ABUSE TRACKER

AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By New Zealand correspondent Dominique Schwartz and Giselle Wakatama
Updated 25 Aug 2014

A former Catholic Brother wanted in Australia for alleged child sexual abuse is challenging a decision to extradite him from New Zealand.

Bernard Kevin McGrath has been fighting authorities’ efforts to bring him back to Australia for two years.

In 2012, New South Wales police requested his extradition so he could answer 252 charges of sexual offending.

The charges relate to allegations McGrath sexually abused 35 boys in the 1970s and 1980s in the Lake Macquarie region, south of Sydney.

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GUAM
KUAM

[with video]

by Sabrina Salas Matanane

Guam – Close to 300 people have signed off on a petition and letter that was sent to the archbishop hoping they’ll see “their way”. Yet another controversial document has been posted on the JungleWatch blog, which focuses on the dealings with the local Catholic church.

This letter was sent to Archbishop Anthony Apuron last Friday by former senator Tommy Tanaka, a parishioner from Saint Francis Church in Yona. “We want to respectfully advice the archbishop that the Parish of Saint Francis is not desiring having a neo priest assigned to it. we have seen the impact of other parishes where the priest from neo have been assigned and parishioners are confused and they go to other places and seeing that Yona has been a Capuchin parish since the early1950’s we respectfully requested that it remain a Capuchin parish,” he explained.

Tanaka, who was born and raised Catholic, and has been attending St. Francis Church in Yona for more than ten years he is one of almost 300 parishioners who hope the archbishop will see it ‘their way’. Although there has been no indication the archbishop plans to assign a priest from the Neocatechumenal Way, they are being proactive to ensure their church remain a “capuchin-pastored parish”. Tanaka says with the Redempotoris Mater Seminary nearby they are asking the archbishop not to impose the way at St. Francis.

He explained, “My feeling personal feeling is Catholics are free to choose their path to God. but personally speaking I choose to continue to practice what I grew up with and I have no desire to seek a different way for me and therefore I have no desire for someone trying to bring a different path to god we’re happy with the capuchins and we want to keep St. Francis parish capuchin that’s our whole intent I have no problem with the way as a practice I just don’t want it being imposed on St. Francis Church in Yona.”

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UNITED STATES
Frum Follies

Late last week, the 15 remaining students enrolled in the 2nd year program (shana bet) of the Pninim seminary controlled by Elimelech Meisels were sent a notice informing them the seminary program was cancelled this year.

They were not offered any alternative placements. I do not know if they refunded the tuition payments, whether they plan to, and if so, on what schedule. Last year, this same 2nd year program had approximately 35 students. I do not know if it was grossly under enrolled before the scandal broke, or whether some 20 other students already withdrew.

BACKGROUND

Meisels has been embroiled in the highly publicized “Seminaries Scandal” since July 10th when the Chicago Beis Din (CBD rabbinical court) advised against attending any of the four seminaries he operated because of the results of their investigation into allegations of “unwanted physical contact of a sexual nature” with his students. Pninim was the seminary where he was the principal and spent the most time.

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PUERTO RICO
Jamaica Observer

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (CMC) – The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency says a suspended Catholic priest has pleaded guilty to child exploitation charges for taking a minor on a cruise with the intent to engage in criminal sexual conduct.

Israel Berrios-Berrios who pleaded guilty in court on Thursday was arrested on May 13 at his residence in Naranjito, Puerto Rico, following an indictment that charged him with transporting a minor with the intent to engage in sexual activity.

Prosecutors charged that Berrios-Berrios transported a 15-year-old male minor to Miami, Florida, where they took a four-day cruise to the Bahamas.

“While on the cruise, Berrios-Berrios engaged in lewd acts with the minor,” prosecutors claimed.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

August 25, 2014

Angus Livingston and Melissa Iaria

The Catholic Church might increase payouts to abuse victims in the Melbourne archdiocese although it maintains that its much-criticised complaints scheme works well and is caring.

The church is considering lifting or removing the $75,000 cap on compensation payments to victims in the Melbourne archdiocese.

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart said overall the Melbourne Response scheme remains a sound and appropriate mechanism for responding to complaints of child sex abuse.

The system operates effectively and efficiently and the process is conducted with professionalism and real compassion, he told the abuse royal commission.

He said he had been moved by reports of how “caring” the scheme’s independent commissioners were.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Cheryl Hall
Updated 25 Aug 2014

It took more than 20 years and three requests to Rome to defrock a priest convicted of child sexual abuse, the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart has told an inquiry.

Archbishop Hart told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that Father Michael Glennon was first convicted and jailed in 1978 but it was not until 1998 that he was laicised.

He was convicted five times on multiple charges and died in jail in January this year.

Archbishop Hart, who was vicar general of the Melbourne diocese before being appointed archbishop in 2001, replacing George Pell, told the hearing it was very difficult before 2001 to get approval from the Vatican to defrock a priest.

“The difficulty would be a serious concentration on procedure,” he said.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

AAP

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart says the protection of children has always been the priority, but abuse victims disagree he has been quick to act on child sex abuse claims.

Archbishop Hart said when there’s litigation between the church and abuse victims, his attitude had been that the church had a responsibility to meet victims’ needs with compassion and resolve their claims fairly and as early as possible.

“When these criminals do these awful things, it gives me no joy whatsoever and that’s why I’ve always been … very quick to act because the protection of children is the absolute priority,” he told the abuse royal commission on Monday.

Archbishop Hart also told the commission he was conscious of the “heavy burden of responsibility” owed generally by the church to Emma and Katie Foster, two sisters abused by pedophile priest Kevin O’Donnell.

Emma later took her own life and Katie was left permanently disabled in a road accident.

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AUSTRALIA
Blayney Chronicle

By Rachel Browne Aug. 25, 2014

It was a random phone call in 2006 that set Newcastle Herald journalist Joanne McCarthy on a path which ultimately exposed the extent of horrific crimes by paedophile priests and led to the royal commission into child sexual abuse.

The award-winning reporter told Australian Story of the day she was at her desk when she received a call from a reader wanting to know why no media had reported that a priest named John Denham had been convicted of child sex offences a number of years before.

So she rang Denham, who was immediately defensive.

“I’ve spoken to a few paedophile priests,” she said. “They’re a breed. Massive egos. At first he denied that he had been convicted. Then his next line was, ‘I hope you have a good lawyer.'”

Last week, Denham gave evidence at his sentencing hearing before a Sydney court, after pleading guilty to 25 charges relating to offences against 20 victims.

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VATICAN CITY
Press TV (Iran)

Following Pope Francis’s vow to punish those clergymen who sexually abuse children, a Vaticanist says it is necessary for the credibility of the church to organize itself against sex abuses.

“Certainly, for the credibility of the church, it is important that the church organizes itself in the best way,” says Marko Politi, an Il Fatto-Vaticanist.

The comment comes at a time that human rights activists and the alleged victims of church pedophilia demand the implementation of immediate and practical regulations that could ensure an end to the sexual abuses by clergymen.

“I think that the UN panels are important in order to stimulate the Catholic Church to act better and better in this field,” adds Politi.

During a meeting with six victims of sexual abuse by priests at his private morning mass in the Vatican residence back on July, the Head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, vowed to punish clergymen who sexually abused children, describing their actions as “satanic.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

August 25, 2014

Jane Lee
Legal Affairs Reporter for The Age

The Catholic Church’s Melbourne archdiocese could afford to double or triple its $75,000 cap on compensation for sexual abuse victims but would need to review the other programs it funds.

The royal commission into child sexual abuse entered its second week of hearings in Melbourne on Monday. The commission is investigating the effectiveness of the church’s Melbourne Response, which has paid more than $17 million to 326 abuse victims since 1996.

Asked whether the archdiocese of Melbourne could afford a doubling or tripling of its current cap on compensation payments, Francis Moore, its executive director of administration, said: “I think it would certainly require some adjustments to the way the Archdiocese operated, and whether the archdiocese could continue all of the programs that it currently provides – could it be managed? Yes, I suspect it could. But not without impacts elsewhere.”

Counsel assisting the commission, Angus Stewart, asked whether increasing the cap would require the archdiocese to sell off assets.

Mr Moore replied that, depending on how much the cap was increased, “it might be more than the accumulated income can cover, in which case there would be a need to go to the reserves of the archdiocese”.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

AUGUST 25, 2014

Rachel Baxendale
Reporter
Melbourne

CATHOLIC Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart has appointed a former federal court judge to review the church’s complaints scheme, despite maintaining the process is conducted with professionalism and compassion.

Archbishop Hart told the child abuse royal commission in Melbourne this afternoon he had appointed Donnell Ryan QC to head a review of the Melbourne Response.

The scheme has paid more than $17 million to 326 abuse victims since it began in 1996.

Mr Ryan will be asked to examine possible improvements to the scheme, including lifting or removing the $75,000 cap on compensation, changing how the amount of compensation paid to victims is determined, and considering whether the amount of compensation paid to victims in the past should be reviewed.

Archbishop Hart said that although he took all complaints about the Melbourne Response seriously and did not wish to discount victims’ pain, the complaints had been “relatively small” in number.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

Catholic Church to review compensation for sexual abuse victims, says Archbishop Denis Hart

PADRAIC MURPHY HERALD SUN AUGUST 25, 2014

A CONTROVERSIAL cap of $75,000 compensation for victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy could be scrapped, Archbishop Denis Hart told the royal commission into sexual abuse.

Archbishop Hart said he had appointed former Federal Court judge Donnell Ryan QC to review compensation levels offered to victims of abuse by clergy in the Melbourne archdiocese.

“(He will provide a report) on whether the cap should be increased or removed,” Archbishop Hart said.

Amid regular gasps from the public gallery, Archbishop Hart defended the church’s handling of sexual abuse cases.

“I think the church seeks all along to act according to justice, charity and compassion,” Archbishop Hart said.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Melissa Davey
theguardian.com, Monday 25 August 2014

The archbishop of Melbourne has described the scheme implemented by the church to investigate child sex abuse claims as compassionate and caring, despite victims heavily criticising it.

Archbishop Denis Hart said the Melbourne Response, implemented in 1996 by the Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne and still investigating child sex abuse claims today, operated with integrity.

“I think that the church seeks always to act according to justice, charity and compassion,” Hart told the royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse on Monday.

“There is evidence from time to time of very real compassion shown. I know that’s not universal, but it shows that it is possible and it shows the type of work that we are doing, that it [compassion] has to be an objective.”

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MALTA
Times of Malta

A court this morning banned publication of details about a case where an 18-year-old man from Marsascala is accusing of defiling a 14-year-old girl at the Splash and Fun Park.

Defence counsel made a request for the court to ban publication of testimony by the victim and her friend.

Police Inspector Josric Mifsud objected, pointing out that in the Gozo priest sexual abuse case, the court had lifted a ban on publication after noting that there was no connection between the priest and his alleged victims. The situation was similar in this case,

The court, however, decided on an outright ban on publication of the details of the case and asked reporters to leave the courtroom.

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Express-Times

By Matthew Bultman | The Express-Times

Statements made by former Warren County employees revealing years of suspicion that ex-Sheriff

Edward Bullock had a perverted interest in young boys carry potentially heavy weight in civil litigation against Bullock and the county, according to legal experts.

The experts, including one with experience in similar lawsuits, agreed the county appears vulnerable as the statements indicate those in a position of authority knew — or should have known — Bullock may have been preying on children but took no steps to prevent it.

“It’s very significant that people would come forward,” said Jeffrey Fritz, a Philadelphia-based attorney who represented numerous victims in the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State. “It’s the smoking gun.” …

Mark Crawford, director of the New Jersey Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said the parallels are stark between what is alleged to have happened in Warren County and previous high-profile sexual abuse scandals involving the Catholic church, Penn State and the Boy Scouts.

People are often hesitant to be a whistleblower, particularly if the person is in a position of authority or is well respected within the community, Crawford said. There can be additional concerns over bad publicity being brought upon the organization, he said.

“Whenever you have an institution that has a vested interest in keeping a reputation, people tend to look the other way,” Crawford said. “Instinctively, they try to protect their own reputation, so to speak, instead of doing the right thing.

“It appears this may be one of those examples,” he said.

Kenneth Lanning is a former FBI agent, who worked in the agency’s behavioral science unit, and authored the book, “Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis.” He said cover-ups or cases of people looking the other way often come down to two factors: ignorance and damage control.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel

For the second time in two years, lawyers for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and sex abuse victims will sit down with a mediator next month in hopes of hammering out a settlement in the archdiocese’s nearly 4-year-old bankruptcy.

None of the parties associated with the case would estimate what it would take to resolve the underlying issues, including a pending lawsuit over $60 million in trust set aside for maintenance of the archdiocese’s cemeteries.

But two things appear certain: Abuse survivors will undoubtedly push for more than the $3 million-plus they were offered as part of the reorganization plan proposed by the archdiocese in February. And the archdiocese appears reluctant to budge, at least at the outset.

“If anything, our starting position is the (reorganization) plan,” said Jerry Topczewski, chief of staff for Archbishop Jerome Listecki. “That’s what’s on the table, and we think it’s a viable plan.”

James Stang, lead attorney for the creditors committee, suggested there would have to be some give for the mediation to succeed.

“They want the bankruptcy done with,” Stang said of the archdiocese. “It’s been hard on the community, it’s been hard on the survivors…and they want to move on.

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UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Betty Clermont

Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga was named by Pope Francis as head of a group of cardinals to help him govern the Church one month after the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope. “Vice pope” or the pope’s “right-hand man” is how Rodriguez Maradiaga is usually described in the press.

Australian Cardinal George Pell was appointed by the pope this past February as prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, giving him control of all Vatican finances and administration including hiring and salaries.

Yet the backgrounds of these now powerful men which demonstrate Pope Francis’ disdain for both the poor and the victims of clerical sex abuse remain unreported by the U.S. media.

Rodriquez Maradiaga actively supported the 2009 coup against the progressive and democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya Rosales. The cardinal was condemned by Latin Americans:

Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez: The path you have chosen to be an accomplice of the military dictatorship is not the way of the Gospel. You cannot be against your people and allow violence and repression in the name of supposed safety and law and the committing of serious human rights violations.

Mr. Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga has brought disrespect to his ecclesiastical position by joining the coup and attacking the Honduran people and their democratic institutions, taking sides in a situation so critical for Honduran society….[H]ere he is, heretically offending the faith in the God of Life that he says he proclaims in order to allay himself with the forces of Death. And, there they are, our brothers, killed in cold blood by military assassins legitimated by the word, equally assassin, of Cardinal Rodriguez.

The cardinal appears to have allied himself with the Honduran oligarchy behind the coup….He has adopted a stance that renders him, if not an accomplice of the Honduran coup leaders, then certainly a cardinal who is very useful to their plot….He appears to have chosen what is arguably the most Machiavellian way of trying to stop Zelaya from returning to Honduras.

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AUSTRALIA
Frum Follies

According to the Herald Sun of Australia, David Samuel Cyprys was accused of assaulting a teenager in jail while serving his prison sentence for assaulting nine Jewish children. Incredibly, after he was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1991, he was allowed to continue working at the Chabad-dominated Yeshiva College of Melbourne where he preyed on children for another two decades.

I am willing to bet many parents complained and were given any of these standard lines to assure them this would not happen again:

* This is the first we have ever heard of such a thing and we will investigate;
* We will get him into therapy;
* We will keep an eye on him;
* He has a family, so this is the best way to deal with it;
* You can’t go to the police; it is forbidden under Jewish law;
* You will destroy your standing in the community and the marriage prospects of you kids if you make a public fuss, instead of letting us handle it privately.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

August 25, 2014

Kieran Tapsell

In his video appearance before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on August 21, the former Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, insisted that the Catholic Church should be treated like every other organisation in society. It should not be held responsible for the crimes of its priests in the same way as the “ownership or leadership” of a trucking company is not responsible if one of its drivers picks up a hitchhiker and molests her.

Pell conceded that “if in fact the authority figure has been remiss through bad preparation, bad procedures or been warned and done nothing or insufficient, then certainly the church official would be responsible”.

Pell’s analogy revealed the fatal flaw in his own argument the moment he used the word “company”. If a trucking company had been remiss as he described, and people were injured as a result, the trucking company would be liable. Those injured would have access to the company’s assets to meet any judgment, even if its directors or officials were dead or had no assets.

Pell spent over $750,000 on lawyers in the Ellis case to prove that the Catholic Church was not like his trucking company, but is an unincorporated association that could not be sued. All of its billions are tucked away in a corporate trust that does nothing else than hold property. The only person who could be sued in that case was Cardinal Freeman, who had been warned about Ellis’s abuser, and yet let him continue as a priest. Cardinal Freeman was incapable of being sued because he was resting in peace in the crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

August 25, 2014

Editorial

Leadership is about asking a simple, profound question – ”is this right?” – and then acting appropriately in response. On this measure, Cardinal George Pell, who now resides in the Vatican after his stints as archbishop of Sydney and before that of Melbourne, has serially failed.

His performance throughout the slow and painful emergence of evidence during the past few decades of rape and other abuse of children by Catholic priests on occasions has been disgraceful.

Let there be no mistake: he has been at the pinnacle of an important organisation – one in which so much trust is placed – that has sought to minimise the financial and reputational damage to itself of the despicable criminal behaviour of some of its clergy. It is an organisation that previously even protected perpetrators by covering up their crimes.

Instead of seeking prosecution of these men, this is a church that in some instances merely transferred them to other dioceses, where their predatory acts continued. As the chairwoman of the recent Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse, Liberal MP Georgie Crozier, said early in the hearings: ”The evidence is quite clear; the criminal sexual abuse of children occurred under the watch of the Catholic Church and it was covered up … These facts are not in dispute.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

AUGUST 25, 2014

THE Vatican has asked the Catholic archdiocese of Sydney to review an investigation conducted under previous archbishop Cardinal George Pell, which criticised the credibility of two alleged victims of church child sex abuse.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is also investigating the matter, following the publication of the resulting church decree in The Australian this year.

This decree, provided to the ­alleged victims in January, provides a powerful and controversial insight into the secretive canon law processes used by the Catholic Church to ­respond to claims of child sex abuse.

After more than a decade of lobbying by one of the alleged victims, the Vatican’s powerful Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith authorised Cardinal Pell “to conduct an administrative penal process” into the case. Cardinal Pell personally appointed three senior Australian clerics to undertake the investigation and forwarded the resulting decree back to the congregation.

The decree itself states that its authors “decided not to see themselves as judges charged with ­determining the guilt or otherwise” of the priest alleged to have committed the abuse.

“What is being tested is the ­reliability, the credibility of those making the complaints,” the ­decree states. It describes one ­alleged victim as “an exaggerator” with “a detailed dossier of these ‘remembered’ events clogging his computer’’. A previous decision by the church to pay this alleged victim financial compensation was done “for actuarial reasons and to appear pastorally concerned”, the decree said.

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IRELAND
Boston globe

By Kevin Cullen | GLOBE COLUMNIST AUGUST 24, 2014

TUAM, Ireland — In 1975, Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney were playing in an apple orchard just off the Dublin Road where the old St. Mary’s mothers and babies home used to be.

Frannie Hopkins, 12, jumped from a wall and whatever he landed on made a funny noise. Barry Sweeney, 10, followed suit and the hollow they felt made them curious.

They pulled back some weeds and found a concrete slab, pulled back the slab, and to their utter amazement saw a collection of skulls and bones.

“I’d say there were a dozen sets of bones,” Frannie Hopkins told me, standing on the spot. “It was a concrete chamber, a crypt or a tomb or a tank.”

For reasons both complicated and not entirely surprising, it is only now that the macabre discovery two boys made 39 years ago has become yet another exercise in Ireland’s ongoing, agonizing confrontation with its uncomfortable past.

Yet, in a sometimes frenzied rush to now consciously confront that ugly past, the concrete chamber that Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney found has been transformed, in some recent accounts, into a septic tank into which evil nuns stuffed the remains of some 800 children who died at the home for unwed mothers run by the Sisters of Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961.

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MALTA
Times of Malta

Editorial

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Is local Church in crisis?

Fr Joe Borg lit a fuse in his The Sunday Times of Malta column last weekend when he questioned Archbishop Paul Cremona’s ability to lead the local Church. He said that while others discussed the issue behind closed doors, he felt as a matter of conscience the duty to speak out about the issue.

If for nothing else, he deserves credit for being upfront. There are many discontented people in various walks of life, priests included, who would do well to take a leaf out of this particular book. However, the second issue that needs to be addressed is, does he have a point?

We asked the Archbishop for an interview on the issue. We got a one-line statement the day after the column was published, saying that he was committed to serve the Church to the best of his ability, and after catching up with him on Friday, he said it is the Pope who decides his future. But no interview.

This in itself is evidence of a problem. The Archbishop is a good man. No one questions that. He has had health problems. Everybody sympathises with that. But, as a question raged over whether Pope John Paul II should carry on in the latter stages of his papacy – and we all know the step Benedict took – so the issue must be addressed as to whether the Church’s best interests are served with Mgr Cremona at the helm.

This is a question the Church itself must resolve. But it can only do this if it first shows a hitherto unseen willingness to discuss it. In truth, rumblings have been around for quite some time and clergymen are doing themselves no good by running away from them.

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LOUISIANA
The Advertiser

Editorial

August 23, 2014

In the face of demands from a victims’ advocacy group, Bishop Michael Jarrell continues to stand firm on his resolve not to reveal the names of 15 priests on whose behalf the Diocese of Lafayette and its insurers paid $26 million to the families of victims in sex abuse cases that spanned the 1980s and ’90s.

In the place of information, representatives of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and the media have received only reports of shoddy record-keeping, poor memories on the parts of investigating bishops and flat-out refusals.

In response to questions from The Daily Advertiser, Jarrell would say only that seven of the 15 priests have died, five moved away and none are in the ministry.

We do know that one of them is Gilbert Gauthe, the infamous convicted pedophile who is reportedly living in Texas since his release from jail. Another is the late David Primeaux, who committed suicide in 2012 in Virginia.

That leaves seven of the 15 unaccounted-for and living anonymously among us. As Jarrell put it, it’s “almost impossible” to monitor their activities.

And that is unsettling.

It was decades ago, some reason — what’s the point of knowing who was involved in the incidents?

The point is that these men were not caught shoplifting or cheating on their taxes. They were accused of molesting children.

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DOMINIKANISCHEN REPUBLIK
Die Welt

[For Nuncio Accused of Abuse, Dominicans Want Justice at Home, Not Abroad – The New York Times]

By Constanze Reuscher, Rome

Als Botschafter des Papstes in der Dominikanischen Republik soll Erzbischof Wesolowski jahrelang Jungen missbraucht haben. Doch der Bischof läuft frei in Rom herum – vom Vatikan geschützt.

Er hatte schon ein paar Bier getrunken, als er durch die Rotlichtviertel von Santo Domingo zog, genügend Geld in der Tasche, auf der Suche nach schnellem Sex. Er suchte nach ganz jungen Männern, er suchte nach Kindern. Er nannte sich nur “Josie”. Viele wussten dennoch, wer er war: Der Botschafter des Heiligen Stuhls, der vatikanische Nuntius, vom Papst in die Dominikanische Republik entsandt – der polnische Erzbischof Josef Wesolowski.

Im Schatten der ältesten katholischen Kathedrale Amerikas betrieb er jahrelang sexuellen Missbrauch. Gemeinsam mit dem polnischen Pater Wojciech Gil soll er sich mit jungen Messdienern in seinem Haus am Strand vergnügt haben. Zwei weitere Geistliche aus seiner Botschaft stehen unter Verdacht, Frauen und Kinder zum Sex gezwungen haben. Ein dominikanischer TV-Sender soll Wesolowski dabei gefilmt haben, wie er ein Kinderbordell in Santo Domingo betrat.

Inzwischen ist der 66-jährige Wesolowski Amt, Würde und auch den Stand des Geistlichen los. Papst Franziskus rief ihn schon 2013 von seinem Posten als Botschafter des Heiligen Stuhls ab. Im Juni wurde er offiziell aus dem Priesterstand entlassen. Der Vatikan hat zudem angekündigt, ihm wegen der “weltlichen” Verbrechen, die er begangen hat, den Prozess zu machen.

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CANADA
Ottawa Citizen

ANDREW NGUYEN

August 24, 2014

André Samson thought the only way to hide his sexual orientation was to be celibate and enter the priesthood.

But when he was ordained, he quickly discovered that there were many others in the church who shared his secret.

Nearly a year ago, Samson summoned the courage to come out on the popular TVA show hosted by Denis Lévesque. After the show, he wandered over to a nearby restaurant in a celebratory mood and thought, “I really felt for the first time in my life, I felt free.”

Following his appearance, Samson said he received hundreds of emails from strangers applauding him for his courage, but what stung the most was that not one of them was from a Catholic priest.

Just last year, Samson suffered backlash from his colleagues after attempts to raise the issue of sexual abuse. His attempts led to a confrontation at the large Montreal church where he was serving, he was treated as a pariah and eventually lost his position at the church.

Samson, who remains a priest, said he feels he has a responsibility to speak out: “If not me, who will?”

He added that many priests and bishops continue to hide their sexual orientation because of their dependence and their fear of being rejected by the church, but he wants others to revel in who they really are.

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.

LOUISIANA
The Advertiser

By Ken Stickneyk stickney@theadvertiser.com August 23, 2014

Public scandal surrounding priest molestation cases in the mid-1980s struck the Diocese of Lafayette at a time when it was woefully ill-prepared to deal with it.

But court papers reviewed by The Daily Advertiser in recent weeks suggest diocesan leaders should have seen trouble coming years earlier.

Those papers were made known recently after Minnesota Public Radio investigated sex abuse in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, uncovering a wealth of documents about numerous priests in the Diocese of Lafayette who had been accused of sexual misconduct since the 1950s. The link between the dioceses — what led MPR to the court files stored in Texas — was Bishop Harry Flynn, who served in both dioceses.

The court papers, which included legal depositions of key diocesan figures in Lafayette, suggest strongly that former Bishop Gerard L. Frey, who served from 1973-1989, lacked the knowledge, savvy and judgment he needed to address sexual misconduct among his priests. One psychologist who worked with the diocese said simply, “It appeared to me that Bishop Frey was hit with a truck.”

But Frey wasn’t alone. Depositions show little communication between diocesan clergy and the diocesan leadership about the onset of trouble. The bishop and clergymen testified under oath that they had little knowledge of myriad, isolated incidents from around the diocese, although the legal papers suggest otherwise in many cases. Priests’ files reportedly contained few specifics, diocesan leaders testified, perhaps intentionally.

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FLORIDA
News-Press

Mary Wozniak, mwozniak@news-press.com August 24, 2014

The 16-year-old boy molested by a priest serving at a Fort Myers church is now a 37-year-old man who remains haunted, angry and determined to help stop others from suffering his fate.

The Port Charlotte man spoke of his experience at the hands of the Rev. Jean Ronald Joseph for the first time Wednesday, exclusively to The News-Press. His story is one of an accuser’s worst nightmare: Outed by the accused and his attorney at a news conference; the letter he sent to church officials describing the abuse and its effect on him read aloud; his own community turning its back on him.

A six-figure settlement with the Diocese of Venice in the case was announced Tuesday by his attorney, Adam Horowitz. The News-Press does not name victims of sexual abuse.

The victim, who came forward in 2008, said he spoke out 15 years after the 1993 incident not because he wanted money but to stop Joseph, who his dying mother considered a second son, from participating in her funeral.

“For many years, I just acted like it never happened and tried to move on with my life,” he said. When his mother was dying from cancer and lupus, he knew he had to tell her. Besides, he said he realized he was getting older, and knew he had to face what had happened.

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MALTA
Malta Independent

Sunday, 24 August 2014 by Neil Camilleri

The Gozitan priest who stands accused of abusing three girls allegedly touched one of his victims, a teenager, in front of her mother, at a family event.

Sources close to the case said Father Jesmond Gauci attended a family BBQ in Gozo and was caught by the girl’s mother touching the girl “inappropriately”. It is understood that the girl’s mother has said she is willing to testify against the priest.

The Malta Independent on Sunday is also informed that the police have discovered several text messages allegedly sent by the priest to at least one of the girls.

The source said the allegations had nothing to do with the school where Fr Gauci taught and that the victims were all Gozitan girls in their teens. The alleged events took place in and around February.

The same source confirmed that Gozo Bishop Mario Grech had personally reported the case to the police. This newsroom has learnt, however, that Mgr Grech first reported the case to the Education Ministry, since Fr Gauci taught religion at a Hamrun state school for boys. The Ministry then advised him to report everything to the police. The report was lodged soon after the alleged abuse took place and investigators have spent the intervening months building up the case.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KMBC

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —A judge is expected to decide soon whether to dismiss probation for the highest-ranking U.S. church official convicted of a crime related to the child sexual abuse scandal.

The Kansas City Star reported that Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker filed a probation status report for Bishop Robert Finn on Friday. Finn leads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. He was convicted in September 2012 of one misdemeanor for failing to report child abuse suspicions.

While offering no opinion on whether probation should be dismissed, Baker did praise two diocese employees’ efforts to keep the diocese in compliance with the terms of the probation.

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LOUISIANA
Daily World

— Joelle Casteix is a member of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

In early August, Lafayette Bishop Michael Jarrell — through his spokesman — said that there is “no purpose” in releasing the names of priests accused of sexual abuse.

The diocese and its insurers paid approximately $26 million to 123 child victims of these men — men accused of horrible sex crimes against children.

No purpose? Victims of sexual abuse and their supporters beg to differ. In fact, Jarrell must heed the highest purposes: public safety, victim healing and his moral duty as bishop.

Dioceses all over the nation have released the names of credibly accused clerics. Even the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which has been blasted by survivors and the public for the cover-up of abuse, has released the names of men and women who sexually abused children.

Why is the public release of names so important?

1. Public safety. Eight of these men are still alive. We don’t know who they are or where they live. They could be volunteering with children, coaching sports, or leading Boy Scout troops.

In essence, Jarrell is creating a public nuisance. He knows who these men are. He knows that they could be molesting children right now. But he refuses to tell us who they are. That’s appalling.

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LOUISIANA
The Advertiser

— Bill Donohue is the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Kudos to Lafayette Bishop Michael Jarrell for not publishing the names of priests accused of a sexual offense. His decision is identical to the one that the leaders of every other institution, public and private, have long come to: It is unethical to do so. Why should the Catholic Church be any different?

A reporter came to my office a few years ago asking me about this issue. Specifically, she asked how I could defend a bishop for not posting the names of accused priests on his diocesan website. I immediately asked for her boss’ name and phone number. She wanted to know why. “Because I am going to report you for sexually harassing me, and then I want to see if your name is going to be posted on the website of your cable news employer.”

She got the point.

I am the CEO of the Catholic League. If someone called me making an accusation against one of my staff members, I can assure you I would not call the cops. No employer would. I would do the same as everyone else: I would conduct my own internal investigation, and would only go to the authorities if I thought the charge was authentic.

There is a profound difference among an accusation, a credible accusation, a substantiated accusation and a finding of guilt. The assumption behind all three levels of accusations is that the accused is innocent, yet this seems not to matter much anymore, especially when the accused is a priest.

The leader of a professional victims’ group maintains that we need to know the names of the credibly accused priests in Lafayette so that parents can protect their children. Nonsense.

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

AUG. 23, 2014

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — He was a familiar figure to the skinny shoeshine boys who work along the oceanfront promenade here. Wearing black track pants and a baseball cap pulled low over his balding head, they say, he would stroll along in the late afternoon and bring one of them down to the rocky shoreline or to a deserted monument for a local Catholic hero.

The boys say he gave them money to perform sexual acts. They called him “the Italian” because he spoke Spanish with an Italian accent.

It was only after he was spirited out of the country, the boys say, his picture splashed all over the local news media, that they learned his real identity: Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the Vatican’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

“He definitely seduced me with money,” said Francis Aquino Aneury, who says he was 14 when the man he met shining shoes began offering him increasingly larger sums for sexual acts. “I felt very bad. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I needed the money.”

The case is the first time that a top Vatican ambassador, or nuncio — who serves as a personal envoy of the pope — has been accused of sexual abuse of minors. It has sent shock waves through the Vatican and two predominantly Catholic countries that have only begun to grapple with clergy sexual abuse: the Dominican Republic and Poland, where Mr. Wesolowski was ordained by the Polish prelate who later became Pope John Paul II.

It has also created a test for Pope Francis, who has called child sexual abuse “such an ugly crime” and pledged to move the Roman Catholic Church into an era of “zero tolerance.” For priests and bishops who have violated children, he told reporters in May, “There are no privileges.”

Mr. Wesolowski has already faced the harshest penalty possible under the church’s canon law, short of excommunication: on June 27, he was defrocked by the Vatican, reducing him to the status of a layman. The Vatican, which as a city-state has its own judicial system, has also said it intends to try Mr. Wesolowski on criminal charges — the first time the Vatican has held a criminal trial for sexual abuse.

But far from settling the matter, the Vatican has stirred an outcry because it helped Mr. Wesolowski avoid criminal prosecution and a possible jail sentence in the Dominican Republic. Acting against its own guidelines for handling abuse cases, the church failed to inform the local authorities of the evidence against him, secretly recalled him to Rome last year before he could be investigated, and then invoked diplomatic immunity for Mr. Wesolowski so that he could not face trial in the Dominican Republic. …

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 interviews with the Dominican authorities. On Aug. 21 last year, Mr. Wesolowski was secretly recalled to Rome. …

According to experts in international law, the Vatican could have waived diplomatic immunity. In Santo Domingo, there have been small protests and petitions signed by more than a thousand people calling on the Vatican to extradite Mr. Wesolowski to the Dominican Republic. Advocates have accused the government of acquiescing to the church. “We think there has been a lot of impunity in this case, and no transparency,” said Sergia Galván, executive director of the Women and Health Collective, which represents abuse victims. “If he’s no longer a diplomat, if he was stripped of that title, he no longer has immunity.”

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UNITED STATES
CNN – The Hunt with John Walsh

Join ‘The Hunt’
Got a tip?
Call 1-866-THE-HUNT or click here

As a pastor, Victor Barnard inspired his congregants with his charisma and apparent devotion to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

“I had never met anybody that I thought loved the word of God as much as Victor Barnard did,” said Ruth Johnson, a former member of Barnard’s River Road Fellowship.

“He was a pastor; he basically took personal care in people, invested into them, and tried to bring the best out of you,” said David Larsen, a former leader of the River Road Fellowship, which consisted of about 10 to 15 members.

Larsen said he helped Barnard set up a so-called “shepherd’s camp” in the mid-1990s in Pine County, Minnesota, to help bring more people into the church. Several of his congregants, including Johnson, moved to the rural area about 100 miles north of Minneapolis to be a part of the camp.

“We sold our homes and the funds went into renovation and things that needed to be rehabbed,” Johnson said. Some congregants who had experience in construction and electrical work helped set up the camp, she said.

Pine County Sheriff Robin Cole said the congregation “kept to themselves.”

Barnard also traveled across the country trying to recruit new members into his fellowship, including Linsday Tornambe’s parents in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

August 24, 2014

Peter FitzSimons
Columnist

Cardinal Pell gets the roadhouse blues

The breathtakingly arrogant venality and cruel callousness of Cardinal George Pell continues to stun me. Speaking via video link from Rome to the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse on Thursday he compared the responsibility of the Catholic Church for sexually abusing children to that of a “trucking company”. You see, if the company’s driver picked up a passenger and then sexually assaulted that person, then “I don’t think it appropriate for the … leadership of that company be held responsible”.

He said that. He really said that!

So, Cardinal Pell, what if the trucking company had a strict policy since its foundation that none of its drivers could have any sexual outlet whatsoever, for their entire adult lives? What if the trucking company had a long and sordid history, globally, not only of their drivers picking up children and abusing them, but also of moving their drivers from state to state so that after every complaint they could be shielded from prosecution, thus allowing them to continue their abuse? What then, Cardinal Pell? For your position to be consistent you have to advocate that if a trucking company continued to employ drivers that took children into their cabs and abused them, that company should not be held responsible.

Given Pell’s position on not even releasing the documentation held by the Vatican over these cases of abuse, he must also maintain it is OK for the head office of this international trucking company in, say, New York, to decline to help authorities investigating this abuse, by refusing to give those files to police. Simply staggering, from first to last. HOW DOES PELL SLEEP? And how does anyone defend this?

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AUSTRALIA
The Independent (UK)

[transcript of the 21 August hearing]

NATASHA CULZAC Saturday 23 August 2014

A Cardinal has provoked outrage after claiming that the Catholic Church should be no more responsible for the abuse of children than a trucking company is of a driver who picks up and molests a woman while on the job.

Cardinal George Pell was speaking to Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse on Thursday, via a video link from the Vatican, when he said that there are instances when the Church should not be blamed.

The inquiry is looking at a scheme set up by the Church in 1996, which had independently looked at child abuse allegations, offered free counselling and compensation payments to victims.

“Let me give a non-controversial example. If there is a series, for example, of trucks carrying merchandise around the country, if in fact these are improperly serviced or the drivers are pushed to work for too long, obviously there is a culpability somewhere in the authority chain.

“If in fact the driver of such a truck picks up some lady and then molests her, I don’t think it’s appropriate – because it is contrary to the policy – for the ownership, the leadership of that company to be held responsible.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Michael Sean Winters | Aug. 22, 2014 Distinctly Catholic

Damien Thompson has an essay at the Spectator, where he is an associate editor, about Pope Francis, why he was elected and what the principal goal of his pontificate is. Thompson, who is a gifted writer, is a less gifted analyst. He correctly spies an often over-looked hermeneutical key to understanding Pope Francis – he is a Jesuit – but instead of hitting the nail on the head, Thompson hits his thumb.
Thompson’s central claim is that the Catholic left is wrong to be hoping for doctrinal change from Pope Francis, that he was “was elected to do one thing: reform the Roman Curia, the pitifully disorganised, corrupt and lazy central machinery of the church.” Thompson writes that, “The Pope has declared a spiritual culture war on the bureaucrats who forced the resignation of his predecessor,” although I am not sure I would characterize the pope’s efforts to reform the curia as a “culture war,” in part because the Vatican curia is at best a sub-culture and the pontiff’s spiritual armament is more invitational than war-like.

This paragraph is especially troubling:

Last year Francis described his ‘court’ as ‘the leprosy of the papacy’. By ‘court’ he may have been referring to monarchical trappings — but employees of the Curia suspected that he was talking about them. For those good priests who found themselves trapped in a sclerotic bureaucracy it came across as a needless insult. ‘Morale is tremendously low,’ says a Vatican source. ‘And matters aren’t helped by Latin American clergy swanning around Rome telling us how they’re bringing us simplicity. There’s a new ultramontanism of the left. You can disagree with anything the church teaches so long as you think Francis is fabulous.’

I imagine that most “good priests” in the curia, and there are many, were as horrified as the cardinal-electors by the corruption within the organization. If morale is low now, because of the pope’s insistence on simplicity, then perhaps these good priests are not so good after all. Thompson’s source, whom he quotes approvingly, is undoubtedly correct about there being a “new ultramontanism of the left,” but I think the Holy Father’s aims, whatever the aims of those who invoke him, are not so easily cast into simple left-right terms as this source seems to think.

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UNITED STATES
Orthodox Church in America

Chancellor’s Diary

One of the “behind the scenes” responsibilities of the chancery is to deal with preventing and addressing sexual misconduct. As we all know this is a concern that affects every organization, but it’s not something that needs to be reported on the front page every day. I think of it as a sanitation department: every town has to have one but it shouldn’t make headlines unless something goes badly wrong. But with dioceses and parishes working diligently to follow the Holy Synod’s recently revised Policies, Standards and Procedures (PSPs) in this area, questions naturally do arise. So a few days ago I received a letter from someone concerned about protecting the clergy from false allegations.

I was disappointed to read the recently promulgated sexual misconduct policy. I am disappointed in the lack of protection for clergy in the guidelines… I prayerfully ask the Synod to reconsider the document.

Here is the reply I sent yesterday (slightly edited).

Thank you for your comments. In fact, you are not the first person to raise concerns about protections for clergy. However, the standards for clergy behavior are very high. The bishop ultimately must decide—based on the evidence—whether the accused clergyman (“the respondent”) is someone who can be fully trusted to be a good shepherd. If on balance of probability there is likelihood that misconduct occurred, then the bishop has to err on the side of protecting his—Christ’s—flock.

But the bishop’s decision must be based on a fair reading of the evidence, and the respondent has every opportunity to present his facts. While it is true that the PSP’s may need further review, there are a number of important checks and balances already in place:

* the respondent is free to bring whatever evidence or witnesses he has to the Response Team during the investigation
* the respondent may involve legal representation if he so chooses
* the respondent may have some other defense person or advocate to assist him, including of course his confessor or spiritual father
* the respondent has the right to a church court to present his case with a defense team if necessary
* the respondent has the right to appeal an adverse church court decision to the Holy Synod

The development of the PSPs over many years involved the review of practices in other churches and organizations. It also involved professionals in the areas of psychology, psychiatry, law and investigations. But our own procedures and those of others are evolving (witness what is happening in the military and on college campuses), so it should be expected that they can and will be improved.

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Friday, August 22, 2014

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

The chancellor of a New York based Eastern Orthodox Church published an entry in his online journal yesterday concerning the group’s sexual misconduct policy.

Archpriest John A. Jillions, chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), shared a question he received about the guidelines, along with his response.

Jillions wrote that he received an email from someone concerned that the OCA’s policy does not do enough to protect clergymen from “false allegations.” In his response, the chancellor nailed one very important point: “If on balance of probability there is likelihood that misconduct occurred, then the bishop has to err on the side of protecting his—Christ’s—flock.”

However, we are disappointed that the chancellor failed to mention an even more important point: that is, false allegations are extremely rare. At least one of the resources on the OCA website spells this out explicitly.

Moreover, as survivors of clergy sexual abuse we are extremely disturbed that the OCA apparently still feels that allegations and investigations must be shrouded in secrecy. Jillions said the issue is “not something that needs to be reported on the front page every day. I think of it as a sanitation department: every town has to have one but it shouldn’t make headlines unless something goes badly wrong.”

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ARGENTINA
Buenos Aires Herald

The recovery of Ana Libertad’s identity is sure to attract attention not only toward the Netherlands, where Ana Libertad has been living, but also to the Vatican, where Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis a little more than a year ago.

In his previous life as Jorge Bergoglio, the now-pontiff was the target of criticisms from the De la Cuadra family for not helping them when they appealed to the Jesuits in Europe in their search all the way back in 1977 to find Elena de la Cuadra, Ana Libertad’s mother.

At the time, she had been missing for months but the family had been told by survivors that she had been seen at a Navy concentration camp. Desperate, the family used a connection with the global head of the Jesuit order, Pedro Arrupe, to lobby for her release. He put them in touch with Bergoglio, who was also part of the order. He provided a letter of introduction to a bishop with connections to the military dictatorship.

The only answer that came back , said Estela, was that her sister’s baby was now “in the hands of a good family. It was irreversible.” Neither mother nor child were heard from again until yesterday, when news broke of the positive identification of Ana Libertad in the Netherlands.

For Estela de la Cuadra, Bergoglio did the bare minimum to keep up appearances within the Jesuit order and that it was evidence of complicity between the Catholic church and the military junta. She has also testified against Bergoglio in court, accusing him of having more knowledge about baby-snatching than he is willing to admit publicly.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

Father Glenn Humphreys, aged 61, a member of the Australia-wide Catholic order of Vincentian Fathers, has been convicted by a jury in Western Australia for sexual abuse committed in that state. Father Humphreys has also ministered in other parts of Australia, including St Stanislaus College in Bathurst NSW. In the W.A. court documents, his current address was given as Marsfield in Sydney.

On 21 August 2014, Father Humphreys was found guilty of sexually abusing a teenage boy on church property in Western Australia 30 years ago. Humphreys was charged with abusing the teenager between 1983 and 1986 while he was assistant priest at a church in Perth.

After six hours of deliberation, a W.A. District Court jury convicted Humphreys of four counts of unlawful and indecent assault.

The court was told Humphreys had assaulted the boy in the church’s presbytery and in a bathroom at a nearby primary school.

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UNITED STATES
City of Angeles

[with video]

Kay Ebeling

From John Brown on YouTube

Once again, in order to get the truth out, Guerrilla Journalists are doing the work that paid journalists don’t have time to do, John Brown will be posting all testimony from now on from The Royal Commission on his YouTube channel and City of Angels Blog will be embedding the videos here, like the one below, over the coming weeks. Word from the Commission was the files were “too long” to post on their website, but Brown is downloading, digitizing, and uploading these videos of testimony in progress in Melbourne from his garage in Toowoomba. (Support this work by clicking the PalPal button on the left with high fives, please)

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WORCESTER (MA)
Telegram & Gazette

By Thomas Caywood TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
tcaywood@telegram.com

WORCESTER — The College of the Holy Cross has settled a lawsuit filed last year by former basketball player Ashley Cooper, who had alleged in her complaint that she was struck and verbally abused by veteran coach Bill Gibbons.

Holy Cross officials declined to discuss whether the settlement included any payment to Ms. Cooper.

“The parties have reached a confidential settlement of all claims in this case, and will have no further comment on this matter,” Holy Cross spokesman Ellen Ryder said in a written statement.

Ms. Cooper’s lawyers did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

The U.S. District Court in New York, where the case had been filed, was notified of the settlement agreement Aug. 15, according to court records.

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UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave

Kevin O’Brien

Cardinal Pell, in open court, in front of victims of sexual abuse, speaking via webcam from the Vatican …

likened the Catholic Church’s responsibility for child abuse to that of a ”trucking company”. If a driver sexually assaulted a passenger they picked up along the way, he said, ”I don’t think it appropriate for the … leadership of that company be held responsible.”

What a completely stupid, crass, unfeeling, unchristian, unspiritual, vulgar and awful thing to say. One of the lawyers involved corrected Pell’s analogy …

Warrnambool lawyer George Foster of Maddens Lawyers labelled the comments as “appalling”.

“I act for people who have been the subject of sexual abuse (and) Cardinal Pell’s analogy given to the royal commission likening the church’s legal liability to abused children as that of a truck company whose driver molested hitchhikers is appalling,” he said.

“May I suggest a more appropriate one: A boss who knows or suspects that his driver deliberately flouts the road laws continues to send him out on jobs.

“Late one night the driver sees a hitchhiker, deliberately lines him up and runs over him. The driver gets out of the truck, goes back to the hitchhiker, further assaults him and robs him.

“The driver then gets back into the truck, reverses over the stricken hitchhiker several times and then drives off while “flicking the bird” to the hitchhiker through his open cabin window.

“The driver then goes back to the depot and tells his boss what has happened. His boss tells him to clean the blood and guts off the bull bar, to tell no one and if challenged say that it was all the hitchhiker’s fault.”

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PUERTO RICO
Imperial Valley News

Written by ICE

San Juan, Puerto Rico – A suspended Catholic priest pleaded guilty Thursday to transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual conduct. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) conducted the investigation that led to the arrest and subsequent guilty plea of the suspended priest.

HSI special agents arrested Israel Berrios-Berrios May 13 at his residence in Naranjito following an indictment that charged him with transporting a minor with the intent to engage in sexual activity. According to the government’s version of facts, Berrios-Berrios transported a 15-year-old male minor to Miami, Florida, where together they took a four-day cruise to the Bahamas. While on the cruise, Berrios-Berrios engaged in lewd acts with the minor.

“The arrest and guilty plea of this man are especially disturbing given the position of trust he occupied,” said Angel M. Melendez, special agent in charge of HSI San Juan. “Identifying people who violate their positions of public trust by contributing to the exploitation of children is a top priority for HSI. Anyone who targets children for sexual exploitation should also consider themselves a target by HSI and by our law enforcement partners regardless of who they are. We have an obligation to protect those most vulnerable in our society who cannot protect themselves.”

In June 2011, the Puerto Rico Crimes Against Children Task Force (PRCACTF) was created by HSI San Juan to respond to the need for an island-wide approach to fighting the escalating number of predatory crimes against children. The task force is a partnership between HSI San Juan and members of local, state and federal law enforcement, as well as local and state government officials and community leaders.

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MONTANA
Flathead Beacon

BY MOLLY PRIDDY // AUG 22, 2014

At least six local men have been arrested and charged with sexual abuse of children in connection with an online investigation that ended on Thursday.

According to the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, there were seven men arrested total, and six of them were from the Kalispell area. Sheriff Chuck Curry reported that one of the suspects is a part-time youth pastor.

Curry confirmed the names of the local men as Justin Allen Zeiss, Benjamin David Emrich, Christopher Paul Adams, Karl Cilroy Wortley, Joshua Frederick Naethe, Daniel Anthony Hall, and Missoula resident Curtis Foster.

Court records indicate the investigation involved an undercover operation, with an ICAC agent posing as a woman offering up a 12-year-old girl for sex, and then arresting the men who communicated with the agent and showed up at a residence to engage is sexual conduct with the girl.

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MONTANA
ABC Fox Montana

[with video]

By Jackie Coffin

KALISPELL –
A four-day online sex sting ends with the arrest of seven men for sexual abuse of children, and more arrests are pending.

Flathead County Sheriff Chuck Curry says the Montana Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force worked with 12 law enforcement agencies to conduct the sting, targeting online predators.

Curry says six of the seven men are from Kalispell, and one is a part-time youth pastor.

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IRELAND
The Argus

Anne Campbell
Published 23/08/2014

THE DUNDALK man who exposed Cardinal Sean Brady’s role in a church inquiry into sex abuse by paedophile priest Brendan Smyth says the All-Ireland Primate is not resigning, but rather retiring ‘as if he has done nothing wrong’, while also revealing that five more of the dead cleric’s victims have come forward since the publication of his book.

It was revealed last week that Cardinal Brady, the parish priest of Dundalk, had written to Pope Francis ahead of his 75th birthday at the weekend offering his resignation as cardinal, in accordance with the Church’s own guidelines for clergy.

But Brendan Boland, whose book ‘Sworn to Silence’ was released last month, revealed how, as a 14-year-old boy in Dundalk in 1975, he was made sign an oath of secrecy after he told the then Fr Brady, and other priests, how he had been abused by Smyth and gave the names and addresses of others whom he believed had suffered the same fate.

Mr Boland’s book says another boy in Cavan was also sworn to silence and Smyth went on to abuse children for a further 18 years.

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AUSTRALIA
The Standard

Aug. 23, 2014

EDITORIAL: THE arrogance of Cardinal George Pell knows no bounds.

His appearance at the royal commission into sex abuse on Thursday confirmed what many victims of horrific acts at the hands of Catholic clergy already knew, he cares very little about them.

Appearing at the commission, not in person but via a video link from the Vatican, Cardinal Pell likened the Catholic Church’s responsibility for child abuse to that of a trucking company whose driver had assaulted a hitchhiker.

The point he was making was that the leadership of the company — in this case the Catholic hierarchy — should not be held responsible.

Cardinal Pell was the architect of the so-called Melbourne Response when he was Archbishop of the Melbourne Diocese in the mid-1990s. It has been roundly criticised by victims’ groups over its limitations to compensation and its failure to condemn guilty priests.

Much anticipated, Cardinal Pell’s appearance before the commission on Thursday might have been an opportunity for him to show a softer, more human side. It might also have been a chance for him to offer a hint of atonement, regret or even sorrow for the crimes of the past.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

David Marr
theguardian.com, Thursday 21 August 2014

Rome has been good to Cardinal Pell. Soft folds of skin fall to his chin. He looks a little older, more comfortable and a very long way away. Hopes of a glimpse of St Peter’s were dashed. He sat in front of the plainest possible curtain for his two-and-a-half-hour grilling by the royal commission.

Surely it was one of his life’s mistakes to compare the church to a trucking company? It opened the cardinal to scorn on all sides. Did he have in mind truckies interfering with hitchhikers? Yes. Did the church have no more integrity than a trucking company?

“The church is not always of the highest integrity,” he said with regret. “It existed for 2,000 years and there is a long history of sin and crime within the church, and one of the functions of the leadership of the church is to control and eradicate this.”

He was against sin and crime; for victims; and full of apologies. He began his testimony from Rome with an apology. He recalled the apology he gave when he became the Archbishop of Melbourne. He apologised once more to Chrissie and Anthony Foster, the parents of the two little girls raped by Father Kevin O’Donnell. He so regretted things were not better between them and the church.

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AUSTRALIA
Deccan Herald

Sydney: Australia’s leading Catholic cleric George Pell, a top Vatican official, came under fire on Friday after drawing an analogy between the church’s response to child abuse and a trucking company.

Cardinal Pell, head of a new Vatican finance ministry, made the comments on Thursday. He acknowledged to a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Melbourne that the church had a moral obligation to the victims of paedophile priests.

But he suggested that when it came to its legal responsibility, the actions of its priests were not necessarily the fault of the church, citing the hypothetical example of a woman being molested by a truck driver.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star

BY JUDY L. THOMAS
THE KANSAS CITY STAR
08/22/2014

Bishop Robert Finn may be one step closer to completing his probation.

Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker on Friday released a probation status report for the spiritual leader of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph.

Baker’s five-page report described the status of each of nine special conditions of Finn’s probation while offering no opinion on whether the two-year probation should be dismissed. Baker did, however, praise the diocese’s ombudsman, Jenifer Valenti, and director of child and youth protection, Carrie Cooper, for helping keep the diocese in compliance with the terms of the probation.

“The State wants to take this opportunity to commend Ms. Cooper and Ms. Valenti for their efforts on behalf of the children of the diocese,” Baker wrote. “Together they have worked tirelessly to implement changes in the culture of the diocese. These changes help to insure that children are protected.”

Jackson County Circuit Judge John Torrence — who convicted Finn on Sept. 6, 2012, of failing to report child abuse suspicions involving the Rev. Shawn Ratigan — will now review the report, then decide whether to dismiss Finn’s probation, which is set to expire on Sept. 5. If the judge dismisses the probation, Finn’s case will become a closed record.

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UNITED STATES
PopeCrimes& Vatican Evils.

Paris Arrow

With news compilation

On Thursday night, appearing at the Royal Commission via video link from the Vatican in Rome, Cardinal Pell equated the Catholic Church’s responsibility for child abuse to that of a “trucking company”. “If a driver sexually assaulted a passenger they picked up along the way, I don’t think it appropriate for the ownership leadership of that company be held responsible.” This is one of the most ludicrous statements that can only come from a twisted criminal mind who has many times covered-up criminal bestial pedophile priests – as a “prince of the mighty Roman Catholic Church” in Australia and his Vatican reward – was to get promoted as the treasurer of the Vatican Bank — appointed by another criminal the biggest in mankind’s history, read our related article –- Hidden Heist in the Holy See.

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OREGON
Houston Chronicle

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The Oregon Supreme Court has handed a 90-day suspension to a Salem lawyer accused of ethics violations for the way he allocated settlement money to victims of alleged sexual abuse by a Catholic priest.

Daniel Gatti represented 15 men from 2001 to 2007 who said they were abused at an Oregon reform school in the 1970s. The state paid $1 million to settle the lawsuits. The Portland Archdiocese paid $600,000.

One client — a prison inmate — complained he didn’t get a detailed accounting of the settlements and that Gatti was less than forthright.

It its decision Thursday, the court said Gatti might have been exceedingly fair in divvying up the money, but it wasn’t his decision to make.

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OREGON
Oregonian

By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com
on August 22, 2014

The Oregon Supreme Court has suspended the license of a Salem attorney for 90 days because of the way he communicated with his clients as he divided up a settlement fund for victims of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest.

The high court found on Thursday that Daniel J. Gatti violated professional rules of conduct by failing to properly explain and receive permission from the sex-abuse victims, his clients, when he represented them as a group. Gatti represented 15 men who as youths decades ago had been incarcerated at the MacLaren Home for Boys and said that they were molested by the facility’s chaplain, the Rev. Michael Sprauer.

Gatti represented the victims from 2001 to 2007 — settling most of their cases with the Archdiocese of Portland for $600,000 and, later, the State of Oregon for about $1.05 million. He took three cases against the state to trial — garnering jury verdicts of $590,000 for one plaintiff, $595,000 for another plaintiff and no money for the third.

Although Gatti said he was going to divide up the state settlement proportionately to how he divided up the archdiocese settlement, he didn’t do that, according to a supreme-court summary of the case.

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AUSTRALIA
The Standard

By MATT NEAL Aug. 23, 2014

A WARRNAMBOOL lawyer who has been working with sexual abuse victims has blasted Cardinal George Pell for likening the church to a trucking company.

Cardinal Pell told the Royal Commission on Child Abuse that the Catholic Church was no more legally responsible for priests who abuse children than a trucking company that employs a driver who molests women.

“If the truck driver picks up some lady and then molests her, I don’t think it’s appropriate, because it is contrary to the policy, for the ownership, the leadership of that company to be held responsible,” Cardinal Pell told the commission via video link from Rome.

But Warrnambool lawyer George Foster of Maddens Lawyers labelled the comments as “appalling”.

“I act for people who have been the subject of sexual abuse (and) Cardinal Pell’s analogy given to the royal commission likening the church’s legal liability to abused children as that of a truck company whose driver molested hitchhikers is appalling,” he said.

“May I suggest a more appropriate one: A boss who knows or suspects that his driver deliberately flouts the road laws continues to send him out on jobs.

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ISRAEL
Tzedek-Tzedek

Full Disclosure: As Tzedek-Tzedek readers will be aware, I established and run Magen. I initiated the organization as a responsible & professional response to child/sex abuse cases, particularly in the frum community.
———–

Yesterday, I attended the grim and tragic funeral of Corporal Dave Gordon z”l.

Dave was a child sex abuse victim, who bravely stepped forward and spoke out publicly, advocating for other victims to also come forward. Dave volunteered his available time to Magen, to help in promoting this cause and protecting other children from being victimized and abused.

In Dave’s case, the damage of the molestation he suffered as a child, played out tragically, even in this 21 year old, heroic, served-in-Gaza, IDF soldier.

The psychological trauma sex-abuse victims endured and often continue to endure for years and even decades, cannot be understated, minimized or overlooked.

As many are now aware, there is an extended blog-war (now officially declared a war of attrition) about Elimelech Meisels and the allegations that he sexually abused his seminary students; and the secondary allegations that, even in Meisels absence, the seminaries are still not safe due to the complicity and/or negligence of members of the staff who are still in positions of authority.

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VATICAN CITY
Religion News Service

Josephine McKenna | August 22, 2014

VATICAN CITY (RNS) One of the most powerful men in the Vatican, charged with cleaning up corruption and fostering financial reform, has outraged survivors of sex abuse by clergy by likening the church to a trucking company that refuses to take responsibility for a driver who molested women.

Cardinal George Pell, a member of Pope Francis’ advisory Council of Cardinals, was appointed the Vatican’s first economic prefect early this year by a pontiff who openly admires his “tenacity.”

But the former archbishop of Sydney has been unable to put Australia’s clerical sex abuse scandal behind him since his move to Rome.

Victim support groups expressed their anger this week after Pell gave video testimony from the Vatican to an Australian government inquiry looking into responses to child sex abuse by the Catholic Church and other institutions.

Using a hypothetical example, Pell said the church was no more responsible for cases of child abuse carried out by church figures than a trucking company would be if it employed a driver who molested women. …

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which represents 18,000 people around the world, said it was appalled by Pell’s testimony and accused the Vatican of failing to protect children.

“He shows that he really has absolutely no conception of what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior and what are appropriate or inappropriate things to say to survivors,” said SNAP’s Nicky Davis, who attended the inquiry in Melbourne, Australia.

Victims were also outraged by the Vatican’s refusal to hand over files requested by the Australian inquiry since the pope has signaled a tougher approach to fighting clerical sexual abuse and established a Vatican committee that includes Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins.

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VATICAN CITY
Gazzetta del Sud

Vatican City, August 22 – Survivors of clerical sex abuse are outraged by testimony from Cardinal George Pell comparing the Vatican to a trucking company that could not be blamed if a driver molested a hitchhiker. Pell, now the Vatican’s economic honcho, made the remark while testifying via videolink from Rome to an Australian probe into historic abuse and alleged cover-ups when he was Melbourne archbishop in the 1990s. Saying it would not be appropriate for legal culpability to be “foisted” on church leaders, he drew an analogy between the Catholic Church and a trucking company, citing a hypothetical example of a case involving a woman who was molested by a truck driver. “It would not be appropriate, because it’s contrary to the policy, for the ownership, leadership of that company to be held responsible,” Cardinal Pell said. “Similarly with the church and the head of any other organisation. “If every precaution has been taken, no warning has been given, it is, I think, not appropriate for legal culpability to be foisted on the authority figure. “If in fact the authority figure has been remiss through bad preparation [or] bad procedures or been warned and done nothing or [done something] insufficient, then certainly the church official would be responsible.” Nicky Davis from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) was in the audience of the royal commission during Cardinal Pell’s comments. She said the truck analogy left the audience “open mouthed in shock”. “We were literally saying to each other, ‘Did he really just say that?’,” she said.

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CANADA
Lethbridge Herald

BY THE CANADIAN PRESS ON AUGUST 22, 2014.

PEACE RIVER, Alta. – A Catholic priest in northwestern Alberta who is accused of sexually assaulting a minor has been told he cannot travel outside Canada to attend a funeral because he is considered a flight risk.

The order was issued following a preliminary hearing Thursday in Peace River for Abraham Azhakathu, who is facing charges of sexual assault and sexual interference.

The 59-year-old man’s brother died in India earlier this year, but a request by the accused to participate in a memorial service was rejected by both the Crown prosecutor and provincial court Judge C. K. Thietke (TEE’-kah).

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service

Boz Tchividjian | Aug 22, 2014

A Texas high school student named Greg Kelley was recently convicted of sexually victimizing a four year old boy. Despite the jury verdict, a small vocal group of supporters have been working hard to convince the public that this sexual offender is innocent.. Marginalizing the powerful voice of the child victim is often at the heart of this disturbing and all too common objective. In my years as a child sexual abuse prosecutor, I discovered that offenders and their supporters use three common strategies to try and convince others to embrace their distorted definition of innocence:

Making it up: In the Texas case, the defendant’s supporters initially argued that the 4 year old witness had made up the abuse allegation, with the hope that the public would believe that children are prone to make up false reports of sexual abuse. Unfortunately for them, the objective research indicates that children are no more likely to lie under oath than adults. In fact, these same studies have repeatedly found that false allegations of child sexual abuse are made only between one and ten percent of the time. Though any false allegation is a tragedy and should be dealt with accordingly, the reality is that such allegations are much more rare than offenders want us to believe. In fact, the research also establishes that children tend to minimize the extent of sexual abuse suffered. All of this tells us that the vast majority of abuse disclosures by children are truthful, and that there is a strong likelihood that the disclosing child was actually abused more than what has been reported.

It is not only research that pokes a major hole in this strategy. In order to believe this approach, we have to accept the illogical notion that little children make up details about a heinous act most have no knowledge about at that age. When offenders and their supporters realize that there is little hope in succeeding with this tactic, they often turn to the second strategy.

Mixing it up: When a child witness provides detailed and consistent testimony, offenders will question the child’s ability to accurately identify the perpetrator instead of attacking the credibility of the child’s allegations. This is best illustrated by the supporters of Greg Kelley when they write, “We are NOT saying that the 4-year-old boy was not sexual assaulted at some point in his young life. He very likely was, given that he had detailed knowledge of explicit sexual activity. However, we do not feel that there was enough evidence to name Kelley as the perpetrator.” With this approach, perpetrators and their supporters are ok with us believing every aspect of a child’s testimony except the part that identifies the perpetrator as the one who committed the offense. Not only is this argument blatantly self-serving, but it also lacks any common sense when the offender is known by the child. Is it likely that a child is capable of providing the details of horrific abuse, but incapable of accurately identifying the known individual who perpetrated the abuse?

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

EDITORIAL
HERALD SUN AUGUST 22, 2014

THE ill-chosen words of Cardinal George Pell in defending the Catholic Church on its legal responsibilities to the many people abused by its priests will only add to their pain.

In an extraordinary statement while giving evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Cardinal Pell compared the church’s position with no more than that of a trucking company whose drivers molested hitchhikers.

The comparison brought an instant rebuke from the commission’s chairman as well as a barrister representing a victim of abuse.

That Cardinal Pell could contemplate such a comparison is baffling. Surely he regards priests — and he is one, as well as holding high office — as the essential core of the church and indivisible from it as an organisation. Barrister Sean Cash’s response was that far from being a trucking company, the Catholic Church was an organisation of the “highest integrity”.

Cardinal Pell found fault with that. The church was not always of the highest integrity, he responded, and had “a long history of sin and criminality within the church”.

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NEW MEXICO
Daily Journal

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
First Posted: August 22, 2014

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico — Four new lawsuits have been filed against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe by men who say they were molested by priests in New Mexico decades ago.

The four suits filed this week by Albuquerque attorney Brad Hall bring the number of lawsuits he’s filed on behalf of alleged victims to 25 and 11 have been settled.

The lawsuits include one naming a former priest who was recently released from a prison in Michigan after serving nine years for molesting two boys in the 1970s. The new suit alleges the former priest molested a now-47-year-old man in the mid-1970s at a church in a community about 15 miles west of Abiquiu (AH’-bee-kyoo).

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OKLAHOMA
The Tablet (UK)

22 August 2014 by Liz Dodd

Satanists have returned a consecrated wafer intended for use in a black mass after a US Archdiocese threatened them with legal action.

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City confirmed that a representative of the group Dakhma of Angra gave the host to a priest, after a lawsuit that contested that the host had been stolen was filed on Wednesday.

The Archdiocese said that it also received a signed statement saying that the group no longer possesses a consecrated host.

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MALTA
Malta Independent

The Magistrates Court today overturned an initial decision not to publish the name of the priest who is charged with abusing of three girls in Gozo over a period of time some years ago.

The court, presided by Magistrate Neville Camilleri, upheld the request made by Inspector Silvana Briffa on behalf of the Police Commissioner for the name of the priest to be mentioned, the police CMRU confirmed to The Malta Independent.

The court said the priest, Jesmond Gauci, is not a relative of the alleged victims and so there should not be a ban on the publication of his name.

The court is still to decide on the appeal filed against the release on bail.

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MALTA
Times of Malta

A court in Gozo has upheld an appeal by the police to lift the ban on the name of a priest accused of defiling minors.

The priest, Fr Jesmond Gauci, was arraigned on Monday but the court had imposed a ban on his name and on the case.

The police argued that there is no direct link between the priest and his alleged victims.

Magistrate Neville Camilleri upheld the request to lift the ban this afternoon.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By JOANNE McCARTHY Aug. 22, 2014

A HUNTER man wept in a courtroom on Friday as he asked the questions that expose the tragedy of child sexual abuse.

“What could I have been? What would my life have been like?” asked the man known as ST, as defrocked Catholic priest John Denham, 72, sat metres away in a glass-enclosed dock.

ST told a sentencing hearing at the Sydney Downing Centre court that he struggled with suicide every day because those questions could never be answered.

“I hate life. I look forward to the day I die,” he said in a statement read to Judge Helen Syme by his legal representative, Nicola Ellis.

ST was Denham’s student at St Pius X High School, Adamstown, in the 1970s.

Denham is being sentenced after pleading guilty in August last year to 25 child sex charges including buggery, violent oral sex and indecent assault involving 18 boys, aged 11, 12 and 13, at Singleton, Wingham and St Pius X in the 1970s. He accepted another 23 indecent assault charges had occurred.

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MALTA
Malta Today

Daniel Mizzi 22 August 2014

A court in Gozo has upheld an appeal by the police to lift the ban on the name and identify of the Gozitan priest accused of defiling minors.

The priest has now been identified as being Fr Jesmond Gauci, of Xaghra. Sources told MaltaToday that the priest, who is in his early 40s, has been a priest for around 10 to 12 years and he was recently employed as a religion teacher at a boys’ secondary state school in Hamrun. Sources also said that the accused is known as Il-Papa.

Sources also said the priest was said to have been in the company of 15-year-old girls in a boat.

In its appeal filed on Tuesday, the police claimed that there should not be a ban on the publication of the name of the priest, arguing that the accused and the alleged victims are not relatives, and consequently, the decision to ban the former’s name is not justified.

“There is no reason why the court upheld the request to ban the publication of the names. There was no ban during other cases, and in addition, this case is nothing special,” police sources told MaltaToday.

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AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

Royal Commission publishes submissions on statutory victims of crime compensation schemes

22 August, 2014

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has published 42 submissions in response to its recent issues paper on statutory victims of crime compensation schemes.

Royal Commission CEO Philip Reed said submissions were received from a range of individuals and organisations, including government, community service organisations, legal services, survivor advocacy and support groups and other support services.

“The Royal Commission is required under its terms of reference to consider the role of compensation in addressing and alleviating the impact of child sexual abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

Source AAP 22 AUG 2014

Most victims of pedophile priests are happy with the Catholic Church’s Melbourne compensation process, the man in charge of the payouts says.

But David Curtain QC says capped payments to victims cannot compensate for the harm done to them.

Critics of the Melbourne archdiocese’s scheme for handling abuse complaints say it is overly legalistic and re-traumatises victims.

Attention is focused on those who weren’t happy with the Melbourne Response but many victims got a lot out of it, said Mr Curtain, the compensation panel chair.

“There are many people who are very happy with the system and express their gratitude for us doing our jobs,” Mr Curtain told the child abuse royal commission on Friday.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Charlotte Observer

By Steve Lyttle
slyttle@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014

The Rev. Michael Joseph Kelleher, 86, died Tuesday at a retirement community in High Point. Kelleher was a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Raleigh and then Charlotte for nearly a half-century, and spent his final years battling charges of child sex abuse.
Store

The Rev. Michael Joseph Kelleher, who served Catholic parishes in North Carolina for nearly a half-century but battled legal troubles in his final years, died Wednesday at a retirement community in High Point.

His death, at age 86, was announced by the Catholic News Herald, the newspaper for the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte.

Kelleher was a pastor at several churches in Charlotte and elsewhere in the western Carolinas after moving to North Carolina in 1966. “Father Joe” was a popular clergy member who maintained support from some former parishioners even after he was charged in 2010 with child sex abuse.

Those charges were dropped by a judge less than two months ago because of Kelleher’s poor health, court officials said.

Kelleher, born in Ireland, came to North Carolina in 1966 as a priest in the Raleigh diocese – at the time, North Carolina’s only diocese. He moved to the Charlotte diocese when that was created in 1972. Kelleher’s pastoral assignments included Our Lady of Assumption and St. Patrick Cathedral churches in Charlotte; St. Dorothy in Lincolnton; and Our Lady of the Annunciation in Albemarle.

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

Catholic priest Glenn Humphreys guilty of indecent assault on teenage boy between 1983-1986

A CATHOLIC priest has been found guilty of abusing a West Australian teenager more than 30 years ago, but acquitted of a rape charge.

Glenn Humphreys, 61, was charged with abusing a boy between 1983 and 1986 when the boy was aged 15 to 17.

A District Court jury found Humphreys guilty late today of four counts of unlawful and indecent assault, but acquitted him of carnal knowledge against the order of nature.

At the start of the trial, Humphrey’s defence lawyer Seamus Rafferty said the priest denied all charges and that the rape incident that was alleged to have occurred during a trip to Quinns Rock did not happen.

Humphreys had engaged in inappropriate behaviour on a few occasions in 1986 but at the time his actions were lawful and involved mutual touching, Mr Rafferty said in his opening statement.

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AUSTRALIA
International Business Times

By Sounak Mukhopadhyay | August 22, 2014

The Vatican refused to submit criminal documents to the child abuse royal commission. The files in question are those of Australian priests accused of child sex crimes. According to the Vatican, it was “neither possible nor appropriate” for an Aussie churchman to be involved in such alleged activities.

The Vatican cited reasons like church investigations to back its claim that Australian priests could never have been involved in sex crimes. It also argued that the internal working files exclusively belonged to the Holy See. According to Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican may be more interested in providing specific case files rather than handing over every file related to such allegations. He said that the Vatican did provide documents of around 5,000 pages after requests for specific files had been made.

The royal commission earlier sent a letter to the Vatican, asking for necessary documents related to child sex related cases. “It is essential that the royal commission understand the nature and extent of the communications between those congregations and the Holy See in relation to child sexual abuse complaints about Australian clerics,” it said. Pell said that the Vatican would not hand over “internal working documents of another sovereign state.” He said that it was “unreasonable” for the royal commission to ask for documents related to child sex related charges.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

AUGUST 22, 2014

Pia Akerman
Reporter
Melbourne

THE $17 million cost of administering the Melbourne archdiocese’s response to clergy child sex abuse – equal to the amount spent on compensation and counselling – has been defended by the man seen as the scheme’s new chief.

Jeffrey Gleeson QC has been described as the likely successor to Peter O’Callaghan as the sole independent commissioner of the Melbourne Response – under which sex abuse claims are investigated and counselling and capped compensation provided for victims – if it continues in the absence of a national redress scheme.

The pair have been working together to investigate complaints since 2012. The royal commission investigating institutional responses to child sexual abuse has heard that the Melbourne Response has spent $17.2 million on ex gratia payments, counselling and medical treatment since it was established in 1996 by then archbishop George Pell. But $17m has been spent on administration costs in the same period, and the average compensation payment has been $36,100.

Mr Gleeson today told the royal commission those administration expenses were fair given the nature of the scheme. “The monies spent administering a scheme to deal with complaints about child sexual abuse are about more than money,” he said. “We are administering more than the doling out of money “We are administering the emergence of truth…I think that’s money well spent.”

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AUSTRALIA
Australian Trucking Association

Watson takes senior Catholic cleric to task for insulting analogy

The Australian Trucking Association (ATA) has slammed Cardinal George Pell for comparing the Catholic Church’s responsibility for child abuse to trucking companies that employ drivers who molest women, describing his comment as insulting.

ATA chair Noelene Watson says Pell’s comparison is uncalled for.

“There are more than 170,000 professional truck drivers in Australia. They have families and children. Pell’s analogy is a deep insult to every one of them,” Watson says.

“These comments are a desperate attempt to deflect attention from the Royal Commission being faced by the Catholic Church and other institutions that deal with children.

“Cardinal Pell must realise that he cannot solve these problems by insulting Australia’s hardworking truck drivers who deliver the goods we use every day.”

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AUSTRALIA
Irish Independent

A top Vatican official has come under fire for drawing an analogy between the Catholic Church’s response to child abuse and a trucking company.

Cardinal Pell, Australia’s leading Catholic cleric and a former archbishop of both Melbourne and Sydney, said it would not be appropriate for legal culpability to be ‘foisted’ on church leaders, although he acknowledged the church had a moral obligation to victims of paedophile priests.

Speaking to a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Melbourne, Cardinal Pell cited the hypothetical example of a woman being molested by a truck driver.

“If the truck driver picks up some lady and then molests her, I don’t think it’s appropriate, because it is contrary to the policy, for the ownership, the leadership of that company to be held responsible,” he said via video link from Rome.

“Similarly with the church and the head of any other organisation.

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MISSISSIPPI
WLOX

[the affadavit]

GULFPORT, MS (WLOX) –
A South Mississippi teacher has admitted to investigators that he molested at least eight boys who were his students, and the abuse spanned a period of 20 years. That’s according to an affidavit released Thursday.

William Richard Pryor, 68, is in federal custody charged with transportation of minors with intent of sexual activity.

WARNING: This story contains explicit details that may be offensive to some readers.

According to the affidavit, Pryor confirmed to FBI investigators that the allegations of molestation by two different victims are true. Pryor also identified six other victims, and gave the FBI details about when and where he sexually abused them.

The affidavit details interviews with two different victims, who are making the molestation allegations.

According to the FBI report, Victim #1 was interviewed on August 18, and told investigators he was molested by his Bayou View Junior High School math teacher, William Richard Pryor. The alleged molestation took place from 1973 to 1975 while the victim was a student at that school. Victim #1 said he would take summer trips organized by Pryor, and it was on these trips that the sexual abuse would happen.

One day later, the FBI spoke to Victim #2, who told a similar story of molestation by Pryor in 1999 and 2000. Again, the victim said he was a student of Pryor’s at Bayou View Junior High when the abuse occurred. According to the affidavit, Victim #2 told investigators that “the molestation consisted of Pryor touching his penis and masturbating him.” Victim #2 told investigators the molestation happened on at least five separate occasions in Louisiana.

That same day, FBI agents interviewed Pryor at St. Patrick High School, where he was working as a math teacher. He has since resigned from the school. Pryor gave the agents a voluntary statement where to confessed to molesting eight children between the mid-70s and ending in 2005, during his time as a teacher at Bayou View Junior High School. Pryor said his victims were between 13 and 14 years old.

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MISSISSIPPI
WJTV

MEDIA RELEASE:

Gulfport, Miss – William Richard Pryor, 68, of Gulfport, was arrested by FBI agents pursuant to a criminal complaint charging him with transportation of minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, announced U.S. Attorney Gregory K. Davis and Acting FBI Special Agent in Charge Johnnie Sharp.

William Richard Pryor was formerly employed as a math teacher at Bayou View Junior High School in Gulfport. According to the criminal complaint, beginning in approximately September, 1973 and continuing through the present, Pryor traveled and transported minor children in interstate commerce with the intent that the minor children would engage in sexual activity.

Pryor appeared today before U.S. Magistrate Judge John C. Gargiulo for an initial appearance. He remains in custody pending a preliminary and detention hearing on Tuesday, August 26, 2014.

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MISSISSIPPI
GulfLive

By Warren Kulo | GulfLive.com
on August 21, 2014

GULFPORT, Mississippi — A 68-year-old teacher who resigned from St. Patrick High School Tuesday has been charged with transporting at least eight boys ages 13-14 to multiple states and engaging in sexual acts with them.

According to U.S. Attorney Gregory K. Davis and Acting FBI Special Agent In Charge Johnnie Sharp, William Richard Pryor was arrested by FBI agents Tuesday on the St. Patrick campus.

The complaint against Pryor alleges that he transported the eight teenage boys to various states from 1973 to 2005 to engage in sex acts.

Prior to working at St. Patrick, Pryor worked at St. John High School and Bayou View Middle School, both in Gulfport, although all of the victims were students at Bayou View.

In an affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint, FBI agent Matthew Campbell says Pryor confessed to molesting eight boys from 1973 to 2005. At least one incident in the 1990’s occurred in Gulfport, Pryor told investigators.

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MISSISSIPPI
Sun Herald

Outlining the affidavit of charges

Former St. Patrick Catholic High School teacher William Richard Pryor, 68, was charged in federal court Thursday with transportation of minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual conduct. Below are bullet points from the affidavit:

* The FBI interviewed two alleged victims Aug. 18 and 19 who said Pryor molested them while they were students at Bayou View Junior High School in the mid-1970s and in 1999-2000.

* Pryor allegedly told the FBI he molested eight children when they were 13 or 14 years old, starting in the mid-1970s and ending in 2005.

* Both victims the FBI interviewed said the assaults happened while on trips.

* The assaults reportedly happened in eight states: Mississippi, California, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, Louisiana, Texas and Georgia.

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MISSISSIPPI/OREGON
Bend Bulletin

The Associated Press /
Published Aug 22, 2014

GULFPORT, Miss. — A Mississippi math teacher admitted that he molested at least eight teenagers over a period of four decades, largely during out-of-state trips, including to Oregon, authorities said Thursday.

The victims were all students at Bayou View Junior High School in Gulfport, where William Richard Pryor taught between 1973 and 2005, according to a criminal complaint and an affidavit filed by the FBI. Pryor appeared in U.S. District Court in Gulfport on Thursday.

He was turned over to U.S. marshals to be held until a preliminary and detention hearing Tuesday on charges of transportation of minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.

U.S. Attorney Gregory Davis said in a statement that the alleged molestation occurred in Mississippi and at least a half dozen other states where Pryor traveled with the victims. One of the victims told the FBI that the molestation occurred during a summer trip Pryor organized.

FBI agent Matthew Campbell said two victims were interviewed this week and Pryor was arrested Tuesday after he talked with agents and confirmed the victims’ accounts, according to the affidavit.

“Pryor provided a voluntary statement to the agents wherein he confessed to molesting eight children when they were 13 or 14 years old. Pryor stated the molestations began in the mid-1970s at Bayou View Junior High and ended in 2005 at Bayou View Junior High,” Campbell stated in the affidavit.

Pryor was working as a math teacher at St. Patrick High School in Gulfport when he was arrested Tuesday. Catholic Diocese of Biloxi Superintendent Mike Ladner said Pryor resigned Tuesday.

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MISSISSIPPI
Sun Herald

BY ROBIN FITZGERALD AND PATRICK OCHS

GULFPORT — Longtime teacher Richard Pryor has admitted to FBI agents he began molesting children 41 years ago on out-of-state trips.

A criminal complaint unsealed Thursday says the trips continued after Pryor began molesting children he taught in September 1973.

The FBI arrested Pryor, 68, of Gulfport, Tuesday on suspicion of transporting minors with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. The charge is punishable by 10 years to life in prison plus post-release supervision of five years to life.

Pryor is held pending court hearings next week.

Pryor resigned his job as a geometry teacher at St. Patrick Catholic High School earlier this week. School district officials have confirmed Pryor is known for organizing private trips that aren’t associated with school functions.

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ILLINOIS
The Observer – Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockford

August 22, 2014

DIOCESE—Bishop David Malloy has asked all parishes to read a letter this weekend.

“I take this opportunity,” he says in the letter, “to renew publicly the commitment of the Diocese of Rockford, our priests, our staff and especially our schools and educational and youth programs to the safety and wellbeing of our young people.”

The Diocese of Rockford has taken several steps to help assure the safety of young people in parish and school programs. That includes safe environment training for youths from pre-kindergarten through high school, all geared for specific age groups.

Adults, whether employees or volunteers, are screened and required to take specialized training. That Virtus training program is available both through class instruction and online. The program raises awareness of the issue of child sexual abuse, what to watch for and what to do if abuse is suspected.

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NEW JERSEY
Philly.com

EMILY BABAY, PHILLY.COM
POSTED: Friday, August 22, 2014

Authorities are investigating allegations that a New Jersey priest sexually abused a 16-year-old boy.

The Diocese of Trenton says it learned about the alleged abuse by Father Romannilo “Nilo” Apura, a pastor at St. Martha Parish in Point Pleasant, this week.

Apura, 67, was taken into custody on Thursday, the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office said.

Prosecutors say he is accused of having sexual contact with the boy in late spring or early summer at a Trenton home. In a separate incident in June, he tried to remove the boy’s pants, prosecutors said.

Apura is facing charges of second-degree endangering the welfare of child, third-degree aggravated criminal sexual contact and fourth-degree attempt to commit criminal sexual contact.

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ILLINOIS
Daily Herald

Eric Peterson

The man accusing Catholic priest Joseph Wilk of sexual abuse will continue his lawsuit against the former Schaumburg pastor, despite the Archdiocese of Chicago recently reinstating the priest to good standing and removing him from a list of abusive clergy, his lawyer said Thursday.

“This case is alive,” attorney Patrick F. Bradley said. “There is so much reasonable cause (to pursue the case), it stinks.”

Bradley filed suit on behalf of his now 29-year-old client in May 2013, naming Wilk, former pastor of St. Matthew Catholic Church in Schaumburg, as defendant. The case’s next status hearing is Oct. 10, Bradley said.

The suit claims Wilk sexually abused Bradley’s client once in 1995, when he was 10 years old, and again from his freshman year of high school until he was 19 years old.

Wilk was pastor of St. Matthew Church from 1994 until 2006.

Based on information it had at the time, an independent review board ruled in early February 2014 that Wilk’s name should be added to a list of past and present archdiocese clergy with a substantiated allegation of abuse against them.

But Jan Slattery, director of the archdiocese’s Office for the Protection of Children and Youth, said Wednesday that new information caused the board to reverse its decision and remove Wilk from that list on July 24. Slattery did not say what that new information was.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC – AM

MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: At the Royal Commission into child sex abuse Cardinal George Pell has defended the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne’s controversial victims’ compensation scheme known as the Melbourne Response.

Giving evidence via video link from Rome, the Cardinal said the scheme he set up was an Australian-first and victims were its first priority.

Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Victims of clerical sexual abuse have told the royal commission the Melbourne Response gave them inadequate compensation, took away their legal rights to sue, lacked compassion and was intimidating.

But the man who set up the scheme 18 years ago, Cardinal George Pell, gave evidence from Rome that the victims were his priority.

GEORGE PELL: We were ahead of the curve. Not sure there was any other system in Australia, perhaps anywhere else, we were certainly no less generous.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Sean Cash, the barrister acting for abuse victim Paul Hersbach, didn’t accept Cardinal Pell’s claim that money wasn’t his main concern when setting up the Melbourne Response.

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ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune

By John Keilman, Tribune reporter

The former pastor of Schaumburg’s St. Matthew Catholic Church has been removed from a list of priests facing substantiated accusations of sexual misconduct, but a lawsuit in which a man claims the priest abused him as a child is still moving ahead.

The Archdiocese of Chicago confirmed in February that Joseph Wilk had been added to the public list of priests facing allegations that a review board deems credible. The confirmation came about nine months after a young man named Donnie Ophus filed a lawsuit accusing Wilk of sexual abuse.

Ophus, now 29, claimed in the lawsuit that Wilk abused him from the ages of 10 to 18. He told the Tribune in an interview this year that Wilk had paid him to keep quiet, but he did tell his father, who reported the allegation to church officials.

Susan Burritt, an archdiocese spokeswoman, said a supplementary review convinced the board that investigates abuse allegations that there was “insufficient reason to suspect that … Wilk engaged in sexual misconduct with a minor.”

The archdiocese removed Wilk from the list July 24, the first time such an action has been taken, Burritt said.

She offered no details about why the board took another look at the case or why it reached its decision.

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NEW JERSEY
Courier-Post

POINT PLEASANT – A Catholic priest who once served in Moorestown was arrested Thursday on a sexual abuse allegation involving a 16-year-old filed by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office.

The Rev. Romannilo S. Apura, pastor at St. Martha Parish in Point Pleasant, was charged in connection with an incident that took place in Trenton, according to a statement issued by the Diocese of Trenton.

Apura has served as pastor of St. Martha Parish since July 2012 and formerly served in the parishes of St. Joachim, Trenton; St. Agnes, Atlantic Highlands; St. Maximilian Kolbe of Holiday City at Berkeley; Our Lady of Good Counsel, Moorestown; St. Ann Parish, Keansburg, and St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral, Trenton.

Bishop David M. O’Connell has suspended Apura pending the outcome of the investigation by law enforcement and recommendations from the Diocesan Review Board.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

AUGUST 22, 2014

ONE of Australia’s worst child sex offenders, pedophile priest John Sidney Denham, has told a court he was a “proud, self-indulgent, self-obsessive person”, who destroyed peoples’ lives.

Denham, a former Catholic priest and schoolteacher, was giving evidence at a sentencing hearing in Sydney after pleading guilty to 25 charges relating to offences against 20 victims. He has asked the judge to take a further 23 charges into account.

The 71-year-old has previously been convicted of abusing a further 39 young boys in the St Pius X Catholic High School in the NSW Hunter Valley between 1968 and 1986.

Wearing his prison greens, Denham told the court he is currently in protective custody in Goulburn jail, where he shares a yard with other child abusers and murderers.

“There are three or four there that I know of, sexual offenders. In the yard there are six ex-policemen, two ex-priests … then there are the people who threw their wives off balconies,” he said.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

AAP

Cardinal George Pell’s comments comparing the Catholic church with a truck company have outraged support groups for victims of child sexual abuse.

The Catholic Church is no more legally responsible for priests who abuse children than a trucking company that employs a driver who molests women, Cardinal George Pell, via video from Rome, told Thursday’s royal commission in Melbourne.

Adults Surviving Child Abuse president Dr Cathy Kezelman said Cardinal Pell’s comments were not helpful to victims of abuse.

“His comments were outrageous,” she told AAP on Friday.

He showed a lack of compassion, and “continues to duck and weave” she said.

“To have their (victims’) experiences denied yet again drives a knife into the wound and twists it,” she said.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

August 22, 2014

Jane Lee
Legal Affairs Reporter for The Age

The Melbourne Response attaches the “stigma” of being a paedophile to priests, brothers and nuns it determines guilty of clerical abuse, the Catholic Church’s independent investigator says.

The Royal Commission into child sexual abuse is investigating the effectiveness of the Melbourne Response, the church’s internal process for handling victims’ complaints.

Jeffrey Gleeson, QC, is one of its two Independent Commissioners who assesses victims’ complaints. He appeared before the Commission on Friday and defended the scheme, saying it helped victims feel “believed”. He also said it was his role to tell them they did not have to report to police if they did not want to.

The Commission’s chairman, Justice Peter McClellan, asked Mr Gleeson whether his approach to complaints was driven by concerns about how his decisions would impact on clerics or for victims: “Because the redress scheme in itself has no consequences for the alleged abuser.”

Mr Gleeson rejected this, saying that clerics were named when he found there had been abuse which meant “that person suffers the appropriate stigma of having been determined to be a paedophile.”

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

Cardinal George Pell insults truck drivers over remarks at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

TRUCK drivers around the country are up in arms over Cardinal George Pell’s comments at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The Chair of the Australian Trucking Association, Noelene Watson, said Cardinal Pell had publicly insulted every truck driver in Australia.

Mrs Watson was responding to Cardinal Pell’s comments at the Commission where he stated that the Catholic Church was no more responsible for priests who abuse children than a trucking company would be if they employed a driver who molested women.

“There are more than 170,000 professional truck drivers in Australia. They have families and children. Cardinal Pell’s analogy is a deep insult to every one of them,” Mrs Watson said.

“These comments are a desperate attempt to deflect attention from the Royal Commission being faced by the Catholic Church and other institutions that deal with children.

“Cardinal Pell must realise that he cannot solve these problems by insulting Australia’s hardworking truck drivers, who deliver the goods we use every day.”

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MINNESOTA
Fox 9

It’s a case that dates back to the early 1970s, but the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is settling a suit with a 54-year-old man who claims Father Tom Stitts sexually abused him while being shuffled through metro parishes.

“This is a bittersweet day,” said Leander James, victim’s attorney. “Our client was sexually abused and his mother silenced. After 43 years, his abuser’s employer has finally heard him, his mother and acknowledged his injury. It’s a first step.”

It took more than 40 years for the man known only as John Doe 100 to get the resolution he’d hoped for. On Wednesday, he and his mother intend to emerge from that confidentiality to speak publicly about the case with their attorneys.

“I need to speak up,” John Doe 100 said. “I’m no longer afraid.”

Seated next to his mother, Yvonne, at a Wednesday afternoon press conference, he announced, “My name is Jon Jaker, and I am a survivor, and today, we won a little bit back.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)

Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Friday 22 August 2014

A Catholic priest who systematically abused dozens of boys says he was “self-indulgent” and just acted on his desires.

John Sidney Denham, 71, was jailed for a maximum of almost 20 years in New South Wales in 2010 for his “sadistic” indecent and sexual assault of boys as young as five.

The priest and teacher has now pleaded guilty over another 25 charges involving the sexual abuse of 18 boys at St Pius X College in Adamstown near Newcastle from 1975 to 1979.

Another 23 offences are also to be taken account when sentencing him.

In a hearing on Friday, Denham told Sydney’s district court he was responsible for “destroying the lives of so many people”.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)

Melissa Davey
theguardian.com, Friday 22 August 2014

The Australian Trucking Association has joined child sexual abuse victims and their advocates in expressing outrage at comments made by Cardinal George Pell while giving evidence before a royal commission on Thursday night.

While facing questions from the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse, Pell said the Catholic Church was no more responsible for child abuse carried out by church figures than a trucking company would be if they employed a driver who molested women.

“If the truck driver picks up some lady and then molests her, I don’t think it’s appropriate, because it is contrary to the policy, for the ownership, the leadership of that company to be held responsible,” Cardinal Pell told the commission via video link from Rome on Thursday.

His comments left chair of the Australian Trucking Association, Noelene Watson, fuming.

“There are more than 170,000 professional truck drivers in Australia,” she said.

“They have families and children. Cardinal Pell’s analogy is a deep insult to every one of them.”

The comments were a desperate attempt to deflect attention from the commission’s questioning of the church, she said.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By court reporter Peta Carlyon and staff
Updated 22 Aug 2014

A commissioner of the Catholic Church’s Melbourne Response has told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that victims told him they wanted justice, not money.

Jeffery Gleeson QC, who investigates complaints of abuse under Commissioner Peter O’Callaghan QC, told the inquiry that victims just wanted to be believed.

“Complainants have told me, it’s not about the money, and I believe them,” Mr Gleeson said.

“I don’t think it’s about the money. It’s about being believed that that person, that priest, that brother, that nun abused them.

“I don’t speak for victims. But my sense for having spoken to them for so many years is that they need to know that there has been a factual finding.

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AUSTRALIA
The Conversation

Michael Salter
Lecturer in Criminology at University of Western Sydney

Cardinal George Pell’s appearance at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will do little to rehabilitate his image in the eyes of clergy abuse victims.

Via video link from the Vatican, Pell used the example of a trucking company to illustrate the legal responsibility of the Catholic Church to victims of clergy abuse. In his view, the church’s responsibility to those abused by priests is comparable to the responsibility of a trucking company to a hitchhiker raped by a trucker.

This was just one of several moments before the royal commission in which Pell’s rhetoric of concern for victims came into tension with the detached and bureaucratic manner that has characterised his response to clergy abuse over the last two decades.

The Melbourne Response

At the royal commission, Pell strongly defended the Melbourne Response, the clergy abuse compensation scheme that he established in 1996 as Archbishop of Melbourne. He described the scheme as an attempt to lessen the suffering of victims and to address their needs quickly and compassionately.

However, Pell’s statement that “money was never my primary concern” sat uncomfortably alongside his emphasis on protecting the financial resources of the archdiocese. Compensation offers were considerably lower than the likely outcome of a successful civil claim.

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NEW MEXICO
ABQ Journal

By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Journal Staff Writer

PUBLISHED: Friday, August 22, 2014

Lawsuits filed this week by four New Mexico men ages 33 to 62 allege they were sexually abused by priests in Archdiocese of Santa Fe parishes.

Former Roman Catholic priest Jason Sigler, 76, who returned to Albuquerque last year after completing a prison term in Michigan, is among the four priests named in the lawsuits.

The new suits, filed Monday in 2nd Judicial District Court, bring to 25 the number of lawsuits filed in recent years by Albuquerque attorney Brad Hall. Of those, 11 have been settled, Hall said.

The plaintiffs are asking for an unspecified amount of money for compensatory and punitive damages.

A 47-year-old man alleged that Sigler molested him around 1976 at a church near Coyote, about 15 miles west of Abiquiu. The man was about 9 at the time.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

August 22, 2014

Jane Lee, Cameron Houston

The way the Catholic Church awards money to victims of clerical abuse has been questioned at the royal commission.

In the final hearing of the week, David Curtain, QC, the chairman of the Melbourne Response’s compensation panel, outlined the calculations used to determine compensation for victims.
Mr Curtain revealed that:

* Victims whose abuse involved “sexual penetration” are paid the highest level
* The panel does not discuss with victims how they arrived at a figure below the current $75,000 cap
* The impact of the abuse on the individual victim is considered above the level of abuse suffered
* There is no cap on the amount of counselling the Church will fund via Carelink or external psychologists
* Victims pay for their own lawyers to be with them at the discussion
* The panel’s decision is not reviewable, and its discussion with victims is not recorded except for the amount agreed on and whether victims want to receive a letter of apology from the Archbishop

The Church has given hundreds of victims ex gratia payments since the Melbourne Response was established in 1996 by Cardinal George Pell, who was then Archbishop of the Melbourne Archdiocese. The royal commission is investigating the scheme’s effectiveness as it considers a national redress scheme for victims of sexual abuse.

Despite criticisms of the Melbourne Response, Mr Curtain said only a minority of victims were unsatisfied with the process.

He said it would not be “appropriate” to comment on the adequacy of the $75,000 cap for victims’ suffering but said “whatever people get is not enough” to compensate them. The payment was “financial recognition of a wrong done”.

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CANADA
Sun News

TONY SPEARS | QMI AGENCY

OTTAWA -A man who claims a local priest sexually abused him is suing the Archdiocese of Ottawa and other local Catholic bodies for $200,000.

The complainant, who QMI Agency has chosen not to name, said that as a young boy in the late 1970s he lived with his mother near the church that was then known as Eglise Ste-Famille in 1978.

The man alleges the priest abused him and his friend through acts of sexual touching and oral sex.

“The priest used his relationship of clerical authority and trust to convince and force the plaintiff to engage in these sexual acts,” the statement of claim alleges.

“He did not permit them to leave the premises during the assaults.

“He threatened the plaintiff with exposure as a liar should he tell anyone about the abuse, stating that nobody would believe him.”

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