ABUSE TRACKER

NEW JERSEY
NJ.com

By Paul Milo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on October 02, 2015

LITTLE FERRY — A Roman Catholic priest who has served at several parishes across North Jersey was arrested Friday for pointing a musket at an 8-year-old parishioner, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said.

Father Kevin Carter, 55, who is currently assigned to St. Margaret of Cortona Church, has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child and aggravated assault by pointing a firearm. Carter was being held on $15,000 bail in Little Ferry and has been ordered to surrender all firearms as well as to avoid contact with the child.

Authorities learned of the allegation after a St. Margaret parishioner contacted the Archdiocese of Newark a week ago. The archdiocese contacted the prosecutor’s office Monday.

The incident occurred Sept. 13, when the child and his family arrived at the church for Sunday Mass, according to a subsequent investigation by the prosecutor’s office Special Victims Unit and Little Ferry police. Before the service, Carter allegedly asked to see the child in a room at the rectory, then ordered him to stand against a wall. Authorities said Carter then grabbed a “Civil War-style” musket and aimed at it him. The incident was seen by several people who were outside the room at the time, authorities also said.

Police later seized the functioning weapon as well as ammunition, gun powder and other items.

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

PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Maryland Reporter

By Len Lazarick

In an old Catholic observance, First Fridays of the month were set aside for special devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For the last 10 years, Art Baselice, an ex-cop, First Fridays of the month have been set aside for another devotion.

From noon to 1 p.m., as he plans to do this Friday, he stands outside the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia with a poster that says “Victim of Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse.” The poster has a picture of his late son Arthur and the Franciscan priest and brother that abused him.

I met Art by chance June 5 after visiting the cathedral while in Philadelphia for the conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

You might have seen this block of 18th Street during Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia. He said Mass at the Cathedral on Saturday, and stopped by it in the pope-mobile on his way to the huge Mass on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway Sunday.

There were no crowds when I met Baselice. He was alone and wary. His is a lonely crusade.

Lonely crusade

Baselice wants the church he grew up with in South Philly to do more to correct and punish the sex abuse by priests and religious that helped lead to the death of his son Arthur from a heroin overdose. That addiction began years earlier, financed by the high school principal that abused him at Archbishop Ryan High School, according to a lengthy article in Philadelphia magazine.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Rhymes with Religion

Boz Tchividjian | Oct 2, 2015

A few months ago I wrote about the deceitful, but all too successful, ways sex offenders in the church act when confronted with abuse allegations. Tragically, the sex offenders are not the only ones who deceive when confronted with abuse disclosures. Too often, leaders of faith institutions respond similarly when confronted with the mishandling of sexual abuse disclosures. Instead of acknowledging the failure and grieving over the pain the institution has caused an already traumatized victim, some leaders immediately move into self-protection mode and will stop at almost nothing in shifting the focus away from their own reprehensible failings in order to protect personal and organizational reputations. (On an encouraging note, as I my last blog post noted, more and more church leaders are responding to abuse disclosures in a manner that places the affirmation and care of the victim above all else.)

A spotlight is switched on whenever an abuse survivor steps forward to tell others how institutional leaders mishandled their sexual abuse disclosure. Spotlights that shine light into dark places are seldom welcomed by those responsible for the darkness. These spotlights come in many different forms and sizes. Some are media reports or articles, while others take the form of lawsuits and criminal cases. In recent years, many survivors have been empowered to turn a blog or a Facebook page into bright and stubborn spotlight. A few years ago, I learned of a faith institution whose leaders had failed miserably when learning that children under its care had been sexually and physically abused. Years later, a handful of these children who were now adults privately confronted the leaders about how their failure to respond had devastated the lives of so many who had been abused. The leaders expressed concern and promised to “look into it”. After two years of empty lip service, the survivors realized that the leaders had little or no plans to do anything. The sad reality was that as long as these conversations remained private, many of the survivors believed that the leaders had nothing to lose by dragging it out as long as possible with the hope that they would simply go away. Instead of continuing the endless and fruitless private dialogue, these brave young adults decided to turn on a spotlight in the form of a public blog that exposes the horrors committed by offenders and the ongoing failures by the institutional leaders to properly respond to these crimes. Over time, this spotlight grew brighter as it reached more and more people around the world. Suddenly, empty lip service was no longer a viable response as the institution no longer controlled a private narrative.

Instead of focusing time and energy in doing the right thing when a spotlight is turned on, many leaders will focus time and energy trying to get them turned off, or at the very least pointed elsewhere. Fortunately, truth can be quite stubborn and has a way of finding the spotlight regardless of how hard others try to turn it off or point it elsewhere.

Turn off the spotlight. This is simply an effort by leaders to take the matter out of the public eye where they have very little control. Turning off the spotlight allows leaders to retake control of the narrative by taking it out of the public eye with little or no accountability. Here are just two ways that leaders attempt to turn off spotlights that are beginning to have an impact.

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PENNSYLVANIA
PennLive

By Ivey DeJesus | idejesus@pennlive.com
on October 02, 2015

One of the most widely covered events during the Pope Francis visit to the U.S. was his meeting with victims of clergy sexual abuse.

Francis, who met with survivors of abuse on Sunday, his last day in Philadelphia, expressed his regret that trusted church officials had violated the innocence of children and had failed to protect them.

Francis consoled them by saying God heard their cries and believes them, and vowed to hold accountable the people who committed and covered up the crimes.

The overture was welcomed by some as a step in the right direction. For those who still struggle with the ravages of the years of abuse at the hands of a trusted priest, the pontiff’s gesture was little more than lip service.

More than 10 years after the clergy sex abuse scandal rocked the church in the U.S., the issue has forged little resolution between church officials and victims.

“I kind of wanted to like the pope until I saw what he was doing,” said John Delaney, who as a student at St. Cecilia Church in Philadelphia, was molested by a priest for more than 10 years. “He is not doing anything for me. He was applauding the bishops. It was a smack in my face. I was very hurt.”

Delaney was “Sean” in the 2005 grand jury report that detailed widespread clergy abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The 2005 report, alleged how the The Rev. James Brzyski subjected Delaney and at least 16 other boys to “unrelenting abuse, including fondling, oral sex, and anal rape” while working as an assistant pastor at two churches in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

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CHILE
Church Militant

by Joseph Pelletier • October 2, 2015

SANTIAGO, Chile, October 2, 2015 (ChurchMilitant.com) – A Chilean cardinal and close advisor to the Pope is being accused of complicity in the cover-up of sex abuse.

Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, one of nine appointed by Pope Francis to the highly influential Council of Cardinal Advisers, testified for five hours Wednesday in a suit filed by the victims of Fr. Fernando Karadima, a high-profile priest accused of sexually abusing several boys two decades ago. The accusations assert that Cdl. Errázuriz, Archbishop-Emeritus of Santiago, Chile, was fully aware of the abuse as early as 2003 and that he chose to ignore the victims’ pleas for action.

Cardinal Errázuriz contends that, while admitting knowledge of the allegations against Karadima, his refusal to act stemmed from a genuine belief that the charges were untrue.

In 2011 the Vatican found Fr. Karadima guilty of sexually abusing several minors and sentenced him to “lifelong prohibition from the public exercise of any ministerial act, particularly confession and the spiritual guidance of any category of persons.” This following the Chilean Catholic Church referring the case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in June 2010.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Reuters

BOSTON | BY SCOTT MALONE

A former Massachusetts priest who figured prominently in the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal and pleaded guilty in 2002 to raping a child will be released from prison after prosecutors dropped their effort on Friday to send him to a state facility for sexual predators.

Ronald Paquin, who was defrocked in 2004, was one of the first arrested amid revelations that members of the Catholic clergy had sexually assaulted children and that bishops had covered it up.

Paquin, who had served in Haverhill, pleaded guilty to three counts of raping a child, beginning in 1989 when the child was 12 years old.

He completed his sentence earlier this year but prosecutors in Essex County, Massachusetts, north of Boston, had tried to have him declared a “sexually dangerous” person who must be confined. Two qualified examiners interviewed Paquin and reviewed his case and concluded that he posed no threat.

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RHODE ISLAND
Providence Journal

By Karen Lee Ziner

Journal Staff Writer Posted Sep. 24, 2015

Ann Hagan Webb, Rhode Island coordinator for Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, says “SNAP phones have been ringing off the hook” from callers upset by the pope’s visit to the United States this week.

“They have been triggered by the pope coming because there’s like a love fest going on with the public and the press, despite him not really doing anything about the [clergy] abuse crisis,” says Webb. “That drives people crazy, including me.”

Survivors were recommending “self-care,” Webb said. “Limiting exposure to the pope in the media, reaching out to each other … . We are all wishing the visit was over … . It’s so easy for us to access our shame and embarrassment regardless of how many years we spent overcoming it.”

A psychologist, Webb was victimized by a Warwick priest who is now deceased, she said. “Personally, it [the pope’s visit] has brought old PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] symptoms of anxiety, agitation and hyper-vigilance back when I least expected it,” said Webb.

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UNITED STATES
ABC News

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SALEM, Mass. — Oct 2, 2015

A former Roman Catholic priest who spent more than a decade in a Massachusetts prison for raping an altar boy will be freed after prosecutors withdrew a civil petition Friday to have him committed as a sexually dangerous person.

Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said he had no choice but to withdraw the petition under state law because two experts who examined Ronald Paquin determined he was no longer sexually dangerous.

“Our contention is that Mr. Paquin poses a danger to the community,” Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, we have no further legal options available to hold Mr. Paquin.”

Under the law, anyone found sexually dangerous can be civilly committed indefinitely at a state treatment center even after their prison sentence has ended.

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UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches

BY ANTHEA BUTLER OCTOBER 2, 2015

Seems like the meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis was not as good for him as it was for her. In a statement released by the Vatican, approved by the pope, the Vatican stated “the Pope met with several people at the nunciature and that “the Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”

Translation: “we got played, but this is not our game in the first place.”

The fact that the Vatican actually issued a statement after Vatican spokesman Fr. Lombardi said he wouldn’t comment is amazing enough. It would be a mistake, however, to make simplistic assumptions that either the Pope is in the tank for Kim Davis, that Liberty Counsel’s Mathew Staver’s version of the meeting is the truth, or that the Pope proved he was really a culture warrior who lied about everything he said in the US. To quote Facebook: it’s complicated.

While this feels like a break up between the Pope and all the great press he received for his welcoming tone in America, the truth is more complicated.

The best explication of what most likely happened has come from Charles Pierce in Esquire, who verified (correctly) that Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the nuncio, is the person who hastily arranged the meeting between the Pope and Kim Davis.

Archbishop Vigano is a Pope Benedict XVI supporter involved in the Vatileaks scandal. Vigano has lied about his own brother, with whom he is involved in a dispute about their considerable family inheritance. Or, to put it another way, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano is the Petyr Baelish of this particular iteration of Vatican “Game of Thrones.” The Archbishop decided to wade into the culture wars at the behest of parties yet unknown, or his own spite at being driven out of Rome.

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UNITED STATES
Reuters

NEW YORK | BY ANGELA MOON

Sentiment towards Pope Francis turned sour on social media over his meeting with a Kentucky county clerk who refuses to issue same-sex marriage licenses, data compiled by Thomson Reuters showed.

The ratio of positive versus negative tweets on the pope had been about 2.6 to 1 on average during and shortly after his Sept. 22-27 visit to the United States. But the ratio fell sharply to about even on Sept. 30 after reports of the meeting, which was originally kept secret.

On Friday, the Vatican said there was “a sense of regret” that the pope had ever seen Kim Davis, the clerk who went to jail in September for refusing to honour a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and issue same-sex marriage licences.

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MASSACHUSETTS
NECN

A former Roman Catholic priest who spent more than a decade in prison after pleading guilty to raping an altar boy will be freed after prosecutors withdrew a request to have him civilly committed indefinitely as a sexually dangerous person.

The Essex district attorney’s office announced Friday that it had withdrawn its petition because neither expert who examined Ronald Paquin found him “sexually dangerous,” which is required under state law for civil commitment.

The now 72-year-old Paquin pleaded guilty in December 2002 to child rape charges for molesting a boy between 1989 and 1992 while assigned to a Haverhill, Massachusetts, church. The boy was 12 when the abuse started. Paquin was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison. His sentence ended in May.

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MASSACHUSETTS
WHDH

HAVERHILL, Mass. (WHDH) –
The Essex District Attorney’s office on Friday withdrew its petition to hold Ronald Paquin as a sexually dangerous person.

According to the DA, neither of the experts who examined him found him “sexually dangerous.” The DA is required by law to withdraw its petition.

Paquin, a former priest in Haverhill, pleaded guilty to three counts of rape of a child in December 2002 and was sentenced to 12-15 years in state prison. The rapes took place in Haverhill between 1989 and 1992, beginning when the victim was 12 years old.

According to the law, a judge must find probable cause after which the person is evaluated by two independent “qualified examiners.” If at least one of the qualified examiners finds the person sexually dangerous, the Commonwealth can proceed to a trial at which is must prove that the defendant meets the criteria for sexually dangerousness beyond a reasonable doubt.

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

MASSACHUSETTS
Patch

By ADAM SWIFT (Patch Staff)
October 2, 2015

On Friday, the Essex County District Attorney’s office in Salem withdrew its petition to have a former Roman Catholic Priest classified as a sexually dangerous predator in an effort to keep him confined in prison.

Ronald Paquin, now 72, pleaded guilty in 2002 to sexually assaulting a 12-year-old altar boy at a Haverhill church between the years of 1989 and 1992, beginning when the victim was 12 years old.

The Essex County prosecutors attempted to keep Paquin confined by having him classified as a sexual dangerous predator, but was forced to withdraw the petition when the experts who examined Paquin found him not to be sexually dangerous.

“Our contention is that Mr. Paquin poses a danger to the community,” Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, we have no further legal options available to hold Mr. Paquin.”

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Herald

Friday, October 2, 2015

By: Joe Dwinell

A former Haverhill priest locked up amid the Catholic sexual abuse crisis has been ordered released, the Essex DA’s office announced today.

Ronald H. Paquin pleaded guilty in 2002 to raping a Haverhill altar boy between 1989 and 1992 and he was sent to the Massachusetts Treatment Center at the Bridgewater Correctional Complex for up to 15 years. He completed his sentence this summer and now the DA says he is being set free after he was deemed not to be sexually dangerous.

Here is the release:

“The Essex District Attorney’s Office today withdrew its petition to hold Ronald H. Paquin as a sexually dangerous person. Neither of the experts who examined him found him “sexually dangerous,” therefore, the District Attorney’s Office must, by law, withdraw its petition. “Our contention is that Mr. Paquin poses a danger to the community,” District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Essex District Attorney’s Office

The Essex District Attorney’s Office today withdrew its petition to hold Ronald H. Paquin as a sexually dangerous person. Neither of the experts who examined him found him “sexually dangerous,” therefore, the District Attorney’s Office must, by law, withdraw its petition.

“Our contention is that Mr. Paquin poses a danger to the community,” District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, we have no further legal options available to hold Mr. Paquin.”

Paquin, a former priest in Haverhill, pleaded guilty to 3 counts of rape of a child in December of 2002 and was sentenced to 12-15 years in state prison. The rapes took place in Haverhill between 1989 and 1992, beginning when the victim was 12 years old.

Under Massachusetts General Law Chapter 123A, Section 1, the Commonwealth may file a civil commitment petition to hold a person believed to be sexually dangerous upon completion of their prison term. A Judge must find probable cause after which the person is evaluated by two independent “qualified examiners.” If at least one of the qualified examiners finds the person sexually dangerous, the Commonwealth can proceed to a trial at which it must prove that the defendant meets the criteria for sexually dangerousness beyond a reasonable doubt.

A probable cause hearing was held over the course of two day in early August, at which Essex Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Kirshenbaum presented testimony from Dr. Gregg Belle, a forensic psychologist specializing in sex offenders. Judge James Lang found probable cause on August 20, 2015. Paquin was then evaluated by two qualified examiners. Neither of them found him sexually dangerous, therefore the Commonwealth must withdraw its petition and Paquin will be released.

Paquin is represented by Attorney David Erickson.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

By John R. Ellement GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 02, 2015

Essex County prosecutors have lost their bid to have Ronald H. Paquin, a former Roman Catholic priest at the center of the abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese, confined to a special state facility for sexual predators.

Prosecutors on Friday notified victims of the 72-year-old Paquin that two qualified experts have concluded he is not a sexually dangerous person. If he had been declared sexually dangerous, Paquin could have been civilly committed to the Massachusetts Treatment Center.

Such a designation could potentially have lasted the rest of his life.

“This is a tragedy,’’ said Michael Emerton, who said Paquin sexually assaulted him when he was a teenager attending the Haverhill parish to which Paquin was assigned in the 1980s. “Everyone needs to be vigilant and watch this person.’’

Emerton was one of the victims contacted Friday by Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett’s office, which launched the effort to have Paquin designated as a sexually dangerous person after Paquin finished his sentence in May.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Friday, Oct. 2

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

A notorious Boston predator priest will soon walk free and Catholics will learn whether Boston church officials will honor or ignore Pope Francis’ recent promises.

[WCVB]

Just days ago, Pope Francis said that “never again” should clergy sex crimes happen and that church officials will provide “careful oversight to ensure that youth are protected.”

Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley can provide that “careful oversight” but likely won’t. We urge O’Malley to use pulpit announcements, church bulletins and parish websites to beg other victims of Ronald Paquin to speak up and call police. An outreach effort like this could well bring forward others who could prosecute Paquin and keep him behind bars away from kids.

But we doubt O’Malley will do this. It would take real courage. It would require doing more than the bare minimum. Very few bishops have done this: acted like truly compassionate shepherds and taken the initiative to help law enforcement pursue predator priests.

In light of these recent papal pledges – and others – and given Paquin’s dangerous propensities, we challenge O’Malley to take tangible steps to act on Francis’ noble sentiments and potentially help keep Paquin away from children.

Recently, Francis talked tough on abuse. Let’s see if O’Malley was listening.

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UNITED STATES
CNN

By Daniel Burke, CNN Religion Editor

(CNN)The day before Pope Francis met anti-gay county clerk Kim Davis in Washington last week, he held a private meeting with a longtime friend from Argentina who has been in a same-sex relationship for 19 years.

Yayo Grassi, an openly gay man, brought his partner, Iwan, as well several other friends to the Vatican Embassy on September 23 for a brief visit with the Pope. A video of the meeting shows Grassi and Francis greeting each other with a warm hug.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Grassi declined to disclose details about the short visit, but said it was arranged personally by the Pope via email in the weeks ahead of Francis’ highly anticipated visit to the United States.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

A Church of England priest and former teacher who gave money to two boys he sexually abused has been jailed.

The Reverend Christopher Howarth, of Rocks Park Road, Uckfield, was found guilty of 26 offences against the boys, now aged 19 and 20.

The court heard he paid money to the boys in return for sexual gratification and told one of them he was “preparing” him for a girlfriend.

Howarth was jailed for 10 years at Lewes Crown Court on Friday.

The 68-year-old, who had admitted one count of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, was also ordered to be placed on the sex offenders’ register indefinitely.

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MASSACHUSETTS
WCVB

SALEM, Mass. —A former Roman Catholic priest convicted of sexually abusing children 13 years ago will be released after prosecutors lost their attempt have him classified as a sexually dangerous person.

Ronald Paquin, now 72, pleaded guilty in 2002 to sexually assaulting a 12-year-old altar boy at a Haverhill church over a period of three years. The rapes took place between 1989 and 1992, beginning when the victim was 12 years old.

Essex County prosecutors attempted to keep Paquin confined, but lost when neither of the experts who examined him this year found him to be sexually dangerous.

“Our contention is that Mr. Paquin poses a danger to the community,” District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, we have no further legal options available to hold Mr. Paquin.”

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

On the day that news broke of the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis, I was finishing Mary Dispenza’s painful, liberating account of her struggle to come to terms with her sexual abuse by a priest as a little girl, followed by her struggle to come to terms with her gay sexual orientation as an adult — and, in both cases, her narrative centers on her difficult attempt to deal with the callousness and cruelty of Catholic “pastoral” leaders as she struggled along. And so Mary Dispenza’s story now blends together in my mind with the revelation that, while refusing to meet with a single LGBT Catholic on his recent tour of “mercy” in the U.S., Pope Francis met with Kim Davis. Of all people . . . .

I learned of Mary Dispenza’s memoir SPLIT: A Child, a Priest, and the Catholic Church (Bellevue, WA: Moon Day, 2014) at the SNAP conference two months ago, where the book was cited several times by presenters in sessions I attended. And then I came home and asked my library to obtain a copy for me via interlibrary loan — which resulted in the library’s notifying me that it wanted, instead, to buy a copy for the library.

What follows is not really a review of SPLIT. It’s more a set of disconnected booknotes.

What really grabbed my attention as I read Mary’s memoir was, of course, her painful attempt to deal with the reality that she is lesbian, in a church (which was her employer at the time) whose pastoral leaders commonly make life a living hell for LGBT human beings. I won’t deny that I found it difficult to read the first part of her memoir, recounting her repeated sexual abuse by Father George Neville Rucker when she was a little girl attending a Catholic school in East Los Angeles.

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UNITED STATES
Reading Eagle

By John Fidler
READING, PA
:
The excitement generated by the pope’s visit to the Americas will linger a lifetime for those who saw him. So will the disappointment felt by those who’d hoped for more from the people’s pope about the sexual abuse crisis that continues to exact a toll on the survivors of abuse by Catholic priests, the survivors’ families and the Catholic Church itself.

On his trip back to Rome Sunday night, Francis admitted that bishops had covered up abuse cases.

“When a priest abuses, it is very grave because the vocation of the priest is to make that boy, that girl grow toward the love of God,” Francis told reporters on the plane, according to published accounts. “For this reason, the church is strong on this, and one must not cover these things up. Those who covered this up are guilty. Even some bishops who covered this up.”

On Sept. 23 in Washington, Francis shocked survivors and their supporters by praising American bishops for their role in responding to sexual abuse by priests.

He said that he was aware of the suffering – by the bishops and priests.

Advocates for survivors erupted. Even a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, a special panel that Francis appointed, was taken aback, The New York Times reported.

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VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast

Barbie Latza Nadeau

VATICAN CITY — It has undoubtedly been a long week for the Vatican press office since the news that Pope Francis met Kim Davis in what was described as a private meeting in Washington, D.C. on September 24 after his historic address to Congress. The meeting, which Davis’s lawyers implied was a secret rendezvous complete with a warm hug from the pope and words of encouragement, was apparently just a meet and greet of the kind Francis and other dignitaries do rather blindly.

On Friday, undoubtedly succumbing to stalker-like pressure from the Vatican press corps in Rome and beyond, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi finally clarified the circumstances of the apparent non-event.  “The brief meeting between Mrs. Kim Davis and Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, DC has continued to provoke comments and discussion,” Lombardi scolded in his statement. …

The Vatican statement will do little to quell the many conspiracy theories that include rumors of a holy coup against the pontiff by evil conservatives duping him in an attempt to sully his reputation ahead of the Grand Synod to begin on Sunday. The pope has a mind of his own, but he is one of the most advised leaders in the world, especially on the U.S. visit, which was planned down to the minute with the help of the powerful American Bishops, some of whom are clearly at odds with the Francis approach to the Church.

It should also be noted, as we’ve reported in The Daily Beast, that the pontiff’s attitude toward same-sex marriage is far from what the LGBT community would hope, and some believe.

And finally, the statement does little to answer the very basic question about just who else was in the group of “several dozen persons” who were apparently with Davis and her husband when they were at the Vatican embassy. Surely a witness to such an historical and hysterical event would have come forward by now to clarify just what contact the pontiff and the gay marriage martyr had.

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Michelle Boorstein October 2

Two days after news of a Kim Davis-Pope Francis meeting renewed the U.S. fascination over what this pope stands for, the Vatican on Friday put out a statement that appeared to downgrade the visit’s significance, saying it should “not be considered a form of support” of the Kentucky clerk’s “position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”

Davis, an Apostolic Christian who went to jail rather than allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, has become a polarizing figure in the country’s debate over religious freedom.

Since the revelation that she met with Francis — an event that was announced by her lawyer, not the Vatican, and kept secret until after the pope had returned to Rome — church insiders have been furiously swapping rumors about who exactly set up the meeting, which U.S. bishops knew of it, who was happy about it and who was upset.

The meeting was cheered by conservatives, who view Francis with suspicion because of previous statements that appeared to be accepting of homosexuality. But it was greeted with dismay by liberals, who have embraced Francis precisely because of his reluctance to engage in U.S. culture wars and his “who-am-I-to-judge” attitude.

[Capehart: Why I am disappointed with Pope Francis]

Church leaders in the United States and in Rome have been resolutely tight-lipped about the meeting, perhaps concerned about the prospect of appearing to publicly rebuke or challenge the pope, particularly on such a sensitive issue.

Among those who declined to comment was the Rev. Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, at whose residence the meeting took place. On Friday, the Vatican said Davis was among dozens of people “invited by the Nunciature” — or the ambassador. Church-watchers have debated and swapped rumors all week about whether Vigano worked on his own to set up the meeting, or at the behest of the pope himself, or in tandem with other bishops or religious freedom advocates or donors.

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UNITED STATES
The Atlantic

EMMA GREEN

This week, lawyers for Liberty Counsel and representatives from the Vatican confirmed that Pope Francis met with Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who has refused to perform same-sex marriages. It immediately became one of the biggest stories about the pope’s trip to the United States: A pontiff who has strained to change the Church’s tone on issues from abortion to homosexuality met with one of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Conservatives chalked it up as a win. The Church’s more progressive prelates pushed back. Now, the Vatican is downplaying the get together. “Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City,” wrote the Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi in a statement to reporters. “Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability.”

The greatest source of speculation since the news of the visit came out has been: Did the pope know who Kim Davis was and understand the controversy she represents? “The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis,” Lombardi wrote. “His meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”

A few hours after the Vatican released its statement, Liberty Counsel, the firm representing Davis, shot back its own counter-statement. “Neither Kim Davis nor Liberty Counsel ever said the meeting was an endorsement of her legal case,” said Mat Staver, Davis’s lawyer. “Rather, the meeting was a pastoral meeting to encourage Kim Davis in which Pope Francis thanked her for her courage and told her to ‘Stay strong.’ His words and actions support the universal human right to conscientious objection.”

It’s still not clear who arranged the meeting with Davis from the Vatican side. In an interview on Wednesday, Staver refused to say who had reached out to his firm, although he noted that their conversations began before Francis arrived in the United States. Thomas Rosica, the Vatican’s English-language media representative, claims that Vatican staff did not organize the meeting, according to the Religion News Service. Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter has speculated who the representative was: “Seeing as the meeting happened at the nunciature in Washington, it could only have happened with the approval and participation of the nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.”

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

So the hugely damaging fallout from the pope’s meeting with Kim Davis has now provoked an unusual response-retraction of sorts from the Vatican media spokesperson Father Lombardi, who says that the pope is a characteristically kind and available man who meets with all sorts of persons (and isn’t that nice, but isn’t it interesting that his kindness and availibilty didn’t extend to a meeting with a single LGBT Catholic among many who asked to see him on his U.S. visit?) Father Lombardi’s brief account of the meeting makes it appear that Kim Davis was “one of several dozen persons” who simply happened to be bustled in front of the pope as he made preparations to leave D.C.

And it does further damage control by stating that the brief meeting with Ms. Davis (and her husband and Mat Staver) does not constitute endorsement of her understanding of religious freedom — though it’s rather difficult to put that disclaimer together with the pope’s words about religious freedom on the plane back to Rome, which seemed precisely to be endorsing her version of religious freedom without naming her.

Here’s what I think as one of the tiny peons far removed from Vatican politics or the heady universe of the heterosexual old boys (of both genders, in some cases) who spin the pope for the rest of us in the Catholic media, along with his clerical spinmeisters: I think the Vatican is in damage-control mode after news of the meeting with the Davises and Mat Staver of the anti-gay hate group Liberty Counsel was leaked. And it now intends to throw the Davises and Mr. Staver to the wolves, without really telling us the full story of what happened.

The statement by Lombardi that this meeting does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of everything that Kim Davis stands for, and the attempt to represent the meeting as the brief encounter of a kind, avuncular pope with a bunch of people he hardly knew, may be the closest we’ll ever get to the “truth” of what happened here.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

[with copy of the letter to Pope Francis]

Katie Burgess
Canberra Times reporter

Child sexual abuse campaigner Damian De Marco has urged Pope Francis to release cardinals from an oath that may restrict them from speaking out about child sexual abuse.

In an open letter to the pontiff, the 2015 ACT Local Hero and Bravehearts ambassador said the oath all new cardinals must swear, which prohibits them from disclosing information which could damage the Roman Catholic Church, is “inappropriate” due to the church’s history of concealing child sexual abuse.

“In Australia, the Catholic Church now has 749,000 children in its care and each of those children are entrusted to a cardinal who will promise to conceal any information that could harm the church,” Mr De Marco said.

“They really should be standing up and saying ‘I promise I will protect these children’ rather than saying we ‘will protect the church’.”

Mr De Marco said despite ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1984, church officials have regularly imposed a “code of silence” on cases of child sexual abuse and placed the reputation of the institution ahead of the protection of children.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Oct. 2, 2015

VATICAN CITY
After days of speculation about Pope Francis’ meeting while in the U.S. with a Kentucky county clerk who has refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, the Vatican clarified Friday that the meeting should not be seen as a show of support by the pope for the clerk.

Francis’ meeting with Kim Davis “should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” Vatican spokesman Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi said in a statement.

“Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City,” Lombardi said in the statement. “Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability.”

“The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” said the spokesman. …

While Friday’s statement clarifies the Vatican’s position on Francis’ meeting, it does not look likely that it will close discussion on the matter.

Davis’ lawyer, Mat Staver, responded almost immediately to the Vatican, disputing the claim that the pope only met the clerk as part of a group. Davis and her husband, Staver told the Associated Press, met the pope alone.

Staver also told the AP that Vatican personnel initiated contact, saying the pope wanted to meet Davis. The lawyer did not name the Vatican officials.

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

VATICAN CITY | BY PHILIP PULLELLA

Pope Francis did not ask to meet a Kentucky county clerk who had been jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and did not offer her unconditional support, the Vatican said on Friday.

Looking to limit controversy after last week’s meeting in Washington between the pope and Kim Davis, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said she was one of “several dozen” people who had been invited by the Vatican ambassador to see Francis.

“The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” Lombardi said in a statement.

The meeting with Davis, which was originally kept secret, disappointed many liberal Catholics but delighted conservatives, who saw it as a sign that the pope was clearly condemning a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Sussex Express

A former Uckfield deputy principal and lay priest who was convicted of sexual offences against two boys has been sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Christopher Howarth, of Rocks Park Road, Uckfield, was convicted at Hove Crown Court on July 17 after a ten-day trial.

The retired 68-year-old was found guilty of 26 offences, all committed in the Uckfield area. He was found not guilty of five offences. He had previously pleaded guilty to two other sexual offences against one of the boys.

Howarth appeared at Lewes Crown Court this afternoon (Friday, October 2) after two previous sentencing dates, on August 7 and September 14, were postponed due to the availability of Her Honour Judge Shani Barnes and of a free courtroom with disabled access to meet Howarth’s needs.

Howarth, who was deputy principal of Uckfield Community Technical College until 2007, and, until his arrest in December 2012, a lay priest at Holy Trinity CofE church in Uckfield, was jailed for ten years.

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CALIIFORNIA
Canyon News

by Kiana Schmitt – October 1, 2015

SANTA MONICA—Eight months after a survivor spoke publicly about her years of sexual abuse from her Rabbi, on Wednesday, September 30, Santa Monica Police Department arrested and booked Rabbi Sholom Dovber Levitansky on felony charges for sexual abuse of a child.

Levitansky, 38, was charged by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office with five counts of oral copulation of a person under 18 years of age, five counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object, and one count of lewd act upon a child.

On February 28 of this year, Jewish Community Watch (JCW), added Levitansky to their Wall of Shame. “Multiple victims came forward and revealed to JCW that they had been abused by Levitansky,” The online posting reads. “After an investigation by JCW’s investigative team that spanned 18 months and following a review by JCW’s board, it was determined that public exposure was warranted and necessary.”

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VATICAN CITY
Bolletino

The brief meeting between Mrs. Kim Davis and Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, DC has continued to provoke comments and discussion. In order to contribute to an objective understanding of what transpired I am able to clarify the following points:

Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City. Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.

The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.

[01616-EN.01] [Original text: English]

Testo in lingua italiana

Dichiarazione su un incontro di Papa Francesco con la Signora Kim Davis alla Nunziatura di Washington, DC (P. F. Lombardi, Direttore della Sala Stampa della Santa Sede)

Il breve incontro fra la signora Kim Davis e il Papa presso la Nunziatura di Washington ha continuato a provocare una serie di discussioni e commenti.

Al fine di contribuire a una comprensione obiettiva di ciò che è avvenuto posso precisare che:

Il Papa ha incontrato presso la Nunziatura di Washington successivamente diverse decine di persone invitate dalla Nunziatura per salutarlo in occasione del suo congedo prima della partenza da Washington per New York City, come avviene durante tutti i viaggi del Papa. Si è trattato di saluti molto brevi di cortesia a cui il Papa si è prestato con la sua caratteristica gentilezza e disponibilità. L’unica “udienza” concessa dal Papa presso la Nunziatura è stata ad un suo antico alunno con la famiglia.

Il Papa non è quindi entrato nei dettagli della situazione della signora Davis e il suo incontro con lei non deve essere considerato come un appoggio alla sua posizione in tutti i suoi risvolti particolari e complessi.

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NEW JERSEY
The Record

BY JEFF GREEN
STAFF WRITER | THE RECORD

MIDLAND PARK — The Newark Archdiocese has declined to take any action concerning a Midland Park priest who is under investigation for allegedly accepting more than $250,000 in cash, checks and gifts from elderly members of an Essex County parish where he worked last year.

Jim Goodness, an archdiocese spokesman, called the investigation by the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office a “personal issue” for the Rev. Alex Orozco to deal with, because neither the archdiocese nor any of its parishes were harmed.

No charges have been filed in the case. Orozco, 37, is being investigated on claims he took large sums of money from wealthy elderly women when he was assigned to St. Rose of Lima Church in Short Hills. He used their cash and checks to buy cars, houses, plane tickets to his native Colombia and a big-screen TV among other items, according to an article first published by NJ Advance Media. In one case, when a woman — whom he called his “grandma” — asked for receipts for the purchases, Orozco failed to produce them, the report said.

Orozco did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. He told NJ Advance Media in an interview that he made mistakes in his solicitations but that parishioners “want to embrace me.”

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ITALIA
Rete L’Abuso

[There are other complaints against Fr. Francesco Zappella.]

Potrebbe cambiare da violenza sessuale in abuso di minori la posizione del prete missionario di Borghetto S. Spirito don Francesco Zappella. Nelle ultime settimane la Rete L’ABUSO ha continuato a raccogliere segnalazioni arrivate non solo da oltre oceano, ma anche dalla Liguria e dal bergamasco dove sembrerebbe che la posizione del sacerdote fosse già piuttosto chiacchierata venti anni fa, al punto tale di costargli l’allontanamento dal Seminario di Bergamo e il successivo reclutamento in quello di Albenga.

L’associazione ha puntualmente trasmesso agli inquirenti quanto appreso dalle segnalazioni depositando agli atti ben 4 informative, l’ultima di ieri mattina, contenente anche la denuncia di un’altra presunta vittima poco più che 20enne, la quale potrebbe costare al sacerdote, attualmente indagato per violenza sessuale, l’incriminazione per abuso di minori.

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UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches

BY KARA LOEWENTHEIL OCTOBER 1, 2015

When Pope Francis came to New York last week traffic came to a standstill. But traffic on social media was brisk, with many of my friends from the social justice world celebrating the Pope’s “liberal” (read: barely modern and centrist in the overall scheme of things) take on hot-button domestic issues. The Pope believes in climate change! He cares if people are starving! He’s willing to let priests forgive women for abortions, at least for a single year of “mercy” (normally, you see, abortion is such a grave sin that a bishop has to be entreated for forgiveness).

And then the news leaked that the Pope had met with Kim Davis, and suddenly all that changed: My Facebook feed was filled with anger, vitriol, and even a sense of betrayal that the Pope was supporting religious exemptions.

Now on one level, this just seems bizarre. Of course the Pope supports religious exemptions. He’s the POPE. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops pays fancy lobbyists every year to push for broad readings of religious exemptions laws. And who’s their boss? The Pope. Many of the non-profit organizations objecting to even signing the form to take advantage of the accommodation from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement are Catholic organizations. So why is it so surprising that the Pope would support Kim Davis and her attempt to claim a religious exemption to performing same-sex marriages—or even appearing to validate them in her official capacity?

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NEW YORK
New York Times

By SAM ROBERTS
OCT. 2, 2015

Joseph Coffey, a New York City detective who took the confession of the serial killer known as Son of Sam, arrested John J. Gotti three times, trailed a minor mobster from Little Italy to Germany in a case that implicated the Vatican Bank, and danced with Nancy Reagan at the Waldorf one night when he was assigned to guard her, died on Sunday at his home in Levittown, N.Y. He was 77.

The cause was complications of a heart condition, his wife, Susan Elise Coffey, said.

“He was instinctive, he understood people and when you were in his cross hairs he knew everything about you,” said Jerry Schmetterer, who collaborated with Mr. Coffey on “The Coffey Files: One Cop’s War Against the Mob,” which was published in 1992. …

Eavesdropping on a wiretapped conversation during an investigation into an attempted mob takeover of the Playboy Club in Manhattan, Sergeant Coffey overheard a minor mobster, Vincent Rizzo, mysteriously arrange a mission to Munich, but not through the usual organized-crime-connected travel agency.

His suspicions took him to Germany, where he persuaded United States Army intelligence officers to plant a bug in a hotel room. There Mr. Rizzo and two confederates detailed the transfer of counterfeit and stolen securities through the Vatican Bank.

The case ultimately led to charges against an archbishop who was the bank’s president.

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VATICAN CITY
Huffington Post

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican said Friday that Pope Francis’ meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, “should not be considered a form of support of her position.”

After days of confusion, the Vatican issued a statement Friday clarifying Francis’ Sept. 24 meeting with Davis, an Apostolic Christian who has become a focal point in the gay marriage debate in the U.S.

In a statement, the Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said Francis met with “several dozen” people at the Vatican’s embassy just before leaving Washington for New York.

Lombardi said such meetings are due to the pope’s “kindness and availability” and that the pope only really had one “audience” with former students and his family members.

“The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” Lombardi said.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Pulse Nigeria

Walter Masocha, 51, self-styled ‘prophet’ and founder of the Agape for All Nations church, dodged a jail term earlier this year for groping a deaconess and molesting a schoolgirl.

The Zimbabwe-born preacher molested members while leading the Agape for All Nations church, it has been said.

He regularly invited women worshippers to private “surgeries” held in his bedroom but banned their husbands from attending, the Daily Record reported.

After his conviction, the Stirling church said they “apologised for any harm done to those affected” and announced the 51-year-old was suspended.

But the preacher is still a central figure in the organisation. A video posted on Agape’s website shows Masocha front and centre during a church event in July, just a month after he was sentenced to a community payback order.

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UNITED STATES
Albuquerque Journal

By Victor Davis Hanson / Syndicated Columnist
Friday, October 2nd, 2015

Unpopular though it may be to say so, I, for one, grew exhausted by the nonstop pronouncements/commentaries of Pope Francis. The spiritual leader of 1 billion Catholics – roughly half of the world’s Christians – Francis just completed a high-profile, endlessly publicized visit to the United States.

But unlike past visiting pontiffs, the Argentine-born Francis weighed in on a number of hot-button U.S. social, domestic and foreign-policy issues during a heated presidential election cycle.

Francis, in characteristic cryptic language, pontificated about climate change. He lectured on illegal immigration. He harped on the harshness of capitalism, as well as abortion and capital punishment. …

In this new freewheeling climate of frank exchange, should Protestant friends now advise Catholic dioceses to open their aggregate 200 million acres of global church lands to help house current migrants? Or should Francis first deplore the capitalist business practices in the administration of the so-called Vatican Bank?

Should the church turn over to prosecuting attorneys all the names of past and present clergy accused of criminal sexual abuse, and cede all investigation and punishment to the state?

Lots of hypocrisy inevitably follows when churches and their leaders politick.

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POLAND
The News

A 45-year-old priest was charged on Thursday with the rape of a minor after being arrested on Monday.

The charges brought against Father Adam W. (surname withheld under Polish privacy laws) follow an investigation that was launched on 11 August by the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Jędrzejów, southern Poland.

The 45-year-old had served as vicar of a parish near Jędrzejów, but he resigned last week.
He stands accused of raping a girl below the age of 15, and he has also been charged with two other counts of sexual abuse.

The alleged offences took place between September 2013 and February 2015.

A court in Kielce, southern Poland, has ruled that the suspect should be initially kept in custody for three months.

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ROME
BBC News

Caroline Wyatt
Religious affairs correspondent

This Sunday will see the start of a Synod of Bishops in Rome that could become one of the defining moments for the Papacy of Pope Francis, just six days after he landed back in Italy from his nine-day trip to Cuba and the US.

The diplomatic complexities that he navigated on that journey may come to seem relatively simple compared with the journey that awaits for representatives of the world’s 1.2bn Roman Catholics at the Synod on the Family.

It starts on 4 October and ends on 25 October, following on from last year’s Extraordinary Synod.
It has been hailed as a key test of this Papacy, and of the Pontiff’s own authority and direction for the Church.

The meeting will involve 279 bishops from more than 120 nations, as well as 17 married couples and 17 auditors, as well as other non-voting representative.

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MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Martin Moylan
Oct 1, 2015

The federal judge overseeing the bankruptcy of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis questioned the need for more legal and other professionals to resolve the case during a court hearing Thursday.

The legal bill for the bankruptcy is already about $3.6 million. Now, the archdiocese wants a firm hired to represent sex abuse victims who might file claims against the church in the future. The estimated cost is $150,000.

About 400 people filed abuse claims by an August deadline, but the archdiocese says some people could still come forward with legally viable claims of abuse that occurred before the church’s bankruptcy filing and could argue they were not subject to the August cutoff.

“They may be minors or have disabilities,” said archdiocese attorney Richard Anderson.

At the hearing, the archdiocese says it has been standard procedure in other church bankruptcies to appoint someone to represent such claimants.

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SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland

Members of an independent inquiry into historical abuse of children in care in Scotland will not be appointed for several weeks, it has emerged, prompting some victims to describe the initiative as a shambles.

The inquiry was due to start work on October 1 and ministers and the inquiry team itself insist it is ‘up and running’ and has begun its task of exploring allegations of abuse in children’s homes, boarding schools, foster care and other care setting such as hospitals.

However the panel which will work with inquiry chair Susan O’Brien QC has yet to be selected, the number of people on it has yet to be determined and a government spokesman said that although interviews had taken place and a panel would be appointed in the ‘very near future’, it could still be several weeks away.

Alan Draper, parliamentary liaison officer for In Care Abuse Survivors (Incas) said: “Our concern is they have known they needed to appoint panel members since they announced the inquiry in December. It is the Government’s responsibility. What is the problem? Without a panel, it can’t be up and running, it is a bit of a shambles.”

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SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland

A public inquiry into historical abuse of children in care in Scotland has formally started its work.

The Historical Child Abuse Inquiry, chaired by Susan O’Brien QC, will cover allegations of abuse of children in formal institutional care.

It has asked those who believe they may have information to share to get in touch.

Organisations with records that may be of interest to the inquiry have also been asked asked to take the necessary steps to ensure they are preserved.

Ms O’Brien said: “Once the Scottish Government has appointed the inquiry panel members, and I have had a chance to discuss the issues with them, we will set out in detail the ways in which we will run the inquiry and take evidence from witnesses.

“Counsel to the inquiry will be in touch with survivors’ representatives during October to make sure that their views are considered before that happens.

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ILLINOIS
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Priest who was here last year is accused
Allegation comes from internal church memo
He’s the 7th Belleville priest “outed” this year for first time
Group will write their names on church headquarters sidewalk
Six of them are “credibly accused child molesters,” church admits
“Continuing secrecy violates Pope Francis’ latest promises,” group says

WHAT
Holding signs and childhood photos at a sidewalk news conference, clergy sex abuse victims and their supporters will

–disclose an internal US Bishop Conference memo – under the heading “WARNING” – that names a never-before-accused priest who worked in the Belleville diocese last year,
–write his name in chalk, and the names of six other recently-outed local predator priests, on the sidewalk outside the diocesan headquarters, and
–provide their photos and work histories.

They will also

— prod anyone who was hurt by the priests to speak up and get help, and
— prod Catholic officials in Belleville and St. Louis to “honor the recent promises by Pope Francis to end church secrecy on abuse” by “coming clean” with more information about the priests and aggressively seek out their victims.

WHEN
Thursday, Oct. 1 at 1:00 p.m.

WHERE
On the sidewalk outside the Belleville diocese HQ (“chancery office”), 222 South Third St. in Belleville, IL

WHO
Two-four individuals who belong to a support group called the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)

WHY

1. SNAP has obtained an internal memo in which Catholic officials warn one another about a Belleville priest who engaged in what they call “inappropriate conduct” with parishioners and “similar inappropriate conduct in (his) previous assignments” outside the diocese.

As recently as last year, he was still working in southern Illinois until he was dismissed by church officials.

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UNITED STATES
Breitbart

by AUSTIN RUSE
1 Oct 2015

The meeting between Pope Francis and Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis came at the invitation of a high-ranking Vatican official connected to the Secretariat of State of the Holy See acting on behalf of the Pope himself, Breitbart News has learned.

According to a person involved in arranging the meeting but who requested anonymity, the Vatican official called Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican who is well known in Rome. The official asked Moynihan if he could help arrange a meeting while the Pope was in the United States.

Moynihan, who has connections in Kentucky, called a Kentucky businessman and Catholic activist who then called a well-known Catholic lawyer also from Kentucky. The lawyer, who is long-time friends with Davis lawyer Matt Staver, told Staver that he and Moynihan had to meet personally with Davis. The source told Staver, “I can’t tell you what its about but you have to trust me.”

The group drove to Rowan County for a meeting with Davis in her office. The source said the men had to maneuver through a phalanx of press to get to her office.

They put her on the phone with the Vatican official, who then invited her to meet with the Pope.

An unnamed Vatican official is quoted in the Washington Post today saying the meeting had to have come from the Davis team. Two sources involved in arranging the meeting have insisted to Breitbart News that the invitation was from the Pope directly to the Vatican official and then to Davis and that Davis’s lawyers were not involved and neither were any others from the Davis camp.

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UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Massimo Faggioli
Professor of History of Christianity, University of St. Thomas

The meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis threatens to overshadow the success of the pope’s visit to the United States. The response to the visit says a lot about the climate created in the United States around the pope’s visit and the inability for some in the church to acknowledge and receive Pope Francis. It says nothing, however, about the position of the pope, the concrete case of Kim Davis, the question of LGBT Catholics in general or same-sex marriage in the civil society. To understand the contours of the meeting we should keep in mind a few things.

First point: Popes meet with a lot of people, both during the general audiences, and even more while traveling. The ways of organizing these meetings vary widely, especially when the pope travels, and the pope himself is often unaware of what’s been planned for him. A worse incident happened – without any fault of his own – when Benedict XVI met at the Vatican, during a meeting with thousands of pilgrims, Rebecca Kadaga, the Ugandan political figure who rose to prominence during the legislative debate about the criminalization of homosexuality.

Second point: It is clear that the non-public meeting between the pope and Kim Davis has forced the hand of the pope in order to make him say something he avoided saying during the trip to America. Lawyers for Kim Davis did the rest, choosing the perfect timing for the revelation: that is, when the pope had already left America and during a time of day in Rome (where I am these days) when it was impossible for the Vatican to react. But Queen Victoria’s “never complain, never explain” no longer works, even for the pope, especially because of the 24-hour news cycle.

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UNITED STATES
Think Progress

BY JACK JENKINS OCT 1, 2015

News broke Tuesday evening that during Pope Francis’s recent visit to the United States, the pontiff briefly met with Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk jailed for refusing to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses. Reports of the rendezvous, which most outlets agree occurred although the Vatican still refuses to formally confirm it, riled both progressive and conservative supporters of Francis.

Some — including Davis — saw the rendezvous as an implicit show of support for the clerk’s cause, a shocking move from a pope who maintains the Catholic Church’s opposition to homosexual relationships but has taken pains to avoid wading into culture wars. Writers such as Crux’s John Allen framed the incident as an example of how Francis doesn’t fit neatly into any of America’s tidy political categories. But many Catholic commentators were quick to warn against drawing any firm conclusions about the meeting, which was reportedly arranged by Vatican officials and not American bishops. In an essay for America magazine, a Jesuit publication, prominent Catholic writer James Martin noted that unless the Vatican explicitly frames the meeting as an endorsement of Davis, people shouldn’t overlay their own beliefs over the pope’s actions.

Pope Francis also met Mark Wahlberg, and that does not mean that he liked ‘Ted.’
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pope Francis also met Mark Wahlberg, and that does not mean that he liked ‘Ted,’” Martin wrote, referencing the Boston-born actor’s widely-panned film featuring a talking bear.

Information about the exchange between the Holy Father and Davis has been sparse, provided almost entirely by Davis and her lawyers, who saw it as a formal approval of her actions. National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters called for the Vatican to reveal more information about the meeting on Thursday, arguing that the lack of details could taint of the pope’s otherwise successful trip to the United States.

“Someone needs to say something or we will only know what Ms. Davis and her lawyers want us to know,” he wrote. “The rest will be speculation, endless speculation … If the pope was badly served by his staff, let that be known. If the pope was badly served by himself, let that be known. But, neither the bishops nor the Vatican can afford to let this fester another minute.”

To get more insight about the possible reasons for the secret meeting, ThinkProgress spoke with Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. Reese — who, like Pope Francis, is a Jesuit priest — helped break down the Vatican’s unusual caginess about the meet up, and offered some hints as to what it could mean.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why, exactly, is the Vatican being so weird about this meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis?

There are two possibilities. One is that somebody brought her to the Vatican embassy here in Washington and simply presented her to the pope without much internal discussion.

So basically, “Hello pope, here’s this lady who was a conscientious objector, isn’t that sad?” And the pope said “Oh, courage [to you], God bless you. Here’s a rosary!”

That view is supported to some extent by the very minimal — really, almost nothing — explanation of the visit by the Vatican. If the Vatican wanted to make a point, they know how to make a point. But this has been so downplayed: The Vatican’s response was about as low-level as you can possibly get. They didn’t even [technically] say it happened!

Now, that kind of raises red flags that says maybe even the Vatican thinks this meeting was a mistake — that’s one theory.

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CANADA
de Gelderlander

Eric Dejaeger, een voormalige katholieke priester van Belgische afkomst, heeft woensdag voor de rechtbank in de Canadese stad Iqaluit schuld bekend voor vier aanklachten van seksueel misbruik. Dat meldt de Canadese zender CBC.

De feiten zouden tussen 1975 en 1978 hebben plaatsgevonden in het Newman Theological College in Edmonton, waar hij toen studeerde. Volgens CBC bekende Dejaeger twee aanklachten wegens grove obsceniteiten. Ook gaf hij toe een jongen en een meisje te hebben aangerand. Een gerechtelijke uitspraak wordt op 22 oktober verwacht.

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CHILE
La Tercera

[Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz yesterday gave five hours of testimony in a civil lawsuit against the archdiocese relating to alleged sexual abuse of minors by priest Fernando Karadima.]

En el día de ayer por más de cinco horas el cardenal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, prestó declaración en el marco de la demanda civil en contra del Arzobispado, -por las supuestas negligencias cometidas tras recibir las denuncias de abuso sexual contra Fernando Karadima.

La Tercera tuvo acceso a su declaración, en la cual se negó a responder una serie de preguntas, pero argumentando otras, como la que hace referencia al daño en la Iglesia Católica.

-¿Los denunciantes han causado daños a la Iglesia Católica?
Sin pretenderlo,debido a la publicidad de la denuncia, sí

-¿En qué habría consistido este daño a la Iglesia Católica?
Ha dañado su confiabilidad, sin afirmar que se le haya querido dañar, el hecho de referirse públicamente al Arzobispo de Santiago como criminal y encubridor, la dañaba.

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UNITED STATES
Esquire

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

I spent a little time Wednesday night examining my conscience, as we used to say around the ol’ confessional, as regards the meeting between Papa Francesco and noted civic layabout Kim Davis. This contemplation was prompted by two things: first, an e-conversation I had with someone who had been part of the papal travelling party and second, the appearance of E. J. Dionne on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC. According to the first person, there were a great number of people during the pope’s tour who were simply hustled in and out for informal private audiences. According to Dionne, the meeting between Davis and the pope was brokered by Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the papal nuncio to the United States at whose residence the pope stayed during his time in Washington, which is when the meeting took place. Together, these facts set off my Spidey Sense about Vatican chicanery.

Before we continue, let us stipulate a few things. First of all, let us stipulate that there are more than a few members of the Church’s permanent bureaucracy, both within the Clan Of The Red Beanie and without, who are not happy that this gentleman got elected Pope, and who are not happy with what he’s done and said since he was. Second, let us stipulate that many members of this group are loyal to both former pope Josef Ratzinger and, through him, to the memory (and to what they perceive as the legacy) of John Paul II who, for good and ill, had a much different idea of how to wield a papacy than Papa Francesco does. Third, let us stipulate that this opposition to the current pope has been active and vocal, to say nothing of paranoid. Finally, let us stipulate that, for over 2000 years, the Vatican has been a hotbed of intrigue, betrayal, and sanctified ratfcking on a very high scale. (It also has been a hotbed of, well, hot beds, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment.) So, if you’re one of these people, and you’re looking to ratfck the pope’s visit to the United States, and to his agenda in general, you’d be looking to put him in a box. So, how would you do that?

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ESTADO UNIDOS
BBC Brasil

Fabíola Ortiz
De Nova York para a BBC Brasil

Organizações da sociedade civil norte-americanas acusam o papa Francisco de negligenciar casos de abuso sexual de crianças e adolescentes cometidos por religiosos e defendem a abertura dos arquivos do Vaticano com a divulgação de nomes dos acusados em todo o mundo.

“O papa nega o quão sério é o problema e minimiza a situação. Ele nega que crianças continuam sendo violadas”, disse à BBC Brasil Barbara Blaine, fundadora da organização SNAP (sigla de Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), uma rede que reúne vítimas de abusos cometidos por padres criada no final dos anos 80 nos Estados Unidos e em outros países.

“Na verdade, ele nem deveria se ocupar disso, deveria mandar os casos para que a polícia investigasse”, afirmou ela. …

De acordo com a ONG Bishop Accountability, os dados oficiais da Igreja nos EUA indicam que 6,4 mil padres foram acusados de pedofilia entre 1950 e 2013.

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ESTADO UNIDOS
La Izquierda Diario (Mexico

[Pope Francis apologized for sexual abuse by priests against minors in Philadelphia but many of those guilty of pedophilia remain unpunished.]

Bárbara Funes
México D.F | @barbarafunes2

Se dio a conocer que el papa Francisco pidió perdón por los abusos sexuales cometidos por sacerdotes contra menores, poco antes del Encuentro Mundial de las Familias en Filadelfia. Pero los miembros de la Iglesia culpables de pedofilia siguen impunes.

Hipocresía papal ante víctimas de abuso sexual por parte de eclesiásticos
Como parte de su campaña para represtigiar a la Iglesia y hacer jugar un rol estratégico al Vaticano en la geopolítica internacional, el papa Francisco –aliado de los militares durante la dictadura argentina de 1976-1983- quiere lavarle la cara a la institución eclesiástica.

En su reciente gira por Estados Unidos, declaró ante víctimas de pedofilia en una reunión privada convenientemente dada a conocer a la prensa: “Lamento profundamente que algunos obispos no cumplieran con su responsabilidad de proteger a los menores. Es muy inquietante saber que en algunos casos incluso los obispos eran ellos mismos los abusadores. Tendrán que rendir cuentas”.

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MICHIGAN
Canale Tonella Funeral Home

January 19, 1926 – July 21, 2014
Resided in Marquette, MI

Obituary

Rev. Norbert Paul LaCosse, 88, of Marquette, died Monday afternoon, July 21, 2014 at the Norlite Nursing Center in Marquette.

Fr. LaCosse was born on January 19, 1926 in Marquette to the late Archie and Vitalie (Greenleaf) LaCosse. He was a 1943 graduate of Graveraet High School.

He attended St. John’s Provincial Seminary in Plymouth, Wisconsin and was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Marquette at the hands of Bishop Thomas L. Noa on June 6, 1952. Fr. LaCosse served in several parishes throughout the Upper Peninsula. He was removed from active ministry according to the norms of the Dallas Charter.

He is survived by one sister, Celeste Jean Kyto of Marquette as well as several nieces and nephews. Preceding him in death besides his parents were two brothers, Leon LaCosse and Eldo LaCosse; also two sisters, Elva White and Ila LaCosse.

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CALIFORNIA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Thursday, October 1, 2015

Statement by Melanie Jula Sakoda, East Bay Director for SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (925-708-6175 cell, melanie.sakoda@gmail.com)

A federal judge has ruled that the Archdiocese of San Francisco cannot dismiss accusations that it failed to prevent students at a boys’ school from sharing inappropriate photos of a teacher. SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, expressed gratitude for the judge’s ruling.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick found a triable issue existed on claims the Archdiocese contributed to civil rights violations that caused a female biology teacher at Junipero Serra High School emotional distress.

[Courthouse News Service]

“I’m glad that the Archdiocese of San Francisco wasn’t able to wiggle out of this case,” said Tim Lennon, the San Francisco Director of SNAP. “Church officials’ response to Kimberly Bohnert’s harassment echoed their response to clergy sex abuse. That is, the Archdiocese used its resources to protect the perpetrators not the victim.”

Melanie Sakoda, the East Bay Director of SNAP agreed. “When Judge Orrick wrote that ‘[t]he school (and the Archbishop’s office) did not appear to learn from, or respond to, each instance of harassing conduct or to prevent similar occurrences in the future,’ the similarity was all too obvious.”

Lennon concluded, “We’re grateful that Ms. Bohnert will not be denied her day in court. The Archdiocese’s continuous efforts to block statute of limitations reform have closed that door to many abuse victims.”

Bohnert sued the Archdiocese last year, claiming it did nothing as students humiliated her for more than two years. The Church claimed that California workers compensation law barred the teacher’s emotional distress claims.

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NEW JERSEY
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015

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

A Newark priest is being investigated for allegedly taking more than $250,000 from elderly parishioners, evidence of even more corruption that’s happening on the watch of Archbishop John Myers and Archbishop Bernard Hebda.

[NJ.com]

Fr. Alex Orozco’s manipulation and deceit are what happens when top Catholic officials tolerate corruption at the top. When Archbishop Myers lavishly spends parishioners’ donations on his already huge and ostentatious mansion, it’s easy to see why his priests feel they can rip off the flock as well.

Shame on Myers and Hebda for keeping these serious allegations secret, which may have enabled Orozco to keep manipulating elderly women for more personal gain. And shame on Juancho Munoz Montoya, a former seminarian at Seton Hall University, for his secrecy as well.

Our hearts ache for current and former members and staff at St. Rose of Lima Church in Short Hills, the Church of the Nativity in Midland Park and the entire archdiocese. We hope that anyone who may have seen, suspected or suffered misdeeds by Newark area clergy – whether financial or sexual – will call police, expose wrongdoers and deter other priests from exploiting parishioners.

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ROME
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Oct. 1, 2015

ANALYSIS

ROME For a while there, we had become used to papal mis-messaging.

The examples during Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy were legendary. Take, for one example, his 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany. Meant as an invitation for dialogue between Christians and Muslims, the message of the speech was overcome by a phrase he quoted from a 14th century Byzantine emperor that deeply offended Muslims.

Until now, Pope Francis had seemed much better about sticking to his message and not undermining himself. But that’s exactly what some think he has done by meeting secretly during his U.S. visit with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who has refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Just hours after giving his incredibly well-received speech to a joint meeting of Congress, Francis apparently met with Davis at the Vatican’s Washington embassy and told her to “stay strong” in her objection, for reasons of conscience, to issuing the licenses.

For many, the mis-message is rather stark.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Kieran Tapsell | Oct. 1, 2015

COMMENTARY

On his tour of the United States, Pope Francis has forcefully reminded the world about the importance of looking after the planet and the perils of climate change. His criticisms of the world economic system and the plight of the poor are timely and welcome. There is very little that Pope Francis can personally do about either of these things except to do what he has done — warn and exhort.

But there is one thing that he can personally do about child sexual abuse, and that is to change canon law by abolishing the pontifical secret over allegations of the sexual abuse of children by clergy and religious.

In an address to bishops in Philadelphia, Pope Francis said:

“The crimes and sins of sexual abuse of minors cannot be kept secret any longer. I commit myself to the zealous watchfulness of the church to protect minors, and I promise that all those responsible will be held accountable.”

The maintenance of secrecy for these crimes is imposed by Article 25 of Pope John Paul II’s motu proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela of 2001 and by Article 30 of its revision by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, which impose the pontifical secret on all allegations and proceedings relating to child sexual abuse by clerics. The footnotes to Article 25 and Article 30 apply Article 1(4) of Pope Paul VI’s instruction, Secreta Continere, which defines the pontifical secret as the church’s highest form of secrecy, and like the secret of the confessional, is a permanent silence. Since becoming pope two and a half years ago, Pope Francis has made no attempt to change this maintenance of secrecy, the very thing he condemned in Philadelphia.

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CONNECTICUT
Journal Enquirer

By Aysha Mahmood
Journal Inquirer

An Enfield Superior Court judge on Wednesday modified the release of a former East Windsor priest accused of sexual assault, allowing him to leave his home during certain hours rather than be under house arrest.

Judge Jorge Simon ruled that the former priest, Paul Gotta, 57, of Bridgeport, can leave his home from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Gotta was arrested in March 2014 on charges of two counts of two counts of second-degree sexual assault and five counts of four-degree sexual assault in connection with the sexual assault of a teenage parishioner, according to East Windsor police.

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

And the comments just keep pouring in to my email box and my Facebook feed, people crushed and angry that the pope chose to meet with Kim and Joe Davis and Mat Staver while he was on a U.S. tour preaching mercy, and, we were told, encouraging the rest of us to rise above the culture-war fixations:

This is from a friend of mine who has a truly remarkable record of working for social justice for many years now in my state, a highly regarded minister:

The fact that Pope Francis met with Kim Davis, and that he did so secretively, is beyond disappointing.

From another wonderful friend of mine, a gay person who’s not Catholic, who long since gave up on religion, but who found the pope inspiring up to now:

When I saw the news that he had dissembled, and that he actually had met with Kim Davis and made out on the plane that he was not referring to her necessarily, that was it for me. I’m done with all the protestations that he’s such a nice, kindly, old man.

From a friend of a friend on Facebook, also not Catholic but who found the pope inspiring — until this:

I watched so much of his visit – felt inspired. Now I kind of feel that watching The Cartoon Network would have done a better job of sustained inspiration.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 1 October 2015 (VIS) – The Holy Father has:

– appointed Msgr. Luigi Renna as bishop of Cerignola-Ascoli Satriano (area 1,327, population 110,889, Catholics 101,672, priests 58, permanent deacons 14, religious 87), Italy. The bishop-elect was born in 1966 in Corato, Italy, and was ordained a priest in 1991. He holds a licentiate in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, and a doctorate from the Pontifical Lateran University. He has served in a number of pastoral and academic roles in the diocese of Andria, Italy, including vice rector of the episcopal seminary; director of the diocesan “Msgr. Di Donna” school of formation; rector of the diocesan minor seminary, and lecturer in moral theology at the Pugliese Theological Faculty in Molfetta. He is currently canon of the cathedral chapter of Andria; director of the diocesan “San Tommaso d’Aquino” library; member of the college of consultors; director of the “San Luca Evangelista” diocesan archive; director of the school for training pastoral workers and rector of the Pius XI Pontifical regional seminary of Molfetta. He was named Chaplain of His Holiness in 2009.

– appointed Fr. Giovanni Roncari, O.F.M. Cap., as bishop of Pitigliano – Sovana – Orbetello (area 2,177, population 72,100, Catholics 70,000, priests 65, permanent deacons 9, religious 68), Italy. The bishop-elect was born in 1949 in Verona, Italy, gave his religious vows in 1972 and was ordained a priest in 1975. He holds a licentiate in Church history and has served in a number of roles in his order and as parish priest and delegate for the archdiocese of Florence for the lay apostolate. He is currently a parish priest, member of the college of consultors, episcopal vicar for the Florentine clergy and professor of theology in the Central Italy Faculty of Theology.

– confirmed the election of Rev. Sarkis Davidian as Armenian bishop of Ispahan (Catholics 2,000, priests 1, religious 12), Iran. The bishop-elect was born in 1943 in Aleppo, Syria and was ordained a priest in 1970. He has served as parish priest in France and Lebanon, and currently exercises his ministry as pastor in Armenia.

– accepted the resignation from the office of auxiliary of the diocese of Cebu, Philippines, presented by Bishop Emilio L. Bataclan, upon reaching the age limit.

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NEW JERSEY
NJ.com

By Mark Mueller | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on October 01, 2015

He called them his grandmas.

The Rev. Alex Orozco befriended the elderly women shortly after his assignment to St. Rose of Lima parish in Short Hills.

Orozco was a new priest, charming and kind and afire with enthusiasm.

And always, it seemed, willing to accept money, parishioners said.

For a car. For a big-screen TV. For a house in the Poconos. For another house in his native Colombia. For credit card bills. For a second car. For plane tickets. For furniture. For dental work.

From 2013 through the end of last year, Orozco allegedly took more than $250,000 in cash and goods from women in the wealthy parish after telling them hard-luck stories about the financial woes afflicting him, his family members and his friends.

The case has sparked a criminal investigation by the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office and has raised broader questions about the limits on what clergymen should accept from generous parishioners and whether some of those transactions rise to the level of fraud or theft.

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MINNESOTA
KSTP

By: Jennie Lissarrague

Minnesota Catholics are invited to weigh in on what qualities they are looking for in the next archbishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.

Archbishop Bernard Hebda, who has been the archdiocese’s apostolic administrator since the resignation of Archbishop John Nienstedt in June, is asking for input on the strengths and challenges of the archdiocese. A series of listening sessions will take place in October and November.

Hebda says the meetings are an opportunity for the local church to help Pope Francis make the decision about the next archbishop. He also said the listening sessions are a reminder for people to be praying about the process and for the right leader.

It’s not known when Pope Francis will appoint a new archbishop to the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and few people will know about the decision before the Vatican officially announces it.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian Jewish News

POLICE this week confirmed to The AJN they are considering laying criminal charges against a former president of the Adass Israel School and a former board member relating to their alleged roles in spiriting Malka Leifer out of Australia seven years ago.

Leifer, then the school’s headmistress, was helped to flee to Israel in March 2008 after allegations she sexually abused students became public. She is currently fighting attempts to extradite her to face criminal charges in Victoria.

In a civil trial this year in which the school and Leifer were co-defendants, the Supreme Court of Victoria was told that then Adass School president Yitzhok Benedikt and board member Mark “Mair” Ernst played key roles in hurriedly arranging for Leifer and some of her family to take an airline flight from Melbourne via Hong Kong to Israel.

Evidence at the trial showed that on the same night as an emergency meeting of the school to discuss the accusations against Leifer on March 6, 2008, Ernst’s wife Hadassa contacted a travel agent who rapidly arranged the airline tickets, which were paid for by members of the Adass community, enabling the Leifers to depart Australia at 1.20am the following morning.

Justice Jack Rush, in a judgment last month that awarded more than $1.2 million to the plaintiff, one of Leifer’s alleged victims, stated that for Benedikt and Ernst, making Leifer answerable to Victoria’s justice system apparently was “not a priority” and most likely they were planning a “deliberate flouting of jurisdiction”.

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UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport

David Pierre

Question: What does a good reporter do when a decades-old story line continues to get old and stale?

Answer: Nothing at all.

Despite nearly $3 billion in settlements, over $80 million in therapy payments, endless mea culpas, and countless apologies to accusers of priest sex abuse from decades ago, the New York Times’ National Religion Correspondent Laurie Goodstein continues to trumpet the tired claims from the lawyer-funded attack group SNAP that the Catholic Church and Pope Francis have somehow “ignored” and “infuriated” victims of clergy abuse.

A sea of protesters

When Barbara Dorris, the “outreach director” of SNAP, and Becky Ianni, Washington D.C.’s SNAP leader, staged a massive two-person protest in Philadelphia where Pope Francis was appearing, Goodstein was apparently eager to push through the crowd for a quote.

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UNITED STATES
PopeCrimes& Vatican Evils.

Paris Arrow

The Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse (FACSA) Statement Regarding Comments by Pope Francis on Clergy Sex Abuse has listed immediate steps for Pope Francis to substantiate his lofty speech. It says: “Most importantly, we implore the U.S. Department of Justice and the Attorneys General of each state in America to investigate the criminal behavior of the Roman Catholic Church in America and take the steps necessary to hold them accountable for their despicable actions.”

Pope Francis knows very well that his JP2 Army- John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army and their Vatican crimes for half-the-20th-century and their Catholic victimssurpass King Herod’s Army and its Jewish children victims in Jerusalem in the first century after Jesus was born. 2,000 years later, today, after American victims’ painstaking lawsuits against all Catholic dioceses across the USA, there are more than 6,500 pedophile priests in the USA alone.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Wall Street Journal

By TOM CORRIGAN

Clergy sexual abuse victims will soon begin voting on a $21 million settlement, which the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee hopes will put its nearly five-year-old chapter 11 case to rest.

Judge Susan Kelley of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Milwaukee on Wednesday approved a plain-language version of the archdiocese’s chapter 11 reorganization plan, at the heart of which is the settlement. Now, the plan will be sent out for a vote by victims and other creditors. Judge Kelley will consider the plan itself at a Nov. 9 hearing.

The terms of the settlement, announced in August, divide about 580 abuse victims into several groups. About 350 victims will share the bulk of the $21 million settlement, and another 105 victims will each receive $2,000, court papers show. The remaining 123 victims, who had previously settled with the archdiocese or otherwise did not qualify for the settlement, won’t receive any monetary compensation.

The settlement also provides a total of $250,000 for victims who come forward in the future, plus $500,000 to provide therapy for victims in any of the three groups.

Non-monetary terms built into the settlement include requirements that the archdiocese publish the names of allegedly abusive priests on its website and that the archbishop send a personal letter of apology to any victim who requests it.

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AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

1 October, 2015

The Royal Commission will hold a public hearing in Adelaide commencing on 6 October 2015 at the Roma Mitchell Commonwealth Law Court Building, 3 Angas Street, Adelaide.

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

1. The experiences of former child residents of the following institutions operated by The Salvation Army (Southern Territory) between 1940 and 1990:

a. Eden Park Boys’ Home, South Australia (Eden Park);

b. Box Hill Boys’ Home, Victoria (Box Hill);

c. Bayswater Boys’ Home, Victoria (Bayswater); and

d. The Salvation Army Boys’ Home (also known as Hollywood Children’s Village), Nedlands, Western Australia (Nedlands).

2. The response of The Salvation Army (Southern Territory) to allegations of child sexual abuse of former residents of Eden Park, Box Hill, Bayswater and Nedlands.

3. The past and current policies, practices and procedures of The Salvation Army (Southern Territory) for responding to claims of child sexual abuse in the institutions it operated.

4. Some aspects of the criminal law that govern the prosecution of child sexual abuse offences in South Australia, in particular the issue of joinder.

5. Any related matters.

Any person or institution who believes that they have a direct and substantial interest in the scope and purpose of the public hearing is invited to lodge a written application for leave to appear at the public hearing by 18 September 2015.

Applications for leave to appear should be made using the form available on the Royal Commission website www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au.

The form should be lodged with the Royal Commission via: Email: solicitor@childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au;or Mail: GPO Box 5283, Sydney NSW 2001.

The public hearing will be streamed live to the public via webcast on the Royal Commission’s website at www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au.

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AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

1 October, 2015

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is calling for submissions from interested parties on issues relating to advocacy and support and therapeutic treatment services.

Advocacy and support and therapeutic treatment encompass a range of services survivors need to address the impact of child sexual abuse and trauma and help them to heal and lead a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Royal Commission CEO Philip Reed said that the Royal Commission is required by its Terms of Reference to ensure justice for victims through the provision of support services.

“Through our case studies and private sessions we have heard about the lack of quality support services as well as a range of difficulties survivors face when seeking support and therapeutic treatment services,” Mr Reed said.

“We now seek submissions from all interested parties on their experiences of advocacy and support and therapeutic treatment services for survivors of child sexual abuse to further increase our understanding of these issues,” he said.

“Through the Royal Commission’s consultations on redress and civil litigation, it is clear that survivors have a range of needs beyond being able to access counselling and psychological care as part of a redress scheme. We noted in our final report on redress and civil litigation that a separate project would investigate the adequacy of advocacy and support services,” Mr Reed said.

It is anticipated that following a review of the submissions a consultation paper will be published, which will call for public submissions. Final recommendations on advocacy and support and therapeutic services will be contained in the Royal Commission’s final report in 2017.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

Australia’s support and treatment services for victims of child sexual abuse will be investigated.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Thursday called for submissions on issues relating to advocacy, support and therapeutic treatment services.

Commission CEO Philip Reed said that through case studies and private sessions, attention had been drawn to the lack of quality support services, as well as difficulties that survivors faced when seeking support and therapeutic treatment services.

The commission has held more than 4000 private sessions and is starting its 33rd public hearing on Tuesday next week.

It will be investigating how former child residents of Salvation Army homes in South Australia were treated between 1940 and 1990.

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SCOTLAND
The National

OCTOBER 1ST, 2015 ANGELA CONSTANCE

TODAY sees the launch of Scotland’s independent National Inquiry into the Historical Abuse of Children in Care.

It is a significant landmark coming less than four months after the appointment of the chair, Susan O’Brien QC and marks the start of the Inquiry’s official business.

When I addressed the Scottish Parliament in May I said that I expected the inquiry to report within four years of its start date. While the remit of the inquiry now extends beyond that originally envisioned and is ambitious in its scope, it is vitally important that the survivors who have campaigned for justice for so long know that they will receive answers within a reasonable timescale

The inquiry will examine instances of abuse of children in care, including residential care; children’s homes; secure care; borstals and young offenders institutions and those placed in foster care. It will also take in allegations from survivors who were boarded out, part of child migrant schemes; those in school hostels and health care units providing long term care; as well as independent boarding schools.

In reaching the decision to commission a national Inquiry I met with survivors and their advocates. They bravely shared their experiences of abuse, but also the effect of fighting to make their voice heard, be believed and answer questions about what happened to them.

I understand that many have become frustrated at the wait this summer to see everything in place to fully examine the failures that allowed these horrific abuses and betrayals of vulnerable young people to take place. My aim throughout this has always been to get the terms and arrangements of this inquiry right to ensure we do not raise the hopes and expectations of all those who have worked with us only to come up short by rushing into decisions that will not deliver for them.

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SCOTLAND
Scotsman

SURVIVORS of historical child abuse have branded a long-awaited inquiry “a shambles” as work finally gets underway today.

Led by Susan O’Brien QC, the inquiry will look into allegations of physical and sexual abuse endured by children in care dating back decades.

The inquiry is expected to report to Scottish Government ministers within four years and will provide a “public acknowledgement” of survivors’ suffering.

But survivors’ groups have expressed frustration at the lack of progress so far, including failure to appoint a panel to assist Ms O’Brien and failure to respond to a request for survivors to be legally represented in accordance with the Inquires Act.

Alan Draper, a spokesman for In-Care Abuse Survivors (Incas), said: “The failure to appoint a panel to assist Susan O’Brien prior to the start date suggests incompetence and will only result in yet further delays to the work of the inquiry, as we assume that anybody appointed will not be able to start work immediately .

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SCOTLAND
The Times

Paris Gourtsoyannis
October 1 2015

Victims’ groups have criticised a public inquiry into historical child abuse that formally begins work today over fears they will be shut out of proceedings.

Charities blasted as “shambolic” the fact that arrangements to guarantee them legal representation within the inquiry have not been finalised in the ten months since it was announced.

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SCOTLAND
BBC News

By Reevel Alderson
BBC Scotland’s social affairs correspondent

Survivors’ groups have criticised a “lack of progress” in the work of a public inquiry into historical allegations of child abuse in Scotland.

They said they felt let down by delays which looked ‘shambolic’ and suggested incompetence.

The inquiry, announced in December 2014, formally began its work on Thursday, although no panel members have been appointed.

It followed a series of disclosures of abuse in childcare institutions.

In May 2015, leading QC, Susan O’Brien was appointed to chair the inquiry, which will have statutory powers to compel witnesses to give evidence.

Although its work has officially started, no hearings are yet planned. Only a website has been launched.

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SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland

A PUBLIC inquiry into the historical abuse of children in care in Scotland will formally start its work today.

The Scottish Government pledged to ”shine a light in the dark corners of the past” earlier this year when it announced Susan O’Brien QC would chair the inquiry.

It will cover allegations of abuse of children in formal institutional care including faith-based organisations, children’s homes and secure care as well as those in foster care, long-term hospital care and boarding schools.

The inquiry, which could take up to four years, covers the period “within living memory” up to December 17 last year – the date Education Secretary Angela Constance announced it was being established.

It will have the power to compel witnesses to attend and give evidence, and Ms Constance previously pledged that where crimes are uncovered the ”full force of the law” would be used to bring those responsible to justice.

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CANADA
Our Windsor

By Allan Woods

MONTREAL — Quebec City police say they are investigating allegations of abuse involving a religious leader accused of keeping at least seven young boys confined in his basement — in one case for 13 years.

At least three of the alleged victims testified they were handed over to the Baptist pastor by their parents at a young age and forced to live in the basement of the home he shared with his wife and children, according to court documents.

The boys, who were ages 5, 8 and 10 when their alleged ordeals began, were home-schooled by the pastor and taught a rigid interpretation of the Bible, according to the boys’ testimony summarized in Quebec family court judgments that ordered two boys into foster care earlier this year.

When the pastor’s orders were disobeyed, the boys testified they suffered cruel and severe punishments such as slaps and punches, the withholding of food and water or being subjected to extreme physical exercise, according to the court judgments.

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TEXAS
Dallas Observer

BY AMY MARTYN
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2015

The Baptist pastor with bright blonde hair was popular among preteen boys in the small town of Commerce, a former resident remembers. Pastor Billy Bob Burge worked in Commerce around 12 years ago, says the man, who asked not to be named. His son’s friends who were involved in the church youth group used to talk about going over to Burge’s house to play video games or have sleepovers. Though Burge had a wife, the arrangement still sounded suspicious to him. “I knew there is a basic rule that you don’t get one-on-one [time] with children,” the man says. At events held at the church, the man recalls seeing Burge in person occasionally. The pastor wore baggy pants and sounded like a teenager when he talked. The man says he confided in one close friend about his concerns and then tried to warn the father of one of the boys who spent time with Burge. The boy’s father was dismissive, “and that was the last I ever said to anybody.” He says he felt in his gut something was off. “In a small town like that, even if you think it, you can’t say it … all you’re doing is making yourself look like a dick accusing someone of that kind of stuff.”

Burge fell off the man’s radar as his son and his friends grew older and graduated from high school. At some point, Burge left town. Last week, the family of another one of Burge’s former young charges, in another town, filed a lawsuit against Burge in Dallas County. At the time the lawsuit was filed, Burge was employed as the “connect pastor” at the Grace Community Church in Greenville.

The lawsuit accuses Burge of sexually abusing a boy in the 1990s. At that time, the suit says, Burge was a youth pastor at the First Baptist Rockwall Church, which is also named as a defendant in the suit:

“In the early to mid-1990s, Billy Bob Burge a Youth Pastor at First Baptist Church of Rockwall engaged in repeated sexual conduct with John Jeremy Sweet-Gomez, a minor. This sexual conduct began when Mr. Sweet-Gomez was approximately twelve to thirteen years old. Pastor Burge’s sexual abuse of Mr. Sweet-Gomez included sodomy, oral sex, and inappropriate sexual touching. These abuses occurred at various locations and times: including on church property and during church-sponsored religious trips.”

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OHIO
10TV

A former central Ohio teacher sits in a Seattle Jail accused of sexual conduct with a student here.

Brian Sze, 34, was a music teacher at Bishop Watterson High School.

Investigators said that’s where he came in contact with a 15-year-old male student.

A search warrant obtained by 10TV says Sze was also hired by the boy’s parents to give him private music lessons at Sze’s Lewis Center home.

That’s where the boy says Sze initiated sexual contact with him.

After their first sexual encounter, the boy says Sze told him “not to tell anyone because he could go to jail.”

The boy estimated they’d had sexual contact 10 times over a one-year period.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Fox 32

CHICAGO (STMW) – The pastor of a South Side church allegedly molested a girl during counseling sessions in his office, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting.

George Waddles started counseling the girl at Zion Hill Baptist Church when she was 13 in late 2011, Assistant State’s Attorney Tara Pease-Harkin said.

As the counseling sessions progressed a year later, Waddles often told the girl he had dreams about her and thought about her when she wasn’t around, Pease-Harkin said. He also allegedly tried to hug and kiss the girl several times during the meetings at the church, 1460 W. 78th St.

Then, in May or June 2014, Waddles asked the girl to sit on his lap, Pease-Harkin said. The girl complied.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Tribune

Steve Schmadeke
Chicago Tribune

A longtime South Side pastor was charged with sexually abusing a 16-year-old girl in his office during a counseling session in 2014.

Prosecutors said the alleged victim and her mother confronted George Waddles, 67, who heads Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church, and secretly recorded his admissions to inappropriately touching the teen.

Waddles turned himself in to Chicago police Tuesday and made “a positive disclosure” to a detective that was consistent with the girl’s story, said Assistant State’s Attorney Tara Pease-Harkin. He was charged with aggravated criminal sexual abuse, a Class 2 felony that carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison or probation on conviction.

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SWITZERLAND
Catholic Citizens of Illinois

By Maike Hickson

September 29, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — While correcting local media reports, the Swiss bishops today confirmed the existence of the so-called “mafia” of bishops that aimed to counter the influence of Cardinal Ratzinger during the pontificate of John Paul II.

The confirmation came amid intense discussion in Switzerland about the question of the now well-known group of cardinals, called the “St. Gallen Group,” about which Cardinal Godfried Danneels recently made some disturbing, even embarrassing revelations.

This morning, the local radio station FM1 Today in Sankt Gallen, Switerland, reported on the alleged secret meetings of this “St. Gallen Group” that supposedly worked both on making Pope Benedict XVI resign and on getting Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio then elected for the Papal office. As sources for their claims, the radio station cited a new biography about Bishop Danneels, as well as a candid public statement that the cardinal himself made. Summing up their claims about this seeming conspiracy, the radio station said:

Karim Schelkens, historian and co-author of the biography, said in an interview that the election of Bergoglio has been without doubt prepared in St. Gallen in the middle of the “mafia” and also that Ratzinger resigned because of it [this “mafia”].

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UNITED STATES
Esquire

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

The big news today seems to be that Kim Davis, the goldbricking county clerk from Kentucky, met secretly with Papa Francesco in Washington and that he endorsed her current status as a faith-based layabout. Given this pope’s deft gift for strategic ambiguity and shrewd public relations, it’s hard for me to understand how he could commit such a hamhanded blunder as picking a side in this fight. And it’s odd that he (or someone) sought to publicize it through an American media entity that is not wholly sympathetic to his papacy. Inside The Vatican, the e-newsletter that broke the story, is edited by Robert Moynihan, a 79-year old whose patron was Benedict XVI.

God, the crowing from the Right is going to be deafening. Everything he said about capitalism and about the environment is going to be drowned out because he wandered into a noisy American culture-war scuffle in which one side, apparently the one he picked, has a seemingly ceaseless megaphone for its views. What a fcking blunder. What a sin against charity, as the nuns used to say.

This is, obviously, the dumbest thing this Pope ever has done. It undermines everything he accomplished on his visit here. It undermines his pastoral message, and it diminishes his stature by involving him in a petty American political dispute. A secret meeting with this nutball? That undermines any credibility he had accrued on the issue of openness and transparency. Moreover, it means that he barbered the truth during the press conference he held on his flight back to Rome, in which he spoke vaguely about religious liberty, and freedom of conscience, but claimed, “I can’t have in mind all cases that can exist about conscience objection.” He certainly knew the details of this case.

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UNITED STATES
Reuters

BY ALEX DOBUZINSKIS AND PHILIP PULLELLA

A Kentucky county clerk who had been jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples secretly met Pope Francis in a move that disappointed many liberal Catholics and encouraged officials who support her stance.

The meeting with Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, and comments by the pope on Monday, may spur action by local officials across the United States who have refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples since the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

Mat Staver, an attorney for Davis and founder of Liberty Counsel, a law firm that champions conservative Christian causes, told Reuters the meeting was not about sending a message to other clerks or judges who have been unwilling to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

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UNITED STATES
Inside the Vatican

Robert Moynihan

As I write this, a man in an Oklahoma prison is about to be executed for a murder he claims he did not commit.

Pope Francis has asked for his life to be spared.

His name is Richard Glossip. …

We live in a real world, with real problems, and in a fallen world, where egoism and cruelty have led to injustice and violence since the killing of Abel by his brother Cain.

And I write this to set into context the story of the very private meeting of Pope Francis with Kim Davis, which occurred on Thursday afternoon, September 24 — the afternoon of the Pope’s address to Congress.

There has been a storm of media attention regarding this encounter since I broke the story yesterday evening. “Why did the Pope wish to see Kim Davis, of all people?” many asked on websites across the internet.

The answer, I think, is this.

Amid all of his many and well-publicized gestures of affection, respect and tenderness during his trip — kissing children, caressing the sick and handicapped, blessing prisoners in a Philadelphia jail — gestures of tenderness which Father Jonathan Morris, when I was with him on Fox News during the Pope’s final Mass in Philadelphia, called the single most striking thing about the entire trip, Pope Francis also wished to offer a very private, intimate gesture of respect and tenderness to a woman who has been widely vilified and has suffered imprisonment due to her fidelity to her personal religious convictions with regard to marriage.

At first, many doubted that this story was even true. “Never happened,” many said, in web postings and in emails to me.

Of course the story is true.

The encounter did occur.

Why did the Vatican keep the meeting private? How was it even possible that it occurred, amid the scrutiny of the Pope’s every move by thousands of journalists 24/7? And, again, why Kim Davis?

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Cathy Lynn Grossman | Religion News Service September 30

As Pope Francis zipped around the East Coast during his U.S. visit last week, his words on confronting sexual abuse were all over the map as well — from praising bishops at the start to warning them at the end after a private meeting with victims.

Why the shifting tenor of remarks?

Different audiences, say church experts and victims’ advocates. …

He sounded “tone-deaf,” said Vatican expert the Rev. Thomas Reese. “Our suffering as priests is nothing like what these poor kids (the victims) or their families went through.”

But church historian Matthew Bunson calculates that Francis was speaking to a new generation of bishops who were cleaning up the mess from their predecessors. The bishops who failed to protect their flocks are long gone — dead or retired.

Bunson, editor of The Catholic Almanac, estimated that less than 10 percent of the 300 bishops who were gathered at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington to hear the pope on Sept. 23 were bishops in 2002 when the scandal erupted.

However, one who was — Cardinal Roger Mahony, retired archbishop of Los Angeles — was sitting front and center alongside others with “dodgy” records, said Terry McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, a website that tracks bishops who some say have failed to protect youth.

“He seemed to be ‘silo-ing’ his audience — not realizing that people from outside this particular silo, the U.S. bishops, would be listening and responding,” said McKiernan.

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UNITED STATES/ROME
New York Times

Correction: September 30, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the publication that first reported the meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis. It was Inside the Vatican, not the Vatican Insider.

By JIM YARDLEY and LAURIE GOODSTEINSEPT. 30, 2015

ROME — Pope Francis met privately in Washington last week with Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who defied a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, adding a new element to an American tour that saw Francis attract huge crowds and articulate left-leaning positions on poverty, immigration, the environment and inequality.

Vatican officials initially would not confirm that the meeting occurred, finally doing so on Wednesday afternoon, while refusing to discuss any details.

Ms. Davis, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., has been at the center of a nationwide controversy over whether government employees and private businesses have a legal right to refuse to serve same-sex couples. She spent five days in jail for disobeying a federal court order to issue the licenses.

On Tuesday night, her lawyer, Mathew D. Staver, said that Ms. Davis and her husband, Joe, were sneaked into the Vatican Embassy by car on Thursday afternoon. Francis gave her rosaries and told her to “stay strong,” the lawyer said. The couple met for about 15 minutes with the pope, who was accompanied by security guards, aides and photographers.

“I put my hand out and he reached and he grabbed it, and I hugged him and he hugged me,” Ms. Davis said Wednesday in an interview with ABC News. ‘Thank you for your courage.’”

“I had tears coming out of my eyes,” she said. “I’m just a nobody, so it was really humbling to think he would want to meet or know me.”

The secretiveness of the meeting, and the Vatican’s refusal to give any information, will inevitably raise questions about why Francis chose to meet with Ms. Davis — and why he kept the meeting secret. Mr. Staver said that he, the Davises and Vatican officials had agreed to not publicize the meeting until after the pope had left the United States because, he said, “we didn’t want the pope’s visit to be focused on Kim Davis.”

Mr. Staver said the idea for a meeting was first discussed on Sept. 14, more than a week before the pope’s arrival. He declined to say who proposed the meeting.

But “this was not a generic meeting in which Kim Davis happened to appear,” Mr. Staver said. The Davises snapped selfies inside the Vatican Embassy. However, he said, “out of deference and respect they didn’t want to pull out a cellphone with the pope. The Vatican had their own photographers there and we’re told the pictures will be released later.”

No photographs had been released by Wednesday evening in Rome.

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CANADA
CTV

The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, September 30, 2015

IQALUIT, Nunavut — A defrocked Arctic priest already serving time for the sexual abuse of Inuit children is awaiting further sentencing on another four counts.

Eric Dejaeger will be sentenced on Oct. 22 after pleading guilty in Iqaluit Tuesday to the additional crimes, which were committed in Edmonton and include indecent assault and gross indecency.

Dejaeger lived in Edmonton from 1974 to 1978, when he was studying to be a priest.

The sixty-eight-year-old is already serving 19 years in prison for 32 sex offences against Inuit children, committed between 1978 and 1982 in the remote village of Igloolik.

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UNITED STATES
New York Times

Ross Douthat

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015 September 30, 2015

It appears we have a backhanded, non-denial version of Vatican confirmation of the story that Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk briefly jailed for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was received by Pope Francis privately during his visit to the United States. (For the story to be false, the Davises would have needed to be pathological liars and someone in Rome would need to have baldly lied to the well-sourced Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican, so it was already reasonable to treat the news as basically confirmed.) This is a fairly surprising bit of news; it also lends some credence to Philip Lawler’s interpretation of this pope’s approach to the American culture war, which he offered after Francis’s address in Washington last week:

Pope Francis challenged Americans of both liberal and conservative political sympathies in his historic address to Congress on September 24. But his objections to conservative stands were clear and direct, while his criticism of liberals subtle and oblique. Why?

… Is it because he knows that the American defenders of life and of marriage really are in sympathy with the Catholic Church, whereas proponents of abortion and homosexuality are fundamentally hostile? Because he knows that he must first establish some common ground with liberal secularists (including some who masquerade as Catholics) before he can expect any positive response? Because he realizes that he can encourage pro-lifers indirectly, and the message will come through loud and clear? Maybe the Pope is reaching out to the lost sheep, confident that the others will await his return.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

[City Edition]

Boston Globe – Boston, Mass.
Date: May 5, 1998
Start Page: A.31
Section: OBITUARIES

Document Text
A memorial Mass will be said today for the Rev. John Bocciarelli, former pastor of St. Anthony Church in Somerville, who died April 19 in Arco, Italy. He was 77.

Father Bocciarelli was born in Piacenza, Italy, and was ordained in 1945. Two years later, he came to the United States, and was associate pastor of Holy Ghost Church in Providence for five years. He then was associate pastor of St. Anthony Church in Somerville before becoming its pastor from 1960 to 1970. He was treasurer of the Scalabrini Provincial House in New York City from 1970 to 1973 before becoming pastor of Holy Ghost Church in Providence for 11 years. He then returned to St. Anthony’s, where he was associate pastor for several years prior to returning to Italy in 1995.

He leaves a sister, Caterina Sordi; and three brothers, the Rev. Luigi, Lino, and Allesandro, all of Piacenza, Italy.

The memorial Mass will be said at 7 p.m. in St. Anthony Church in Somerville. An additional memorial Mass will be said May 31 at 10:30 a.m. in St. Anthony Church.

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UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Michelangelo Signorile

After first refusing to confirm nor deny it, the Vatican has confirmed that Pope Francis met with the Kentucky clerk Kim Davis at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, where Davis’ attorney — who made the news public after the pope’s trip ended — said Francis told her to “stay strong.” And that simple encounter completely undermines all the goodwill the pope created in downplaying “the gay issue” on his U.S. trip.

The pope played us for fools, trying to have it both ways. As I noted last week, he’s an artful politician, telling different audiences what they want to hear on homosexuality. He did that in Argentina as a cardinal — railing against gay marriage when the Vatican expected him to do so — and he’s done that since becoming pope, striking a softer tone on the issue after Benedict’s harsh denunciations were a p.r. disaster for the Catholic Church in the West. But this news about Kim Davis portrays him as a more sinister kind of politician. That’s the kind that secretly supports hate, ushering the bigots in the back door — knowing they’re an embarrassment — while speaking publicly about about how none of us can judge one another.

I would have more respect for the pope if he had publicly embraced Kim Davis and made an argument for her, as he did in his visit with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who are battling against filling out a form to exempt themselves from Obamacare’s contraception requirement, claiming that even filling out the form violates their religious liberty — even though I vehemently disagree with the pope on that issue. I’d have more respect if he boldly, explicitly made a public statement (not the vague, general statement he made on his plane on the way home only in response to a reporter’s question about Davis), as he did in trying to stop the execution of a Georgia inmate who was put to death this morning. But by meeting with Davis secretly, and then at first having the Vatican neither confirm nor deny the encounter — and now having the Vatican say it “won’t deny” the meeting while it still won’t offer any other details — the pope comes off as a coward.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

SHANNON DEERY HERALD SUN SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

CHURCHES and religious organisations would lose millions of dollars in tax breaks, concessions and hand outs under a radical plan to force priests, rabbis and imams to sign up to a national faith register.

Under the bold proposal clergy would for the first time be forced to undergo government-specified training and security checks and would be monitored by a national body, or risk losing government funding.

Former premier Ted Baillieu has backed the plan that has been put to federal and state leaders including the Prime Minister’s office, and Premier Daniel Andrews.

It is understood a number of high-profile politicians have also privately backed the proposed reforms saying ministers of religion should be subject to more stringent compliance.

The proposals have been tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse amid concerns about the lack of scrutiny of some religious institutions.

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MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015

Statement by Frank Meuers of Plymouth MN, SNAP director Southern Minnesota (952-334-5180, frankameuers@gmail.com)

The temporary head of the Twin Cities archdiocese is holding a meeting to talk about a permanent head of the archdiocese. In our view, the top priority is finding an archbishop who hasn’t and isn’t hiding child sex crimes. That will be tough.

[The Catholic Spirit]

Listening to people is easy. Acting on what you hear is tougher. Tougher still is finding a new archbishop who has acted with courage and compassion in clergy sex abuse and cover up cases. But we hope this will happen.

Regardless of who takes the reins of this archdiocese, it’s important that Catholics realize that this is a long-standing, deeply-rooted crisis in which most clerics are guilty of ignoring or concealing known or suspected child sex crimes. So no new archbishop will be fully “clean.”

And no new archbishop, by himself, can quickly reverse decades of recklessness, callousness and deceit. It’s up to every single church employee and member to be vigilant and to report any information or suspicions about possible child abuse to secular authorities. It’s up to every single church employee and member to aggressively seek out anyone who may have been abused and urge them to get help from independent sources.

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UNITED STATES
WJLA

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30TH 2015

On the last day of his visit to the U.S., Pope Francis met with victims of the church sex abuse scandal. David Lorenz of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) joined us today with his take on the Pope’s response to the scandal.

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ROME
Crux

By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor September 30, 2015

ROME – If anyone suspected that Pope Francis didn’t really mean the strong words he spoke on religious freedom last week in the United States – that he was phoning it in, while his real concerns were elsewhere – claims that he held a private meeting with Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis certainly should lay that suspicion to rest.

The meeting was first reported by Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican magazine. A Vatican spokesman said Wednesday, “I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no comments to add,” which, in effect, is a way of allowing the report to stand.

Taken together with his unscheduled stop to see the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Davis encounter means Francis has expressed personal support to leading symbols of the two most contentious fronts in America’s religious freedom debates – the contraception mandates imposed by the Obama administration, and conscientious objection on gay marriage.

Before unpacking what it means, let’s roll out the necessary caveats.

First of all, the fact that someone arranged a brief encounter between Francis and Davis does not necessarily mean that Francis initiated the contact, or even that he necessarily grasps all the dimensions of her case. By her own account it was an extremely brief greeting, just long enough for the pope to tell Davis to “stay strong” and to give her a rosary. Asking for prayers and offering a blessed rosary to individuals following a meeting is a customary gesture for Pope Francis.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on two unscheduled meetings by Pope Francis when he came to the United States:

The pope made several impromptu stops and visits while in the United States: he hugged disabled children on the street; he visited orphanages; and he stopped by St. Joseph’s University. But beyond these pastoral gestures, he made two very important cultural statements: he visited the Little Sisters of the Poor and he greeted Kim Davis.

The Little Sisters of the Poor are suing the Obama administration for forcing them to sanction the distribution of abortion-inducing drugs in their health care plan. The pope’s visit was a clear rebuke of the heavy-handed tactics of the administration’s HHS mandate. Indeed, he encouraged the brave sisters to stand fast.

Now we have learned that the pope met privately with Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused, on religious grounds, to issue a marriage license to a gay couple. “Thank you for your courage. Stay strong.” These words by the pope need no interpretation. Moreover, his invocation of conscience rights as a fundamental human right can only be read as a statement against the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage.

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

Laurie Goodstein @lauriegnyt
Vatican confirms meeting: spokesman Rev Lombardi says he doesn’t deny Pope and Davis met but won’t add more. Via @EPovoledo @nytimes

Robert Moynihan’s Inside the Vatican report on Pope Francis’s secret meeting with Kim Davis has just now come back up (I reported earlier today that it had been down previously), right after Laurie Goodstein sent out the tweet above.

My thanks to Jamie Manson for sharing information about Laurie Goodstein’s tweet on Facebook.

If you’re like me, LGBT Catholic folks and people who care about LGBT human beings, now’s the time to give up on the Catholic church. I will never listen with respect to another word this pope says.

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UNITED STATES/VATICAN CITY
New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
SEPT. 30, 2015

Pope Francis met privately in Washington last week with Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who defied a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, a Vatican spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.

Ms. Davis, the Rowan County clerk, has been at the center of a nationwide controversy over whether government employees and private businesses have a legal right to refuse to serve same-sex couples. She spent five days in jail for disobeying a federal court order to issue the licenses.

On Tuesday night, her lawyer, Mathew D. Staver, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Davis and her husband, Joe, were sneaked into the Vatican Embassy by car on Thursday afternoon. Francis gave her rosaries and told her to “stay strong,” the lawyer said. The couple met for about 15 minutes with the pope, who was accompanied by security, aides and photographers. Mr. Staver said he expected to receive photographs of the meeting from the Vatican soon.

On Wednesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed the meeting, but he declined to elaborate. “I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no other comments to add,” he said.

Mr. Staver said that Vatican officials had been aware of Ms. Davis, and that the meeting had been arranged through them — not through bishops or the bishops’ conference in the United States. He would not identify the Vatican officials.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Herald

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

By: Peter Gelzinis

Cardinal Sean O’Malley looked none the worse for wear at Logan International Airport yesterday after spending the last 10 days following Pope Francis from Cuba to Washington, D.C., then on to New York and Philadelphia before accompanying the pontiff back to Rome.

On the contrary, O’Malley looked invigorated. For almost two weeks, he’d been at the side of a man who stopped this country in its tracks with his humility, grace and insight.

“Pope Francis calls us to be better versions of ourselves,” O’Malley said. He said Francis left us with an image of the church “not as a museum, or a concert hall, but rather as a field hospital … a living, vibrant institution that embodies the spirit of mercy.”

It’s no wonder O’Malley, who sold off the granite palace on Lake Street and opted to reside in a small apartment in the South End, would find a kindred spirit in Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who rode the subway in his native Buenos Aires, and promptly gave up the red shoes and lavish Vatican Suite when he became pope.

O’Malley said Americans instinctively reacted to the essential goodness of a man whose presence “seemed to cut through the noise and speak to a sense of community and dialogue.”

Though the pope’s meeting with victims of sex abuse on Sunday was an effort to cut through that noise, there still came a question about Cardinal Bernard Law and what, if anything the pope might do. After noting the pope had removed three bishops recently, O’Malley suggested Law’s exile from Boston was in itself a step toward healing.

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NEW MEXICO
Gallup Independent

Published in the Gallup Independent, Sept. 26, 2015

By now, many people have seen the photo of Gallup Bishop James S. Wall greeting Pope Francis in Washington. But after enduring more than six years of Wall’s oppressive tenure in the Diocese of Gallup, we wonder if Wall really listened to the pope’s message that day. Or was it just a photo op for Wall?

Pope Francis had a lot to say about what a good bishop should be, and certainly the Diocese of Gallup is sorely in need of a good and holy leader.

While Pope Francis encouraged his bishops to be shepherds who selflessly devote themselves to their flock, the Gallup Diocese struggles under a bishop who has — in the words of the pope — given in to “the temptation of narcissism, which blinds the eyes of the shepherd, makes his voice unrecognizable and his actions fruitless.”

Just because Wall carries a bishop’s crosier, he’s hardly a pastor — a shepherd — who responds to the needs of his sheep. He’s not a shepherd who “smells like his sheep.” Instead, Wall is notorious for ignoring his own sheep. He ignores their letters, emails, phone calls, requests to meet and even their good-hearted invitations.

When officials at St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School were fearful Wall was going to sell their property, the mission’s director couldn’t get his own bishop to answer a letter or meet with him. The mission’s attorney had to file a complaint in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to get Wall’s attention.

It’s a sad state of affairs when Gallup’s “airport bishop” has made more trips to Europe in six years than he has to St. Bonaventure, a Catholic mission just 30 miles from Gallup that serves needy Native American families.

While Pope Francis urged his bishops to “dialogue fearlessly” with others and not to “be paralyzed by fear,” Wall is a man who hides behind his own chancery walls. He rarely talks to anyone outside his elite conservative clique, and he appears paralyzed by fear — fear of making decisions, fear of controversies, fear of people who think differently than he does. When Wall made the ill-advised decision to shut down the thriving St. John Vianney Parish in Gallup, he didn’t have the moral courage to answer questions from frustrated parishioners. Instead, the Rev. Kevin Finnegan, then the vicar general and chancellor, was forced to clean up the mess.

Pope Francis warned bishops not to “fall into hopeless decline whenever we confuse the power of strength with the strength of that powerlessness with which God has redeemed us,” Wall forgets redemption and resorts to bully power and bully strength.

Just days before Pope Francis urged Americans to welcome immigrants into their midst and days before the pope blessed a luncheon for the homeless at Catholic Charities in Washington, Wall and his attorneys and auctioneers sold the Catholic Charities immigrant aid office and soup kitchen in Farmington. A report that the buyer is going to donate the property back to the charitable organization is the only thing hopeful in this pathetic story.

While Pope Francis made some very disappointing statements about the “courage” of bishops in dealing with the clergy sex abuse crisis, his misguided compliments certainly cannot be applied to Wall. Gallup’s bishop has not made any “great sacrifice” nor has he divested “whatever is unessential in order to regain the authority and trust” in this bankrupt diocese.

Wall has valuable property that he could sell, but he won’t. Wall could sell his and other private residences in Gallup, he could sell commercial property leased to a McDonald’s restaurant, a shopping center in Gallup or a sprawling ranch in Arizona. But he is not willing to make those sacrifices. He and his attorneys hold on tight to those assets and instead put the squeeze to nonprofit organizations like St. Bonaventure Mission and Catholic Charities. When those poor decisions generate bad publicity, the diocese stonewalls the media’s questions.

And what about the bishops’ “generous commitment to bring healing to victims”? There is very little healing in the Diocese of Gallup. For six years, Wall and his army of attorneys have blocked clergy abuse survivors at every turn. They battle them in court, and they wear them down with one legal delay after another. They have rubbed salt in the survivors’ wounds.

Jesus once asked what father would give his son a stone when he asked for bread, or give him a snake when he asked for a fish. When Wall came here, he promised transparency, but gave more secrecy. He promised unity, but produced more division. He promised to be a caring pastor, but is merely a small-minded church politician.

The Diocese of Gallup needed someone Holy, but we got someone Holy inept, Holy inadequate, Holy corrupt.

So, Pope Francis, pray for us. The devil is in our midst.

In this space only does the opinion of the opinion of the Gallup Independent Editorial Board appear.

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NEW MEXICO
Gallup Independent

Published in the Gallup Independent, Gallup, N.M., Sept. 26, 2015

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

GALLUP – After selling nearly three dozen pieces of unwanted property in auctions in Phoenix and Albuquerque at fire sale prices, the Diocese of Gallup earned just about $160,660 from the endeavor.

According to reports submitted to U.S. Bankruptcy Court by diocesan attorneys, the sales total for both auctions was $225,066. Tucson Realty & Trust Co. of Arizona and Accelerated Marketing Group of California, the businesses that were hired by the diocese to promote and conduct the auctions, walked away with about $65,500. The diocese paid the companies a flat fee of $45,000 and agreed to let them collect a buyer’s premium of 10 percent on every sale.

Todd Good, the CEO and president of Accelerated Marketing Group, barred the public and the media from observing the Albuquerque auction Sept. 19. Good only allowed qualified bidders into the event, although the auctions had not been described as closed in court documents.
It is unknown if any member of the public was barred from observing the Phoenix auction Sept. 12.

Diocese fundraiser

Attorneys with Quarles & Brady LLP, the diocese’s lead bankruptcy firm, had promoted the auctions as a way to help raise funds to pay for the Gallup Diocese’s plan of reorganization. However, the property sales will only make a slight dent in the amount of money the diocese now owes a multitude of attorneys, accountants and other professionals.

The diocese’s bankruptcy costs top more than $2.7 million, according to quarterly billing statements submitted to U.S. Bankruptcy Court as of June 30. The diocese owes Quarles & Brady more than $1.5 million.

In an interview in July, George H. “Hank” Amos III, the CEO and president of Tucson Realty & Trust Co., predicted he and Good would replicate the successful auction they conducted for Quarles & Brady about a decade ago during the Diocese of Tucson’s bankruptcy.

“We sold every single one,” Amos said of the Tucson properties. “They sold their properties for more than what they appraised for.”

Amos credited those high prices to supporters of the Diocese of Tucson who wanted to help out the church, and he said he assumed the same thing would happen with the Diocese of Gallup’s auctions.

Extremely low prices

That, however, did not happen. Almost all of the Diocese of Gallup’s properties sold for far less than their actual or assessed values. The Phoenix auction, which only generated $58,960 for the sale of about a dozen properties in Arizona, saw extremely low sales prices.

The highest sales price of $26,400, which included the 10 percent buyer’s premium, was paid for three parcels being used by the Vincent de Paul Society’s Food Bank in Winslow, Arizona. The remaining properties sold at a fraction of their value, with prices ranging from $110 to $7,700.

The Albuquerque auction, which generated total sales of $166,106 for 23 New Mexico properties, included four five-figure sales prices.

The diocese’s lot on Aztec Avenue and Fourth Street in Gallup sold for $55,000, which is about half of its assessed value. A building in Farmington used by Catholic Charities sold for $44,000. The 64 parcels of land that make up La Vega Estates near San Rafael sold for $38,500, and a vacant piece of land in Farmington brought in $12,100.

All the remaining New Mexico properties sold for prices ranging from $121 to $4,400.

The Diocese of Gallup garnered negative publicity for the sales of the food bank property in Winslow and the Catholic Charities building in Farmington when Debe Betts, the director of Catholic Charities, told a Farmington reporter the diocese was selling the property out from underneath the nonprofits.

Questions about marketing

So why were the Diocese of Gallup properties sold at fire sale prices? Were the auctions poorly attended, and were they poorly advertised and promoted?

Since the public was barred from attending the Albuquerque auction, the level of attendance and bidding participation is unknown.

When Quarles & Brady attorneys requested court permission to sell the diocese’s unwanted property, they promised a “heavily marketed” campaign that would feature press releases, background kits, interviews, editorial columns, editorial board visits, radio advertising, direct and electronic mail promotions, and a telemarketing campaign.

Amos and Good were then paid $45,000 to do that work.

Susan Boswell, the diocese’s lead bankruptcy attorney, was asked if she received proof from Amos and Good that such a marketing campaign was conducted, along with questions about some apparent errors in the auction report figures. Boswell, however, declined to respond.

Attorney James Stang, legal counsel for the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors that represents the interests of clergy sex abuse claimants, also declined to comment on how effective he believed the campaign had been.

Online news reports indicate only two newspapers outside of Gallup, along with one business blogger, published any articles about the auctions.

This is in contrast to the Diocese of Gallup’s campaign to advertise its deadline for clergy abuse survivors to file claims with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. That campaign was heavily marketed and resulted in 57 claims being filed.

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