ABUSE TRACKER

IRELAND
RTE News

The Taoiseach has described as “truly appalling” the confirmation that significant quantities of human remains were found at the site of a former mother-and-baby home in Tuam in Co Galway.

Speaking in Castlebar, Enda Kenny said the babies of single mothers involved had been treated like “some kind of sub-species”.

He pointed out that this was not something that happened centuries ago in the dawn of history, but something that happened “in our own time”.

Tánaiste and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald said the discovery is an infinitely sad reminder of an Ireland that was a “very harsh, harsh place” for women and their babies.

She said it shows the tortured relationship the State and church had with pregnant women, saying “it is a tragedy that we are now facing in its entirety”.

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IRELAND
Connacht Tribune

Galway Bay fm newsroom – The Taoiseach has described the discovery of a mass grave at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home as truly appalling.

Politicians on all sides of the political divide have condemned the Galway find which comprises of hundreds of discarded babies’ bodies.

Enda Kenny says the relevant authorities should now be given time to decide how next to proceed.

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ROME
La Croix

Sexual abuse victim Marie Collins has resigned from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. CDF prefect, Cardinal Gerhard Müller has contested her accusations.

Nicolas Senèze, Rome

Why did Collins resign?

“In the face of obstacles, she felt that the only solution was to shake things up and resign,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, in the Corriere Della Sera, an Italian daily newspaper.

In fact, the Commission, an advisory committee to the Pope, does not have any direct authority over the dicasteries of the Curia.

The Commission has to count on their collaboration and cannot verify the implementation of its recommendations. Furthermore, it does not have its own budget or actual personnel.

What was the nature of the Curia’s resistance?

The role of the Commission is to “create a climate of the protection of children in the Church”, affirms Cardinal Parolin. However, there are problems with the demarcation of powers between the Commission and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which is directly responsible for dealing with cases of sexual abuse.

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PENNSYLVANIA
PennLive

Altoona-Johnstown Diocese sex abuse: what each priest is accused of (warning: graphic content)

By Colin Deppen | cdeppen@pennlive.com

Almost a year to the day after child sex abuse allegations first rocked the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, church and law enforcement officials were set to publicly announce a new set of reform measures on Monday — measures meant to prevent similar abuse from happening in the future.

Acting U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania Soo Song and Altoona-Johnstown Bishop Mark Bartchak have called a news conference for Monday afternoon in Johnstown, at which time they’re expected to announce a collaborative framework to “protect the children of the diocese from sexual abuse,” a media advisory explained.

Further details were unavailable Monday morning.

The news conference comes a year after then-Attorney General Kathleen Kane held her own event in Altoona to announce that a grand jury investigation of the diocese had determined that hundreds of children were sexually abused over a period of 40 years by church leaders, and that at least 50 priests or religious leaders had been involved in sexual abuses. Kane went on to describe the abuse allegations in shocking detail.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Philly.com

MARCH 6, 2017

by JOE MANDAK, The Associated Press

PITTSBURGH (AP) – Western Pennsylvania’s top federal prosecutor and a Catholic bishop who heads a diocese where investigators say two former bishops helped cover up child-sex abuse by dozens of priests are scheduled to announce a plan to prevent future abuse.

Acting U.S. Attorney Soo Song and Altoona-Johnstown Bishop Mark Bartchak have called a news conference for Monday afternoon in Johnstown.

They’ll “announced a collaborative framework to protect the children of the diocese from sexual abuse,” according to a media advisory.

A year ago, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane released a 147-page report based on secret diocesan records and other evidence that detailed abuse by more than 50 priests and clergy against hundreds of children. The report criticized Bartchak’s predecessors, James Hogan, who headed the diocese from 1966 to 1986 and died in 2005, and Joseph Adamec, who succeeded Hogan and retired in 2005.

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PENNSYLVANIA
We Are Central PA

Church officials are unveiling new plans Monday, to keep children safe a year after child abuse was discovered in the Altoona-Johnstown Catholic Diocese.

Bishop Mark Bartchak hinted that new policies were in the works last week.

Today, the Bishop will hold a news conference in Johnstown to unveil the diocese’ new plan to protect children from sexual abuse.

Local abuse victims and congressman Mark Rozzi have been outspoken and very critical of the Church’s response after it found more than 50 priests were involved in a cover-up.

Monday’s news conference is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WJAC

JOHNSTOWN — The Altoona-Johnstown Catholic bishop, along with Western Pennsylvania’s top federal prosecutor, are set to announce joint plans Monday to prevent future children from sexual abuse at area churches.

This planned announcement comes more than a year after a grand jury report shed light on decades of alleged child sex abuse at the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.

Acting U.S. Attorney Soo Song and Altoona-Johnstown Bishop Mark Bartchak have called a news conference Monday at 1 p.m. at the Penn Traffic Building in Johnstown.

Song and Bartchark plan “to announce a collaborative framework to protect the children of the diocese from sexual abuse,” according to a media advisory.

A year ago Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane released a 147-page report based on secret diocesan records and other evidence that detailed abuse by more than 50 priests and clergy against hundreds of children. The report criticized Bartchak’s predecessors, James Hogan, who headed the diocese from 1966 to 1986 and died in 2005, and Joseph Adamec who succeeded Hogan and retired in 2005.

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IRELAND
The Nationalist

MONDAY, MARCH 06, 2017

The Coalition of Mother and Baby home Survivors has claimed that up to 7000 babies could have been buried at 9 mother and baby homes across the country.

Chairperson Paul Redmond has said the worst is yet to come.

“Tuam is the tip of the ice-berg. It was the fifth biggest of the Mother and Baby homes and some of them like St Patrick’s on the Navan road were four times the size.

“It’s a fact that the further back you go, the worse the conditions got.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY JAMES FOGARTY
6 MAR 2017

A garda investigation into the Tuam baby scandal is the only way to move forward, the Justice Minister claimed yesterday.

Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald said: “It is inevitable that once the coroner finishes its work there will be a role for gardai.

“We will have to face the pain of it. Not just on this site but on other sites as it is the only way we can put this tragedy in context in order to move forward.”

Speaking on RTE Radio, Environment Minister Simon Coveney agreed with his Cabinet colleague.

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IRELAND
Breaking News

06/03/2017

The Bon Secours order that ran the Tuam mother and baby home has come under pressure to disband and to give up their assets to the State, writes Elaine Loughlin.

People Before Profit (PBP) have called on the nuns to make a complete and unreserved apology to the victims of the mother and baby home.

Speaking this morning AAA-PBP TD Bríd Smith claimed the Bon Secour nuns had been guilty of a “massive cover-up” of “criminal activity” which they had denied for many years.

Ms Smith was joined by Deirdre Wadding, a former resident of Bessboro mother and baby home in Cork.

Ms Wadding said the revelations that more than 700 babies had been buried in pits in the Co Galway home, had shocked her but proved that “church and State colluded from the very foundation of this State to oppress women. Women and children have been brutalised by those twin forces for decades now.

“For me it has been a very wobbly few days, to be personal about it, as I read about Tuam it certainly stirred up my own experiences,” said Ms Wadding who was sent to Bessboro aged 19 in 1981.

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VATICAN CITY
Crux

Inés San MartínMarch 6, 2017
VATICAN CORRESPONDENT

German Cardinal Gerhard Muller, whose Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was cited by abuse survivor Marie Collins as part of the reason for her resignation from Pope Francis’s anti-abuse commission, has fired back, saying it’s time to drop the “cliche” of a reforming pope being hobbled by internal opposition in the Vatican.

ROME-The head of a powerful Vatican office cited by the last survivor of clerical abuse to serve as an active member of the pope’s anti-sexual abuse commission as part of her reason for resigning has fired back, saying it’s time to drop the “cliché” of Pope Francis wanting reform and his opposition in the Roman Curia seeking to block it.

“Sustaining the pope’s universal mission, trusted to him by Jesus, is part of our Catholic faith and the ethos of the curia,” said German Cardinal Gerhard Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Asked to explain why Marie Collins had decided to resign, he said that the work his department and the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is very different. The congregation, he said, carries through the canonical process against the clerics accused of the gravest crimes.

“Yet the congregation has cooperated in the constitution of the commission,” Muller said. “One of our collaborators is part of it. I can affirm that in these last years there’s been permanent contact.”

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ROME
Christian Post

BY FELIX N. CODILLA III , CHRISTIAN POST CONTRIBUTOR
Mar 6, 2017

The annual Lenten retreat this week is very timely for Pope Francis, considering the recent troubling developments besetting the Vatican. What makes it even more relevant is the participation of the Roman Curia, some of whose members are purportedly behind moves to oust him from the throne of the Holy See.

The grumbling among some disgruntled cardinals has been felt immediately after then Jorge Bergoglio was elected to the papacy four years ago when he sought to reform the Church’s bureaucracy, particularly its finances which was said to have caused Pope Benedict’s resignation.

A book entitled Merchants in the Temple exposed the alleged corruption within Rome — from cardinals’ luxurious living in lavish apartments to the questionable use of charity funds — and the setbacks encountered by Pope Francis as he tried to institute economic reforms.

Pope Francis further earned the ire of traditionalists when he issued the Amoris Laetitia, wherein he left it to local bishops whether or not to allow communion for divorced and remarried priests. The document relaxes the old rule that the Eucharist may be received only after the annulment of marriage.

But the governing body’s dissatisfaction didn’t end there. The Guardian reported how Pope Francis displeased the conservatives among them when he expressed agreement to some of the points raised by Martin Luther. “There was corruption in the church, worldliness, attachment to money and power,” he said during the 500th anniversary of the Reformation on October 2016.

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VATICAN CITY
Religion News Service

By Josephine McKenna

VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican’s top doctrinal official, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, has rejected suggestions from a clergy abuse victim that Pope Francis is facing critical internal resistance from foes of his efforts to overhaul the church’s central administration.

Mueller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a key department of the Roman Curia, made his remarks in an interview with an Italian daily on Sunday (March 5) after Irish sex abuse survivor Marie Collins cited opposition from Mueller’s office as the main reason for her resignation last week from the pope’s commission to protect minors.

The interview in Corriere Della Sera was published as the pope joined members of the curia on a Lenten spiritual retreat in the town of Ariccia outside Rome.

“I think you should put an end to this cliché’, the idea that there is on the one hand the Pope who wants reform and on the other a group of resistors who would like to block it,” the conservative German cardinal said.

“It is part of our Catholic faith and the work ethos of the Roman Curia to support the Pope’s universal mission, entrusted to him by Jesus Christ. ”

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NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press

BY MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — At least a half-dozen times over two decades, authorities investigated reports that members of a secretive evangelical church were being beaten. And every time, according to former congregants, the orders came down from church leaders: They must lie to protect the sect.

Among the members of the Word of Faith Fellowship who coached congregants and their children on what to say to investigators were two assistant district attorneys and a veteran social worker, the ex-followers told The Associated Press.

Frank Webster and Chris Back – church ministers who handle criminal cases as assistant DAs for three nearby counties – provided legal advice, helped at strategy sessions and participated in a mock trial for four congregants charged with harassing a former member, according to former congregants interviewed as part of an AP investigation of Word of Faith.

Back and Webster, who is sect leader Jane Whaley’s son-in-law and lives in her house, also helped derail a social services investigation into child abuse in 2015 and attended meetings where Whaley warned congregants to lie to investigators about abuse incidents, according to nine former members.

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IRELAND
Joe

Last week “significant quantities” of human remains were discovered at the site of the former mother and baby home in Co. Galway.

Speaking on Morning Ireland this morning, Paul Redmond, chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby home Survivors said that he expects the commission of investigation to ascertain that between 7,000 and 8,000 babies died in homes in Ireland from the 1920s up until the 60s.

Despite this, US-based conservative Bill Donoghue has denounced the claims saying there is “no evidence of a mass grave” and slammed the controversy as ‘a lie’.

Writing on the Catholicleague.org, Mr.Donoghue says “it was a lie in 2014 and it is a lie in 2017”.

“If there was a Pulitzer for fake news, the competition would be fierce. Mass graves. Sexually assaulted women. Children stolen. It is all a lie.”

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IRELAND
BBC News

The discovery of human remains at the site of a home for unmarried mothers has been welcomed by the historian whose research uncovered the burials.

Catherine Corless said “finally the truth has come out” about burials of infants at the former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway.

A state-appointed inquiry confirmed on Friday that “significant quantities of human remains” were found during a dig.

The inquiry was ordered in 2014 as a result of Ms Corless’s research.

‘Underground chambers’

She found death certificates for 796 infants who died at the home from natural causes, but despite painstaking research, she has not been able to locate their burial records.

A statement from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation said test excavations carried out over the last four months had uncovered a “long structure divided into 20 chambers”.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Marie O’Halloran, Lorna Siggins

The State must fully excavate sites at every Magdalene laundry and Mother and Baby Home where children’s remains may have been buried, a survivors’ group has said.

The Government has not said whether a full excavation will take place at the former grounds of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, where a commission of inquiry looking into the religious-run homes for unmarried mothers has found the remains of a “significant” number of children aged under three.

Calling for a wider disinterment programme, the Justice for Magdalenes research group said it had compiled a list of 180 institutions, agencies and individuals charged with the care of unmarried mothers and their children.

It also appealed for a halt to plans to redevelop two former Magdelene laundries in Dublin until it could be established that neither site contained children’s graves.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Monday, March 06, 2017

Shane Kilcommins

While the Catholic Church is at the centre of the scandal, both the State and public at large were also complicit, writes Shane Kilcommins.

The remains of a significant number of babies and infants found at the site of a former mother and baby home at Tuam is one further example — and not the last, I suspect — of the systemic abuse that occurred in the archipelago of institutions that existed in post-independence Ireland.

The abuse in all its forms is, of course, horrific, terrifying and shameful. It begs so many questions. How, for example, could it occur in institutions which are meant to espouse Christian values such as kindness, charity, love for thy neighbour, and good will?

How could such abuse and such violence exist for so long in parallel with the supposed operation of a democratic and constitutional state? How could it occur in a “civilised society”?

Many commentators on incidences of systematic abuse and violence inform us that it often occurs when three conditions are met. First, the wrongdoing is tolerated and indeed authorised by the institution, the state, or even by society more generally.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Teresa Kelly
March 6 2017

I am the chairperson of the Tuam Babies Graveyard Committee.The committee was formed in August 2013. This group of like-minded people wished to do the right thing for the children who were buried in the grounds of what was once the St Mary’s old orphanage.

It was known locally as ‘The Home’. Our initial aims were simple:

* Erecting a dignified memorial recognising the children in name, age, and their date of death;
* We also sought to have the area preserved and maintained in the future as a mark of respect.

These areas had been maintained and looked after by members of this committee for over 40 years prior to the site gaining national and worldwide recognition.

From the outset of this project it was very clear that we wanted these children recognised and remembered.

We felt it was beyond belief that the Bon Secour sisters could have left this area without any sort of memorial or acknowledgement of the children’s existence.

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IRELAND
IrishCentral

Niall O’Dowd @niallodowd March 06, 2017

“A great many people are always asking what is the good of keeping these children alive? I quite agree that it would be a great deal kinder to strangle these children at birth than to put them out to nurse.” — Doctor Ella Webb, June 18, 1924, speaking about illegitimate children in care in Ireland at the time.

The story of Doctor Webb’s comments was in the Irish Times that day in 1924. It was allowed to go without outrage or question.

How do you like euthanasia Irish Catholic style?

Have no doubt what happened in Tuam happened in such homes all over the country. Tuam came to light because of a fearless local writer, Catherine Corless, who suspected the truth and tracked it down with forensic clarity.

The same dreadful business was going on in other homes too,

Elaine Byrne, a columnist with the Sunday Business Post in Ireland, discovered the quote above as she researched how on earth were up to 800 children allowed to die and their bodies be stuffed in a septic tank by the Bon Secours sisters in Tuam, County Galway.

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INDIA
Independent (UK)

Shehab Khan @shehabkhan

The Catholic Church has sparked outrage in India after it blamed “consumerism” and bodily “temptations” for the alleged rape of a 15-year-old girl.

Priest Mathew Vadakkacheril, from Kerala in India, was accused of raping the child and later arrested.

The girl was allegedly raped several times and became pregnant, according to India Today. The child has since been delivered at a private hospital and since taken to an orphanage, reportedly without the mother’s consent.

Yet it is the response to the incident among the Christian community in India that is now making headlines.

A Christian weekly magazine, which is backed by a Catholic Sabha or association, blamed the alleged victim for the event and said Mr Vadakkacheril may have momentarily “forgotten his position”.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Ralph Riegel
March 6 2017

An elderly priest dismissed by his diocese over abuse allegations claimed that clerics are now “guilty until proven innocent”.

Fr Dan Duane, who served as a priest for 42 years in Cork, said he now faced losing his Church-provided home and had also had his retirement income slashed.

But he has vowed to defend his good name and is hoping a last-ditch appeal to Pope Francis can halt his dismissal as a priest in the Diocese of Cloyne.

“The lies against me are now threatening to destroy my life,” he said.

“I am an innocent man and yet I face penury and homelessness.

“There has also been a campaign of vilification waged against me in the media despite the fact I have consistently protested my innocence of these appalling allegations.”

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INDIA
The News Minute

The diocese’s decision comes a day after he was removed as Wayanad Child Welfare Committee (CWC) chairman by the state government.

TNM Staff

Monday, March 06, 2017

Mananthavady Archdiocese has suspended its spokesperson Fr Thomas Joseph Therakam.

The diocese’s decision comes a day after he was removed as Wayanad Child Welfare Committee (CWC) chairman by the state government as he allegedly tried to help the Kottiyoor priest Robin Vadakkumchery in hushing up the latter’s rape case, in which a minor girl was raped and subsequently gave birth to a baby.

In a statement, Mananthavady bishop Jose Porunnedam on Sunday said the decision was taken after the government’s move to sack Therakam and also said that the Church will stand by the rape survivor.

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INDIA
Huffington Post

A magazine backed by the Catholic Sabha in Kerala has put out an article that not only victim-shames a minor girl a priest allegedly raped and impregnated, but also attempts to absolve the church of any wrongdoing in the criminal act.

Dhanya Rajendran, writing for the News Minute, reported that the Sunday Shalom, a Christian weekly newspaper published in Malayalam and English, decided to put the onus of blame on the 16-year-old survivor, rather than on alleged sexual predator Father Robin or Mathew Vadakkancheril. Read what it had to say:

“Here, the girl is above the age of 15. Let me tell you this, as I consider you like my daughter – you are also at fault. Before the Lord, it is you who will have to answer first. Daughter, why did you forget who a priest is? He has a human body and has temptations. He may have forgotten his position for a few seconds, my child who has taken the Holy Communion, why didn’t you stop or correct him?”

PTI added that the police in Kerala on Sunday intensified the search to trace seven accused, including five nuns and a doctor, who are on the run since the arrest of the Catholic priest. The five nuns and the gynaecologist of the church-run hospital, where the 16-year-old girl delivered a boy, continued to evade arrest. The search conducted for the second day on Sunday failed to yield any result, investigating officer Sunil Kumar told Press Trust of India. A helper, Thangamma, is among the accused absconding, he said.

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INDIA
One India

Written by: Anusha Ravi Updated: Monday, March 6, 2017

The Mananthavady diocese removed its spokesperson Father Thomas Joseph Therakam for helping rape accused pastor Father Robin Mathew Vadakkanchery cover up the rape of a minor. After facing charges of shielding a rape accused priest, the diocese sent a letter of apology to the victim’s parents and also removed its member for making arrangements for the accused to flee the country.

Father Therakam was removed after the church found out that he had not only arranged for the 16-year-old rape victim to be shifted to an orphanage run by the church but also arranged for the accused to flee to Canada after the incident came to light. As ironical as it is, Father Therakam is also the chairman of Child Welfare Committee in Wayanad. The state government had hinted at removing him from the committee but the man is currently absconding along with another member and a nun, Dr Betty.

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INDIA
The New Indian Express

IDUKKI: Close on the heels of the alleged rape of a minor by a 48-year-old priest in Kannur, a 20-year-old temple priest has been arrested for raping a 70-year-old temple employee in Idukki.

The man has been identified as Vaishakh Pallikkattil of Madukka near Mundakkayam. He reached the temple at Cheruthony as a temporary arrangement for one day as the priest had taken a leave. The woman, a widow, was under severe stress after the incident and informed the same to doctors at the Idukki District Hospital. The accused was arrested from his house, 90 km from Idukki, on Sunday following a case that was registered after doctors informed the police.

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INDIA
India Today

Written by: Neha Vashishth
March 6, 2017

“Consumerism and temptations” are the reasons why a 16-year-old girl from Kerala got raped. As much absurd this sounds, these are the reasons given by a magazine backed by a Catholic Sabha, resorting to openly blaming and shaming the rape survivor, a minor.

People behind the magazine forgot she DID NOT ASK FOR IT and NO-ONE ASKS FOR IT.

Father Robin or Mathew Vadakkancheril of St Sebastian church in Kannur, Kerala was accused of raping and impregnating a minor. He fled the scene, but was arrested for the heinous crime.
The minor was raped several times before she got pregnant. After she delivered the child at a private hospital, the newborn was taken to an orphanage without informing the girl.

But Sunday Shalom, a Christian weekly, said that the rape could have been stopped by the minor. The weekly said, “Here, the girl is above the age of 15. Let me tell you this, as I consider you like my daughter – you are also at fault. Before the Lord, it is you who will have to answer first. Daughter, why did you forget who a priest is? He has a human body and has temptations. He may have forgotten his position for a few seconds, my child who has taken the Holy Communion, why didn’t you stop or correct him?”

Let us remind and would ask all those who are reading this to repeat after us – NO ONE ASKS FOR RAPE.

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GUAM
KUAM

Updated: Mar 05, 2017

By Krystal Paco

Dozens of members of the Concerned Catholics of Guam and the Laity Forward Movement picketted for the 33rd consecutive week in front of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica on Sunday morning. The message singular: defrock Archbishop Anthony Apuron.

Apuron stands accused of molesting at least four former Agat altar boys. He’s currently undergoing a canoncial trial in Rome, but was last seen in California earlier this year.

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IRELAND
The Times

Catherine Sanz
March 6 2017
The Times

A group of women who were former residents of homes for unmarried mothers have written to the attorney-general seeking genocide prosecutions against the religious orders that ran the centres.

They believe that, due to their status as single mothers, the state-sanctioned and mostly religious-run homes violated genocide laws by causing them to suffer serious bodily and mental harm through mass internment and the forcible removal of their children.

The 63 members of Irish First Mothers, who range in age from early 40s to late 70s, were residents in a number of mother and baby homes across Ireland including Bessborough in Co Cork, The Good Shepherd in Co Meath and St Patrick’s in Dublin.

Most of the women allege that they were pressured or forced into giving their babies up for adoption and three infants born to the women died while in the homes.

They were prompted to write the letter after the recent discovery of a significant number of infant remains were found inside sewage chambers on the site of a former home in Tuam, Co Galway.

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IRELAND
Herald

Shane Phelan and Kevin Doyle – 04 March 2017

The religious order that ran the Tuam mother and baby home, where the remains of hundreds of children have been discovered, has failed to issue an apology.

A commission of investigation yesterday announced it had discovered the remains of the young children in underground chambers at the property.

The Bon Secours Sisters said it couldn’t comment on the find, which Minister for Children Katherine Z appone described as “disturbing”.

Significant quantities of human remains were discovered at the site of the former St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, an institution where unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth, in Tuam, Co Galway.

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UNITED STATES
Irish Independent

Ian Begley
March 6 2017

The president of the Catholic League has denounced the Tuam Baby scandal as ‘fake news’.

Despite “significant quantities” of human remains discovered at the site of the former mother and baby home in Co Galway, US-based conservative Bill Donoghue claims there is “no evidence of a mass grave”.

“It was a lie in 2014 and it is a lie in 2017,” he wrote on Catholicleague.org. “The hoax is now back again, and an obliging media are running with the story as if it were true. Any objective and independent reporter would be able to report what I am about to say, but unfortunately there are too many lazy and incompetent reporters prepared to swallow the latest moonshine about the Catholic Church.

“If there was a Pulitzer for fake news, the competition would be fierce. Mass graves. Sexually assaulted women. Children stolen. It is all a lie.”

Independent councillor for Tuam Billy Connelly told the Irish Independent he cannot understand how anyone could denounce the evidence already presented.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Alan O’Keeffe
March 6 2017

Dublin woman Anna Corrigan said she does not believe that both of her baby brothers born in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home actually died there.

She believes her brother William may have been adopted illegally in the US as no death certificate was issued for him, she said.

A death certificate was issued for her oldest brother, John. Inspectors who visited the institution in the 1940s stated he was in an “emaciated” condition. Later, when his death was listed, a death certificate stated measles as a cause of death.

If the bodies of one or two of her brothers are identified with DNA tests, she wants the remains to be given to her for a family burial. “The Garda forensic team should have been sent to the site a long time ago. I want to give a sample of my DNA to help the investigation,” she said.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Monday, March 06, 2017

Identifying the remains of young children at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home would be technically very difficult and the prospect of establishing causes of death highly unlikely, according to forensic and Garda sources, writes Cormac O’Keeffe, Juno McEnroe and Conall Ó Fátharta.

Sources told the Irish Examiner that they did not believe it would be possible to uncover evidence of criminality, if there was any, in the deaths.

Garda sources said the exhumation, mass identification, and forensic examination involved would be entering “uncharted waters” given the scale and complexity of the undertaking.

Last Friday, it emerged that the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation found “significant quantities of human remains” involving children up to the age of three, in underground sewage chambers at the former Bon Secours Sisters home.

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IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

By Alan O’Keeffe
March 6 2017

Police in the Republic are liaising with the State coroner investigating the Tuam Mother and Children’s Home deaths as a full criminal probe looks increasingly likely.

Last week the presence of a large number of human remains in a septic tank was confirmed at the site, which was run by the Bon Secours nuns.

Relatives of children who died at the home now want full Garda involvement in the investigation being undertaken by a State Commission of Investigation.

Tuam-based Minister of State at the Office of Public Works Sean Canney said it is open to the Coroner for North Galway to call on the support of the gardai and any other authorities as he may deem necessary.

“If there is to be a Garda investigation, so be it. Whatever is required in order to give closure to people,” he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Marie O’Halloran, Lorna Siggins

The State must fully excavate sites at every Magdalene laundry and Mother and Baby Home where children’s remains may have been buried, a survivors’ group has said.

The Government has not said whether a full excavation will take place at the former grounds of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, where a commission of inquiry looking into the religious-run homes for unmarried mothers has found the remains of a “significant” number of children aged under three.

Calling for a wider disinterment programme, the Justice for Magdalenes research group said it had compiled a list of 180 institutions, agencies and individuals charged with the care of unmarried mothers and their children.

It also appealed for a halt to plans to redevelop two former Magdelene laundries in Dublin until it could be established that neither site contained children’s graves.

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IRELAND
98 FM

6 Mar 2017
Trish Laverty

There are calls for the sites of two former Magdalene laundries in Dublin to be examined for children’s graves.

It follows a socking report last week that showed hundreds of remains had been discovered in Tuam.

On Friday it was confirmed that significant quantities of human remains had been found in a septic tank on the site of a mother and baby home in Co. Galway.

Records show that almost 800 deaths were recorded at the home over almost 40 years.

There are now calls for the planned redevelopment of the Magdalene laundry in Donnybrook and any potential redevelopment of the laundry off Sean McDermott St. not the take place until the sits are fully examined for graves.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Chai Brady
March 6 2017

Hundreds gathered yesterday to remember the women who suffered in the Magdalene Laundries, many of whom were buried in mass graves.

The event marked the sixth annual Flowers for Magdalenes.

Mary Merritt (85) was in the laundries for 14 years.

“Every one of those women should have had a separate grave with their name on it,” she said.

“They cut my hair, they took my name, they took my clothes, but I wouldn’t let them take my spirit.”
The Justice for Magdalenes Research group found that there are at least 1,663 women from the laundries buried in cemeteries – many of whom are in unmarked graves.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Marie O’Halloran

The sites of two former Magdalene laundries in Dublin should not be redeveloped until it is confirmed there are no children’s graves there, a survivor has demanded.

In an address to the Flowers for Magdalenes commemoration at Glasnevin Cemetery, Mary Merritt, who spent 14 years in High Park laundry in Drumcondra, said the planned redevelopment of the Magdalene laundry in Donnybrook, and any potential redevelopment of the laundry off Seán MacDermott Street, should not take place until the sites are fully examined for graves.

Her call echoed those of the Justice for Magdalenes Research organisation, the co-founder of which, Claire McGettrick, said the organisation had compiled a list of 180 institutions, agencies and individuals involved with unmarried mothers and their children.

Around the North Circular Road and places in Clontarf “there would have been houses dotted around those areas” involved, she said but the commission of inquiry into mother-and-baby homes was looking at 18. She said they had the names of 1,600 people who died in the laundries.

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VATICAN CITY
Crux

Marie Collins March 5, 2017
SPECIAL TO CRUX

Crux editor John Allen’s recent argument that my resignation from the pope’s anti-abuse commission will “free me up” and allow me to feel less “conflicted” is not only inaccurate, but patronizing. The problem with the commission isn’t having survivors as members, but opposition from clerical men in the Roman Curia.

[Editor’s note: In the wake of the resignation of the last clerical abuse survivor to serve as an active member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Irish lay woman Marie Collins, Crux editor John L. Allen Jr. published an analysis suggesting that the outcome may have been both inevitable and desirable.

Collins objected via social media, and Crux offered her the opportunity to reply. The following is that response.]

Firstly I want to thank Crux for offering me the right of reply. Although in the article I am combined with Peter Saunders, I am here speaking only for myself.

I was quite disturbed reading this article as in many cases John Allen purports to know my feelings and how I was thinking in certain situations. I found this not only to be inaccurate, but also patronising.

The statement that my resignation was “inevitable” is certainly not true. There was no “inevitability” of my leaving, unless Allen knew in advance that there were men in the Roman Curia who would be obstructing the commission, and I would refuse to cover it up!

I accepted my appointment to the Pontifical Commission with every intention of remaining for my full term.

The article seems to imply that because I was sexually abused by a priest in childhood I am incapable of independent thought or action, that I must always be looking over my shoulder concerned how my words or actions might be seen by survivors outside the commission. It also stated that I was put in a “politically untenable spot.”

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CALIFORNIA
Variety

Maane Khatchatourian
News Editor, Variety.com
@MaaneKhat

UPDATED: The Los Angeles Police Department is conducting an ongoing investigation on sexual assault allegations against “That ’70s Show” star Danny Masterson, which the actor has vehemently denied.

According to journalist Tony Ortega, best known for his extensive reporting on the Church of Scientology, the Church allegedly covered up the allegations — stemming from the early 2000s. The LAPD didn’t comment on Scientology’s involvement with the investigation.

“The Los Angeles Police Department Robbery Homicide Division, Sexual Assault Section, is conducting an investigation involving the actor Danny Masterson,” reads a statement from the LAPD obtained by Variety on Friday. “Three women have come forward and disclosed that they were sexually assaulted by Masterson during the early 2000’s.”

Masterson denied the claims in a statement sent by his rep to Variety, saying the “false allegations appear to be motivated to boost Leah Remini’s anti-Scientology television series.” The accuser’s name has been redacted from the below statement.

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UNITED STATES
Independent (UK)

Jacob Stolworthy @Jacob_Stol

Actor Danny Masterson, who appeared in sitcom That ’70s Show, is reportedly being investigated by the LAPD after allegations that accusations of sexual assault were covered up by the Church of Scientology.

Variety has reported that the LAPD is looking into claims of sexual assault that were said to have been committed by Masterson – a practicing Scientologist – in the early 2000s. Masterson has denied the claims.

A statement from the LAPD reads: “Three women have come forward and disclosed that they were sexually assaulted by Masterson during the early 2000s.”

The claims that the Church of Scientology covered up the allegations against the actor come courtesy of journalist Tony Ortega.

Masterson’s representative told Variety that the “false allegations appear to be motivated to boost Leah Remini’s anti-Scientology television series [Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath].“

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NEW YORK
WNYT

March 05, 2017

SCHOHARIE — A Schoharie County man accused of sexually abusing teenage boys is due back in court Monday.

51-year-old Jonathan Luce is accused of luring boys from church to his home in the town of Jefferson to have sex with them. State police say they know of three victims, ranging in age from 12-17.

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NEW YORK
Press TV (Iran)

Victims of child sex abuse in the US state of New York say their fight for justice has been stalled by the political apparatus of the state’s Roman Catholic Church.

The church and other institutions are preventing state lawmakers from passing a bill that would relax one of the nation’s tightest laws of limitations on filing criminal charges against sexual abusers, The Associated Press reported Sunday.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo is a key supporter of the Child Victims Act, a retroactive bill that has languished in the state’s Legislature for over a decade.

“These survivors deserve justice, plain and simple,” Cuomo said in a statement to The AP. “Giving victims the opportunity to advance their claims in court is the right thing to do, and I urge the Legislature to join me and pass this measure once and for all.”

A similar law in California, passed in 2002, resulted in Catholic dioceses there paying $1.2 billion in legal settlements.

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UNITED STATES
IrishCentral

Tom Deignan @IrishCentral March 06, 2017

How about pedophiles and the people who protect them?

In recent weeks, interesting stories about President Trump’s right-hand Irish Catholic man Steve Bannon have been trickling out. Among the revelations: he’s got kind of a man-crush on fellow Irish Catholic and former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke.

Burke ended up on Pope Francis’ bad side — more on that later — and was booted upstairs to a job at the Vatican. For a while, Burke seemed a raging relic.

At a time when Pope Francis was talking about opening doors, not judging people and protecting the weak — you know, all those crazy things Jesus spoke of — Burke represented the opposition. He proudly wanted to go backward, not forward.

Make the Vatican great again, if you will.

In the end, Burke was out in the cold. But Trump’s election — and Bannon’s budding alliance with Burke — has made him an influential figure again. This should enrage the millions of Irish Americans and other Catholics who voted for Trump.

Rewind to October 2010. Millions — faithful as well as lapsed Catholics — were still absorbing the sex abuse revelations. That’s when Burke was promoted to cardinal by Pope Benedict.

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KANSAS
Topeka Capital-Journal

An Overbrook church is being sued for allegedly aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of two children.

A court review of the case is scheduled on Monday, March 6, in Osage County District Court.

The plaintiffs in the case are four unnamed individuals, including two minors. Grace Community Church, in Overbrook, and Richard Calderwood are listed as defendants.

On Feb. 21, Calderwood, 53, was granted 36 months on probation in connection with two counts of aggravated indecent solicitation of a child in Wabaunsee County District Court. His sentence includes lifetime registration as a sex offender. According to the original criminal complaint which was filed in October 2014, the crimes took place between May 1, 2013, and Jan. 1, 2014, and involved children who were 4 and 6 years old at the time the complaint was filed.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Patsy McGarry

It has been said of some senior civil servants, in Ireland as elsewhere, that they believe governments are elected to carry out their will. Such Sir Humphrey-like attitudes are not confined to civil societies.

They also exist at the Vatican where, inevitably, similar senior bureaucrats go one better. They believe the pope has been chosen by God to carry out their will.

Should a pope resist, though they prefer to think him misled, they will show him the way. He may propose, but they dispose. Or nothing happens.

And trying to get them to admit any of this would be every bit as futile as expecting the Sisters of Bons Secours to comment on confirmation that the remains of many hundreds of infants are to be found in Tuam at the Mother and Baby Home they once managed there.

A perfect example of Rome’s bureaucrats at work is how the Vatican’s commission for the protection of minors has been treated by some in the Curia, particularly at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

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PENNSYLVANIA
Reading Eagle

By Liam Migdail-Smith
HARRISBURG, PA.

Last legislative session, state Rep. Mark Rozzi began his push to give victims of childhood sexual abuse a chance to confront their abusers in court with what he saw as a compromise plan.

The Muhlenberg Township Democrat said he’d hoped a limited approach would make it easier to win over skeptics. But state senators nonetheless gutted the bill of the piece victims and their advocates most wanted: an avenue for victims to sue their abusers and organizations that shielded them even if the window to do so has already closed.

So as Rozzi reboots the effort this year, he’s starting with the proposal victims most want to see. His bill would end time limits for victims to sue or press criminal charges going forward and open a two-year window for those abused in the past to file lawsuits regardless of when they were assaulted.

Now, victims have until age 30 for lawsuits and age 50 to bring criminal cases.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Tom Joyner

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has come a long way since it first began hearings in April 2013.

Since then, it’s made almost 2,000 referrals to authorities, held more than 6,500 private sessions, and handled almost 40,000 phone calls.

But with so much ground to cover, where is it up to now and what’s left to go?

Why are we having a royal commission?

The child abuse royal commission was first announced in November 2012 by the Gillard government following calls that year for a national inquiry into how the Catholic Church handled allegations of abuse.

What is a royal commission?

The announcement was triggered by explosive allegations on Lateline from a former priest and a senior NSW police officer that the Catholic Church was covering up claims of abuse.

It was also prompted by reports of clerical abuse in the Newcastle and Hunter Valley regions by journalist Joanne McCarthy in the Newcastle Herald.

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CITTA’ DEL VATICANO
Corriere della Sera

Il prefetto del Sant’Uffizio, cardinale Gerhard Ludwig Müller, replica alle accuse di Marie Collins: sono pronto a incontrarla

di Gian Guido Vecchi

CITTÀ DEL VATICANO «Non posso capire che si parli di mancanza di collaborazione». Il cardinale Gerhard Ludwig Müller, teologo, curatore dell’opera omnia di Ratzinger, è dal 2012 prefetto della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede. È la prima volta che parla da quando Marie Collins, vittima di un prete pedofilo quando aveva 13 anni, si è dimessa dalla Pontificia commissione per la protezione dei minori denunciando «una mancanza di collaborazione vergognosa» della Curia e in particolare della sua Congregazione. È qui, nel palazzo dell’ex Sant’Uffizio, che vengono processati i sacerdoti accusati di pedofilia. Il cardinale è un uomo imponente, dal tono asciutto.

Eminenza, ha avuto occasione di parlare con Marie Collins prima delle dimissioni? «Non ho avuto mai prima l’occasione di incontrarla. Ma naturalmente sono pronto, nulla lo impedisce».

Ci sono state resistenze in Curia e nel suo dicastero? «Penso si dovrebbe mettere fine a questo cliché, l’idea che ci sia da un lato il Papa che vuole la riforma e dall’altro un gruppo di resistenti che vorrebbero bloccarla. Fa parte della nostra fede cattolica e dell’ethos del lavoro della Curia romana di sostenere la missione universale del Papa, a lui affidata da Gesù Cristo».

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Mar. 6, 2017

VATICAN CITY

The head of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation has defended his office’s apparent refusal to reply to letters from victims of clergy sexual abuse, a decision which led the only abuse survivor on the pontifical commission about the matter to resign her post.

Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, says in a new interview it is “a misunderstanding” to think that his office “could deal with all the dioceses and religious orders in the world.”

“It is good that personal contact with victims be done by pastors in their area,” Muller said in an interview Sunday with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. “When a letter arrives, we always ask the bishop that he might take pastoral care of the victim, clarifying to him or her that the Congregation will do all that is possible to give justice.”

Having the Vatican congregation respond to the letters, the cardinal states, “would not respect the legitimate principle of diocesan autonomy and subsidiarity.”

Muller was speaking four days after Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor, resigned her post on Pope Francis’ Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. In a statement for NCR March 1, Collins explained she was resigning due to frustration with Vatican officials’ reluctance to cooperate with the commission’s work to protect children and care for survivors.

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GUAM
Guam Daily Post

PICKET LINE: More than 40 people walked the picket line for the defrocking of Archbishop Anthony Apuron again Sunday morning. The Concerned Catholics of Guam and the Laity Forward Movement are both seeking the removal of Apuron and held their 33th picket in front of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica, Sunday, March 3. David Castro/The Guam Daily Post

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INDIA
Outlook

A Kerala priest’s arrest for rape spills out tales about the laity being exploited in ways more than sexual

MINU ITTYIPE

The Church did provide him with the customary accommodation for work and rest, but the vicar went on to use the parsonage for deeds inhuman. Fr Robin Vadakkumchery alle­gedly raped a minor girl under his parish in north Kerala and further exploited the victim’s poverty by reportedly forcing her father to own up the pregnancy. The 48-year-old priest was arrested three weeks after he fathered a child, leading to his suspension from performing the holy sacraments, including mass. But then, this isn’t the first time the cle­rgy sensed the dark acts of the man in white robes.

First, on how Vadakkumchery is said to have brushed the serial cruelty under the carpet. He is claimed to have paid the dirt-poor family in a rugged belt of Kannur district Rs 10 lakh to conceal the real criminal, having persuaded the expe­ctant teenager to tell the police that the rapist was her parent. Not knowing the gravity of the situation, the father of the 16-year-old said he was the one who committed the crime and that the family was not interested in pursuing the case. Only when the police moved to arrest him did the girl spill the beans and reveal the identity: Vadakk­umchery, who, ironically, used to speak against child abuse.

Earlier in February, the cops were alerted by a rights NGO, Childline India Foundation, after the minor gave birth to a boy in Christuraj hospital off hilly Koothuparamba. Twenty days since the delivery came the arrest of Vadakkum­chery, who was the vicar of the St Sebastian’s church in Neendunoki off Kottiyoor along the Western Ghats bordering Karnataka. While the newborn was shifted to an orphanage in Vythiri (the entrance to neighbouring Wayanad district), the accused priest is said to have attempted to flee India. He reportedly sought to fly to Canada when the police nabbed him on February 28 at Thrissur district’s Puthukad, 35 km north of the international airport at Kochi.

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IRELAND
Newstalk

In a statement released this afternoon, People Before Profit have called for the Bon Secours sisters to make a full and unreserved apology to the victims of Tuam.

They have also called for them to open up all their files on the Mother and Baby Homes for public scrutiny.

Bríd Smith from the People Before People Profit Alliance said “The case of the Tuam babies is one of the most sickening and disturbing stories of our time.

“At the very least there is a case of deliberate neglect of children born outside marriage which led to death by malnutrition.

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IRELAND
The Irish Sun

By GARY MENEELY
5th March 2017

A large number of human remains — aged up to three years — were discovered at the site, a former institution where unmarried women were sent to give birth.

The home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam, Co Galway, was demolished in the 1970s to make way for a local authority housing estate.

In a statement last night, gardai told the Irish Sun: “An Garda Siochana is liaising with the Coroner on this matter.”

Speaking yesterday, Housing Minister Simon Coveney said that Garda involvement in the probe could not be ruled out. Mr Coveney declared there was also significant responsibility on the State.

Mr Coveney said: “When you look at the way in which children’s bodies were discarded . . . 17 of the 20 chambers had remains in them, it’s hard to see that there wouldn’t be garda involvement.

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INDIA
Times of India

TNN | Updated: Mar 5, 2017

Kannur: A day after Wayanad Child Welfare Committee (CWC) chairman Fr Thomas Joseph Therakam was removed from his post for his alleged role in a conspiracy to hush up a minor’s rape by a priest and her subsequent delivery, church authorities suspended him as the spokesperson of Manathavady diocese.

A statement issued by bishop Jose Porunnedam of Mananthavady diocese on Sunday said the decision was taken in the backdrop of the government’s move to sack Therakam.

The bishop, who had earlier apologized to the survivor and her family said the diocese will stand by the survivor. The statement also said steps would be taken to avoid such incidents in future.

Meanwhile, the foundling home which is part of the Holy Infant Mary’s Girls Home at Vythiri in Wayand alleged that the CWC has been making baseless charges against it. In an official statement issued by the administrator, the foundling home said its officials had informed about the newborn baby the very next day it was brought to the orphanage.

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AUSTRALIA
Shepparton News

by BARCLAY WHITE MARCH 06, 2017

Bishop Leslie Tomlinson, it is time to go.

That is the message that two prominent critics of the Catholic Church have for the Bishop of Sandhurst Diocese after the revelations of the high rates of alleged sexual abuse by priests within the district.

Catherine Dooley from Tatura is a lifelong Catholic but in recent years has become a prominent critic of the church over what she believed was the mismanagement and lack of accountability within its structure.

Along with former Catholic priest Frank Purcell, they led a campaign urging Pope Francis to sack George Pell due to how he handled the sexual abuse crisis that engulfed the Catholic Church.

With the release of figures last month from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that revealed that Sandhurst Diocese had the second-highest rate of alleged sexual offences in the country, Ms Dooley and Mr Purcell believe local change was needed.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY JAMES FOGARTY

5 MAR 2017

The granddaughter of a woman buried in a mass grave believes there could be dozens more bodies buried there.

The shock allegations come as prayers were said across the country yesterday for the almost 800 babies discovered in a septic tank in Tuam, Co Galway.

Angela Collins, who was originally called Angelina before she was re-named by nuns, is buried in a Magdalene Laundry grave at St Finbarr’s cemetery in Togher, Co Cork.

Her family have been fighting to have their beloved grandmother to be exhumed.

They allege there could be many more than the officially recorded 72 women buried at the mass grave.

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IRELAND
Independent Catholic News (UK)

March 5, 2017

Archbishop Michael Neary, Archbishop of Tuam, focused on the discovery of children’s remains buried at the former Mother and Bay Home in Galway, during his homily for the First Sunday of Lent today. He said: “I am horrified and saddened to hear, through the Commission’s interim statement of 3 March 2017, that quite a large quantity of human remains were discovered on this site… This points to a time of great suffering and pain for the little ones and their mothers…This points to a time of great suffering and pain for the little ones and their mothers.”

The full homily text follows:

Each year, on the First Sunday of Lent, the Church puts before us, in the Gospel passages She has chosen for us, the accounts of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. We are invited to enter into these scriptural texts and to acknowledge how they mirror what is going on in our own lives, and to avail of the opportunity to be changed for the better and transformed by them during the forty days of Lent.

This is true of the texts before us this year too, but I am sure you will understand if I do not reflect with you on the Gospel we have just heard proclaimed but, rather, if I speak for a moment on the news which emerged from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation on Friday morning.

I was greatly shocked, as we all were, to learn of the extent of the numbers of children buried in the graveyard at the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. I was made aware of the magnitude of this situation by media reporting and historical research. I am horrified and saddened to hear, through the Commission’s interim statement of 3 March 2017, that quite a large quantity of human remains were discovered on this site which, on analysis, matches the timescale of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. This points to a time of great suffering and pain for the little ones and their mothers. Albeit not unexpected, I was very upset as I read the Commission’s findings made public on Friday, 3 March 2017.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Ronan McGreevy

A Catholic bishop has told the Citizens’ Assembly that the revelations from Tuam made us “hang our heads in shame”.

Bishop of Limerick Dr Brendan Leahy said he was as surprised as anybody else by the news that the remains of hundreds of babies and young children were found behind a septic tank on grounds once owned by the Bon Secours Sisters.

During the questions and answer session at the assembly, a citizen from Tuam asked Bishop Leahy, who was representing the Irish Bishops’ Conference, how they could square their concern for the unborn with what happened in Tuam between 1926 and 1961.

She said: “How does the Church expect us to go along with this given the horrific track record that the religious orders has when dealing with the most vulnerable as you call them, the voiceless weak in our society historically. And specifically, in light of the discovery of the recent discoveries of the 780 babies thrown into septic tanks in Tuam?”

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INDIA
Times of India

TNN | Updated: Mar 5, 2017

Kozhikode: Senior Congress leader and former Union minister A K Antony has come down heavily on the priest who is accused of raping and impregnating a 16-year-old girl at Peravoor in Kannur. Talking to reporters here on Sunday, Antony termed the act of Fr Robin Vadakkancheril as a hideous crime and demanded strict action against the priest.

“It is a shame to say that such a person is a priest. The accused do not deserve any mercy and should not be given any consideration of a priest,” he said.

Religious or political background of the persons accused in such heinous crimes should never be considered while taking action, Antony responded when asked about the priest’s arrest.

“The police should take all steps to prove the crime and ensure punishment to the accused so that a clear message is sent across the society,” said Antony adding that Kerala should no more be called ‘God’s own Country’.

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INDIA
The Indian Express

By: PTI | Kannur (kerala) | Published:March 5, 2017

Police today intensified the search to trace seven absconding accused, including five nuns and a doctor, who are on the run since the arrest of a Catholic priest accused of raping a minor girl. The five nuns and the gynaecologist of the church-run hospital, where the 16-year-old girl delivered a boy, continued to evade the arms of the law.

The search conducted for the second day on Sunday failed to yield any result, investigating officer Sunilkumar told PTI.

A helper, Thangamma, is among the accused absconding, he said.

Police had yesterday said eight persons had been booked for their alleged role in hiding facts related to the case relating to the rape and subsequent delivery of the baby by the 11th standard student on February 7.

They were booked under non-bailable sections of POCSO Act and Juvenile Justice Act.
Fr Robin alias Mathew Vadakkancheril, who was the vicar of the local church at Kottiyoor in Kannur district and the prime accused in the case, was arrested on February 28.

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INDIA
The News Minute

The convenient excuse that the church hands out each time such an assault comes out in the open is this – “Not all priests are like that.”

Dhanya Rajendran

Sunday, March 05, 2017

I believe in God. In those low-points of my career or in my personal life, for one fleeting moment I look up to God and pray that everything gets alright. I believe in prayer.

But no amount of religiosity, spirituality or faith in God can get anyone to defend or justify an act as sickening and predatory as a Christian priest getting a 16-year-old girl pregnant, and then covering it up. And yet, this is exactly what the Church in Kerala is doing. Worse, many connected with the priest directly or indirectly are openly blaming the child.

Here are those reprehensible lines from Sunday Shalom, a magazine supported by the Catholic Sabha in Kerala, which would get anyone to seethe in anger.

“Here, the girl is above the age of 15. Let me tell you this, as I consider you like my daughter – you are also at fault. Before the Lord, it is you who will have to answer first. Daughter, why did you forget who a priest is? He has a human body and has temptations. He may have forgotten his position for a few seconds, my child who has taken the Holy Communion, why didn’t you stop or correct him?”

The girl the article blames is the 16-year-old who recently delivered a child at a hospital in Kannur. After an attempt to cover-up by the girl’s family, the priest who had allegedly raped her and impregnated her was arrested.

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NEW YORK
Associated Press

BY DAVID KLEPPER
ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York legislation to relax one of the nation’s most restrictive statutes of limitations on child molestation victims continues to stall under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church and other opponents.

The bill has circled the drain in Albany for a decade, but victims and advocates are optimistic this year because they’ve gained a key supporter, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The fate of the Child Victims Act could rest with Senate Leader John Flanagan, a Long Island Republican, who supporters say has refused to meet to discuss the bill.

“They are denying us our day in court,” said Bridie Farrell, 35, a former competitive speed skater and a leading advocate for the bill.

Four years ago Farrell publicly accused a former teammate and mentor of repeatedly abusing her when he was 33 and she was 15 – too long ago to file charges or a civil suit. “They are protecting the institutions of the abusers.”

Currently, under New York law, victims of child sexual abuse have until age 23 to bring either criminal charges or file a lawsuit against their alleged abusers. It’s one of the tightest statutes of limitations in the country, a distinction that advocates say puts New York in the company of states like Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Michigan.

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IRELAND
Connacht Tribune

[The Chieftains with Joni Mitchell – The Magdalene Laundries via YouTube]

Galway Bay fm newsroom – Up to one hundred people attended a special event at Bohermore Cemetery this afternoon to remember the women of Galway’s Magdalene Laundries.

The ‘Flowers for Magdalenes’ event is now in its 6th year, and sees flowers laid on the graves of the women who once lived and worked in the laundries.

There were emotional scenes as a number of those in attendance shared their personal stories at today’s event.

They included women who were themselves ‘Magalene Women’, women who worked alongside them, and those whose relatives worked at the laundry.

One eldery man recalled how his mother died there, while a sister he never met disappeared from the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

Today’s event also included a recital of the names of the former Magdalene women buried in Bohermore.

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IRELAND
RTE News

The Justice For Magdalenes Research group has said that a huge amount of work needs to be done to identify where all of the women who died in Magdalene laundries are buried.

Co-founder Clare McGettrick said at least 1,600 women died in these institutions but it is still not known where many are buried.

She was speaking at Glasnevin Cemetery today, one of several locations where flowers were laid on Magdalene graves.

Events were also held in Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and New Ross.

Survivors, as well as children of women who died in Magdalene laundries, spoke at today’s events.

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IRELAND
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

When Catherine Corless’s research suggesting that there was a mass grave at a home for unwed mothers and their children at Tuam in County Galway, Ireland, first began to be circulated, the blowback from some apologists in the Catholic institution was enormous. It took real grit and determination for her to keep investigating this story in the face of claims she was lying, that she was out to get the church, that she had exaggerated her findings and what they meant, and on and on.

As Ireland’s commissioner for children Katherine Zappone has now confirmed, Corless was right all along. She’s a hero.

Catherine Corless sums up her findings about the Tuam home and its mass grave in an interview with Tom Sykes:

The fact that the deaths were reported and that death certificates were issued for the children who were never buried – and let us not forget that prohibiting the decent burial of a human is and always has been a terrible crime in Ireland – is an indication of the incredible arrogance of the nuns. But it is also evidence that there must have been a wide circle of people in authority and the church who knew full well what was going on. Multiple children’s bodies a year were disappearing, unaccounted for, and no questions were asked.

“They were a law unto themselves,” says Corless, “They were surrounded by those eight foot high walls. Nobody – literally nobody – was allowed in; they were met at the gate and hardly any outsiders were brought in. They didn’t employ any locals as such -maybe they might bring somebody in for maintenance, for fixing the roof or a chimney–but otherwise the women who gave birth there and who were waiting to give birth, they were the ones that did all the work.” . . .
Corless believes that financial motivation was the primary motivation behind the illegal burials.

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UNITED STATES
Esquire

Charles Pierce

In other news from the Motherland, it long had been suspected that babies were killed and disposed of at what always is mistakenly called an “orphanage” in Tuam, County Galway. A remarkable woman named Catherine Corless, a local historian, was struck by the fact that the local registry had recorded 800 death certificates from the facility but only listed two actual burials. Corless ferociously pursued the investigation and she was finally (and tragically) proven correct this week. From The Guardian:

A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday. Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said. The commission said DNA analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961. The home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns, received unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The women were separated from their children, who remained elsewhere in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted.

This is a very mild description of what really went on, as Limerick historian Liam Hogan has been explaining on his essential stream on the electric Twitter machine. The children were separated from their mothers, who often got shuffled into the infamous Magdalene Laundries. The children then were put up for adoption. Hogan has links to Irish newspapers going back years describing the repressive, sex-hysterical Catholic theocratic impulse behind facilities like the one in Tuam. Some of the clips describe a bureaucracy of death only a couple of steps beyond that of Buchenwald.

God damn the people who did this, and whoever in the Church enabled it. And a bit of a hymn for the departed, most of whom never really had a prayer.

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AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

Michael Gorey

The leader of nearly 160,000 Catholics in the Canberra region sees light among the darkness of child sexual abuse revelations and hopes to heal and console.

Archbishop Christopher Prowse, who recently appeared before the Royal Commission and last week faced calls to resign, likened himself to biblical figure Job in the ash heap and conceded he had needed emotional support to deal with the unfolding tragedy.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Canberra Times, Archbishop Prowse said he hoped the church in future would be known more for its good works than the shame of abuse.

“Communities are largely traumatised by it,” he said.

“I know many of my priests find it very, very painful. The vast majority of priests are heroic, dedicated and holy men.

“One paedophile priest is one too many, but there have been too many Judases in our midst and it’s really affected us all.”

Archbishop Prowse said it would be his lenten pilgrimage to engage with victims of abuse and their families.

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IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

The latest revelations about the burial of babies in the former Mother and Baby home in Tuam, though widely predicted, provoke a sense of both sadness and shame. Sadness, that the very precious, elemental relationship between mothers and their children could be so disrespected by institutions of Church and State in Ireland; and shame because as priests we are part of an institution that has played a central role in this sorry saga.

It will be argued, with some cause, that the Catholic Church was not totally to blame, as the whole culture of Ireland during that period made it acceptable for pregnant unmarried girls to be treated so shamefully. But the Church, because of its dominant position in the Ireland of the time, must take a large degree of responsibility for what happened. Also, we must acknowledge that individual priests in parishes, through the advice they gave to parents of unmarried pregnant women, and in some cases through public condemnation from pulpits, helped to limit to Mother and Baby homes the options available to parents.

The recent Tuam revelations, coinciding with the attitudes of Vatican officials which led to the resignation of Marie Collins from the Vatican Commission on Clerical Sex Abuse, serve to underline our conviction that Catholic sexual teaching and the attitudes that can underpin it need urgent renewal. There is still a long way to go before women are treated with equal respect and dignity in the Catholic Church.

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IRELAND
Galway Bay FM

Galway Bay fm newsroom – The Association of Catholic Priests has issued a statement on the discovery of infant remains at the former site of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

It says the revelation, though widely predicted, provokes a sense of sadness and shame that the precious relationship between mother and child could be so disrespected by institutions of church and state.

The statement adds the culture of Ireland during the period concerned made it acceptable for pregnant, unmarried girls to be treated so shamefully.

It reads that it will be argued, with some cause, that the Catholic Church was not entirely to blame – but continues to say that the church must take a large degree of responsbility given it’s dominant position at the time.

The statement concludes that there is still a long way to go before women are treated with equal respect and dignity in the Catholic Church.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

CHRISSIE FOSTER
The Australian
March 6, 2017

My husband and I just spent the past three weeks in Sydney at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The hearing, Case Study 50, was the final examination into the Catholic Church and its failure to protect children from pedophile clergy.

We listened to church leaders explaining what they have done in response to child abuse by clerics over the past 4½ years of exposure in the royal commission hearings and the public exposure over decades.

When heads of provincial orders, bishops and archbishops were questioned by counsel assisting Gail Furness about the new systems they were putting in place, gaping holes appeared in these and their attitudes.

They had not enacted, or even thought about, implementing many of the suggested safety measures, nor had they considered any form of internal analysis to gather insight for change.

It was galling to hear from the archbishops in particular. We were disheartened and wondered if anything had changed. We were hearing once again the horrific Catholic clergy excuse for the atrocities that scar their history.

Their unique, weak and repetitive justification for the cover-up of the extensive rape and sexual assault by clergy was offered three times by Hobart’s Archbishop Julian Porteous during his evidence. “Nobody understood the seriousness of the effects of sexual abuse on children… ,” he said.

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IRELAND
The Sunday Times

John Mooney
March 5 2017
The Sunday Times

A DNA database is expected to be established to record the remains of the young children whose bodies were found in underground chambers on the site of a former home for unmarried mothers in Tuam, Co Galway.

Discussions are under way involving the government, Galway county council, gardai and representatives of a commission investigating alleged abuses at religious-run mother and baby homes about what action should now be taken.

The focus is on how to identify the remains, how to remove the bodies from the site, and whether it will be possible to establish causes of death. No decision has been reached on where the bodies will be reinterred.

The remains of an unknown number of children, ranging in age between 35 foetal weeks and three years old, were discovered in recent weeks by the commission, which last week said there were “significant quantities of human remains” in 17 of 20 underground chambers.

Gardai do not believe there is any prospect of pursuing criminal charges against anyone associated with the order of the Bon Secours Sisters, the Catholic order of nuns that ran the home.

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IRELAND
Irish Mirror

BY JAMES WARD
5 MAR 2017

A woman raised in a Church-run institution has spoken of how the Tuam scandal brought memories of her horrific childhood flooding back.

Maz Nolan, 63, told the Irish Sunday Mirror she had to speak out after news broke of the 800 babies buried at the Galway Mother and Baby Home.

She revealed her heartbreaking story of abuse at the hands of cruel nuns and the scars that she bears to this day.

She remembers being beaten by one of the Sisters of Nazareth when she couldn’t do her math homework.

Maz said: “She actually had a branch of a tree that she had carved all the twigs off it. I was hit on the knuckles with it, that was my first experience of cruelty.

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IRELAND
The Journal

[with video]

PATRICK JOSEPH HAVERTY spent the first five and a half years of his life in Tuam mother and baby home.

Sitting in local historian Catherine Corless’s house, Haverty tells TheJournal.ie that the formal recognition that “a significant number” of children’s remains have been discovered in sewage containers at the old mother and baby home site is “bittersweet”.

For years, survivors like Haverty have been telling their story, but until three years ago, it had fallen on deaf ears, something he says has to change now.

Haverty was born in the Tuam home in 1951.

“My mother had to leave (the mother and baby home) after 12 months and she knocked on the door for five and a half years trying to take me out, but the nuns wouldn’t allow it, so eventually I was fostered out to a good family.”

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Lorna Siggins Tuam, Co Galway

Archbishop of Tuam Dr Michael Neary has said he is “horrified and saddened” to have learned of the large number of children buried in the “graveyard” at the former Bon Secours mother and baby home in the town.

Speaking at 10.30am Mass on Sunday in Tuam Cathedral, Dr Neary said his continued priority was to seek a “dignified re-interment” of the remains of children in consecrated ground – in cooperation with the families of the deceased.

The archdiocese would also continue to co-operate with the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, he said,although not directly involved in running the institution, which closed in 1961.

The commission’s work, “though difficult to read and comprehend” was “another necessary step on the path to the truth”, he said.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Denise Calnan and Shane Phelan
March 5 2017

Minister Simon Coveney said there is a “significant responsibility” on the State following the discovery of the mass grave of babies in Tuam, Co Galway.

The Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government also said garda involvement in the investigation into the remains at the site of the former mother and baby home cannot be ruled out.

Speaking on RTE Radio One’s Marian Finucane Show, Minister Coveney said it was “difficult to see” why gardaí would not be involved.

“I mean you look at the way in which children’s bodies were literally discarded in the way what they were,” he said.

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INDIA
Sun Daily

NEW DELHI: Five nuns and a doctor are on the run in India after being accused of concealing the birth of a baby to a teenager who alleges that a priest raped her, police said Sunday.

Arrest warrants have been issued for the six and for two hospital staff. They are accused of concealing the 16-year-old’s delivery from authorities and hiding the baby in a Catholic orphanage at Kunnur in the southern state of Kerala.

“They deliberately hid the incident from officials,” Prajish Thottathil, a senior police officer, told AFP, adding some of the accused likely also knew about the alleged assault.

Three of the accused work at a private hospital while the rest were associated with the orphanage where the baby was left.

The accused priest Robin Vadakkumchery was arrested last week after the victim gave birth in February, prompting an investigation.

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UNITED KINGDOM
New York Times

By CEYLAN YEGINSU
MARCH 4, 2017

YORK, England — Having disclosed his “sin” of masturbation, Mark Stibbe, age 17, was ordered to strip naked and lean over a wooden chair in the garden shed of a lavish Hampshire mansion on the southern coast of England.

Then came the first blow from a cane, its impact so ferocious that it sent the boy into a state of paralysis that lasted through at least 30 more strokes that left him collapsed on the floor, blood oozing down his legs.

“I remember being so appalled by how vicious the first lash was that I couldn’t scream,” Mr. Stibbe, now 56 and an acclaimed Christian author, recalled on a recent afternoon in his Yorkshire home. “You’re in this tiny shed full of canes with this man. I felt utterly powerless.”

Until that day in the late 1970s, the man he says beat him, John Smyth, was known to Mr. Stibbe and his friends as a charismatic lawyer and influential evangelical Christian leader who regularly attended the Christian forum of their nearby boarding school, Winchester College, the oldest in Britain. Now, Mr. Smyth, 75 and keeping a low profile in South Africa, stands at the center of a widening scandal of sadistic abuse of dozens of boys over three decades that has ensnared the leader of the Anglican Church, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, though only peripherally.

The accusations against Mr. Smyth, which were first reported in February as part of a Channel 4 news investigation, are the latest in a string of large-scale child abuse and sex scandals that have embroiled British institutions in recent months, exposing a long history of denial and cover-ups.

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IRELAND
Laois Nationalist

SUNDAY, MARCH 05, 2017

The Justice Minister says it’s ‘inevitable’ that Gardaí will be involved in the investigation into the discovery of infant remains in County Galway.

It follows confirmation on Friday that a “significant” number of infants and children were buried at a former mother and baby home in Tuam.

Frances Fitzgerald also told today’s Sunday Independent that inquiries at other former homes around the country are also likely.

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INDIA
Business Standard

The Kerala police are on the lookout for five nuns and two others who were involved in an alleged rape case of a 17-year-old girl by a Catholic priest, authorities said on Saturday.

The suspects comprise a doctor and an administrator of a hospital where the victim gave birth to a baby boy.

Speaking to IANS, Sunil Kumar the investigating officer in the case, said they will arrest all the accused.

“In all there are eight accused and the main suspect is 49-year-old Robin Vadakkanchery, a parish vicar near Kannur. He has already been arrested,” said Kumar.

The case surfaced with the arrest of the priest earlier this week who was caught on his way to the Kochi airport to fly out of the country.

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INDIA
One India

Written by: Anusha Ravi Published: Saturday, March 4, 2017

If not for an anonymous intimation to the child helpline, a Catholic priest in Kerala would have gotten away with raping and impregnating a 16-year-old minor. There are allegations that there was an attempt at the systematic cover up. Father Robin Vadakkumchery, 48, vicar of St Sebastian’s church in Kottiyoor accused of raping the minor was finally arrested while he attempting to flee to Canada.

It is alleged that Vadakkumchery had managed to silence the church-run hospital where the minor delivered an infant after being raped by the pastor. Further the allegation is that he had tried to cover up the crime by shifting them to an orphanage.

The child helpline was tipped off about the minor after she delivered a child, and filed a complaint with the police which marred the cover up plan.

After making arrangements with the hospital and the church-run orphanage, the priest is alleged to have pressurised the victim’s parents to take the blame upon themselves. While the police refused to file a complaint against the priest, the victim, more shockingly, accused her father of raping her.

What came as a shocker to the investigating authorities was the victim’s father accepting his daughter’s allegations. The victim opened up about the actual accused only after multiple rounds of questioning by the police. Inconsistencies in her statement led the police to believe that the victim as well as her parents were trying to conceal the facts.

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INDIA
The New Indian Express

KANNUR: A day after the police implicated seven people as accused for trying to cover up the incident where a 16-year-old girl delivered a baby after she was allegedly impregnated by a Catholic priest in Kottiyoor, some of the nuns involved in the case were found absconding.

The investigating officers, who visited the hospital where the child was delivered and the orphanage in Wayanad to where the child was shifted, found huge discrepancies.

The police have registered cases under POCSO Act and Juvenile Justice Act against six women including five nuns and a doctor.

The accused persons are Sr Ancy Mathew, Christu Raj Hospital administrator, Sr Tessy Joseph, gynaecologist, Hyderali, pediatrician , Sr Ophelia and Lis Maria of Holy Infant Mary orphanage, Wayanad, Sr Anitta of Kristudasi Convent, Iritty and Thankamma of Kottiyoor, who helped the priest.

Fr Robin Vadakkumchery, former vicar of St Sebastian’s Church, Kottiyoor who was arrested while trying to escape to Canada on February 27, has been remanded in judicial custody. Meanwhile, police had sent a report against Fr Thomas Joseph Therakam Child Welfare Commission (CWC) Wayanad district and Dr Betty, a member, pointing out their lapses in reporting the case.

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INDIA
India.com

Kozhikode (Ker), Mar 5 (PTI) Former Union minister A K Antony today slammed the priest accused of raping a minor girl in Kannur district of Kerala, stating that he was a “shame to the community and does not deserve any mercy.” “He has done a heinous crime and does not deserve any mercy
.
He is a shame to the community and should not be given any consideration of a priest,” he told reporters here when asked about the arrest of Fr Robin Vadakkancheril.

“One should not see the political or religious background of the accused in such cases,” he said.

Fr Robin alias Mathew Vadakkancheril was arrested on February 28 after a complaint was lodged by the victim’s mother with Childline, a helpline for children, alleging that he had “sexually exploited” her 16-year-old daughter last year.

He was also removed from office by church authorities.

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IRELAND
The Journal

THE JUSTICE FOR Magdalenes Research (JFMR) group has called on members of the public to lay flowers at the graves of Magdalene women today.

Events to mark the sixth annual Flowers for Magdalenes commemoration will take place at various locations around the country where Magdalene Laundries operated.

JFMR noted there are at least 1,663 former Magdalene women buried in cemeteries in Ireland, many of whom are in unmarked graves.

In a statement the group said: “This year’s Flowers for Magdalenes events hold particular significance as new property developments are planned on three former Magdalene Laundry sites at Donnybrook, Sean McDermott Street and Sunday’s Well.”

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IRELAND
Christian Science Monitor

David Iaconangelo
Staff | @diaconangelo

MARCH 4, 2017 —Government investigators in Ireland said on Friday they had uncovered the remains of babies and children buried in a network of 20 underground chambers at a former Catholic orphanage, appearing to confirm long-held suspicions of mass burials at the church-run facility during the 1950s.

Three months of excavations had already turned up “significant quantities of human remains” of children between 35 weeks and 3 years old at the site, said the judge-led Mothers and Babies Commission.

Ireland’s Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, called the findings “sad and disturbing.” She said a proper burial and other memorials would be offered to any surviving relatives of the children.

“We will honor their memory and make sure that we take the right actions now to treat their remains appropriately,” Ms. Zappone said.

The shocking discovery ties into a larger movement that has sought to reckon with past abuses committed at Catholic orphanages and schools, in the decades following a growing secularization – and economic renaissance – in Irish society.

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IRELAND
The Daily Beast

The dogged effort of a determined historian in a small Irish town uncovered one of the greatest tragedies in modern Irish history.

Tom Sykes

DUBLIN—On Friday morning, the Irish government’s minister for children made a shocking announcement.

Katherine Zappone stood in front of a hastily convened news conference in Dublin and confirmed a horrific, longstanding rumor that the bodies of several hundred babies and children had been illegally disposed of by an order of nuns in a sewage system hidden underneath a so-called ‘mother and baby’ home operated by the Bon Secours congregation of nuns – the name is French for “good help” and their motto is “Good Help to Those in Need”.

“Up to now we had rumors. Now we have confirmation that the remains are there, and that they date back to the time of the mother-and-baby home, which operated in Tuam from 1925 to 1961,” Minister Zappone said, her voice at times seeming to break with emotion.

The minister’s statement came after a specially appointed commission published the results of test excavation at the site in Tuam, Co Galway, a patch of waste ground adjacent to a housing estate which was built after ‘the Home’, as it was known locally, was demolished.

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INDIA
Kaumudi

MANATHAVADY: In the Kottiyoor case related to the sexual abuse of a minor girl by former Vicar Father Robin Wadakkanchery, Manathavady diocese head Bishop Jose Porunnedam has apologised to the victim and her family.

He says it is impossible to digest the he fact that that the sentinel of believers himself has committed the atrocity. He has made this point clear in the letter sent by the bishop to the parish, directing the church to remove the Vicar from his post.

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GUAM
Guam Daily Post

Neil Pang | The Guam Daily Post

As the church continues in its effort to educate clergy, Catholic school personnel, all church employees and volunteers on the newly adopted Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, news from the Vatican may cast a pall on recent strides made by the leadership of the Archdiocese of Agana.

According to the Associated Press, Pope Francis has reduced sanctions against some pedophile priests in an effort to apply his vision of a merciful church, even to those guilty of abusing minors under their care.

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke told the AP that Francis’ philosophy of mercy applied to “even those who are guilty of heinous crimes.”

Just as Coadjutor Archbishop Michael Byrnes told media during a press conference in February, punishment for priests found guilty of abusing minors always includes being removed from public ministry, but those priests are not necessarily defrocked.

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INDIA
Kaumudi

KOZHIKODE: Priest Fr Robin arrested in the Kottiyoor sexual abuse case should not be given the consideration of a priest, said senior congress leader A K Antony. He should be treated like a criminal, he said.

Antony said, “What the priest did was a heinous crime. Severe punishment should be given for this outrageous crime. Those attacking women should be punished severely. Such incidents will not recur again only if the guilty are punished. Nothing will happen only if a case is registered in sexual abuse cases. Punishment should be ensured. The state where attacks on women are on the rise should no longer be called God’s Own Country.”

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INDIA
Gulf News

Thiruvananthapuram: Six nuns and a priest in Kerala who are likely to be arrested in connection with the case pertaining to another priest abusing and impregnating a school girl, are believed to be on the run. Five of the nuns have been named as accused in the case.

Police on Sunday refrained from pushing ahead with the arrests, but reports indicate that the accused are missing from their workplaces.

The schoolgirl victim had given birth to a baby boy in early February and following an anonymous call to Child Line, the first accused, a Catholic priest attached to the Mananthavady diocese, Robin Vadakkumcherry, 48, was arrested.

Police believe there was an elaborate attempt to cover up the matter with the school girl being admitted to a Church-run hospital for delivery and the new-born taken to an orphanage run by nuns a day after birth.

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INDIA
The New Indian Express

KOCHI: The Mananthavady diocese has apologised to parishioners of St Sebastian’s Church, Kottiyoor, where Fr Robin Vadakkumchery, who allegedly impregnated a minor girl, was serving as a priest. Fr Robin was arrested last week on charges of raping the 16-year-old girl.

The diocese authorities said it was not an official apology, but an expression of grief by the bishop to the parishioners who were shocked by the incident.

“The letter containing the bishop’s message was read out at the church when the new parish priest took charge,” said diocese spokesperson Fr Thomas Joseph Therakam.

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ROME
The Guardian

Catherine Pepinster
Saturday 4 March 2017

When Pope Francis was elected nearly four years ago, on 13 March 2013, he was escorted – like every pope before him – from the Sistine Chapel to the Room of Tears. It is the place where a new pope pauses for a moment – and no doubt many of them do shed a few tears, thinking of the momentous responsibility upon their shoulders – before stepping out on to the balcony of St Peter’s to greet the world as the new leader of the Roman Catholic church.

When Francis, known until then as Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, first appeared that night, he appeared remarkably sanguine, joking that the cardinals had gone to the ends of the Earth to choose the next pope. If he’d had any inkling of what these last four years would be like, he would surely have wept in that Room of Tears.

While hugely popular across the globe with Catholics and non-Catholics alike, Francis has struggled against fierce opposition from the Vatican establishment to haul the Roman Catholic church into the 21st century, fought to reform its government, tried to persuade cardinals to revise their thinking on the divorced and remarried, and been openly opposed by rebel prelates.

Last week marked the start of Lent, one of the most important periods of the church’s calendar, a time when Catholics fast, give alms and reflect on humanity’s sinfulness in the run-up to their commemoration of the crucifixion and of Easter. It is usually marked by quiet prayerfulness, and on Sunday the pope, along with members of the Roman Curia, will leave Rome to begin a five-day retreat. He will leave a Vatican beset by tension, turmoil and rebellion. There are even rumours that growing numbers of Vatican hands think he should quit.

On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, came a big blow, in effect caused by the pope’s enemies: Marie Collins, the last abuse survivor on his commission into child abuse in the church, quit, frustrated at the lack of progress and what she calls “shameful lack of cooperation” from the officials most concerned with cases of abuse, highlighting the intransigence of the Roman Curia, or governing body, in the Vatican – the body Pope Francis wants to reform.

With Collins gone from the Commission for the Protection of Minors, set up by the pope to investigate the worldwide scandal of sexual abuse by priests and religious brothers, and the other victim representative, the Briton Peter Saunders, on indefinite leave of absence, the commission has lost a certain integrity.

When she stepped down, Collins complained that the commission had been starved of resources, progress was slow and there was “cultural resistance” to its work in the Vatican.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Times

Sean O’Neill, Chief Reporter
March 4 2017
The Times

A blacklist of institutions in Australia unfit to house British child migrants was torn up by the government under pressure from one of the royal family’s favourite charities, documents submitted to a public inquiry reveal.

The Fairbridge Society, which is now part of the Prince’s Trust, ran isolated farm schools at which children suffered physical and sexual abuse and threatened ministers with “a first-class row” if they tried to curb child migration to the colonies in the 1950s.

The government backed down and allowed Fairbridge, which was financially supported by the royals, received regular royal visits and had the Queen’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, as its president, to send hundreds more children to Australia.

The story of how the charity used its privileged position to lobby ministers is chronicled in papers disclosed to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which is examining the treatment of child migrants in the postwar period. …

Elderly men and women have told how they were abused at state and religious orphanages in Britain before being selected for migration or volunteering to go to Australia to escape.

Many were from poor families struggling after the war or were children whose unmarried mothers had no income to care for them. They were handed over to councils, religious orders and seemingly respectable charities. Thousands were sent abroad without their parents ever being informed.

One man, who asked for anonymity, said that he had been beaten and abused by Catholic nuns and priests in Britain before he was sent to Australia aged 12 in 1953 and suffered further abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers. He said: “I’m 75 now but I think about these things every day. The beatings were pretty horrific and for me it will never go away.”

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VATICAN CITY
news.va

(Vatican Radio) A communiqué released on Saturday by the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy provides a synopsis of the Annual Accounts of the Holy See, Vatican City State and Related Entities for 2015.

Please find the full text of the communiqué below:

The Holy See recorded a deficit of Euros 12.4 million in 2015. The main sources of income for 2015, in addition to investments, include the contributions made pursuant to Canon 1271 of the Code of Canon Law (Euros 24 million) and the contribution from the Institute of Works of Religion (Euros 50 million). As in previous years, the most significant expense for the Holy See is the cost of personnel. The Governatorato of the Vatican City State indicates a surplus of Euros 59.9 million for 2015, largely due to continued revenue from the cultural activities, especially those linked to the Museums. The 2015 Annual Accounts represent the first set of financial information prepared following the Vatican Financial Management Policies (VFMP), approved by Pope Francis on 24 October 2014, which are based on International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS). The Secretariat for the Economy informed the Council for the Economy that the journey towards a full implementation of the VFMP is firmly underway and highlighted that, however, a few more years will be necessary for this process to be completed and a full audit to be performed.

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VATICAN CITY
Associated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican has issued new figures showing it narrowed its deficit by half in 2015 to 12.4 million euros ($13 million).

That compares with a deficit of 25.6 million euros in 2014. The Vatican released the figures for 2015 on Saturday but didn’t include fuller details as it has in previous years, citing a transition in its financial accounting system that also delayed disclosure of the 2015 figures.

The Vatican also reported 24 million euros in contributions from Roman Catholic dioceses, up from 21 million a year earlier, and 50 million euros from the Vatican bank, the same as the previous year.

The Vatican city-state, which includes the post office, museums and other activities, posted a surplus of 59.9 million euros, down 6 percent from the year before. The Vatican didn’t offer details like how much the museum earned or personnel costs.

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IRELAND
RTE News

Groups campaigning for generations of unmarried mothers and their children have said the State must ensure that all human remains buried in unmarked graves at institutions are identified.

It follows confirmation yesterday by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation that significant quantities of human remains have been discovered at the site of a children’s burial ground in Tuam in Co Galway.

Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone has said the first concern must be to respect the dignity and the memory of the children.

She also said that Galway County Council would engage with local residents and those affected to decide what happens to the remains.

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IRELAND
Galway Bay FM

Galway Bay fm newsroom – The Children’s Minister is being accused of ignoring some of the survivors of mother and baby homes.

It follows the revelation yesterday that the remains of a “significant” number of young children and babies have been found at the site of the former home in Tuam.

Minister Katherine Zappone says the discovery was not unexpected, but was still deeply disturbing and must be appropriately responded to.

Paul Redmond – Chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby home Survivors – says this case is just the tip of the iceberg.

He alleges that since Minister Zappone’s appointment, she has ignored the group and ‘will have nothing to do with us’.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Shane Phelan and Kevin Doyle
March 4 2017

A religious order which ran a mother and baby home has failed to issue an apology after a commission of investigation discovered what are believed to be the remains of hundreds of children in underground chambers at the property.

The Bon Secours Sisters said it couldn’t comment on the find, which Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone described as “disturbing”.

Significant quantities of human remains were discovered at the site of the former St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, an institution where unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth, in Tuam, Co Galway.

The find has vindicated the painstaking research of amateur historian Catherine Corless, whose work helped lead to the setting up of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission.

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IRELAND
Daily Mail

By Fionn Hargreaves For Mailonline and Alison O’reilly For The Daily Mail

Historian Catherine Corless, 62, revealed that when she started to research into the deaths of almost 800 children at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, Tuam, she was told to ‘just leave them there’

The historian who spearheaded the campaign to discover the fate of 800 children who died at a former Catholic home for unmarried mothers and their children in Ireland was told ‘just leave them there’.

Catherine Corless, 62, discovered there were 798 death certificates for children at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, but only one burial certificate.

But when she started researching in 2014, she was told that it wasn’t worth uncovering as it happened a long time ago.

She told the Irish Mirror: ‘The county council knew at the time that there were remains there, the guards knew it, the religious [orders] knew it and it was just all nicely covered in and forgotten about.

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INDIA
The Times of India

Mar 4, 2017

Kannur: A conspiracy was hatched to hush up the rape of a minor girl by Robin Vadakkancheril alias Mathew Vadakkancheril, a 48-year-old priest in Kottiyoor, police has said. The authorities of the hospital where the girl delivered the baby, and also the orphanage in Wayanad which took the baby under its care without informing the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), made serious lapses, they said.

Though cases have been registered under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act against eight people including five nuns — one of them a gynecologist in the hospital where the girl delivered — they are all absconding, said Iritty DSP Prajesh Thottathil.
Police said cases have been registered against a pediatrician, Dr Hyderali, and the administrator of the hospital, Ancy Mathew, a nun. The others are Thankamma, a female employee of St Sebastian Church, Neendunoki, near Kottiyoor and nuns Liz Maria, Anita and Ophelia, who handles the orphanage in Mananthawady.

“We have concrete evidence on efforts made to hush up the case. There were serious lapses on the part of Christu Raj Hospital in Koothuparamba, where the girl delivered. The newborn was taken away from the mother and shifted to the Holy Infant Foundling Home, part of the HIM orphanage at Vythiri in Wayanad in violation of rules,” said the DSP.

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