ABUSE TRACKER

VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) The Vatican’s Secretary of State said the “Vatileaks” case has caused a “heavy atmosphere,” and called some press reports on the case “very emotional, if not hysterical.”

“I do not believe these polemics can create a tranquil atmosphere,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin told Vatican Radio.

“Indeed, it creates a heavy atmosphere,” he said. “If we look at press, we see unreasonable attacks with little meaning, that are ill-conceived and very emotional, if not hysterical.”

However, Cardinal Parolin said “God can write straight with crooked lines,” and said although the leaking of Vatican documents is “an attack on the Church,” the situation can be “turned to the good” if welcomed with a “spirit of conversion.”

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VATICAN CITY
Deutsche Welle

[with video]

The Vatican has put two Italian journalists under investigation for their alleged role in divulging state secrets. The pair wrote books detailing gross financial mismanagement and corruption within the church.

Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi were being investigated on suspicion of “complicity in committing a crime,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Wednesday.

The journalists last week published two books based on classified documents leaked from a committee that was set up by Pope Francis to review the Vatican’s financial affairs.

Their works outline the mammoth challenge Pope Francis faces in reforming the Catholic Church and include revelations of theft, wasteful spending and greed within the secretive city-state.

The investigation by Vatican magistrates has already led to the arrest of two members of the commission who had access to the documents. Lombardi said he expected more Holy See officials to be placed under investigation.

In the Italian and Vatican legal systems, it is not unusual for magistrates to carry out such probes without charges ever being filed. It may also be difficult for the state-city to investigate the two Italian nationals if they were given the documents outside Vatican territory.

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ROME
The Local

Rome properties owned by the Vatican are being used as saunas and massage parlours, according to the latest leaks in the Italian press.

The buildings are also allegedly being rented out for cheap to powerful friends and allies, the reports said.

The revelations come a week after the Vatican arrested a priest and a former employee on suspicion of leaking documents, which formed the basis of two new books, detailing the murky world of the Vatican’s finances.

Luxury homes were rented out at knock-down prices, and hotels and beauty centres managed by private companies became places “to meet secretly”, the reports said.

Some of the properties listed include premises close to the Italian Parliament and a solarium near Piazza Barberini.

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CONNECTICUT
Norwalk Daily Voice

by Amy Maciaszek 11/11/2015

NORWALK, CONN. — A panel discussion Nov. 17 at Norwalk Community College about clergy sex abuse news in Connecticut features three area journalists who’ve covered it.

It also includes a viewing of the trailer for the newly released film “Spotlight” that focuses on Catholic clergy sex abuse coverage in the Boston area.

Norwalk Community College is partnering with the Connecticut chapter of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) to host the panel discussion that features Dave Altimari, Tom Connor and Dan Tepfer, three Connecticut journalists who have spent years writing about the problem of sex abuse, college officials said.

Titled “Spotlight on Investigative Journalism: Covering the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis,” the event takes place from 1:30-3 p.m., Nov. 17, in the college’s East Campus Glen Re Forum.

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METHUEN (ma)
St. Monica Parish

This weekend a movie was released in the cinemas called Spotlight. It is a dramatic portrayal of a very real and painful scandal in the life of the Church in the Archdiocese of Boston. It depicts the work of The Boston Globe Spotlight Team in breaking the story of the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Archdiocese in January, 2002. The scandal was amplified by the failure of bishops to remove priests from ministry and in some cases moving them to other parishes and even other parts of the country where they abused more children. Though the number of abusive priests was small as a percentage of the total number of priests, sadly many of these priests had a large number of victims. I am aware that St. Monica Parish suffered tremendous pain, particularly at the hands of one notorious priest. It brings me great sadness to know that parishioners, and their families, have suffered such pain. To my knowledge, St. Lucy Parish
thankfully did not suffer the same trauma.

My second year in the seminary 2003-2004, a family friend, roughly my age, called me. He knew I had entered the seminary and he trusted me. He told me that he had been abused by a priest as a pre-teen. I did the best I could to convince him that what happened was not his fault, as he seemed to think it was. I knew he needed far more help than I could provide. I convinced him to go to the office the Archdiocese had established in Newton to help victims and I went with him that day. As we met the staff in the lobby and exchanged greetings I thought I’d be merely waiting for him in the lobby. To my surprise, he insisted that I stay in the meeting with them. Of course I complied with his request as the counselors advised whatever would put him most at ease. He then described very vividly what was done to him, in far more detail than when we had spoken before. It remains, even after seven years of priesthood, by far the most painful and difficult pastoral experience I have ever encountered. It is hard to describe his pain which you could see so vividly in his shaking as he spoke. Knowing that some of you, and your loved ones, have experienced the pain that I saw this man enduring is heartbreaking and something of which I am keenly aware.

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

VATICAN CITY | BY PHILIP PULLELLA

A leaks scandal rocking the papacy widened on Wednesday as the Vatican put two Italian journalists under investigation and said it suspected other Holy See officials had helped two arrested for stealing documents.

The latest twist in the scandal came in a statement about the two journalists who wrote books based on the leaks. It said they were being investigated on suspicion of “complicity in committing a crime.”

The leaks are one of the biggest internal scandals to hit the papacy of Pope Francis and were reminiscent of the “Vatileaks” furor that preceded the resignation of former Pope Benedict in 2013. The Italian media has dubbed the latest episodes “Vatileaks II”.

“Investigators are also looking into the role of people who, because of their office positions (in the Vatican) may have cooperated in obtaining the confidential documents,” spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said in the statement, indicating that the scandal looked set to widen soon.

On Nov. 2, the Vatican announced the arrests of a high-ranking Holy See official and an Italian woman who works in public relations for allegedly leaking the documents to the authors of two new books.

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CALIFORNIA
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on November 11, 2015

A priest who worked for six years at Orange’s St. Joseph Hospital has been accused of improper conduct” in numerous assignments. The conduct was so bad, in fact, that he was “dismissed” from his home diocese and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a warning to dioceses nationwide.

What did Orange Bishop Kevin Vann do with this warning? Not much. Same with San Bernardino’s Bishop Gerald Barnes.

So here’s the scoop: Fr. Peter Balili worked at Orange’s St. Joseph’s hospital as a part of his studies in “pastoral ministry.” The priest also had assignments in the San Bernardino and San Francisco dioceses. But in 2014, the Diocese of Belleville, IL, DISMISSED him from his duties after they learned of (what they vaguely describe as) “improper conduct.”

They also believe that he engaged in this conduct in his other assignments, including California. How did I find out about this? The Diocese of Cleveland actually does as they promise and is transparent about these warnings.

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NEW JERSEY
Road to Recovery

The Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, refuses to acknowledge, validate, and settle the claims of a man who was sexually abused repeatedly as a minor child by a repeat pedophile priest, Fr. John P. Nickas, at St. Rocco’s Parish, Newark, New Jersey

The Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, has acknowledged, validated and settled at least one other public claim against Fr. John P. Nickas but is stalling and foot-dragging regarding the credible claims of a man who was sexually assaulted repeatedly as a minor child by Fr. John P. Nickas, causing the clergy sexual abuse victim to be re-victimized

What
A press conference and demonstration alerting the media and general public that the Archdiocese of Newark is stalling and dragging its feet by not acting fairly and justly toward a man who was repeatedly sexually abused as a minor child by Fr. John P. Nickas, now deceased, at St. Rocco’s Catholic Church and Rectory in Newark, New Jersey

When
Thursday, November 12, 2015 at 11:00 am

Where
On the public sidewalk in front of the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, at 171 Clifton Avenue, Newark, New Jersey 07104

Who
Members of Road to Recovery, Inc., a non-profit charity based in New Jersey that assists victims of sexual abuse and their families, including its Co-founder and President, Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D.

Why
When “John Doe” was approximately seven years old, he attended St. Rocco’s School in Newark, New Jersey, for his elementary school education. His family attended St. Rocco’s Church in Newark and “John Doe” became an altar server at approximately age seven. Fr. John P. Nickas, a Newark Archdiocesan priest assigned to St. Rocco’s Parish, Newark, caught “John Doe” stealing communion wafers, brought him to the basement of St. Rocco’s Church, and sexually assaulted the little boy. Sometime later, Fr. John P. Nickas brought “John Doe” into the rectory of St. Rocco’s Parish and sexually assaulted him again. After that, Fr. John P. Nickas brought “John Doe” and a friend of a similar age to St. Rocco’s Rectory and made both boys simulate a sex act with each other while Fr. John P. Nickas watched.

Sometime after these events, Fr. John P. Nickas left St. Rocco’s Parish but returned when “John Doe” was approximately fourteen years of age. Fr. John P. Nickas resumed his sexual abuse of “John Doe” as a minor teenager and sexually abused him in St. Rocco’s Rectory again.

Demonstrators will call on the Archdiocese of Newark to stop its stalling and foot-dragging, acknowledge and verify the claims of “John Doe,” and help him heal so he can gain a degree of closure.

Contacts
Dr. Robert M. Hoatson, Road to Recovery, Inc., Livingston, NJ – 862-368-2800
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, Boston, MA – 617-523-6250

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CHILE
La Tercera

Carlos Reyes y Angélica Baeza
11 de noviembre del 2015

Sorpresa causó la llegada tres horas antes de lo estipulado, de Fernando Karadima al Palacio de Tribunales.

La declaración del ex párroco de El Bosque en el marco de la demanda civil interpuesta contra el Arzobispado, comenzó puntualmente a las 15.30 horas en la Quinta Sala de la Corte de Apelaciones, frente al ministro de fuero Juan Manuel Muñoz.

Karadima, quien fue condenado canónicamente por abusos en febrero de 2011, y obligado a llevar una vida de “oración y penitencia”, cumple su castigo en el convento de las Siervas de Jesús de la Caridad, ubicado en Providencia.

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CHILE
Yahoo! News

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A prominent priest who has been punished for sex abuse is testifying in a court case that three of his victims brought against Chile’s Catholic Church.

Grey-haired and balding, the Rev. Fernando Karadima walked into court wearing a Roman collar on Wednesday. He was expected to be questioned for at least three hours and reporters were not allowed to be present.

The Vatican ordered Karadima to life of penance and prayer in 2011 for abusing young boys. A local judge later determined the allegations were truthful but said the time limit had expired for prosecution.

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UNITED STATES
WNPR

By LYDIA BROWN

Listen live at 9:00 am on Thursday.

In the early 2000s, a unit of Boston Globe reporters known as the “Spotlight” team uncovered child sex abuse in one of Boston’s most powerful institutions: the Catholic Church.

Now, their story is being told on the big screen, in a new film called “Spotlight.” This hour, we learn more about the movie with former Globe columnist Eileen McNamara. We also find out how the clergy abuse scandal has been — and continues to be — covered in other U.S. cities.

GUESTS:

Eileen McNamara – Journalism professor at Brandeis University; former columnist for The Boston Globe
Dave Altimari – Reporter on the Hartford Courant’s investigative desk
Jim Hackett – Childhood victim of clergy sex abuse; member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)
Madeleine Baran – Investigative reporter at Minnesota Public Radio

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VATICAN CITY
GlobalPost

Agence France-Presse on Nov 11, 2015

The Vatican on Wednesday said its judicial authorities had launched a probe against two Italian journalists over confidential documents that were leaked to the media, revealing gross financial mismanagement at the heart of the secretive city-state.

Journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi are being investigated for possible complicity “in the offence of divulging confidential news and documents”, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said.

The reporters last week published two explosive books shedding an unflattering light on corruption, theft and uncontrolled spending at the Vatican, basing their claims on leaked classified documents.

As part of the investigation into the disclosures the Vatican last week arrested an Italian PR expert, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, and Spanish priest Angel Vallejo Balda for allegedly stealing and leaking the classified documents to the media.

Both served on a special commission set up by Pope Francis to advise him on economic reform within the Vatican to clamp down on unbridled spending.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Liverpool Echo

An inquiry into institutional child sex abuse is to launch in Liverpool.

The first stage of the independent inquiry, the Truth Project, will pilot in the city next week with the view to expanding across the country.

The project allows victims and survivors to share their experience with the Inquiry during private sessions or via written statements.

Information received will be turned into anonymous summaries to inform the inquiries reports and recommendations.

Some of the institutions involved are the armed forces, local authorities, the media, schools, the NHS , religion organisations and voluntary and private organisations.

The inquiry aims to identify organisations and institutions that have failed in their duty to protect children from sexual abuse.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

11 November

The Chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Hon Lowell Goddard DNZM is today announcing the start of the Inquiry’s Truth Project Pilot in Liverpool. She will visit organisations supporting victims and survivors of child sexual abuse to talk about the Truth Project and to hear about their hopes for how the Inquiry can provide an opportunity for victims and survivors to share their experiences.

The Truth Project will allow victims and survivors of child sexual abuse to share their experience with the Inquiry during a private session with a member of the Inquiry or via a written statement.

Inquiry chair Hon. Lowell Goddard DNZM said:

“I would like to thank the Merseyside Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre and Stepping Stones North Wales for meeting with me today. The work of organisations such as these is incredibly important in helping support victims and survivors of child sexual abuse. I am grateful for the time they have taken today to talk to me about their work and about some of the challenges faced by those whom they support.

It brings home to me the importance of the work of the Inquiry in identifying organisations and institutions which have failed in their duty to protect children from sexual abuse. And it highlights that this Inquiry must, as I have said before, shine a light on the failings of organisations and institutions across the breadth of England and Wales – and not simply within the Westminster context.

Next week, here in Liverpool the first phase of the Truth Project that I announced in July will begin. The Truth Project will enable victims and survivors of child sexual abuse to contribute to the work of the Inquiry. It will help us gain a better understanding of the patterns of abuse, and will assist in explaining why many crimes went unreported and undetected for so long, often leaving other children at risk of abuse in later years.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Sandra Laville
Wednesday 11 November 2015

An ambitious project to take testimony from thousands of victims of child abuse across the country will begin within days as part of an independent inquiry into institutionalised abuse.

The Truth project, set up by the Goddard inquiry into child abuse, will begin pilot hearings in Liverpool next Tuesday, where it will take evidence in private from victims in the north-west and north Wales. The commission said regional offices elsewhere in the country would be set up afterwards to take testimony from other victims.

It is hoped that the project – which is similar to one undertaken by the Australian Royal Commission – will provide a broader picture of the scale and nature of institutional child abuse. Anonymised accounts of the hearings will be published when the inquiry reports.

Justice Lowell Goddard, the chair of the inquiry, travelled to Liverpool on Wednesday to open the Truth project. She met staff from Merseyside Rape and Sexual Abuse support centre (Rasa) and Stepping Stones, based in north Wales, which support victims of child sexual abuse and will be providing support and advocacy for victims at the hearings.

“The Truth project will enable victims and survivors of child sexual abuse to contribute to the work of the inquiry,” Goddard said. “It will help us gain a better understanding of the patterns of abuse, and will assist in explaining why many crimes went unreported and undetected for so long, often leaving other children at risk of abuse in later years.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse is to begin hearing directly from victims and survivors.

A pilot phase of the Truth Project, part of the inquiry headed by New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard, will begin in Liverpool next week.

Victims and survivors will be able to share their experiences in a private session or via a written statement.

Justice Goddard said it would help the inquiry understand why many crimes went unreported and undetected for so long.

The pilot scheme is part of the independent inquiry launched by Home Secretary Theresa May, looking at how institutions and organisations, including the BBC, police, armed forces, schools and children’s homes, handled abuse claims.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) A communiqué released on Wednesday by the Holy See Press Office said that in the past few days partial and imprecise information has appeared in the secular press regarding the content of confidential documents pertaining to APSA, the Office that administrates the patrimony of the Holy See.

Reiterating that APSA continues to and always has collaborated with the competent authorities, the communiqué explains that leaked information appears to suggest that the institution has been used for illegal financial activities.

The Vatican Judiciary Authority – it continues – has opened an investigation into the leaking of these documents, and that APSA, which is not under investigation, continues to carry out its activities within full respect of the rules and regulations in force.

Also on Wednesday, a press release published by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples describes the insinuations proffered by some media as “unacceptable.”
The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples – also known as Propaganda Fide – says it is perfectly in line with Pope Francis’ reform of the Curia and it is committed to respect the will of donors who throughout the years have contributed to the funding of its missionary mandate.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

By Nicole Winfield | AP November 11

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican said Wednesday it had placed two Italian journalists under investigation in its probe over leaked documents that revealed waste, greed and mismanagement at the highest levels of the Catholic Church hierarchy.

Journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi wrote two bombshell books detailing the uphill battle Pope Francis is facing in reforming the Vatican. Their books, released last week, were based on leaked documents from a reform commission Francis named to get a handle on the Vatican’s finances and propose reforms.

Already, two members of the commission who had access to the documents have been arrested.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said Wednesday that Nuzzi and Fittipaldi had been placed under investigation by Vatican magistrates for their alleged role in dealing with the leaked documents. He said other officials were being looked at for having possibly cooperated in the scandal.

Reached in Berlin, Nuzzi said he knew nothing of the investigation. Fittipaldi was quoted by his L’Espresso magazine as saying the investigation is the price he has to pay for doing his job.

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UNITED STATES
Contra Costa Times

By Tim Stier, Oakland Tribune My Word © 2015 Bay Area News Group

The movie “Spotlight” opens in Bay Area theatres on Friday. It tells the story of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation team’s reporting in 2001 and 2002 on the clergy sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston and its cover-up by Cardinal Law.

To many, this movie will draw unwanted publicity to the Catholic Church. As a priest of the Roman Catholic diocese of Oakland in voluntary exile since 2005, I welcome this publicity.

I hope this movie shines the spotlight on Oakland and San Francisco so the full extent of abuse and cover-up right here in the Bay Area may be known.

For the truth is that if the same spotlight were to shine on the Catholic Church in San Francisco and Oakland, the news would be just as heartbreaking and horrifying as in Boston.

The reason the Boston Globe Spotlight team of journalists was able to shine such light on the Catholic Church in Boston was due to the courage of abuse survivors, journalists and a judge who forced the Archdiocese of Boston to open its secret files on scores of criminal priests.

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CANADA
Nunatsiaq Online

THOMAS ROHNER

Convicted of dozens of sex crimes against mostly Inuit children over a span of two decades, the former Roman Catholic priest, Eric Dejaeger, made a brief appearance at the Nunavut Court of Appeal in Iqaluit Nov. 10 to try to get at least some of those convictions overturned.

Dejaeger, appearing before Justice Robert Kilpatrick in baggy navy blue sweatpants and sweatshirt, with his head and beard recently trimmed, had filed a notice of appeal earlier this year, on March 26.

That notice lists six convictions that Dejaeger, now 69, is appealing, but contains so little detail that it’s not clear which incidents these convictions relate to.

But it remains likely that Dejaeger is appealing at least some of the 32 sex crimes against Igloolik children on which Kilpatrick convicted the former priest in September 2014.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Kirchen Zeitung

[The news of the abuse allegations against Bishop Heinrich Maria Janssen has caused consternation in the Hildesheim diocese. Many people doubt whether the allegations are correct.]

Die Nachricht von den Missbrauchsvorwürfen gegenüber Bischof Heinrich Maria Janssen hat im Bistum Bestürzung ausgelöst. Viele Menschen zweifeln, ob die Vorwürfe stimmen. Weihbischof Heinz-Günter Bongartz beantwortet die Fragen von Matthias Bode:

Die Menschen fragen sich, wie stichhaltig die Vorwürfe sind. Was spricht für die Glaubwürdigkeit des Opfers?

Dafür spricht einiges. Der Betroffene konnte zahlreiche Details wie Umstände, Zeit und Orte des Missbrauchs benennen. Wir haben diese Angaben, so weit möglich, geprüft und sind zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass sich die Dinge so abgespielt haben könnten. In den Gesprächen, die Domkapitular Martin Wilk und ich mit dem Mann geführt haben, war eine große persönliche Betroffenheit zu spüren. Darüber hinaus legt der Lebensweg des Mannes nahe, dass er eine solche Geschichte nicht einfach erdichtet hat. Schließlich hat er seine Angaben durch eine Eidesstattliche Erklärung untermauert, ein ganz wichtiger Faktor für uns.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Jesus.de

[Catholic theologian Wolfgang Beck has called for better control of German bishops because of the abuse allegation against a former bishop in Hildesheim. Strong clericalism still exists in the higher levels of the church, he said. The basic problem is the structures that favored child abuse and other scandals were not changed until now. It is necessary for independent control for the higher clergy, he said.]

Der katholische Theologe Wolfgang Beck hat angesichts des Missbrauchsvorwurfs gegen einen ehemaligen Bischof in Hildesheim eine Kontrolle aller deutschen Bischöfe gefordert. In den höheren Ebenen der katholischen Kirche gebe es immer noch einen ausgeprägten Klerikalismus, sagte Beck der in Hannover erscheinenden “Neuen Presse”.

Das Grundproblem sei, dass die Strukturen, die Kindesmissbrauch und andere Skandale begünstigten, bis heute nicht verändert worden seien. Notwendig sei eine unabhängige Kontrolle auch für die hohe Geistlichkeit: “Ab Domkapitularen aufwärts, auch für den Bischof.” Früher habe sich ein Kind, das missbraucht worden sei, möglicherweise nicht getraut, etwas zu sagen, “weil ein alter Mann gottgleich auftritt”, betonte Beck, der auch das “Wort zum Sonntag” in der ARD spricht.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Australian Associated Press
Wednesday 11 November 2015

A victim of a pedophile counsellor wore a wire to a meeting with his abuser in a bid to catch him out.

The victim recalled St Paul’s School counsellor Kevin John Lynch told him that headmaster Gilbert Case had called during the meeting to check the teen hadn’t beaten Lynch up.

The man’s brother read his testimony to the child sex abuse royal commission in Brisbane on Wednesday.

In the testimony, he recounted the moment, at 19, he realised the depravity of sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Lynch at the prestigious Brisbane school in the 1990s.

“It came out of nowhere and hit me like a bomb that I must to go to the police,” he said of his epiphany.

He subsequently went to the Boondall police station and was able to organise a meeting with Lynch at the counsellor’s home.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics

Mark Silk | Nov 11, 2015

Yesterday Pope Francis traveled to the heart of Renaissance Italy and conjured up the image of a Christian Humanism threatened by ancient heresies. Speaking in Florence’s famed Duomo at the Fifth National Ecclesial Congress of the Italian church, the pontiff seized on this year’s theme of “Jesus Christ, the new humanism” to warn against the “temptations” of Pelagianism and Gnosticism.

Christian Humanism, according to Francis, is all about humility, selflessness, and beatitude. “These features tell us that we must not be obsessed with power, even when this assumes the appearance of a useful or functional power in the social image of the Church,” he said.

Pelagianism takes its name from a fourth-century British monk who taught that human nature is untainted by original sin and thus it is within the power of the unaided mortal will to choose good over evil. This, said the pope, “leads the Church not to be humble, selfless and blessed. … Often it leads us even to assuming a style of control, of hardness, normativity. Rules give to the Pelagian the security of feeling superior, of having a precise orientation.”

Gnosticism, from the Greek word for knowledge, is the name given by historians to dualistic views held by a range of heretical groups in late antiquity. For Francis, it “leads us to place our trust in logical and clear reasoning that, however, loses the tenderness of our brother’s flesh.”

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 11 November 2015 (VIS) – The Holy Father has:

– appointed Fr. Karel Choennie as bishop of Paramaribo (area 163,829, population 505,580, Catholics 115,221, priests 18, permanent deacons 4, religious 16), Suriname. The bishop-elect was born in Suriname in 1958 and was ordained a priest in 1985. He holds a licentiate in pastoral theology from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and has served in a number of pastoral roles in the diocese of Paramaribo, including parish priest, episcopal vicar, member of the diocesan curia and vicar general. He is currently pastor of the St. Clement parish.

– accepted the resignation from the office of auxiliary of the archdiocese of Detroit, United States of America, presented by Archdiocese Francis R. Reiss, upon reaching the age limit.

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WASHINGTON
KING

John Langeler, KING 5 News November 10, 2015

As darkness set on St. Mary’s in Marysville Monday night, Fr. Dwight Lewis was hustling away in a caravan – the parish’s 5th leader in six years was gone.

“Right now, to tell you the truth, I want a revolt against the Archdiocese,” said Jovi Estella of the Parish Council.

Parishioners said the news blindsided them.

Fr. Lewis explained he’d been told to leave Monday morning and had to be gone by the end of the day.

“We want to know why they removed… just like this,” said parishioner Adriana Maldanado.

Supporters say Fr. Lewis helped unify St. Mary’s, bringing together different threads of the congregation, expanding help for the homeless, and was one of many to help after the Marysville-Pilchuck shooting.

But according to the Archdiocese, concerns were raised. A review found serious “administrative issues.”

Nothing illegal, the church said, but something that had to be dealt with “so parishioners know things are being handled responsibly.”

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

A Catholic priest, now working as a NSW Police Force chaplain, has been charged over the alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl in 2002 and 2003.

The 49-year-old man was arrested about 8.30am today in Narranera, a town in the Riverina region of southern NSW.

He was charged with aggravated sexual assault of a victim aged under 16, and has appeared in Wagga Wagga local court.

Police alleged he assaulted the then 10-year-old girl between September 2002 and January 2003.

He was remanded in custody and is expected to appear in the same court tomorrow.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

A NSW Catholic priest has been arrested over an alleged historical child sexual assault.

The 49-year-old priest and police chaplain has been charged with the aggravated sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl between September 2002 and January 2003.

He was arrested in Narrandera about 8.30am on Wednesday and faced Wagga Wagga Local Court, where he was remanded in custody.

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ITALIA
Corriere della Sera

di FIORENZA SARZANINI

Case di lusso affittate a prezzi stracciati, alberghi e centri estetici gestiti da società private e divenuti luoghi di incontro segreti, operazioni di compravendita con plusvalenze occultate: c’è anche questo trai documenti trafugati dai «corvi» del Vaticano. Elenchi con migliaia di nomi e indirizzi raccolti in vista di una «revisione» dei criteri per l’amministrazione del patrimonio immobiliare, in particolare quello di proprietà di Propaganda Fide. Liste di «clienti» eccellenti che fanno aumentare la preoccupazione di chi indaga per l’utilizzo di questi atti riservati che potrebbero diventare strumento di minacce e ricatti. Anche perché era stata proprio la Cosea, la commissione referente per lo studio dei problemi economici e amministrativi, a stilare l’elenco delle case di proprietà di ben 26 istituzioni. Sono almeno quattro gli alti prelati ascoltati negli ultimi giorni e la convinzione è che la resa dei conti all’interno della Santa Sede sia tuttora in corso. Ecco perché non si esclude che nuovi provvedimenti possano essere presi nei prossimi giorni. E che l’inchiesta possa coinvolgere altri religiosi dopo monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda – ancora in stato di arresto – e Francesca Chaouqui, rilasciata dopo aver iniziato a collaborare, entrambi accusati di aver «venduto» materiale che doveva invece rimanere riservato.

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ITALY
Corriere della Sera

di FIORENZA SARZANINI

Luxury homes rented at rock-bottom prices, hotels and beauty centres run by private companies used as secret meeting places, property sales listed at lower prices than those actually paid: these all feature in the documents stolen by Vatican moles. There are also lists with thousands of names and addresses collected in order to “review” the criteria used for the management of real estate, especially that owned by Propaganda Fide. These lists of exclusive “clients” have attracted the interest of investigators looking into the use of confidential documents as the potential basis for blackmail and threats. This is also because it was Cosea, the commission set up to study the Vatican’s economic and administrative problems, that drew up the list of houses owned by no fewer than 26 institutions. At least four senior prelates have been interviewed in recent days, and it is believed that there are still scores waiting to be settled within the Holy See. Consequently, further arrests may be made in coming days, and the investigation may involve other priests in the wake of the arrest of Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda – who is still being held in custody – and Francesca Chaouqui, released after she began to cooperate. Both have been charged with having “sold” material that should have remained confidential.

Saunas and hotels

Judicial investigations have revealed that buildings in Rome’s historic centre were converted into sauna and massage centres, often frequented by priests looking for sexual encounters. Inquiries also brought to light the identity of businessmen to whom Propaganda Fide leased entire buildings to use as hotels. A case in point is Mauritius Stornelli, brother of former Finmeccanica executive Sabatino Stornelli, whose company Burcardo in 2013 signed a contract for the lease of an entire building covering hundreds of square metres, converted into ultra-luxurious suites. Other properties were also involved, less prestigious but equally suitable for a highly select clientele. There are dozens of similar cases. Moreover – in addition to the list of private individuals who benefited from long-term leases at knock-down prices –, Propaganda Fide has relationships with dozens of companies which often served as covers for their real owners. Suffice it to say that the institution owns around 800 apartments covering a total of over 180,000 square metres. Checks carried out by the Gendarmerie revealed that the stolen documents include lists of all the tenants and the amounts they paid monthly. Further inquiries are focusing precisely on this, also because another religious institution has ended up “under observation”, namely the Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni, which owns a large number of properties and became famous for renting a house in the historic centre of the capital to the former finance minister, Giulio Tremonti.

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NEW MEXICO
KOB

Two of the most notorious alleged pedophile priests in New Mexico are still making headlines years after their deaths after a lawsuit was recently filed against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

In the past few days, two adult men have come forward after their child trauma triggered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a need for help.

Brad Hall is the new attorney for the alleged victims. He says the two new cases join 50 other cases his laws firm has filed over the past few years.

“They are alleging that the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and…in one of these cases, the Servants of the Paraclete, together put pedophile priests out into New Mexico parishes,” Hall said.

The suit names two priests: Father Bernard Bissonette and Father James Porter. Both are dead but are named in multiple suits against the Archdiocese.

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VATICAN CITY
Daily Mail (UK)

By SIMON TOMLINSON FOR MAILONLINE

Vatican-owned properties are being used by priests as brothels and massage parlours, according to the latest claims to emerge from the Vatileaks scandal.

The properties implicated in a report, leaked by a Vatican mole, include premises close to the Italian Parliament and a solarium near Piazza Barberini.

A Vatican department, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, owns hundreds of exclusive properties in central Rome, was also singled out in the document.

It claimed that Vatican officials were allowing buildings to be leased out at peppercorn rents as favours to powerful colleagues.

The document also alleged that they would allow dodgy property deals that would see addresses being used as brothels and illicit saunas, it was reported by The Independent.

The claims come two years after the Church was embarrassed by revelations that several priests shared an apartment block with Europe’s largest homosexual sauna.

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CANADA
CBC News

Former Catholic priest Eric Dejaeger is appealing 24 of his convictions for sex crimes against children in Igloolik, Nunavut, that took place more than 30 years ago. He hasn’t indicated yet on what legal grounds he’s appealing.

Dejaeger was convicted of 32 counts of child sex abuse and sentenced to 19 years in prison last February. He was found guilty on 24 of those counts following a trial, and had previously pleaded guilty to another eight.

He’s appealing the guilty verdicts from the trial, which were handed down on Sept. 12, 2014, the Crown’s office confirmed.

Dejaeger was in an Iqaluit courtroom today to speak to the matter. He has applied for funding through Nunavut’s Legal Services Board to get a lawyer.

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ARKANSAS
Arkansas Online

By Brandon Riddle

A former youth minister charged with 50 counts of video voyeurism earlier this year now faces additional rape charges related to the case, Jonesboro police said.

Anthony Waller, 39, of Marion was arrested Tuesday on two counts of rape of children believed by police to be 10 or 11 as part of an ongoing investigation into “a very large amount of child pornography” on his computer.

Evidence included “thousands of images of prepubescent girls either completely nude or scantily clad,” according to authorities.

Waller was arrested in Marion about 11 a.m. Tuesday, police said. Craighead County jail records show a booking time of about 12:45 p.m. He is being held at the jail pending a probable cause hearing Thursday.

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ARKANSAS
KAIT

JONESBORO, AR (KAIT) – A longtime children’s pastor in Jonesboro has been charged with computer child pornography, according to documents filed in Jonesboro District Court Wednesday afternoon.

Tony Waller, 39, had tens of thousands of files of nude or scantily clad pubescent girls in his possession, according to the Jonesboro Police Department.

Detective Brandon King, who is investigating Waller’s case, said it is one of the largest child pornography cases he has ever seen.

According to the affidavit, Waller’s wife told police she found child pornography on a laptop she and her husband shared. She told police while looking for a file, she stumbled across folders she did not recognize, which turned out to be thousands of videos and pictures of little girls.

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CALIFORNIA
Jewish Journal

by Haley Fox
Posted on Nov. 10, 2015

A rabbi arrested on felony charges of sexual abuse of a child entered a plea of not guilty at his arraignment Nov. 10 at the Airport Courthouse in Los Angeles. Sholom D. Levitansky, 39, of Sherman Oaks arrived at court wearing a suit and yarmulke, flanked by a handful of other men in similar dress, and one woman.

At the arraignment, Judge Keith Schwartz issued two oral orders restricting Levitansky’s behavior while he’s out on $370,000 bail. Schwartz told the rabbi that he’s prohibited from having contact with the two alleged female victims in the case, and that he is also forbidden from any contact in general with females younger than 18 years old.

The only condition Levitansky may make contact with female minors is if there’s another adult present who is aware of the charges against Levitansky.

“They’re going to watch you to make sure nothing else allegedly happens,” Schwartz said.

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CANADA
Windsor Star

SARAH SACHELI, WINDSOR STAR

Deborah Kloos believes in the power of prayer.

The Windsor woman was abused by her parish priest more three decades ago. She left the church for years, but with counselling and reflection, returned. Now she wants Catholics around the world to pray together once a year for people wounded by abuse.

“The only real hope is to pray together for healing to help restore a person’s broken spirit and give them hope,” Kloos said. “We can’t undo that pain, but we can at least show that we care by praying for them.”

Survivors of all kinds of abuse, not just those preyed on by clergy, should be included in the church’s intentions, Kloos said. Prayers should also be offered for all the good priests tainted by the scandal.

Kloos has been lobbying for a day of prayer for more than two years.

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AUSTRALIA
Independent Australia

For decades Nicky Davis was one of the silent majority of clergy abuse victims who believed no one would ever face responsibility for the many crimes against her. She finally reported her abuse after the appalling treatment of Australian survivors by Pope Benedict at World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney. Nicky’s perpetrator was arrested, despite the best efforts of church officials to hide the truth and she and the multiple eyewitnesses to her abuse prepared themselves for trial, until Australia’s predator friendly court system denied Nicky access to justice. Thanks to one of many convenient legal loopholes, another dangerous predator with dozens of victims walked free without a trial, unsupervised and is now being hidden by the church officials who helped him evade responsibility for his thousands of child sex crimes.

As a result, Nicky became a SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) Australialeader and a vocal advocate for justice for survivors, dedicated to ensuring sweeping law reform. Nicky was one of many who worked hard to achieve the announcement of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Recently Nicky was one of a small group of international survivors who protested the cannonisation of JPII in Rome and forced the international media to address the issue of his refusal to take action against known child sex predators. In 2014 Nicky spoke of her personal experience to the UN Committee Against Torture in Geneva, during the reviews of both the Holy See and Australia, supplementing the extensive documentary evidence prepared by human rights lawyers, and finally convincing the entire Committee that the sexual violation of children is indeed a most damaging form of torture.

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AUSTRALIA
The Conversation

Chris Goddard
Adjunct Professor, Child Abuse Prevention Research Australia, Monash University

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is shifting its attention from Brisbane Grammar to St Paul’s School. In two weeks’ time, the commission will return to issues in Melbourne and Ballarat. Anglican, non-denominational and Catholic institutions in different states are being scrutinised.

The adults who survived the abuse finally get the opportunity they were denied as children: to describe the abuse, after years of being silenced, and to identify the perpetrators and those who failed to listen and protect them.

Other adults are called to explain what they did, if anything, to protect the children and to stop the offenders. They will be asked about what was done to silence the children and to protect the institution. Some of these people are important – for example, Cardinal George Pell and former governor-general Peter Hollingworth.

The silencing of children has as long a history as child abuse itself. So many myths are used to silence children and minimise crimes: children were said to lie, fantasise and be seductive.

Neerosh Mudaly and I wrote a 2006 book about children’s experiences of abuse and professional interventions, The Truth is Longer Than a Lie, which has now been adapted for a play of the same name. Its premiere is in Melbourne on November 11.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Australian Associated Press
Wednesday 11 November 2015

Drugged and vulnerable in a paedophile counsellor’s office, the student pleaded “Please don’t do this”, the child sex abuse royal commission has heard.

But it didn’t stop Kevin John Lynch, an infamous abuser of boys at two Brisbane schools, from sadistically molesting him.

Now 33, the victim told the child sex abuse royal commission he endured a horror session with Lynch in 1996 where the counsellor sprayed an immobilising drug into his mouth, put “unbearable” pressure on his body and inserted a hypodermic needle into his penis.

Lynch then briefly performed oral sex on the boy, at that time a student at St Paul’s school.

But when, alongside another victim, the student went to then-headmaster Gilbert Case to complain about their treatment, their concerns were swatted away, he said.

“In his opinion [we] were lying,” he told the commission on Wednesday.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Conversation

John Pollard
Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

For the second time in four years, the Vatican has been plunged into crisis by the publication of books exposing not only the battles for power within its hallowed walls, but also the misbehaviour of staff members of the Roman curia, the governing bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In his latest book, Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’ Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican, investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi lays bare the resistance which the Argentinian pope has encountered in his efforts to clean up not only the Vatican Bank (Istituto per le Opere di Religione) but also the wider financial mismanagement that has been endemic in the Vatican for years.

The first claims about financial mismanagement, this time in the Vatican City of which the pope is head of state, came from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó who was head of its administration. After his claims were made public, Viganó was packed off to Washington as papal envoy to the US. But the “Vati-leaks” scandal really broke in January 2012 with programmes on Italian television that revealed the goings-on behind the scenes in the Vatican of Benedict XVI.

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INDIA
UCA News

A bishop has refuted charges that a jailed priest from his central Indian diocese raped a nine-year-old girl.

Father Joseph Dhanaswami, 44, a priest from Ambikapur Diocese in Chhattisgarh state, was arrested Sept. 11 on charges of sexually abusing a fourth-grade student at Jyoti Mission High School where he was principal.

“The priest has been put in jail through no fault of his own,” Bishop Patras Minj of Ambikapur told ucanews.com. The case was fabricated in a bid to defame the church, “which is popular among poor people because of its services,” he said.

The state’s top court rejected a bail application by Father Dhanaswami on Oct. 26 after prosecutors told the court that a chemical analysis found “semen and human spermatozoa” in the girl’s undergarments.

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UNITED STATES
The New Yorker

BY RICHARD BRODY

The fine points of journalistic investigation are often thrilling to observe in the new movie “Spotlight,” nowhere more so than in the document-centered work by which reporters coax information from the government. Set mainly in 2001, the movie unfolds the work done by a quartet of reporters at the Boston Globe (called the Spotlight team) who revealed that many local priests had been sexually preying on minors, that the church had been doing its best to cover up their crimes, and that the local government was also complicit in that cover-up.

Yet, despite the movie’s stirring depiction of the vital societal role played by fearlessly independent newspapers, and despite its vision of horrific but essential truths revealed by deeply committed journalists, “Spotlight” ultimately leaves behind the numbing satisfaction of familiar emotions and the dull thud of familiar gratifications. What the movie needed to do was to spark curiosity and fascination about the psychology of the people involved in the investigation (including those involved against their will).

That investigation involves personal sources and academic research, and it gets its emotional fury from the testimonies of victims. But the movie’s McGuffin, the very pivot of the story, is a court motion made by the newspaper seeking the release of hitherto-sealed documents related to suits brought by victims against the Archdiocese. The moment of triumph involves a judge whose ruling frees up another batch of documents and a court clerk who controls access to a photocopy machine.

The judge before whom the newspaper and the Archdiocese plead, Constance Sweeney (who is played in the film by Laurie Heineman), is a former Catholic-school student who is believed to be favorable to the Church. As it turns out (no spoiler here), Sweeney rules in the Globe’s favor, which helps the Spotlight team push their investigation forward. As I watched the movie, I was utterly frustrated—I wanted the camera to be a fly on the wall in Judge Sweeney’s chambers as she discussed the case with her law clerk, or perhaps with a colleague, so that her reasoning would become part of the film. No such luck; the ruling is delivered, and the journalists get back to work.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Christian Today

Ruth Gledhill CHRISTIAN TODAY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR 10 November 2015

A top politician in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, has condemned the Church of England and the Bishop of Winchester for the way a safeguarding inquiry in connection with the island’s Dean has been handled.

In correspondence seen by Christian Today, Senator Sir Philip Bailhache, former Bailiff of Jersey, has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby complaining that the Anglican church on the island is “in limbo” as a result of a failure to publish a report into the incident.

In his strongly-worded letter, Sir Philip describes the situation as “intolerable” and warns that unless the Bishop of Winchester Tim Dakin grasps the nettle and publishes the report, “irreparable damage” will be done to relations between the Church of England and the church in Jersey.

The Bailiwick of Jersey is a self-governing democratic Crown dependency with its own financial and judicial systems. The Anglican church was part of the Winchester diocese but was moved to Canterbury by Archbishop Welby as a result of the row over the case.

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UNITED STATES
News 10

By Andrew Murphy
Published: November 10, 2015

BOSTON (AP) – High-ranking leaders of the Catholic church have sent talking points to U.S. dioceses in advance of the wide release of “Spotlight,” a movie detailing the Boston Globe’s 2002 investigation into the church’s cover-up of clergy abuse.

The Boston Globe reports the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops formulated the guidance, complete with statistics, in September in anticipation of the film’s Nov. 20 nationwide release.

A spokesman for the group, Don Clemmer, says church officials wanted to prepare clergy members for speaking with victims who might be experiencing pain coinciding with the movie’s release, and to show that the church has changed.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

by Saskia Edwards

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is still in Brisbane.

Amanda Gearing is a Walkley Award winning journalist who has been helping hundreds of victims for over a decade.

Her submission to the Royal Commission in 2012 suggested that Brisbane Grammar, St Paul’s and the Brisbane Anglican Diocese be looked at as part of the inquiry.

Steve spoke to Amanda who has been sitting in on the Royal Commission hearings.

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AUSTRALIA
Courier-Mail

MATTHEW KILLORAN THE COURIER-MAIL NOVEMBER 11, 2015

THE MAN who blew the whistle on serial pedophile Kevin Lynch said it: “It hit me like a bomb that I must go to police”.

The former St Paul’s School student went to police and wore a wire to get evidence against him.

Police later arrested Lynch in 1997 on nine counts of sexual abuse. The school counsellor killed himself the next day.

But the former student, known as BSE, then faced a battle against the school when he took legal action against them for what happened.

BSE told the story of how he brought down Lynch to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse this afternoon.

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UNITED STATES
Mercury News

By Randy Myers
San Jose Mercury News Correspondent
POSTED: 11/09/2015

Gracefully understated yet undeniably powerful, “Spotlight” not only captures what it feels like to be a pack of journalists hot on the trail of a clergy abuse scandal, but richly re-creates the Boston setting and the shocking culture of silence within the Catholic Church hierarchy and beyond. It rivals “All the President’s Men” in a portrayal of journalism so crisply executed by director and co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy,you’re likely to hear even more about it at Oscar time.

Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams headline a top-notch ensemble cast in a taut drama that exactingly conveys a place and time when old-school investigative reporting held sway — the sort that exposes malfeasance in high places and makes heads roll.

In 2002, reporters on the Boston Globe’s Spotlight regional investigative team dug up a shocker. At the urging of a new executive editor who saw something they had not, the reporters uncovered 70 pedophile priests the Catholic Church had protected over decades — in the heart of a city where the church was sacrosanct and a vital part of many lives. The series earned the Globe a Pulitzer for public service reporting in 2003 and triggered numerous investigations.

“Spotlight” is likely to stir your outrage, but McCarthy and co-screenwriter Josh Singer (TV’s “West Wing”) go beyond mere provocation. They put us into the worn-out shoes of a motley team of reporters, nailing all the details of what a newsroom looks and feels like just as the newspaper industry was preparing to take a big hit from the internet.

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UNITED STATES
East Bay Express

By Kelly Vance

For most Americans, especially those in law enforcement and news gathering, the public opinion tipping point on the issue of child sexual abuse by adult authority figures came on January 6, 2002, when the Boston Globe published a bombshell investigation of pedophilic crimes committed under the nose of the Roman Catholic church in that city. Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight tells the story and the story behind the story in a brisk, businesslike fashion from the newspaper’s point of view, buoyed by sharp performances from a large cast of character actors.

Ask anyone who has ever worked in one — there’s no place in the world quite so alive as a newsroom an hour before deadline. A flurry of activity but also of ideas, people pinging off each other, a clatter of opinions, the talk of the town. Of course, print publications are not what they used to be, and today’s broadcast and online media offer a degree of heat but little light. With that in mind, the central subplot of Spotlight — the title refers to the Globe’s hush-hush squad of investigative reporters — functions as a tribute to the time-consuming, old-fashioned business of developing sources, knocking on doors, asking the same questions day after day, boiling down mountains of hearsay and random information, and either coming up with a usable story, or throwing it all away and going after something else. A romantic concept? Yes, but in its way a microcosm of democracy.

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AUSTRALIA
New South Wales Police Force

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

Police from Griffith Local Area Command have charged a Catholic priest over an alleged historical sexual offence.

The 49-year-old man was arrested in Narrandera about 8.30am today (Wednesday 11 November 2015).

He has been charged with aggravated sexual assault of victim under the age of 16 years.

The man appeared in Wagga Wagga Local Court today, where he was remanded in custody to face the same court tomorrow (Thursday 12 November 2015).

It is alleged the man sexually assaulted a then 10-year-old girl between September 2002 and January 2003.

A process is underway to suspend the man from his duties as a police chaplain.

The investigation continues.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

A NSW Catholic priest has been arrested over an alleged historical child sexual assault.

The 49-year-old priest and police chaplain has been charged with the aggravated sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl between September 2002 and January 2003.

He was arrested in Narrandera about 8.30am on Wednesday and faced Wagga Wagga Local Court, where he was remanded in custody.

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CALIFORNIA
Al Jazeera

At least 16 states have no statute of limitations for rape cases in face of rape kit backlog, delays in reporting crimes

November 10, 2015
by Marisa Taylor @marisahtaylor

A California lawmaker plans to introduce legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations on rape and some sexual assault cases, joining a handful of other U.S. states that have made the same move.

State Senator Connie M. Leyva, a Democrat from Chino, California said Monday that when the new legislative session begins in January, she will propose scrapping the 10-year statute of limitations on rape cases. The proposed bill would also apply to sexual assault cases involving lewd or lascivious acts, child sexual abuse, oral sex and sexual penetration.

“A sexual predator should not be able to evade legal consequences in California for no other reason than that the time limits set in state law have expired,” Leyva said Monday in a release. “Victims should have the opportunity to prove their accusations in a court of law, even if it is over a decade after the offense was committed.”

The issue of expired statutes of limitations in sex crimes cases has been up for public debate in recent months after reports of allegations by more than a dozen women accusing comedian Bill Cosby of raping or sexually assaulting them. Many of the women’s cases date back to the 1970s and 1980s, meaning that the statute of limitations for criminal suits has expired, although the accusers can — and have — since filed civil suits against him. Cosby has denied the charges.

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MISSOURI
Berger’s Beat

Following a 2.5 week trial, a Minnesota jury has awarded $8 million to a victim of predator priest Fr. Vincent Fitzgerald, who spent 13 years in Belleville (and shorter stints in Alton, Godfrey and Peoria until his death in 2009). He also worked in Mansfield in the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese. .

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MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation

11/10/2015

Jennifer Haselberger

If you have ever wondered what Dante’s hell would look like if populated by the former leaders (and I use that word loosely) of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, I suggest that you pick up Saint Paul poet Zach Czaia’s slim new book of poems Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota).

In his poem ‘If Dante Were Alive Today’, the one feasting on heads and brains is not Count Ugolino but Archbishop John Nienstedt, and the treasonous one providing who makes up the meal is none other than the former Vicar General, Father Kevin McDonough.

There are several other poems in the collection that refer explicitly to the sexual abuse crisis in our Archdiocese, while others offer poetic reflections on Zach’s experiences teaching in the Minneapolis public school system, his days as a high school quarterback, and his Catholic faith. All are extremely accessible and intriguing, and, as the jacket cover suggests, ‘present a mode of healing in a difficult hour’.

Amen.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Yorkshire Evening Post

Tuesday 10 November 2015

A retired Roman Catholic priest is set to appear in court accused of historic sexual abuse offences at a West Yorkshire children’s home.

Roy Lovatt, 70, from Redcar, has been charged with five counts of indecent assault and seven counts of a serious sexual offence. He will appear at Leeds Magistrates’ Court on December 9.

In a statement today, West Yorkshire Police said the charges against Lovatt relate to alleged abuse at the former Thorp Arch Grange Children’s Home, in Wetherby, in the 1970s and 1980s.

The force has also revealed that two men and a woman have been charged over alleged historic sexual abuse at the former Shadwell children’s home in Leeds in the 1980s and 1990s. …

A spokesman for the Diocese of Middlesbrough said: “The Roman Catholic Diocese of Middlesbrough can confirm that it is aware that a retired priest in the Diocese has been assisting West Yorkshire Police with their enquiries into allegations of historic offences and that on November 9 2015 he was formally charged.

“The offences with which he is charged relate to a time before he was ordained as a Catholic priest.

“The Diocese can further confirm that the priest concerned has not exercised any ministry since the inquiries began and will not be doing so for the time being.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
National Catholic Reporter

Marie Rohde | Nov. 10, 2015

MILWAUKEE
It took less than two hours for a federal judge to approve a plan that will allow the Milwaukee archdiocese to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy after nearly five years of legal battles.

Archbishop Jerome Listecki spoke briefly Nov. 9 in a courtroom packed with sexual abuse survivors and more than 20 lawyers. Listecki praised the abuse victims for coming forward, saying they had raised the consciousness of the archdiocese and elsewhere.

“There is no resolution that will bring back what they have lost,” said Listecki, adding that he hopes the confirmation of the plan will turn the corner for the archdiocese, allowing it to focus on charitable, educational and spiritual work. “When we have a strong church, we have a strong community.”

One survivor, Mark Atkinson, stood up in court and questioned why it took so long for the archdiocese to deal with the issue.

“I went to the archdiocese in 1993 and nothing changed until 2002,” Atkinson said, adding that the archdiocese was covering up the scores of allegations that had come forward. “Why did we have to wait until 2002?”

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on a story in today’s Boston Globe

On the front page of the Metro Section in today’s Boston Globe, there is a story about the movie “Spotlight” that smacks of bias and gullibility; the former is driving the latter.

Lisa Wangsness relies on Terence McKiernan of Bishop Accountability for her data. She writes that he told her that “the bishops could have agreed to make lists of abusive priests available nationwide.” Referring to him again, she writes that “More than 2,400 abusive priests nationwide have never been named.”

First, McKiernan is known for making up figures on the fly. A few years ago, after he told a sympathetic audience he was going to “stick it” to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, he accused him of “keeping the lid on 55 priests.” That is a lie. Several times I have personally challenged him to name the names and every time he runs.

Second, the term “abusive priests” is meaningless. Were they simply accused or was there a credible accusation made against them? Were the accusations substantiated or unsubstantiated? Was there a finding of guilt? Wangsness never tells us because it obviously doesn’t matter to her.

Third, what institution, including the Boston Globe, publishes the names of employees who have had an accusation made against them?

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UNITED STATES
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

BY CARY DARLING
cdarling@dfw.com

The new film Spotlight, opening Friday in North Texas, would seem to have it all.

It boasts a stellar cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber and Stanley Tucci. It’s directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy, who earned plaudits for such earlier films as The Station Agent and the Oscar-nominated The Visitor. Co-writer Josh Singer spent many years writing for such TV series as The West Wing and Fringe.

To top it off, it has the kind of loud, award-season buzz that could translate into big box-office.

But Spotlight, based on the journalistic investigation that exploded into the Roman Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal in the early 2000s, came close to never seeing the light of the multiplex.

“This movie almost fell apart three times. And when I say almost fell apart, it did fall apart,” says McCarthy by phone from Washington, D.C. “That just speaks to the environment of the industry right now and how difficult it is to get movies like this made — adult movies that are about something.”

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ITALY
RTE News

Pope Francis has called for a Catholic Church that is not cosseted, self-centred and obsessed with power and money.

His landmark statement, delivered in Florence to Italy’s bishops, comes ten days after leaks from a papal commission prompted the Vatican to arrest commission members, Fr Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, and public relations executive, Francesca Chaouqui.

Today’s plea for a different type of global Church comes two days after Pope Francis vowed to forge ahead with reforms despite evidence in the leaked documents that he is meeting resistance from the Vatican’s old guard.

The reforms have included an overhaul of the scandal-plagued Vatican bank to make its operations transparent, giving autonomy to its Financial Intelligence Authority in order to avoid interference by top cardinals, and urging Church officials to shun extravagant lifestyles.

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CALIFORNIA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Statement by Joelle Casteix of Orange County California, SNAP Southern California director (949-322-7434, jcasteix@gmail.com)

We applaud a California legislator’s move to reform the state’s predator-friendly statute of limitations in sexual violence cases.

[Los Angeles Times]

To us, this bill is about prevention, not justice. If passed, more predators will be exposed and more crimes will be prevented. It’s just that simple.

Every single person who has been sexually traumatized should have his or her “day in court.” Every single offender should be exposed and punished. But even more, every single adult and child in California should be protected from rapists and molesters. If only one man, woman or child avoids decades of devastating pain because of this proposal, it will have all been worth it.

This notion, raised by defense lawyers, of “balancing rights” in rape cases is bunk. The privacy rights of criminals are secondary. The safety rights of kids and adults are primary.

Statutes of limitations are archaic and dangerous. They give people who commit and conceal sexual violence incentives to silence victims, intimidate witnesses, discredit whistleblowers, destroy evidence, fabricate alibis and sometimes flee the area or the country. They enable and encourage more crimes and cover ups. They must be repealed or radically relaxed.

The measure is sponsored by State Sen. Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino).

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TEXAS
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Tuesday, November 10, 2015

For more information: David Clohessy, Executive Director of SNAP (davidgclohessy@gmail.com, 314-566-9790), Barbara Dorris, Outreach Director of SNAP (bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org, 314-503-0003)

Fifty-five year old murder case still stalled
Texas prosecutor pledged in his campaign to reopen the file
But District Attorney has not issued an update in six months
A victim’s group is writing him, begging for “action & transparency”
“File charges now, while the suspect and witnesses are still alive,” says SNAP

Six months ago, a high profile, unsolved, decades-old murder investigation in McAllen was re-opened by a new district attorney. Now, a victims group is writing the prosecutor and urging him to disclose the status of the case and file charges against the most widely known suspect.

[Texas Monthly]

A year and a half has passed since Ricardo Rodriguez won an election to become the prosecutor of Hidalgo County. During the campaign, he repeatedly pledged to re-examine the murder of Irene Garza, a 25 year old teacher.

[Valley Central]

“Irene’s family deserves justice. The public deserves protection. And citizens deserve information,” said David Clohessy, director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “Rodriguez should act now while the main suspect and key witnesses are still alive. At a bare minimum, he should issue a public update and a plea to others with information to come forward immediately.”

Garza disappeared on April 16, 1960, after telling her mother she was going to confession at McAllen’s Sacred Heart Church. Four days later her body was pulled from an irrigation canal.

A priest at the church, Father John Feit, was the prime suspect in Garza’s death. The cleric admitted that he had heard Garza’s confession that evening, and other evidence also linked him to the crime. However, Feit, who now lives in Arizona, was never prosecuted for the murder.

Decades later, Rodriguez challenged long time district attorney Rene Guerra in his run for a ninth term after 32 years in the office. Rodriguez, a former judge, specifically referenced Guerra’s failure to prosecute the old murder case in his campaign.

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ROME
Independent (UK)

Michael Day Rome @michael2day

Vatican-owned properties in Rome are operating as seedy saunas and massage parlours where priests pay for sex, according to the latest in a series of leaked reports to embarrass the Church.

It is also claimed that Vatican officials are allowing buildings to be rented out at peppercorn rents as favours to powerful colleagues and turning a blind eye to shady property deals, as well as allowing addresses to be used as red-light establishments.

Among the properties mentioned in the document, made public by a Vatican mole, are premises in two streets close to the Italian Parliament and a solarium near Piazza Barberini, according to press reports.

One particular Vatican department, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, has been highlighted in the list. It owns hundreds of high-value properties in central Rome, worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Two years ago it emerged the Vatican had purchased a €23m (£16m) share of a Rome apartment block, 2 Via Carducci, which housed the Europa Multiclub, Europe’s biggest gay sauna. Tales of visiting priests were legion, and a section of the sauna’s website promoting special “bear nights” included a video of a hirsute man stripping down and changing into a priest’s outfit.

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UNITED KINGDOM
ITV

Three men and a woman have been charged with historic offences relating to sexual abuse at children’s homes in Leeds.

The four were arrested as part of Operation Polymer, an ongoing investigation into physical and sexual abuse at children’s homes in Leeds in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

70-year-old Roy Lovatt from Redcar has been charged with five counts of indecent assault and seven counts of buggery. The charges relate to the former Thorp Arch Grange Children’s Home, in Wetherby, in the 1970s and 1980s.

A further three people have been charged in relation to events at the former Shadwell children’s home in the 1980s and 1990s.

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UNITED STATES
Crux

By Lisa Wangsness
The Boston Globe November 10, 2015

Roman Catholic Church leaders in the United States have sent talking points to dioceses around the country to help them prepare for the release of the movie “Spotlight,” highlighting the progress the Church says it has made in preventing and responding to the sexual abuse of children by clergy.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops drew up the guidance and statistics in September in anticipation of the movie’s release, said Don Clemmer, a spokesman for the bishops. He said Church leaders wanted dioceses to be ready to speak to victims who experienced pain with the release of the movie, and to show them — and the wider public — that the Church has changed.

Letters from bishops and stories in diocesan newspapers issued in recent days endeavor to portray a Church dramatically — and permanently — transformed by the abuse crisis since The Boston Globe’s 2002 investigation of clergy abuse and the coverup by Church hierarchy. The film chronicles that Globe investigation.

In their public responses so far, the bishops reiterate apologies to victims and in some cases offer phone numbers they can call to seek counseling or report abuse. They also detail abuse prevention efforts, renew vows to immediately report abuse complaints to civil authorities, and highlight the American Church’s zero-tolerance policy that mandates the removal of predators from the Church. …

But Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org, an organization that tracks the abuse crisis, said the bishops have failed to fully address issues related to the abuse crisis that remain unresolved.

For example, he said, the bishops could have agreed to make lists of abusive priests available nationwide. Only about 30 of the 178 dioceses have done so, he said. Boston is one that has provided a list, although advocates complain it is incomplete. More than 2,400 abusive priests nationwide have never been named, he said, and it is impossible to know how many are still living.

“In a way, the movie is all about that issue: Who are these men who have done these things, how many are there, what are their names? Where have they worked? What have they done? It’s all about making a list,” he said. “I think it’s such an obvious thing to address for the bishops, especially those who haven’t made a list yet.”

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NEW YORK
Crux

By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor November 10, 2015

NEW YORK – While describing sensational recent leaks of secret materials from a papal study commission he led as “very sad,” the Vatican’s key lay financial adviser nevertheless insists those leaks “definitely” will not stop the march toward transparency and accountability on Pope Francis’ watch.

“In no way will it have an impact on all the work that’s being done, or the intention of the Holy Father to get the reform going,” said Joseph F.X. Zahra, a Maltese economist who’s the senior lay member of a new Council for the Economy in the Vatican created by Francis in 2014 to oversee financial policy.

Zahra said that if the aim of the disclosures was to slow down the pace of change, “it definitely will not work.”

Zahra spoke to Crux on Monday in New York, during a speaking tour of North America organized by the US branch of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, a body dedicated to promoting Catholic social teaching.

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IDAHO
KREM

Taylor Viydo, KREM.com November 3, 2015

KOOTENAI COUNTY, Idaho — A man who knew a Coeur d’Alene truck driver accused of abusing underage boys spoke out on Tuesday. He said the suspect abused one of his relatives.

Court documents stated Kevin Sloniker, 30, is accused of sexually abusing ten different boys between 2005 and 2015.

Since this man’s relative reported an incident of unwanted touching involving Sloniker, KREM 2 agreed to not reveal his identity so we will be referring to him as Ralph. He said he thought that Sloniker was socially awkward, but he was extremely surprised when these allegations against him surfaced.

Ralph said he first met Sloniker while attending camp where Sloniker was a counselor. One of Ralph’s relatives was friends with Sloniker and told detectives about an incident of unwanted touching when he was a teenager. Ralph said he was not aware of that until court documents in this case were released.

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DELAWARE
Christian Today

Ruth Gledhill CHRISTIAN TODAY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR 10 November 2015

A US judge is considering whether it is constitutional to have a law that protects the clergy of just one religious denomination from disclosing what is said to them in confession.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Mary Miller Johnston, who has served on the Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee to the Delaware State Bar Association and who is a member of the board of governors of Wesley Theological Seminary, is considering whether legislation should apply to elders in a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation.

Delaware currently protects Catholic priests from disclosing to police any child abuse or other crime disclosed to them in confession, and is not the only state to do so. The priest-penitent privilege is regarded in law in the US, UK and elsewhere as similar to the lawyer-client confidentiality privilege and usually protects ministers of all religions and denominations within those religions.

The Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit against the Laurel Delaware Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses last year alleging two elders failed to report a sexual relationship between an adult female member of the church and a 14-year-old boy, Delaware Online reported.

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VATICAN CITY
The Economist

THE Vatican is an oddity: a state within a city that is the capital of another state. Seldom have the anomalous relationships between the Vatican, Rome and Italy been more in evidence than this week. On November 5th, two books came out in Italy that included the latest in a long series of eyebrow-raising revelations about the Vatican’s finances. Both draw on leaks from confidential reports prepared for Pope Francis and his predecessor, Benedict XVI, as part of a drive to clean up the Vatican’s act (not least in order to comply with international regulations on money-laundering and the funding of terrorism).

Three days before publication, the papal spokesman revealed that detectives of the Vatican Gendarmerie had traced the origin of the leaks and locked up two former members of a committee established by Francis to advise him on restructuring his financial bureaucracy. Francesca Chaouqui, a public-relations executive who denies any wrongdoing, was let go after being detained overnight in a convent. But a senior Vatican prelate, Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, was still being held as The Economist went to press. (He has been detained in the same lock-up in which the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was confined in 2012, after he was fingered as the source of the last big leak of embarrassing Vatican secrets.) Neither Ms Chaouqui, an Italian, nor Monsignor Vallejo, a Spaniard, has Vatican citizenship. But the pope’s prosecutor claims jurisdiction over their alleged offences. If indicted, they risk up to eight years in jail.

The books’ allegations may trouble the consciences of the Catholic church’s leaders. They hardly square with the church of (and for) the poor that Francis says he seeks. One of the authors claims the Holy See’s real-estate holdings, not including church properties such as cathedrals, are worth at least €4 billion ($4.4 billion). He also says a fund for the care of sick children paid €200,000 towards the conversion of a cardinal’s penthouse apartment and €23,800 to charter a helicopter for him.

Other disclosures bear on the Vatican’s relationship with Italy. According to a leaked auditors’ report, the Vatican earns €60m a year selling petrol, cigarettes and other products at below-market prices in Italy. They should be available only to the city-state’s citizens, yet more than 40,000 Italians are said to have cards giving them access to the shops beyond the Vatican’s walls. One of the books reports a request from Italian prosecutors for information on a named individual suspected of hiding taxable assets in the Vatican bank. (Vatican officials insist all accounts opened without good reason by lay Italians are now blocked.)

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Bruce Vielmetti of the Journal Sentinel

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley on Monday confirmed the Archdiocese of Milwaukee reorganization plan, marking a milestone in the longest-running and most contentious of the 14 Catholic Church bankruptcies filed since 2004 to address sexual abuse liabilities going back decades.

“I hope a page can be turned,” Kelley said at the end of the approximately two-hour hearing, “that there will be some peace for survivors and the archdiocese can go back to its important ministries.”

There was no sense of celebration among the many parties packing the courtroom — more a sense of relief, resignation and some bitterness that the proceedings were over, more than four years after the archdiocese filed for protection and three months after the outline of the plan was announced.

The bankruptcy plan will pay about $21 million to survivors — of which their own lawyers will take a share — and set up a $500,000 fund for continued therapy.

An additional $8 million will pay the archdiocese’s legal fees plus those of the creditors’ committee. That’s on top of about $12 million already paid out. Two dozen attorneys appeared before Kelley on Monday.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 10 November 2015 (VIS) – The director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., in response to questions from journalists, today affirmed that:

“There is no basis to the reports in some articles claiming that in recent days, as part of the investigations in process in the Vatican, a number of cardinals and high prelates have been heard (it has even been stated that four cardinals were involved). This is absolutely false.

“Similarly, the reports in recent days in some articles regarding contacts with the Italian authorities by Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello in relation to the problems of leaked documents are entirely untrue”.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Eagle-Tribune

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

David Clohessy

Only one predator priest appears in “Spotlight,” the already acclaimed film about clergy sex crimes and coverups in the Boston Archdiocese that opens next month. He’s the now-defrocked Ronald H. Paquin.

That’s fortuitous, because just weeks ago, Paquin walked out of prison.

Paquin is known to have sexually abused more than 40 boys. Once, with four boys in his car, he crashed. One boy died, and another was badly injured. The surviving boys later said he had been drinking while driving.

Weeks ago, Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said “Paquin poses a danger to the community.”

Sadly, however, two state experts disagree. In light of their psychiatric evaluations, the ex-priest cannot be civilly committed to a lock-down center for sexual predators.

So after a decade behind bars, Paquin has been freed from prison. What now?

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ITALY
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Nov. 10, 2015

FLORENCE, ITALY
Pope Francis has strongly outlined anew a comprehensive vision for the future of the Catholic church, forcefully telling an emblematic meeting of the entire Italian church community here that our times require a deeply merciful Catholicism that is unafraid of change.

In a 49-minute speech to a decennial national conference of the Italian church — which is bringing together some 2,200 people from 220 dioceses to this historic renaissance city for five days — Francis said Catholics must realize: “We are not living an era of change but a change of era.”

“Before the problems of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally,” the pontiff said at one point during his remarks.

“Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives — but is alive, knows being unsettled, enlivened,” said the pope. “It has a face that is not rigid, it has a body that moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: it is called Jesus Christ.”

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MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation

11/09/2015

Jennifer Haselberger

What follows is the acceptance speech that I delivered this part weekend at the Call to Action Conference in Milwaukee.

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Frank Bruni wrote of the dangers of genuflecting too readily before society’s temples, religious or otherwise, and rued the damage that is caused when faith is truly blind. Bruni was reflecting, as one might expect, on the film Spotlight, which opened this week in New York, Los Angeles, and, significantly, Boston. Spotlight, as I am sure you all know, recounts the story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation into the history of sexual abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston.

Many of you will probably remember when the Boston Globe began releasing its articles in the spring of 2002. You may also recall that one of the starting points for the Globe investigation was the James Porter case from the early 1990s. Most people associate Porter with Massachusetts, and especially his home diocese of Fall River, where he would later admit to having abused over 100 children in the 1960s. But Porter’s attempts at treatment brought him to Minnesota, my home state, where he lived for nearly twenty years before returning to Massachusetts to stand trial. It was the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis that advanced Porter’s request for laicization, a process that allowed him to subsequently enter into marriage in the Catholic Church. In fact, he was married at my home parish, not long after my baptism at the same church. Some of his children, my contemporaries, were baptized in the very same font as I was. Eventually, he and his wife moved their family to the suburbs, where they attended the same parish as my cousins. Porter was also permitted to volunteer as a math tutor at the nearby Catholic school. Permitted until, that is, his arrest and conviction for molesting his children’s babysitter.

In his reflection on the film, Bruni writes of what many critics have described as one of the most difficult moments of Spotlight, when the plaintiff’s attorney representing many of the abuse victims tells a reporter from the Boston Globe to mark his words: ‘If it takes a village to raise a child’, the lawyer warns, ‘it takes a village to abuse one’.

The Porter case epitomizes this view of widespread complicity in the sexual abuse scandal. Porter has been accused of molesting as many as 68 children between 1960 and 1963; abuse that was largely kept secret because of a culture of shame and denial. Nonetheless, by 1963 at least four parents had approached church officials with reports of abuse, prompting Porter’s transfer to a new town and a new parish. His second assignment lasted a mere two years, and was followed by a stint in a treatment facility operated by the Servants of the Paraclete. After less than two years in treatment, Porter was assigned to church-run halfway house in northern Minnesota and then to the parish of St Philip in Bemidji. Within months Porter began to abuse children in Minnesota, and so he was sent to a new treatment facility in St Louis where he eventually decided to leave the priesthood. By 1971, Porter was living in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and working at a bank.

There is no question that church officials in Massachusetts and Minnesota were aware of Porter’s history when they allowed him access to parishes and parishioners. The Diocese of Fall River reassigned Porter after receiving complaints from parents. The diocese in northern Minnesota where he served, the Diocese of Crookston, was governed by a bishop with a particular concern for so-called troubled priests, who had invited the Servants of the Paraclete to open a halfway house in his diocese. And, out of all, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis was probably the most informed, as it was the Archdiocese that processed Porter’s laicization, gave permission for his marriage, and was implicated in the first of his criminal trials.

It took the reporters at the Boston Globe two years to assemble the jagged pieces of the Porter story- two years in which they struggled to assemble the facts to show who knew what and when. I never read the Globe reports. I was living in Belgium in 2002, and so I was both linguistically and geographically isolated from the scandal that was engulfing the American Catholic Church. Then again, when I eventually decided to look into the Porter case in 2013, I didn’t have to work nearly as hard as the Globe reporters to figure out who was to blame. That is because when I decided to look into the matter, I had the files at my fingertips. In a cardboard box sitting on the floor of my office at the Chancery in Saint Paul, I had four files on Porter that had been part of the private archive of Archbishop John Roach.

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UNITED STATES
Miami New Times

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of Boston Globe reporters exposed the scope of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church not just in Boston but worldwide. The film is less an elegy for the art and craft of news reporting than a rallying cry. If journalism were really dying, how could it inspire art this vital? Though it’s set in 2001 and early 2002 — practically ancient times in the distressing recent history of newspapers — Spotlight feels both timeless and modern, a dexterously crafted film that could have been made anytime but somehow feels perfect for right now.

This is also the story of the difference an outsider can make in a historically clannish city: The picture opens with a prologue, set in 1976, that dramatizes in fleet shorthand the way the Boston Archdiocese had, for many years, quickly and efficiently dealt with clergy members who’d molested children — by hustling those priests into a “treatment center” and then off to a faraway parish, where the cycle could all too easily be repeated. Flash forward to the summer of 2001, when the pedigreed Boston Globe gets a new editor, direct from the less highborn Miami Herald: Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) hadn’t grown up in Boston, as many Globe reporters and editors had; he was also Jewish, as many Globe reporters and editors were not.

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WISCONSIN
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

CONTACT: Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director, 414.429.7259

(SNAP Statements on the bankruptcy settlement today here and here.)

Letter to Pope Francis from deaf survivors of St. John’s School on behalf of the 575 survivors in the Milwaukee Archdiocese Bankruptcy.

November 9, 2015

Dear Pope Francis,

We are writing to you as deaf survivors of childhood sexual assault by Father Lawrence Murphy who operated for decades St. John’s School for the Deaf in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. As far as we know, in the mid 1970’s we were the first victims of these crimes to publicly come forward anywhere in the world. We did so very reluctantly and only after learning that the Milwaukee Archdiocese, with the likely knowledge and advice of Vatican officials, was continuing to cover up the crimes of Fr. Murphy and leave deaf children at risk.

Ours has been a long and difficult journey for justice since then, both for our deaf brothers and sisters but also for our many hearing brothers and sisters who are fellow survivors from the Milwaukee Archdiocese, especially the 575 brave souls who came forward five years ago to file cases in to Federal Bankruptcy Court. We all did so at the explicit urging of Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki who promised us “healing and resolution” through this court process.

It is very clear to us that the bankruptcy court has been neither an instrument of healing or resolution, much less justice.

This five year bankruptcy has been a wounding and revictimizing experience for survivors and for the Catholic community. The most important issues about the church cover up of sex crimes in Milwaukee remain unanswered and unresolved, especially the disturbing pattern of financial fraud and mismanagement by church officials. The most obvious example is the transfer of nearly $60 million dollars by former Archbishop Timothy Dolan into a so-called “Cemetery Trust” before the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy. Evidence has repeatedly surfaced in court showing a pattern of financial corruption, most glaringly a letter from Dolan to the Vatican seeking permission to create the Cemetery Trust in order to keep US courts from compensation victims such as ourselves.

Twice as much money in the bankruptcy settlement will be going to church and other lawyers (the most lavish legal profits of any church bankruptcy in US history), than to all 575 victims combined. Clearly, this shows a serious mismanagement and diversion of church resources. It is hard for us not to believe that you intended those resources to go to help heal victims not enrich lawyers. How does this possibly promote the church’s mission of spreading the Gospel and healing the wounded?

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CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Times

Patrick McGreevy

State Sen. Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino) said Monday that she will introduce legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations for rape and some other sexual crimes to increase the chance that victims will get justice.

California law generally limits the prosecution of a felony sexual offense to 10 years after the offense is committed, but more time can be provided if new DNA evidence is found.

Leyva said a bill she will introduce when the Legislature reconvenes in January would eliminate the deadline for prosecuting crimes including rape, sodomy, lewd or lascivious acts, oral copulation, sexual penetration and continuous sexual abuse of a child.

“Survivors of sexual offenses, including rape, deserve to know that California law stands on their side as they seek justice,” Leyva said in a statement. “A sexual predator should not be able to evade legal consequences in California for no other reason than that the time limits set in state law have expired.”

The bill will get scrutiny from the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, the statewide association of criminal defense attorneys, according to Ignacio Hernandez, a lobbyist for the group.

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IRELAND
Irish Central

Frances Mulraney @FrancesMulraney November 10,2015

The Register of Deaths from Bessborough Mother and Baby home reveals that during certain months in the 1940s the death rate among children living in the home amounted to a child dying roughly every second day.

For many years, Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, in Co. Cork, run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, was an institution where pregnant and unmarried women were referred to before they gave birth as, at the time, having a child outside of marriage was considered a serious sin in Ireland.

Several such homes were established throughout Ireland to look after these children and their mothers, but many have since been the subject of controversy regarding the treatment of women and children within their walls and the accusations of illegal adoptions to couples overseas.

In 2012, a damning report by the Irish government’s Health Service Executive (HSE) found that the Irish Catholic mother and child home had an infant mortality rate of 68% in 1943. This report was not released to the public at the time, although it did cause the government to temporarily stop sending women to Bessborough.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Donna Field

A convicted paedophile teacher has accused students of making up stories about him after he was convicted of a child sex offence.

The conduct of former music teacher Gregory Robert Knight, as well as that of former counsellor Kevin John Lynch, is under scrutiny at the child sexual abuse royal commission underway at the Brisbane Magistrates Court.

Both men worked at Brisbane’s St Paul’s School during the 1980s and 1990s.

Knight later resigned from St Paul’s and moved to the Northern Territory to work at Darwin’s Dripstone High School, where serious allegations of child abuse were made against him in 1993.

The school and the NT Department of Education refused Knight’s offer to resign, with the school sacking him on the spot.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Joshua Robertson
Monday 9 November 2015

A former South Australian deputy premier has said he was “naive” to give a known paedophile teacher – who he had spared from dismissal when education minister – a personal reference that enabled him to work in Queensland and Northern Territory schools where he sexually abused more students.

Donald Hopgood told the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse he had a “misguided” sense of obligation to Gregory Robert Knight – who he knew in 1978 had sexually assaulted three students – because Knight conducted a concert band in which the minister played trumpet.

Despite being warned by the South Australian crown solicitor that the only available course was dismissal lest Knight remain a teacher in that state or elsewhere, Hopgood rescinded his sacking of Knight in 1978.

He then failed to ensure the South Australian teacher registration board was informed of undisputed departmental findings that Knight had fondled the penises of three boys at school camps the previous year.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)

A convicted paedophile accused of molesting boys across three states has denied he’s ‘delusional’ to proclaim his innocence.

Gregory Robert Knight started his teaching career in South Australia where he was found to have touched the penises of at least three teenage boys during school camps in 1977.

He then moved to Queensland and worked at Brisbane Boys’ College, where he was again subject to allegations of abuse.

In 1981, he successfully applied for a job as a music teacher at St Paul’s School, also in Brisbane, but resigned three years later after a student came forward with more complaints of misconduct.

A move to the Northern Territory followed, where he ultimately pleaded guilty and was convicted of 15 counts of child sexual offences in 1994.

But Knight on Tuesday told the child sex abuse royal commission many of the claims against him were baseless.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

BY ALEXANDRA PATRIKIOS AAP NOVEMBER 10, 2015

A CONVICTED pedophile who was repeatedly allowed to resign from his teaching posts despite being accused of molesting boys across Australia insists he isn’t sexually attracted to children.

GREGORY Robert Knight previously taught in schools in South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory and attracted allegations of abuse in all three states.

He was convicted of child sex offences on two separate occasions.

But Knight staunchly rejected the suggestion he was attracted to boys while being questioned at the child sex abuse royal commission.

He did so despite agreeing he was a convicted pedophile.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

[with audio]

November 10, 2015

Jorge Branco
Journalist

A prestigious Brisbane school hired a now-convicted paedophile after the headmaster was warned he had been dismissed for “improper, irregular and highly odd behaviour” toward students, a royal commission has heard.

Disgraced music teacher Gregory Robert Knight started teaching at St Paul’s School in 1981, under headmaster Gilbert Case.

The year before he was forced out of Brisbane Boys’ College after complaints he instructed boarders at the school to walk from their beds to the showers with towels slung over their shoulder, not around their waist so he could watch them.

The boarding master was also accused of breaching school policy by allowing a boy to shower in his personal school quarters.

On Tuesday afternoon, former BBC head Graham Thomson told the child abuse royal commission he called Mr Knight to his office and was “confounded by his inability or unwillingness” to make a comment about the matters, after they came to his attention in 1980.

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WALES
Wales Online

BY MARTIN SHIPTON

New claims surrounding a former headteacher from Newport who killed himself when he was confronted with an allegation of child abuse suggest he was one of the most prolific paedophiles in recent Welsh history.

BBC One Wales programme Week In Week Out has been told by solicitors representing several of his alleged victims that Jon Styler is now thought to have targeted around 100 boys.

Andrew Collingbourne, a solicitor representing several of Styler’s alleged victims, told the programme: “I believe we’ve only scratched the surface, there could be 100 plus victims.”

Styler, a charismatic former head teacher of the Church in Wales primary school at Malpas near Newport, hanged himself in 2007 while being investigated by Gwent Police about an allegation of abuse against a boy.

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WALES
BBC News

A former head teacher accused of historical sexual abuse may be one of the most prolific paedophiles in recent Welsh history, solicitors representing his alleged victims have claimed.

Lawyers said Jon Styler, from Newport – who killed himself while being investigated by police – could have abused more than 100 boys.

He strongly denied all allegations.

The Children’s Commissioner for Wales said the way the case was handled by police should be looked at again. …

Mr Styler hanged himself in 2007 after allegations emerged earlier that year that he had abused a boy at the former Malpas Church in Wales Primary School.

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ILLINOIS
Daily North Shore

by Steve Sadin • November 9, 2015

DEERFIELD — A former Deerfield pastor was indicted on four counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse by the Lake County Grand Jury Nov. 4 after police said he confessed to fondling a teenager from the church.

Samuel Kee, 39, of Lake Zurich and the former pastor of teaching and discipleship at the North Suburban Free Evangelical Church in Deerfield, walked into the Deerfield Police Department Oct. 14 and said he wanted to confess to a crime, according to Bernas.

Bernas said Kee told detectives he committed a crime of a sexual nature in the summer of 2014 with a girl who was 16 at the time. Bernas said Kee confessed to touching the teen in inappropriate places on her body.

“We talked to the juvenile victim to confirm the facts and the next day (Oct. 15) he was charged,” Bernas said. “We got a call (from the church) there was an internal investigation on Oct. 2.”

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

BY SHAYNA JACOBS NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, November 9, 2015

A Manhattan babysitter has been charged with sexually abusing a kid he looked after for six years — and prosecutors believe he may have preyed on other kids as well.

Milton Narvaez, 38, was first looked at during “an investigation into the peer-to-peer sharing of images of child sexual assault,” the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. …

Narvaez, who was a custodian at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church in Midtown, is charged with predatory sex assault, sex abuse and other charges related to the his attacks on the boy, who he watched for six years beginning in 2008. The boy was six when the abuse started, prosecutors said.

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NEW YORK
CBS New York

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A man who previously worked as a babysitter or nanny to several Manhattan families has been indicted under charges of sexually abusing a child and retaining images of the abuse over a period of six years while the child was under his care, officials said.

According to a statement from the Manhattan District Attorney, Milton Narvaez, 33, had dozens of images of children in his possession, as well as video of him explicitly abusing a boy he babysat for. The alleged assault was discovered during a routine investigation of peer-to-peer image sharing of child sexual assault through online sharing platforms, according to the statement. …

According to the statement, Narvaez also worked as a custodian at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church in Midtown.

Any parents whose children might have been cared for by Narvaez, attended events or programs at the Armenian church, or had any contact with the defendant is asked to call the Manhattan DA’s Office Child Abuse hotline at (212) 335-4308.

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AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times

November 9, 2015

John Thistleton
Reporter for The Canberra Times.

A long-time religion writer does not have far to look for enough sex scandals to fill a book.
Retired Canberra Times journalist Graham Downie was not after scandal in his latest book, Servants and Leaders – Eminent Christians in their Own Words, but could hardly miss the extraordinary public utterances of people like Cardinal George Pell and former governor-general and previously Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth.

Hollingworth’s fall from grace began while commenting on ABC television on an affair between a priest and woman that began when she was about 14 at an Anglican hostel in Forbes. As more scandal emerged, his position as the Governor-General became more untenable.

“What I wrote for the Canberra Times, and have put it in the book, when Hollingworth went to Brisbane there was a time-bombing ticking which he could not defuse, and that was all this nasty sexual abuse at the schools in Brisbane which the [royal] commission was hearing just last week,” Downie says.

“If he had his time again I’m not sure what he could have done about all the abuse, it had already happened, but I’m sure he would be far more cautious about what he said publicly,” Downie says.

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UNITED STATES
Religion & Politics

By Mara Willard | November 9, 2015

Ppotlight, the film released on Friday, appears at first glance to be a scripted homage. The movie offers a fictionalized portrayal of the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2002 exposé of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Spotlight is this generation’s All the President’s Men, nostalgic enough to remind us of microfiche but timely enough to influence the very story that it depicts. The film’s paper chase is an energizing validation of the methods of investigative journalism honed in the 1970s. The Globe’s reporters of the early 2000s would have been raised on the cinematic depiction of American icons Woodward and Bernstein.

As the power of the presidency looms over Washington, so the Catholic Church reigns in Boston. And the drama of Spotlight is full of Irish Catholic lawyers, cops, editors, and judges. According to the movie, it takes an outsider to this world to fully question its power structures. Newly arrived at the Boston Globe from the Miami Herald, editor Martin Baron (played with dispassionate intensity by Liev Schreiber) gets a few sideways glances for his own faith and background. “So the new editor of the Boston Globe is an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball,” is the dry observation of one archdiocesan insider. Baron, who refuses Red Sox tickets at one point, is shown reading the Globe in a scene at a coffee shop, while Mass empties out across the street.

Baron upturns the city’s status quo of conspiracy and denial by filing a legal motion to unseal certain court documents, which would uncover key internal documents from the Archdiocese of Boston. “You’re going to sue the Church?” he is asked repeatedly by nervous Globe staffers. Baron pushes his team to look further into the Catholic sexual abuse allegations. (Incidentally, Baron is now the top editor at Woodward’s Washington Post.) “Show me the church manipulated the system … Show me that this was systemic—that it came from the top down,” he tells the reporting team.

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Michelle Boorstein November 9

“Spotlight,” a new film about the Catholic clergy abuse scandal’s explosion in 2002, begs the question: How are things different in 2015?

Dozens of U.S. church leaders have in the past few days been offering answers in the form of public statements, with some primarily focusing on the survivors and others casting the scandal as fully in the past and framing the church as the leader today in a society that hasn’t fully dealt with the problem.

“Spotlight, which began playing in U.S. cities Nov. 6, tells the story of Boston Globe investigative journalists who broke the story. (The Globe’s editor at the time was Marty Baron, now executive editor of The Washington Post)

The range of views in the new statements – which follow a memo of talking points the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ sent to its dioceses in September — show the way the church still wrestles with how to tell its own story.

The movie “looks back at this historical past – 15 years and more as it dramatizes a newspaper investigation into abuse that occurred in the Boston area,” Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl wrote Nov. 2. “My wish is that other entities, like the public school systems, would attempt to do what the Church has done and offer the same level of protection to children in their care as we do.”

In the first line of a piece on “Spotlight” this weekend, Francesco C. Cesareo, chairman of the USCCB’s National Review Board, also expressed the view that the Catholic Church’s problems with sexual abuse echo those of society as a whole. …

Terry McKiernan, founder of a Boston-based abuse-tracking group bishopaccountability.org, said he doesn’t see child sex abuse as necessarily more prevalent in the Catholic Church. But he believes the reaction in the new statements about “Spotlight” reflect an ongoing problem.

“What if they had responded in a searching way? A radical way? Because there is so much left to do,” he said. “And I’d prefer they not take credit for something they did so reluctantly. It’s not something they innovated, they were forced into it.”

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UNITED STATES
Film News

Powerful drama and independent feature film, Romans, commences principal photography in West London from next week starring award winning actor Orlando Bloom (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Hobbit). The four week shoot will take place in West London and will start from Monday 16th November.

Directed by The Shamassian Brothers (The Pyramid Texts) with screenplay by BAFTA award winning writer Geoff Thompson, Romans is produced by WSG Entertainment’s Sheetal Vinod Talwar as well as James Harris and Mark Lane, The Tea Shop & Film Company and Jasper Graham, Dreamscape Films. Set in present day London, Romans is based on true life events and follows the story of a middle aged man, Malky played by Orlando Bloom, still trying to come to terms with crippling insecurity, the residue of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted and idolised priest. The abuse by the priest, the withdrawal of his mother’s love and abandonment of God set Malky’s life onto a twisted trajectory of violent employment, serial self-abuse and psychotic sexual jealousy. The arresting narrative follows Malky as he confronts the demons that have been haunting him for twenty years and makes the decision to forgive his abuser despite aching for violent revenge.

Producer, Sheetal Vinod Talwar said: “Romans is an incredible script. The dialogue is brilliant and believable; the reversals and surprises are well placed and powerful. The characters and situations are vividly drawn. Orlando was the perfect choice for ‘Malky’ and will take audiences on a raw and harrowing voyage through the inner human psyche. With the Shamassian Brothers at the helm, it’s going to be a beautiful picture.”

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UNITED STATES
Hollywood Reporter

by Alex Ritman 11/10/2015

While he might be better known on screen for his skill with an Elvish bow and arrow or for prancing about pirate ships with Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom is set to soon start shooting on a wholly different project.

In Romans, announced Tuesday, the British actor will star as Malky, a man still trying to come to terms with crippling insecurity resulting from childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted and idolised priest. Based on real-life events, the story will see the combination of the abuse, the withdrawal of his mother’s love and abandonment of God set Malky’s life onto a twisted trajectory of violent employment, serial self-abuse and psychotic sexual jealousy. Malky must confronts the demons that have been haunting him for twenty years and makes the decision to forgive his abuser despite aching for violent revenge.

To be directed by The Shamassian Brothers (The Pyramid Texts) from a screenplay by BAFTA-winning writer Geoff Thompson, whose 2008 short Romans 12:20 was the basis for the feature, Romans is produced by WSG Entertainment’s Sheetal Vinod Talwar as well as James Harris and Mark Lane, The Tea Shop & Film Company and Jasper Graham, Dreamscape Films. It will start shooting in London Nov. 16.

“Romans is an incredible script. The dialog is brilliant and believable; the reversals and surprises are well placed and powerful. The characters and situations are vividly drawn,” said Talwar. “Orlando was the perfect choice for Malky and will take audiences on a raw and harrowing voyage through the inner human psyche. With the Shamassian Brothers at the helm, it’s going to be a beautiful picture.”

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UNITED STATES
Dallas Observer

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREKTUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of Boston Globe reporters exposed the scope of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church not just in Boston but worldwide. The film is less an elegy for the art and craft of news reporting than a rallying cry. If journalism were really dying, how could it inspire art this vital? Though it’s set in 2001 and early 2002 — practically ancient times in the distressing recent history of newspapers — Spotlight feels both timeless and modern, a dexterously crafted film that could have been made anytime but somehow feels perfect for right now.

This is also the story of the difference an outsider can make in a historically clannish city: The picture opens with a prologue, set in 1976, that dramatizes in fleet shorthand the way the Boston Archdiocese had, for many years, quickly and efficiently dealt with clergy members who’d molested children — by hustling those priests into a “treatment center” and then off to a faraway parish, where the cycle could all too easily be repeated. Flash forward to the summer of 2001, when the pedigreed Boston Globe gets a new editor, direct from the less highborn Miami Herald: Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) hadn’t grown up in Boston, as many Globe reporters and editors had; he was also Jewish, as many Globe reporters and editors were not.

But in his early days at the paper, after reading a seemingly minor piece by columnist Eileen McNamara about the archdiocese’s propensity for covering up abuse cases, Baron picks up on a potentially explosive story that seems obvious to him, while everyone else treats it as business as usual. Baron, low-key to an almost comical degree, asks his staff if the church’s record of protecting sex offenders isn’t something the paper should be looking into. The protests and excuses come from all sides, including deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) and longtime reporter and editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), who together lead the paper’s Spotlight team, a crew of reporters devoted to long-term investigations. No one wants to tangle with the church in Boston, or with the aggressively affable and unnervingly powerful Cardinal Law (played, with creepy precision, by Len Cariou). But Baron, seemingly with little more than an arched eyebrow, persuades the Spotlight staff to investigate.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Hull Daily Mail

A FORMER teacher has walked free from court during a trial into alleged sexual abuse at a Market Weighton school.

Charges of assault causing actual bodily harm and indecent assault against Michael Curran, 62, were dropped during the trial at Leeds Crown Court on Monday.

Judge Geoffrey Marson QC directed the jury to formally find Mr Curran not guilty on the two charges and he left the court a free man.

It was the second time Mr Curran has faced charges following a police investigation into allegations of abuse at the school. Last year, Humberside Police paid damages to Mr Curran and faced a legal bill that may run to £500,000 after two officers deliberately sought to secure his dismissal from his job in education, even though he had been cleared of any wrongdoing at court.

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UNITED STATES
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on November 9, 2015

In September, I was listening to AirTalk on KPCC, one of LA’s NPR stations. On Fridays, they feature Film Week (one of my favorites), a show where reviewers talk about new film debuts, international film festivals, and DVD releases.

On this particular show, the host and one of the reviewers were discussing the Venice Film Festival and the film Spotlight. (still looking for the interview link. sorry) The host, Larry Mantle, said something that struck me. “Who is going to want to see a movie about sexual abuse?”

His guest answered it perfectly. He said – and I paraphrase – Spotlight isn’t a film about child sexual abuse. It is a film about journalists uncovering a story, layer by layer. And the guest was right. I will add: It’s a film about victims demanding accountability. It’s about justice through journalism.

It’s a film with a winning message, a call to action, and the power of truth in reporting. I was invited to a sneak screening of Spotlight in early October. I was lucky to be able to see it with Barbara Blaine, the founder and president of SNAP.

I also took my father, who had never met Barbara, and who loves a good movie. And what an amazing night it was. My 78-year-old dad (who is not a part of the “movement”) loved the film. He left with questions – good questions – about whether or not things have really changed, how bishops still react, and if reporters were still devoted to such meaty stories. He looked at Barbara was blown away by the organization she created. He couldn’t believe that I actually KNOW Phil Saviano, Mitch Garabedian, and Richard Sipe (and have spoken with Mike Rezendes on numerous occasions).

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston.com

By Bryanna Cappadona @brycappa
Boston.com Staff | 11.09.15

Spotlight doesn’t give too much screen time to accused priests. The movie is, at its core, much more about the value of investigative journalism and the reporters who tell the stories.

Then again, an extraordinarily memorable scene in the film does involve one particular clergy member: Father Ronald H. Paquin.

As the Spotlight reporters set out on foot in search of their story, approaching the homes of priests, victims, and anyone who’d be willing to talk, Sacha Pfeiffer, played by Rachel McAdams, ends up on the doorstep of Paquin’s home. When he answers the door, she’s visibly staggered (because it’s him? because of how he looks? because she’s shocked at her own investigative skills?).

Pfeiffer, who discloses that she’s a Globe reporter, doesn’t hesitate to ask Paquin right on his front porch for his response to accusations that he’s molested children.

“I fooled around,” Paquin says. “But I never raped anyone and I never felt gratified myself.”

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler Nov 09, 2015

Vatican journalist Andrea Gagliarducci has the best insights that I’ve seen to date on the new eruption of leaks from the Vatican. As you might have suspected, the story involves a power struggle within the Vatican bureaucracy.

For years, powerful men inside the Vatican exchanged small favors with their Italian secular counterparts. Some of those favors involved financial transactions—the use of the Vatican bank for personal accounts, perhaps, or real-estate transfers on friendly terms. Most of these little deals were harmless, but some were not technically legal, and some may have involved shady characters.

For Italian financiers, unsupervised transactions through the Vatican became more attractive after 9/11, when European banking authorities began imposing strict new regulations on Italy’s banks, to counteract money-laundering and the financing of terrorism. Some Vatican officials—Gagliarducci refers to them as the “men of compromise”—remained willing to help out their friends, and coincidentally their influence grew as the health of St. John Paul II deteriorated.

Things came to a head when Italian banking officials began to cut ties with Vatican institutions, citing the risk of unaccountable transactions. Pope Benedict XVI responded by beginning a process of financial reform. Gagliarducci writes:

To cut a long story short, under Benedict XVI, the “men of compromise” who played games across the Vatican-Italian financial border, lost influence.

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CONNECTICUT
The Hartford Courant

David Owens

HARTFORD — Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a Roman Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy.

The Rev. Paul Gotta, 57, is charged with second-degree sexual assault and six counts of fourth-degree sexual assault. Gotta, who had assignments at churches in East Windsor at the time of his arrest, is on leave from the Archdiocese of Hartford.

Gotta is also facing federal firearms charges. Gotta’s defense attorney is William Paetzold of Glastonbury. Debra Collins is the prosecutor. Testimony is scheduled to begin Nov. 23 in Superior Court in Hartford.

Gotta is accused of abusing a teenage boy he met through one of the East Windsor churches where he worked as a priest.

The teen was arrested in June 2013 on allegations that he tried to manufacture bombs, illegally possessed explosives, illegally possessed a silencer, made disturbing comments about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombing, and about his own school, Metropolitan Learning Center in Bloomfield.

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DELAWARE
The News Journal

Jessica Masulli Reyes, The News Journal November 9, 2015

A Delaware judge is considering the constitutionality of a state law that exempts priests from being required to report suspected child abuse disclosed during confessions – and, if the law is constitutional, whether it should protect elders in a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation.

The Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit against the Laurel Delaware Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses last year alleging two elders failed to report to state authorities a sexual relationship between a woman and a 14-year-old boy, both of whom were members of the congregation.

State law says individuals and organizations must report suspected child abuse and neglect immediately via a 24-hour state hotline, unless they learn of the abuse in an attorney-client setting or “that between priest and penitent in a sacramental confession.”

On Monday afternoon, Superior Court Judge Mary M. Johnston heard arguments in Wilmington about whether the elders should fall under the exemption for priests. This then led her to question if it is constitutional to have language in a law that only protects clergy of one religion.

The judge, who called the case “very interesting,” is expected to issue a ruling at a later date.

A 14-year-old boy disclosed to his mother in January 2013 that he was in a sexual relationship with Katheryn Harris Carmean White, a fellow member of the congregation and a teacher’s aide at Seaford Middle School, according to the lawsuit.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

November 9, 2015

Shannon Deery Herald Sun

A VETERAN lawyer accused of pressuring a child sex abuse victim not to help police is facing disciplinary action that could end his career.

Alex Lewenberg has survived a house bombing, a stabbing and a shooting during a colourful legal career as a criminal defence lawyer representing notorious crooks ­including Boris “The Black Diamond’” Beljajev, Tony Mokbel’s brother, Horty, and former bikie gang boss Brendan Peterson.

But the former boxer now faces a possible ­career-ending knockout blow after an investigation by the state’s legal watchdog into comments he made to a victim of child sexual abuse.

The Jewish victim had helped police in their prosecution of notorious Jewish paedophile David Cyprys.

In covertly recorded conversations, Mr Lewenberg, fresh from representing Cyprys, was heard telling the victim Jews shouldn’t help police prosecute fellow Jews.

“I am not exactly delighted that another Yid would assist police against an accused, no matter whatever he is accused of,” Mr Lewenberg said.

“There is a tradition, if not a religious requirement, that you do not assist against (the people of Abraham).”

Mr Lewenberg is understood to have admitted making the comments, and similar comments while in court representing Cyprys, but has told the Legal Services Commissioner they must be understood in context.

Cyprys was jailed for the abuse of a string of children aged seven to 17 in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Legal Services Commissioner has applied to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal for orders against Mr Lewenberg after finding there was a likelihood he would be found guilty of professional misconduct.

VCAT can impose fines, suspend practising certificates or make a recommendation to the Supreme Court that practitioners be disbarred.

“The comments ascribed to Mr Lewenberg would reasonably be regarded by fellow legal practitioners of good rep­ute and competency as comments that were disgraceful or dishonourable,” the Legal Services Commissioner said in a letter seen by the Herald Sun.

Victims advocate Manny Waks, himself a victim of Cyp­rys, said it was difficult to see how Mr Lewenberg could be allowed to continue practise.

“I hope that Mr Lewenberg is appropriately sanctioned,” Mr Waks said.

shannon.deery@news.com.au

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