ABUSE TRACKER

DEUTSCHLAND
RTF

[The Rottenburg-Stuttgart diocese has confirmed that a former Leutkircher pastor was accused of sexually abusing a child. However, no financial compensation has been paid to the victim.]

22.12.2014Die Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart hat einen Medienbericht über sexuelle Vergehen des früheren Leutkircher Pfarrers an einem Heimkind im Grundsatz bestätigt. Allerdings sei das Verfahren im Sommer bereits abgeschlossen und das erlittene Unrecht des Opfers auch finanziell anerkannt worden, stellte die Kommission Sexueller Missbrauch (KSM) der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart am Montag fest. In dem Medienbericht wird allerdings fälschlicherweise der Eindruck erweckt, die Diözese erkenne nur noch bis Jahresende Opfer sexuellen Missbrauchs an.

Tatsächlich bezieht sich die Aussage offenbar auf den vom Staat initiierten Heimkinderfonds West. Dieser mit 120 Millionen von Bund, Ländern und Kirchen ausgestattete Fonds zahlte bislang nach einem Anerkennungsverfahren jedem in einem Heim missbrauchten Menschen bis zu 10.000 Euro an Sachleistungen.

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

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.

4. The Boston Globe’s recent front-page investigative report (at right) and editorial about past cover-up by Robert J. Geisinger, S.J., the Pope’s new prosecutor of abuse cases, was made possible in part by research and documents we shared with the Globe.

5. We produced the first comprehensive analysis of how the pope handled abuse when he was an Argentine archbishop. In July, it was cited in the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and the Wall St. Journal.

6. To launch our global database initiative, we published the first database of accused priests in Argentina, the Pope’s home country, in both English and Spanish. In the course of our research, we came to know Argentine victims, including four who unsuccessfully had sought the Pope’s help. We introduced them to each other, and together they wrote a letter to Pope Francis, asking for a meeting.

7. We sent Homeland Security documents we had obtained about a Pennsylvania priest alleged to have sexually molested boys at a Honduras orphanage. Homeland Security investigated, and the priest, Father Joseph Maurizio (at right), was indicted.

8. We caused Pope Francis to remove a bishop (at right below). The Pope’s unusual move came in response to the media uproar caused by our revelation in March that an abusive priest banned from the Scranton diocese had been made second in command of a diocese in Paraguay. Within six months, Pope Francis had removed not only the priest, but the bishop in Paraguay who had hired him.

9. Our authoritative data on church bankruptcies, settlements with victims, and numbers of accused priests were cited by the New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, Associated Press, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets.

10. We answered individual queries from dozens of survivors. “You are the blessing I’ve been praying for since I finally had the nerve to start speaking up last year,” a survivor wrote to us in October.

Our 2015 Projects Will Include

Completing assignment histories for all 170 accused Jesuits in our database. For the first time, it will be possible to understand the full impact of abuse in the largest religious order. See a sample Jesuit assignment history.

Posting Philadelphia priest files. We will post thousands of pages of Philadelphia files in time for the September 2015 visit of Pope Francis. See the first of the Philadelphia files.

Posting list of accused priests in the Philippines. We will post the first public list of accused priests who have worked in the Philippines in time for Pope Francis’s visit there in January. See a document about one of the priests in the new database.

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

GUAM
Marianas Variety

By Jasmine Stole – jasmine@mvguam.com – Variety News Staff

HAGÅTÑA — Concerned Catholics of Guam President Greg Perez said the recently formed organization is looking forward to meeting Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai, Rev. Tadeusz Nowak and Archbishop Martin Krebs when the three visit Guam in January.

Perez said he’s made a request to meet with the three officials between Jan. 4 through the Jan. 10.

“We sincerely believe this (visit) is in response to some of the complaints and concerns and questions that have been raised on island and have made its way to Rome,” Perez said. “We’re looking forward to meeting with them and they will come in and provide solutions.”

Archbishop Hon and Rev. Nowak will be here for the first time in an official capacity, according to Rev. Adrian Cristobal, spokesman for Guam Archbishop Anthony Apuron. It will also be Archbishop Krebs’ second visit to Guam in six months.

Hon is the secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and Krebs is the apostolic delegate to the Pacific Islands.

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

UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Pope Francis has been in the news lately. A lot. Headlines yesterday about his scolding of the Vatican Curia ranged from “Francis Gives Roman Curia Officials Coal for Christmas” (Robert Mickens, National Catholic Reporter), to “In Curia: Merry Christmas, You Power-Hungry Hypocrites” (Josephine McKenna, Religion News Service), to “Pope Francis Says the Vatican Curia Is Sick with Power and Greed” (Philip Pullella, Reuters), to “Pope Francis Denounces the Vatican Elite’s ‘Spiritual Alzheimer’s'” (Barbie Latza Nadeau, Daily Beast). I especially like Charles Pierce’s wry summary of Francis’s come-to-Jesus meeting with the Curia:

Spiritual Alzheimer’s?
A mark, that will surely leave.
I’m sure that, within a few weeks, a Senior Vatican Official, or Ross Cardinal Douthat, will explain that the pope really was talking about birth control.
But, still, wow.

As I say, the pope’s in the news. And here’s more good commentary about Francis and his papacy I’d like to recommend to readers today, as you follow the media statements about his remarks to the Curia:

Jason Berry, “How Pope Francis Became the World’s BFF”:

Neither book [i.e., Austen Ivereigh, The Great Reformer and Elizabeth Piqué, Pope Francis: Life and Revolution] gives any coverage to Bergoglio’s handling of clergy sex abuse cases as a bishop and cardinal. The website BishopAccountability.org has posted an extensive file of media reports and documents on scandals in Argentina to suggest that Bergoglio was not a healing pastor to abuse victims. And while as pope he has removed several bishops for child abuse, several prominent cardinals in the Vatican who were grossly negligent in concealing pedophiles, notably the former Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, have suffered no loss of status. Conversely, Francis has stiffened internal Vatican laws governing child abuse accusations; he has appointed an advisory committee that includes a prominent Irish abuse survivor to develop a policy. The central issue is de facto immunity traditionally given to bishops and cardinals.

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

UNITED STATES
Esquire

By Charles P. Pierce on December 22, 2014

As always, the usual disclaimers are in place, but it seems that Papa Francesco took advantage of his annual Christmas message to give some members of the Clan Of The Red Beanie a good kick right in the chasubles.

The pope denounced the lust for power of ladder-climbing clerics, those who indulge in hypocritical double lives, and lamented a sense of “spiritual Alzheimer’s” that leads clerics to forget the joy that is supposed to animate their lives. He also attacked what he called “existential schizophrenia” and the “terrorism of gossip.” He was especially critical of cliques that “enslave their members and become a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body,” eventually leading to death by “friendly fire.” “These and other maladies and temptations,” Francis said, “are a danger for every Christian and for any administrative organization, community, congregation, parish, ecclesial movement, etc., and can strike at both the individual and the corporate level.”
Spiritual Alzheimer’s?

A mark, that will surely leave.

I’m sure that, within a few weeks, a Senior Vatican Official, or Ross Cardinal Douthat, will explain that the pope really was talking about birth control.

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

UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

* Pope Francis surprisingly severely scolded and shamed the Vatican’s bureaucracy, gathered publicly this week for pre-Christmas festivities with the boss. Some of the officials, including Boston’s previously shamed Cardinal Bernard Law, appeared to be in shock, as seen in the PBS video here:

* [PBS]

* Every official was hit — the good, the bad and the ugly. A bit unfair, according to some conservative commentators, who were right on this. The officials may have been expecting good wishes for the season after a tough year. Instead they got a terrible scolding. All manner of immoral actions were cited, they were told, as prevalent in the corridors of Catholic Church power: ruthless careerism, back-biting, narcissism, complacency.

* Pope Francis, following Hans Kung’s medical metaphor, clinically diagnosed no less than 15 specific ailments suffered by Church officials, ranging from a diminishing awareness that the officials’ work had a sacred purpose—to delusions of omnipotence and the terrorism of gossip. Implicitly, Francis indicated he would act to change things soon, no? Will he? Can he? When? How? What was his point in publicly ambushing the entire Vatican bureaucracy? The shrewd ex-bouncer seems always to have a point, even if one has to tease it out at times, no?

* What’s next? Will Pope Francis fire some more officials? Will he act to fix the top down monarchical system that almost inevitably fosters these immoral actions? Francis has not yet “named names” and some of these ailments plague many of his worldwide bishops as well, from many indications.

* Was this just a planned media friendly papal rant of a frustrated ex-bouncer, or is it a prelude to a full housecleaning as openers? After all, criminally convicted Kansas City’s Bishop Finn still remains on his episcopal throne, just one example of Francis’ management omissions so far!

* Was Pope Francis just trying to let worldwide Catholics through him “vicariously vent” their built up hostility to their failed Church leaders? This chilling Christmas rebuke was surprising, especially since Francis has been dealing with the Vatican hierarchy for over four decades, and for over two decades as an episcopal insider. What did he expect to find when he volunteered to be pope at 76 years old?

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

VATICAN CITY
Wall Street Journal – via BishopAccountability.org

By Deborah Ball and Tamara Audi
Wall Street Journal
December 23, 2014

http://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-issues-blistering-critique-of-vatican-bureaucracy-1419278268
Click image at right to view PDF of front page.

Pope Francis launched his harshest criticism to date of the Vatican bureaucracy, likening it to an “ailing body,” and setting the stage for what is expected to be sweeping reform next year.

In his Christmas address on Monday to cardinals and senior officials attached to the Curia, the church’s Rome-based administrative apparatus, Pope Francis warned against “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease,” careerism and gossip.

The harsh critique grabbed wide attention, with the Religion News Service offering a headline that said, “Pope Francis to Curia: Merry Christmas, you power-hungry hypocrites.”

Pope Francis has broken new ground during his papacy in a range of areas, suggesting a more open approach to homosexuals, advocating a stronger role for women in the church, rebalancing the College of Cardinals to increase the weight of the emerging world, and helping support the reopening of relations between Cuba and the U.S.

In a similar vein, the address to the Curia seemed to serve notice that he aggressively plans to take on the problems that have developed in the Vatican bureaucracy during the past decade from infighting among cardinals to embarrassing leaks. …

Terence McKiernan, President of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks the sex-abuse scandal in the church, said the pope’s speech must be followed with real actions.

“This is a very capable man who is really making some remarkable changes. Rhetoric is part of the way you change things, but it needs to be accompanied by real and significant action,” he said.

“He’s opening up a dialogue that never existed before and I think that’s a very healthy thing,” said Raymond Flynn, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, and a Catholic. “Some people will get their nose out of joint, but in the final analysis I think this makes the church stronger.”

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

NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

BY JOANNE SWEENEY – 23 DECEMBER 2014

For 17 years she was referred only as ‘Number 51’.

But the little girl who grew up unloved and neglected in an orphanage – now under scrutiny in a major Government investigation – has had the last word.

Marie Therese Rogers-Moloney’s heartrending story of the physical and emotional abuse she experienced at the Catholic Church-run Nazareth House and the search for her parents has resulted in success as a best-selling writer.

The Belfast woman’s memoir – For The Sins Of My Mother – is currently in the top 10 in the best selling list in Eason’s.

The book, which she started to write over 20 years ago, has sold more than 800 copies in just three weeks after being launched by publisher Colourpoint Books at Belfast Castle last month.

The retired nurse and administrative officer will be one of a number of adults cared for by The Sisters of Nazareth congregation at Nazareth House to give evidence at the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry next year.

The memoir tells of how she was allocated the number in place of her birth name – which today includes the surnames of both parents – and how she was labelled as “educationally subnormal” by the nuns who looked after her when she retreated into silence in order to escape any mistreatment. Yesterday she told the Belfast Telegraph: “Not all the nuns were bad, but there were three nuns who were just plain cruel and there was no need for it.

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

UNITED STATES
Commonweal

Grant Gallicho December 23, 2014

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the Urrutigoity case. Read the first part here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here.

The day after Fr. Eric Ensey first sexually assaulted him, John Doe testified, he asked to sleep on the couch. The two were staying with Ensey’s parents in California so that John could visit Thomas Aquinas College. He was considering of attending TAC after graduating from St. Gregory’s Academy in Pennsylvania, where he had met Ensey. It was the fall of 1998. “I remember thinking that I would like to [sleep on the couch],” John would later testify as part of a federal lawsuit alleging that Ensey and Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity had molested him. Yet he was worried that asking to move from Ensey’s bedroom, where the two had spent the previous night, to the sofa “might give some sort of bad connotation.” John thought Ensey’s parents might wonder whether “something had happened, and that was the one thing that I did not want to admit.”

John was upset about what had happened while he stayed at Ensey’s parents. He would later allege that the priest had sexually assaulted him while he was passed out drunk on four occasions during that trip to California. But John “was trying to put it out of my mind.” At the same time, he found it hard to believe that Fr. Ensey “could do something wrong.” By trying to banish those memories, John was able to continue spending time with Ensey when they returned to St. Gregory’s Academy. After resuming his late-night meetings with Ensey, John faced more mockery from classmates. “They made fun of me for spending time with Fr. Ensey,” John recalled, even though it was “very widely known among the students that a good portion of the students drank with Society members.” On one occasion, John returned to his dorm room well after lights out. As he was about to slip into bed, he noticed that someone had spat mucus all over his pillow. “So I didn’t really feel accepted.”

Ensey provided solace. “He made it a point to discuss how friendship should be kept between one or two [people]…and how he was a true friend and no one else was.” By this point, Ensey seemed to be “the only one who understood me…the only one I bothered to invest time in,” John testified. So he continued to participate in Ensey’s brand of alcohol-assisted spiritual direction. On several occasions between the time they returned from California and the time John graduated, Ensey fondled him, according to John’s testimony. (Under oath, Ensey denied assaulting or groping John; efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.)

Yet John still hadn’t told anyone, and he continued spending time with Ensey. That did not mean he was comfortable with the situation. Rather, Ensey had continued to insist that because John was “raised American” he had “Puritanical instincts concerning male friendship,” according to John. Ensey repeated his view “that it was natural for men to sleep in the same bed…[and] to cuddle.” The “Puritanical” aspects of American culture were something Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity was known to complain about, according to other witnesses.

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

CANADA
CKNW

Liza Yuzda
December 23, 2014

One of the women who filed suit against Former Vanoc CEO John Furlong, accusing him of abuse, has withdrawn her lawsuit.

A judge granted Beverly Abraham’s request for dismissal Friday.

Furlong has maintained his innocence.

A year ago police confirmed they found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Furlong.

He’s already taken legal action against reporter Laura Robinson who he is accusing of mounting a ‘malicious’ campaign to destroy his reputation.

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

CANADA
CBC News

By Jason Proctor, CBC News Posted: Dec 23, 2014

A woman who claimed she was abused by John Furlong while he was a teacher in Burns Lake, B.C., has dropped her lawsuit against the former head of the Vancouver Olympic Games.

Beverly Mary Abraham was the most outspoken of three people who filed claims in the wake of a Georgia Straight newspaper article alleging Furlong had mistreated students at Immaculata Roman Catholic School in the late 1960s.

“The reason for it is that it was kind of stressing me out,” Abraham said from her home in Burns Lake. “I’ve been thinking about it for months.”

Justice Miriam Gropper dismissed Abraham’s claim last Friday after she made an application in B.C. Supreme Court. The case was dismissed by consent, without costs to either party. The other two claims continue, but the CBC has learned the lawyer representing both remaining claimants is withdrawing from the lawsuits.

Vehement denial

Furlong has vehemently denied the allegations in all three lawsuits and the newspaper story. He is suing the author of the article, Laura Robinson, but previously dropped a claim against the weekly paper that published the article in September 2012.

His counsel at Hunter Litigation Chambers issued this statement in relation to Abraham:

“Mr. Furlong has always maintained that Ms. Abraham’s claim, as well as the claim of assault by the other two plaintiffs, are false. The dismissal follows the RCMP’s conclusion following an investigation that, ‘Based on the facts uncovered, the allegations made by Beverly Abraham are not supported.'”

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

VATICAN CITY
The Economist – Erasmus

POPE Francis is a bag of surprises. When members of the curia, the Vatican’s Italian-dominated bureaucracy, gathered this week for a pre-Christmas meeting with the boss, they may have been expecting some emollient words of encouragement and good wishes for the season when their faith’s beginnings are enjoyably celebrated. Instead they got a terrible scolding. All manner of pathologies were at work, they were told, in the corridors of ecclesiastical power: ruthless careerism, back-biting, narcissism, complacency. The pope diagnosed no less than 15 specific failings, ranging from “spiritual Alzheimer’s”—presumably, a diminishing awareness that the curia’s work had a sacred purpose—to delusions of omnipotence and the “terrorism of gossip”. Indeed, some Vatican operatives were said to be guilty of “cold-bloodedly killing the reputation of their own colleagues and brothers”.

Many people will immediately understand what the pope was talking about. In the weeks and months before the surprise resignation of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, nearly two years ago, the papacy seemed on the verge of paralysis because of the rumours of financial and sexual scandal that were swirling round the Vatican. Ever since then, the new pope has been working hard to get the curia under control. As the first pope from the global south, he has invited a team of non-Italian prelates to advise him on reforming the administration’s labyrinthine structures. In recent days his Australian adviser on economic matters, Cardinal George Pell, reported that the financial situation was both better and worse than anybody imagined; he had found that “hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on any balance-sheet.”

Strangely enough, the papal scolding comes only days after a historic success for the one department of the Vatican that is widely admired. The historic breakthrough in relations between the United States and Cuba, announced last week, was in large measure orchestrated by the holy see’s diplomatic service, and the Vatican was not shy about taking some credit for this. So was the pope being a tad unfair, or inconsistent, in celebrating a diplomatic triumph one day and excoriating his own bureaucrats a few days later? In fact, both initiatives (helping the breakthrough with Cuba, and the drive to clean up the curia) come from places deep inside the pope’s complex personality, to judge from the biography which I reviewed in this week’s print edition.

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

VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

The cardinal claims: ‘The Pope talks about himself as well. Gossip can kill’

GIACOMO GALEAZZI
VATICAN CITY

‘To be honest, nothing like this has ever happened before’. Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, the former Vatican governor and foreign minister, does not hide his surprise. ‘It is the first time this has happened; never before had a Pope set us in the Curia a series of pathologies that we must examine ourselves on.’ All along, says the cardinal who has been head of some of the most important offices of the Holy See for many years, ‘the exchange of Christmas wishes has been a customary occasion, that follows a usual pattern’.

What did you expect from Pope Francis’ speech?

‘On this occasion, his predecessors would usually say nothing but the most relevant events of the past year. They summed up the principal events in the Church and in their apostolic activity. So you could have expected Francis to talk about his travels to the Holy See and Turkey, instead he said nothing about them. Maybe he will refer to these in his speech to the ambassadors to the Vatican.’

How did you welcome the Pope’s warning?

‘It is the request of an examination of conscience, of an end-of-the-year confession. For the first time a Pope asks the Curia to examine itself on a number of problematic issues. For instance, on the basis of my experiences of the Curia, I believe that a simplification of procedures would diminish scandals.’

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

REPUBLICA DOMINICANA
Caracol

[The Dominican Attorney General said today that so far they have received no official report from Polish authorities on a dismissal of the case in that country against exnuncio Jozef Wesolowski, accused of sexual abuse in the Caribbean nation.]

La Procuraduría General dominicana dijo hoy que hasta el momento no hay ningún reporte oficial de las autoridades polacas sobre una desestimación en ese país del caso contra el exnuncio Jozef Wesolowski, acusado de abuso sexual de menores en la nación caribeña, tal como informó la prensa.

Agencia EFE | 22 de Diciembre de 2014

Santo Domingo, 22 dic (EFE).- La Procuraduría General dominicana dijo hoy que hasta el momento no hay ningún reporte oficial de las autoridades polacas sobre una desestimación en ese país del caso contra el exnuncio Jozef Wesolowski, acusado de abuso sexual de menores en la nación caribeña, tal como informó la prensa.

“Las informaciones provenientes de un diario polaco, no citan nombres de autoridades, solo “fuentes cercanas a la Fiscalía”. No es oficial”, indicó la Procuraduría a través de un mensaje en Twitter, en el que se refirió a las versiones de medios sobre una desestimación del caso en Polonia contra Wesolowski por supuesta falta de evidencias.

La Procuraduría explicó, además, que en este momento se llevan a cabo dos procesos por presuntos abusos por parte de sacerdotes polacos en República Dominicana con dos “jurisdicciones diferentes”: en Polonia contra el religioso Wojciech Gil y en el Vaticano contra Wesolowski.

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

POLAND
The New York Times

By JOANNA BERENDT
DEC. 22, 2014

WARSAW — Poland has suspended an investigation into the Polish-born former Vatican ambassador, Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, who has been accused of sexually abusing boys while serving in the Dominican Republic.

Przemyslaw Nowak, a spokesman for Warsaw’s regional prosecutor’s office, said Monday that the investigation had been suspended for purely formal reasons. The Dominican investigators have not responded to Poland’s requests for materials and evidence concerning the allegations against Mr. Wesolowski, who has been defrocked. The inquiry could begin again if the Dominican Republic shares — or officially declines to share — the requested documentation, Mr. Nowak said.

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

UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave

Kevin O’Brien

One of the readers of my latest post (It’s Not the Abuse Crisis – It’s the Neglect Crisis) somehow got it into his head that I was making the claim that only the liberals are to blame for the Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Church – which would be a pretty insane position for me to take. Perhaps he hasn’t read my criticisms of all of the so-called “conservative” bishops who have enabled abuse, such as Finn, Carlson, Niendstedt, Livieres, etc.

In fact, as everyone knows (but this lone reader), the Abuse crisis cuts across the Big Divide. If liberals could point to hung-up conservatives as abuse enablers, they would, except that conservatives can point to loosey-goosey liberals as abuse enablers. The problem continues to be so wide-spread that every single type of bishop is guilty – and while some of the worst are from the right, some of the worst are also from the left.

But this shows how strange our thinking is.

Conservatives in the Church are a weird bunch, rebelling against the Church on Torture and Lying and Economic issues; but liberals in the Church are even stranger, for not only do the liberals rebel on any issue that has to do with our “naughty bits”, the liberals go one step further and make the appallingly stupid mistake of thinking that Church teaching is up for grabs, and that it can be changed, despite 2,000 years of history to the contrary. Not only can it be changed, it will be changed! Just wait long enough and the bishops will endorse “gay marriage”, contraception, abortion and pornography – all things most bishops even now wink at and ignore … but someday these will be positive goods that the bishops will not only tolerate and enable – the bishops will proudly endorse every last one of them! What a strange fantasy to have.

There are days when I wish I was taller than 5′ 10″. But I don’t demand that the yardstick be changed and that feet and inches be redefined to make me 6′ 3″. In other words, I can understand not liking the measure the Church proposes by which we are to measure ourselves in relation to Christ. I can understand ignoring that measure, discrediting it, making fun of it. What I can’t understand is how changing that measure will somehow change us. My height will not change regardless of any tricks I play with the ruler. But liberals are in awe of their ability to alter reality by changing the standards by which we measure reality.

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

GUAM
Pacific News Center

Written by Janela Carrera

Guam – Just a few days after Deacon Steve Martinez was practically fired as a Deacon of the Church, Archbishop Anthony Apuron has decided to reinstate him.

In a letter Deacon Steve Martinez wrote to his supporters, he announced that just a few days after he was censured by the Church as Deacon, he was reinstated. However, Deacon Martinez notes that he’s not out of the woods yet.

Instead, Archbishop Anthony Apuron gave him a new deadline of January 19 to cut ties with the Concerned Catholics of Guam, a new organization whose mission is to investigate the Archdiocese of Agana and to provide a forum for concerned Catholics who feel they have been mistreated by the Church.

Last week, after failing to meet a 24-hour deadline to leave the group, Deacon Martinez accepted Archbishop Apuron’s punishment.

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

CANADA
StarPhoenix

A former Saskatoon youth pastor will spend two years under house arrest and 20 years on the national sex offender registry for a child luring conviction.

Kris Allan Gowdy, 44, was sentenced on Friday in Durham Region court in Oshawa, Ont. He was convicted following a trial earlier this year of luring a child over the Internet. A charge of attempted aggravated sexual assault was dropped in 2013.

Gowdy worked as a youth pastor at Saskatoon’s Lakeview Church between May 2011 and July 2012, before his arrest in Ontario, where he was living at the time.

After his arrest, a church official said Lakeview Church was not aware of any inappropriate behaviour involving Gowdy during his employment.

In August 2012, Gowdy was arrested in Ontario after making arrangements on social media to meet a 15-year-old boy for a sexual encounter. The boy was actually an undercover police officer.

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

VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast

Barbie Latza Nadeau

VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis may be known for his generosity when it comes to the needy, giving out 400 sleeping bags to Rome’s homeless and opening the doors of previously shuttered convents to Syrian refugees; but on Monday he made it absolutely clear he won’t be showing the same kindness to the Curia, the clerics who run—or think they run—the worldwide Catholic Church from their comfortable positions in Rome.

In language that left these officials stunned and silent, Francis denounced those among them who “create a parallel world of their own, where they set aside everything they teach with severity to others and live a hidden, often dissolute life.”

The pope didn’t just deliver a lump of coal to the Curia this Christmas; he set it ablaze, outlining what he called 15 ailments that he says are ruining the Catholic Church, ranging from “spiritual Alzheimer’s” to “existential schizophrenia” which the pope described as “the sickness of those who live a double life, fruit of the hypocrisy typical of the mediocre.” They are afflicted with “progressive spiritual emptiness,” he said, which no amount of academic honors and degrees can fill. …

Francis’s comments were met with scorn, reportedly garnering scant applause or none and plenty of glances among the cardinals who expected the usual benight season’s greetings from the pope. Writing in the Boston Globe, Vatican expert John Allen calls the pope’s address “risky” because like a president lambasting congress, the pope does need his Curia to make the changes he so strongly desires: “To insiders, it threw a key question into sharp focus: Is Francis in danger of alienating the very people he will need, sooner or later, to actually get anything done?”

The Vatican’s English language spokesman Father Thomas Rosica said that the pope’s words were prophetic. “Now and then in our religious history, prophets arise to call us back to our origins, our roots and also our intended mission,” Rosica wrote in a note to the press. “That is what Pope Francis is doing. His words apply not only to the Roman Curia at the Vatican but to the entire Church throughout the world. His words are also valid for many institutions in the world today that lose sight of their original mission.”

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NEW YORK
CBS 6

[with video]

Updated: Monday, December 22 2014

FONDA – A Northville man has been arrested, charged with sexual contact with a minor.

State Police say 50 year old David Dickey had sexual contact with a 16 year old earlier in the summer of 2014. Investigators say he was directing a play for a local Fulton County Church group when he became involved with the teen.

He was charged with Sexual Abuse and Endangering the Welfare of a Child. He was arraigned in Town of Mayfield Court and out on $1,000 bail.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Fox 43

DECEMBER 22, 2014, BY HOWARD SHEPPARD

DAUPHIN COUNTY, PA (WPMT) Dauphin County Judge Richard A. Lewis sentenced former youth minister and a former Dauphin County Domestic Relations Officer, Joshua Markelwitz, of Enola, to 12 years to 24 years in a state prison for charges stemming from his sexual molestation of a minor. Prior to sentencing Judge Lewis classified Markelwitz a Sexually Violent Predator under Pennsylvania’s Megan’s Law statute.

Markelwitz, 28, met his victim and her family through his church when she was about 11 years old.

Markelwitz was a youth leader at the church and her guitar teacher when he began molesting her. He molested the victim on numerous occasions over the period of approximately 3 years. The victim reported the abuse to the police when she was 15 years old.

During the course of the investigation another teenage victim, from Cumberland County, came forward indicating that Markelwitz also had a sexual relationship with her. Markelwitz met the Cumberland County victim when he was a volunteer with her high school band. Markelwitz began a sexual relationship with her after she turned 16 years old. Charges related to the Cumberland County case were consolidated into the Dauphin County prosecution. Markelwitz also admitted to charges related to the Cumberland County victim when he pleaded guilty before Dauphin County Judge Richard A. Lewis back on June 5, 2014.

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NEW YORK
News 10

MAYFIELD, N.Y. – The New York State Police arrested a Northville man for allegedly having inappropriate sexual contact with an underage teenager.

David Dickey is accused of having sexual contact with a 16 year old earlier in the summer. He was directing a play for a local Fulton County church group when he became involved with the teenager, according to police.

The 50-year-old was charged with Sexual Abuse in the Third Degree and Endangering the Welfare of a Child. He was arraigned in the Town of Mayfield court and posted $1,000 bail. He will reappear in the Town of Northampton Court on January 8, 2015.

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NEW YORK
Albany Times Union

MAYFIELD — State Police on Monday arrested a Fulton County man for allegedly having inappropriate sexual contact with a 16-year-old while directing a play for a local church group.

David E. Dickey, 50, of Northville, was charged with sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child, both misdemeanors.

Dickey became involved with the teen while directing a play earlier this summer, police said.

He was arraigned on the misdemeanors in Mayfield Town Court and posted $1,000 bail. He is to reappear in Northamption Town Court in January.

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OREGON
KPTV

[with video]

By Ben Senger

(KPTV) –
Hillsboro police arrested a youth minister in the sexual abuse of two boys at the church where he worked.

Officers took Dylan Ritterman into custody on Thursday on more than a dozen counts of sex abuse charges.

Police told Fox 12 there are at least two victims who Ritterman allegedly abused in the basement of the Bethel United Pentecostal Church in downtown Hillsboro.

The allegations were reported to police by the mother of one of the victims, who is now 18. She told police that Ritterman touched her son inappropriately in 2009 and 2010, when the boy was 14 and 15 years old, respectively. Police said the suspect would also drive the victim home occasionally.

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TEXAS
Yuma News Now

Dallas, Texas – A former north Texas youth minister was indicted by a federal grand jury last week on child pornography offenses, announced U.S. Attorney Sarah R. Saldaña of the Northern District of Texas.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Garland Police Department investigated.

Derek Hutter, 37, was charged with one count of attempted production of child pornography and one count of receipt of child pornography. He was arrested on those charges and entered a not-guilty plea before U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul D. Stickney Dec. 18.

Hutter worked as a youth minister at the South Garland Baptist Church in Garland, Texas.

The indictment alleges that about Aug. 14, 2014, Hutter sent an email to Jane Doe #1, a minor girl, requesting she take sexually explicit photos of herself and text them to him. The indictment further alleges that about Sept. 14 Hutter received images of child pornography on his email account.

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UNITED STATES
PBS Newshour

GWEN IFILL: Pope Francis took church leaders and Catholics around the world by surprise today when he used an annual Christmas event in Rome to sharply rebuke and audience of top church officials for their shortcomings.

The cardinals, bishops and priests of the Curia, who run the Holy See, sat mostly silent and unsmiling as the pope delivered a scalding review of their behavior.

POPE FRANCIS, Leader of Catholic Church (through interpreter): Let’s start with the sickness of feeling immortal, immune or, even more, indispensable and therefore of neglecting the necessary routine checkups.

GWEN IFILL: Francis said the Vatican officials have a spiritual Alzheimer’s that makes them forget their real purpose, and he listed 15 illnesses, or sins, from vanity to gossip-mongering to materialism.

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VERMONT
WCAX

[with video]

By Alex Apple

BURLINGTON, Vt. – Vermont Catholics have a new leader. Pope Francis appointed Christopher Coyne as the 10th Bishop of Burlington.

“Bishop Coyne arrives as our new bishop and spiritual leader with many rich and varied experiences of church lives,” said Monsignor John McDermott, introducing Bishop Coyne Monday morning in Burlington.

The New England native comes to Vermont after four years serving in Indiana. “I come with no pre-established plans or any agenda other than to serve my brothers and sisters as a faithful disciple,” Bishop Coyne said.

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Lester HioThe Straits Times
Tuesday, Dec 23, 2014

The Franciscan friars in Singapore said yesterday that they were not affected by a financial scandal exposed by the worldwide head of their Catholic religious order.

Last week, Friar Michael Perry, leader of the Order of Friars Minor (OFM), revealed that the organisation which has its headquarters in Rome is broke after “questionable financial activities” by some members.

The friars in Singapore declined to comment on the scandal, but assured donors that funds here are unaffected.

“There has been no impact, as we have never invested with them,” said Father Clifford Augustine, parish priest of the Church of St Mary of the Angels, which the friars run in Bukit Batok East.

The local chapter of the OFM is registered as a company limited by guarantee, which means that every dollar is accounted for by local auditors, he explained.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Financial Times

Kiran Stacey, Political Correspondent

Theresa May will next month make a third attempt to propose a suitable person to run an inquiry into the alleged sexual abuse of children by politicians, six months after announcing the probe.

The home secretary is likely to choose a judge that would preside over hearings, government officials said on Monday. This means witnesses could be required to testify but also that the inquiry could take years to reach a conclusion.

Ms May is also poised to scrap a panel that was appointed to look into the sex abuse allegations and replace it with a new system to reflect the new statutory powers that the inquiry will be given.

“Theresa May has her heart in the right place but I’m not sure about other people. I can’t help thinking that there is something afoot when you have establishment figures chosen to chair it who are wholly inappropriate because they are connected to some of those involved,” said Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Crux

By Robert Costello
Special to Crux December 22, 2014

In the weeks since Pope Francis convened a Synod of Bishops from around the world to discuss issues important to family life, there has been a lot of talk about whether the Church should be more welcoming to gays, allow divorced/civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion, or make annulments easier to obtain.

In the coming year, bishops are supposed to talk to their congregants and each other about the Church’s stance on these and other issues, all related to keeping families strong and together.

Yet the most destructive thing to happen to Catholic families in the history of the RCC is being completely ignored: clergy sexual abuse of children. The Church’s treatment of children is a record of carnage.

I know! I was sexually abused by my parish priest. It not only ruined my life; it also destroyed my family.

The Rev. John M. Cotter started to abuse me when I was seven years old and in second grade at St. Theresa of Avila School in West Roxbury, Mass. The sex abuse lasted for six and a half years. He was everywhere a little boy could be. Being a member of the parish meant that I was an altar boy, involved with the Cub Scout – Boy Scout program, CYO (Catholic Youth Organization), and school. He even abused me in my own home when I was very sick on the living room sofa while my mother was in the kitchen preparing him lunch.

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VATICAN CITY
Crux

By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor December 22, 2014

ROME – Pope Francis delivered a blistering criticism of the headquarters over which he presides on Monday, ticking off a catalogue of “spiritual diseases” to which he believes Vatican officials are susceptible, such as careerism, arrogance, and gossip, calling it all the “pathology of power.”

His annual Christmas speech to the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s central administrative bureaucracy, played around the world as a scathing indictment. To insiders, it threw a key question into sharp focus: Is Francis in danger of alienating the very people he will need, sooner or later, to actually get anything done?

“I have to say, I didn’t feel great walking out of that room today,” one senior Vatican official said, who had been in the Vatican’s Sala Clementina for the speech and who spoke on the condition he not be identified.

“I understand that the pope wants us to live up to our ideals, but you wonder sometimes if he has anything positive to say about us at all,” the official said, who’s been in Vatican service for more than two decades.

For the record, this was an official who describes himself as an “enthusiast” over the direction being set by Pope Francis.

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: “One of the Most Creative Things That’s Happened to the Catholic Church in America Has Been This Vast Exodus of Catholics from the Church”

James Carroll in a recent interview with Michael Schulson:

One of the most creative things that’s happened to the Catholic Church in America has been this vast exodus of Catholics from the church. Everybody who leaves the church, whether it’s women who are impatient, fed up with the second-class status of women, or whether it’s people who are fed up with this clerical sex abuse scandal, whatever it is: everybody who leaves the Church is a challenge to the church to do a much fuller job of reckoning with the truth of this situation.

“A much fuller job of reckoning with the truth”: since every Catholic who leaves (and/or is shoved away from the Catholic table) is an indictment of a catholic church’s claim to be truly catholic, to be able to cope with the multivalent truths of many different kinds of human beings, to set a table big enough that we all can sit around it . . . . A church that exists to serve and include only the few, to endorse the truths of the lives of only the select chosen, cannot honestly call itself a catholic church.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Robert Mickens | Dec. 22, 2014 A Roman Observer

ROME
It’s now all but official. Pope Francis and certain members of the Roman Curia’s old guard are openly at battle for the soul and future of the Catholic church. And their clash is over a sense of entitlement and privilege traditionally tied to a clericalist ethos and court mentality that has long held sway at the Vatican.

The Argentine pontiff pretty much confirmed that on Monday in his annual pre-Christmas meeting with the Curia’s top officials during which he denounced a long list of bad attitudes and behavior he believes are ailing the church’s central offices. (Read Joshua J. McElwee’s excellent report on the 15 illnesses that, according to Francis, are threatening the Curia’s spiritual and moral health.)

The 78-year-old pope delivered his screed to the cardinals and bishops — that’s exactly how many people inside and beyond the walls of the Vatican will read it — just a little more than 24 hours after France’s oldest national paper, Le Figaro, published a cover article in its Sunday magazine titled, “The Secret War Inside the Vatican: How Pope Francis is shaking up the Church.”

The conservative paper’s highly respected Vatican analyst, Jean-Marie Guénois, claimed in the article that the “climate inside [the Vatican] is not good.” He wrote that “fear reigns” among many officials and employees who do not like how the pope is dismantling traditional protocols and who are nervously waiting to see how his eventual structural reforms will affect them. Guénois quoted one of these officials as saying, “His way of governing is disconcerting.” …

Even though the Jesuit pope did not name names, it’s clear he believes some of these cardinals and bishops are inflicted with the “ailments” he listed — an exaggerated sense of self-importance, lust for power and control, lack of empathy for others, opposition to the movements of the Holy Spirit, careerism, and the “very serious evil” of leading a double life, which he labeled “existential schizophrenia”.

The officials, all wearing black cassocks with their red and violet skullcaps and sashes, sat stony-faced throughout the stinging address, which went on for slightly more than 30 minutes.

Uncharacteristically, the pope hardly looked up from his written text and made only a couple, very minor unscripted remarks. His delivery was slow and deliberate. The prelates politely, but unenthusiastically applauded at the end.

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VATICAN CITY
Sydney Morning Herald

December 23, 2014

Philip Pullella

Vatican City: The Vatican’s top administrators would have been expecting an exchange of pleasantries at their annual Christmas meeting with Pope Francis on Monday.

Instead, Francis chose the occasion to issue a stinging critique, telling the priests, bishops and cardinals who run the Curia, the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church, that careerism, scheming and greed had infected them with “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.

Francis, the first non-European pope in 1300 years, has refused many of the trappings of office and made plain his determination to bring the Church’s hierarchy closer to its 1.2 billion members. To that end, he has set out to reform the Italian-dominated Curia, whose power struggles and leaks were widely held responsible for Benedict XVI’s decision last year to become the first pope in six centuries to resign. …

“This is the ideological and religious manifesto of a radical reform of the Curia,” Carlo Marroni, a Vatican expert with the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore, said. “He doesn’t describe the details of the reform that we will most likely see next year, but he indicated the principles according to which the Church has to change, at least in the pope’s intentions.”

In his Christmas speeches, Benedict XVI, now pope emeritus, had often issued programmatic statements for the year to come, and talked about controversial issues like same-sex marriage. However, he had not used such a stern tone.

Last year, in his first Christmas speech to the Curia as pope, Francis warned his prelates against drifting “downwards towards mediocrity,” and urged them to be “conscientious objectors” to gossip.

In a meeting with the Vatican’s employees soon after his speech to the Curia, Francis repeated his plea for forgiveness, asking the laypeople who work for the Vatican to pardon his shortcomings and those of his collaborators, as well as some scandals that have hurt the church.

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VATICAN CITY
Oregonian

By The Associated Press

VATICAN CITY — To the Catholic Church’s “seven deadly sins,” Pope Francis has added the “15 ailments of the Curia.”

Francis issued a blistering indictment of the Vatican bureaucracy Monday, accusing the cardinals, bishops and priests who serve him of using their Vatican careers to grab power and wealth, of living “hypocritical” double lives and forgetting that they’re supposed to be joyful men of God.

Francis turned the traditional, genteel exchange of Christmas greetings into a public dressing down of the Curia, the central administration of the Holy See, which governs the 1.2-billion strong Catholic Church. He made clear that his plans for a radical reform of the structures of church power must be accompanied by an even more radical spiritual reform of the men involved. …

“This is a speech without historic precedent,” church historian Alberto Melloni, a contributor to Italian daily Corriere della Sera, said in a telephone interview. “If the pope uses this tone, it’s because he knows it’s necessary.”

Melloni noted that until Francis was elected, the Vatican bureaucracy largely answered to no one, saying “an entire generation of the Curia ran it as if they were pope.” St. John Paul II was too busy traveling the world, and later too sick, to pay attention to administrative details, and Benedict left the minutiae of running a government to his deputy, later determined to have been part of the problem.

The Rev. Robert Wister, a church historian at Seton Hall University, said Francis was essentially asking the Curia to undergo an examination of conscience, asking them to reflect on how they had sinned before God before going to confession.

“Perhaps he believes that only a severe rebuke can help turn things around,” he said.

The cardinals were not amused. Few smiled as Francis spoke, and at the end they offered only tepid applause to a speech that was so carefully prepared it had footnotes and Bibilical references. Francis greeted each one, but there was little Christmas cheer in the room.

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VATICAN CITY
Los Angeles Times

By TOM KINGTON

Pope Francis on Monday launched a stunning attack on the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Vatican, accusing them of succumbing to greed, jealousy, hypocrisy, cowardice and “spiritual Alzheimer’s.”

In a pre-Christmas speech to the officials of the Roman Curia, Francis kept the season’s greeting to a minimum, choosing instead to ask prelates to make “a real examination of conscience.”

Francis then listed 15 “illnesses” he said they were prey to, including the “terrorism” of gossip, which he called a “cowardly” disease which could kill the reputation of a colleague “in cold blood.”

Top of the list was the fault of feeling “immortal, immune or even indispensable,” which Francis said could be remedied by a visit to a cemetery to see the graves of those who once felt immortal.

Francis also slammed prelates for showing off, accumulating wealth and leading double lives, which he said could lead to “existential schizophrenia.” …

“I have never seen a Christmas speech like this; this felt more like Lent,” said Maria Antonietta Calabro, a Vatican specialist at Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. “Francis was elected to clean up the Curia and he is returning to this theme and strongly reasserting his authority.” …

Francis also attacked those who “discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines” to build their own power, even if they claim they are doing so “in the name of justice and transparency.”

Australian Cardinal George Pell, who was tasked by Francis with giving order to Vatican finances, recently wrote an article for a Roman Catholic publication claiming he had found millions of euros unaccounted for only to have Vatican officials deny funds were concealed.

“It looks like Francis is referring to Pell, which is ironic because Pell is his man,” said Calabro.

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VATICAN CITY
Bustle

LAUREN BARBATO

Pope Francis delivered his annual Christmas message on Monday, and it ended up being a lot less festive than expected. Instead of spreading some Christmas cheer, the pope harshly criticized Vatican bureaucracy. All Francis wants for Christmas is for everyone to stop gossiping — is that so much to ask for?

While addressing senior Vatican officials, which includes bishops and cardinals who serve the Holy See, Francis laid out their laundry list of sins — 15, to be exact. Some of the sins these Vatican officials have committed are the lust for power, feelings of superiority, and the “terrorism of gossip.” What a way to end the year.

Francis began by suggesting that the Vatican has been “exposed to sickness,” causing it to become an “ailing body” that has weakened the Catholic Church. The first sickness, the pontiff said, was “considering oneself ‘immortal’, ‘immune’ or ‘indispensable’.”

Francis continued:

A Curia that is not self-critical, that does not stay up-to-date, that does not seek to better itself, is an ailing body. … It is the sickness of the rich fool who thinks he will live for all eternity, and of those who transform themselves into masters and believe themselves superior to others, rather than at their service.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

* Aging Pope Francis cannot clean up the Catholic Church “mess” and its rigged leadership transition process, unless he moves now to restore the Church’s consensual management structure with its democratic accountability. It is basic “Management 101″. Changing the obsolete top down monarchical management structure, and curtailing the resulting and continuing priest child abuse and financial scandals, among others, cannot be avoided any longer! It appears to be “now or never” for Pope Francis and the Vatican.

* The first Catholics consensually managed their leaders; Catholics can and must do so again, as discussed below. Otherwise, the Vatican Titanic will continue to sink.

* Unless Pope Francis acts promptly, while he yet is still able, to make the worldwide Catholic 0.01% leadership accountable again to the Catholic 99.9% laity, he will likely fail.

* Now in his 79th year, Pope Francis has once again raised unexpectedly his mortality, volunteering that he will not “be around” in connection with Rome’s Olympic bid. He had also a few months ago publicly broached with reporters the prospect of his own death in “two or three years”, while also not ruling out retirement before then.

* Pope will be nearing his 80th year, when his all “celibate male” Final Synod of Bishops gives him in less than ten months their recommendations for Church reforms. It appears to be now or never for this pope to make a real difference in Church reform that is not just a temporary fix that can be readily reversed by his soon to be secretly selected successor, perhaps Cardinal Sodano’s protege, Cardinal Parolin.

* Pope Francis now has the full power to change the procedures for selecting bishops, including the Bishop of Rome (i.e., the Pope himself). He needs to begin now to change these procedures promptly, just as he created his Council of Cardinals out of thin air, it appears. Canon law is whatever a pope says it is, in the final analysis.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Belfast Telegraph

22 DECEMBER 2014

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.

And John Mann called on Home Secretary Theresa May to lift the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act in relation to historic abuse, which he believes are holding back former Special Branch police officers from coming forward with vital information relating to allegations of a child sex ring linked to powerful people in Westminster in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mr Mann’s comments came as a second Labour MP warned that the Government looks as though it does not “want to get to the truth” about historic child abuse after Mrs May indicated that a troubled inquiry panel commissioned to look into the issue could be disbanded and replaced.

Simon Danczuk said victims would be dismayed at the lack of progress in the probe, and could not help worrying that the litany of mistakes – including the resignation of two chairmen following claims about their perceived closeness to establishment figures – was “deliberate”.

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UNITED STATES
Think Progress

BY JOSH ISRAEL POSTED ON DECEMBER 22, 2014

In 1882, a group of Catholic men gathered together by New Haven, CT pastor Father Michael J. McGivney incorporated an organization to provide for the families of its deceased members. More than 125 years later, the Knights of Columbus boasts of more than 1.8 million members and of “donating more than $167.5 million to charitable needs and projects” in 2012. Among its members: presidential 2016 hopeful Jeb Bush (R), Speaker of the House John Boehner (R), and Justice Samuel Alito.

But while much of the Knights’ charitable efforts in recent years have supported purely altruistic causes such as the Special Olympics and Habitat for Humanity, millions of their charitable dollars have funded a very socially conservative ideological agenda: opposing abortion, LGBT rights, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and pornography, while supporting public funding for religious organizations.

While legally independent from the Catholic Church, the Knights of Columbus entities call themselves the church’s “strong right arm.” The main national organization, a tax-exempt 501(c)(8) “Fraternal Benefit Society,” provides insurance-type benefits to its membership, much like a life insurance company. In 2012, the organization’s revenue and expenses exceeded $2 billion. While only Catholic men above the age of 18 are allowed to join, Catholic women are permitted to join a much smaller affiliated auxiliary organization called the Columbiettes.

The Knights also operate a legally-separate but affiliated charitable arm called the Knights of Columbus Charities Inc. That tax-exempt non-profit organization made about 57 percent of its annual grants in 2013 to efforts to “promote matters affective life family, marriage and similar priorities in building a culture of life.” More than $1 million of that went to support “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” a network of facilities that dissuade women from choosing to terminate their pregnancies, often by sharing misinformation.

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UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Burke E. Strunsky
Prosecutor

Faith is a deeply personal experience, and I don’t say this as a politically correct sound bite. I truly believe that I’m lucky to live in a country that values the right of its citizens to freely practice religion if they so choose. However, as a criminal prosecutor, I am repeatedly faced with situations in which people forsake reason for faith or forsake faith for reason. It’s a false dilemma–a needless collision of choices. Too many make the tragic mistake of relying solely on their faith in cases of crimes, particularly child sexual abuse. Some religious groups might see these events as strictly a crisis of the soul when, in fact, concealing these atrocities only contributes to even deeper spiritual crises for the victims and their families. That’s why I make this plea to families of all faiths: Please do not rely exclusively on the guidance of your religious institutions to deal with the crime of child molestation. If people truly believe in God or a higher power, then they should open their minds and hearts to the possibility that, in addition to their capacity to believe, they also possess the ability to reason for a reason.

It’s impossible to pinpoint the first primordial whispers of faith or even the birth of religion–itself a communal kind of faith. Since the earliest man tilted his head to the cosmos and wondered, “Where does it all come from?” humanity has been searching for the meaning of life. Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, faith and religion appear to be distinctly human phenomena, pointing us in the same direction toward the same intangible reality of a higher purpose or an unexplainable force that guides and connects us. Thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that in the search for truth, humans possess two unique sources of knowledge–reason (natural) and faith (supernatural)–and that the two were never meant to contradict one another but rather to work together.

Secrecy is essential to the crime of child molestation and when it encounters the sacred secrecy inherent to some religious organizations, an atmosphere is created in which the predator can thrive. Psychoanalyst Sue Grand has studied child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and sums up the crisis from both psychological and religious perspectives: “Secrecy, concealment, denial, ambiguity, confusion: These are Satan’s fellow travelers, requiring elaborate interpersonal and intrapsychic collusion between perpetrators and bystanders. The operations of silence potentiate evil and remove all impediments from its path.”

Historically, the most prominent religious organizations involved in criminal and civil child sexual abuse cases included the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church).This certainly doesn’t mean that people who belong to these groups are more likely to sexually abuse children than are, say, Methodists, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus. Rather, it’s the manner in which these institutions have sometimes handled sexual molestation accusations that is problematic. It often leaves the pedophile free to roam and attack again.

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UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast

Jason Berry

The first Jesuit pope has endeared himself to people not so much through his religion but through his humane politics, which were forged in repressive Argentina.

In the 20 months since his bow from the balcony above St. Peter’s Square after the conclave, introducing himself as the bishop of Rome, Pope Francis has registered in poll after poll as the most popular person in the world.

“Barack Obama gets an average of 1,300 retweets on his account; Pope Francis gets twenty thousand,” wrote Alma Guillermoprieto in a June 23 profile of the pope for Matter, signaling another sign of this pope’s status.

Popes, presidents, the Dalai Lama, certain first ladies, and movie stars typically lead such surveys; but after decades of scandals over sexually abusive priests and financial corruption reaching into the Vatican Bank, the church’s reversal under Francis is a striking media narrative. For much of the popular tide behind him reflects another reality: his politics have an appeal that reaches far beyond the declining number of church-going Catholics. Not since 1989, when John Paul II bestrode the global stage as a catalyst in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, has a pope stirred such feelings of hope. John Paul was youthful in his sixties with a radiant charisma. Francis is well into his seventies, looks it, has a mild demeanor and soft speaking style; but his rhetoric is electrifying.

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CANADA
Nova News

Former Yarmouth priest granted full parole on November 2012 conviction for indecent assaults

YARMOUTH – A former Yarmouth County priest who was sentenced in November 2012 after pleading guilty to sexually abusing six young boys dating back to the mid 1960s to the earlier 1980s has been granted full parole.

Albert LeBlanc – who was 83 years old when he was sentenced in a Yarmouth courtroom to five-and-a-half years in prison – was granted full parole in early December.

The victims of his crimes have been made aware of the Parole Board of Canada’s decision.

As part of his parole conditions, LeBlanc must immediately report all intimate relationships and friendships with females and males who have parental responsibility for male children under the age of 18.

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VATICAN CITY
NPR

KRISHNADEV CALAMUR

Pope Francis has blasted the Vatican’s top bureaucrats at an annual Christmas gathering, accusing the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Curia of “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and careerism.

“Sometimes, [officials of the Curia] feel themselves lords of the manor – superior to everyone and everything,” Francis told the Curia’s assembled members, according to Vatican Radio, which carried a report of the meeting titled “Pope Francis: Christmas greetings to Curia.”

The Curia is dominated by Italians who oversee the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Francis, an Argentine, is the first non-European to hold the papacy in more than a millennium. The former Cardinal had not worked in the Curia before his election, and has made reform of the Vatican a major part of his agenda.

“The Curia needs to change, to improve … a Curia that does not criticize itself, that does not bring itself up to date, that does not try to improve, is a sick body,” he said.

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (UK)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Monday 22 December 2014

Pope Francis ended the year with a scathing critique of the church’s highest-ranking officials, including a list of 15 “ailments” that he said plagued the Vatican’s power-hungry bureaucracy.

The Argentinian pontiff used a traditional Christmas greeting to the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Holy See to portray a church hierarchy that had lost its humanity at times, a body consumed by narcissism and excessive activity, where men who are meant to serve God with optimism instead presented a hardened, sterile face to the world.

The 78-year-old pope’s second Christmas speech since his election in 2013 was met by tepid applause among his Vatican audience, according to the Associated Press, and just a few smiling faces.

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VATICAN CITY
USA Today

Josephine McKenna , Religion News Service December 22, 2014

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Pope Francis launched a blistering attack on the Vatican bureaucracy Monday, outlining a “catalog of illnesses” that plague the church’s central administration, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and gossipy cliques.

The pope’s traditional Christmas greeting to the cardinals, bishops and priests who run the Holy See was less an exchange of warm wishes than a laundry list of what the pontiff called the “ailments of the Curia” that he wants to cure.

In a critique that left many of the assembled clerics clearly uncomfortable, the 15 ailments in Francis’ “catalog of illnesses” reflected the take-no-prisoners approach he promised when he was elected nearly two years ago as an outsider with little direct experience in Rome.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Dec. 22, 2014

ROME
Pope Francis on Monday used an annual pre-Christmas meeting with the cardinals and bishops of the Vatican bureaucracy — normally an exchange of good wishes and blessings — to issue a scathing critique of them, warning against 15 separate “diseases” in their work and attitudes.

Saying he wanted to prepare them all — including himself — to make “a real examination of conscience” before Christmas, Francis said while the Vatican bureaucracy was called to “always improve and grow in communion,” it was also prone to “disease, malfunction, and infirmity” like every human institution.

“I believe it will help us [to make] a ‘catalog’ of diseases … to help us prepare for the sacrament of reconciliation, which will be a good step for all of us to prepare for Christmas,” Francis said.

Many of the 15 diseases given by Francis were frank and blunt: a feeling of indispensability like a “rich fool”; of having a “spiritual Alzheimer’s” that makes a person dependent on the present; of living an “existential schizophrenia” of double lives that create “parallel worlds”; and a “terrorism of gossip” that sows discord and that amounts to “cold-blooded murder” of friends and colleagues.

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VERMONT
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Monday, Dec. 22

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 566 9790, SNAPclohessy@aol.com , davidgclohessy@gmail.com )

We are deeply disappointed that Pope Francis has promoted Cardinal Bernard Law’s former mouthpiece. For years, time and time again, then Fr. Christopher Coyne repeated deceptive public relations spin about heinous child sex crimes and callous cover ups by Law and other Catholic officials.

[Burlington Free Press]

Ironically, on the same day that headlines tout a tongue-lashing of self-serving church bureaucrats by Pope Francis, the Vatican announces the promotion of an aide to perhaps America’s most self-serving church bureaucrat ever.

[Island Packet]

While a bishop in Indiana, we prodded Coyne to aggressively reach out to anyone who may have seen crimes by Fr. Francis Markey who was arrested by US marshals at his Indiana home in connection with the alleged rape of a 15-year-old boy twice, including the day of the boy’s father’s funeral.

As best we can tell, he ignored our request.

[SNAP]

And he did absolutely nothing in Boston or Indianapolis that gives us any hope he’ll be any better on children’s safety than his predecessor.

So we urge Vermont Catholics and citizens to be skeptical and vigilant and report known or suspected clergy sex crimes and cover ups to secular authorities, not church officials.

In many ways, Francis is very different than Benedict. When it comes to the abuse crisis, however, he really isn’t. Both popes promote church officials who ignored or concealed known or suspected clergy sex crimes, time and time and time again. Today’s announcement continues that depressing pattern.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 22 December 2014 (VIS) – This morning in the Clementine Hall the Holy Father held his annual meeting with the Roman Curia to exchange Christmas greetings with the members of its component dicasteries, councils, offices, tribunals and commissions. “It is good to think of the Roman Curia as a small model of the Church, that is, a body that seeks, seriously and on a daily basis, to be more alive, healthier, more harmonious and more united in itself and with Christ”.

“The Curia is always required to better itself and to grow in communion, sanctity and wisdom to fully accomplish its mission. However, like any body, it is exposed to sickness, malfunction and infirmity. … I would like to mention some of these illnesses that we encounter most frequently in our life in the Curia. They are illnesses and temptations that weaken our service to the Lord”, continued the Pontiff, who after inviting all those present to an examination of conscience to prepare themselves for Christmas, listed the most common Curial ailments:

The first is “the sickness of considering oneself ‘immortal’, ‘immune’ or ‘indispensable’, neglecting the necessary and habitual controls. A Curia that is not self-critical, that does not stay up-to-date, that does not seek to better itself, is an ailing body. … It is the sickness of the rich fool who thinks he will live for all eternity, and of those who transform themselves into masters and believe themselves superior to others, rather than at their service”.

The second is “’Martha-ism’, or excessive industriousness; the sickness of those who immerse themselves in work, inevitably neglecting ‘the better part’ of sitting at Jesus’ feet. Therefore, Jesus required his disciples to rest a little, as neglecting the necessary rest leads to stress and agitation. Rest, once one who has brought his or her mission to a close, is a necessary duty and must be taken seriously: in spending a little time with relatives and respecting the holidays as a time for spiritual and physical replenishment, it is necessary to learn the teaching of Ecclesiastes, that ‘there is a time for everything’”.

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UNITED KINGDOM
RT

Survivors of alleged Westminster child sex abuse have called on the government to replace the current inquiry with a more powerful body. Meanwhile, it has been revealed that the Home Secretary was considering disbanding the investigation entirely.

A letter written to Home Secretary Theresa May by survivors of child abuse urged that powers be given to a new inquiry which would have the authority to “compel witnesses to give evidence under oath.”

The letter, which was shown to the BBC, reportedly requested a “replacement of the current panel” and an increase in “statutory powers,” it was reported Sunday. Signed by an organization of survivors and professionals, the letters claimed that more powers would “increase confidence” in the inquiry.

“It is essential that those conducting the inquiry have appropriate experience, are free from strong links to prominent establishment figures or any other potential conflict of interest and have a proven track record of promoting survivors’ rights,” the letter said.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

[with audio]

22 December 2014

Dozens of child abuse survivors have urged the government to scrap an inquiry into historical abuse and replace it with a more powerful body.

In the letter to Home Secretary Theresa May, survivors, survivors’ groups and associated professionals call for a new inquiry with the power to “compel witnesses to give evidence under oath”.

Ian McFadyen is an abuse survivor and campaigner who signed the letter.

He told the BBC 5 live Breakfast that he felt the inquiry “must have teeth”.

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VATICAN CITY
euronews

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican’s top administrators would have been expecting an exchange of pleasantries at their annual Christmas meeting with Pope Francis on Monday.

Instead, he chose the occasion to issue a stinging critique, telling the priests, bishops and cardinals who run the Curia, the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church, that careerism, scheming and greed had infected them with “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.

Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,300 years, has refused many of the trappings of office and made plain his determination to bring the Church’s hierarchy closer to its 1.2 billion members.

To that end, he has set out to reform the Italian-dominated Curia, whose power struggles and leaks were widely held responsible for Benedict XVI’s decision last year to become the first pope in six centuries to resign.

“The Curia needs to change, to improve … a Curia that does not criticise itself, that does not bring itself up to date, that does not try to improve, is a sick body,” he said in a sombre address.

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VATICAN CITY
BBC News

Pope Francis has sharply criticised the Vatican bureaucracy in a pre-Christmas address to cardinals, complaining of “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and “the terrorism of gossip”.

He said the Curia – the administrative pinnacle of the Roman Catholic Church – was suffering from 15 “ailments”, which he wanted cured in the New Year.

Pope Francis – the first Latin American pontiff – also criticised “those who look obsessively at their own image”.

He has demanded reform of the Curia.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Mittelbayerische

VON NIKOLAS PELKE, MZ

HEIDECK Die Gebetsbücher sind längst vergriffen, als die letzten Besucher in den Gottesdienst eilen. Die Stadtpfarrkirche ist besetzt bis auf den allerletzten Platz. Ein Blick in die Gesichter der Menschen an diesem Samstagabend zeigt: Die Katholiken in Heideck sind durch die Bank angespannt.

Wie wird der Pfarrer Tobias Göttle seiner Gemeinde im mittelfränkischen Landkreis Roth gegenübertreten? Nach all dem was passiert ist in den letzten 16 Monaten. Nach den schweren Vorwürfen des Kindesmissbrauchs und den Monaten in der Untersuchungshaft. Alle sind sie heute gekommen, um dabei zu sein, wenn der alte und neue Pfarrer ein paar Tage vor Weihnachten in den Kreis der Gemeinde zurückkehren soll. Darüber sprechen, wie sich das anfühlt, will vorher keiner. Was könne man schon sagen, wenn ein katholischer Geistlicher einen Jungen sexuell missbraucht haben soll? Die Öffentlichkeit sei allzu schnell bereit gewesen, den ungeheuerlichen Verdacht für bare Münze zu nehmen. Waren die katholischen Priester nicht genau aus diesem Grund zuletzt weltweit in die Schlagzeilen geraten? Auch in Heideck hat es Schlagzeilen gegeben. „Pfarrer hinter Gittern“ war nur eine davon.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Nordbayern

The Heidek parish priest was returned to service this past weekend after he was cleared of charges of sexual abuse of a minor. He was greeted with applause.]

HEIDECK – Dass in einem Gotteshaus Beifall aufbrandet, ist eher selten. Am Samstagabend jedoch gab es für den Heidecker Stadtpfarrer in der Kirche St. Johannes der Täufer reichlich Applaus, nachdem dieser die vergangenen Monate aus seiner Sicht hatte Revue passieren lassen, in denen er dem Verdacht des sexuellen Missbrauches eines Minderjährigen ausgesetzt und deswegen ein Vierteljahr in Untersuchungshaft war (wir berichteten mehrfach). Nachdem der Haftbefehl gegen ihn aufgehoben und die kirchenrechtliche Untersuchung abgeschlossen war, kehrte der Geistliche am Samstag an seine alte Wirkungsstätte zurück – in Begleitung des Eichstätter Bischofs Gregor Maria Hanke.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Radio Oberland

[Abuse Ettal Abbey: court date is set]

Montag, 22. Dezember 2014
Er soll zwischen den Jahren 2001 und 2005 mehr als 20 Kinder sexuell missbraucht haben – Jetzt steht der Gerichtstermin für den angeklagten Pater aus dem Kloster Ettal. Wie das Tagblatt mitteilt muss er sich zum ersten Mal am 22. Januar vor der Jugendstrafkammer des Münchner Landgerichts verantworten. Für die Verhandlungen sind sieben Tage angesetzt.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Bild

[A priest named only as George K. (56) has been accused of abusing children, including his godson. The vicar at Willich was in charge until 2008 of several municipalities in the Lower Rhine and is said to be accused of at least 23 cases of abuse.]

VON JOACHIM OFFERMANNS

Krefeld (NRW) – Er ist ein Mann Gottes: Doch Pfarrer Georg K. (56) wird beschuldigt, ihm anvertraute Kinder missbraucht zu haben. Selbst das eigene Patenkind war nicht vor ihm sicher.

Der Pfarrer aus Willich, der bis 2008 verschiedene Gemeinden am Niederrhein betreute, soll zwischen 2001 und 2006 das zunächst 11 Jahre alte Patenkind in mindestens 23 Fällen missbraucht haben.

Von dem nackten Kind soll er Fotos gemacht haben. In zwei Fällen, so die Anklage, hat er mit dem Kind vor den Übergriffen Marihuana geraucht. Außerdem soll er den damals 8 Jahre alten Bruder des Jungen dreimal missbraucht haben – so zum Beispiel bei einem gemeinsamen Sauna-Besuch.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Bundespresse REPORT 2014

Sexueller Missbrauch Minderjähriger durch katholische Geistliche in Deutschland | Fernau / Hellmann | Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft

[Sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy in Germany | Fernau / Hellmann | Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft]

Im vorliegenden Sammelband werden erstmals empirische Befunde zum sexuellen Missbrauch durch katholische Geistliche in Deutschland präsentiert. Die Datenbasis bilden zwei Betroffenenbefragungen, die vertiefende Erkenntnisse über Hintergründe, Besonderheiten und Folgen von innerkirchlichen Missbrauchserfahrungen liefern: eine quantitative Fragebogenerhebung sowie eine qualitative Interviewstudie.

Schwerpunkte der quantitativen Untersuchung sind die Analyse von zentralen Charakteristika der Taten sowie von psychosozialen Folgen, welche diese bei den Betroffenen auslösten. Ferner werden die Reaktionen der Behörden und der katholischen Kirche auf Offenbarungen von Betroffenen in den Blick genommen. Im Fokus der qualitativen Forschung steht die Rekonstruktion verschiedener biografischer Umgangsformen mit den Missbrauchserfahrungen. Dabei wird insbesondere der Rückgriff auf katholische Glaubensvorstellungen in der Auseinandersetzung mit der erlebten sexuellen Gewalt beleuchtet.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

An analysis of the speech to the Curia. The Pope does not introduce a new project from the top but the way of mercy that the Church has always recommended in order to cure the 15 ‘diseases’

GIANNI VALENTE
VATICAN CITY

In his traditional speech to the collaborators of the Roman Curia, a few days before Christmas, Pope Francis avoided customary evaluations of the past year and did not launch programmatic discussions or key words on which to realign the language and initiatives of the Vatican congregations. The Pope spoke to the heads of the Vatican congregations in the Curia about the life of the Curia and its ‘diseases’. His speech expounded a detailed, collective ‘examination of conscience’, recommended to cardinals, bishops and monsignors called to collaborate with him in the Vatican.

The Pope took on the role of spiritual father, educated at the school of St. Ignatius. He did not have any qualms about calling the pathologies, affecting his immediate surroundings, by their name. He did it with lucidity and ‘expertise’ of the object, frustrating once again the stereotype of the Latin-American alien who is not used to the ‘complexities’ of Rome and Europe, with which critics and neo-courtiers attempt to neutralise him. Pope Francis highlighted the root of the curial diseases, as well as providing an ample symptomatology and, above all, he suggested remedies. He started from the rediscovery of the nature of the Church as ‘Mystical Body’ of Christ, according to the consecrated form of Pius XII’s encyclicals ‘Mystici Corporis’.

The ‘Messiah complex’ is mostly responsible for these pathologies among ecclesiastics also in the Curia. This complex often takes over circles and ambitious ecclesiastics, used to putting the teaching about the necessity of grace on the backburner; a teaching already pronounced by Christ to his disciples. Pope Francis said that ‘it must be clear to us all that without Him we can do nothing’. Christmas, said Pope Francis to the officials of the Curia, is a favourable chance to rediscover this dynamic of grace told in the Gospel, because ‘it is also the festival of a light that is not welcomed by the “chosen people” but by the “poor and simple” who awaited the salvation of the Lord.’

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

Francis invites his collaborators to examine their conscience to confess their ‘sins’ in today’s speech. He mentions vainglory and feeling essential, as well as ‘spiritual Alzheimer’s’ and hoarding money and power. The Pope also speaks of closed circles and worldly profit, as well as the ‘terrorism of gossip’

ANDREA TORNIELLI
VATICAN CITY

15 diseases listed and explained, one by one in detail. In his second Christmas speech to the Roman Curia, Pope Francis identifies and explains 15 shades of sin, inviting everyone to ask for God’s forgiveness. The same God who ‘is born in poverty in a cave in Bethlehem to teach us the power of humility’, and was welcomed not by the “chosen” people but by the “poor and simple”. Pope Francis asks his collaborators to really examine their conscience in preparation for confession before Christmas.

Francis explains that these ‘diseases’ and ‘temptations’ do not only concern the Curia but ‘are naturally a danger to every Christian and every curia, community, congregation, parish, and ecclesiastic movement’. The Pope, however, clearly identifies these as present within the environment where he has been living for 21 months now.

The Pope said that ‘it would be good to think of the Roman Curia as a small model of the Church, that is as a “body” which earnestly attempts to be more alive, healthier, more harmonious and more united in itslef and in Christ every day”. The Curia, like the Church, cannot live ‘without having a vital, personal, authentic and solid relationship with Christ’. And a member of the Curia who does not draw from that every day will become a mere bureaucrat. He adds that ‘ we will talk about the list of diseases which, following the Fathers of the desert, will aid us in preparing for confession’.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis received the heads and other senior officials of the departments of the Roman Curia on Monday, in their traditional exchange of Christmas greetings. In remarks prepared for the occasion and delivered Monday morning, the Holy Father focused on the need for those who serve in the curia – especially those in positions of power and authority – to remember and cultivate an attitude and a spirit of service.

“Sometimes,” said Pope Francis, “[Officials of the Curia] feel themselves ‘lords of the manor’ [It. padroni] – superior to everyone and everything,” forgetting that the spirit, which should animate them in their lives of service to the universal Church, is one of humility and generosity, especially in view of the fact that none of us will live forever on this earth.

This “disease” of feeling “immortal” or “essential” – irreplaceable – was one of fifteen maladies, which Pope Francis identified during the course of his address: from a tendency to prefer Martha’s portion over Mary’s, to over-planning (and micromanaging), to wearing being a perpetual downer and wearing a “funeral face” all the day long.

“These and other maladies and temptations,” said Pope Francis, “are a danger for every Christian and for any administrative organization, community, congregation, parish, ecclesial movement, etc., and can strike at both the individual and the corporate level.”

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CITTA’ DEL VATICANO
Bolletino

[Francis: a Curia that is outdated, sclerotic or indifferent to others is an ailing body – Vatican Information Service]

La Curia Romana e il Corpo di Cristo

“Tu sei sopra i cherubini, tu che hai cambiato la miserabile condizione del mondo quando ti sei fatto come noi” (Sant’Atanasio).

Cari fratelli,

Al termine dell’Avvento ci incontriamo per i tradizionali saluti. Tra qualche giorno avremo la gioia di celebrare il Natale del Signore; l’evento di Dio che si fa uomo per salvare gli uomini; la manifestazione dell’amore di Dio che non si limita a darci qualcosa o a inviarci qualche messaggio o taluni messaggeri ma dona a noi sé stesso; il mistero di Dio che prende su di sé la nostra condizione umana e i nostri peccati per rivelarci la sua Vita divina, la sua grazia immensa e il suo perdono gratuito. E’ l’appuntamento con Dio che nasce nella povertà della grotta di Betlemme per insegnarci la potenza dell’umiltà. Infatti, il Natale è anche la festa della luce che non viene accolta dalla gente “eletta” ma dalla gente povera e semplice che aspettava la salvezza del Signore.

Innanzitutto, vorrei augurare a tutti voi – collaboratori, fratelli e sorelle, Rappresentanti pontifici sparsi per il mondo – e a tutti i vostri cari un santo Natale e un felice Anno Nuovo. Desidero ringraziarvi cordialmente, per il vostro impegno quotidiano al servizio della Santa Sede, della Chiesa Cattolica, delle Chiese particolari e del Successore di Pietro.

Essendo noi persone e non numeri o soltanto denominazioni, ricordo in maniera particolare coloro che, durante questo anno, hanno terminato il loro servizio per raggiunti limiti di età o per aver assunto altri ruoli oppure perché sono stati chiamati alla Casa del Padre. Anche a tutti loro e ai loro famigliari va il mio pensiero e gratitudine. …

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (Nigeria)

Monday, 22 December 2014 Written by AFP

POPE Francis lambasted the Vatican’s bureaucracy on Monday, saying some within the Church had a lust for power, were indifferent to others and suffered from “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.

The Argentine used a Christmas speech to cardinals, bishops and priests to list a catalogue of ailments plaguing some at the very top and urging a “cure”.

He said the Vatican was riven with “existential schizophrenia”, “social exhibitionism”, “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and a lust for power, all of which have led to an “orchestra that plays out of tune”.

He warned against greed, egoism and people who think they are ‘immortal’.

It is not the first time the 78-year-old has taken on the scandal-hit, intrigue-filled Curia, and called for them to renounce gossip and act responsibly.

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VATICAN CITY
Island Packet

BY NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press
December 22, 2014

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis issued a blistering critique Monday 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’ 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.

Francis, who is the first Latin American pope and never worked in the Italian-dominated Curia before he was elected, has not shied from complaining about the gossiping, careerism and bureaucratic power intrigues that afflict the Holy See. But as his reform agenda gathers steam, he seemed even more emboldened to highlight what ails the institution.

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GUAM
Radio New Zealand

A high-level Vatican official is to visit Guam’s Catholic community next month.

The Pacific Daily News reports that it is unclear whether the nature of the visit by Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai is friendly or investigatory.

Guam’s Archdiocese of Agana says that Hon’s Guam trip is a “pastoral visit” that comes in the wake of Archbishop Anthony Apuron’s recent trip to see Pope Francis in Rome.

However, Hon is the secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the Vatican office to whom some of Guam’s Catholics have sent letters in recent months, seeking an investigation into various controversies in the local archdiocese.

Representatives from different Guam parishes have formed a group called Concerned Catholics of Guam and plan to investigate the archdiocese’s handling of a sexual molestation allegation against Archbishop Apuron.

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GUAM
KUAM

by Krystal Paco

Guam – Controversy continues to plague the local Catholic Church as a new riff emerges, this time between Archbishop Anthony Apuron and Deacon Steve Martinez.

It was on December 17th Deacon Martinez tells KUAM he received a letter from Apuron giving him 24 hours to comply with a directive or face censure meaning he would be removed from his position as a deacon at the Agana Cathedral. That censure automatically went into effect the evening of the 18th.

According to the creator and main blogger at JungleWatch, Tim Rohr, Martinez was accused of exciting hatred and contempt against the church, inciting animosities and hatred against an ordinary and provoking subjects to disobedience as well as joining an association which is plotting against the church. But when asked for proof to substantiate the claims Rohr says “nothing”.

Then over the weekend according to Martinez he received another letter from the archbishop reversing his removal however that letter came with the warning that he could still be subject to censure until January 19th. Rohr says this means a gag order has been placed on Martinez. Martinez says that all of this stems from his involvement in the newly formed group the Concerned Catholics of Guam. You may recall that the CCOG was formed by a group of parishioners to investigate the recent controversies within the archdiocese.

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VERMONT
Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington

BURLINGTON – At 6 a.m. Vermont time today – 12 p.m. Noon at the Vatican – Pope Francis appointed The Most Reverend Christopher James Coyne (@bishopcoyne), until now Auxiliary Bishop of Indianapolis, as Tenth Bishop of Burlington.

A Boston native, Bishop Coyne will formally be installed as pastor of Vermont’s 118,000 Catholics on Thursday, January 29, 2015, at 2:00 PM, with a Solemn Mass of Installation in Saint Joseph Co-Cathedral. The Pope’s ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, will be in attendance as the Holy Father’s personal representative.

“I am grateful to Pope Francis for his confidence in me in appointing me to Burlington. Personally, I could not be happier to be assigned here and look forward to returning to my native New England,” Bishop Coyne said.

The Catholic Church’s first blogging priest to become a bishop on his appointment by then-Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, Coyne is an internationally cited leader in the Faith’s “digital revolution.” Having kept a dedicated daily presence on both Facebook and Twitter to a current 10,000 followers, as well as producing a regular podcast, the bishop’s outreach has been featured on NBC’s Today Show and in the nationally broadcast coverage of the Indianapolis 500, at which he delivered the pre-race Invocation for the last three years. In November 2014, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops elected Bishop Coyne as the next chairman of the national church’s communications efforts, a three-year mandate which begins in 2015.

The middle of seven children born to a postal worker and parish secretary in Woburn, Mass., after graduating from the University of Lowell and working two years as a full-time bartender, Bishop Coyne attended seminary for five years and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston on June 7, 1986. While ministering in parishes for most of his years in Massachusetts, Bishop Chris additionally spent twelve years serving as a professor of liturgy at St. John’s Seminary, Brighton, and a number of years as the Archdiocesan Director of Worship and later Secretary for Communications.

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VERMONT
Burlington Free Press

MIKE DONOGHUE, Free Press Staff Writer December 22, 2014

Auxiliary Bishop Christopher J. Coyne of Indianapolis has been named the new Bishop for the statewide Roman Catholic Diocese in Vermont.

The 56 year-old Massachusetts native has been serving in Indiana for four years. Coyne, who was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Boston in June 1986, served in Massachusetts for much of his religious life.

In Vermont Bishop Coyne will oversee the state’s largest religion — about 120,000 Catholics spread among about 120 churches. There are 13 Catholic schools, including high schools in South Burlington and Rutland. The diocesan headquarters are on Joy Drive in South Burlington. …

Coyne became well-known in Massachusetts when the Boston archdiocese in 2002 appointed him the primary spokesman in the wake of numerous priest sex abuse cases and the resulting lawsuits and trials. He held that post for three years.

Vermont has had its share of priest sex abuse cases. When Matano arrived in 2005 he inherited many of the legal problems that stemmed from lack of action by his predecessors, primarily Bishop John A. Marshall, who served Vermont from 1971 to 1991.

Matano initially did not want to settle many of the sex abuse cases. After losing some costly civil trials, the diocese eventually agreed to a $17.65 million out-of-court payout in May 2010 to settle lawsuits with 26 victims alleging long-ago child molesting. The diocese also agreed to undisclosed amounts to settle three other cases that were on appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.

Matano always said the money would not come from parish members and eventually the Burlington diocese began to sell some of its property in an effort to pay the settlement. The diocesan headquarters on North Avenue was eventually sold for $10 million in January 2011 to Burlington College. Camp Holy Cross in Colchester, a 26-acre parcel on Lake Champlain was sold for $4 million in January 2012. Camp Tara, a short distance away, had sold for $2.2 million in 2004.

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CANADA
The Irish Times

Jennifer Hough

Mon, Dec 22, 2014

When Valerie Andrews heard an interview last year on the CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster, with Irish adoption campaigner Philomena Lee, she thought “great, but why don’t you give us some airtime?”

“We are here, we are the Canadian Philomenas,” says Andrews, who has been fighting for years to have the story of Canada’s mother-and-baby homes unearthed and acknowledged.

Canada’s tale is all too familiar: pregnant single women incarcerated in religious homes, forced to attend church and carry out unpaid labour; babies removed after birth and illegally adopted, with no way of tracing them.

Testimonies, trickling out slowly from under layers of grief and shame, suggest what happened was just as extreme as what occurred in Ireland, contends Andrews, executive director of Origins Canada, an adoption rights group.

But the Canadian story is yet to have its breakthrough moment, one, perhaps like the Philomena movie, that pierces public consciousness in a way that makes the issue impossible to ignore.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Danuta Kozaki

The Salvation Army’s reputation has been severely damaged by evidence that children were abused in its homes in the past, research suggests.

In an annual index of the reputations of 40 of Australia’s largest charities, the Salvation Army fell from 10th last year to 27th this year.

The Charity Reputation Index, published by research consultants AMR, is based on a survey of the public and considers issues such as trust, leadership and governance.

Managing director Oliver Goodman said community perceptions of the Salvation Army were affected by the high-profile hearings of the Royal Commission into Institution Responses to Child Sexual Abuse earlier this year.

The inquiry heard evidence children were physically and sexually abused in the homes over many years.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

Dozens of child abuse survivors have urged the government to scrap an inquiry into historical abuse and replace it with a more powerful body.

The call comes after a leaked letter from Theresa May told inquiry members their panel might be disbanded.

Peter Saunders, from National Association for People Abused in Childhood, said the move would be supported by the majority of survivors.

Labour’s Simon Danczuk said the inquiry so far had been an “utter mess”.

Mr Danczuk, who exposed child sex abuse allegations against former Liberal MP Cyril Smith, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that survivors would be “dismayed” by the progress of the inquiry – which was set up in July and has started work, but has no chairman.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Channel 4

Dozens of child abuse survivors welcome Theresa May’s indication that the panel conducting an inquiry into historical abuse could be disbanded to make way for a more powerful body.

A letter, signed by more than 60 victims and representatives who wish to remain anonymous, calls for a statutory inquiry to be declared, a public announcement that the existing panel will be scrapped and replaced on a “transparent fit-for-purpose” basis and the appointment of an inquiry chair who has “demonstrable experience and ability in challenging the establishment”.

“It is important that the inquiry is centred on bringing perpetrators before the courts, holding those that have failed in their professional duty or covered up allegations or been obstructive to account and delivering justice for survivors,” the letter reads.

Home Secretary Theresa May’s first two choices to chair the inquiry have both stood down amid claims they were too closely linked to establishment figures.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

Shambolic government inquiry into child sex abuse looks like a ‘deliberate’ cover up, says Labour MP

By TOM MCTAGUE, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR FOR MAILONLINE

Theresa May’s shambolic handling of the government’s historic child abuse inquiry looks like a ‘deliberate’ attempt to stop victims getting to the truth, a Labour MP has claimed.

Simon Danczuk said survivors of abuse could be forced to take ‘direct action’ if the Home Secretary fails to get a grip.

The remarks, which sparked a furious backlash, come after Mrs May revealed that an independent panel set up to support the planned public inquiry could be disbanded.

Some victims’ groups welcomed the move despite warnings it could delay the inquiry for ‘yet more weeks and probably months’.

Mr Danczuk said victims would be dismayed at the lack of progress in the probe, and could not help worrying that the litany of mistakes was party of a wider cover up.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Andrew Sparrow, political correspondent
Monday 22 December 2014

A leading organisation representing child abuse victims has welcomed reports that Theresa May, the home secretary, may scrap the abuse inquiry panel so that it can be replaced with a more powerful body.

Peter Saunders, chief executive of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac), told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that he did not know any abuse survivors who had confidence in the panel as it currently exists.

He was speaking after it emerged that more than 60 victims and their representatives had written to the Home Office supporting the call for the panel to be replaced with a statutory inquiry that has the power to call witnesses.

Having to wind up the panel and start again would be an embarrassment for May, who originally announced the inquiry in the summer. On Monday Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP who has played a leading role in campaigning for an inquiry, said the Home Office was making so many mistakes that he was starting to suspect it wanted to stop the inquiry getting to the truth.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Independent

LIZZIE DEARDEN Monday 22 December 2014

A Labour MP has said that continuing chaos surrounding the Westminster child abuse inquiry makes it look as though the Government does not “want to get to the truth”.

Simon Danczuk said victims would be dismayed at the lack of progress in the probe, and could not help worrying that the litany of mistakes was “deliberate”.

The Home Secretary has indicated that the troubled inquiry panel may be disbanded and replaced after calls from victims’ families to give it more powers, potentially causing further delay.

Fiona Woolf and Baroness Butler-Sloss have both stepped down from the role of inquiry chairman and a replacement has not yet been appointed.

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MARYLAND
The Baltimore Sun

By Susan Reimer
The Baltimore Sun

A Towson University student has added her name to a civil suit involving a Towson associate professor and rabbi accused of taking pictures and videos of women in a ritual bath.

The young woman, who asked that she be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, was a student of Rabbi Barry Freundel when, she said, he encouraged her to participate in a mikvah as research for a term paper, even though she was not Jewish and had no wish to convert.

A mikvah is a cleansing ritual that is often a final step for a convert.

Stephanie said she believed as soon as the charges against Freundel were make public in October that she had been videotaped, too.

“I felt shock first. Total and complete shock,” she said in a telephone interview Sunday. “It took a while to feel everything else that comes with something like this.”

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INDIANA
The Daily Beast

M.L. Nestel

He preached against homosexuality on Sundays—and forced himself on young men during the week.
Pastor Gaylard Williams earned a good reputation among his evangelical ilk.

The Indiana holy man carried himself with humility, and on the pulpit Gaylard Williams played to his conservative congregants by coming out swinging against homosexuals.

The God-fearing 59-year-old was able to prove himself a servant of God to the elderly followers who filled the pews every Sunday at the Praise Cathedral Church of God in the small hamlet of Seymour, Indiana, to receive his heartfelt sermons.

And Williams presented himself as a dedicated husband for two decades to his wife, who also led the women ministry, and took pride as a father in having reared two upstanding sons.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Southwark News

22 December 2014 By Court Reporter

A controversial African preacher who claimed to be able to give infertile couples ‘miracle babies’ was cleared of raping a follower on Thursday.

Self-styled ‘Archbishop of Peckham’ Gilbert Deya, 61, vowed to continue in his mission to “preach the gospel of Jesus Christ” after the court cleared him of two counts of rape, two of sexual assault, attempted rape and assault by beating after nearly five hours of deliberations.

Deya said: “The court has today rightly ruled that I am an innocent man” after he stood accused of sexually assaulting one of his followers during an alleged campaign of abuse spanning nearly a decade.

The alleged victim came to Britain from Sierra Leone in 2003 and visited Deya’s church in Peckham in 2006.

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

Bethany Hiatt
December 22, 2014

The Christian Brothers have reopened 80 previously settled cases in the wake of royal commission hearings held earlier this year into sexual abuse at four WA orphanages.

In a written statement, the Christian Brothers said new settlements had been reached in 14 cases and mediation meetings had taken place recently in 20 cases in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The commission released a report on Friday which found that Christian Brothers leaders knew of allegations of sexual abuse of children at four WA orphanages and failed to manage the homes to prevent the systemic ill-treatment for decades.

Christian Brothers Oceania province leader Brother Peter Clinch said it had made significant progress on the commitment it made at the public hearings in April to re-examine cases that had been “settled on demonstrably unjust and unreasonably low terms”.

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INDIANA
The Journal Gazette

$1.9 million judgment against Catholic diocese

Rebecca S. Green The Journal Gazette

Almost every single thing for which Emily Herx asked the jury, she received.

Nearly $2 million in damages, and vindication, after the jury ruled that the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend discriminated against the former language arts teacher at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School when they fired her for undergoing in vitro fertilization.

The verdict came after about 51/2 hours of deliberation Friday afternoon, capping off a four-day jury trial before U.S. District Judge Robert Miller Jr. in the expansive federal courthouse just a few blocks from the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the center of the diocese.

As she waited for the jury to come in, Herx sat ramrod straight in her chair at the table next to her attorney, Kathleen DeLaney, her face anything but calm as she clearly tried to control her breathing and anxiety.

Throughout the trial, she heard herself characterized by the defense as a potential drug abuser, an emotional basket case and as someone who committed a sin so grave and immoral that no circumstances could justify it.

But after the verdict was read, she seemed to uncoil with relief, crying and holding onto DeLaney in a long and tearful embrace.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

1. Exceptional “Grandma” figures, Hillary Clinton and Betty Clermont, are in different ways poised to challenge in 2015 the world’s most prominent “Grandpa” type figure, Pope Francis, as the Vatican priest child abuse and contraception ban controversies are set to boil over next year.

2. Betty Clermont is a retired grandmother armed only with a computer and Internet access. She is author of “The Neo-Catholics”. Her well researched recent reports relentlessly and exhaustively have shown the large gaps between Pope Francis’ deeds and words. Please see Betty Clermont’s exceptional, interesting and disturbing new report at:

3. [Daily Kos]

4. Hillary Clinton has been in Vatican struggles over women and children’s rights since at least her 1995 clash with Mary Ann Glendon, now apparently Pope Francis’ top female adviser, at the UN Beijing Conference on women’s rights. For a recent look back at Hillary Clinton’s 1995 efforts, please see , “20 Minutes That Changed The World: Hillary Clinton In Beijing.” and her 1995 address at Beijing at:

5. [Huffington Post]

6. [YouTube]

7. Betty Clermont also has exposed repeatedly the captive main stream media’s subtle and troubling role in creating the Francis Myth. She has illustrated extensively the appalling power of the nearly monopolistic main stream media, almost stealthily, to create an “accommodating” world religious leader in Francis to facilitate the obscene and dangerous trend towards worldwide income inequality. Where are the main stream media investigators on these matters? Why are so many of them so often outdistanced by a lone, but courageous, grandmother like Betty Clermont?

8. The main stream media’s papal omissions, however, may soon be reversed in 2015. Two world media stars are on course to collide in the “battle of the sexes”, senior style, in 2015.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

December 22, 2014

Angharad Owens-Strauss

One of Australia’s best-known welfare organisations, the Salvation Army, has dropped 17 places from last year in the 2014 AMR Charity Reputation Index, a yearly survey which measures the overall reputation of the country’s 40 largest charities .

The Salvation Army dropped from No.10 in 2013 to No.27 this year.

The results follows allegations of child sex abuse by Salvation Army staff that were the subject of a royal commission inquiry. More than 100 children came forward with reports of physical, sexual and indecent abuse.

In a February hearing of the royal commission, James Condon, leader of the Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory, said the charity’s reputation was no longer a priority.

“The priority is the survivor, not protection of the Salvation Army,” he said.

The National Heart Foundation of Australia dropped nine places in this year’s index.

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UNITED KINGDOM
ITV

The panel set up to run the public child sex abuse inquiry may be “disbanded” by Theresa May in the New Year, according to reports.

In a letter addressed to panel members, and leaked by investigative website Exaro News, the Home Secretary says she is considering three options which will give the inquiry full statutory powers – two of which would most likely require the panel being split up.

The three options outlined by May to secure the inquiry statutory powers, including the ability to compel witnesses to give evidence, are:

* the appointment of a new chairman who would then request statutory powers

* the setting up of a new inquiry panel under statutory terms

* holding the inquiry as a Royal Commission without the powers of a statutory inquiry

The Home Office said May was still considering all her options and nothing has yet been decided.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

By Tom Symonds
Home Affairs correspondent

The independent panel set up to support the planned public inquiry into historical child abuse could be disbanded, the BBC understands.

Home Secretary Theresa May has written to panel members saying three options to give the inquiry full statutory powers are being considered.

Only one option does not require the panel to be disbanded.

A Home Office spokesman said Mrs May wanted to balance making progress “with the need to get this right”.

The panel, which has started work, still has nobody to chair it after the first two nominations stood down.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent
21 Dec 2014

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has indicated for the first time that she is prepared to go back to the drawing board over the controversial Government inquiry into historic child sex abuse.

Members of the official inquiry panel set up by the Home Office said they were “devastated” that ministers were poised to scrap the existing set-up in the New Year.

However, groups representing alleged victims of abuse welcomed the ​ development and said they hoped the new inquiry would have tougher powers, including the ability to force witnesses to give evidence.

In a letter to panel members Mrs May said she was considering a number of options, which would have “implications” for members.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Sky News

By Sean Dilley, Sky News Reporter

Survivors have welcomed reports, in a letter seen by Sky News, that Theresa May is planning to scrap the panel set up to investigate allegations of historical child sex abuse.

The letter, signed by more than 60 victims and representatives who wish to remain anonymous, lists a series of demands for the Home Secretary regarding the Child Sex Abuse Inquiry.

It calls for a statutory inquiry to be declared, a public announcement that the existing panel will be scrapped and replaced on a “transparent fit-for-purpose” and the appointment of an inquiry chair who has “demonstrable experience and ability in challenging the establishment”.

It reads: “Following the mistakes of the last six months, we consider your proposals as an opportunity to place the inquiry on to a firm footing whereby it can focus on dealing with organised and institutional abuse and cover ups at the highest levels.

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UNITED STATES
Daily Kos

SAT DEC 20, 2014

by Betty Clermont

“Americans will vote for Republicans even though they disagree with them on everything. [O]n the biggest issues facing Congress, they still agree with Democrats on … almost everything. That includes issues like raising the minimum wage, making the rich pay more in taxes, letting illegal immigrants stay in the United States, taking action to stem global warming, legalizing same sex marriage and fixing the Affordable Care Act rather than repealing it,” noted Zachary A. Goldfarb, policy editor at the Washington Post, after November’s elections.

By 2014, “the state of the nation has improved dramatically over the past four years. Unemployment is down to 5.9 percent and consumer confidence is back to levels not seen since before the deep recession which began in late 2007. The stock market is at record highs while the annual federal budget deficit is less than half of what it was when Barack Obama first took the oath of office,” explained Jon Perr who cited the above article by Goldfarb.

A majority of Americans don’t know this because the corporate media don’t report it.

“At its founding [in 1934], the Federal Communications Commission viewed the stations to which it granted licenses as ‘public trustees’ and required that they make every reasonable attempt to cover contrasting points of views. The Commission also required that stations perform public service in reporting on crucial issues in their communities. Soon after he became FCC Chairman under President Reagan, Michael Fowler stated his desire to do away with this Fairness Doctrine.”

“The devolution of the American press began when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. [Broadcasters] no longer have an obligation to serve the public interest. Their only obligation is to their shareholders,” stated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. …

The following illustrates the appalling power of the corporate media to create a world leader and will hopefully generate a conversation, using this example, about how to overcome its lies and omissions. Information about Pope Francis withheld by the corporate media comes after the popular headline. …

Pope Francis Addresses Sex Abuse Scandal

Next to appointing and promoting a dozen or so churchmen with records as dismal as his own in protecting predator pedophiles, there is no better example of Pope Francis’ lack of resolve to protect children than his handling of his former nuncio to the Dominican Republic, Archbishop Josef Wesolowski. For more than 16 months after being informed of the accusations against his ambassador, the pope left Wesolowski with free access to more children. Additionally, Pope Francis has done everything possible to prevent Wesolowski from being prosecuted by Dominican officials.

A Catholic deacon, Francisco Javier Occi Reyes, was arrested by the police on June 24, 2013. The deacon “said at the time of his arrest he was ‘pimping’ a youngster for Wesolowski, who was allegedly waiting in his vehicle nearby….The minors interviewed [by the police] admitted to masturbating for, and of taking part in oral sex with the archbishop as he filmed them with a cell phone [in exchange for cash] while another witness affirmed seeing porno in his laptop at the Vatican embassy.”

Occi confessed to the allegations. “When no one came to bail him out, the deacon sent an anguished letter dated July 2 to Wesolowski… The deacon sent copies of the letter to Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus López Rodriguez, the head of the Church in the Dominican Republic, and to a Dominican bishop, Gregorio Nicanor Peña Rodríguez. The cardinal then carried the evidence to the Vatican, where he met directly with Pope Francis according to Dominican officials.”

Reported with the usual “Pope Francis gets tough on sex abuse” headlines, on July 11, 2013, the pontiff enacted a civil law making sexual violence and possession of child pornography punishable by up to 12 years in prison not only for those who live in Vatican City State, but also all employees, including the diplomatic corps, of the Holy See. Those accused of these crimes would be tried by the Cardinal Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura (Supreme Court) and two other judges of his choosing – providing a possible motive for the later dismissal of the independently-minded Cardinal Raymond Burke.

According to experts in international law, the Vatican could have waived diplomatic immunity for the ambassador. But in hindsight, it’s probable that Pope Francis wanted Wesolowski tried under his control.

Because the pope kept the information about Wesolowski secret, the general public knew nothing about the ambassador until a local TV broadcast on August 31, 2013. The result of a year-long investigation, the program contained testimony about Wesolowski’s crimes. Three days after the broadcast, a local bishop confirmed that Wesolowski had already been dismissed by the pope and that he had left the country only a few days earlier. There were accusations that the pope allowed Wesolowski to escape and his whereabouts remained unknown.

“For me it was a surprise to see Wesolowski walking along Via della Scrofa in Rome. The silence of the Church has injured the people of God,” tweeted Santo Domingo archdiocese Auxiliary Bishop Víctor Masalles on June 24, 2014. Another report stated “the former papal nuncio was living in a fairly upscale house for prelates called the Casa del Clero.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

Organisations which help victims of child sexual abuse have been awarded £2 million by the Government due to a massive surge in their workload.

The Home Office and the Ministry of Justice said charities and other groups had seen an increase in demand because of the Government’s high-profile inquiry into the issue, prompted by allegations of a Westminster paedophile conspiracy.

Organisations will be able to apply for a share of the fund if they are assisting people directly affected by issues covered in the inquiry.

Further cash was also announced for other groups assisting victims of sex abuse, brining the total to £7 million.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Mirror

Dec 20, 2014 By Nick Dorman, Alex Varley-Winter

The former Metrpoplitan Police officers have agreed to ­compile formal statements on what they knew of VIP child abuse operations being shut down

Ex-cops who claim VIP paedophile investigations were axed in a cover-up are to hand a dossier to Britain’s most senior police officer.

They have agreed to ­compile formal statements on what they knew of ­operations being shut down.

The file will be presented to Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.

Last week we told how in messages on a members-only web forum for ex-officers, it was claimed probes which got close to explosing VIPs were “canned”.

Now we can reveal messages on the site detail the plan to compile a dossier for Sir Bernard and Home Secretary Theresa May’s Child Sex Abuse inquiry.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Exaro News

20 December 2014

By Alex Varley-Winter

Exaro today publishes postings on a private forum in which former officers from Scotland Yard discuss submitting statements on the cover-up of VIP paedophiles.

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UNITED STATES
Salon

PHIL ZUCKERMAN

What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over so much of America?

The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. It is simply not the case that in recent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existence of God, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot. Sure, this may be happening here and there, in this or that dorm room or on this or that Tumblr page. The best-sellers written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—as well as the irreverent impiety and flagrant mockery of religion by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, House, South Park, and Family Guy—have had some impact on American culture. As we have seen, a steady, incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.

For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer in schools, advocating “abstinence only” sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House. …

A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation of, and reaction against, the Catholic Church’s pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators to remote parishes rather than having them arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash lawbreaking, and the aggressive slandering of accusers—and all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victims have been made known than one can imagine. After the extent of the crimes—the rapes and molestations as well as the cover-ups—became widely publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual sexual crimes themselves morally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was truly shocking. The result has been clear: a lot of Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England. Between 2000 and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its members in Maine, and closed nearly seventy parishes—a quarter of the total number—throughout the Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39 percent in 2008. And according to an “American Values” survey from 2012, although nearly one-third of Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as such—a precipitous nationwide decline indeed.

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ALASKA
KNOM

By Jenn Ruckel, December 19, 2014

after more than a year without an official leader, the 18,000 Catholics in the 46 parishes of northern Alaska will now be led—for the first time in U.S. history—by an active duty military chaplain. Bishop Chad Zielinski was ordained in Fairbanks on Monday, and was welcomed by a host of priests, deacons, and parishioners from throughout the region.

The ceremony was a unique blend of Catholic and Native traditions, bringing people together all the way from North Pole to Barrow and Nome. While the diocese is still recovering from a dark chapter—more than 100 claims of sexual abuse at the hands priests and church volunteers—parishioners like Michael Welch say this is a time for healing, with the guidance and support of their new bishop.

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GUAM
Pacific Sunday News

Written by
Gaynor Dumat-ol Daleno
Pacific Sunday News

A high-level Vatican official is visiting Guam’s Catholic community next month, but whether the visit will be friendly, or investigatory, is in dispute.

“The Archdiocese of Agana is happy to welcome the pastoral visit of His Excellency, the Most Reverend Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai,” the archdiocese stated Friday, in part, in a written statement to the media.

Hon is the secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the Vatican office to whom some of Guam’s Catholics sent letters over the past several months, seeking an investigation of the various controversies in the local archdiocese.

The Archdiocese of Agana emphasized, by underlining in Friday’s media statement, that Hon’s Guam trip is a “pastoral visit.”

Hon’s visit, according to the archdiocese, comes “in the wake of Archbishop Anthony Apuron’s successful visit with Pope Francis last month in Rome.” …

More than a week ago, certain members of different parishes on Guam formed a nonprofit group called Concerned Catholics of Guam Inc., and announced the group plans to investigate the management of the local church, its financial books, and the archdiocese’s handling of a sexual molestation allegation against Apuron.

Apuron has called the allegation a “horrible calumny,” but declined to respond further to the allegation on the advice of his attorney because he’s planning a defamation lawsuit to defend the church.

The group’s president, Greg Perez, made a statement on Dec. 9 on why Concerned Catholics was formed. “A few of us would meet occasionally to discuss these stories about the archbishop, priests who have been allegedly blamed for mismanagement of funds or alleged disobedience and then removed from their parishes, the lack of transparency with the finances of the archdiocese, neglect of precious artifacts in the archdiocesan museum, among other issues,” Perez said.

Tim Rohr, a Guam resident who writes a blog on Catholic issues, called Jungle Watch, believes the nature of the Vatican official’s visit is investigatory. “The people who are coming — the nature of their office is investigation,” Rohr said.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

Press Association

The troubled child abuse inquiry panel could be disbanded in order for a new, more powerful, body to take over, Theresa May has indicated.

The Home Secretary has written to the panel’s members setting out her plan for the inquiry to be given statutory powers, including the ability to compel witnesses to give evidence.

But the move has left members of the panel “devastated” that they could face being removed from the inquiry.

Mrs May told MPs last week that she wanted the inquiry – which is without a chairman following the resignation of two previous appointees – to be given extra powers.

That could mean waiting for a chairman to be appointed for the inquiry panel, who would then request statutory powers, or setting up a new inquiry panel under statutory terms.

The third option of a Royal Commission – as some want – would not have the powers of a statutory inquiry under the 2005 Inquiries Act and would be ”legally more risky”.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Nadia Khomami
Saturday 20 December 2014

Theresa May is to scrap the panel for the independent inquiry into child sex abuse, it has been reported.

The home secretary wrote to each member of the panel to tell them she is considering turning it into a statutory inquiry, or setting up a fresh statutory inquiry or a Royal Commission, according to the Exaro News website.

The letter, which followed a meeting between May and panel members on Monday to discuss the future of the inquiry, added that any statutory inquiry panel would be newly appointed, and that existing panel members can apply for positions on the new panel.

She put this decision down to concerns raised about the panel by abuse survivors. May wrote: “As I said on Monday, I am currently considering these three options and I appreciate this has implications for the members of the panel.

“I should like to make clear that I appointed each and every one of you for your experience, your professionalism and your undoubted commitment.

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GUAM
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on December 20, 2014

I hate watching sports … but I LOVE stories about sports.

The minutiae about how any particular game is played is usually lost on me. For me, going to a live sporting event is about the spectacle, not the stats or the rules.

But give me a documentary, movie, book, magazine article, or TV show about the PEOPLE in and behind the games, and I’m mesmerized. These stories draw me in because they are about ordinary people who do extraordinary things. These stories take place in a world—our world—where ANYTHING is possible. There are no victims and there is no pity. This is a world full of vision, enthusiasm, dreams, hope, love, and the value of tenacity.

Which brings me to a small island in the Western Pacific: Guam—an island full of ordinary people doing very extraordinary things. These people aren’t athletes—they are Catholics fighting to take back their church, their faith, and their reputations.

I went to Guam in 2010. Survivors on the island had asked me to come there and reach out to other survivors who felt like it was not safe to come forward and report. The Archbishop of Hagatna, Anthony Sablan Apuron—according to Catholics and critics—was perceived as a bully who scared and shamed victims into silence. So, for some sex abuse victims in the Archdiocese of Hagatna (the only diocese on Guam), coming forward and reporting abuse was tantamount to career and reputation suicide. For the rest, it was suicide.

So when Guam legislators passed a 2011 civil window that allowed sex abuse victims to come forward and use the civil courts to sue their abuser (but not the Archdiocese), victims didn’t come forward … it was just too risky.

Fast forward to 2014. This is where the story really begins. (Note: this story is SO complex and complicated, I know I’m going to miss some of the big points. But the story is still pretty darned juicy.)

Local Catholics, led by trail blazers such as Tim Rohr (a man Apuron had recruited to discredit me in 2010) and Fr. Matthew Blockley, decided that they had had enough. Apuron was pushing the Neocatechumenal Way, a lay movement within the church that according to John Allen, Jr., is “playing fast and loose with both Church teaching and the liturgical rules, fostering a cult of personality, and dividing parishes by insisting that members attend their own Saturday evening services rather than the usual Sunday Mass.”

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VATICAN CITY
AGI

(AGI) Vatican City, Dec. 20 – Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone is no longer Camerlengo of the Holy Church of Rome. Pope Francis has replaced him with Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran, the memorable Foreign Minister of Pope John Paul II and currently president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

Bertoni turned 80 last Dec. 2 and therefore could not eventually participate in a Conclave. As Protodeacon, Cardinal Tauran announced the election of Pope Francis on March 13, 2013.

During the last few month, he closely collaborated with the Pontiff, especially in cleaning up the Vatican’s financial sector and the IOR Vatican bank in particular. Born in Bordeaux, Cardinal Tauran is now 71 years old.

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AUSTRALIA
Courier-Mail

RASHIDA YOSUFZAI AAP DECEMBER 19, 2014

A FORMER priest who was provided with a character reference by Tony Abbott while he stood trial for sexually abusing an altar boy had further complaints made against him.

A REPORT by the royal commission into child abuse said those complaints justified “serious reservations and concern” about the danger John Gerard Nestor posed to children and his suitability for ministry.

Nestor was a priest in the Wollongong diocese in NSW when he was charged and convicted of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old altar boy in 1996.

Mr Abbott, then a parliamentary secretary in the Howard government, described Nestor as a “beacon of humanity” in a character reference provided for his former seminary colleague.
Nestor was later acquitted on appeal.

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UNITED STATES
New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
DEC. 20, 2014

Six years ago, in the midst of the scandal over child abuse by rogue Catholic priests, the Vatican shocked many of the laity by ordering a sweeping investigation into the behavior and fidelity of the 50,000 American nuns who quietly labor in hospitals, prisons and outposts of the nation’s impoverished. The inquiry, ordered by the church under Pope Benedict XVI, seemed a deliberate distraction from the abuse scandal, and was tinged with male chauvinism.

Now, under the more egalitarian Pope Francis, the inquiry has been concluded with a generally positive report that mainly praises the sisters and their works in words of gratitude and encouragement.

The report should help counter the fear and discouragement that many sisters felt when Rome ordered the inquiry into the community life and finances of the nation’s 350 women’s religious orders. Far from discouraging the social justice ministries that nuns have pioneered, the report urged the sisters to continue their work taking on “the structural causes of poverty.” It even quoted Francis’s call for “a more incisive female presence in the church.” No means for achieving that were suggested, though the sisterhood was a bastion of good works during the harrowing scandal that saw hundreds of men dispatched from the priesthood.

Unfortunately, there is a second, more ill-advised inquiry still to be completed — into whether the national leadership of the nuns has taken on what a ranking prelate termed “a certain secular mentality” and “a certain feminist spirit.” The inquiry was begun under Benedict when Vatican officials expressed concern that teachings on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood might have been criticized at leadership conferences of American nuns.

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CONNECTICUT
Road to Recovery

[Note: This event has been postponed.]

Hartford, CT Archdiocese has been informed of clergy sexual abuse by a deceased Hartford, CT priest, Fr. Vincent A. Brown, but refuses to acknowledge and validate the sexual abuse claim of the victim, Charles Mc Gilton, and help him heal

Hartford, CT Archdiocese, despite knowing about sexual allegations against the late Fr. Vincent A. Brown, has not ordered a public golf tournament named after Fr. Vincent A. Brown to be re-named

Fr. Vincent A. Brown, formerly assigned to St. Mary’s Parish, Branford, repeatedly sexually abused a minor child, Charles Mc Gilton, when Fr. Vincent A. Brown was assigned to St. Lawrence Parish in West Haven, CT

What
A media event and leafleting to alert St. Mary’s Parish, Branford, CT, the greater Connecticut area, and the general public of the Hartford Archdiocese’s unwillingness to help a sexual abuse victim of a Hartford Archdiocesan priest, the late Fr. Vincent A. Brown.

When
Sunday morning and afternoon, December 21, 2014 after the 7:00 am Mass until the end of the 12:15 pm Mass (and all Masses in between). Press conference will be held at 11:30 AM.

Where
On the public sidewalk outside St. Mary’s Parish, 731 Main Street, Branford, CT, 203-488-1607

Who
Charles Mc Gilton, the sexual abuse victim of Fr. Vincent A. Brown, from West Haven, CT; Dr. Robert M. Hoatson, President of Road to Recovery, Inc. a non-profit charity that advocates for and assists victims of sexual abuse and their families; and other supporters.

Why
Charles Mc Gilton was a young boy when his family lived near and attended St. Lawrence Catholic Church in West Haven, CT. Charles Mc Gilton delivered newspapers to the rectory at St. Lawrence Church where Fr. Vincent A. Brown invited him in and repeatedly sexually abused him there. Fr. Vincent A. Brown also sexually abused Charles Mc Gilton in a local West Haven store where many of Fr. Vincent A. Brown’s parishioners and neighborhood friends gathered to eat and talk. Subsequently, Fr. Vincent A. Brown was transferred to St. Mary’s Parish in Branford, CT, where, today, a golf tournament, which raises thousands of dollars annually for the parish school, is named for Fr. Vincent A. Brown, held at a local elite country club, and supported by local Hartford media personalities, civic and Church leaders, and other celebrities. Demonstrators will call on the Hartford Archdiocese in the person of Archbishop Leonard Blair, the people of St. Mary’s Parish, Branford, and all people in the greater Hartford/New Haven region to acknowledge and validate Charles Mc Gilton’s allegations, apologize for the sexual abuse he endured, and provide him with the resources he needs to heal. Demonstrators will also demand that the name of Fr. Vincent A. Brown be removed from the annual St. Mary’s Parish Golf Tournament and any other honorary titles he holds.

Contacts
Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., 862-368-2800
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, Boston, MA, 617-523-6250

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