ABUSE TRACKER

VIRGINIA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

The process of choosing an appropriate firm was “flawed” they say
Mennonite committee apologizes to victim for excluding her
Survivors applaud this “rare public stand” by church leaders

Statement by SNAP Leader Barbra Graber, 540-214-8874, mennonite@snapnetwork.org, August 8, 2016

Today, a church panel ended their involvement in an investigation into a former Mennonite university vice president accused of sexual abuse, stalking and making violent threats. We applaud their compassionate move. We hope that officials will still take the Panel’s original recommendation of GRACE as the chosen investigating group or go back to the drawing board and this time be genuinely inclusive.

In August of 2014, Lauren Shifflett reported the crimes she suffered by church member Luke Hartman, to Lindale Mennonite Church officials. Instead of reporting it, church officials and possibly other Mennonite agencies covered it up.

In January of 2016, Hartman was arrested for solicitation of prostitution.

Through out this time, since 2011, he was vice president of enrollment at Eastern Mennonite University.

Under pressure, Mennonite officials agreed to launch an outside investigation into the church’s response to these and other reports of misconduct in the Mennonite community of Harrisonburg, VA that soon went beyond Hartman’s misdeeds against Lauren Shifflett.

After research and deliberation, the church-appointed Panel for Sexual Abuse Prevention recommended Boz Tchividjian’s GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) as their top choice for the job. Mennonite survivor groups OurStoriesUntold and the Anabaptist Mennonite Chapter of SNAP agreed. So did Lauren Shifflett.

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ISRAEL
JTA

August 8, 2016

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli chief rabbi David Lau published an open letter calling on educators to deal seriously with every report of child abuse of any kind.

The rabbi released the letter Sunday evening at a conference of haredi Orthodox rabbis. It was first reported on the haredi Orthodox Kipa news website.

“To my great pain we’ve recently witnessed horrific cases of abuse in our midst; cases in which children were hurt in their houses and their schools. How painful it is to hear that the very places which are supposed to provide a security and strength for our children, have become places of fear,” the letter read.

“At this time, parents, teachers, relatives and all those engaged in the holy work of education must keep their eyes open and assist those who need it in any way possible. Burying our heads in the sand is not the answer to these difficult and painful issues, and everyone must take responsibility, even if these things do not affect him directly,” Lau wrote.

The letter comes amid several new investigations and indictments of child sex abuse in the haredi Orthodox community.

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ISRAEL
Jerusalem Post

His letter comes in the wake of several indictments in recent months against members of the haredi community for sexual assault against children.

Chief Rabbi David Lau has issued a letter to educators in the haredi sector calling on them to report suspicions of child abuse to the authorities and not to sweep such claims under the carpet.

His letter comes in the wake of several indictments in recent months against members of the haredi community for sexual assault against children.

Last week, an indictment was issued against six teachers in a hassidic elementary school in Tel Aviv, while another indictment was issued in May against a well-known haredi rabbi for raping three of his nieces hundreds of times over several years.

In July, an indictment was issued against a leading Breslov rabbi, Rabbi Eliezer Berland, for sexual assault involving a minor.

In Lau’s letter, written last week and made public on Monday, the chief rabbi noted that “of late, terrible phenomena have become known in our court and our sector,” in incidents in which “children have been harmed at home or in educational institutions.” Such cases had been incredibly painful to hear of, he wrote.

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GEORGIA
WTOC

By Don Logana, Anchor

SAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) –
An effort is underway to reach out to victims of clergy abuse in Savannah.

We caught up with Michael Corbett, the local director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), to learn more about the newly formed group’s mission.

Last month, Catholic Diocese of Savannah paid out a record $4.5 million for a priest abuse case involving a child. Not all victims can afford lawsuits. Victims and advocates we spoke to say many victims of clergy abuse suffer in silence alone, and even money doesn’t heal the wounds.

“Money can help provide some necessities, relieve some anxieties, but it can’t bring back your childhood or all the years we lost in the meantime,” said Corbett.

Corbett lives and works in Savannah, but he was a 17-year-old teenager in Boston when he was sexually assaulted by a Catholic Priest, Father Robert Gale. His story – along with many others – was told in the Academy Award-winning movie, Spotlight, which is based on the award-winning expose on child sex abuse in the Boston Archdiocese.

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ARIZONA
Arizona Republic

A minister at Grace Fellowship Church in Buckeye was held on suspicion of voyeurism and unlawful recording after a mother demanded the cellphone from a man bending down in front of her daughter’s changing room at a local store, according to court documents.

The mother said she observed a man holding a cellphone under the door of a changing room her daughter was using at a store near Watson and Yuma roads. She confronted the man, asking him to give her his phone. The woman saw video footage of the girl on the phone, according to court documents.

A Buckeye police officer took possession of the phone after he was called to the store about 10:45 a.m. Saturday, documents said.

Christopher David Santos, 31, admitted to officers that he activated the recording feature and put his cellphone under the changing room door and planned to view the footage for his sexual stimulation, according to court documents.

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ARIZONA
ABC 15

[with video]

BUCKEYE, AZ – Police say an employee from a Buckeye church has been arrested after being caught tape recording a young girl in a dressing room at a department store.

Christopher Santos, currently employed at Grace Fellowship Church, was taken into custody on Saturday after he was caught taking video on his phone of a 14-year-old female changing in a dressing room.

Officers were called to the scene near Watson and Yuma Roads on a report of a male subject who had been caught videotaping persons inside the store’s dressing rooms.

The victim’s mother caught him in the act and demanded his cell phone, the device the suspect was using to record. She then called police and handed his cell phone over to upon arrival. They found the video of the victim on the phone and it has been impounded for evidence.

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ARIZONA
12 News

BUCKEYE, Ariz. – A youth pastor was arrested Saturday after he was caught recording video of a teenage girl in the Bealls Outlet’s changing room.

According to police, 31-year-old Christopher Santos was seen holding his cell phone under the store’s changing room door while a 15-year-old girl was in there.

The girl told police she wasn’t aware she was being recorded and was only wearing her underwear at the time.

The teen’s mom saw Santos bending over with his phone underneath the changing room door. She confronted him and her daughter took his phone.

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GREECE
Tornos News

A 52-year old Orthodox priest is facing investigations after making sexual advances to a 15-year old girl from Larissa, Greece. The priest, who according to reports serves in a parish outside Greece, met the minor through Facebook, and what started out as an innocent friendship in April with comments on various issues, gradually turned into a sexual attraction on his part for the 15-year old student.

The priest, who used his real name on his Facebook profile, started messaging the young girl indecent images and making clear sexual advances and suggestions to the minor. His obsession with the girl resulted in him traveling to Larissa in an effort to persuade the her to abandon her home and follow him abroad.

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GEORGIA
Savannah Now

Aug. 9. The confidential support group – for both religious sex abuse victims and for their families – will be at 7 p.m. Aug. 9. The location is not being made public in order to protect the privacy of the participants. SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests) has no affiliation with any church organization and is open to victims hurt in any denomination. Those interested in attending should contact Savannah SNAP Director Michael Corbett at 508-207-7418, Savannah@SNAPnetwork.org or SNAP National Outreach Director Barbara Dorris at 314-503-0003, bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org for meeting location.

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UNITED STATES
The Mennonite

The Mennonite Church USA Panel on Sexual Abuse Prevention has terminated its participation in the investigation into the handling of reports of sexual abuse at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Va., Virginia Mennonite Conference and Lindale Mennonite Church, Linville, Va. On Aug. 2, EMU announced that it had contracted with D. Stafford & Associates (DSA) and Mennonite Church USA, VMC and Lindale were in contract negotiations with the group.

On Aug. 3, in a statement to The Mennonite (and published on the MC USA website Aug. 8), the panel wrote, “We cannot affirm the process that resulted in the selection of D. Stafford for EMU, or any process that does not involve Lauren Shifflett…We are sorry for the ways in which we have been complicit in this, and view it as a missed opportunity. Now we are choosing to support Lauren, victims and survivors over this flawed process.” Read the full statement.

On April 12, Shifflett posted an online account of her experience of abuse by Luke Hartman, former vice president of enrollment at EMU, followed by an April 21 blog written by her sister, Marissa Buck, listing her concerns about the handling of these reports by Lindale and EMU.

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LOUISIANA
Louisiana Law Review

Oct. 22, 2014

By Julie Love Taylor, Senior Associate

By now, most Americans are familiar with the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, in which the Church has been criticized for its handling—or rather, mishandling—of priests who sexually abused minors.[1] Recently, Catholics in Louisiana were reminded of this scandal but with a slightly different twist. In April 2014, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a decision involving alleged sexual abuse—not by a priest, but by a church parishioner—and a priest’s failure to report that abuse.[2] The Supreme Court’s holding potentially opened the door to a sticky situation: Can a court compel a priest to break the seal of confession when the penitent is a minor alleging sexual abuse.

I. The Supreme Court Case: Parents of Minor Child v. Charlet

In 2008, 14-year-old Rebecca Mayeux reached out to Fr. Jeff Bayhi, a priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, through the Sacrament of Confession. According to the petition, Mayeux revealed to him that George J. Charlet, Jr., a 64-year-old fellow parishioner, sexually abused her.[3] Charlet, a well-known and active parishioner of Our Lady of Assumption in the Diocese of Baton Rouge, allegedly sent Rebecca emails “laced with seductive nuances” and ultimately kissed and fondled her.[4]

Rebecca met with Fr. Bayhi on three separate occasions, confiding in him that Charlet “inappropriately touched her, kissed her, and told her that ‘he wanted to make love to her.’”[5] Fr. Bayhi allegedly told Rebecca that the situation was “her problem” and to “[s]weep it under the floor and get rid of it.”[6] Subsequent to Fr. Bayhi’s dismissal of Rebecca’s pleas, the abuse allegedly continued.[7]

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BRASIL
El Nuevo Herald

EFE

BRASILIA
El sacerdote brasileño Bonifacio Buzzi, quien el pasado viernes había sido detenido por segunda vez por un supuesto abuso sexual de menores, fue hallado sin vida en su celda, al parecer víctima de un suicidio, informaron hoy fuentes oficiales.

Buzzi, de 57 años, había ido a prisión en 2007, condenado a veinte años por pederastia, pero obtuvo la libertad condicional siete años después por buena conducta.

Sin embargo, la semana pasada fue acusado de abusar sexualmente de dos niños en la localidad de Tres Coraçoes, en el estado de Minas Gerais, y un juez ordenó que regresara a prisión.

Según las autoridades de Minas Gerais, Buzzi fue detenido el pasado viernes y este domingo fue encontrado sin vida en una celda que sólo él ocupaba.

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BRAZIL
Reuters

A Brazilian priest mentioned in the Catholic clergy sex abuse film “Spotlight” was found dead in a prison cell after he was arrested again for suspected pedophilia, authorities said on Monday.

Father Bonifacio Buzzi, 57, hanged himself with a sheet in a jail in the state of Minas Gerais where he was taken after his arrest on Friday, the state government said in a statement.

A decade ago Buzzi was convicted of abusing a 10-year-old boy in Mariana, Minas Gerais and jailed from 2007 to 2015. He was arrested last week following criminal complaints that he had molested two boys aged 9 and 13.

Buzzi was cited among the pedophilia cases listed at the end of “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 film based on the Boston Globe newspaper’s investigation of sexual abuses by Catholic priests and efforts by the Boston Archdiocese to cover them up.

Allegations against Buzzi first emerged in the 1990s in his home state of Santa Catarina. In 1995 he was convicted of molesting two boys in his parish near Mariana after their parents accused him of performing oral sex on their children.

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LOUISIANA
The Times-Picayune

By Emily Lane, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Former First Baptist Church of New Orleans youth minister Jonathan Bailey was sentenced Monday (Aug. 8) to serve 10 years in prison after admitting to sexual misconduct involving a member of the church who was 13 when the abuse began.

Prosecutor Bonycle Thornton read a statement in court from the young woman who Bailey victimized, describing how while serving then as her youth minister Bailey “worked hard to get me to trust him instead of my family.”

The victim’s father testified that the family agreed to the plea deal despite the notion that no sentence seemed long enough, in order to prevent further abuse and protect his daughter.

Bailey pleaded guilty to six counts of molestation, five counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile and one count of obstruction of justice. Though he was sentenced to 27 years total, the plea agreement allows him to serve the sentences at the same time, meaning he will serve a total of 10 years in prison. He must also register as a sex offender, Orleans Criminal District Court Judge Robin Pittman noted.

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NEW ZEALAND
Otago Daily Times

Editorial

What a shambles. The supposedly august and sweeping Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales appears increasingly tenuous after the departure of its third chairwoman in two years.

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced last week that New Zealand judge Dame Lowell Goddard had resigned from the inquiry, which was established in 2014 in the wake of the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal and tasked with investigating how state and other institutions handled their duty of care to protect children.

Dame Lowell had been in the job for 18 months. The announcement appeared to have come out of the blue and no explanation was given. Dame Lowell later made a public statement in which she commented about the inquiry’s “legacy of failure” which had been “hard to shake off”. It appeared very much as if she was simultaneously admitting defeat and laying blame.

That “legacy” is certainly hard to ignore. The two previous chairwomen (retired English judge Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and lawyer and former Lord Mayor of London Fiona Woolf) had been forced to resign (after only a week and two months in the job respectively) after revelations they had close links with establishment figures.

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SCOTLAND
The Courier

by Aileen Robertson
August 8 2016

A survivor of sex abuse has held a vigil outside St Andrews Cathedral in Glasgow.

Dave Sharp, 57, organised the event, during which candles were lit and a piper played a lament to remember victims.

Before the event, he told The Courier he intended to invite church leaders to pray with him for those who had lost their lives to abuse.

Mr Sharp, who has been campaigning for justice for abuse victims, raised banners claiming victims like himself had been “abandoned” by the Catholic Church.

He said: “We need the Scottish public to help us to get the Scottish Government and the church leaders to stop turning their backs on us and to come out and talk to us about what they are doing about helping all those people who continue to suffer in isolation and addiction.”

Mr Sharp gave evidence to police as part of a recent investigation into historic abuse at St Ninian’s School in Falkland.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

8 AUG 2016
BY CORMAC O’SHEA

The former pupil said smashing the skull of a Christian Brother gave him ‘satisfaction’ after abuse he suffered

A former pupil at a Christian Brothers school has described how he took revenge for classroom abuse by digging up a Brother’s grave and smashing their skull.

The man said he had been beaten with a leather strap in front of his classmates when he was a pupil at the school in Ireland.

Giving his name only as ‘Dave’, he told Niall Boylan on Classic Hits 4fm, how he later gained revenge for the treatment he received.

He said: “When I was about 15 or 16 a few of the lads went up to an orchard, and in the orchard there used to be a graveyard and you could see half of the coffins.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

Reading reports in the Herald about the royal commission’s probe into child sexual abuse in the Newcastle Anglican diocese has made Topics feel sick to the stomach.

The reports about top brass in the clergy knowing nothing and not recalling crucial events were shocking to say the least.

“I Can’t Recall,” the Herald’s headline said last Friday, preceded by “I Knew Nothing” the day prior.

This is serious stuff, no doubt. But this amnesia has an almost absurd comic aspect to it.

This is why the headlines made Topics immediately think of Sergeant Schultz. Anyone who watched the TV show Hogan’s Heroes would remember Schultz – the portly prisoner-of-war camp guard at Stalag 13.

John Banner played the big-hearted Schultz in the show, which ran from 1965 to 1971.

Afraid of being entangled in trouble, Schultz often turned a blind eye to the prisoner’s tricky transgressions.

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AUSTRALIA
Australian

DAN BOX
Crime reporterSydney
@DanBox10

The Anglican Archbishop of Perth warned two youth leaders they would face legal action if they continued to complain about ­alleged child abuse committed by a senior priest, a royal commission has heard.

Archbishop Roger Herft “was more interested in standing up for (the alleged abuser) than listening to the issue,” one of the youth leaders said in a witness statement tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Robert Wall told the commission he met Archbishop Herft in about 1994-95, when he was the bishop of Newcastle, in NSW, to report the allegations against Graeme Lawrence, the dean of the city’s cathedral.

Mr Lawrence, who was ­defrocked in 2012 after having group sex with a teenager, has been identified in evidence to the commission as part of a “Gang of Three” church officials who protected serial paedophile priest Peter Rushton.

The commission yesterday heard a note of a 2015 meeting with former diocesan trustee Keith Allen records him saying “the biggest concern in the Newcastle diocese was Bishop Roger Herft”. The file note records Mr Allen “indicated that Herft will be in trouble”, counsel assisting the commission Naomi Sharp said.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Huffington Post

Will Black
Writer with a background in anthropology and mental health care

A day in the life of a child can be very long, intense and memorable. Hopefully most readers can remember some wonder-filled days from their childhood. Special days out with family or adventures with friends, these hours become indelibly imprinted on our minds. They become part of us.

Unfortunately, it is the same with bad experiences. Experiences of child abuse, for example, can remain with the individual for life, casting a shadow over the world. These experiences can also have a detrimental impact on relationships – with relatives, oneself and with society itself – including social institutions that are meant to be trusted.

Therefore, when survivors of abuse have courageously disclosed their experiences (often to then be dismissed), campaigned relentlessly and repeatedly returned to horrific events in a quest for justice, being let down by a public inquiry is a betrayal. But this is exactly what has happened, again and again and again.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), was finally established as a statutory inquiry in early 2015, after decades of allegations about children abused within institutions. After the death of BBC presenter and prolific paedophile Jimmy Savile, in 2011, there was a flood of reports of his crimes and those of other abusers in positions of influence. As well as allegations about individuals, a broad range of institutions were accused of failing to protect children and covering up abuse. Politicians were among those accused of abusing children and aiding cover-ups.

When it emerged that more than 100 files pertaining to abuse by ‘VIPs’ had gone missing from the Home Office, then prime minister David Cameron made the outrageous suggestion that those alleging abuse and a cover-up are ‘conspiracy theorists’, Theresa May, home secretary at the time, was less dismissive, stating: “There might have been a cover-up. I cannot stand here and say the Home Office was not involved in a cover-up in the 1980s, and that is why I am determined to get to the truth.”

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ISRAEL
Haaretz

Yair Ettinger Aug 08, 2016

The multiplicity of investigations and indictments against sex offenders in recent weeks, primarily involving the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, has spurred Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, David Lau, to take the unusual step of speaking out on the issue.

Lau issued a call to Haredi parents and educators to take seriously any stories of sexual assaults of children and to increase awareness of and vocal opposition to any such incidents.

“It is absolutely forbidden to sweep these things under the rug and to evade dealing with these difficult phenomena which, if they are not stopped, could cause numerous other souls to be hurt,” Lau wrote, in a letter to a conference of Haredi teachers.

The letter was written during an especially turbulent time, during which every few days a new horrifying story has emerged or an indictment filed on suspicion of sex crimes against women or minors in family frameworks and educational institutions alike.

Among other developments, charges have been filed against six teachers in a Talmud Torah school in central Tel Aviv; a man from a famous rabbinical family has been indicted for allegedly abusing his daughters; and charges have been filed as well against a senior rabbi at a Jerusalem yeshiva, who is accused of serious sexual assaults, including rape, over a period of years, of members of his family since they were young girls – a case that may mark a turning point in the Haredi public’s approach to sex crimes.

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LOUISIANA
Think Progress

Jack Jenkins

It was 2008, and Rebecca Mayeux was living a nightmare.

Just 14 years old at the time, she was being sexually harassed and abused by a member of her church, 64-year-old George Charlet Jr. According to Mayeux*, Charlet bombarded her with emails “laced with seductive nuances” over the course of a summer, slowly escalating his inappropriate advances before ultimately kissing and fondling her.

As if the abuse wasn’t enough, Mayeux had to sit in the same pews as Charlet every Sunday at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church, a tiny country parish about 35 miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Shaken and afraid, Mayeux, like so many children who endure sexual abuse, felt too ashamed to tell her parents about her ordeal, fearing they would judge her.

Instead, she fled to the person she thought she could trust the most: Father Jeff Bayhi, her parish priest.

Mayeux says she visited Bayhi on three occasions to reveal intimate details about her abuse, always meeting under the context of Catholic confession. She says she told him about her unsettling experience, which included an avalanche of suggestive emails, “obsessive” phone calls, and Charlet saying he “wanted to make love to her” before inappropriately touching her.

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KOSOVA
Today

PRISTINA – A former priest wanted on child sex abuse charges from the 1970s and 1980s should not be extradited to Britain because the crimes were committed too long ago, a court in Kosovo ruled on Monday.

Lawrence Soper was detained in the western town of Peja, where he had lived for 4-5 years under the name Andrew Charles Kingston, in May on an international arrest warrant. He is accused of sex offences while he was a teacher in Britain.

British media said the former abbot from Ealing, west London, now in his 70s, had jumped bail in 2011 and a European arrest warrant was issued.

“British citizen Andrew Charles Kingston Soper should not be extradited because offences he has been charged with exceeded the statute of limitations,” a spokeswoman at the Basic Court, the first instance court in Peja, said.

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GUAM
KUAM

Updated: Aug 08, 2016

By Krystal Paco

It’s become a Sunday ritual. Dozens of Catholics picket in front of the Hagatna Cathedral before Sunday morning mass. Their signs demand for to have Archbishop Anthony Apuron defrocked as well as question the actions made by Guam’s interim archbishop Savio Hon Tai Fai. Archbishop Hon was appointed to Guam from the Vatican amid allegations of molestation made against Apuron.

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AUSTRALIA
The Advertiser

[with video]

Political Reporters Lauren Novak and, The Advertiser
August 8, 2016

THE release of the Nyland Royal Commission on Monday is the latest in a series of reports into the state’s child protection system.

Over the past 10 years there has been a litany of inquiries into the Government’s failure to protect children, including three high-profile inquiries also led by former Supreme Court justices.

They repeatedly found a culture of secrecy, unwieldy bureaucracy, lack of resources and a failure to put children first.

As South Australians begin to digest the 260 recommendations made by Margaret Nyland, the Government faces continued criticism for not having implemented the hundreds of proposals already put forward.

Advocates and victims are already warning this latest blueprint for change must not “sit on the shelf”.

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AUSTRALIA
Australian

MICHAEL OWEN
SA Bureau ChiefAdelaide
@mjowen

VERITY EDWARDS
ReporterAdelaide
@VerityEdwardsau

An initial $200 million over four years will be spent by the Weatherill government to begin implementing wideranging reforms based on 260 recommendations of a 850-page final report of a royal commission into South Australia’s troubled child protection system.

Premier Jay Weatherill has today apologised for failings amid findings one in four children in the state is subject of some form of notification to authorities.

“It is true that we’ve failed … the commissioner doesn’t apportion blame,” Mr Weatherill said.

In her report, Commissioner Margaret Nyland said problems with child protection systems were not unique to South Australia, although the state had the “dubious distinction” of caring for a higher proportion of infants and young children on a rotational basis, by commercial shift workers, than anywhere else and relied on this form of care more than any other jurisdiction.

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IRELAND
Donegal Now

The scandal at St Patrick’s College in Maynooth is set to take another twist this week and deepen even further as a former trainee priest will reportedly make a written statement to Gardaí claiming that he was sexually harassed by a member of staff.

The staff member is still employed at the college, according to the Mail On Sunday, and they have not been contacted by Gardaí at this stage either.

The news comes on the back of allegations that suggested a trainee priest was posting partially nude pictures of himself of the gay dating app Grindr, while Archbishop Diarmuid Martin will no longer send trainee priests from his dioceses to Maynooth to study because of the toxic atmosphere there.

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IRELAND
RTE News

The trustees of St Patrick’s College in Maynooth are to meet within the next five weeks to decide their response to the current controversy at the institute.

The announcement by Primate of All Ireland Archbishop Eamon Martin, comes hours after Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, publicly expressed surprise that a trustees’ meeting had not yet been called to address the ongoing crisis.

Yesterday, on RTÉ’s This Week, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin defended his unprecedented decision to move his three seminarians studying at Maynooth to Rome’s Irish College.

He described the climate of anonymous allegations about inappropriate sexual behaviour in the main national seminary as “dangerous and poisonous” saying there was “a strange atmosphere of innuendo” which was “unsettling” for his students and that he had to do something for their futures

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NIGERIA
Christian Times

Chiqui Guyjoco
07 AUGUST, 2016

Protesters demanding for the dismissal of an allegedly corrupt Anglican bishop have interrupted the Anglican Church from convening its synod in Nigeria. The said protesters also clashed with authorities which resulted with five people injured.

According to the Anglican’s official website, protesters surrounded St. John’s Anglican Church in Amukpe recently and blocked the clergy and delegates from entering the church to participate in the scheduled synod. The protesters held placards and demanded the resignation of Rt. Rev. Blessing Erife­ta, the bishop of Sapele.

The vicar of St. John then reportedly called the who were soldiers positioned to protect an oil pipeline nearby and requested them to clear the church building of the demonstrators. The clergy prayed at a school nearby as the authorities and protestors clashed. The incident resulted in injuries among four women and a youth.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

IAN KIRKWOOD
8 Aug 2016

A SOLICITOR and former trustee of the Anglican DIocese of Newcastle has admitted tearing up the original 1990 resignation of paedophile priest Stephen Hatley Gray, which was then replaced with one dated the day before Gray was charged with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy.

Central Coast solicitor Keith Allen, who began giving evidence to the Royal Commission on Friday, was again subjected to an intense examination by the commission’s chairman, Peter McClellan, and counsel assisting, Naomi Sharp.

The resignation letter of the disgraced priest Gray has featured in several segments of evidence so far.

In evidence last week, retired former Newcastle assistant Bishop Richard Appleby insisted he was instructed by his bishop, Bishop Holland, to drive to the Central Coast to obtain the resignation after a wild party at the church rectory.

But in Mr Allen’s evidence, it emerged that the letter discussed by Bishop Appleby in evidence – and shown to the commission as being hand-written on church letterhead – may not have been the original letter.

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AUSTRALIA
Guardian News

IAN KIRKWOOD
8 Aug 2016

THE Royal Commission has heard sensational evidence about a secret filing system of “brown envelopes” used in the Newcastle Anglican church under former Bishop Roger Herft.

The commission heard there would have been more than 20 cases detailed in the brown envelopes. Detail of the history of child sexual abuse at the church’s Morpeth seminary were also said to be held in the church archives, stored at the University of Newcastle.

Detail of the brown envelopes emerged when the royal commission showed solicitor and former “ear to three Bishops”, Keith Allen, a file note of a meeting held in early 2015 with the diocesan business manager John Cleary.

The file note also revealed Mr Allen believed the church had influence over the police until quite recently and that the former dean of Newcastle, Graeme Lawrence, would be a focus of the royal commission and any police investigation and that Lawrence would ‘’bring others down’’.

Counsel assisting Naomi Sharp quoted from the file note: “Cleary records you saying that the biggest concern in the Newcastle diocese was Bishop Roger Herft. He indicated that Herft will be in trouble. This was mainly because of Herft’s handling of the Brown envelopes through Herft’s Brown envelope advisory/review committee”.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Beau Donelly and Chris Vedelago

The Catholic Church has housed a string of paedophile Christian Brothers on the same inner-city property it rents out as a family-friendly function centre.

A Fairfax Media investigation has revealed the Christian Brothers have been housing child sex offenders next to the Treacy Centre wedding and conference facility in Parkville since it opened three decades ago.

Past residents include notorious paedophiles Robert Charles Best and William Stuart Houston, who are both now serving lengthy jail sentences for historic sex crimes.

The Christian Brothers have refused to disclose how many known abusers are currently living in the complex, citing privacy concerns.

“Any Brother who has a substantiated claim of child sexual abuse against them is subject to appropriate but strict monitoring including restrictions in relation to children,” a spokesman said.

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UNITED STATES
Charisma News

8/4/2016
JESSILYN JUSTICE

A Mormon Australian film director was charged with more than 50 counts of sexual assault for his alleged conduct with 15 boys, according to reports.

Scott, who directed films Spirit of the Game and The Playbook, allegedly molested the children when he coached soccer in Australia during the 1990s, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The abuse occurred while Scott was a high-ranking member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Reports of child abuse within the group are not uncommon.

Late last month, attorneys subpoenaed LDS President Thomas S. Monson about the church’s sordid history with abuse, particularly about Navajo children in the church’s Indian Student Placement Program.

“What President Monson knew or didn’t know about this and child sexual abuse within this program in general, is relevant. If President Monson claims no knowledge, that too is relevant to what the church knew or should have known about Lee and his ability to lead this program within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation and protect Indian Placement Program’s children from sexual harm,” victims’ attorney Craig Vernon said.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

The Anglican Archbishop of Perth Roger Herft had a ‘brown paper envelope’ system to deal with child sex abuse complaints when he was bishop in a NSW Anglican diocese where abuse was widespread.

The envelopes containing information about child sex abuse allegations and other matters brought to the attention of the diocese of Newcastle were dealt with by a review committee.

They were created as a more secret filing system by Bishop Herft, solicitor Keith Allen told a child sex abuse royal commission on Monday.

Mr Allen, a former trustee of the diocese, was questioned about advice he gave the church in 2015 in readiness for the royal commission hearing which began last week.

In that advice, recorded by the current business manager of the diocese, John Cleary, Mr Allen suggested Archbishop Herft would be in trouble over the brown paper envelopes.

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AUSTRALIA
Guardian

Australian Associated Press
Sunday 7 August 2016

A solicitor has denied he advised a former bishop of a New South Wales Anglican diocese to say he could not recall any knowledge of paedophile priests when giving evidence to the child sex abuse royal commission.

Keith Allen, who had been a member of several boards in the Anglican diocese of Newcastle for 40 years, returned to the witness stand for a second day at a commission hearing into how the diocese handled abuse allegations over 30 years.

Allen answered “no” five times when asked if a file note by John Cleary, the business manager of the diocese, was an accurate record of him saying he would advise bishop Alfred Holland to say he could not recall any knowledge of paedophile priests when he appeared before the commission.

In another extraordinary day at the commission sitting in Newcastle, Allen was questioned about acting for the church while also advising a victim’s solicitor.

He was also asked about arranging a fraudulent record for a sexual predator so he could get work elsewhere.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Susan Wyndham

In researching her biography of Daniel Mannix, the Archbishop of Melbourne for 46 years, Brenda Niall was surprised to find how liberal his views were on most issues: he opposed World War I conscription, capital and corporal punishment, and the White Australia policy; supported the church reforms of Vatican II; and called for more openness in teaching children about sex.

“I can’t say whether sexual abuse was going on his time but it probably was,” Niall says. “He lived to be 99 and his attitude to sex education was way before its time. If it had happened, children might have talked to their parents … He was against the silence.”

Niall’s biography, Mannix, has won the $25,000 National Biography Prize for its nuanced and personal portrait of a complex man who was Archbishop until his death in 1963 and is mostly remembered as a fierce anti-communist cold warrior of the 1950s and ’60s.

“He is a biographer’s nightmare,” Niall says, partly because he left instructions for all his letters to be burnt after his death. Only a few were saved by B.A. (Santamaria) for a biography he was writing.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Dan Cox

A Newcastle lawyer and Anglican Church official has said he did not go to police with allegations of abuse against priests because he was trying to protect the church.

Former trustee and Newcastle Diocesan Council member Keith Allen has spent the entire day giving evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

The case study in Newcastle is looking at the past and present systems, policies and practices within the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle for responding to allegations of child sexual abuse.

Mr Allen discussed the church’s handling of sealed “brown envelopes”, which contained matters of concern to the diocese including criminal allegations against priests.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Philly.com

by Joseph A. Slobodzian, Staff Writer

Msgr. William J. Lynn returned to a Philadelphia courtroom Thursday, four years older and a lot thinner than when he left to serve three to six years in prison for his conviction in the Catholic Church clergy sex abuse scandal.

Two Pennsylvania appeals courts have erased Lynn’s child endangerment conviction, although they are powerless to give back 33 months in prison.

But for the 65-year-old former secretary for clergy – the first Catholic Church official in the nation convicted for the way he supervised pedophile priests – freedom on $250,000 bail is the only clearing in a legal cloud that has shadowed him since 2002.

Still ahead, on May 1, is another public trial in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, on a charge of child endangerment, and the potential of another conviction and return to custody.

After Lynn was released Tuesday, defense lawyer Thomas A. Bergstrom criticized District Attorney Seth Williams for revisiting the case against Lynn.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Sarah MacDonald
PUBLISHED
08/08/2016

A former seminarian at St Patrick’s College in Thurles has told of the severe physical and mental abuse he endured while studying at the seminary.

‘James’ told the Irish Independent of the bullying he endured at the seminary – including one incident where he had a bucket of dirt thrown over him by two people wearing balaclavas.

Outlining for the first time in full his experiences of physical and mental abuse almost 25 years ago in the seminary, as he embarked on what he thought was the path to priesthood, he said, “As I now recall that year, I feel so much pain and horror for what I experienced.”

“When I entered [the] seminary, I was living with over 100 students and priests and lecturers.

“These priests were there to guide us on our journey to ordination and help us discern what we truly wanted out of life. They would be our leaders, spiritual directors and brothers within whom we would place our trust and always be confident that they cared for our wellbeing,” he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Luke Byrne

PUBLISHED
08/08/2016

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin’s long-term ambition for the capital’s trainee priests is to take them out of seminaries altogether and put them into communities.

Speaking over the weekend, the archbishop advocated “a very different form” of training for the priesthood.

It comes as the controversy over his decision not to send prospective priests to Maynooth, over an apparent gay subculture there, rumbles on.

“A seminarian going on a dating site, there’s something wrong there,” he said, in an interview with RTÉ’s ‘This Week’.

Archbishop Martin spoke about the church’s teaching on human sexuality, calling it something that is “more difficult to get across to people.” He suggested that this was one reason why it might be better to take priests out of seminaries.

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

By Annette Blackwell – AAP on August 8, 2016

A solicitor has denied he advised a former bishop of a NSW Anglican diocese to say he could not recall when giving evidence to the child sex abuse royal commission.

Keith Allen who had been a member of several boards in the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle for 40 years has returned to the witness stand for a second day at a commission hearing into how the diocese handled abuse allegations over 30 years.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Mirror

7 AUG 2016
BY BEN ROSSINGTON

Theresa May was warned not to look outside the UK before choosing the New Zealand judge who quit the national child abuse inquiry this week, it was claimed.

The Prime Minister, as Home Secretary, appointed Dame Lowell Goddard last year. She is the third chairwoman to quit.

A legal source said: “The PM was advised by very senior people not to look outside because of the need for an intricate understanding of British law and the establishment.

“It’s a difficult balancing act, you want someone who gets it but isn’t part of it. There were questions about whether Justice Goddard had the level of knowledge needed.”

In hearings at the High Court last week the performance of the judge, 67, came under fire. She quit after it was revealed she spent 74 days abroad working or on holiday.

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ISRAEL
Times of Israel

Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau on Sunday said members of the ultra-Orthodox community had an “obligation” to treat cases of child abuse and said the issue must not “be swept under the rug.”

In an open letter, the chief rabbi implied that such crimes should be reported to the authorities, but stopped short of explicitly calling for police involvement.

“Under no circumstances may these awful matters be swept under the carpet or be ignored. If they are not stopped, they can cause damage to many other people,” Lau wrote.

“At this time, it is an obligation for all parents, teachers, family members and anyone working in education, to keep their eyes open and to offer as much help as possible to those in need. Burying one’s head in the sand is not the [correct] response to these difficult and painful topics,” Lau wrote.

In his letter, the chief rabbi referred to recent cases of abuse within the Haredi community, which he termed “truly shocking.”

Last week, indictments were filed against six teachers at an ultra-Orthodox school run by the Belz Hasidic sect in Tel Aviv for alleged severe physical abuse of students. One of the six educators was also charged with sexual abuse. Some 22 students are suspected of having suffered physical abuse from the ages of 3-4 to 10-11.

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ISRAEL
Jerusalem Online

After six teachers at a Tel Aviv Hassidic school were indicted this week for abusing their students, Rabbi Benny Lau wrote in an open letter to educators that he was “disgusted” by the revelation and urged them not to keep such incidents a secret.

Aug 7, 2016

Omri Ariel

Amid allegations of sexual abuse made against six teachers at a Tel Aviv Hassidic school, Israel’s Chief Rabbi Benny Lau published on Sunday an open letter to educators in the ultra-Orthodox community, urging them to keep their eyes open and to assist students who may be going through similar experiences.

“To hear that these places, which should have served as a stronghold and a safe haven to these children, became places of nightmare and fear, was extremely painful,” Rabbi Lau wrote. “All of us – parents, teachers and everyone who takes part in the sacred work of education – must now keep our eyes open and assist as much as we can those who need us.”

The ultra-Orthodox community has long been under scrutiny for tending to cover up cases of sexual assault occurring within its schools or homes. Often, even parents who find out about it refrain from involving the police for fear of being cast out or put to shame.

“Turning a blind eye is never an answer to such difficult issues,” Rabbi Lau added. “Each of us must be aware that he or she carries responsibility, even if it doesn’t involve them directly.”

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ISRAEL
Arutz Sheva

Chief Rabbi David Lau published an open letter to educators this evening (Sunday), in which he calls for them to “open their eyes” and deal with any and every instance of child abuse of any kind.

“To my great pain we’ve recently been witness to horrific cases of abuse in our midst,” the Chief Rabbi opened, “cases in which children were hurt in their houses and their schools. How painful it is to hear that the very places which are supposed to provide a feeling of safety and security for our children, have become places of fear.”

Rabbi Lau called for all parents and educators to open their eyes and observe what is happening around them. “Burying our heads in the sand is not the answer in these difficult and painful matters. Every individual must know that he bears responsibility for what goes on around him, even if it doesn’t involve him personally.”

The Chief Rabbi noted that while he chose not to go into the details of the recent cases of sexual abuse in his letter, it is nonetheless important for people to talk about these matters. “I feel disgusted by the very fact that we have to address these matters, but address them we must.”

“As those who dedicate their lives to providing better education, you bear an even greater responsibility to look around and devote your full attention to anything that might damage the souls of our precious youth.”

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IRELAND
Irish Central

Niall O’Dowd @niallodowd August 07, 2016

Delusion is among the most damaging mental states of all, allowing individuals to enter fantasy worlds where they can pretend their delusions are reality.

We currently have an outstanding examples of delusionary behavior in the Irish Catholic Church who are pretending there is no gay crisis in their main seminary at Maynooth.

The bishops of Ireland have agreed en masse (with one exception) to deny and to protest the findings of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin that the main seminary in Maynooth has essentially become a hotspot for gay seminarians and very likely should be shut down.

There is evidence of gay dating sites being widely used, of cover ups reaching the higher echelons, of straight novices being shunned if they report any such incidents, of a heterosexual student fired when he reported two seminarians having sex in bed – the list goes on and on.

There has been a gay culture predominant in Maynooth seminary for decades according to experts who know.

Now Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has called it into the open. He stated about Maynooth seminary that there is “an atmosphere of strange goings-on there”.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

Martin Evans

7 August 2016

Professor Alexis Jay, who exposed the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, has emerged as the favourite to take over the Government’s chaotic child sex abuse inquiry.

The former social worker, who currently sits on the inquiry’s panel, is understood to be willing to consider taking on the role if approached by Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary.

Professor Jay is widely respected among survivor’s groups and having been brought up in a tenement in Edinburgh, by a single parent, has none of the establishment links that have tripped up previous heads.

The entire future of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was thrown into doubt last week, when Dame Lowell Goddard became the third chairman to quit amid criticism over her commitment to the role.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

JOANNE MCCARTHY
7 Aug 2016

FORMER Newcastle Anglican Bishop Brian Farran will be questioned this week about why he told a church board he was placed in an “unnecessary and unfortunate pressured environment” after it made defrocking recommendations against four priests public.

The priests included former Newcastle Anglican Dean Graeme Lawrence.

NSW Local Court magistrate Colin Elliott after professional standards hearings in 2010 into child sex allegations against Lawrence, his partner and teacher Greg Goyette and Hunter Anglican priests Andrew Duncan, Bruce Hoare and Graeme Sturt.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse public hearing into Newcastle Anglican diocese was told last week that Mr Elliott will give evidence criticising Bishop Farran’s handling of the matter and subsequent changes to the professional standards board’s powers.

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IRELAND
RTE News

[with audio]

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said the National Seminary in Maynooth needs to come forward to show that its house is in order and procedures are “robust”.

Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week, he said procedures need to be shown as accessible and are being used.

His comments follow anonymous allegations of homosexual activity, the use of the dating app Grindr, and other allegations of misconduct at the seminary.

Archbishop Martin said there have been “misunderstandings” from some bishops over his decision to transfer three trainee priests to Rome.

He said many bishops did not agree with his move but he said he defended his position to them because not taking action on the matter would have been “very foolish”.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Tomás Heneghan
PUBLISHED
07/08/2016

The Archbishop of Dublin has said his long-term ambition following the recent scandal at Maynooth is to set up a new form of community training for seminarians.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said he wishes to take men training to become priests in Ireland away from the closed environment of a seminary.

The cleric was speaking to RTÉ Radio One’s This Week programme on Sunday afternoon.

He told the show he made his decision to remove three seminarians from St Patrick’s College at Maynooth in June, following various reports and blogs.

He explained: “I have an obligation, if I feel there is an atmosphere that is unsettling for my students I have to take action.”

He said that despite the decision of other bishops not to remove their seminarians from the college, he did not believe he was overreacting.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Ciarán D’Arcy

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has linked the issue of gay activity involving seminarians to the treatment of sexual abusers in the Catholic Church, and has challenged authorities to show that Maynooth “has its house in order”.

Dr Martin stood over comments he made last week that a “poisonous” atmosphere had prevailed at the national seminary, and said the decision not to send three seminary students from the Dublin Archdiocese there was taken in June.

Controversy erupted last Monday when allegations of homosexual activity, sexual harassment and the use of gay dating apps among seminarians at Maynooth surfaced.

“I believe when I see something that I am not happy with, that I would be very foolish not to take action about it,” he told RTÉ Radio’s This Week programme.

“One of the things that I constantly recall in the child sexual abuse, which is another matter but it’s linked to this, is on how many occasions something happened and then somebody said ‘well everybody knew there was something wrong there’ and nobody came forward,” he said.

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IRELAND
Journal

THE ARCHBISHOP OF Dublin has called for a new community-based system for training priests.

Diarmuid Martin was speaking to RTÉ’s This Week programme today after a week of media activity around alleged gay culture in place at St Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Ireland’s national seminary.

Anonymous allegations had been made that seminarians had been using Grindr, a gay dating app.

Martin had on Tuesday confirmed to the Irish Times that he would not be sending three student priests from his diocese to the seminary, describing “an atmosphere of strange goings-on”.

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GEORGIA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Monday, August 8, 2016

An international self-help organization for men and women who were molested by religious leaders will hold its first confidential support group meeting in Savannah on Tuesday, August 9th.

Michael Corbett, who is the Savannah director for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), explained why he is starting a local support group.

“SNAP was there when I needed it. The other members understood what I had been through, because they had had similar experiences. Sharing my story with them helped me tremendously on my healing journey, and I want to share that gift with others.”

In 1993 Corbett was a 17 year old Boston teenager when he was sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest, Father Robert Gale. In 2001, the Savannah SNAP leader was interviewed by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team for their Pulitzer Prize winning exposé of the cover up of child sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese. Gale was convicted as a result. The Globe’s investigation was the subject of the movie Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for best picture earlier this year.

Barbara Dorris, the long-time National Outreach Director for SNAP, will be on hand to help launch the new support group, and she also commented on the launch.

“We hope that by starting these meetings we can reach out to local victims who are still suffering in silence. We urge both survivors and their supporters to join us on Tuesday. By sharing their truths people realize that they are not alone, and they can begin to heal.”

The confidential support group – for both religious sex abuse victims and for their families – will be held at 7:00 pm. on August 9th. The location is not being made public, in order to protect the privacy of the participants. Those interested in attending should contact Corbett (508-207-7418, Savannah@SNAPnetwork.org) or Dorris (314-503-0003, bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org) for the location of the meeting.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

AAP

A child sex abuse survivor will tell a royal commission two Anglican priests had group sex with him while another priest watched and stroked a 17-year-old boy who was so drunk he passed out.

The evidence on Monday from a man given the pseudonym CKH follows shocking revelations last week about a network of pedophiles in the Anglican diocese of Newcastle who targeted children in a church-run boys home.

CKH is expected to say he was 14 years old when priest Andrew Duncan had oral sex with him and the sexual abuse continued for years. During his involvement with Duncan, CKH alleges he was groomed to have sexual encounters with three other priests, Graeme Lawrence, Bruce Hoare and Graeme Sturt.

He will also say he was 19 when the group sex incident happened in a motel room after a Riverina diocese clergy function in 1984.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Sue Berelowitz

The resignation of Lowell Goddard as chair of the official inquiry into historical child sex abuse is an opportunity for us to now focus on the really critical issue. For the inquiry to be credible the whole purpose must be to learn the lessons from past institutional failures so that children now and in the future are effectively protected.

The inquiry I chaired into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups found extensive evidence of professionals and institutions refusing to see the signs and hear the voices of abused children. This was institutional denial by those whose job is to protect children from rape and sexual violation.

There is a dangerous belief that the sexual abuse of children is a “historical” phenomenon, that it’s about a few rotten apples in high places or recognised positions of power. Let’s look at the reality. The new crime survey from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) tells us that 11% of all females and 3% of all males aged 16-59 have disclosed that they were sexually abused as children.

This translates into at least 600,000 girls in England today who are, have been or will be victims of sexual abuse by the time they are 18. The figure for boys would be at least 150,000. These figures are profoundly shocking and yet I am not in the least surprised by them for they fit the known evidence, including that most people were abused by someone known to them such as a friend, acquaintance or family member.

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GUAM
The Freethinker

A while back, Anthony Sablan Apuron, above, then Catholic Archbishop of Guam warned that the introduction of marriage equality to the South Pacifiic island that belongs to America would ‘destroy the basic fabric of society’ and put Guam on the ‘road to a totalitarian system’.

Apuron and Guam’s Catholic archdiocese are now embroiled in a $2-million lawsuit that alleges that Apuron abused boys in 1970s.

According to this report, three former altar boys and the mother of another filed the libel and slander lawsuit, saying they were called liars when they accused Apuron of sexual abuse.

The lawsuit appears to have forced a 95-year-old Catholic priest – the Rev Louis Brouillard – into the open. After he was identified as an abuser during a hearing this week in the Guam Legislature, he stepped forward to confess abusing boys on Guam. He said he had confessed his sins to other priests on the island at the time but none told him to specifically stop.

Instead, the other priests told him to “do better” along with regular penance, such as saying Hail Mary prayers.

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VATIKAN
derStandard (Osterreich)

The Vatican has placed an employee on leave until further notice because he allegedly sought intimate contact with a minor. This was confirmed by the Vatican spokesman Greg Burke on Sunday.]

7. August 2016

Mann soll sich einer 13-Jährigen unangemessen genähert haben

Vatikanstadt – Der Vatikan hat einen Angestellten bis auf weiteres beurlaubt, weil er intimen Kontakt zu einer Minderjährigen gesucht haben soll. Das bestätigte Vatikansprecher Greg Burke am Sonntag auf Anfrage, wie die Nachrichtenagentur Kathpress berichtete.

Burke betonte zugleich, der Fall sei außerhalb des Vatikan angesiedelt. Er widersprach damit der Darstellung der italienischen Tageszeitung “Il Mattino” (Sonntag), die den Beschuldigten in das Umfeld von Papst Franziskus und dessen Residenz Santa Marta rückte.

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CITTA’ DEL VATICANO
Il Mattino

[Another scandal at the Vatican. An employee has been accused of pedophilia.]

Città del Vaticano. I guai non finiscono mai. Ancora una volta Papa Francesco si trova a fronteggiare un caso parecchio imbarazzante. Un’altra grana da risolvere, un altro dispiacere. Stavolta a dare grattacapi è un dipendente che ogni tanto si intravedeva a Santa Marta, anche se era impiegato in un altro settore. In questi giorni è stato allontanato dal Vaticano con accuse pesanti: adescamento di minorenni via chat, materiale pedo pornografico. Il ragazzo, un laico di cui non sono note le generalità – è stato denunciato alla autorità giudiziaria vaticana in attesa che si completino le opportune verifiche per poi procedere la vicenda in tribunale. Tutto è nato a causa di alcuni filmati che giravano in rete e che sono stati intercettati dai gendarmi. Papa Francesco, saputo dell’accaduto, c’è rimasto male. Sbalordito e addolorato.

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AUSTRALIA
The Austrlian

MICHAEL MCKENNA
ReporterBrisbane
@McKennaattheOz

Child protection advocates are calling on Australian states to widen reforms of litigation laws so abuse victims forced into compensation settlements can launch new legal action.

Queensland, Western Australia and the ACT are about to join Victoria and NSW in abolishing the statute of limitations that ­effectively blocks victims from having their cases heard in court.

In Queensland, victims have had until their 21st birthday to sue institutions over their abuse.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse last year recommended states reform laws to allow people to sue regardless of when alleged abuse happened.

However, so far legislative changes have excluded victims who have already taken action and been forced into settlements after the time limit defence was used against them. Some victims received as little as $10,000, a fraction of what churches, schools and governments now face in court-ordered damages.

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NEW YORK
Road to Recovery

A religious order of priests and brothers, the Franciscan Friars of Holy Name Province, based in midtown Manhattan, refuses to help a woman who is a childhood sexual abuse victim of Fr. Paul A. Walsh OFM, a/k/a Fr. La Salle A. Walsh, OFM, a priest who served at Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church and Preparatory School in Kingston, Jamaica

Woman who was sexually abused at approximately the age of ten (10) in approximately 1962 by Fr. Paul A. Walsh, OFM, a/k/a Fr. La Salle Walsh, OFM, wants the Franciscan Friars to pay for the cost of her therapy, resolve her clergy sexual abuse claim, and help her try to heal

What
A demonstration and leafleting regarding the Franciscan Friars’ Holy Name Province refusal to help a childhood sexual abuse victim of a Franciscan Friar, Fr. Paul A. Walsh, a/k/a Fr. La Salle A. Walsh, from Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church and Preparatory School in Kingston, Jamaica

When
Sunday, August 7, 2016 from 8:45 am until 12:30 pm (before and after Sunday Masses)

Where
At the rear entrance to St. Francis of Assisi Parish on West 32nd Street, Manhattan, between 6th and 7th Avenues.

The address of St. Francis of Assisi Parish is 135 West 31st Street, New York, NY 10001
212-736-8500

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

Why
A woman who was approximately ten-years old in the 1960s and sexually abused by Fr. Paul A. Walsh, a/k/a Fr. La Salle A. Walsh, OFM, at Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church and Preparatory School in Kingston, Jamaica, wants the Holy Name Province of the Franciscans to pay for her therapy, resolve her claim, and help her try to heal. Demonstrators will demand of the Holy Name Province of the Franciscans that it help the woman who was sexually abused as a child by a Franciscan priest try to heal by paying for her therapy and resolving her clergy sexual abuse claim in a timely and just manner.

Contacts
Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., Road to Recovery, Inc. – 862-368-2800 – roberthoatson@gmail.com

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

South Australian Parliament should be recalled so recommendations from the Child Protection Systems Royal Commission can be implemented as soon as possible, the State Opposition says.

The final report by Commissioner Margaret Nyland contains 260 recommendations and is 850 pages long, Child Protection Reform Minister John Rau revealed today.

It was delivered to Governor Hieu Van Le at Government House on Friday afternoon, but the contents will not be made public until after a State Cabinet meeting on Monday.

Opposition Leader Steven Marshall said the document could not be properly scrutinised because Parliament had risen for the winter break.

He said it should be recalled so that legislative changes prompted by the report are not delayed.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Kim Bielenberg

PUBLISHED
07/08/2016

The catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly states that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”.

The Vatican warns that under no circumstances can a gay lifestyle be approved, but that has not stopped rumours and scandals reaching to the very heart of the institution.

This has not just happened over years and decades, but over centuries, leading to inevitable accusations of hypocrisy.

According to several accounts, which are hard to verify 1,000 years later, Pope John XII from the 10th Century had sex with men and boys and was accused of transforming his palace “into a whorehouse”.

The 14th Century Pontiff Boniface VIII, who reigned from 1294 to 1303, was said to have declared to a prospective male lover that two men having sex was “no more a sin than rubbing your hands together”.

Historical rumour records that Paul II passed away while having sex with a page boy, and that he was succeeded by Sixtus IV, who appointed his lover, Petro Riario, who happened to be his nephew, a cardinal at the age of 17.

While recent popes have been free of gay scandal on a personal level, the rumours and stories of liaisons among the clergy continue to be a feature of Vatican life and are regularly reported in the Italian press.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Sunday Times

James Gillespie
August 7 2016
The Sunday Times

n the Millbank offices of the child sex abuse inquiry, tensions between Dame Lowell Goddard and her team had been building for some time.

They reached a climax on Thursday when a source alerted The Sunday Times. “The confrontation with Goddard will take place today,” the insider said. “If she tries to cling to office and goes to Theresa May or Amber Rudd, she will discover that there is no support for her.”

A few hours later Goddard had gone — tendering a curt resignation letter that was immediately accepted by Rudd, the home secretary.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Mail on Sunday

By AMIE GORDON FOR MAILONLINE and DAVID ROSE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

In a damaging blow to the Government’s inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, staff have criticised former chair Dame Lowell Goddard, describing her as ‘difficult’ to work with and ‘autocratic’.

This comes after the New Zealand judge resigned on Thursday as chair of the £100 million Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).

Sources claimed Dame Lowell, appointed by then-Home Secretary Theresa May just over a year ago, had lost the confidence of senior staff and members of the inquiry panel.

Her resignation letter was immediately accepted by Mrs May’s successor as Home Secretary, Amber Rudd.

Insiders and lawyers in the inquiry, which is already besieged by setbacks, have accused her of acting in an ‘autocratic’ manner towards staff.

One insider told The Sunday Times Dame Lowell was ‘difficult’ to work with and staff had to develop a ‘thick skin’.

Another told the paper: ‘Goddard’s treatment of the staff and of the panel of four assisting her has been autocratic.’

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

By AMIE GORDON FOR MAILONLINE

Lord Greville Janner’s family have announced they intend to launch legal action to have him removed from the Government’s child sex abuse inquiry.

Daniel Janner QC, the son of the Labour peer who died amid allegations of paedophilia, criticised the ‘disarray’ of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse following the resignation of its third chairwoman, Dame Lowell Goddard.

He described the allegations against his late father as ‘obscene’, adding a ‘dead and innocent man’ could not defend himself.

This comes as another setback to the £100 million Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, after its chair Dame Lowell Goddard left her post on Thursday – hours after Mr Janner had sent an email detailing his plans to take her to court.

Lord Janner, who died aged 87 in December, is alleged to have abused children over a period spanning more than 30 years and dating back to the 1950s.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Kim Bielenberg

PUBLISHED
07/08/2016

The hugely popular gay dating app Grindr is banned or blocked in countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This week the embattled Irish Catholic hierarchy would be forgiven for wishing that it was also outlawed in Maynooth, the location of Ireland’s only seminary.

Grindr boasts that it is the world’s largest gay social network, enabling men to see pictures of “100 guys on a location-based grid… chat, make a date, and have some fun anytime, any place”.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin this week announced that he was not sending students of the priesthood to the 200-year-old seminary at Maynooth.

Part of the reason given was that some students in the seminary were allegedly using Grindr.
The dating app has become part of normal gay culture among two million users worldwide, in the same way as Tinder is used by heterosexuals to hook up online.

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WISCONSIN
Gazette Xtra

JONAH BELECKIS
Sunday, August 7, 2016

ELKHORN—Court cases are like puzzles, now-retired Walworth County Judge James Carlson says.

Some are easy to put together. Some are difficult.

Carlson, 72, of Whitewater, retired Monday after 37 years as a judge. He still remembers certain cases, and most of them were the difficult ones. …

Carlson remembers the Rev. Donald McGuire, a Jesuit priest from Illinois who was convicted in 2006 on five charges of indecent behavior with a child and sentenced to seven years in prison. After the case wrapped up, Carlson said, nearly 40 people came forward to say they had been molested.

Today, the story of priest sexual abuse is still in the news, particularly after the movie “Spotlight” won an Oscar for its portrayal of The Boston Globe’s investigation in the early 2000s.

Some of these ills of society have gotten better over time. Some have gotten worse.

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SOUTH CAROLINA
WSPA

By Tony Cedrone
Published: August 6, 2016

GREENVILLE, SC (WSPA) – With the school year just days away, protecting your children from predators is important to all parents.

Just last weekend, Greenville County officials say a former campus pastor at Summitt Church in Greenville inappropriately touched and molested a 12-year-old at his home.

In a rare twist, investigators say James Briley called last Friday and admitted to committing the crime.

Now, experts want parents to talk to their kids about how to protect themselves around predators.

Suzy Cole with the Children’s Advocacy Center says, “Just like the safety rules about looking both ways before you cross a street, there are also safety rules about your body.”

Cole says it’s important for kids to know the difference between safe touching and unsafe touching, even if it seems harmless.

“If someone tickles you and it starts to hurt and you don’t like it, you tell them to stop and it stops right then,” says Cole.

Nowadays, Cole says, using old methods to teach kids about stranger danger doesn’t cut it, “more than 95% of the children we see here were not abused by a stranger but by somebody they know, usually somebody they love.”

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KENTUCKY
The Independent

By MIKE JAMES The Independent

ASHLAND Kentucky State Police have charged a regional radio personality with first-degree sexual abuse in an ongoing investigation.

Timothy “Fig” Carper, 49, of Grayson was arrested Friday and taken to the Carter County Detention Center, according to the Kentucky State Police Ashland post.

Carper is a well-known sports broadcaster for WLGC.

He also is a former youth pastor for a Grayson church.

The warrant for his arrest was issued after a grand jury heard evidence and testimony July 22, according to state police.

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IRELAND
The Sunday Times

Justine McCarthy
August 7 2016
The Sunday Times

A Dublin diocesan priest who has self-published a book listing Catholic clergy in Dublin from 1900 to 2011 said he omitted priests convicted of child sexual abuse because he was concerned about data protection.

The names of notorious clerical abusers such as Ivan Payne, Tony Walsh, Patrick Hughes and Bill Carney, who died in the Midlands Prison last year, are missing from the book, entitled the Archbishops, Bishops and Priests Who Served in the Archdiocese of Dublin 1900 to 2011, compiled by J Anthony Gaughan.

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CONNECTICUT
Republican-American

Cleric who served in Naugatuck named

BY MICHAEL DOOLING REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Suggestions of allegations of sexual abuse by a Naugatuck priest 50 years ago surfaced Thursday in the latest lawsuit filed against him in New Mexico, his home for decades until he fled the country to avoid legal action against him.

Arthur J. Perrault, the priest who served Naugatuck’s St. Francis Church in 1965, has been named in another lawsuit filed in the Second Judicial District Court in Albuquerque, New Mexico

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Sarah MacDonald
PUBLISHED
03/08/2016

The news that gardaí have told a former seminarian who alleges that he was sexually harassed by a member of staff in the National Seminary in Maynooth that they are taking his complaint seriously and that an investigation will be launched is significant in the latest chapter of the scandal.

A day after the Irish Independent reported the story of a man who made allegations of inappropriate behaviour at the seminary, he approached gardaí to make a preliminary statement about alleged harassment.

“They certainly felt that a couple of isolated incidents which I mentioned did warrant investigation by them, and would be deemed sexual assault,” he said.

“I will be meeting them next week in person to provide a written statement concerning the above.”
Later that day, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin described the atmosphere in the National Seminary in Maynooth as “poisonous”.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Donal Lynch
PUBLISHED
07/08/2016

‘So I suppose this makes me like Annie Murphy”, I said to the recently ex-seminarian sitting on the edge of my bed. He smiled wryly at me. This was the early 2000s, we were still very young, and post-coital banter felt like a strange kind of progress – gay sex in Ireland still had a furtive air to it. And every extra taboo we could violate – including a religious vow – made the whole thing even more exciting.

A relationship would not have been possible, even if we had wanted it. The years of pent-up sexual energy this man had accumulated had by now given way to even more years of reckless promiscuity. That began in the seminary itself – at least five of his classmates had been gay – but it quickly became untenable to stay there. Even then there was a tipping point for rumours.
After he left Maynooth, even by libertine gay male standards, his single-minded pursuit of new encounters was legendary. In the years after we first met there were tales of his life that seemed alternately swashbuckling and tragic.

Through the addictive fog of this behaviour, little glimmers of insight came to this man. He told me the years in the seminary had not made him like this. Joining it was supposed to have been a solution to an obsession. He had grown up in a world that had told him that his sexuality was bad. Like a lust-obsessed Victorian this shame and secrecy around sex had placed it at the centre of his life. The seminary seemed like the logical panacea. And yet it only made things worse. As Camille Paglia said of the church scandals in the US, “when the wires go underground they raise their voltage.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Maeve Sheehan
PUBLISHED
07/08/2016

It seemed like tabloid heaven – a Catholic archbishop talking about a “gay culture” at the national seminary and rumours of student priests using gay dating app Grindr.

Archbishop of Dublin Diar- muid Martin explained why he had decided to pull his seminarians out of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, to study in Rome instead.

“I just wasn’t happy with Maynooth,” he said last Monday after the Irish Independent brought the story into the national consciousness. “There seems to be an atmosphere of strange goings-on there – it seems like a quarrelsome place with anonymous letters being sent around.”

On RTE news on Wednesday he said the allegations in these letters included claims that students were on Grindr and that the authorities there were dismissing anyone who tried to complain.
He described a “poisonous” atmosphere in which anonymous letters flourished.

As one of four archbishops in Ireland, Dr Martin is a trustee of St Patrick’s College and was a recipient of these poison pen letters.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Guardian

Barbara Ellen

Since Dame Lowell Goddard became the third person to resign as chair of the independent inquiry into child abuse (IICA), much time and energy has been wasted denigrating her for “bailing”, and sniping about her salary, her lack of grasp of British law and the extended “holidays” at home in New Zealand.

Presumably at some point, it will be revealed exactly what happened. The only thing that matters right now is that her appointment has failed, as did then-home secretary Theresa May’s other appointments, Lady Elizabeth Butler-Sloss (strong establishment links, including a brother who was lord chancellor during the era being scrutinised), and Dame Fiona Woolf (accused of too close an association with the late Leon Brittan, who was being investigated). What a hot mess, and it’s not the only one.

The IICA was established, post-Savile, to investigate how public bodies and established institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse. Now not only is a new chair needed, but so too arguably is a completely fresh approach. The inquiry has been widely criticised for becoming overwhelmingly broad in scope, complex, incoherent, impractical, and expensive. Reading about the IICA in detail is not only to invite a pounding headache, but also to understand why Lowell Goddard resigned, and why there’s not a stampede to take over the job.

A recurring criticism is that the inquiry has become so overblown and complicated as to doom it to eventual failure. It’s a fair point. Then again, what did people expect? This was always going to be a wide-ranging, multi-faceted, decades-spanning historical inquiry, requiring painstaking investigation, involving personal testimonies from multitudes of abuse survivors and third parties. What screams “quick and simple” about any of that?

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Sunday Times

James Gillespie and James Lyons
August 7 2016
The Sunday Times

Senior officials and lawyers in the child sex abuse inquiry had been threatening to make a declaration of no confidence in its chairwoman before she resigned abruptly last week.

According to sources in the inquiry, Dame Lowell Goddard quit after there was a “terminal” loss of confidence in her by her legal team.

She was also accused of behaving in an “autocratic” manner towards staff, being dismissive of the four panel members who sat with her and failing to grasp key legal issues.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Mail on Sunday

By DAVID ROSE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

Dame Lowell Goddard, the New Zealand judge who resigned on Thursday as chair of the £100 million Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), did not leave her post voluntarily but was effectively fired, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

Dame Lowell, appointed by then-Home Secretary Theresa May just over a year ago, had already lost the confidence of senior staff and members of the inquiry panel, according to two well-placed legal sources.

After she gave a stumbling performance at a preliminary hearing on the case of former Labour politician Greville Janner, when she appeared not to understand her own legal powers, this was picked up by Mrs May’s successor as Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, and her advisers.

The final straw was the disclosure – prompted in part by questions from this newspaper – that in her first year in the job, she spent 30 days on leave and 44 days supposedly ‘working’ in Australia, although in all that time she held only two meetings with members of a child abuse inquiry underway there. A Home Office spokeswoman last night insisted it was ‘her decision’ to offer her resignation. But asked whether this had been suggested to Dame Lowell by officials because her position was becoming untenable, she refused to comment.

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IRELAND
The Sunday Times (UK)

Justine McCarthy
August 7 2016
The Sunday Times

Diarmuid Martin, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, was aware of gay sex rumours circulating about the national seminary at St Patrick’s College in Maynooth when he received a signed letter from a woman last May. She said she was writing on behalf of an unnamed seminarian who feared a backlash if he went public. She urged the prelate to take action to stop student priests’ promiscuous homosexuality, including use of the gay dating app, Grindr.

Martin replied that, if what the woman was alleging was true, somebody must come forward with information.

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IRELAND
The Sunday Times (UK)

Justine McCarthy
August 7 2016
The Sunday Times

A widely-reported allegation that a Maynooth seminarian discovered two student priests having sex together in the college was untrue, according to a man who brought the complaint to the seminary authorities.

Mainstream and Catholic media have reported that a seminarian, who has remained anonymous, was expelled after he reported finding two students in bed together.

Francis McLoughlin, who says he lodged the complaint with a fellow student on behalf of the anonymous seminarian, told The Sunday Times he now accepts it was a “misunderstanding”.

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MISSOURI
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: Charles M. DeGuire was ordained for the Archdiocese of St. Louis in 1934. He assisted in parishes in University City and St. Louis, and pastored parishes in Folk, St. Mary’s, and St. Louis. He retired in 1976 and died in 1982. DeGuire was accused in a lawsuit filed June 21, 2016 of sexually abusing an altar boy beginning in 1967, when the boy was a 10-yr-old 5th grader, and continuing until the boy was in 8th grade.

Ordained: 1934
Died: April 20, 1982

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

By SAM GREENHILL and CHRISTIAN GYSIN and CHRIS GREENWOOD FOR THE DAILY MAIL and BEN TUFFT FOR MAILONLINE

Dame Lowell Goddard, who quit as head of the nationwide child abuse inquiry, could be allowed to stay in her £110,000-a-year luxury London apartment, despite resigning with immediate effect.

Lawyers from the Home Office are poring over the New Zealand judge’s contract, but it is thought she is entitled to a three month notice period, with taxpayers footing the bill for her residence and pay.

The former chair of the landmark inquiry could also receive up to £90,000 in severance pay – as well as being able to stay in her Knightsbridge apartment for three months.

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UNITED STATES
The Guardian (UK)

Joanna Walters
@Joannawalters13
Saturday 6 August 2016

Anne Scott has negotiated with Burmese generals, government ministers, Israeli military chiefs and fighters in the Gaza Strip, but this was her toughest battle yet.

“For about four months I was having full-on 2am panic attacks,” she said.

She was referring to a time earlier this year when she was negotiating with her illustrious New England boarding school into agreeing to a settlement with up to 30 men and women, herself included, who were subjected to rape and sexual abuse by staff as teens.

On Wednesday, the elite St George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, which was founded in 1896 and has taught Astors, Vanderbilts and a Bush, among others, issued a statement in conjunction with Scott and her lawyers in which the school agreed to pay compensation to victims.

It had previously apologized and pledged to learn from “what happened”, after Scott broke a 25-year silence to go public last December.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail

What a farce!

As Dame Lowell Goddard becomes the third chairman in two years to resign from Theresa May’s child abuse inquiry (or was she pushed?), this ill-fated exercise is once again up in the air.

The Mail has deep compassion for victims of paedophilia, who often bear mental scars throughout their lives.

But with the departure of this deeply unimpressive New Zealand judge, who spent three of her first 12 months in the £500,000-a-year job on holiday or overseas, it is surely time to take stock.

Leave aside problems in finding a competent chairman with no links to Establishment figures under suspicion.

From the outset, the inquiry has been blighted by its dauntingly wide brief to cover more than 60 years and investigate dozens of institutions.

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OREGON
KATU

[with video]

by Kellee Azar, KATU NewsFriday, August 5th 2016

PORTLAND, Ore. — A minister is locked up in the Multnomah County jail, accused of producing child pornography in Colorado.

U.S. Marshals will be transferring James Parkhurst, a United Methodist Church Deacon and Executive Director of Camp and Retreat Programs for the Oregon-Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church , into federal custody for the case that originates out of the District of Colorado Federal Court.

According to the church’s communication director, Greg Nelson, Parkhurst went through an extensive background check before being hired.

“We have a process of screening employees and volunteers that are part of our program, he passed that screening. We also have processes to protect children or vulnerable adults when they are working in our camp or churches,” Communications Director Greg Nelson said.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Deborah Orr

Dame Lowell Goddard, brought in to head the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse hasn’t said much about why she has resigned, but criticism has appeared in the media of the amount of time she had spent abroad or on holiday. Maybe she’s unfeasibly thin-skinned. Perhaps she has been looking for some time for a plausible reason to bolt. MPs who yesterday demanded an explanation may get to the truth.

Still, a year is good going for the New Zealander. The first appointee, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, lasted less than a week. The second, Fiona Woolf, didn’t quite make two months. Butler-Sloss resigned because it emerged that her brother, Michael Havers, had been attorney general during failed investigations three decades ago. Woolf resigned because she had social links to the family of Leon Brittan, whose own role at various times would necessarily be part of the investigation.

It’s no coincidence that the inquiry has burned through three chairs already. The demands of the role dictate that any suitably experienced British head will be part of the establishment the inquiry is investigating. Yet it’s hard to see how anyone who isn’t British would have enough understanding of the general culture to grasp the enormity and complexity of the task. Or even grasp quite what the task actually is.

Sure, you don’t have to have been a child in the 1970s to understand quite how ruthlessly Jimmy Savile dominated an enabling media, or what a self-deprecating renaissance man Clement Freud appeared to be, or what a trusted politician Cyril Smith was. But it helps. These men were at the heart of the establishment for most of their adult lives. And there were many more, some now convicted, others dead, and others, probability dictates, still sauntering away from justice.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Sun

BY NICK PISA 6th August 2016,

THE £360,000-a-year judge who quit Britain’s child abuse inquiry will keep her £2,000-a-week grace and favour home.

Dame Lowell Goddard, 67, who quit on Thursday, could also get a £90,000 pay-off.

She was appointed in April 2015 after first Baroness Butler-Sloss quit a week into the job and then Dame Fiona Woolf left after little over a month.

Yet she heard no evidence into claims of abuse from the Church, Westminster and the judiciary.
She also spent more than 44 days in Australia and New Zealand on “inquiry business”.

Yet in that time she had just two meetings with officials from Australia’s Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse during 2015 and 2016.

As well as her pay, her £110,000 rent on a flat and her bills and driver were covered by taxpayers.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Ciara Treacy
PUBLISHED
06/08/2016

One of Ireland’s best-known clerics has said the national seminary in Maynooth is “living in the past”, but added that it has wider problems.

Fr Brian D’Arcy said the seminary’s issues were broader than a “couple of guys in some form of homosexual contact”.

He also argued that the seminary draws students who want the security of traditional views.

Asked if he thought the issue surrounding St Patrick’s College was one of promiscuity or homosexuality, the Fermanagh-based priest said: “I don’t think it’s either. Honestly, I do not know. There are, at most, a couple of guys involved in some form of homosexual contact.

“The issue is that the Archbishop feels that Maynooth is not suitable to educate priests and that is a major issue.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Michael Kelly

06/08/2016

No man has done more to ensure that the Catholic Church in Ireland retains credibility than Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. It’s a reputation that he has sometimes paid a heavy price for, but also one that he’s been loath to claim credit for.

A career Vatican diplomat, Martin (71) was thrust into the maelstrom in 2003 when Pope John Paul II handpicked him to return to his native Dublin to manage a Church in crisis. Cardinal Desmond Connell – then at the helm of the country’s largest diocese – had been mortally wounded by the punishing revelations in Mary Raftery’s ‘Cardinal Secrets’ documentary which exposed a corrupt culture that put the avoidance of scandal and the reputation of the Church ahead of the needs of children.

To be fair to Connell, he had acted to remove abuser-priests from ministry, but, crucially, he had been lax in reporting suspected abusers to the civil authorities.

Rome knew that Dublin needed urgent attention and it found it in the Pope’s representative to Geneva, Diarmuid Martin. From his arrival, Martin pledged full co-operation with a judicial inquiry which had been established to investigate the handling of abuse allegations. He struck up an instant rapport with survivors who, before his arrival, had felt their concerns fell on deaf ears.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Breda O’Brien

World Youth Day (WYD), an event instituted by St John Paul II as a regular gathering of young people, had about two million participants this year. In the US, more than one-third of seminarians in training cite attendance at a WYD as an influence on their vocation.

You could say it’s because anyone attending a World Youth Day (oddly named because the official programme is six days long) is likely to be open to the idea of a religious vocation, but pilgrims are a very varied bunch. They range from those who are at best not actively antagonistic to the church, to those who have a very deep Catholic commitment.

However, at WYD, vocations are sparked in part because they will see and interact with lots and lots of young religious and priests, the majority of whom seem very happy and fulfilled.

Most young people will be drawn to marriage rather than a religious or other vocation, but for the minority who have a different calling it must be so discouraging to come home from WYD to be greeted by another alleged scandal in Maynooth.

When Archbishop Diarmuid Martin gave Maynooth a vote of no confidence by withdrawing his three clerical students, presumably it was after trying to effect reforms along with his episcopal colleagues.

Ironically, the students will be going instead to the Pontifical College in Rome, which was itself the subject of a heavily critical report in 2012 after what is called an apostolic visitation, in this case headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Nicola Anderson

PUBLISHED
06/08/2016

‘The dogs in the street know Maynooth in its current state is not fit for purpose… this is my experience of Maynooth. What have our bishops to fear in thoroughly reforming our national seminary?”

These words were those of a young student at the national seminary.

He loves the Church, he explains – but what he has met with in Maynooth is a formation structure that prefers him to be “worldly, to be just one of the lads, to be a ‘yes man’ who’ll not offer the challenge of the Gospel to the modern world”.

His words were spoken by an actor on RTÉ radio – but there can be little doubt that the authorities in Maynooth have already figured out the identity of the young seminarian behind the sentiment.

If the situation at the national seminary is as many claim it to be, it seems possible that he will soon be approached and advised that his vocation is not working out. But his removal will not quell a disquiet that has mounted to a deafening hum in the wake of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s announcement that he would be transferring three Dublin seminarians to Rome because of “strange goings-on” at Maynooth.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Martina Devlin

06/08/2016

No room at the inn for priesthood candidates if you’re a woman, or a man who can’t take a vow of celibacy – and move along please if you’re a practising gay. What a chilly Christian family the Catholic Church has let itself become. No wonder there are only 55 trainee priests at Maynooth.

The Catholic Church has been stalled at a crossroads for some considerable time, with dwindling vocations and shrinking congregations. Those who seek to jump-start the institution – such as Archbishop Diarmuid Martin – face obstacles from a doggedly conservative bloc.

This week, we see him isolated among the Irish hierarchy in his stance on Maynooth, with nobody in the Church’s management class willing to support him. The Irish Church is inherently traditionalist, and Archbishop Martin (who trained in Rome and spent most of his career there as a diplomat) is not part of that clerical club.

However, the Irish people trust the Archbishop of Dublin and admire his sincerity. That tells its own story.

Perhaps the bishops and archbishops genuinely disagree with his decision to send the Dublin diocese’s trainee priests to Rome rather than Ireland’s national seminary. Equally, it’s possible they are closing ranks and playing old school politics.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Gina Menzies
PUBLISHED
06/08/2016

The Maynooth story is symptomatic of the challenges facing the Catholic Church and its future direction. Both Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Father Brendan Hoban of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) have used the same phrase – a “closed, strange world” – to describe Maynooth Seminary. And the fallout is much wider than rumours circulating about inappropriate sexual activities in the Seminary.

The secrecy that hovers over Maynooth reflects the lack of transparency in the handling of clerical child abuse. Are the people of God not entitled to know how their future priests are being trained to minister? Those who struggle to remain in the Church are ill served by the current confusion and lack of leadership.

The issues of clerical formation and theological orthodoxy in Maynooth form the current battleground between two visions for the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The ongoing battle is between those who seek a reform of the institutional Church in accordance with the documents of Vatican II, and those who believe that the way forward is a return to and restoration of the pre-Vatican II model of the Church.

The phrase Roma locuta; causa finita est (Rome has spoken; the cause is finished), coined by St Augustine in the fifth century, underpinned a simpler, rule-bound world in which all decisions were taken within the Vatican circle and unquestioning obedience was required of the faithful.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Sarah MacDonald
PUBLISHED
06/08/2016

The gay culture at the national seminary in Maynooth has been an open secret for decades, according to former student priests.

A former St Patrick’s College seminarian is the latest to claim the existence of a gay culture within the seminary has been well known in church circles for decades, and that the trustees of Maynooth have long been aware of it. The man, who studied in Maynooth in the 1990s, said there were gay cliques operating within Maynooth and heterosexual students were pressured to say nothing.

And a leading expert on religious affairs has warned the hierarchy that churchgoers are “entitled to know” how their future priests are being trained.

Writing in today’s Irish Independent, theologian Gina Menzies says: “The secrecy hovering over Maynooth reflects the lack of transparency in the handling of clerical child abuse.”

Meanwhile, the Maynooth controversy will be discussed with college management at the autumn general meeting of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Maynooth in September. The meeting will be attended by Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin.

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IRELAND
98 FM

[with audio]

The Irish hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church will meet next month to discuss the recent controversy surrounding St Patrick’s seminary.

It follows allegations of a so-called gay sub-culture among trainee priests at the college, as reports emerged some seminarians were found using a gay dating app.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has opted to send three seminarians to train in Rome over Maynooth, while the college continues to refute the allegations.

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IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

By Kim Bielenberg
PUBLISHED
06/08/2016

The hugely popular gay dating app Grindr is banned, or blocked, in countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This week, the embattled Irish Catholic hierarchy would be forgiven for wishing that it was also outlawed in Maynooth, the location of Ireland’s only seminary.

Grindr boasts that it is the world’s largest gay social network, enabling men to see pictures of “100 guys on a location-based grid … chat, make a date, and have some fun, anytime, any place”.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, this week announced that he was not sending students of the priesthood to the 200-year-old seminary at Maynooth. Part of the reason given was that some students in the seminary were allegedly using Grindr.

The dating app has become part of normal gay culture among two million users worldwide, in the same way as Tinder is used by heterosexuals to hook up online.

But in the eyes of Archbishop Martin, the app was “inappropriate for seminarians” as it was “something which would be fostering promiscuous sexuality”.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Oxford Times

Matt Oliver, Local government reporter. Call me on 01865 425498 / @OxMailMattO

THE Government needs to “get a grip” on the national inquiry into child sexual abuse after the latest judge in charge of it quit, councillors have said.

Ian Hudspeth, leader of Oxfordshire County Council, raised concerns that Dame Lowell Goddard’s departure from the investigation would mean lessons learnt in Oxford from Operation Bullfinch would not be shared with the rest of the country quickly.

The landmark operation by police and social services uncovered the rape and abuse of six young girls by seven men in an organised gang, an area the inquiry is expected to look at.

Mr Hudspeth said: “Here, a key part of tackling these vile atrocities was the joint working that developed between authorities to catch things at an earlier stage and stamp it out.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

Editorial

Dame Lowell Goddard has stepped down as chairman of the public inquiry into child sex abuse, the third person to do so – triggering a desperate hunt to find a replacement. The stated motivation of the inquiry is a noble one. Child abuse is a heinous crime and has been shielded by institutional failure. Victims and their families want the justice they are owed.

The thirst for endless public inquiries is unhelpful. Contemporary victims are rarely rescued by long, expensive discussions of hindsight that can feel like a prosecution of past decades.

But, as Charles Moore writes, there is good reason to pause and think before proceeding with this particular inquest. It is no coincidence that governments have struggled to find an effective chairman. The indictment of the entire establishment by some campaigners has meant that any person with almost any connection to that establishment has been deemed unacceptable – and judges, generally, are well-connected people.

This problem speaks to the enormous, unwieldy scope of the investigation. It is unlimited to any particular period of history or part of British society, and can effectively put ghosts on trial. Accused people are normally allowed some opportunity to defend themselves. The dead obviously cannot do that, which means that this inquiry operates within a reality well beyond the normal bounds of British justice.

The thirst for endless public inquiries is unhelpful. Contemporary victims are rarely rescued by long, expensive discussions of hindsight that can feel like a prosecution of past decades. There are terrible things happening right now among the living that need to be addressed – one example is the recent child abuse scandal in Rotherham that exposed failings within local government and police. Enough talk – get on with the job of protecting the young.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Archbishop’s criticism of Maynooth seminary latest example of individuality

Patsy McGarry

A friend resorted to the Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel this week in response to all the talk of “strange goings-on” at the national seminary in Maynooth. “Si j’étais Dieu en les voyant prier/ Je crois que je perdrais la foi.” Or: “If I were God seeing them pray/I believe that I would lose my faith.” It was not an untypical reaction.

More typical was the perplexed guy at a train station on Thursday morning. “What’s he at?” he roared at me from a platform across the tracks, referring to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, “Is he mad? He sounds like a drunk in a pub: ‘I don’t like this place. . .the atmosphere. . .I’m outta here!’.”

He believed the Archbishop was just throwing a tantrum. From regular observation over the past 13 years, since his arrival back in Dublin in 2003, this reporter has yet to witness Archbishop Martin throw a tantrum despite some trying circumstances.

It wasn’t always so. In his highly entertaining 2008 memoir Good Times and Bad the Archbishop’s only sibling, older brother Séamus, recalls how the younger “Diarmuid had not been the ‘holy’ type of person one associated with those who had a vocation for the priesthood. As a child he might have been far more accurately described as a ‘holy terror’. He was noted throughout the extended family for throwing tantrums – in a family in which tantrum-throwing had been brought to a fine art.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Sarah MacDonald
PUBLISHED
06/08/2016

A former Maynooth seminarian claims senior figures in the Catholic Church have been aware of allegations of a gay culture in Maynooth for decades.

The man, who is now married with children, studied in Maynooth in the 1990s. He said the existence of a gay culture within the seminary has been well known within church circles for decades and the trustees of Maynooth have long been aware of it.

‘Sean’ did not want to be named publicly, but he is known to the Irish Independent.

He said even back in the 1990s there were gay cliques operating within Maynooth and heterosexual students tended to be isolated or pressured into keeping their heads down and saying nothing about what they witnessed. Many left the seminary and married.

The former trainee priest questioned why Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was acting now on Maynooth.

The former seminarian also highlighted how the Murphy Report, which investigated the mishandling of allegations of clerical sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin, reported on the death of a Dublin priest in a gay sauna.

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OHIO
Toledo Blade

By TK Barger | BLADE RELIGION EDITOR
Published on Aug. 6, 2016

When the Rev. Kristopher Schondelmeyer, 33, was early in his high school years, he already felt the call to Presbyterian ministry and been in conversation with the head pastor of his church in Sedalia, Mo., about it.

“My family has been Presbyterian for generations,” said Pastor Schondelmeyer, who has been associate pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church since 2010. “This is in my blood; if you cut me, I’ll bleed Presbyterian blue. This is who I am.”

It was very surprising, therefore, that in 2014 the pastor would sue the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) at the national, regional, and local levels in response to his having been sexually assaulted by a certified lay pastor when he was 17.

But on June 22 at the church’s national general assembly in Portland, Ore., the stated clerk, who is the top clergy official, interrupted business to formally apologize to Pastor Schondelmeyer on behalf of the church, after the lawsuit was settled in 2014 and 2015.

“It seemed the right thing to do, to publicly acknowledge this,” said the Rev. Gradye Parsons, who has since retired from the role as stated clerk. “It was really a lack of public acknowledgment that made this all the harder for Kris to get justice.”

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