ABUSE TRACKER

MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation

Jennifer Haselberger

[with copy of the criminal complaint]

06/05/2015

Subject: Message from Very Reverend Charles V. Lachowitzer Regarding Charges Against the Archdiocese

Dear Friends in Christ,

At noon today the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office served the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis with civil and criminal complaints that the Archdiocese failed to protect children in the case against former priest Curtis Wehmeyer several years ago. The charges are against the archdiocese as a corporation, not against any individual.

We are reviewing the charges and will continue to cooperate with the County Attorney’s office and investigators from the St. Paul Police Department. We will follow up with further information when available. Please join in praying for victims/survivors of sexual abuse by clergy, as well as for healing in our local Church. Sincerely yours in Christ, Very Reverend Charles V. Lachowitzer Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia

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.

MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Statement by Frank Meuers of Plymouth, Twin Cities SNAP leader, 952-334-5180

We’re glad the Ramsey County Attorney can no longer ignore the large amount of data that has been made available from victims, survivors, and Ms. Jennifer Haselberger, a former archdiocesan employee. It shows the blatant, repeated cover up of crimes by archdiocesan officials, way beyond just the Fr. Curtis Wehmeyer case.

The demand for justice has finally overridden the ploy of secrecy, and now charges have at last been filed. We now ask anyone with any information about abuse or cover up to come forward at once. Please help facilitate this movement from silence to openness.

We urge prosecutors to ask church officials for their passports so there’s no chance they can flee overseas.

We dispute the notion that Catholic officials “turned a blind eye” to abuse. They did worse. They deliberately and repeatedly put and kept kids in harm’s way by valuing their reputations and comfort and devaluing boys and girls. They engaged in active wrongdoing, not passive wrongdoing. These are smart men with smart lawyers and smart PR advisors. These were – and continue to be – cover ups, not “mistakes” or “failures.”

We hope that individual church officials will be charged. Dozens of current and former Catholic staffers planned and participated in the cover up. So in that sense, it’s an institutional crime. But individual Catholic officials intentionally made these selfish choices. So individuals should be held responsible too. That’s the only real way to deter cover ups in the Catholic church in the present and future.

It’s good that the persistent cries of so very many abused people of this archdiocese are being hear. It will be better, however, when more charges are filed against individual church staff and a guilty verdict is issued against them.

[Star Tribune]

Choi called the archdiocese claim to monitor problem priests “a sham.” So it the archdiocesan claim to “investigate” predator priests.

“We were falsely led to believe that the Archdiocese had an effective program in place” to monitor priests, Choi said. He’s one of tens of thousands who’ve been misled by Catholic officials.

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.

MINNESOTA
International Business Times

By Eben Blake

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis was charged Friday for how it handled multiple allegations of sexual abuse over the course of several years. The archdiocese received six gross misdemeanor counts as a corporation, according to the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, with a prosecutor saying that the church “turned a blind eye” to the conduct of a priest.

The charges stemmed primarily from the archdiocese’s actions surrounding Curtis Wehmeyer, who was sentenced to five years in 2013 for criminal sexual misconduct and possession of child pornography and was defrocked as a priest in March. Wehmeyer pleaded guilty in 2012 to molesting two brothers, according to the Associated Press. He is currently charged with sex crimes in both Minnesota and Wisconsin.

“It is not only Curtis Wehmeyer who is criminally responsible for the harm caused, but it is the archdiocese as well,” said Ramsey County prosecutor, John Choi, reported the Star Tribune. “Today, we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” said Choi, reported the New York Times.

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.

MINNESOTA
BBC News

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is facing criminal charges after US officials said church leaders ignored reports that a priest was molesting children.

Archdiocese is charged as a corporation with failing to protect children, but no individuals were charged.

Officials alleged that the archdiocese “turned a blind eye” to complaints about priest Curtis Wehmeyer for years.

Wehmeyer, now defrocked, was convicted of molesting two brothers in 2013.

`It is not only Curtis Wehmeyer who is criminally responsible for the harm caused, but it is the archdiocese as well,” said Ramsey County prosecutor John Choi at a news conference on Friday.

“This organization said it protected children when in reality it did not”, said Mr Choi who called the church’s monitoring program for trouble priests “a sham”.

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.

ILLINOIS
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Friday, June 5

Statement by Barbara Blaine of Chicago, president of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 312-399-4747, bblaine@SNAPnetwork.org )

We extend our deepest sympathies to the dozens of relatives, hundreds of friends and thousands of admirers of Eugene Kennedy, who has passed away at the age of 86. Most knew him for his towering intellect, compelling speeches and gripping writing. We knew him for his generous and kind heart.

Early in the Catholic abuse and cover up crisis, Kennedy relentlessly and eloquently reminded everyone he could that it’s about complicit bishops more than predator priests. He was also among the first to emphasize that genuine reform could happen best when victims and lay people ignored the church hierarchy and instead prodded secular authorities.

Even earlier (in 1971), he directed a psychological study of US priests for the American Bishops that showed a shockingly large sub-set of clerics whose inner psych-sexual growth lagged far behind their chronological growth. From these half grown men many sex abusers arose. Kennedy quietly but persistently warned bishops about these men. Later, he charged church officials with failing to address sexual intimacy and he held the Vatican responsible for a sexually dysfunctional system.

With deep compassion, he empowered lay Catholics to speak up, seek reform and avoid being intimidated or cowed by self-serving prelates. Kennedy stressed that the hierarchy wasn’t and isn’t the church but that rank-and-file Catholics were and are the church. He managed to always couch his wise counsel in gentle terms, without ever sounding impatient or judgmental.

Outspoken and inspiring advocates like Kennedy have played and still play an enormous role in prodding recalcitrant Catholic officials to respond to abuse victims and the laity. His voice – and his heart – will be sorely missed.

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.

MINNESOTA
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

As Chris has noted in a comment here today, this noontime the Ramsey County, Minnesota, prosecutor’s office announced that it has filed criminal charges against the archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis. Mitch Smith writes for New York Times:

Prosecutors in Minnesota filed criminal charges on Friday against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, accusing church leaders of mishandling repeated complaints of sexual abuse by a priest.

The charges and accompanying civil petition, announced by the Ramsey County prosecutor, John J. Choi, are a sweeping condemnation of the archdiocese and how its leaders have handled sex abuse allegations.

“Today, we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” Mr. Choi said in a statement.

Note that the New York Times story has a link to the court document containing the charges. Jennifer Haselberger has also published a copy on her blog. She also notes that the archdiocese has issued a response — of sorts — and she provides a copy of the response.

As Brian Roewe notes for National Catholic Reporter, these criminal charges were, according to Haselberger, what she had both hoped for and feared when she blew the whistle on the archdiocese’s cover-up of the case of Rev. Wehmeyer, after which she resigned her position as the chancellor for canonical affairs for the archdiocese.

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

UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on the latest attack on the Duggar family:

Sarah Palin, and her daughter Bristol, have rightly slammed the mainstream media for bashing the Duggars as hypocrites while continuing to laud Lena Dunham, the celebrity who sexually molested her own sister. But it’s not just the secular media that are guilty of rank duplicity—it’s hit the Catholic media.

On the front page of the National Catholic Reporter, a newspaper and website which opposes every Catholic Church teaching on sexuality [click here], there is an article by David Clohessy, the director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). He condemns the Duggars because “no one told the police” about Josh Duggar’s sexual molestation of his sisters.

In the 1990s, David Clohessy knew about the crimes committed by a sexual molester but never called the cops. The abuser was his brother Kevin, then a priest.

It gets worse. In his article today, David Clohessy slams Bishop Robert Finn, who previously led the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, for not reporting a disturbed priest who downloaded crotch-shot pictures of fully-clothed girls (there was one non-pornographic photo of a naked girl) to his computer. Yet the founder of SNAP, Barbara Blaine, who works closely with Clohessy, wrote to the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners in 2009 pleading with the panel to go easy on Dr. Steve Taylor: he is a former SNAP shrink who was sent to prison for downloading child pornography to his computer

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.

MARYLAND
The Baltimore Sun

By Kevin Rector
The Baltimore Sun

The trial of former Episcopal bishop Heather Cook has been delayed until September.

Former Episcopal bishop Heather Elizabeth Cook, charged in the December drunken-driving death of a popular bicyclist in Baltimore, doesn’t want to go through a “contested trial,” her attorney said Thursday.

“We would hope that we could resolve the case without trial for everyone’s sake,” including the family of 41-year-old bicyclist Thomas Palermo, David Irwin said outside Baltimore Circuit Court.

Irwin’s comments, which came shortly after a brief court proceeding in which Cook waived her right to a speedy trial and accepted a postponement until Sept. 9, were the first indication that Cook is considering accepting culpability in the case through a plea deal.

Irwin said he has made the “earliest of plea considerations,” but has only spoken “very, very briefly” with prosecutors on the matter.

Cook, 58, has pleaded not guilty to all 13 counts against her, including automobile manslaughter, driving under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of an accident.

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.

MINNESOTA
NPR

SCOTT NEUMAN

The Archdiocese of St. Paul has been criminally charged with allegedly turning a “blind eye” to sexual abuse against minor boys by former priest Curtis Wehmeyer, who pleaded guilty in 2012.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said he was holding the archdiocese to account as a corporation on six gross misdemeanor charges and a related civil complaint for failing to stop Wehmeyer’s abuse.

Choi said the archdiocese “time and time again turned a blind eye” to what was going on at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul., where Wehmeyer served. He was dismissed as a priest by Pope Francis in March, three years after he was permanently barred from ministry.

“The facts we have gathered cannot be ignored, they cannot be dismissed, and are frankly appalling, especially when viewed in their entirety,” the attorney said.

Choi said facts in the case were still being uncovered. St. Paul Police Chief Tom Smith asked anyone with information to come forward.

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.

MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Head of support group holds news conference
He’ll react to charges against Catholic archdiocese
And he’ll beg other victims to “keep stepping up and speaking up”
SNAP: Choi should take church officials’ passports so they can’t flee

WHAT
Holding signs and childhood photos at a hastily-called sidewalk news conference, a Twin Cities clergy sex abuse victim who heads a support group will discuss the new criminal charges against the local Catholic archdiocese

WHEN
TODAY, Friday, June 5 at 4:15 p.m.

WHERE
On the sidewalk outside the Chancery, Archdiocese of St. Paul & Minneapolis, 226 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul, MN

WHO
At least two individuals, including Frank Meuers, Minnesota SNAP leader, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (952-334-5180, frankameuers@gmail.com)

WHY
Meuers says “The demand for justice has finally overridden the ploy of secrecy, and now charges have at last been filed. We now ask anyone with any information of abuse to come forward at once, and help facilitate this movement from silence to openness, and we congratulate the county attorney and his staff for heeding the persistent cries of so very many abused people of this diocese.”

Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, SNAP Outreach Director of SNAP, says “We’re glad the Twin Cities archdiocese is being charged. But the credit goes to brave Minnesota victims who have stepped forward and exposed wrongdoing. Their civil lawsuits, police reports and courage has made this happen.

We believe this is the first time in more than a decade that a Catholic diocese has faced criminal charges.

Catholic officials almost always hire expensive lawyers, exploit every technicality and fight bitterly to protect their clerical careers. We predict that will happen here.

So it’s not time for complacency. Every single man and woman has a moral and civic duty to call prosecutors with what they know or suspect about Twin Cities clergy sex crimes or cover ups, no matter how seemingly insignificant or long ago.

By passing a three year civil window, lawmakers gave victims hope. Victims then filed suits and police reports. And now, a big and powerful Catholic institution faces charges. That’s not ideal but its progress.

The cover ups in the Twin Cities are so widely-documented at this point, we believe John Choi had little choice but to pursue the church hierarchy. We’re glad he did. But a charge is not a conviction. So it’s crucial that current and former church staff and members overcome their fears, pick up the phone and call the law, whether they’re victims, witnesses or whistleblowers.”

Meuers will discuss his own abuse at the hands of a Minnesota priest and will take questions.

CONTACT
Barbara Dorris (314 503 0003, SNAPdorris@gmail.com)
David Clohessy (314 566 9790, SNAPclohessy@aol.com)
Verne Wagner (218-340-1277, lwagsmn@yahoo.com)

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.

MISSOURI
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release Friday, June 5

Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, SNAP Outreach Director of SNAP, bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org, 314-503-0003

In a rare move, the Twin Cities Catholic archdiocese – where St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson spent 50 years – is being criminally charged with “a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership over the course of decades,” according to a prosecutor.

Carlson worked in the Twin Cities until 1994 and has been deposed under oath several times about clergy sex abuse and cover up cases there. The investigation is on-going and we hope that Carlson himself will be charged individually.

Carlson was born in Minneapolis, attended Catholic schools, studied at St. Paul Seminary, and ordained to the priesthood there in 1970. He earned a Master’s in Divinity from St. Paul Seminary in 1976, and went on to work as a pastor, a judge on the archdiocesan tribunal, director of the Office of Vocations, and chancellor of the curia in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. He was also chaplain at the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities.

In 1983, Carlson was appointed auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The credit for these charges goes to brave Minnesota victims who have stepped forward and exposed wrongdoing. Their civil lawsuits, police reports and courage has made this happen.

We believe this is the first time in more than a decade that a Catholic diocese has faced criminal charges.

Catholic officials almost always hire expensive lawyers, exploit every technicality and fight bitterly to protect their clerical careers. We predict that will happen here.

So it’s not time for complacency. Every single man and woman has a moral and civic duty to call prosecutors with what they know or suspect about Twin Cities clergy sex crimes or cover ups, no matter how seemingly insignificant or long ago.

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.

MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

[Investigation photos in Curtis Wehmeyer case]

By Jean Hopfensperger Star Tribune JUNE 5, 2015

The Ramsey County Attorney’s office filed criminal charges Friday against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis for “failing to protect children” from an abusive priest.

The charges stem from the archdiocese’s oversight of former priest Curtis Wehmeyer, who is now serving a prison term for abusing two boys while he was pastor of Blessed Sacrament Church in St. Paul.

“Today we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” said Ramsey County Attorney John Choi.

“By filing criminal charges and taking civil action, we are holding the archdiocese accountable for its failure to responsibly and meaningfully respond to numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct by Curtis Wehmeyer.”

Choi said church officials failed to enforce their own restrictions for Wehmeyer. He cited a 2010 incident when a priest reported to Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché that on a camping trip Wehmeyer had slept in the same bed with one of the victims.

He said others also had contacted church officials about Wehmeyer’s behavior.

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.

MINNESOTA
Minneapolis/ St. Paul Business Journal

Jun 5, 2015

Cody Nelson
Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal

The Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul is being criminally charged for “failing to protect children” who were victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests, the Pioneer Press reported Friday.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said the organization is facing gross misdemeanor charges. No individuals were charged.

Friday’s news is just the latest in a long string of turmoil for the archdiocese that started with an investigation by MPR News.

In January, the archdiocese filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because it couldn’t afford the claims brought against it for sex abuse lawsuits.

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.

MINNESOTA
KARE

ST. PAUL, Minn. – The Ramsey County Attorney announced criminal charges against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis Friday, in response to the way sexual abuse allegations were handled within the church.

John Choi, county attorney, and St. Paul Police Chief Thomas Smith held a press conference Friday to announce six gross misdemeanors against the church and condemn the way the Archdiocese handled former priest Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer, who is currently behind bars for abusing children. A civil petition has been filed, as well.

Wehmeyer pleaded guilty in November of 2012 to several counts of criminal sexual conduct with minors and 17 felony counts of possession of child pornography. He was also charged with criminal sexual conduct with a third victim in Wisconsin. He’s currently serving a five-year sentence.

“It is not only Curtis Wehmeyer who is criminally responsible for the harm caused, but it is the Archdiocese, as well,” Choi said.

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

MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

By Elizabeth Mohr
emohr@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 06/05/2015

Ramsey County attorney John Choi said Friday that a 20-month investigation has led to criminal charges against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis for “failing to protect children.”

Choi cited the case of Curtis Wehmeyer, a priest convicted of molesting two boys.

“It is not only Curtis Wehmeyer who is criminally responsible for the harm caused, but it is the archdiocese as well,” he said.

Choi called the archdiocese program to monitor problem priests “a sham.”

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.

MINNESOTA
Jeff Anderson & Associates

Jeff Anderson Statement Praising Actions of Ramsey County Attorney in Charging Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis

6/5/2015

(St. Paul, MN) – The charges filed by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and John Choi today deserve high praise. The complaint is against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and it demonstrates and recites the problem to be a systemic one, a corporate one, by the top officials, by the Archdiocese, spanning years. It names 10 officials engaged in a pattern of conduct and alleges serious violations of law about which we have been concerned and addressing for years.

I have, in the past, been openly critical of the seeming inaction by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office and John Choi in not charging the Archdiocese officials pertaining to Curtis Wehmeyer and others, and expressed frustration over a seeming lack of vigor. Today, I am praising the Ramsey County Attorney for taking this action. It is evident that it took that office a long time to carefully develop the evidence and to conduct their own independent investigation, armed with the documents disgorged in civil litigation and the depositions taken of the top officials, by interviewing witnesses and developing a body of evidence that has supported a criminal complaint against the Archdiocese as a corporation.

Naming the Archdiocese as a corporation implicates the wrongdoing and the failure to protect children by all of the top officials, past and present, and the scope of this demonstrates a serious systemic problem that, now, law enforcement has chosen to address in a definitive way. For that, we are grateful and it brings great comfort to the survivors and the many families who have never been able to understand why top officials have not been held accountable like ordinary citizens would be if they had made the choices this Archdiocese has.

THE MOST PRAISE GOES TO THE COURAGEOUS SURVIVORS WHO HAVE COME FORWARD, SHARED THE SECRET AND ALLOWED BOLDER ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN, AND CHANGES TO BEGIN TO BE MADE. THEIR COURAGE IS MAKING A DIFFERENCE EVERY DAY.

Contact: Jeff Anderson: Office/651.237.5143 Cell/612.817.8665
Mike Finnegan: Office/651.237.5143 Cell/612.205.5531

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.

MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Friday, June 5

Statement by Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 503 0003, SNAPdorris@gmail.com )

We’re glad the Twin Cities archdiocese is being charged. But the credit goes to brave Minnesota victims who have stepped forward and exposed wrongdoing. Their civil lawsuits, police reports and courage has made this happen.

We believe this is the first time in more than a decade that a Catholic diocese has faced criminal charges.

Catholic officials almost always hire expensive lawyers, exploit every technicality and fight bitterly to protect their clerical careers. We predict that will happen here.

So it’s not time for complacency. Every single man and woman has a moral and civic duty to call prosecutors with what they know or suspect about Twin Cities clergy sex crimes or cover ups, no matter how seemingly insignificant or long ago.

By passing a three year civil window, lawmakers gave victims hope. Victims then filed suits and police reports. And now, a big and powerful Catholic institution faces charges. That’s not ideal but it’s progress.

The cover ups in the Twin Cities are so widely-documented at this point, we believe John Choi had little choice but to pursue the church hierarchy. We’re glad he did. But a charge is not a conviction. So it’s crucial that current and former church staff and members overcome their fears, pick up the phone and call the law, whether they’re victims, witnesses or whistleblowers.

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.

MINNESOTA
KSTP

By: Jennie Lissarrague

Charges have been filed against the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, which is accused of failing to protect children, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi announced Friday.

Choi said the charges are in relation to three victims of former priest Curtis Wehmeyer.

Six charges have been filed, all of which are gross misdemeanors. They include three counts of Contributing to Need for Protection or Services and three counts of Contributing to Status as Juvenile Petty Offender or Delinquency.

Because the charges are against a corporation rather than individuals, Choi said no one is looking at jail time; if convicted, the archdiocese faces up to $3,000 in fines on each charge.

Choi said the charges are part of a 20-month-long investigation involving more than 50 witnesses and 170,000 pages of documents.

“This case isn’t about religion,” St. Paul Police Chief Tom Smith said. “It’s about allegations of misconduct and crimes committed.”

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.

MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said Friday the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is being criminally charged for its “role in failing to protect children” from a priest’s abuse.

by Meg Martin, MPR News 1

Raw audio: Ramsey Co atty announces charges against Twin Cities archdiocese

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.

MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

[with copy of the criminal complaint]

Jon Collins
Madeleine Baran

Jun 5, 2015

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is being criminally charged for its “role in failing to protect children and contribution to the unspeakable harm” done to three victims of former priest Curtis Wehmeyer, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said Friday.

• Sept. 23, 2013: Archdiocese knew of priest’s sexual misbehavior, yet kept him in ministry

The charges place responsibility for the abuse of those children not just on Wehmeyer “but the archdiocese as well,” Choi told reporters as he announced the charges.

Choi said the six counts qualify as gross misdemeanors and could lead to fines against the archdiocese. Prosecutors “don’t have sufficient evidence” to charge any church official at this point, he added.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office has also filed a civil petition against the archdiocese.

Choi said the investigation remains ongoing and “robust” and that new facts that support the allegations in the charges today have been uncovered.

Church officials time and time again turned a blind eye in the name of protecting priests at the expense of protecting children, Choi said.

• Listen: Friday’s news conference

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.

MINNESOTA
National Catholic Reporter

Brian Roewe | Jun. 5, 2015

The Ramsey County prosecutor has brought multiple criminal charges against the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese “for its failure to protect children” in relation to former priest Curtis Wehmeyer.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi announced at a midday press conference Friday six charges related to three victims of sexual abuse linked to Wehmeyer, who is in jail serving a five-year sentence after he pleaded guilty in November 2012 to three felony counts of criminal sexual misconduct with two minors and 17 felony counts of possession of child pornography.

The charges — all gross misdemeanors with possible fines, according to reports out of the press conference — include three counts of contributing to the need for protection or services and three counts of contributing to status as a juvenile petty offender or delinquency. In addition, Choi brought a civil petition against the archdiocese alleging that because of conduct related to the criminal charges, the archdiocese contributed to the need for protection or services of children.

The county attorney told local media that at this stage, there is not currently sufficient evidence to bring charges against individual church officials.

“Today, we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” Choi said in a statement.

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.

MINNESOTA
Los Angeles Times

By TINA SUSMAN

Prosecutors in Minneapolis announced charges Friday against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, saying clergy there caused “unspeakable harm” to young victims of sexual abuse at the hands of a former priest.

The priest, Curtis Wehmeyer, is serving a five-year prison term for sexually abusing boys while he was a pastor in St. Paul.

The charges are against a corporation — the diocese — not an individual, meaning nobody will face jail time, but the archdiocese could face fines. The charges, misdemeanors, allege that the archdiocese as a whole failed to protect children, and Ramsey County Atty. John Choi said they stem from its handling of Wehmeyer.

At a news conference on Friday, Choi said prosecutors did not have enough evidence to charge specific individuals, but he said church officials in general opted to protect priests at the expense of children.

“The allegations reveal a disturbing way in which this organization said it protected children when in reality it did not,” he said.

The charges come after a 20-month investigation led by police and county prosecutors into the handling of clergy abuse by the archdiocese. The probe was sparked by Wehmeyer’s arrest in 2012 on sexual abuse charges.

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.

MINNESOTA
Daily Mail (UK)

MINNEAPOLIS, June 5 (Reuters) – Prosecutors in Minnesota brought criminal charges on Friday against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, accusing it of failing to protect children in connection with a priest who pleaded guilty in 2012 to sexual abuse.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said prosecutors were alleging “a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior” over the course of decades at the highest level of leadership in the archdiocese.

The six misdemeanor charges and a related civil complaint seek to hold the archdiocese accountable for the victims’ needs for protective services and their delinquency resulting from the conduct, Choi said in a statement.

Choi said the archdiocese failed to respond meaningfully to “numerous and repeated reports” of troubling conduct by priest Curtis Wehmeyer from his entrance into seminary in 1997 until his formal dismissal as a priest in March of this year.

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.

MINNESOTA
Huffington Post

The Associated Press | By AMY FORLITI

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Criminal charges were filed against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis on Friday for its handling of a priest who molested children, with a prosecutor saying church leaders “turned a blind eye” to problems with the priest.

Ramsey County prosecutors charged the archdiocese as a corporation with six misdemeanor counts alleging that it failed to protect children. No individual church leaders are named in the criminal complaint.

The charges stem from the archdiocese’s handling of the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer, who was eventually sent to prison for molesting two boys. Attorneys for several victims who sued the archdiocese have alleged that church officials waited too long between when they confronted Wehmeyer in 2012 and when they informed police, which they say gave Wehmeyer time to destroy evidence.

Wehmeyer, a former priest at Church of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul, later pleaded guilty to molesting two boys and was sentenced to five years in prison.

“It is not only Curtis Wehmeyer who is criminally responsible for the harm caused, but it is the archdiocese as well,” Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said Friday. He said the archdiocese “time and time again turned a blind eye” to what was going on with Wehmeyer.

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MINNESOTA
The New York Times

By MITCH SMITH
JUNE 5, 2015

CHICAGO — Prosecutors in Minnesota filed criminal charges on Friday against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, accusing church leaders of mishandling repeated complaints of sexual abuse by a priest.

The charges and accompanying civil petition, announced by the Ramsey County prosecutor, John J. Choi, are a sweeping condemnation of the archdiocese and how its leaders have handled sex abuse allegations.

“Today, we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” Mr. Choi said in a statement.

Though there have been several allegations of sexual abuse over the years by priests in the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Friday’s charges focus on the church’s handling of “numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct” by Curtis Wehmeyer, who was dismissed as a priest in March.

Mr. Wehmeyer, 50, was sentenced to five years in 2013 for criminal sexual conduct and possession of child pornography. He is in prison in Minnesota, and he has been charged with sex crimes in Wisconsin.

The six criminal charges, all misdemeanors with a maximum fine of $3,000, accused the archdiocese of failing to protect children. Mr. Choi also filed a civil petition against the archdiocese that he said was intended to provide legal remedies to prevent similar inaction from happening again.

Civil cases against the archdiocese and priests have poured in since 2013, when the Minnesota State Legislature passed the Child Victims Act, which opened a three-year window for filing lawsuits involving claims of sexual abuse that were beyond the legal statute of limitations.

David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said he was pleased to hear of the indictment, “but the credit goes to

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MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Friday, June 5

Statement by Verne Wagner of Duluth, Northeast MN SNAP director ( 218- 340-1277, lwagsmn@yahoo.com )

We’re glad Bishop Paul Sirba met with one parish about Fr. Brian Lederer.

[Hibbing Daily Tribune]

But predator priests molest at more than one location and often hurt non-Catholic kids too. So Duluth Catholic officials should hold an open public meeting about this case, answer questions, and prod anyone who may have seen, suspected or suffered crimes by Fr. Lederer or cover ups by his colleagues to call law enforcement.

Meeting with dozens at one church is damage control. Reaching thousands through public outreach is real reform.

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ARKANSAS
People

Despite outcry from the Duggars, police records detailing how Josh Duggar molested five underage girls as a teen – including four of his sisters and the family babysitter – were not illegally released, the Springdale, Arkansas, city attorney said in a statement Thursday.

Last month, after consulting with Springdale City Attorney Ernest Cate, the city’s police chief, Kathy O’Kelley, released the scathing, 2006 police report containing child molestation accusations against the 19 Kids and Counting stars’ eldest son to a tabloid, which unleashed a media firestorm and led to Josh resigning from his job at the Family Research Council.

During their exclusive interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly Wednesday night, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar said they believe their son’s police records were illegally released – and that they are looking into taking legal action to make sure this never happens again.

“This information was released illegally,” Jim Bob told Kelly. “I wonder why all of this press is not going after the system for releasing juvenile records. That is a huge story.”

But Cate says that the Springdale Police Department did not break any laws. “On May 20, 2015,” his statement reads, “in full compliance with Arkansas law, the Springdale Police Department responded to a records request under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

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UNTIED STATES
Breitbart

by JOHN NOLTE
5 Jun 20150

Let’s not fool ourselves. We are not talking about a youthful indiscretion here — we are not talking about smoking dope, a DWI, a shoplifting beef, or even a secret abortion. At the age of 14 and 15, Josh Duggar molested five underage girls. Four of those girls were his sisters. One of those sisters was only five-years-old at the time. According to Josh’s own parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, the “touching” occurred both on top of and under the clothes of the victims, and at times, when the victims were asleep.

Let me repeat:

Josh Duggar molested 5 underage girls.

Josh Duggar molested his own sisters.

Josh Duggar molested a sister who was five-years-old.

This is an abominable crime, and the fact that Josh Duggar escaped paying for this crime through our criminal justice system is more than just a little troubling. The idea that, even as a juvenile, you can molest five underage girls and face no legal consequence is inexcusable.

From what I can glean from this mess of a story, sometime in 2003, after Josh admitted to his parents for a second time that he was still molesting his own sisters (and one outsider), his dad decided it was time to tell law enforcement what was going on.

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NEW YORK
Road to Recovery

MEDIA RELEASE – JUNE 5, 2015

Hollywood screenwriter Neal E. Gumpel, who was sexually abused as a minor child by known Jesuit priest pedophile Roy Alan Drake, SJ, will be joined by his wife, Helen Gumpel, retired successful fashion model and actress, who thwarted a sexual attack in Bill Cosby’s dressing room on the set of “The Cosby Show,” at Alumni Weekend at Fordham University to draw attention to the lack of appropriate response by Fordham University, Fordham Prep School, and the Northeast Province of the Jesuit Fathers and Brothers to the sexual abuse allegations of Neal E. Gumpel.

Rev. Joseph Mc Shane, SJ, President of Fordham University, will give a talk during Alumni Weekend entitled, “Fordham: Living the Mission” but will probably not include the hypocrisy of the Jesuit Fathers and Brothers in not acknowledging the sexual abuse of a minor boy by Fr. Roy Alan Drake, SJ, and not helping him heal. Alumni will be called upon to remind Fr. Mc Shane and the Jesuits of their mission to validate and help heal those harmed by their own members, especially Neal E. Gumpel.

What
A press conference and leafleting alerting the media, alumni and supporters of Fordham University, Fordham Prep, the Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and the general public of the refusal of these institutions and organizations to help a clergy sexual abuse victim of one of its priests and teachers, Fr. Roy Alan Drake, SJ, heal by validating his claim of sexual abuse as a minor child.

When
Saturday, June 6, 2015 from 10:00 am until 11:30 am – President Rev. Joseph Mc Shane’s address to alumni begins at 11:00 am in Duane Library.

Where
On the public sidewalk outside the motor vehicle entrance to Fordham University, Bronx, New York, across from the New York Botanical Gardens on Southern Boulevard.

Who
Hollywood screenwriter Neal E. Gumpel, a resident of Connecticut and son of two Fordham University alumni (Jane and Dr. Roy); Helen Gumpel, wife of Neal E. Gumpel, former successful fashion model and actress who appeared in an episode of “The Cosby Show”; and members of Road to Recovery, Inc., a non-profit charity that assists victims of sexual abuse and their families.

Why
Neal E. Gumpel was an unsuspecting high school minor teenager when his brother invited him to spend a weekend at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine. Rev. Roy Alan Drake, SJ, was a Jesuit priest from Fordham Prep School and the greater Fordham Jesuit community who was working at the time at Maine Maritime Academy and invited Neal E. Gumpel to his residence on or near the campus, served him alcohol and sexually abused him. Demonstrators will call on Fordham University, Fordham Prep School, and the Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus to do the right thing by validating the claim of Neal E. Gumpel and helping Neal E. Gumpel heal.

Contacts
Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., Road to Recovery, Inc. (Fordham Alumnus, Ph.D. 1988) – 862-368-2800
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, Boston, MA – 617-523-6250

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AUSTRALIA
Exame

Sidney — O cardeal George Pell, terceira autoridade mais influente do Vaticano, enfrenta acusações de criar um programa de compensação de vítimas de abusos sexuais para proteger os ativos da Igreja e de fazer uso de táticas agressivas para desencorajar as vítimas a ingressar com ações judiciais quando era bispo na Austrália.

Pell, que no ano passado foi colocado à frente das finanças do Vaticano pelo Papa Francisco, também se defronta com acusações relacionadas ao início de sua carreira, quando era padre e auxiliar de bispo.

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CANADA
BBC News

[with video]

A report on Canada’s history of separating indigenous children from their parents at residential schools has called the practice “cultural genocide”. But what does the proposed reconciliation mean for survivors?

In 1966, five-year-old Joseph Maud was separated from his family and sent to live at a Canadian residential school for indigenous students in Pine Creek, Manitoba.

Forty-nine years later, he returned to the site of the former school with the BBC. Even after five decades, the experience is still fresh in his mind.

“My reconciliation includes trying to reconcile with that five-year-old boy – and that nothing was his fault.” Maud says.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

JUNE 06, 2015

Rebecca Puddy
Reporter
Adelaide

The Catholic Church in Adelaide has conceded that the damage caused to disabled children and their families by a convicted sex offender can never be ­repaired.

The child sex abuse royal commission this week handed down its findings on the church’s handling of offences against disabled children at St Ann’s school in the late 1980s and early 90s by pedophile Brian Perkins.

Adelaide Archdiocese Vicar General Philip Marshall said the church would do all it could to stop child abuse. “I don’t think you can ever repair the damage that those children went through,” he said.

Father Marshall declined to comment on compensation claims for three of the victims, which were still being negotiated with the church.

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AUSTRALIA
The Saturday Paper

Diarist-at-large Richard Ackland flys about the nation.

Cardinal Pell is fortunate, indeed, to have sermons delivered on his behalf by Father Gerard Henderson, the texts of which are published regularly in The Catholic Boys Weekly, aka Lord Moloch’s Weekend Australian.

As a result the Cardinal’s public standing could not be in better shape. According to Hendo, Pell has dedicated his life to hunting down clerical paedophiles in his midst and if anyone thinks otherwise it is the fault of the ABC, Mark Scott, and left-wing journalists.

I couldn’t agree more. In recent sermons Fr Gerard recounted how he wrote to current ABC chairman J. J. Spigelman asking him to “renounce” the comments of one of his long-ago predecessors as chairman of Aunty, Professor Richard Downing, who defended an ABC program in 1975 that discussed “the phenomenon of paederasty”.

It’s a complete puzzle why Spigsy is not busying himself rummaging through ABC programs of 40 years ago and “renouncing” ones that Fr Gerard says represent a “double standard”.

Such is life in the Spigeltent.

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MISSOURI
Riverfront Times

By Danny Wicentowski Fri., Jun. 5 2015

For critics of First Christian Church of Florissant’s embattled lead pastor Steve Wingfield, the road to reform has been paved with hollow promises and paper victories.

In April, Wingfield sued four former members of the north St. Louis County megachurch for defamation. These so-called whistleblowers, Wingfield insisted, were actually spreading lies about how he’d supposedly ignored early warnings about Brandon Milburn, a charismatic youth minister who this March was sentenced to 25 years in prison for sexually abusing two young boys between 2007 and 2009.

Milburn’s crime devastated the 2,500-member congregation, some of whom believe Wingfield hasn’t done nearly enough to help Milburn’s victims or come clean about the full scope of his work at the church. Some current and former members are calling for Wingfield’s resignation, while his supporters (including the church’s board of elders) have stood firm behind their leader.

But the tide may be shifting. Last month, Wingfield dismissed the defamation lawsuit against the four former church members. Now, one of those defendants, a woman named Dawn Varvil, is taking some demands of her own to Wingfield.

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UNITED KINGDOM
West Briton

By CMJohannaCarr | Posted: June 05, 2015

THE FORMER communications chief for the Bishop of Truro is facing jail after pleading guilty to sexual offences against five young boys.

At Truro Crown Court on Friday, Jeremy Dowling, 76, of Church Path, Bude, admitted 15 counts of sexually abusing the boys, who cannot be named for legal reasons, between 1959 and 1971.

The pensioner retired as communications officer for the Truro Diocese in 2009, having worked for several bishops over the previous 25 years.

He was also a governor at Budehaven School for 18 years, before stepping down in 2013.

Dowling admitted four counts of indecently assault one boy aged under-13, including at a cricket match and in an outside toilet.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Pirate FM

A former press officer for the Bishop of Truro admits a string of child sex offences.

Jeremy Dowling worked for the Diocese for 25 years before he retired in 2009.

He has admitted fifteen charges spanning over a decade from 1959 to 1971.

The case was adjourned for the preparation of a pre-sentence report on Dowling by the probation service.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

A Diocese of Truro press officer has admitted sexually abusing boys over a period of more than 10 years.

Jeremy Dowling, 76, carried out the assaults on five children, aged between 12 and 15, from 1959 to 1971.

Truro Crown Court heard Dowling abused the boys at sporting events and in toilets while working as a teacher in Devon.

The Bishop of Truro described Dowling’s offences as “deeply shocking” and said his thoughts were with the victims.

Sentencing was adjourned until July 10 for a pre-sentence report to be prepared.

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UNITED STATES
The Wall Street Journal

By ALLYSIA FINLEY
June 4, 2015

When Pope Francis visits Washington, D.C., in September, he will canonize Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan priest who led the spread of Christianity in the New World. Last month, the pope exalted Father Serra for ushering “in a new springtime of evangelization in those immense territories, extending from Florida to California.”

Ironically, the Spanish missionary who will become the U.S.’s first Hispanic saint is being vilified by multiculturalists as a rapacious imperialist. To add injury to insult, in the lead-up to the pontiff’s visit, liberal legislators in Sacramento are looking to remove the soon-to-be-saint’s statue in the U.S. Capitol.

Father Serra spent most of his missionary life in Mexico. However, his greatest legacy was founding California’s first nine missions—there are 21—and the 600-mile connecting trail El Camino Real that runs from San Diego to Sonoma. Dozens of roads and schools, including NFL quarterback Tom Brady’s alma mater, are named in his honor. Generations of California fourth-graders have had to construct miniature cardboard models of the missions.

While being Christianized, natives learned how to cultivate crops, raise livestock, weave clothes, make soap and perform other tasks necessary to sustain themselves. Father Serra was as integral to California’s founding as John Winthrop was to the settlement of Plymouth Bay. Gov. Jerry Brown has hailed the priest as “a very courageous man and one of the innovators and pioneers of California.”

Yet revisionist historians take a dim view of the missions. A fourth-grade state history textbook (which my class used in 1997) noted that “for the people who had lived in California for hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived, the growth of the missions was tragic . . . Thousands of Indians died, and by the end of the 1800s much of the Indian way of life had died also.”

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MINNESOTA
Hibbing Daily Tribune

Posted: Friday, June 5, 2015

by Brian Arola Staff Writer barola@hibbingdailytribune.net

HIBBING — Bishop Paul Sirba of the Diocese of Duluth held a town hall-style meeting with parishioners of Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church Tuesday to answer questions in the aftermath of sexual misconduct charges levied against the church’s associate pastor in May.

Brian Lederer, the priest charged with five felony counts of sexual conduct on May 7, is currently on administrative leave from the parish. He was expected to appear in St. Louis County Court in Hibbing Thursday, but the hearing was reset to July 23. He has yet to enter a plea.

The hour of question and answer time drew more than 100 individuals to St. Leo’s Hall, with questions ranging from what will happen next for Lederer, to what Assumption School is doing in response to the alleged incidents.

Sirba started out the hour by stating that Lederer’s future status with the church will be dependant upon the court’s determination.

While labelling the allegations as “credible,” he called on parishioners to let the legal process play out before prejudging the case.

“Civil authorities have taken their rightful place in conducting an investigation,” Sirba said. “We still have, by law, the presumption of innocence.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

June 6, 2015

John Silvester
Crime reporter, The Age

Collusion, cover-ups and conspiracies are usually the domain of Hollywood writers, the naive and the slightly nutty. Except, that is, when they are true.

In recent times senior police have condemned leaders of the Catholic Church for failure to co-operate with investigations into sexual assaults by clergy members.

About two years ago Victoria’s then deputy commissioner (and now new Chief Commissioner) Graham Ashton told a state parliamentary inquiry, “The processes of the Catholic Church are designed to put the reputation of the church first and the victims second”.

But the terrible truth is that for decades police were part of the problem, with key officers actively working for the church and against fellow officers investigating rogue priests.

They were known as the Catholic mafia – men who covered up crimes, tipped off the church and allowed sex offenders to continue molesting children – all in the name of protecting their religious institution.

Some were local sub officers that stood over younger police. One became a commander and had state-wide influence and yet another was a key member of the CIB and monitored major investigations.

And if there is a God they must have all gone to hell in the express lane.

Some issues were relatively minor. A recently retired officer remembers, “During the early 1970s Catholic priests were bullet-proof. I recall even in the early 1980s one of my constables booked a priest for speeding and was forced to withdraw the ticket after being lectured about the correct procedures by the (extremely Catholic) senior sergeant.”

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NEW YORK
Buffalo Business First

Jun 5, 2015

Michael Petro
Buffalo Business First

A few months ago, Diane Tiveron and some of her colleagues at HoganWillig went to Albany to stand behind state Assemblyman Margaret Markey as she lobbied for the Child Victims Act of NY.

The Amherst law firm represents Buffalo natives Antonio Flores and Vanessa DeRosa, victims of child sexual abuse who are now adults with no legal remedy due to the state’s statute of limitations on such cases.

Tiveron, the firm’s managing partner, was in Albany on behalf of her clients but also, she said, because she felt the reform effort was right and just.

She pointed out that New York is on the wrong end of an anomaly among states that allow only five years after a victim’s 18th birthday to commence a lawsuit against their abuser.

The five years is on the lower end of similar state statutes, joining the ranks of such places as Georgia, Alabama and Missouri, she said. Many other states have expanded the number of years in their statutes or have no limitations.

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CANADA
Catholic Culture

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) has responded to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was established in 2008 to examine the treatment of Native Americans in religious residential schools.

From 1884 to 1948, Canadian law compelled Native Americans to send their children away from home to residential schools, most of which were Catholic or Anglican institutions. The last residential school closed in 1996, and in 2009, Pope Benedict apologized for “the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church.”

“Seventeen dioceses and 37 religious institutes” were “involved in managing and helping to operate the former Indian Residential Schools which were under the jurisdiction of the Government of Canada,” the CCCB stated in a notice posted on its website.

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CANADA
Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops

Immediately following the presentation of the summary report by Justice Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), on June 2, 2015, the Most Reverend Gerard Pettipas, C.Ss.R., Archbishop of Grouard-McLennan and President of the corporation of Catholic Entities party to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement (CEPIRSS), released a statement. CEPIRSS represents 17 dioceses and 37 religious institutes involved in managing and helping to operate the former Indian Residential Schools which were under the jurisdiction of the Government of Canada.

A joint statement was also issued on behalf of The Anglican Church of Canada, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Roman Catholic Entities Parties to the Settlement Agreement, The United Church of Canada, and the Jesuits of English Canada.

Neither the Catholic Bishops of Canada as a whole nor the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) was ever involved in the operations or management of the former Indian Residential Schools. The Anglican Church of Canada, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the United Church of Canada were involved as national bodies in decision-making and management involving the schools. However, the CCCB is not the national office of the Catholic Church in Canada, nor does it have authority over dioceses or religious communities in the country.

Link to the statement by Archbishop Pettipas (PDF)

Link to the joint statement

Link to a summary report on media coverage (PDF)

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VATICAN CITY
euronews

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican appointed its first auditor-general on Friday in Pope Francis’ latest move aimed at ensuring transparency in the scandal-plagued finances at the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.

A statement said the pope, who has made cleaning up finances a major plank of his papacy, had chosen Libero Milone, a 66-year-old Italian who is a former chairman and CEO of the global auditing firm Deloitte in Italy.

Cardinal George Pell, head of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, has said the auditor-general will be autonomous, answerable only to the pope and free to “go anywhere and everywhere” in the Vatican to review the finances and management of any department.

Milone was born in the Netherlands and has experience working as an accountant in major firms in Britain, Italy, and the United States. He has also worked as an auditor for the Rome-based United Nations World Food Programme and major Italian companies such as car maker Fiat and the Wind telecoms group.

As a result of the clean up campaign, the Vatican bank, which had been embroiled in numerous scandals in the past, has enacted a wide-ranging drive to tighten financial governance and eliminate abuse.

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NEW YORK
The JC

June 4, 2015

A New York rabbi who was once considered for the post of chief rabbi of Britain has been accused of encouraging male members of his congregation to join him for naked sauna sessions.

Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt, currently the leading rabbi at Riverdale Jewish Centre in the Bronx, is a well-respected member of New York’s Orthodox Jewish community and a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

However, the New York Times published an article last weekend in which several of his former students claimed that he had a habit of inviting them into the sauna with him after a game of squash. The young men were allegedly encouraged to strip naked, and some claimed that he stared at them in the showers. One man claimed that when he was 15 years old, the rabbi invited him over for late-night conversations, during which he frequently put his hand on the boy’s leg.

The allegations against Mr Rosenblatt reach back as far as 1988, when Sura Jeselsohn, a parent in Mr Rosenblatt’s congregation, made complaints regarding his behaviour.

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NEW YORK
JTA

(JTA) — The board of a New York synagogue in a letter to congregants said its rabbi, Jonathan Rosenblatt, committed “no misconduct” amid a debate about the propriety of his sauna talks with boys and young men launched by a published report.

In its letter sent Tuesday to members of the Riverdale Jewish Center in the Bronx, the board wrote that Rosenblatt adhered to established guidelines when playing racquetball and visiting the showers and sauna with boys and young men from the congregation.

Over the weekend, The New York Times wrote in an article that some of these congregants and former congregants of the modern Orthodox synagogue discussed the trips to the sauna during which the rabbi “engaged the boys in searching conversations about their lives, problems and faith.” Some of the boys were “uncomfortable” with the rabbi in the sauna, according to the article, and some said he gawked at and touched them.

According to the synagogue board’s letter, “We recognize that there are strong feelings about the situation and the appropriate steps the congregation should take going forward. We want to assure you the Board agreed upon a process that includes gathering more information and giving careful consideration to our options in the best interest of the community.”

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NEW YORK
The Jewish Link

BY PHIL JACOBS

Riverdale—Michael Stein had a particularly difficult and late night last Sunday.

The Riverdale Jewish Center board member and former assistant rabbi to Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt, the shul’s spiritual leader, was collecting some 40 signatures of former RJC rabbinic interns in support of their mentor.

All of Stein’s efforts were part of an effort to offset the impact of a New York Times story detailing Rabbi Rosenblatt’s use of a shvitz or sauna as a part of his rabbinic practice. There after a game of squash with a youth or adult, he’d be nude in the athletic facility’s open showers with congregation members, students, youth, young adults or others and then both would cover up with a towel in the sauna. That, according to Stein, was where a great deal of relationship building, counseling and bonding would take place.

“Never,” said Stein, who was also a rabbinic intern at RJC, “did it involve touch or anything that was sexual. That is and was never the intention of the rabbi.”

The synagogue has gone into damage control since the Times story was published.

Indeed, its executive committee released a letter Tuesday to its membership directed at the Times article.

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By Eleanor Gordon-Smith, 5/6/2015

Way back in 2012 — a safer time, when Skywhale was just a multi-boobed glimmer in Patricia Piccinini’s eye — the Gillard government announced The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

You might have seen it in the news this week, because on Monday Cardinal George Pell was called back from the Vatican to front the Commission’s second hearing in Ballarat later this year.

Is Child Abuse In This Country Really So Bad?

Well, that’s one of the things we wanted to find out. It all started with Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox, who contra to popular belief is not the villain in a Roald Dahl short story, but a brave and experienced police officer. Fox told a November 2012 episode of Lateline that the scale of sexual abuse allegations he had seen was “astonishing” and said “the [Catholic] Church hinders police investigations”, as he called for a royal commission.

About a week after that interview, Prime Minister Gillard announced the creation of the royal commission, saying there were “too many revelations of adults who have averted their eyes from this evil”. The commission proceeded with bipartisan support, in part because it did not set out to investigate just the Catholic Church. It would be about “institutions”, including schools, youth groups, exercise clubs and the Church.

The commissioners come from a diverse range of backgrounds, and assembled for this task like the bespectacled white-haired Avengers: there’s an ex-cop (Bob Atkinson) a child psychiatrist (Helen Milroy), a judge (Jennifer Coate), a senator (Andrew Murray), and Thor.

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TENNESSEE
WBIR

Brittany Bade, WBIR

(WBIR-Greeneville) A former East Tennessee priest, convicted of raping an altar boy in 2011, wants a new trial.

William Casey is serving a more than 30 years after he was convicted of inappropriately touching Warren Tucker in the 1970’s.

“He used to take me back and forth from Kingsport to Greene County. Where he lives and had a rural cabin on his property. There was the majority of the abuse,” said Tucker, who was last living in Indiana, in the 2011 trial.

Tucker’s 40-year-old memories were called into question in the Summer of 2013, when the former priest tried to get his conviction thrown out. His then-attorneys argued too much time passed between the crime and the trial, but his conviction was upheld. …

SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told 10News in a statement, “We’re sad that an admitted predator priest is rubbing salt into the wounds of his victims by making yet another desperate legal move to escape responsibility for his heinous crimes by exploiting legal technicalities.”

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Daily

By S. I. Rosenbaum June 4, 2015

If you’ve followed the abrupt, strange downfall of Rabbi Barry Starr, the Commonwealth’s case against him goes a long way toward defending his character.

Starr was arraigned Tuesday, pleading not guilty to charges of embezzlement and larceny. He’s accused of misappropriating thousands of dollars in temple funds and loans from congregants at Temple Israel in Sharon, where he served as a rabbi for 28 years. The money allegedly went to pay off Nick Zemeitus, a Milton man who was allegedly blackmailing the rabbi over an alleged sexual encounter. (Zemeitus was arraigned last month on charges of extortion and larceny, and is being held on $400,000 cash bail.)

Yet as the District Attorney’s office lays out the charges against Starr, it also takes pains to counter what it says are “lies” Zemeitus told. For example: In an email found on Starr’s computer, Zemeitus wrote demanding money from Starr and threatening to expose what he said was a sexual liaison between Starr and Zemeitus’s brother, a sixteen-year-old boy. This detail, included in early police reports, was quickly repeated in media stories that did not debunk Zemeitus’s claim.

But as it turns out, Zemeitus admitted he was an only child. “Zemeitus lied in his emails about having a younger brother,” the DA’s office wrote in the statement. And police investigators found not even “a single incident of child pornography or allegations,” or any child porn images on Starr’s computer, the DA’s office wrote.

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NEW YORK
JTA

June 4, 2015

NEW YORK (JTA) — Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt asserted his innocence in his first public comment since the publication of a New York Times article about his habit of inviting young males to join him for naked heart-to-heart talks in the sauna.

In a letter sent Thursday to congregants of his Orthodox synagogue, the Riverdale Jewish Center in New York, Rosenblatt said he never did anything unlawful, does not agree with the accusations and attacks against him, and regrets if his conduct inadvertently offended anyone. He did not acknowledge any inappropriate behavior.

“If any of you feel that my behavior, even if innocent, was inappropriate, I apologize to those affected,” he wrote.

Earlier in the week, the board of the Riverdale Jewish Center sent a letter to congregants saying that Rosenblatt was not involved in any “misconduct.”

The story published last Friday on the Times website focused on Rosenblatt’s custom for decades of inviting male congregants or students, some as young as 12, to play squash or racquetball, then join him in the public shower and sauna or steam room, often naked. No one cited in the story accused Rosenblatt of sexual touching, but several expressed their discomfort with the practice and described the behavior as deeply inappropriate for a rabbi and mentor. At various times, Rosenblatt was told by rabbinic bodies or his congregation’s board to limit such activity.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Church Times

by Madeleine Davies

Posted: 05 Jun 2015

CALLS have been made for the Church of England to open up its safeguarding files to independent review, after the example set by the Methodist Church last week.

The Methodist Church published a report, Courage, Cost and Hope, on Thursday of last week, and offered survivors of abuse a “full and unreserved apology”. The 100-page document is an independent review, spanning 64 years and identifying nearly 2000 cases of abuse. Six police investigations have been instigated as …

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AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

5 June, 2015

This is the second stage of the Royal Commission’s public hearing examining preventing child sexual abuse in out-of-home care and responding to allegations of child sexual abuse occurring in out-of-home care.

Evidence will be received from care leavers, representatives from organisations which provide advocacy and support services and oversight bodies (Children’s Guardians, Public Advocates, Children’s Commissioners and Ombudsmen).

The scope and purpose of the public hearing is to inquire into:

1. The incidence of child sexual abuse in contemporary out-of-home care settings.

2. Recruitment, assessment and training of carers in out-of-home care.

3. Monitoring and oversight of children in out-of-home care in the context of preventing child sexual abuse and responding to allegations of child sexual abuse.

4. Systems, policies, practices and procedures for

a. reporting allegations of child sexual abuse in out-of-home care
b. responding to allegations of child sexual abuse in out-of-home care, and
c. supporting children who have been sexually abused in out-of-home care.

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VATICAN CITY
Fortune

by Shawn Tully JUNE 4, 2015

Under new leadership, the Institute of Religious Works is looking to progress from handling deposits to asset management.

For decades, the Institute for Religious Works embarrassed the Vatican with a legion of alleged sins––rampant money-laundering, thwarting Italian authorities by concealing the identity of its depositors, and an arrogance that might be best expressed by the phrase, “God’s bankers do their own thing. The rest of the banking world can do theirs.” Even bank offices in a medieval prison tower commissioned by Pope Sixtus V deepened the dark legend.

But since early 2013, the IOR, informally called the Vatican Bank, has modernized its operations and rescued its reputation. Today, the IOR is tightly regulated by the Vatican’s SEC, the Department of Financial Intelligence. It regularly exchanges tax and other information on its depositors with the Italian government. It publishes richly detailed annual reports, which are audited by Deloitte.

Now, IOR’s president, Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, wants to transform the bank’s business model. Appointed last July, de Franssu is the IOR’s second professional leader, and the former European chief of Invesco, the $800 billion-plus mutual fund colossus based in Atlanta.

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ROME
The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Friday 5 June 2015

George Pell has always courted – some say relished – controversy. From the time the staunchly conservative Australian cardinal suggested that sex abuse had never been a systemic problem in the Catholic church, to his refusal in the past to grant communion to gay Catholics – saying God did not make “Adam and Steve” – Pell’s uncompromising style has ruffled feathers.

Now Pell – a senior official in charge of church finances – is embroiled in a bruising fight of a different sort: one that has pit him against a layman, Peter Saunders, who was handpicked by Pope Francis last year to help rehabilitate the church following years of sex abuse scandals and cover-ups.

This week Saunders claimed in an interview in Australia that Pell’s allegedly “callous” past treatment of sex abuse victims was “almost sociopathic”.

In response, Pell – who has vehemently denied allegations that he once sought to bribe an abuse victim in return for his silence, among other cover-up allegations – said he would seek advice on legal action against Saunders, who is a survivor of sex abuse and a member of the pope’s commission on abuse in the church. Pell has previously apologised to victims of clergy sex abuse for the pain they endured.

The loaded exchange occurred after witnesses spoke out against Pell at a hearing before an Australian royal commission on child abuse. Claims that Pell ignored or sought to silence allegations of abuse are more than a decade old. Pell has denied all of the claims and was summoned to testify at the next hearing by the royal commission. A date has not yet been set.

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

THE Catholic Church has reaffirmed an apology to students and families affected by abuse at a school in Adelaide following a damning report from the sex abuse royal commission.

IT has also pledged to circulate the findings to every Catholic school principal in SA to ensure they are complying with policies and practices to prevent such abuse happening again.

Vicar General Philip Marshall said the report made it clear systemic failures at St Ann’s Special School allowed bus driver Brian Perkins to abuse intellectually disabled children between 1986 and 1991.

Father Marshall repeated the “full and complete” apology first offered in 2002 for the “suffering and anguish” inflicted on the children and their families.

In its report on Thursday the abuse inquiry detailed a litany of failures by police, the school and the church in their handling of the St Ann’s case.

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AUSTRALIA
Headlines from the Catholic World

Canberra, Australia, Jun 5, 2015 / 12:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A group of Australian bishops have emphasized Cardinal George Pell’s record of leadership against clergy sex abuse following critical news broadcasts and comments from a member of the pontifical council against abuse.

“He is a man of integrity who is committed to the truth and to helping others, particularly those who have been hurt or who are struggling,” seven bishops said of the cardinal in a June 3 statement.

They said the cardinal was one of the first bishops to implement a comprehensive response to investigate alleged sex abuse by Catholic clergy and to help abuse victims.

The seven bishops included Archbishops Anthony Fisher of Sydney, Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Timothy Costelloe of Perth, Julian Porteous of Hobart, and Christopher Prowse of Canberra-Goulburn. Bishop Peter Comensoli of Broken Bay and Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney Terence Brady also signed the statement.

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NEW YORK
WHEC

A former Rochester man has been charged in a sexual abuse case involving a church youth group.
Roy Battle, age 36, who now lives in California, has been indicted on charges of sexual abuse in the first degree.

We’re told the charges stem from the abuse of two teenage boys who were members of a church youth group that Battle led from 2005 to 2012.

Police say Battle was charged following an investigation that began in July 2014 when one of the boys came forward saying Battle “subjected him to inappropriate sexual contact.” We’re told the contact happened at Battle’s home on Glendale Park.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

South Australian Catholic schools will review their procedures after a damning report was handed down into the church’s employment of paedophile Brian Perkins.

About 30 intellectually disabled students were sexually abused by Perkins in the late 1980s and early ’90s at St Ann’s Special School at Marion, which is now closed but was run by the Catholic Education Office.

Perkins worked as a bus driver at the school between 1986 and 1991, and also undertook volunteer work, but it was not until 2003 that he was convicted of abusing three children.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Thursday released its findings into the case, and identified a number of failings by the school, the police and Catholic Church.

It found the school did not comply with its own policies on volunteer supervision, and the school principal failed to report the initial allegations of abuse.

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TENNESSEE
WATE

Laura Halm, WATE 6 On Your Side Reporter

GREENEVILLE (WATE) – A former East Tennessee priest, convicted of rape, is asking for a new trial.

William Casey was sentenced to a 35 year prison term in 2011 for aggravated rape and sexual misconduct in a case dating back to the 1970s. The now-adult victim, Warren Tucker, says the abuse lasted for years.

Casey has recently hired a new attorney, Frank X. Santore, Jr. The State of Appeals Court has already upheld Casey’s conviction and was denied permission to appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Santore says he can’t get Casey’s conviction thrown out, so he wants a new trial.

“I am not sitting here saying this is going to be a slam dunk. In fact, we have the burden going forward by clear and convincing evidence here. The presumption of innocence is removed,” said Santore. …

Catholic Diocese of Knoxville spokesperson Jim Wogan sent us the following: “These allegations were thoroughly investigated years ago. A court of law made its decision in 2011. Beyond that, the Diocese of Knoxville will have no further comment on this matter.”

According to SNAP, Survivors Network Abused by Priests, Warren Tucker does know about this post-conviction relief petition and is very concerned. SNAP says they hope this petition is not granted because it means dragging the victim through horrible experiences all over again. The organization adds they do know that the law can take many turns, so they’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, they’ll continue to listen and advocate for victims

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AUSTRALIA
Perth Now

Mother of St Ann’s Special School paedophile victim says commission findings won’t diminish impact of the crimes

THE mother of one of Brian Perkins’ vulnerable young victims says the royal commission findings would allow those affected to “get the real truth”, but the horrific crimes would live with them forever.

Helen Gitsham told The Advertiser the commission had confirmed her beliefs about the scandal that “anything that could go wrong did go wrong”.

Her son David attended the school from 1975 to 1988 while paedophile bus driver David Perkins was employed at the school.

His behaviour deteriorated in the years after, but it was not until 2001 when the abuse was uncovered publicly they began to suspect he had been a victim of Perkins.

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AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

REPORT OF CASE STUDY NO. 9 :The responses of the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide, and the South Australian Police, to allegations of child sexual abuse at St Ann’s Special School

Executive summary

St Ann’s Special School was located in Adelaide in South Australia. St Ann’s was owned and operated by Catholic Special Schools Incorporated (CSSI). It was established in 1975 and became Our Lady of La Vang School in 2013.

The school catered for students with intellectual disabilities ranging from a moderate to profound level of severity. Many of the children enrolled at the school had limited communication abilities. There were between 50 and 60 students at the school. They were aged between five and 20 years old.

Mr Brian Perkins was born on 20 February 1936. In 1956 he was convicted of abduction of a child by force or fraud. He was sentenced to a three-year good behaviour bond. In 1968, he was convicted of carnal knowledge or attempted carnal knowledge and sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. In 1974, he was convicted of carnal knowledge or attempted carnal knowledge and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and a $50 fine. He also had previous convictions in South Australia and Victoria between 1952 and 1974 for larceny and minor dishonesty offences.

Mr Claude Hamam was the principal of St Ann’s from September 1985 to December 1996.

Mr Perkins applied for a job at St Ann’s as a bus driver. The job required him to take children with intellectual and communication disabilities to and from the school each day while unsupervised.

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CALIFORNIA
Daily Breeze

By Larry Altman, Daily Breeze
POSTED: 06/03/15

A South Bay assistant basketball coach recently named head coach of the girls team at West High School in Torrance was arrested today on suspicion of raping one of his former players, police said.

Timothy Lucas, 32, of Cypress was taken into custody at Manhattan Beach Middle School, where he worked as an instructional assistant, police and school officials said.

Detectives released few details of the allegations against Lucas, but said the forcible rape occurred at a Hermosa Beach residence about 18 months ago. …

According to police, Lucas is a girls basketball coach who worked for several South Bay schools, including Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, Manhattan Beach Middle School and Bishop Montgomery High School in Torrance.

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UNITED STATES
Truthdig

Posted on Jun 3, 2015

By The Rev. Madison Shockley

Dennis Hastert, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, is to Washington what many a pedophile priest has been to the Vatican: an accused sexual predator who is treated as if he deserves more protection than his alleged victims.

An FBI indictment issued last week says that “in or about 2010,” Hastert agreed to pay $3.5 million to a person known only as “Individual A” to cover up unspecified misconduct that had occurred years earlier. Though there are few clues in the indictment itself, several major news outlets have since reported that Individual A was a male student of Hastert’s when Hastert was still a high school teacher in Yorkville, Ill., and that the unspecified misconduct against the student was sexual. In addition, while I was writing this article, ABC News reported that a second student from the same high school made similar accusations against Hastert but did not seek compensation.

Leaving Hastert’s actual guilt or innocence aside, I am astonished that both the Washington political establishment and the press corps have consistently expressed disbelief that a person in his position could be capable of sexually abusing a child. The press has done everything possible to take the focus off of the question of child sexual abuse and to place it on Hastert’s alleged violations of banking laws—thus turning the story into a prototypical financial scandal that fits the political narrative in ways that a child sexual abuse scandal cannot.

To accept that a former speaker of the house—once one of the most powerful people in government and second in the line to succeed the president—might have sexually abused a child when he was a high school teacher is too much for some politicians and pundits. But by ignoring that dimension of the story, they do a great disservice to victims of childhood sexual abuse and to the public at large. They imply that a person who has served at the highest levels of government is incapable of such behavior—behavior that is rightly regarded as so reprehensible that perpetrators are not only exiled from the halls of power but spurned by society as a whole.

Members of the American political elite feel they are protecting the establishment by giving Hastert the benefit of the doubt, just as the Vatican and its subsidiaries have done for accused priests. But they do so by sacrificing Hastert’s alleged victims on the altar of organizational integrity. Even current House Speaker John Boehner has said: “The Denny I served with worked hard on behalf of his constituents and the country.” This is no time to be providing character references for a man that agreed to pay millions of dollars to a former student who accused him of a sexual offense.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

04 JUNE 2015

A confessional and paintings of “saintly” monks are among items under the hammer at notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth’s former abbey this weekend.

Pictures and statues of boys, girls and cherubs are also among the nearly 600 lots for sale as the serial child abuser’s former order has been forced to sell off Kilnacrott Abbey in Co Cavan.

The doomed home of the Nobertines in Ireland, near Ballyjamesduff, was where Smyth sheltered for years during the 1990s on the run from police in Northern Ireland.

The scandal led to the collapse of Dublin’s Fianna Fail/Labour coalition government, under then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.

The abbey has since been sold for 610,000 euro to a US-based religious organisation known as Direction For Our Times.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has appointed the Superior of the Society of St. Pius X, founded by Lefebvre, to be the first-instance trial judge in the case against a Lefebvrian priest who is accused of a serious crime

ANDREA TORNIELLI
VATICAN CITY

He announced it himself during the course of a sermon at Our Lady of the Angels church in Arcadia, California, on May 10, 2015: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has appointed the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), Bishop Bernard Fellay, as first-instance judge in a case involving a Lefebvrian priest. The former Holy Office is in charge of dealing with a number of “delicta graviora”. The one that pops up most frequently, is the one involving the sexual abuse of minors. Fellay presented this as an example of the “contradictions” in the Holy See’s approach to the Fraternity.

“We are labeled now as being irregular, at best. “Irregular” means you cannot do anything, and so for example they have prohibited us from saying Mass in the churches in Rome, for the Dominican sisters who had their pilgrimage in Rome in February. They say, “No, you cannot, because you are irregular”. And these people [who] say that, were people of [Pontifical Commission] Ecclesia Dei.”

“Now, sometimes, unfortunately,” Bishop Fellay said, “also priests do silly things, and they need to be punished. And when it is very, very serious, we have to make recourse to Rome. So we do. And what does the Congregation of the Faith do? Well, they did appoint me as the judge for this case. So I was appointed by Rome, by the Congregation of the Faith, to make judgements, canonical Church judgements on some of our priests who belong to a non-existent Society for them (for Rome, Ed.). And so, once again, a beautiful contradiction indeed.”

This is not the first time the SSPX has made recourse to Rome when it comes to “delicta graviora” and dispensations from priestly obligations. What is new in this case is that the former Holy Office headed by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has decided to entrust the case to Mgr. Fellay himself, making him first-instance trial judge. An expression of attention. A sign that the path toward full communion with the Lefebvrians continues, as Archbishop Guido Pozzo confirmed in a statement to Vatican Insider. He archbishop, who is also Secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, said: “The decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not imply that existing problems have been resolved, but it is a sign of benevolence and magnanimity. I see no contradiction here, but rather, a step toward reconciliation.”

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OHIO
Fox 8

JUNE 4, 2015, BY DAVE NETHERS

NORTHFIELD, Ohio- A national advocacy group for victims of sex crimes is asking Bishop Richard Lennon of the Diocese of Cleveland to formally discipline a local priest for his support of a high-profile sex offender.

Fr. Ralph Wiatrowski of St. Barnabas Church wrote a letter to Judge Richard Reinbold in April asking for leniency in the sentencing of former Nordonia Hills School Board President Steven Bittle.

Bittle pleaded guilty to child pornography charges. He also staged armed standoff with authorities outside of his Sagamore Hills home last September.

Court records reflect he had long been a member of St. Barnabas Church, where he served on the parish finance council and ministries that served children from preschool to junior high age.

In his letter to the court Fr. Wyatrowski asked judge Reinbold “for any leniency that could be shown to Mr. Bittel.” Twice in the letter, the St. Barnabas pastor asked the court not to send Bittel to prison.

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CANADA
Toronto Star

Back in 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada’s aboriginal peoples for Ottawa’s role in trying to “kill the Indian in the child” by removing 150,000 children to residential schools where cultural assimilation was the goal and 6,000 perished. He called it a “great harm” and vowed his support for communities that are struggling to this day to recover.

“We are now joining you on this journey,” he pledged.

Yet when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its report this week calling for a bold new era in Crown/native relations, Harper mustered little more than an indifferent shrug. He took credit in Parliament for setting up the commission. And he defended his government’s record, saying “vast amounts of money” have been earmarked for jobs, schooling, and health.

But he didn’t say a word at the commission’s closing ceremony. Unlike Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, he couldn’t bring himself to utter the words “cultural genocide.” And apart from throwing a token $1 million to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to help house its records, he didn’t endorse any of the commission’s 94 recommendations.

This was a missed opportunity to showcase Ottawa’s willingness to invest more than lip service in the new, healthier relationship the commission called for with the country’s 1.4 million indigenous people. Canadians expect better of their leadership.

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CANADA
The Globe and Mail

BILL CURRY
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Jun. 04, 2015

The most horrific stories of abuse at residential schools may never become public as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission prepares for a legal battle this fall to block the destruction of key documents.

Even though the commission wrapped up four days of closing ceremonies this week and has released its final recommendations, it is still fighting in court to preserve sensitive transcripts of stories told by nearly 38,000 former students. But not all former students support the TRC’s position and the legal case has created unusual alliances.

Children and staff at a residential school in Fort Providence, NWT in 1921. The Canadian government funded such institutions from the 1870s to the 1990s, which saw more than 150,000 children taken from their homes.

The government of Canada is also seeking to preserve the documents, while Catholic churches and the Assembly of First Nations have expressed concern about their potential release.

At issue are the specific stories of former students who suffered sexual abuse or severe physical abuse that were told during private hearings called an Independent Assessment Process. The adjudicated hearings were set up through the same out-of-court residential schools settlement that created the commission. Former students were eligible for financial compensation based on the severity of the abuse they suffered.

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ZIMBABWE
Zimeye

The woman who took on bravery against odds to expose the preacher (who flaunted himself as God’s High Commissioner) Walter Masocha, taking on herself “the Samson mantle,” Jean Gasho, has launched a powerful charity organisation to support victimised church people. The legendary Samson of the Bible used the jaw bone of a donkey in a flash to kill one thousand men, and Jean Gasho picked up her own “jaw” to crush the injustices of the man who called himself God’s High Commissioner and everyone’s “Daddy,” and yet was no holy man at all, being soon revealed as a sex offender preying on simple minds using God’s name.

Her organisation is called JAW – Just A Woman and seeks to help female victims of religious abuse. In a statement to ZimEye.com, Jean said, “JAW is a non-profit charity organisation with a primary goal of educating and empowering women against religious and domestic abuse.

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CALIFORNIA
Mountain News

Posted: Thursday, June 4, 2015

By Glenn Barr, Reporter

A federal jury in Los Angeles returned a guilty verdict Friday against a Catholic priest, formerly assigned to a church in Lake Arrowhead, who was charged with abusive sexual conduct for groping a sleeping woman on an airline flight last Aug. 17.

Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Laura Eimiller said Father Marcelo De Jesumaria, 46, is not in custody and is scheduled for sentencing on Aug. 24. He is currently free on a $15,000 bond, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Los Angeles office. Jesumaria could face a maximum two-year prison sentence

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MARYLAND
Baltimore Brew

Fern Shen June 4, 2015

After a bench conference with Circuit Court Judge Wanda K. Heard, Heather Cook and her lawyers stepped back and explained why they were in court today asking for a postponement.

“We need time to finish our investigation,” said attorney David B. Irwin. “There are some things we need to get together. . . some discovery to the state.”

Looking down at the trial table, Cook began to sign the papers waiving her right to a speedy trial when she was addressed sharply by Heard, “Ms. Cook, I need you to listen.”

“Yes, your honor,” Cook said, looking up and waiting while Heard officially informed her of her speedy trial rights. The former Episcopal bishop said she understood and resumed signing the paperwork.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC South East SA

By Kate Hill

As horrendous cases of child sexual abuse in institutions are continuing to make headlines across the nation’s media, the Victims of Crime Support Service has said the coverage can prompt ’emotional triggers’ and traumatic memories in people.

In the south east this week was Diane Newton, a Victim Support Services (VSS) counsellor working with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, who encouraged such individuals to come forward and contact the service.

VSS held forums this week in Kingston and Naracoorte to give individuals and service providers information on contacting the commission and what local support services were available for survivors of child sexual abuse.

As more sexual abuse stories emerged from the commission’s hearing this week in Ballarat, Ms Newton said the spotlight had been thrown onto a dark corner of human society.

“The public are now becoming more aware of this major issue in our society,” she said.
“This is a huge opportunity for the Australian public to be able to come forward, have support, have a voice and say ‘we need to change things’.

South east Victim Support Coordinator, Virginia Hill said a number of south east residents had come forward to contact the commission about their experiences.

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UNITED STATES
Pewsitter

By Frank Walker
Pewsitter.com

Things are looking grim and ominous for Cardinal Pell, high-level curial reformer yet famous defender of the Faith at that heresy-laden Synod on the Family. He appears to be getting the evil eye from Cardinal O’Malley, the man in charge of those caustic pro-gay professional victims who are spreading their hate from within the offices of the Church itself.

Jean-Louis De La Vaissiere writes:

External experts brought in by Pope Francis to help tackle the tiny city state’s ills are answering the papal call for openness — and infuriating some Holy See stalwarts in the process.

Over the past few months members of the pope’s commission for child protection — handpicked by Francis to help root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church — have publicly attacked a cardinal and a bishop.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service

David Gibson | June 3, 2015

NEW YORK (RNS) Amid the national buzz over transgender celebrity Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner revealing her new female identity, a leading culture warrior in the Catholic hierarchy on Wednesday (June 3) denounced the spread of “gender ideology” and warned that it threatens the very foundation of the church’s faith.

“The clear biological fact is that a human being is born either male or female,” Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco said at the start of an address in Manhattan at a conference aimed at promoting an older form of the Mass in Latin.

“Yet now we have the idea gaining acceptance that biological sex and one’s personal gender identity can be at variance with each other, with more and more gender identities being invented,” said Cordileone, who is the point man in the battle against gay marriage for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Cordileone said a friend recently pointed out to him that a major university advertised housing “for a grand total of 14 different gender identities.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
SFist

As if more confirmation were necessary, “controversial” San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has again revealed himself to be a sanctimonious ass. He’s done it this time by openly mocking trans people and the LGBT community as a whole. According to the Religion News Service, Cordileone’s current target is the “gender ideology” which “threatens the very foundation of the church’s faith.”

“The clear biological fact is that a human being is born either male or female,” Cordileone said at a Manhattan conference. (He is incorrect.) And, no joke, this conference was “aimed at promoting an older form of the Mass in Latin.” Talk about bringing the church into the 21st Century.

“[N]ow we have the idea gaining acceptance that biological sex and one’s personal gender identity can be at variance with each other, with more and more gender identities being invented,” Cordileone continued. Mentioning that a friend cited a number of gender identities advertised as options for university housing, Cordileone scoffed, adding “I’m sure even more will be invented as time goes on.” That one got a hearty laugh from the audience of 200 bigoted Catholics. Of the LGBT acronym, Cordileone noted “Those initials keep getting longer and longer.”

So, for that matter, does Cordileone’s rap sheet. Most recently, the Archbishop stepped in it with a move to include “morality clauses” in the contracts of teachers and staff at Catholic high schools asking that they “affirm and believe” “homosexual relations,” birth control, and masturbation to be “gravely… intrinsically” evil. That’s gotten the Archbishop in hot holy water, most notably with 100 local catholic leaders who bought and signed a full page ad in the Chronicle this April calling on the Pope for Cordileone’s immediate removal.

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CANADA
Toronto Star

By: Tim Harper National Affairs, Published on Thu Jun 04 2015

OTTAWA — Stephen Harper can only have one item at the top of his agenda when he visits the Vatican next week.

The prime minister must formally invite Pope Francis to travel to Canada to apologize for the role of the Catholic Church in this country’s shameful residential schools era.

It is a demand of the commission and it has the backing of church leaders in this country.

Harper’s position — that he will wait for the final report of the commission later this year before reacting — looks like a bid to move this off his plate until after a federal election.

But there is no need to wait on this request.

The Roman Catholic church has often appeared to be, first and foremost, consumed with protecting the Roman Catholic church and initially church leaders here seemed headed along that same path when Justice Murray Sinclair called for an apology from Pope Francis, on Canadian soil, within a year.

They equivocated, explaining it was up to the church in Canada, not the Pope, to deal with this, that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission didn’t understand the decentralized nature of the church or the autonomous nature of the bishops, that the demand was “bold” and putting a deadline on such a gesture made it that much more difficult.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Peter Feuerherd | Jun. 4, 2015

Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a writer, psychologist, and former Maryknoll priest transformed into a lay Catholic activist, died Wednesday. He was 86.

Kennedy died in Lakeland Hospital in St. Joseph, Mich., with his wife, Sara, beside him and surrounded by family.

Kennedy, retired psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago, was comfortable both inside powerful church circles — he was a confidante to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and authored books about his friend — and on the outside, lobbying for changes about how the hierarchy handled sex abuse and other issues. Much of his retirement was spent talking to groups such as Voice of the Faithful, galvanizing lay action on church issues.

“In many ways, he was right in the middle of the church and he looked around. He also stepped to the edge and looked deeper at some aspects of the church,” said Msgr. Ken Velo, a Chicago priest, former aide to Bernardin, and friend of Kennedy’s.

In an essay for NCR, posted online in June 2002, soon before the bishops met in Dallas to chart a response to the sex abuse crisis, Kennedy blamed the scandal on the “characteristic passivity of American bishops” and warned against the secretiveness of clerical culture. He castigated what he called a “Pontius Pilate Syndrome” in the hierarchy, a “getting along by going along.”

In 2006, Kennedy told a Voice of the Faithful meeting in Long Island, N.Y., “The world of hierarchy has come to an end. Don’t fight with it. Let it disintegrate.”

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NEW MEXICO
Gallup Independent

Published in the Gallup Independent, Gallup, N.M., May 30, 2015

Part one of a two-part series

By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Independent correspondent
religion@gallupindependent.com

THOREAU — Officials with St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School are breaking their silence about their long-simmering property dispute with the Diocese of Gallup.

It’s a dispute that was triggered when the diocese filed its Chapter 11 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and listed more than a dozen properties in Thoreau as real property that might possibly be sold to help finance the diocese’s plan of reorganization.

But from the perspective of stunned St. Bonaventure officials, that property belonged to the mission. They had been using that property for years.

Now, with a recent court order by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David T. Thuma, mission officials have found themselves as the only Catholic school in the Gallup Diocese being ordered to participate in the diocese’s mediation meetings scheduled for June 10-11.

Chris Halter, executive director of the mission, and Cindy Howe, the mission’s office manager, spoke out about the impact of the property dispute in a series of interviews over the last week. Halter wanted local community members to understand the properties in Thoreau are not merely vacant pieces of land that have little use.

Halter and Howe asserted the Thoreau properties are being used by St. Bonaventure for its school and charitable programs, and the impact on the local Navajo community will be severely affected if St. Bonaventure either loses the land in mediation or has to pay the Diocese of Gallup to continue using the property.

“If the mission and school go away, how will it affect the community?” Halter said in an interview May 21. “What happens to 40 years of Christian service?”

Halter, who said he believes “a real injustice is being done” by having St. Bonaventure property included in the Gallup Diocese’s bankruptcy case, said the Catholic mission is “seeking justice from the courts” as it heads into mediation.

School and charitable programs

According to Halter and Howe, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School includes both its PreK-8 school and a number of charitable programs that serve surrounding Navajo communities. They said the school provides a tuition-free, private Catholic education for approximately 200 students each year, most of whom are Navajo children from low income families.

Charitable programs run by the mission, they said, include a 4,000 gallon water truck that regularly delivers mission well water to about 200 Navajo families without running water, a thrift store that provides area residents with inexpensive clothing and household items, a home rehabilitation repair service and a program that provides limited utility bill assistance to needy families.

Howe said the mission offers college scholarship assistance to former St. Bonaventure students, partners with other nonprofits and ministries to help Native families build hogans, and cooperates with law enforcement agencies in promoting the Project Safe Neighborhood program. The mission also helped build a community playground in Thoreau, Halter added, on what is now a piece of the disputed property.

In addition, Halter said the mission’s two mobile home parks in Thoreau provide low income housing for area residents.

St. Bonaventure’s annual budget is about $4 million, Halter said, with 90 percent of that money coming from private donors across the country. The remaining 10 percent, he added, comes from government funding programs for schools and small grants from churches or other organizations.

Halter said the mission and school, which he said receive no money from the Diocese of Gallup, currently employ 65 people.

Seeds of dispute

The seeds of the St. Bonaventure’s dispute were sown in a series of property title transfers over several decades. According to Halter, Phillips Uranium Corporation originally donated most of the Thoreau property to the Diocese of Gallup for St. Bonaventure’s use. Halter said the diocese later transferred the property titles over to St. Bonaventure.

However, he said, during the tenure of Robert D. O’Connell, the mission’s former executive director, the property titles were transferred back to the diocese although St. Bonaventure continued to use the land.

In a 2014 interview, O’Connell said he transferred the titles back to the diocese at the request of the late Bishop Donald E. Pelotte and his chancery staff, but he did so with the knowledge of St. Bonaventure’s Board of Trustees. O’Connell said that action should have been reflected in the board minutes.

Halter, who emphasized that he respected O’Connell, said, “We do know that he transferred the titles. Under what circumstances we don’t have a clear understanding of.” Halter said all the board minutes from that time period have been located and none indicate there was discussion between O’Connell and the board about the title transfers.

Halter added he wasn’t sure how important those transfers would have ever been if the Diocese of Gallup hadn’t filed for bankruptcy. But soon after the diocese filed its Chapter 11 reorganization petition, officials at St. Bonaventure learned they were about to be pulled into the diocese’s bankruptcy case by virtue of a dispute over those oft-transferred property titles. It’s a dispute that is now heading to the mediation table.

Neither Susan Boswell, the lead bankruptcy attorney for the diocese, nor Suzanne Hammons, the diocese’s media coordinator, responded to questions posed about the St. Bonaventure situation.

“Regarding your questions about St. Bonaventure – those issues will be addressed as part of the Chapter 11 process, so I can’t comment on them at this time,” Hammons said in an email Thursday.

Editor’s Note: On Monday, St. Bonaventure officials discuss their unsuccessful attempts to resolve the property dispute with the Diocese of Gallup and their concerns for the mission’s future.

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NEW MEXICO
Gallup Independent

Published in the Gallup Independent, Gallup, N.M., June 1, 2015

Part two of a two-part series

By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Independent correspondent
religion@gallupindependent.com

THOREAU — When the Diocese of Gallup filed for bankruptcy in November 2013, Chris Halter, the executive director of St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School, was jolted by the contents of one of the diocese’s court documents.

More specifically, from Halter’s perspective, the document featured an oversight — a “big oversight” — that threatened troubles ahead for St. Bonaventure.

It was a 120-page document signed by Gallup Bishop James S. Wall that included a number of U.S. Bankruptcy Court “schedules” that provided details about the Diocese of Gallup’s assets, debts and creditors. When Wall signed the document on Nov. 26, 2013, he declared the information was true and correct.

But for Halter and other St. Bonaventure officials, Schedule A, the schedule that listed real property owned by the diocese, featured a glaring and alarming omission.

St Bonaventure omission

Wall and his bankruptcy attorneys had listed more than a dozen properties in Thoreau as being real property owned by the Gallup Diocese. However, they neglected to note in the court document that most of the Thoreau property had been used by St. Bonaventure for decades.

“I have zero idea,” Halter said of the possible reason behind that omission. “There was no mention of St. Bonaventure.”

According to Halter, “99 percent” of the Thoreau property listed in Schedule A is being used by the nonprofit mission for its charitable work. Some of the property, he said, is being used for the mission’s tuition-free, private Catholic school that annually educates about 200 students, mostly Navajo children from low income families. Other property is used by the mission’s administrative offices, thrift store, two low income mobile home parks and a community playground. A well on the property supplies safe drinking water for the mission’s 4,000 gallon water truck to deliver to Navajo homes without running water.

In contrast, diocesan attorneys included information on Schedule A that noted other properties were being used by the Vincent de Paul Society’s Food Bank in Arizona, Gallup Catholic School in Gallup, Catholic Charities in Farmington, the San Juan Catholic Center Mission in Kirtland, and various churches and missions in New Mexico.

“It was laid out pretty clear what those properties were used for, but St. Bonaventure’s was not,” Halter said.

Legal complaint

According to Halter, St. Bonaventure’s officials wrote the diocese a letter asking diocesan attorneys to modify Schedule A to indicate the mission’s use of the property, but to his knowledge that has never happened.

“I’ve requested on numerous occasions to speak to Bishop Wall, but there has been no response,” Halter added, explaining he has made personal visits to the Gallup chancery, and unsuccessfully tried to reach the bishop through phone calls and letters. In the six years Wall has been bishop, Halter said, he only recalled the bishop visiting the mission twice, with the last visit in 2010.

St. Bonaventure did hire Albuquerque attorney Charles R. Hughson, who filed a complaint against the diocese in bankruptcy court in January 2014. Hughson argued that the Thoreau property had been given to St. Bonaventure by the diocese, and that the mission’s former chief executive had transferred the property back to the diocese without authorization.

Less than three weeks later, Hughson withdrew the complaint. That decision, Halter said, was made after diocesan attorneys cited case law regarding the mission’s possible share of litigation costs.

Neither Susan Boswell, the lead bankruptcy attorney for the diocese, nor Suzanne Hammons, the diocese’s media coordinator, would respond to questions posed about the St. Bonaventure situation.

Ordered into mediation

The Thoreau properties became further embroiled in the Diocese of Gallup’s bankruptcy case earlier this year when U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David T. Thuma approved the diocese’s request to appraise the value of five “key properties,” including the disputed St. Bonaventure property.

And on April 27, Thuma ordered St. Bonaventure to participate in mediation with the Gallup Diocese and eight other parties June 10-11.

“I am not certain as to why we are the only Catholic School in the Diocese of Gallup that has been ordered to participate in the mediation except for the fact that we believe a real injustice is being done by having our lands included in this bankruptcy issue…” Halter said.

Halter also questioned why the Southwest Indian Foundation, another nonprofit charitable organization operating in the diocese, had not been ordered to participate. SWIF, which was founded by chancery officials, operates a successful national mail order catalog business that specializes in Native American-themed products. Bishop Wall has served on its board. In a recent court motion, diocesan attorneys asked Thuma for permission to auction off select real properties. Although the motion only includes one small piece of property in Thoreau, it leaves the door open for adding more properties in the future. That provision has left Halter and other St. Bonaventure officials worried.

Hardship for mission

Halter said mission officials are concerned the diocese will put additional Thoreau properties on the auction list, and they are also concerned the diocese may require St. Bonaventure to purchase the property it has been using for decades.

“Is it fair for us to have to buy back property that we feel are already ours?” he asked.

St. Bonaventure has purchased other property in Thoreau, Halter said, and officials have considered the expensive and difficult option of moving all the operations of the school and mission off the disputed property and onto the other property.

“This option has been discussed,” Halter said. “It is not our favorite option but is certainly within the realm of possibilities.”

Halter said any loss of the disputed property will severely affect St. Bonaventure’s school and charitable work, and any amount of money it has to contribute to the diocese’s plan of reorganization will create hardship for the mission and the people it serves.

Cindy Howe, St. Bonaventure’s office manager, echoed those concerns. She outlined a lengthy list of charitable programs that she said St. Bonaventure provides to low income Navajo families living on the eastern portion of the reservation.

“There’s a really big need on the Navajo Nation,” Howe said. “If there’s no St. Bonaventure, I don’t know where these people will go.”

“I’m hoping all this goes away one day and we’re still here,” she added.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, June 3

Statement by Susan Vance of Knoxville, Eastern TN SNAP leader ( 865-927-2923, 865-748-3518 cell, vancefamily1@comcast.net )

McDowell County, N.C., during a Monday morning appearance in General Sessions Court, according to Greene County Circuit Court Clerk Gail Davis Jeffers.

On Monday evening, Capt. Victor Hollifield, of the McDowell County (N.C.) Sheriff’s Department said by telephone from Marion, N.C.

We’re sad that an admitted predator priest is rubbing salt into the wounds of his victims by making yet another desperate legal move to escape responsibility for his heinous crimes by exploiting legal technicalities.

[Greeneville Sun]

Shame on Fr. William C. Casey for his latest hurtful, self-serving legal maneuver. We hope he fails and that this “Hail Mary” filing will prompt more people with information or suspicions about his crimes to step forward.

We call on every bishop who supervised Fr. Casey to publicly denounce this hurtful move, especially Knoxville Bishop Richard Stika.

Finally, we in SNAP call on other victims of Fr. Casey to come forward and help police and prosecutors keep this dangerous cleric locked up and away from kids.

We wish that Catholic officials who helped Fr. Casey conceal his crimes would be charged and convicted and that every single person who was hurt by Fr. Casey gets help. That might happen if those who saw, suspected or suffered his crimes by Casey or cover ups by Catholic officials will speak up.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

David Clohessy | Jun. 4, 2015 Examining the Crisis

In a disclosure that’s eerily reminiscent of several recent predator priest cases, an ex-police officer says that a reality TV show star lied about the extent of his son’s child sex crimes. This isn’t an isolated incident. And there’s a crucial lesson in this case for all of us.

Jim Bob Duggar is an arch-conservative former politician whose 15 minutes of fame comes from the program “19 Kids and Counting,” centered on his huge family and conservative values. As a 2002 U.S. Senate candidate in Arkansas, Jim Bob argued that “rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes.”

Jim Bob and his family are making headlines these days because of disclosures that his son Josh had been investigated for “forcibly fondling” at least five girls. A police report indicates that Josh admitted his wrongdoing in 2002, and the following year, Jim Bob told the elders of his Baptist church about the crimes. Those elders decided to handle the situation quietly and “in house.”

So no one told the police.

Months later, Jim Bob and several church elders sat Josh down with an Arkansas state trooper who gave the young man a “very stern talk.” No official course of action was launched.

The now-ex-trooper said last week that both men told him that that Josh had molested only one girl.

This set of facts should sound familiar to NCR readers. It’s almost exactly what Kansas City Catholic officials did with the sexual images of children on a cleric’s computer: minimized how much wrongdoing the predator did and misled a police officer about it.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher

The Melbourne Catholic archdiocese has finally been forced to admit that Father Anthony Bongiorno committed sexual crimes against children during his 30 years working in Melbourne parishes. Anthony Salvatore Bongiorno began training for the priesthood about 1960, aged 25, in the same trainee group as George Pell and Denis Hart, both of whom eventually became archbishops of Melbourne. In 1994, Pell (then an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne) officiated at a requiem mass for Bongiorno’s brother Sam. Bongiorno’s crimes were covered up until the mid-1990s.

A Melbourne man, “Rex”, has been awarded compensation from the Victorian Government’s Crimes Compensation Tribunal for sexual crimes committed upon him by Father Bongiorno. The tribunal, in 1997, accepted evidence that Father Bongiorno had indecently assaulted the boy repeatedly at St Ambrose’s parish in Sydney Road, Brunswick beginning in 1981-82. The compensation was for the damage that this church-related abuse caused to the victim’s adolescent development.

Bongiorno has also been investigated by the commissioner on sexual abuse for on the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese, Peter O’Callaghan QC. Mr O’Callaghan accepted that Bongiorno had committed child-sex abuse while at Brunswick.

Rex’s story

Acccording to legal depositions, Rex testified that in 1981 Father Tony Bongiorno invited him to stay overnight at the Brunswick presbytery, where he shared the priest’s bed. Bongiorno touched the boy’s genitals in the bedroom and again later while showering with the boy. This genital touching continued regularly for years.

In 1985, Rex told a social worker about Bongiorno’s sexual abuse. When the Catholic diocesan office heard the complaint, it asked another priest, Father O (who was a close friend of Bongiorno from seminary days) to “investigate”. Bongiorno denied the allegation and Father O reported this orally to the archdiocese, which dropped the matter.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 1 June 2015)

For years, the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese knew that Father Peter Searson was committing sexual offences against boys, girls and women but he was allowed to continue in parishes, including at the Doveton parish (in Melbourne’s south-east), where he survived for years under the supervision of the regional bishop for the south-eastern suburbs, Auxiliary Bishop George Pell. The Victoria Police investigated Searson for sexual offences in parishes but found it difficult to extract evidence from “loyal” church people. Eventually, after 35 years as a priest, when Searson’s record was about to become public, the church authorities dumped Searson from parish work. Later, hoping to protect the church’s public image, the church also removed his name from the published list of retired priests.

Originally a Marist Brother

Broken Rites research has ascertained that Peter Lloyd Searson was born on 4 April 1923 in Adelaide, South Australia, where he was a pupil at Sacred Heart College, a Marist Brothers school in Somerton Park. He was recruited to become a Marist Brother, and he adopted the “religious” name “Brother Bonaventure”. (There was a “Saint” Bonaventure in medieval Europe but Peter Lloyd Searson was certainly no saint.)

The Broken Rites research confirmed that Peter Searson’s name is included in a list of Marist Brothers who entered the Melbourne province of this religious order. (The Melbourne province provided Marists for South Australia and Western Australia, as well for Victoria.)

In the 1950s, Brother Bonaventure Searson taught at a Marist Brothers college in Mount Gambier, South Australia. A former Mount Gambier student, born in 1942, told Broken Rites in 2002 that he was a boarder at the school in the 1950s. Brother Bonaventure, he said, had a fetish for strapping students on their naked buttocks.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 1 June 2015)

One of Australia’s most notorious paedophile priests, Father Kevin O’Donnell, committed sexual crimes against children throughout his 50-year career in Melbourne Catholic parishes while his superiors and colleagues looked the other way. In his final years, he even received public praise from one of his superiors, Bishop (later Cardinal) George Pell (see further down in this article, under the sub-heading “Praise from George Pell”). Eventually some of O’Donnell’s victims (with help from Broken Rites) contacted the police and got O’Donnell convicted and jailed. Cardinal George Pell has some explaining to do about how the church covered up for Father Kevin O’Donnell.

O’Donnell is dead but his numerous victims — and their families — still bear the scars of his crimes.

Father Kevin O’Donnell was a child abuser from 1942 to 1992. He fitted Masses, weddings and funerals in between his sex-abuse activities.

The Catholic Church now admits that O’Donnell was a child-abuser from day one. Broken Rites has seen a typed transcript of an interview that Mr Peter O’Callaghan QC (sex-abuse commissioner for the Melbourne archdiocese) had with an O’Donnell victim on 23 March 2003. In the transcript, Mr O’Callaghan commented that O’Donnell was engaged in sex abuse from the time he was ordained — and (said Mr O’Callaghan) he did it in every parish he was in.

During his career, the Melbourne church authorities were told of O’Donnell’s crimes but chose to keep him in the ministry, thus inflicting him on further victims. Some of O’Donnell’s fellow-priests knew that he was a danger to children but they remained silent. Certain other priests, when consulted by O’Donnell victims, just “didn’t want to know about it”.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 4 June 2015)

Broken Rites has forced the Catholic Church to admit that it protected one of Australia’s worst paedophile priests, Monsignor John Day, for many years while he was committing sexual crimes against children. At one stage, Monsignor Day had another criminal priest, Father Gerald Ridsdale, working under him. One church leader — Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, of the Ballarat diocese — spoke in defence of Monsignor Day. And a eulogy of Monsignor Day was published in the diocese’s magazine (about this time, Father George Pell became editor of this magazine).

Monsignor John Day was a senior priest of the vast Ballarat Diocese, which covers western Victoria, extending from the city of Mildura (on the New South Wales border in the north-west) to the city of Warrnambool (on the coast in the south). Ballarat is merely the town where the bishop lives. The major part of Monsignor Day’s career was spent in Mildura (Sacred Heart parish), from 1957 to 1972. Mildura was an important parish and Day was promoted to the rank of Monsignor — one rung below a bishop.

When Broken Rites established its national telephone hotline in September 1993, one of the first calls we received was about Monsignor John Day. Now, years later, we are still receiving occasional calls and emails about him.

In late 1993, Broken Rites began researching Monsignor Day. Our investigation led us to a former Victoria Police detective, Denis Ryan, who worked in Mildura in 1962-72. Broken Rites discovered that, in 1971, after Day had been in Mildura for 15 years, Detective Ryan gathered 16 sworn written statements, from 14 boys and two girls at Mildura, detailing how Day had committed sexual offences against them during the 1960s. The offences included buggery, attempted buggery, indecent assault and gross indecency. Parishioners and police notified Day’s boss, Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, in 1971-2 about this evidence. But Mulkearns denied that there was any substance in the allegations against Day and he retained Day in the ministry. Thus, the Ballarat diocese managed to keep the lid on the Monsignor Day scandal for two decades … until Broken Rites ended the cover-up.

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CALIFORNIA
Orange County Weekly

By Matt Coker Thu., Jun. 4 2015

An author and speaker who has appeared several times in OC Weekly and on ocweekly.com for her tireless advocacy on behalf of young sexual abuse victims–and who was herself molested years ago by a choir director at Mater Dei Catholic High School in Santa Ana–receives a well-deserved honor Friday.

Our Lady of Perpetual Protest: Joelle Casteix has spent the past five years fighting for Catholic Church sex-abuse victims. But there’s one molester she hasn’t nabbed yet: Her own

The Violence Prevention Coalition of Orange County (VPCOC) includes Joelle Casteix among its 19th annual Ambassador of Peace Awards recipients being feted starting at 11:30 a.m. Friday at Turnip Rose, 1570 Scenic Ave., Costa Mesa.

A former journalist, educator and public relations professional, Casteix has taken her own experience as a victim of child sex crimes and devoted her career to exposing abuse, advocating on behalf of survivors and spreading abuse prevention strategies for parents and communities. Since 2003, she has been the volunteer Western Regional Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. That has taken her around the world to expose abusers, help victims and train families, churches and communities to raise empowered children and keep communities safe from child sexual abuse.

She is the author of The Well-Armored Child: A Parents’ Guide to Preventing Abuse and The Compassionate Response: How to Help and Empower the Adult Victim of Child Sexual Abuse. You can keep up on what she is up to at Casteix.com.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors headed by Sean O’Malley, has issued a statement in light of the fracas between Peter Saunders and Cardinal George Pell

IACOPO SCARAMUZZI
VATICAN CITY

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors headed by US cardinal Sean O’Malley, has intervened with a statement in light of the recent clash between Peter Saunders, a member of the Commission who was abused by a paedophile priest when he was a child and Australian cardinal George Pell, Secretary of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy.

Speaking on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes Australia programme, Saunders accused Pell of showing indifference to the victims of a paedophile priest in Australia when he was a young priest, even going as far as to define Pell’s attitude “sociopathic” and expressing the hope that the Pope would remove him from his Vatican role. The prelate – who will be giving evidence at a hearing before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Institutional Child Sex Abuse after already speaking in a parliamentary inquiry in Victoria – was defensive in his response: he stressed that he never covered up any complaints made against paedophile priests and said he would resort to legal action. The Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi also issued a comment, saying that the statement made in recent days by Cardinal Pell in response to the accusations made by the Australian Commission, was “worthy of respect and attention”. The Vatican spokesman added that the statements made by Saunders “were clearly entirely personal and were not made on behalf of the Commission”. Now, the Commission Saunders is a member of has also expressed itself.

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MICHIGAN
Upper Michigans Source

by Aaron Boehm

MARQUETTE — In 2014, the Catholic Diocese of Marquette was again found to be in compliance with the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.

This charter was adopted by the U.S. Catholic bishops in 2002 to address the problem of child and youth sexual abuse by clergy. StoneBridge Business Partners of Rochester, New York conducted the audit of the diocese’s compliance with the Charter. During the audit period of July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014, 2600 children and youth received training in safe environment awareness in diocesan Catholic schools and parishes.

In addition, 356 diocesan, parish and Catholic school employees and volunteers from throughout the U.P. were trained in the prevention of child and youth sexual abuse, bringing the total number of adults trained since 2002 to 4,000. Currently, the diocese rechecks the background of every priest, religious, employee and volunteer every three years.

Bishop John Doerfler said, “Since the audits first began in 2003, the Diocese of Marquette has been found to be in compliance with the Charter year after year, which underscores our commitment to keeping children safe. To extend Christ’s love and healing, I am open to meeting with those who have been harmed by clergy sexual abuse of minors.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

JUNE 05, 2015 1

Verity Edwards
Reporter
Adelaide

Serious failings by St Ann’s ­Special School in South Australia, police and the Catholic Church have been found by a royal commission inquiring into the sexual abuse of intellectually disabled students.

The findings by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concern a school bus driver who repeatedly abused several disabled children in the 1980s.

Brian Perkins was convicted in 2003 of five sexual offences against three students at St Ann’s and sentenced to 10 years, but later died in jail.

Perkins worked at the southern suburbs Adelaide school ­between 1986 and 1991 and was responsible for driving children with intellectual disabilities to and from school.

Many were unable to communicate with their parents and tell them they had been abused by Perkins.

The royal commission found complaints were made about Perkins in 1991, when police found pornographic photos of the students at his home, but he was not convicted for more than a decade.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Worcester Telegram & Gazette

By Mark Sullivan
Telegram & Gazette Staff

Posted Jun. 3, 2015

ASHLAND – A church whose members allegedly were targeted in a $3.5 million Ponzi scheme run by a former elder of the congregation says it is encouraging members who “may have fallen victim” to assist in the investigation.

Charles L. Erickson, former director of MetroWest Ministries in Ashland, is alleged to have bilked investors of millions in a pyramid investment scheme he claimed was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

A complaint filed by the securities division of the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office charges Mr. Erickson defrauded at least 25 investors, about a third of them recruited from his Ashland congregation.

The Connect Community Church in Ashland released the following statement:

“Five months ago, one of the members of the church, Charles Erickson, resigned his membership in the church acknowledging that he had deceived several members in a commodities investment scheme.

“The Board of Elders has removed Mr. Erickson from his position as an elder as the result of his actions.

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OHIO
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Thursday, June 4

For more information: David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 566 9790, davidgclohessy@gmail.com ), Barbara Dorris ( 314-503-0003 cell, bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org ), Barbara Blaine ( 312-399-4747, bblaine@snapnetwork.org )

Church staff help sex offender
Victims denounce their letters
Bishop should reprimand pastor, group says
SNAP: “He should visit parish & educate his flock”

At least ten staff, volunteers or members of a Cleveland Catholic church wrote a judge seeking a shorter prison term for a convicted child sex offender who brandished a gun at a police officer. A support group for clergy sex abuse victims is urging Cleveland’s top Catholic official to visit the parish and discipline the pastor.

The controversy stems from a March guilty plea on child sex charges by Steve Bittel, an active parishioner at St. Barnabas church in Northfield. An investigation revealed that most of the 67 videos found on Bittel’s computer featured children between 3 and 16 years old. Of the 67 files found, one of the files downloaded to Bittel’s IP address is described in court records as a five-minute video of a “slightly pubescent girl” undressing and performing sex acts on herself, according to Stow Municipal Court records.

More than 25 of Bittel’s relatives, friends and fellow Catholics wrote to Judge Richard Reinbold urging leniency for him before his sentencing. Among them were ten individuals with ties to St. Barnabas parish, including its pastor.

Leaders of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, are asking Bishop Richard Lennon to go to the church this weekend, reprimand the pastor and “tell your flock that it’s wrong, reckless and hurtful to help a predator get back out on the streets sooner.”

In a letter to Lennon, SNAP says he has “a duty to put the safety of innocent kids above the wishes of misguided adults and to make sure that church members and staff do so too.”

“School and church officials should always put the safety of the innocent above the preferences of their friends. Helping sex offenders get shorter sentences is hurtful and irresponsible,” said Judy Jones of SNAP.

“When officials write letters urging lighter punishments for sex offenders, they are being selfish and short-sighted and they rub even more salt into the already deep and usually still fresh wounds of victims and their loved ones,” said Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, SNAP’s outreach director. “And it’s not enough for Lennon or another church official to say ‘We’re sorry.’ The only way to prevent these misdeeds in the future is for Lennon to punish the pastor.”

Those writing to the judge on Bittel’s behalf include St. Barnabas pastor Fr. Ralph Wiatrowski and others associated with the parish: James Vinson, John Marion, Nancy Zajac, Toni Zobel, Luella Merecki, Bob and Annette Fischer, and Thomas and Kathleen Raffay.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service

Shepherds, shamers, and shunners: The rise of church discipline in America (Part 1)

Jonathan Merritt | Jun 3, 2015

When Karen Hinkley decided to have her marriage annulled, she had no idea it would lead to a public shaming from one of the largest mega-churches in America.

After learning her husband was entangled in a decade-long child porn addiction that led to a pattern of lies and a heap of secrets, Karen decided to call it quits. But as a member of The Village Church (TVC), a congregation of more than 10,000 outside of Dallas, Texas, such action triggered formal disciplinary action that included sharing the details of her situation with their entire church body.

While no major religious polling organizations posses recent data on how many American churches utilize similar discipline procedures, many believe the number is growing, particularly among conservative congregations. As more cases come to light over time, they raise questions about the biblical basis and legal implications of such practices. Are these churches doing their best to care for their flocks or are crossing a ethical line?

Jonathan Leeman is author of “Church Discipline: How the Church Protects the Name of Jesus” and editorial director of 9 Marks, a Washington D.C.-based ministry that believes rigorous church discipline is one of the nine central components that comprise a “biblical church.” He says that if a church member is found to be participating in unrepentant, outward, and significant sins, the congregation should enact discipline. This may include excommunication or public disclosure of their situation, but usually it only requires personally confronting the sinner.

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IRELAND
Galway Advertiser

The HSE raised concerns in 2012 that up to 1,000 babies may have been illegally adopted to the United States, in “a scandal that dwarfs other, more recent issues with the church and state,” according to a report in the Irish Examiner.

The warning is contained in an internal note of a teleconference that took place in October 2012 with the then head of Medical Intelligence Unit, Davida De La Harpe, and then assistant director of Children and Family Service, Phil Garland.

This suggestion was made more than two years before the discovery of a mass grave at the home, containing the bodies of 796 children, which forced the Government to launch an enquiry into all mother and baby homes in the country.

The note echoed the concerns of the principal social worker for adoption in HSE West, who had discovered “a large archive of photographs, documentation, and correspondence related to children sent for adoption in the USA,” and “documentation in relation to discharges and admissions to psychiatric institutions in the Western area”.

Letters from the home to parents were also discovered, asking for money towards the upkeep of children that had been adopted or had died by that time. The social worker compiled a list of up to 1,000 names, but claimed it was unclear “whether all these relate to the ongoing examination of the Magdalene system, or whether they relate to the adoption of children by parents, possibly in the USA”. It did note the possibility that death certificates of children were falsified in order to facilitate illegal adoption.

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CANADA
Toronto Sun

DANI-ELLE DUBE, POSTMEDIA NETWORK

OTTAWA — The Truth and Reconciliation report is considered the beginning of the healing process for aboriginal survivors of Canada’s residential schools.

But for some, like Ottawa’s Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, the report and its recommendations spark debate.

Postmedia Network sat down with the city’s ninth bishop to discuss his perspective on the issues surrounding the report. The responses have been edited for space.

Q: One of the recommendations in the report asks for Pope Francis to issue an apology to aboriginal Canadians on behalf of the Catholic church, despite Pope Benedict having issued one back in 2009. Do you agree with this recommendation?

A: I didn’t know there was going to be this other request from the Pope and what struck me as rather demanding in the apology is that they wanted it delivered within a year in Canada and that they wanted it to address certain things, like the spiritual abuse they suffered.

Q: Why did this particular recommendation stand out to you?

A: Because I look for things that touch the church. I know the report does say that the church for them is important, but they also asked for royal proclamation from the Queen, but don’t make the recommendation that she come to Canada and make a statement like they’re asking of the Pope.

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UNITED STATES
Politics USA

By: Jason Easley
Wednesday, June, 3rd, 2015

The Duggars interview on Fox News backfired. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar showed no remorse, claimed that they were victims of the police and media, and revealed to the world why they should never be allowed back on television.

The interview intro featured Megyn Kelly referring to Josh Duggar’s admitted child molestation as “allegations.” Megyn Kelly’s intro sounded like it came directly from the Duggars agent.

The interview began with Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar repeating their press release. The Duggar parents said that they were devastated. Jim Bob said that Josh was just curious about girls, and the girls didn’t even know that he did it. (Jim Bob and Michelle are working hard to whitewash their son’s crimes.) Jim Bob said, “Looking back, we did the best we could under the circumstances.” The Duggars claimed that this happens in a lot parents’ homes. Jim Bob said, “Again, this is not rape or something like that.” …

Michelle Duggar was asked if she feared for the safety of her daughters, and she answered that they put safeguards in place, but she expressed no fear for her daughters. Jim Bob Duggar admitted that they didn’t try to protect their daughters as much as, “Josh’s heart went astray.” Jim Bob tried to explain it away again by saying that none of the girls knew about it or understood what he had done. Duggar was claiming that Josh Duggar’s child molestation was a victimless crime.

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VATICAN CITY
Zee News (India)

AFP

Vatican City: External experts brought in by Pope Francis to help tackle the tiny city state`s ills are answering the papal call for openness — and infuriating some Holy See stalwarts in the process.

Over the past few months members of the pope`s commission for child protection — handpicked by Francis to help root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church — have publicly attacked a cardinal and a bishop.

The cardinal in question is the Vatican`s finance chief George Pell, who was accused by commissioner Peter Saunders of being an “almost sociopathic” man who covered up abuse and tried to buy the silence of at least one victim.

Australian Pell, who was described by Saunders as “a massive, massive thorn in the side of Pope Francis`s papacy”, threatened legal action and was defended by the Vatican, who stressed Saunders was only expressing his personal views.

Despite the anger among red hats in the gilded corridors of Saint Peter`s, Saunders — a British child abuse victim — stood his ground and has not apologised.

The anti-paedophilia body has strong ties to survivor groups who are highly critical of the Vatican, and its members readily draw attention to the Church`s flaws, even if it embarrasses the very man who appointed them.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald

by Fr Mark Drew
posted Thursday, 4 Jun 2015

As the crucial family synod approaches, his critics could prove his greatest allies

A French journalist working on a documentary about opposition to the Pope recently asked Cardinal Raymond Burke if he was an enemy of Francis. The reply was illuminating. “Well, I certainly hope he’s not my enemy,” retorted the former head of the Vatican’s supreme court, who now occupies a largely ceremonial sinecure as patron of the Knights of Malta.

Does the Pope really have enemies? Catholics used to pray in the liturgy that he would be saved from them, but it was taken for granted then that we were referring to enemies outside the Church. There remain terror groups like ISIS that would like to harm him physically. But what might shock some Catholics is the notion that the Pope might have “enemies” inside the Church. And, as I will argue, they may actually turn out to be his greatest allies at this October’s crucial family synod.

Since the Counter-Reformation, and the definition of papal infallibility in 1870, the authority of the Roman pontiff has seemed absolute. But after the Second Vatican Council what was always a reality has become more visible: all popes encounter questioning and even opposition in implementing their policies for the governance of the Church.

Resistance is often to be found not only in the diverse reality of the wider Church, but even within what has to many appeared as the inner sanctum of absolute papal power: the Roman Curia. Benedict XVI resigned precisely because he believed that only a younger and stronger man could overcome this insidious internal foe.

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KENTUCKY
WHAS

LOUSVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) — Allegations of child pornography have cost a Trinity High School teacher and assistant football coach his job.

Patrick Newman will answer to the charges in court on Friday, June 5.

Federal detectives say Newman’s social media accounts contained sexually explicit videos and messages between him and a teenage boy in Texas.

Trinity sent a note home to parents, stating that neither the school nor the Archdiocese of Louisville have ever received any reports of this nature involving Newman with any of the schools where he has taught.

The letter read as follows:

WEDNESDAY, 03 JUNE 2015 09:57
June 3, 2015

Dear Parents,

We learned yesterday that Mr. Patrick Newman, a Trinity teacher, is facing criminal charges involving internet pornography with a minor, while using his home computer. Neither Trinity nor the Archdiocese of Louisville have ever received any reports of this nature regarding Mr. Newman, and there are no indications of any involvement of the schools where he has previously worked.

Based upon the complaint and Mr. Newman’s statements, he will not be returning to work in any capacity at Trinity.

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