened by the problems facing our beloved Church in Guam. It is undeniable that our Archdiocese is clearly divided, and that many of our people are angry, distraught, and confused by all the discord within our Church and among our leaders. The people of the Archdiocese – and even the many in our island community who are not Catholic but who are nonetheless concerned for our island – are all looking to you to provide resolution, healing, and closure. Unfortunately, rather than bringing about resolution, healing, and closure, it is clear that information released by the Chancery has only served to further inflame the situation rather than quell it.

With that said, I pray that you take what I am about to say positively, for my sole intention is to offer my thoughts in an effort to foster understanding, reconciliation, and ultimately the restoration of peace and unity within our fractured Church. I understand that there are numerous issues that need to be addressed, but I wanted to specifically focus on the one area that I believe can be immediately improved: the area of finances.

On this subject, I believe I am more than qualified to speak, as it has been my profession for well over 35 years. As you know, for the last thirteen years, I have been entrusted as the Chief Financial Officer of Calvo Enterprises, the largest locally owned company in Guam. Prior to that, I worked in the public sector as Director of the Bureau of Budget Management and Research for the Government of Guam, serving as the Chief Financial Advisor for three governors of Guam. In all of my previous positions, I have enjoyed the complete trust of my employers, who knew that I would always give my best professional advice.

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NEW YORK
Wall Street Journal

By PEGGY NOONAN
Dec. 26, 2014

The Archdiocese of New York is threatening to close down my little church, a jewel in Catholicism’s crown on 89th Street just off Madison, in Carnegie Hill, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This has caused great pain in our neighborhood this Christmas. St. Thomas More Church is where my son made his first holy communion, where he was confirmed. It is where at the presentation of the cross, on Good Friday, everyone in the parish who wants to—and that is everyone in the parish, poor people, crazy people, people just holding on, housekeepers, shopkeepers, billionaires—stands on line together, as equals, as brothers and sisters, to kiss the foot of the cross. It always makes me cry.

None of this is important except multiply it by 5,000, 10,000, a million people who’ve walked through our doors the past 75 years to marry, to bury, to worship.

There is context, of course, and context must always be respected. New York isn’t the only place that is or will be closing churches, so the story may have some national application.

The Catholic Church, the greatest refuge of the poor in the history of the world, is always in need of money. The New York Archdiocese itself supports schools, hospitals, charities, churches, orders. It is in constant need. There is the refurbishment of mighty St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which has been extremely expensive. There has been the cost, the past 20 years, of all the settlements and legal fees associated with the sex scandals. Compounding this is the constant bureaucratic challenge to manage resources efficiently, professionally.

The Church must save where it can. Churches have been closed. Most had particular stresses in common. Some lost parishioners due to demographic change and a peeling off of the faithful. Some cannot support themselves financially and become a drain on the archdiocese. Some churches have fallen behind in repair and have become structurally dangerous. Some lost their place in the heart and life of their communities.

But the great mystery at the heart of the threatened closing of St. Thomas is that none of these criteria apply to it. Not one.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 24 December 2014).

A former Catholic Brother charged with 252 child sexual assaults appeared in court in Sydney on 24 December 2014 after being extradited to Australia from New Zealand. Bernard Kevin McGrath (formerly a member of the St John of God Brothers) faced an extensive list of charges at Sydney’s Parramatta Local Court – including raping, molesting and abusing 35 children while he worked as a Catholic Brother in New South Wales.

McGrath (born 22 May 1947) was refused bail and was remanded in custody until his next court date, which is 29 December 2014 for a brief administrative procedure. The main court process will begin in 2015.

The Australian government has been seeking McGrath’s extradition for three years for crimes he allegedly committed during his time as a Catholic Brother in New South Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.

In August 2014, he was ordered to surrender to Australia by New Zealand’s Justice Minister. McGrath then lost a New Zealand High Court appeal against the extradition.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Sarah MacDonald

PUBLISHED 26/12/2014

Spies unhappy with the orthodoxy of Irish priests are responsible for fewer than five letters received by the Papal Nuncio every year.

Archbishop Charles Brown said claims that there was a cohort of spies frequently reporting clerics to the nunciature were “exaggerated”.

“It is not the case that there is a huge cohort of spies out there … that’s a bit exaggerated, to put it charitably,” the former Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith official stated.

“Every day at the nunciature I get letters of all types. From people who are upset because the candles have been moved on the altar, to letters written by people who are perhaps deeply psychologically disturbed – and we try to respond to them with compassion.

“I can say before God that people reporting priests to the nunciature are very few – maybe four or five a year. Maybe all of these spies are writing to Rome independently of the nunciature,” Archbishop Brown suggested.

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MAINE
WGME

BANGOR (WGME) — The members of a Greek church are moving on, with a renewed faith, after the arrest of their former priest. Adam Metropoulos is awaiting trial on child porn and sex abuse charges. He was the priest at the St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Bangor. The church suspended Metropoulos and now has a new leader.

The new reverend and his parishioners say they’re looking forward to a new chapter at the church. “The community is warm and nice so I feel very welcome and I feel very much at home. The house was like, oh, it’s not the house I came to. People were gloomy and people were still looking at me like this is that other guy,” Rev. Fr. Makarios Nganga, Interim Parish Priest, said.

The new priest says his wife and children are still in his native Kenya but he already feels like a part of the church community.

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MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Madeleine Baran St. Paul, Minn. Dec 26, 2014

One of the biggest stories of 2014 was the MPR News investigation of the clergy sex abuse cover-up in the Twin Cities archdiocese.

A year ago this month, a Ramsey County judge forced Archbishop John Nienstedt to release the names of priests credibly accused of sexually abusing children. In the months that followed, the archdiocese faced new revelations about how deep the cover-up went and who was involved.

What’s the current state of the scandal?

Much is still happening behind the scenes. Indications are that the archdiocese will file for bankruptcy, though it claims that it hasn’t decided yet. If the archdiocese does file for bankruptcy, all of the church’s finances would be under scrutiny by a federal judge. We don’t know where that would lead or how much money victims would end up receiving.

Has the archdiocese put procedures in place to ensure reform?

Not as far as we can tell. Over the past year and a half, the archdiocese has announced a new task force and appointed various priests and lay people to advise the church on handling abuse complaints, but the structure of the chancery remains the same. The archbishop holds all the power, and does not have to follow anyone’s recommendations. The structure that allowed this cover-up to happen is still in place.

It’s also important to note some context. This isn’t the first time this archdiocese has faced a clergy sex abuse cover-up. Each time, the scandal starts with an allegation that church leaders covered up abuse. Then the archdiocese apologizes, announces new policies, meets with victims and stresses the idea of healing and moving on. Bishops in the 1980s and ’90s said the same things that church leaders say now.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

* “May Jesus save the vast numbers of children who are victims of violence … ; children, so many abused children”, so prayed and preached Pope Francis in his well publicized 2014 Christmas greetings to the world. Seemingly on cue, Francis also lamented that many children are ” … never born because of abortion. …”.

* And let us hope and pray that Jesus does help save all the children. But what about Pope Francis doing more to save some children the pope failed to mention that he actually already has the power to save — like those children who still remain at risk of priest sexual abuse or who struggle to recover from the effects of such abuse worldwide, as well as those millions of children whose parents cannot afford to raise them adequately but had them anyway, thanks to Vatican lobbying against affordable access to contraception for these poor couples. Pope Francis will visit the Philippines in a few weeks and can see for himself the millions of struggling kids there on their own, often abandoned by their destitute parents who were, in effect, denied access to effective and affordable family planning.

* An experienced Vatican journalist recently confirmed, in effect, what numerous reports since the pope’s election about his extensive activities with respect to Vatican financial scandals already suggested clearly. Pope Francis may actually be putting a much higher priority on maximizing Vatican wealth than on protecting Catholic children from priest predators and complicit bishops who protect them. Is that what Jesus would have done?

* Generating unlimited children, of course, is geo-politically a “win win” situation for the Vatican. If the children survive, they then become potential donors and voters subject to Vatican indoctrination and influence. If the children struggle, the burden then is mainly on themselves, their parents and their governments. It is only on the Vatican with whatever papal funds remain, if any, after funding the hierarchy’s high lifestyles, political crusades, escalating legal expenses, etc.. Ultimately, children are optional costs for the Vatican.

* Importantly, Francis recently publicly ambushed his cornered Vatican staff. The hapless Vatican officials are an easy target for the pope since many of them lack career and financial options like many diocesan bishops have available to them. Yet, even so, the pope significantly omitted addressing directly and adequately with the assembled Vatican officials either the child abuse cover up or sexism, two major Vatican “ailments” that he urgently must address more effectively. Why these material omissions?

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PHILIPPINES
The Philippines Star

SKETCHES By Ana Marie Pamintuan (The Philippine Star) | Updated December 26, 2014

My favorite news head on that story about Pope Francis’ greeting to the Vatican Curia is from the Religion News Service: “Merry Christmas, you power-hungry hypocrites!”

RNS reported: The pope’s traditional Christmas greeting to the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Holy See was more “Bah! Humbug!” than holiday cheer as he ticked off a laundry list of “ailments of the Curia” that he wants to cure.

Christmas surely wasn’t merry for a lot of people in the Vatican.

And some members of our local clergy must be having second thoughts about the wisdom of having Francis see for himself the state of the faith in Asia’s bastion of Roman Catholicism. Would Francis also recite a Pinoy version of the 15 Ailments of the Vatican Curia?

The pontiff looks like someone who personally does his homework and is attuned to world affairs. Consider his role in the historic rapprochement between the United States and Cuba. Would Francis say that “spiritual Alzheimer’s” can be catching and has infected certain Filipino bishops?

We can expect this pope, before he visits Manila and the Visayas, to read up on Philippine history, which is inextricably linked with the history of the Catholic Church in this country. Church interference in political affairs, as we all know, did not start in the House of Sin – a reference to the archbishop of Manila during the Marcos regime.

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UNITED STATES
Talk to Action

Frank Cocozzelli
Mon Dec 22, 2014

It has been more than two years since Bishop Robert Finn was convicted by a Missouri criminal court for failing to report child abuse by Fr. Shawn Ratigan. Finn had been warned about Ratigan’s behavior but the prelate inexplicably waited six months before notifying authorities as required by law.

Within that same period of time, Ratigan pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography. He is now serving a 50-year sentence in prison. But Finn walks free.

Enter Pope Francis.

The new pontiff has been a breath of fresh air in many ways. But when it comes to removing Bishop Finn as head of the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph Missouri the air around the pontiff has gotten stale.

That’s why many were encouraged when Cardinal Sean O’Malley was interviewed recently by the CBS News program 60 Minutes. O’Malley is not just any Cardinal. He is a close friend of and advisor to Pope Francis, who appointed him to lead the Vatican’s new sexual abuse commission aimed at strengthening rules to protect children. When the conversation turned to Bishop Finn, Cardinal O’Malley did not mince his words:

Norah O’Donnell: I want to ask you about Robert Finn, who is the bishop of Kansas City/St. Joseph and, as you know, he pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor for not reporting one of his priests to authorities. Bishop Finn wouldn’t be able to teach Sunday school in Boston.
Cardinal Seán O’Malley: That’s right.

Norah O’Donnell: How is that zero tolerance…

Cardinal Seán O’Malley: Well…

Norah O’Donnell: …that he’s still in place? What does it say to Catholics?

Cardinal Seán O’Malley: Well, it’s a question that the Holy See needs to address urgently.

Norah O’Donnell: And there’s a recognition?

Cardinal Seán O’Malley: There’s a recognition of that.

Norah O’Donnell: From Pope Francis?

Cardinal Seán O’Malley: From Pope Francis.

But it was not to be. Or at least not yet. It has been more than a month since that interview when it sounded like Bishop Finn was on his way out the door.

Why is he still there?

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

Frank Bruni

There was a Christmas Eve a little more than a decade ago when I did something that was, for me, rare, at least on a holiday typically spent in full-party mode, with booze, food, family and friends. I went to church.

No one had died. No one was getting married or baptized. This visit was entirely volitional — and, I told myself, ornamental, which was true to a point.

The church, you see, was St. Peter’s Basilica. I was The Times’s correspondent in Rome. And because I covered the Vatican, I had dibs on prime seats relatively close to the altar. Forgive the following mixture of profane and sacred, but you don’t have to be a Beyoncé devotee to say a quick yes to free tickets in the front rows. You go for the pageant and the privilege.

Pope John Paul II presided over the Mass, as best he could. He struggled to form coherent words, a man disintegrating before the world’s eyes, month by painful month. Many of us in the press corps who kept tabs on him and trailed him — to Guatemala, to Croatia, to Poland — were essentially on a deathwatch. …

Now there’s Francis. And things are different. Not different enough, not by a long shot. The church remains wrong on women and wrong on gays, and I’ve noted repeatedly the shameful discrepancy between Francis’ kind words and the unkind firings of lesbian and gay employees by Catholic institutions in the United States.

But almost two years into his papacy, it’s impossible to deny the revolutionary freshness of his posture: humble, receptive, even casual. The pomp is gone and, with it, the air of thundering judgment. If the rules haven’t been rewritten, they seem less like bludgeons than in the past.

Francis doesn’t hold himself high, an autocrat with all the answers. He crouches to a level where questions can be asked, conversations broached, disagreements articulated.

He insists that other church leaders lower themselves as well, and used a traditional Christmas address on Monday not to chide the flock for its transgressions but to remind the shepherds of theirs.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

(Article posted on 22 December 2014.)

Christian Brother William John Obbens (also known as Brother “Dominic” Obbens) has appeared in court, charged with two counts of indecent assault of “a person under 16 under authority”. Police allege that the offences were committed on one boy, then aged 13, in the late 1980s, while Brother Obbens was a teacher at St Patrick’s Christian Brothers College in Goulburn, south-western New South Wales.

The case had its first mention in Goulburn Local Court on 22 December 2014 when the prosecutors officially filed the charges against Brother Obbens during a brief administrative procedure.

Brother Obbens, aged 69, now of Balmain in Sydney, sat behind his solicitor in court.

As often happens, the court adjourned the case for several weeks while the prosecutors and the defence are dealing with some court documentation. The prosecution must provide a brief of evidence to the defence by 28 January 2015, and the defence is to provide a reply by February 11.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 20 December 2014)

One of Australia’s most prominent Catholic religious orders – the St John of God Brothers (SJOG) – has had an entrenched culture of sexual abuse, according to court evidence. The St John of God religious order has specialised in accommodating boys who have an educational or, in many cases, an intellectual disability. This Broken Rites article is about court cases in the 1990s (and also in 2006) involving Brother Bernard Kevin McGrath, who was jailed for committing sexual crimes against disabled victims.

Bernard Kevin McGrath (born 22 May 1947) grew up in New Zealand. In the 1960s, aged 18, he joined the St John of God Brothers (SJOG), a Catholic religious order which was conducting residential institutions in Australia and New Zealand for boys who have an educational or intellectual disability. For his training, he went to Sydney where the SJOG order has its headquartes for Australia and New Zealand. Most of McGrath’s working life has been spent at SJOG institutions in Australia and New Zealand.

McGrath gave details of his SJOG career in a six-hours videotaped interview with New Zealand detectives in 2003. In the videotape, which was shown in a New Zealand courtroom in 2006, McGrath tells how he was bullied by his authoritarian father who pressured him into joining a religious order at age 18. (McGrath’s father had trained for the Catholic priesthood but ended up as a manual worker.)

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 24 December 2014).

A former Catholic Brother charged with 252 child sexual assaults appeared in court in Sydney on 24 December 2014 after finally being extradited to Australia from New Zealand. Bernard Kevin McGrath (formerly a member of the St John of God Brothers) faced an extensive list of charges at Sydney’s Parramatta Local Court – including raping, molesting and abusing 35 children – after being flown in from New Zealand in police custody.

He was refused bail.

The case will come up in court again on 29 November 2014 for a brief administrative procedure.

The Australian government has been seeking McGrath’s extradition for three years for crimes he allegedly committed during his time as a Catholic Brother in New South Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.

In August 2014, he was ordered to surrender to Australia by New Zealand’s Justice Minister and then lost a New Zealand High Court appeal against the extradition.

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

[with video]

FROM his comments about “spiritual Alzheimer’s” to his appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, it’s been a big year for Pope Francis.

As the world prepares to celebrate Christmas, we look back on some of the most awesome things the ever-smiling Pope Francis did in 2014:

He blasted the Vatican bureaucracy

Proving he’s not afraid to take on the big guns in the lead-up, Pope Francis issued a blistering critique of the Vatican bureaucracy that serves him, denouncing how some people lust for power at all costs, live hypocritical double lives and suffer from “spiritual Alzheimer’s” that has made them forget they’re supposed to be joyful men of God.

Francis’s Christmas greeting to the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Holy See was no joyful exchange of holiday good wishes. Rather, it was a sobering catalogue of 15 sins of the Curia that Francis said he hoped would be atoned for and cured in the new year.

He had some zingers: How the “terrorism of gossip” can “kill the reputation of our colleagues and brothers in cold blood.” How cliques can “enslave their members and become a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body” and eventually kill it by “friendly fire.” About how some suffer from a “pathology of power” that makes them seek power at all costs, even if it means defaming or discrediting others publicly. …

He promised to take a strong stance against abuse scandals

In April, Pope Francis asked for forgiveness for the “evil” damage to children caused by sexual abusers in the clergy. In his strongest statement on the subject yet, he described the abuse as a “moral damage carried out by men of the Church”, and said “sanctions” would be imposed.

The statement, made in a meeting with a child rights group, didn’t hold back.

Pope Francis pleaded for forgiveness for the “evil” of priests who sexually abused children, and promised to take an even stronger stand than before against Catholic abuse scandals.

“I feel compelled to personally take on all the evil that some priests — quite a few in number, (although) obviously not compared to the number of all priests —  to personally ask for forgiveness for the damage they have done for having sexually abused children,” he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Nishad Sanzagiri

In 2013 Pope Francis had a lot to celebrate. Not only was he named Time magazine person of the year, but was also awarded the title of Esquire’s best dressed man.

But far from resting on his laurels, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics had a very eventful 2014 too. …

Personally asked for forgiveness for the ‘evil’ of sexually abusive priests

Pope Francis pleaded for forgiveness for the “evil” of priests who sexually abused children, and promised to take an even stronger stand than before against Catholic abuse scandals.

Vatican Radio quoted him as saying: “I feel compelled to personally take on all the evil that some priests - quite a few in number, (although) obviously not compared to the number of all priests - to personally ask for forgiveness for the damage they have done for having sexually abused children.”

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Paul Lakeland | Dec. 24, 2014

THE CATHOLIC LABYRINTH: POWER, APATHY, AND A PASSION FOR REFORM IN THE AMERICAN CHURCH
By Peter McDonough
Published by Oxford University Press, $29.95

The Catholic Labyrinth: Power, Apathy, and a Passion for Reform in the American Church is a most unusual and remarkably provocative book, both in its thesis and in the way it is constructed. There are surely very few texts on “the state of the American Catholic church” in which bishops figure very little, the pope even less. There cannot be many written by someone quietly signaling liberal sympathies while being less than enthusiastic about the chance of real change. And this has to be the only one in which Jesus Christ, the Gospel and the Eucharist are remarkable by their almost total absence from the weighty 300 pages of closely argued but elegant and attractive prose.

Author Peter McDonough argues that since the Catholic community as a whole is mildly conservative and fairly complacent, the chances of an end to a moderately authoritarian and insistently hierarchical church are slim. Moreover, the fact that most contemporary Catholics vote with their feet on most if not all of the ethical teaching of the church, both sexual and political, reduces still further any righteous indignation for change. …

One of the more original aspects of the author’s argument is that he marginalized the effectiveness of both conservative and reformist pressure groups in today’s church. While many think of the church as an intensely polarized community, McDonough’s message is that these strong feelings only influence a minority, while the majority of Catholics just go to church and then get on with their lives without paying much attention to either left or right or, for that matter, the voice of ecclesial authority itself.

Conservative Catholic groups, of course, are very well-funded (the Knights of Columbus, Opus Dei, First Things magazine) and have figured out that their struggle is a cultural one in which old-time religion and “family values” blend into a coherent if not particularly influential ideological position. Influential, of course, with a minority of Catholics and, perhaps, a majority of Catholic bishops, but not especially with the mainstream, and destined, thinks McDonough, to fail ultimately to convince a body of believers suspicious of culture warriors and an ethic of sexual repression.

Reform groups, on the other hand, are passionate about internal ecclesial issues but far less well-funded (FutureChurch, Voice of the Faithful, SNAP) and quite disinclined to connect their various platforms to a wider national political agenda. Their cherished causes may find some support among the rank and file of the church, but not enough to inspire real reform.

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UNITED STATES
International Business Times

By Zoe Mintz

It would not be an understatement to say Pope Francis has reached rock-star status. His image has graced the covers of Time Magazine, Rolling Stone and even The Advocate, a gay focused magazine. In March, Fortune called the pontiff one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders. Forbes says he is the fourth most powerful person on the globe. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. His approval ratings are sky high. He even helped broker a historic diplomatic deal between the U.S. and Cuba.

But has he lived up to the hype?

“He absolutely lives up to the hype,” Robert Christian, editor for Catholic blog Millennial Journal, told International Business Times in an email. “Francis’ message is not that he’s perfect — it’s that this is who he is: a guy who cares deeply about the poor and vulnerable, who tries to live simply, who tries to build his life around his love of God and others. People can see with their own eyes this is true, and that’s why he is connecting with them.” …

Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis

The clergy sexual abuse crisis — where thousands of priests have been accused of abusing children over a span of 60 years — is arguably the largest problem the modern Catholic Church faces. It is also the area where Pope Francis has been lagging, according to David Clohessy, the national director of SNAP, or the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — a 12,000-member U.S.-based organization representing victims of clergy sexual abuse. He has wanted doctrinal change for just as long. But he is met with the challenge that most advocacy groups have: Dealing with a 2,000-year-old institution that moves at a very slow speed.

Between the ages of 12 to 16, Clohessy has memories of his childhood priest molesting him during overnight skiing, hiking and boating trips. He suppressed the memories for years, he said, until they flooded back in his mid-30s. He later discovered three of his siblings said they were abused as well.

One of those siblings — his younger brother Kevin — later became a priest. When Clohessy went public with his claims in 1992, one of the youth supervisors in his diocese came forward with a list of names of clergy who teenagers told her “made them feel uncomfortable” during overnight trips. One of those names was Kevin’s. He reportedly would get drunk with the boys and make sexual advances. An 18-year-old said Kevin fed him alcohol and carried him to bed.

In 1993, Kevin was removed from his post and entered a treatment program. Church officials said the allegations against him were “inappropriate and serious” but the sexual behavior was “not criminal, in that it did not involve anyone below the legal age of consent.” He was relocated to a different parish. To the best of Clohessy’s knowledge, Kevin is currently working at a funeral home. He was not criminally prosecuted or defrocked.

“With each new pope there seems that there’s more talk, promises and apologies, but little-to-no decisive reform,” Clohessy said. There are roughly 6,400 priests who have been publicly accused of sexual abuse in the U.S. Clohessy suspects there are more who have been protected by their bishops.

It was only in the past six months or so when Pope Francis began speaking about the crisis. In May, he met with sex abuse victims and called the allegations an “ugly crime” akin to performing “a satanic Mass.” In June, Polish Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski was defrocked after a Vatican tribunal found him guilty of sexually abusing minors. During a homily given in July, Francis called for “zero tolerance” of sex abuse by clergy and met with six more victims. In November, he created a panel of clergy and sex abuse victims that will advise the Vatican on child protection policies. They will meet for the first time at the Vatican on Feb. 6-8.

For Clohessy this isn’t enough.

“In so many other areas the pope’s word is all he has. In terms of peace, hunger, inequality — the pope can’t do anything about those things except exhort. He has incredible power with the abuse crisis,” Clohessy said. Catholics, he added, should “judge him by his deeds and not his words in every area of his papacy.”

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INDIA
Bangalore Mirror

Falsely accused by his wife of indecent behaviour with girls, Shantaraju believes she was after his property

A city pastor who was accused by his wife of indecent behaviour with girls has been cleared by the court. The wife also accused him of being cruel to her and their children. The Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate court found that there was no truth in the charges made by the wife, and after more than three years, cleared him of any wrongdoing in its November 22 order. K Shantaraju runs the Children Development Centre in Bethel Church, Siddarthanagar, in Gangammanagudi police limits. The prosecution alleged that Shantaraju had behaved in an indecent manner with girls who were coming to him for tuition. His wife Priyalatha said when she questioned it, Shantaraju was cruel to her and their children, and even threatened their lives. The relatives of Shantaraju were also made accused in the case.

The wife had accused the pastor of sexual abuse of minors, but the CID police found that the allegation of sexual abuse had no truth and the dispute was mainly matrimonial. However, the allegation found mention in the judgment. The judgment said, “It is quite natural that the wife could have developed hatred against her husband and his relatives. This is all the more so when the first accused is suspected to have a relationship with another lady.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

December 25, 2014

Aisha Dow

Dressed in their Sunday best, families across Victoria flocked to church services on Christmas morning. But not everyone was content to celebrate Jesus’ birth the traditional way.

In Sunshine North hundreds gathered at a huge concrete warehouse – Enjoy Church’s western campus – where the “doof doof” of the band could be heard even in the car park. …

Melbourne Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart said sometimes people wonder why bad things happen to good people. He also made a reference the ongoing Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.

“During these days of the Royal Commission we pray especially for the innocent victims of sexual abuse in the church and acknowledge the courage of those victims who have come forward to speak of their abuse,” he said.

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UNITED STATES
The Times-Tribune

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: December 25, 2014

In addition to the traditional prayers and wishes for peace and goodwill, Pope Francis has presented the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics a distinctly unique Christmas gift — sweeping reforms of Vatican institutions.

Members of the Curia, the powerful cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Vatican bureaucracy, sat before the pope Monday like schoolchildren waiting to see the vice principal.

Pope Francis was unsparing in his assessment of their performance. He accused some of them of using their careers to accumulate power and wealth and, thus, of being hypocritical relative to the church’s fundamental mission — what he called, delightfully, “existential schizophrenia.”

That was just one of the “15 illnesses of the Curia” he defined in a Christmas season address that departed exponentially from its usual collegial tone.

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FLORIDA
Sun Sentinel

By Paula McMahon
Sun Sentinel

A former church and school official pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a federal charge of using a cell phone to lure a teenage boy into sexual activity with him.

Jeffery London, 51, who was a youth mentor at Bible Church of God in Fort Lauderdale and dean of students at Eagle Charter Academy in Lauderdale Lakes, was indicted in the federal case last week. The charge carries a punishment of 10 years to life in federal prison.

State prosecutors in Broward County dropped their remaining child sex abuse charges against Jeffery London, clearing the way for his federal prosecution on a related charge. London was photographed in Broward Circuit Court during the Dec. 8 hearing. (Rafael Olmeda, Sun Sentinel)
Earlier this year, a Broward Circuit Court jury found London not guilty of 27 state charges of lewd and lascivious conduct involving seven boys. London was not released from jail after the acquittal because he still faced additional abuse charges.

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UNITED STATES
PopeCrimes& Vatican Evils.

Paris Arrow

A picture speaks a thousand words. Here are images of the 2 evil Achilles Heels of John Paul II and George W. Bush, two contemporaries in the 20th century who covered-up – through religion – their own worst crimes against children and youth of America and the whole world.

The 2 Evil Achilles Heels of Satanas Saint John Paul II are Cardinal Bernard Law and priest Marcial Maciel, the serial pedophile, pederast, adulterous priest and poster boy of the JP2 Army – John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army. Read the related links below for further explanations.

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VATICAN CITY
The National (United Arab Emirates)

Jacopo Barigazzi

December 24, 2014

Iacopo Scaramuzzi is a Vatican analyst. He studied journalism at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University and for years has been following the day by day activities of the Catholic Church for Italian media. Here he talks about Pope Francis.

What has changed? How is it possible that Pope Francis is bringing about so much change in a such a short time?

The three main contributors to the Holy See are the US, the German and the Italian [Catholic] churches.

What has changed is that the money management issue has been put on the table of the last conclave. The Americans and Germans pay large amounts of money but what they have been seeing are many scandals, clashes with the Italian central bank and all of these involving mainly Italian cardinals and bishops.

Now there are basically no Italians left in the positions that count?

Exactly. The big donors that now want to have more weight are the starting point of what has followed after Bergoglio’s [Pope Francis] election, the de-Italianisation of the Roman curia.

Now all the top positions are held by non-Italians. At the helm of Ior [the Vatican bank at the centre of many financial scandals from the beginning of the 1970s] now there is French banker Jean-Baptiste de Franssu.

George Pell, who heads the Vatican’s new secretariat for the economy, is an Australian Cardinal.

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VATICAN CITY
Bloomberg Businessweek

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis is celebrating Christmas Eve with a late-night Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica just days after excoriating his staff for a laundry list of sins.

Many of the same cardinals, bishops and priests who received the dressing down will be in St. Peter’s Basilica for the Mass. Several have spoken out in recent days saying Francis was merely asking them to examine their consciences and use the Christmas season to heal.

Wednesday’s Mass kicks off a busy few weeks for the 78-year-old pontiff that includes his traditional Christmas day speech, New Year’s Eve vespers and 2015 greetings a few hours later.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Daily Hampshire Gazette

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Now that’s what we call harkening to the reason for the season. In the second of his annual Christmas addresses, Pope Francis chastised a Vatican leadership in which he said too many prelates preach a Christ-like selflessness but practice a life of backstabbing, power grabs and political maneuvering.

“Brothers, let’s guard ourselves from the terrorism of gossip,” Francis told cardinals and bishops gathered at the Apostolic Palace, The New York Times reports. “The ailment of close circles enslaves their members and becomes a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body.”

Francis’ call to conscience provides the latest, and most dramatic, evidence that the first Latin American pope plans to devote his time at the Holy See to a gospel of inclusion rather than one that has too often excluded the weak, the scorned, the fallen-from-favor. What better message to deliver at this time of year when many celebrate a holy man who devoted his life to embracing the least among us?

In less than two years at the Holy See, Francis has made his home in humble quarters rather than the luxurious papal residence, reminded the church of its duty to the poor, called for acceptance of gay people and pushed for an end to the Cold War between the United States and Cuba.

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MASSACHUSETTS
The Republican

By Shira Schoenberg | sschoenberg@repub.com
on December 24, 2014

BOSTON – Two days after Pope Francis delivered a harsh critique of the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Sean O’Malley said concern about the church administration is widespread and was discussed at the last conclave, when cardinals met to select the pope.

“Whoever was elected the pope knew that one of his biggest challenges was going to be the renewal of the central administration of the church, and Pope Francis is doing that with great energy, and he has our support,” said O’Malley, who is the archbishop of Boston.

Pope Francis made waves with his annual Christmas greeting to the Curia, a group of cardinals, bishops and priests who make up the church administration. The pope accused the Curia of having 15 kinds of spiritual sickness. Among them: “Spiritual Alzheimer’s,” or forgetting one’s connection with God, the sickness of gossip, of “rivalry and vainglory,” of pursuing worldly power and of overly valuing belonging to a closed group. The Associated Press reported that the address was unprecedented in the sharpness of Pope Francis’ rebuke. Some observers suggested that it was prompted by the results of a secret investigation into leaks of confidential Vatican papers to journalists in 2012.

O’Malley sits on an advisory board to the pope that is tasked with helping the pope reform the church administration, which has been plagued with problems including the church’s response to priests accused of molesting children and allegations of corruption within the Vatican bank. O’Malley spoke to reporters in Boston on Christmas Eve before helping serve lunch to homeless people at the Pine Street Inn.

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UNITED STATES
Clarion-Ledger

Chicago Tribune
December 24, 2014

In holiday messages at this time of year, the boss usually musters the energy to say nice things to the people who work for him. Even if he’s exasperated by the performance of his employees or beset by arrogant bullies on the corporate rungs above him.

That’s the generosity of the Christmas spirit, right?

But what if the boss used this holiday interlude not to extol the good but to point out in withering detail his subordinates’ personal shortcomings?

And what if that message resonated well beyond the boss’ workplace, so that all of us could read his remarks and, gulp, see ourselves in the unflinching mirror that he held aloft?

You may have guessed that we’re talking about Pope Francis’ extraordinary Christmas message on Monday.

Instead of a traditional message of charity and hope, Francis excoriated the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Vatican. He accused them of knuckling under to 15 ailments and temptations, including greed, jealousy, hypocrisy, cowardice and, in a memorable phrase, “spiritual Alzheimer’s.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
LifeSite News

At almost the same moment that Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview that those defending Catholic moral teaching – and the practice of barring people in irregular sexual unions from receiving Communion – are being marginalized within the Church, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales have issued a document for clergy that all but accuses such Catholics of the ancient Donatist heresy.

In a “Reflection Document for Clergy,” the English bishops appear to follow the line of Cardinal Walter Kasper and his followers, saying, “It is not for us to make rash or premature conclusions” about people living in sexual sin.

“We meet people at many different stages of family life which are often not clearly defined in this way nor do they occur in the ‘traditional’ order in which we used to think,” they said.

The bishops go so far as to issue a thinly veiled accusation of heresy against those, like Cardinal Burke, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, Cardinal George Pell and others, who have refused to follow the Kasper line. The document quotes St. Augustine of Hippo, the 4th century Doctor of the Church, who the bishops say “offers us a way of looking at the Church from his age which is still relevant today.”

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

By Josephine Mckenna | Religion News Service December 24

VATICAN CITY — Cardinal Walter Kasper, one of Pope Francis’ closest advisers, has sought to downplay the pontiff’s scathing critique of the Curia earlier this week.

Kasper, who previously led the Vatican body responsible for promoting Christian unity, said the pope was asking the Curia, or Vatican administration, to examine their conscience in a bid to promote spiritual renewal.

The German cardinal, joined by Argentine Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, said Francis was asking the Curia to set an example.

“The fundamental thing is he wants spiritual reform of the Curia,” Kasper told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Wednesday (Dec. 24).

“Certainly also reform of the structures is important and he is working on that. But the basis of the problem is spiritual.”

The pope announced what he termed 15 illnesses affecting the Curia at his Christmas greetings on Monday, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and gossipy cliques.

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UNITED STATES
Forbes

Robert Goulder , Contributor

For centuries the inner workings of the Vatican Bank have been cloaked in secrecy. That was before Pope Francis, who has pledged to restore public confidence in the administration of the Roman Catholic Church. This week we learned the United States and the Holy See have brokered a FATCA agreement for the automatic exchange of taxpayer information. The long arm of the U.S. tax code is nothing short of astonishing.

I don’t recall issues like offshore banking and tax evasion being discussed at Sunday school during my youth, but then I wasn’t an attentive pupil. I suppose it’s possible that bilateral exchange of taxpayer information was mentioned at some point in the Beatitudes, but I’d need to double-check. Probably not, since the Sermon on the Mount predates the drafting of article 26 of the OECD model tax convention.

These days, tax treaties aren’t the only way for nations to exchange bank data. We live in the age of FATCA and its progeny — the OECD’s common reporting standard — which are spreading around the world faster than the good word. From Zurich to Bethlehem, from the Cayman Islands to Galilee, FATCA is everywhere. And as of this week, we learned how Francis views the issue. The pontiff is cool with tax transparency. Depending on how one feels about the issue, this news could be either sweeter than sugar plums, or worse than a lump of coal in your stocking.

On December 22 a Treasury Department Web page noted that the Holy See and the U.S. government have reached an agreement in substance regarding FATCA. That informal accord, concluded November 30, adheres to the FATCA Model 1 intergovernmental agreement. There are no details yet on when a formal signing ceremony will be held. In the meantime, the Treasury Department now includes the Holy See on its expanding list of FATCA-compliant jurisdictions.

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Ever wonder how many more child molesting US clerics there are who have never been publicly exposed?

Consider this: On December 9, in one tiny diocese – Gallup, New Mexico – a court filing revealed in five names of “never before disclosed” credibly accused child molesting clerics.

[BishopAccountability.org – KOAT]

Then, on December 16, Gallup Bishop James Wall released names of 20 priests who it deemed “credibly accused” who had never been publicly accused before.

[Gallup diocese]

So to be crystal clear: In just one diocese, in just two weeks, 25 new names of predator priests have been disclosed.

And there are nearly 200 dioceses in the US. . .

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MISSOURI
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2014

For more information: David Clohessy of St. Louis, SNAP Director (314) 566-9790 cell, SNAPclohessy@aol.com

Checks arrive for abuse victims
Dozens settled with KC diocese
In rare move, they share nearly $10 million almost equally
And they include three whose cases were rejected by court
“It’s completely unprecedented,” says support group head

Dozens of Kansas City men and women who were sexually assaulted as children by priests have received their settlement checks, just in time for Christmas. And it what’s being called “an unprecedented act of generosity,” they are essentially sharing millions equally and including in the settlement three other victims whose cases were tossed out on legal technicalities.

“In my 25 years of work on the church’s abuse crisis, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said David Clohessy of St. Louis, SNAP’s director. “These incredibly kind victims agreed to divide their almost $10 million settlement basically equally and with three other survivors whose cases had already lost because their abuse happened away from church property so they had no legal standing whatsoever. We are so impressed by and so grateful to these incredible individuals.”

In November, almost 30 adults resolved their civil abuse and cover up lawsuits against the KC Missouri diocese and its convicted bishop, Robert Finn. They were represented by KC attorney Rebecca Randles ( 816 510 2704, rebecca@rmblawyers.com ).

“I’m proud of every single abuse victim I’ve represented, and I’ve represented more than 100 of them,” she said. “But I’ve never been more proud of my clients than I am now. Rather than try to ‘compete’ among themselves for a larger amount, they’re showing tremendous sensitivity and kindness to one another.”

The settlement came near the end of a nearly three week trial in which Jon David Couzens said that Msgr. Thomas O’Brien repeatedly molested him and that local Catholic officials could and should have prevented the crimes. O’Brien has been accused of sexually assaulting more children than any Missouri cleric, according to SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

“These wounded individuals are heroes for doing so much for so long to expose wrongdoing by Kansas City Catholic clerics. They have been courageous and compassionate and effective,” said Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, SNAP’s outreach director. “This settlement won’t magically heal them of the lifelong traumatic effects of the terrible assaults they endured as children. But we are confident that this settlement will help them in their recovery. And we’re thrilled the checks arrived before Christmas.”

“We hope this outcome will prod others who have been hurt by priests, nuns, deacons, seminarians and other Catholic employees to get help, come forward, expose wrongdoers and protect kids,” said Dorris.

Couzens was sexually violated by another KC priest – Fr. Isaac True. That case settled as well.

Because he endured what SNAP calls “a tough trial and cruel defense tactics by Finn’s lawyers,” the victims voted to give Couzens a somewhat larger share.

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GUAM
Jungle Watch

Father Efren Adversario

Dear Tim and Family,

Greetings to you and your family during this festive time of anticipating the Lord’s coming in our midst. May He give you peace, and reward you generously for the brave endeavors you have undertaken in service of the Holy Mother Church. I would like to have this on jungle watch when you are able to have time. Thank you, once again.

Luke 4:18 ff. “The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me and sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to give liberty to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to bring freedom to the oppressed, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

These words uttered by Jesus Christ echo the words of the prophet Isaiah as he announced the beginning of his public ministry. These are words given to us as a mandate of our discipleship. Christmas is a feast that, although commercialized and often taken out of context, reminds us to heed the profound tome of incarnational salvation. Christmas is not about a vulnerable and helpless little infant or about nebulous little cherubs singing away “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” as the late Fr. Raymond Brown (with whom I had the honor to work on his library before his death) expounded in his book, the Adult Christ at Christmas,” but a call to arms about the stewardship entrusted to us. …

This Christmas I hereby affix my name to the cause of Concerned Catholics of Guam. I believe in their goal to build bridges and to foster transparency (in all levels of administrative decisions) in the Archdiocese of Agana. More importantly, I believe in the integrity of their leaders. Prior to their incorporation, I had the honor of individually engaging Mr Perez, Ms Lujan, Rev Martinez, and Mr Shinohara on different matters unrelated to the current church brouhaha. They are dyed-in-the-wool Chamorro laypeople (or clergy in the case of Deacon Steve) whose sole purpose is to facilitate healing that comes from seeking answers to issues that current leadership has chosen to arrogantly ignore. They have simply given face to the valid and just right of laypeople to know where their donations go, and to truthful answers to recent decisions. It is that simple! They are respectful (and respectable!) people who would themselves shirk from confrontation but have taken great interest in the inaugural words of Jesus as he started public ministry to bring healing to our church.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics

Mark Silk
Follow @directorsilk | Dec 24, 2014

So far as I can tell, it’s unprecedented for a pope to chastise the Curia publicly. When Pope Francis administered those 15 Merry Christmas whacks heard round the world on Monday, he was doing something new under the Roman sun.

That’s not to say that popes have always been happy with the world’s oldest continuously functioning bureaucracy. Martin V, the Italian aristocrat whose election ended the Great Schism in 1417, reduced the cardinals to “quivering, stammering children in his presence,” writes Eamon Duffy in his History of the Popes. One hundred years later, when Leo X discovered cardinals plotting against him, he executed the ringleader and created 31 new ones in a single day.

“How many people work at the Vatican?” a journalist once asked Pope John XXIII. “About half of them,” he famously replied. Francis, who came into office with a mandate to get the Curia working properly, has by word and deed made clear that he means to do just that.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

* May God help Pope Francis! He faces as the last absolute monarch, in an increasingly democratic world, unrelenting and escalating governmental pressures in Australia, the UK, the USA, Germany, China and many countries in between. Yet as his Christmas speech to his Vatican bureaucracy (the Curia) indicated, he is served by some men who are stuck in a Renaissance time warp.

* As Pope Francis tries to sail through a treacherous child abuse and financial scandal triggered tsunami, he might do well to put down the Catechism for a few days and reflect on one of the best informed analysts of Curia behavior, Machiavelli. Perhaps, Francis is already doing this. Ten short examples of Machiavelli’s relevant wisdom are set forth below.

* Before he begins his 80th year in less twelve months, Pope Francis can successfully seize the opportunity, follow his conscience and apply his unique status, forceful temperament and popular appeal. Most importantly, he can declare “infallibly” key changes. By then, he will have received new input from his two advisory Synods of Bishops. He has already been enlightened by his valuable two years of experience as pope.

* Pope Francis now also is unhampered by his prior pastoral positions and unfettered by his earlier ideological constraints as an obedient cardinal, bishop and Jesuit. If Francis fails to act effectively soon, the consequences will likely be quite negative for the leadership of the Catholic Church.

* Pope Francis acts at times like a radicalized realist. His preferred theologian, Cardinal Kasper, describes him as “radical”. Francis is clearly pressing forward relentlessly on a novel path to change. When necessary, he is even bypassing or sidelining fearful and entrenched opponents and factions. His opponents often overlook the many risks that presently exist in the Vatican’s vulnerable predicament. Pope Francis is evidently well aware of these risks. At times, some of his opponents prefer “to play their fruitless fiddles while Rome burns”.

* Pope Francis can accomplish much if he wants to and finds the wisdom and courage to do so. Equally important, it seems unlikely any of his successors will get a more propitious opportunity in the foreseeable future to adopt long overdue changes. It may be now or never for Pope Francis and the Vatican. Does he realize that? His scolding of the Curia suggests he does.

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WASHINGTON (DC)
The Jewish Daily Forward

By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Published December 24, 2014.

Two new lawsuits aim to hold Modern Orthodoxy’s largest rabbinic organization responsible in the Rabbi Barry Freundel mikvah-peeping scandal.

Both lawsuits allege that the Rabbinical Council of America and Freundel’s own synagogue were aware of inappropriate conduct by Freundel prior to the discovery that he was using a hidden camera to view women as they bathed nude in a Washington, D.C. ritual bath. The lawsuits, which seek class action status, charge that the RCA and Congregation Kesher Israel should have taken measures to remove him from his positions of responsibility based on his earlier behavior.

One of the suits underlines odd behavior by Freundel relating to the mikvah, noting that he allowed non-Jews to attend rituals there and that he invented the notion of “practice dunks.” That suit also quotes an unnamed Kesher Israel staff member saying that Freundel “treated the mikvah like a car wash. Every Sunday, six students at a time.”

That suit charges that Freundel used his role in the RCA’s controversial centralized conversion system to put himself in a position of power over potential converts — a position he allegedly used for sexual exploitation.

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NEW YORK
The Jewish Week

12/24/14
Hella Winston
Jewish Week Correspondent

When the bribery and extortion charges against chasidic sex-abuse whistleblower Sam Kellner were finally dropped last March by incoming Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, advocates for abuse victims hailed the decision. At the same time, they urged Thompson to investigate and bring to justice those who allegedly framed Kellner, who was indicted in 2011 under the administration of the former DA, Charles Hynes.

It has now been almost 10 months since the Kellner case was dismissed and the district attorney has taken no action against those who were behind the trumped-up charges.

Now, advocates suggest, there may be at least a partial explanation: Leo Friedman, the son of one of the three witnesses who apparently gave false grand jury testimony against Kellner, Satmar power broker Moses Friedman, was a hefty contributor to Thompson’s campaign.

Moses Friedman, who is known in the Satmar community as Moshe Gabbai for his longtime role as the personal secretary of the previous Satmar rebbe, Moses Teitelbaum, is also a cousin by marriage of Baruch Lebovits, a convicted child molester whom Kellner helped to put in jail.

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NEW YORK
Wall Street Journal

By MELANIE GRAYCE WEST
Dec. 23, 2014

For dozens of Roman Catholic parishes in the New York area, this Thursday will mark a last Christmas celebration.

The reorganization of 368 Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of New York is entering a new phase as archdiocese leaders begin implementing more than 50 mergers announced in early November and slated to take effect next August.

But some churches aren’t going down without a fight.

At least 18 parishes are now seeking recourse with the Vatican to overturn or limit the scope of the imminent merger, according to Sister Kate Kuenstler, a canon lawyer advising the churches.

Among the parishes at various stages of the appeals process are the Church of the Nativity in the East Village, and the Church of Our Lady of Peace and the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, both on the Upper East Side. The Church of St. Elizabeth is the only one in New York offering regular services for deaf and hearing-impaired Catholics.

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UNITED STATES
Crux

Margery Eagan
On Spirituality columnist
@MargeryEagan

December 24, 2014

Congratulations to Emily Herx, the Indiana Catholic school teacher fired for using in vitro fertilization treatment to become pregnant. Last week she won a nearly $2 million lawsuit against the Fort Wayne-South Bend Roman Catholic archdiocese.

Most heartening: she won on the basis of sex discrimination, meaning the Church can’t always get away with treating women differently than men.

Herx was fired for running afoul of Church teachings on reproductive issues. But her lawsuit argued that the archdiocese had not fired any male teachers who’d run afoul of Church teachings as well by, for example, obtaining vasectomies or agreeing to their wives’ tubal ligations. A federal jury agreed with Herx fast, deliberating but a few hours in a single day.

Her suit also exposed the Church’s continuing double standard between the rank and file and its bishops. While the archdiocese in Herx case cracked down, again, over a matter involving sex and a teacher, the Vatican remains slow to crack down on matters involving sex and its bishops. Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City has become the new poster boy for this double standard. Two years post his criminal misdemeanor conviction for failing to report to police a suspected pedophile priest, Finn is still being investigated by Rome.

Herx, a woman suffering with infertility, notes in her suit that a priest labeled her a “grave, immoral sinner.” What, then, is Finn?

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UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org

Please donate today to BishopAccountability.org – your gift is tax-deductible and helps document and promote transparency.

1. Our website hosted 1.5 million unique visitors — a 15% jump from 2013!

2. Our website grew to an astounding 300,000 pages of documents, articles, and reports. We maintain the world’s largest archive of abuse documents outside the Holy See.

3. Our Database of Accused Priests grew by 178 names. It now provides information on more than 4,000 accused bishops, priests, nuns, and brothers.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph

LEMA SAMANDAR THE DAILY TELEGRAPH DECEMBER 24, 2014

A FORMER Catholic brother has been extradited from New Zealand after he was charged with 252 child sexual assault offences.

Bernard McGrath, 67, was extradited from New Zealand overnight and was taken to Mascot Police Station where he was charged.

He appeared briefly at Parramatta Local Court today.

He will spend Christmas behind bars and is expected to make a bail application during his next court appearance on January 29.

Strike Force Lozano, comprising detectives from Lake Macquarie Local Area Command, was formed to investigate allegations of multiple child sexual assault offences committed in the 1970s and 1980s at a school near Morisset.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

A former Hunter region Catholic Brother accused of a series of historical child sex offences has arrived in Sydney after being extradited from New Zealand.

Police began investigating Bernard Kevin McGrath in 2010 and have been caught up in a long running legal battle to get him back to Australia.

In August, the 66-year-old former Catholic Brother was ordered to surrender to Australia by New Zealand’s Justice Minister.

He appealed to the High Court which last week ruled the extradition would not be unjust.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)

Former Catholic brother appears in court after being extradited back to Australia to face 252 child sexual assault charges

By SARAH DEAN

A former Catholic brother charged with 252 child sexual assaults has appeared in court after finally being extradited to Australia from New Zealand.

Former brother Bernard McGrath faced an extensive list of charges at Parramatta Local Court – including raping, molesting and abusing 35 children – after being flown in from New Zealand on Tuesday.

He appeared via video link and was refused bail.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

A former Catholic brother extradited from New Zealand to Australia to face hundreds of child sexual abuse charges has been refused bail in a Sydney court.

Bernard McGrath, 66, is in Australia after a legal bid to block his extradition failed in New Zealand’s highest court earlier this month.

On Wednesday, his matter was mentioned at Parramatta Local Court.

McGrath, who is a New Zealand citizen, didn’t apply for bail which was formally refused, the NSW Department of Justice confirmed.

He is facing a total 252 charges, including 102 counts of indecent assaults on males.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler | Dec 23, 2014

Sometime early in the new year, Pope Francis will reveal the names of the new cardinals who will be elevated at a consistory in February 2015. How many American prelates will be on the list?

Quite likely, none at all.

There are currently 18 US citizens in the College of Cardinals. The only country with a greater representation is Italy, with a staggering 48. By contrast, the entire continent of Africa can boast only 18 cardinals, and Asia only 19. If Pope Francis seeks a geographical balance in the College, he may not want to add to the American contingent.

Look at the numbers in a slightly different way: Today there are 111 cardinals who are under the age of 80 and therefore eligible to vote in a papal conclave; 11 of them are Americans. The US accounts for roughly 7% of the world’s Catholic population, but 10% of the cardinal-electors. On this score, too, there would seem to be no urgent need to increase the American representation.

Again there are some striking contrasts: Brazil, with nearly 12% of the world’s Catholics, would have only four votes in a papal conclave today. Mexico, with almost 9%, would have 2 votes; the Philippines, with a Catholic population nearly the same as that of the US, would also have just 2 votes.

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CANADA
Sun News

MICHAEL MUI | QMI AGENCY

VANCOUVER – A B.C. woman has dropped her lawsuit alleging sexual abuse against former Vancouver Olympics organizing committee CEO John Furlong.

Lawyer Jason Gratl said Tuesday that Beverly Abraham, of Burns Lake, applied to have the suit dismissed, and the request was granted this past Friday in B.C. Supreme Court.

Furlong has always insisted he is innocent of all allegations.

Meanwhile, Gratl has also withdrawn from representing Grace West and Daniel Morice, both of whom also sued Furlong.

He couldn’t provide reasons, however, because of professional confidentiality obligations.

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CANADA
The Tyee

By Bob Mackin, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca

Allegations by one woman that John Furlong sexually, physically and mentally abused her 45 years ago will not be tested in court, but two others who similarly accused the ex-VANOC boss are still scheduled to face him in B.C. Supreme Court.

Beverly Mary Abraham withdrew her lawsuit Dec. 19, two weeks after her lawyer, Jason Gratl, filed notice to quit the case. Gratl is also no longer representing Grace Jessie West or a male victim who wishes not to be named.

In September, the parties set March 30, 2015 to begin an 18-day trial where the allegations would be heard either together or consecutively. Furlong previously claimed his innocence and agreed to pay the costs of the civil trial. November court filings indicate there was a dispute between Gratl and Furlong’s lawyers over whether the trial would be by judge alone or with a jury.

Last June, the court ordered the RCMP’s North District Regional General Investigations Section to release Abraham and West’s investigation files to Gratl. Examination for discovery of Furlong was to be completed by Dec. 31, 2014.

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CANADA
Metro News

By Thandi Fletcher

A woman who claims former Vancouver Olympic CEO John Furlong sexually abused her while he was a teacher in a northern B.C. school has withdrawn her lawsuit.

Beverly Mary Abraham said she decided to drop the civil case after months of careful consideration, saying the stress of the lawsuit was too difficult to bear following the deaths of several relatives this year.

“I was so stressed about everything,” she told Metro from her home in Burns Lake, B.C. “There was a lot of weight on my shoulders.”

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CANADA
The Globe and Mail

MARK HUME
VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Dec. 23 2014

Three lawsuits that seek to portray former Vancouver Olympic CEO John Furlong as a repeat sexual abuser appear to be unravelling in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

One of the three suits has been dismissed. And the two remaining cases are now in doubt with the withdrawal of Jason Gratl, the Vancouver lawyer who was acting for all three accusers.

Beverly Mary Abraham, Grace Jessie West and a man who has asked not to be named, filed sexual abuse claims against Mr. Furlong last year, alleging he assaulted them while they were students of his at a Burns Lake elementary school in 1969-70.

The cases were scheduled to be tried jointly in March, but a motion to dismiss the two remaining cases is expected to be made by Mr. Furlong at a hearing in January.

Mr. Gratl declined comment Tuesday, but in an interview Ms. Abraham confirmed she asked the court to dismiss her claim last Friday, after Mr. Gratl told her he was no longer going to represent her.

“He told me that there was one of his clients that did something wrong and he was charged with it, so he had to walk away,” said Ms. Abraham. “He kind of dropped all three of us together all at once. He didn’t want to drop me but he said that with one, he cannot go to court.”

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WASHINGTON (DC)
Baltimore Jewish Times

DECEMBER 23, 2014 – א טבת תשעה

BY DMITRIY SHAPIRO

While the criminal trial of Rabbi Barry Freundel, formerly of the Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C., on six counts of voyeurism has not yet begun, some women who allege they are Freundel’s victims have joined a class-action civil lawsuit against his former employers, seeking to be compensated for emotional injuries.

A team of attorneys from the Baltimore-based firm Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin and White LLC, led by attorney Steven Kelly, held a news conference at the National Press Club last week announcing the addition of the Rabbinical Council of America to the list of defendants in the civil action they filed earlier this month.
RCA now joins Kesher Israel, the National Capital Mikvah and Georgetown University as defendants in the suit, all of which are accused of negligently failing to oversee Freundel prior to his arrest in October, despite previous RCA inquiries into improper conduct between Freundel and conversion candidates.

Two plaintiffs who believe themselves to be victims of Freundel (the U.S. Attorney’s office has not publicly released the identities of the six victims listed in the criminal complaint) were also added to the case. They are Emma Shulevitz, 27, of Rockville, and Towson University student Stephanie Smith.

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WASHINGTON
Seattle PI

By Joel Connelly

Mark Driscoll, the blue jeans-clad, controversy-plagued former lead pastor at Mars Hill Church, has resurfaced with a new website, just eight days before the Seattle based mega church he co-founded formally dissolves.

The website, its layout bearing striking resemblance to that of his former church, is offering “free exclusive resources directly from Pastor Mark Driscoll” for those who sign up. The initial offering is a Christmas-themed e-book, “The Boy Who is Lord: Jesus’Birth in Luke’s Gospel.”

The Driscoll site also asks for gifts, saying: ”Your tax-deductible donation allows us to continue hosting and distributing Pastor Mark’s Bible teachings and resources.”

The donations “apparently go to something called Learning for Living, described as ‘an application-pending registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax-deductible in full or in part,’” Warren Throckmorton reported on Patheos.

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CANADA
Blackburn News

BURNS LAKE, B.C. – A woman who dropped a lawsuit alleging former Olympic CEO John Furlong sexually abused her while a teacher in Burns Lake, B.C., says she feels like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders.

Beverly Abraham’s lawsuit against Furlong was dismissed in B.C. Supreme Court on Friday with no costs to either party, after she asked the court to allow her to withdraw the legal action.

Abraham said three of her family members have died recently, including her brother who was like a “twin” to her, and she couldn’t handle the stress of the lawsuit on top of her grief.

“A lot was just really heavy on my shoulders. I was going through a lot of stress with this,” she said in a phone interview Tuesday.

She says she decided that discontinuing her lawsuit was the best option for her to move on with her life after consulting with hereditary chiefs from her First Nation.

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MALTA
Malta Independent

[with photo of the card]

Rachel Attard
Wednesday, 24 December 2014

Dominican friar Charles Fenech has sent a Christmas card to a woman who was allegedly abused by him, The Malta Independent has learnt. The card depicting the scene of the Nativity contained a religious message inside. He signed it by hand and addressed it to her, and her family.

Yesterday week the court started hearing evidence in the case against Fr Fenech, 54, who is facing sexual abuse charges. So far, the alleged victim together with three other witnesses have given evidence behind closed doors. The woman who received the card was one of the witnesses who testified.

The sender’s address on the back of the is that of the Dominican Priory in Rabat. The card was sent in the last week of November as one can see from the Maltapost stamp. That date was before the court hearing. This was the week after The Malta Independent on Sunday published details from a sworn statement given by one of Fr Charles’ alleged victims to the police.

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OREGON
KOIN

HILLSBORO, Ore. (KOIN 6) — A youth pastor is facing criminal charges over claims he sexually abused at least one minor in his church’s basement, the Hillsboro Police Department confirmed Tuesday.

Dylan Ritterman, 27, worked as a youth minister at Bethel United Pentecostal Church, where the alleged molestation is said to have occurred.

Police arrested Ritterman last week after the mother of an alleged victim came forward. The mother told investigators that Ritterman touched her son inappropriately in 2009 and 2010, Hillsboro Police Lt. Mike Rouches confirmed.

The boy, now 18, was 14 and 15 at the time of the purported abuse, Rouches said.

Hillsboro police believe Ritterman may have abused more children but have not released any information regarding additional claims.

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OREGON
Oregonian

By Laura Frazier | lfrazier@oregonian.com
on December 23, 2014

A 27-year-old man has been accused of sexually abusing two teenage boys during his time as a youth pastor at a Hillsboro church, police say.

Dylan Ritterman was arrested Dec. 18 on allegations he “unlawfully touched” two boys, said Lt. Mike Rouches, a spokesman with the Hillsboro Police Department. The boys were 14 or 15 at the time, he said.

Ritterman was a youth pastor at Bethel United Pentecostal Church, Rouches said. At least one incident is believed to have occurred in a room at the church and at least one other in a car after Ritterman drove a boy home, he said.

A call has been placed to the church for comment.

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ARKANSAS
THV

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) – On Monday, a Hot Springs youth pastor was arrested for the rape of a 13-year-old girl.

The victim confirmed that Andrew Lee Jackson, 28, was her youth pastor at her church.

In a police report, the victim stated that she and Jackson engaged in sexual intercourse five different times at his residence that he shared with his wife.

She reportedly explained that she would often spend the night at his home in the living room on the couch with Jackson and his wife on separate sections of the couch.

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ARKANSAS
Arkansas Online

By Danielle Kloap

A Hot Springs youth pastor accused of rape has been arrested, according to the Garland County sheriff’s department.

The Jefferson County sheriff’s department arrested Andrew Lee Jackson, 28 of Hot Springs, in White Hall Monday night. He faces three counts of rape.

Police started the investigation involving Jackson and a 13-year-old girl Nov. 7, according to an arrest report.

Police said that the teen told investigators she and Jackson engaged in sexual intercourse three times at Jackson’s home between August and October.

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VATICAN CITY
Rome Reports

[with video]

Being a member of the Roman Curia is more dangerous than it looks. During his Christmas address to its members, Pope Francis asked this selected group cardinals to keep an eye on 15 diseases.

POPE FRANCIS
“A Curia that isn’t self-critical, that doesn’t want to update and doesn’t want to improve, is like a sick body.”

He went on to explain that all the different temptations have the same root, to distance oneself from God. He also referred to what he called “careerism,” that is, the wish to receive more and more titles that only feed vanity.

POPE FRANCIS
“It is the sickness of those people who live a double life. People who want to multiply their power at all costs, even if they have to slander, defame and discredit the other, even in newspapers and magazines.”

The Pope read his address in a very peaceful and quiet way. Still, he also made very strong remarks when he talked about the danger of gossiping.

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UNITED STATES
Questions from a Ewe

Just before I read reports of his Christmas address to the Vatican Curia, I was wondering if Pope Francis ever actually received the Christmas card and other letters I’ve sent him. He doesn’t write…; he doesn’t call…; he doesn’t visit… What’s a girl to think?

However, now I think it’s possible he has received my mail because his “15 Ailments of the Curia” echo many concerns I’ve expressed in my missives. If you’ve not read his list, I encourage you to do so.

As much as I appreciate Francis acknowledging and even chastising the hierarchy for its arrogance, hubris, insensitivity, hypocrisy, insecurity, self-absorption, fear and unhappiness resulting in over-bearing, domineering, control-freak, career-climbing, self-promoting, money-grubbing, gossiping, suck-up, fashionista hierarchy members who travel in cliques, his litany had a glaring omission: the ailment of “sexism.” I don’t know why he overlooked that ailment unless maybe it’s one that plagues him or one he does not acknowledge. Regardless, without addressing it, the other ailments will never be fully addressed.

I actually believe that tackling Pope Francis’ list of 15 without correcting the ailment of sexism likely will just make a sick turn of the crank grinding women down further within the church and society. I don’t know if that would be an intended or unintended consequence but humble, sensitive, secure, confident and happy sexists are still sexists. One might argue that such sexists are even more destructive ones because their charm wins people’s confidence enabling them to manipulate and abuse people more easily.

I think Francis would bristle at being labeled a sexist. I think he probably envisions himself a very pro-female kind of guy what with him appointing 5 whole women to his 30 person International Theological Commission. That mentality is fairly common amongst people of Francis’ and my parents’ generation. They are so indoctrinated into promoting a gender ideology of females’ limitations and duties, that they often see their sexism as just a factual manifestation of nature…”it’s just how things are…” And though some such folks believe themselves to be rather equality-minded, their face-palm worthy sexist statements and actions belie the gender ideology to which they are enslaved.

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CANADA
Vancouver Sun

BY TIFFANY CRAWFORD, VANCOUVER SUN DECEMBER 23, 2014

One of the women who accused former Vancouver Olympic CEO John Furlong of sexual abuse has withdrawn her lawsuit.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge granted Beverly Mary Abraham’s request for dismissal on Friday.

Just over four months ago, Abraham lost her brother and shortly after her cousin and her 16-year-old nephew both died. Then, a month ago, her 91-year-old mother broke her leg and Abraham said she felt like she couldn’t deal with the stress of the lawsuit.

She said after speaking with her husband and hereditary chief, “it was time to let it go.” She said she stands by her allegations but she is too tired and stressed out to continue.

“A lot of weight came off my shoulders. I felt a hundred times lighter instead of dragging all these problems around,” she said Tuesday morning from her home in Burns Lake. “I just want to give it up to God. I told the truth. That’s all that matters. It hurts me deeply inside when I think of all the people that supported me saying ‘way to go Bev.’ It seems to me I let them down, but I had to take care of myself too.”

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VATICAN CITY
The Pilot

Monday, December 22, 2014

Vatican City (ZENIT) — Pope Francis received in audience the Cardinals and Superiors of the Roman Curia Dec. 22 for the presentation of Christmas greetings.

After the greeting of the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Pope gave the Roman Curia the address ZENIT translates below.

* * *
“Thou art above the Cherubim, Thou who hast changed the miserable

condition of the world when Thou made Thyself like us” (Saint Athanasius).

Dear Brothers,

At the end of Advent we meet for the traditional greetings. In a few days we will have the joy of celebrating the Lord’s birth; the event of God who makes himself man to save men; the manifestation of the love of God who does not limit himself to give us something or to send us some message or some messengers, but gives himself to us; the mystery of God that takes our human condition and our sins on himself to reveal his divine life to us, his immense grace and his gratuitous forgiveness. It is the meeting with God who is born in the poverty of the cave of Bethlehem to teach us the power of humility. In fact, Christmas is also the feast of light that was not received by the “Chosen People” but by the “poor and simple people,” who awaited the Lord’s salvation.

First of all, I would like to wish you all – collaborators, brothers and sisters, papal representatives scattered throughout the world – and all your dear ones, a Holy Christmas and a happy New Year. I want to thank you cordially for your daily commitment at the service of the Holy See, of the Catholic Church, of the particular Churches and of the Successor of Peter.

We being persons and not numbers or just denominations, I remember in a special way those that, during this year, finished their service having reached the age limit or having taken on other roles or because they were called to the House of the Father. To all of them also, and to their families, go my thoughts and gratitude.

Together with you I wish to elevate to the Lord a heartfelt and profound gratitude for the year we are leaving behind, for the events lived and for all the good that He willed generously to fulfil through the service of the Holy See, asking Him humbly for forgiveness for the faults committed “in thoughts, words, deeds and omissions.”

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