ABUSE TRACKER

IRELAND
Irish Times

Patsy McGarry

The wellbeing of the child should be the primary consideration for any Catholic priest who becomes a father, guidelines approved by Ireland’s Catholic bishops state.

The guidelines say the priest “should face up to his responsibilities – legal, moral and financial. At a minimum, no priest should walk away from his responsibilities.”

In arriving at any decision concerning his child, it is “vital” that the mother, “as the primary caregiver, and as a moral agent in her own right, be fully involved”. It was also “important that a mother and child should not be left isolated or excluded”.

The guidelines, Principles of Responsibility Regarding Priests who Father Children While in Ministry, were approved by the bishops last May, but have yet to be published on their website or any Catholic diocesan website in Ireland.

They were prepared following discussions with Galway-based psychotherapist Vincent Doyle (34), whose father, Co Longford priest Fr JJ Doyle, died of lung cancer in 1995.

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AUSTRALIA
The Advertiser

Meagan Dillon, Court Reporter, Sunday Mail (SA)
August 19, 2017

A FORMER South Australian church pastor has been found guilty of sexually exploiting two young sisters more than 40 years ago — crimes that were examined by the Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse.

District Court Judge Gordon Barrett this month found ex-Salvation Army officer Christian Siebert guilty of two counts of the persistent sexual exploitation of two girls — then aged four and six — between 1976 and 1978.

Both victims first made statements to Victoria Police in 2004, and went on to give evidence at the royal commission two years ago.

The District Court heard a Salvation Army couple were posted to an SA country town and moved there with their two daughters and son in 1976.

Siebert, who would later become a pastor, was aged 20 at the time and was an active member of the church congregation where he spent a lot of time with the siblings, who lived next to the church.

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DEUTSCHLAND
kath.net

[Diocese of Hildesheim: The abuse report is now available. However, the results will be publicized in October. According to the NDR, the current Hildesheimer Bishop Norbert Trelle will no longer be in office at the time of publicizing the results because he will have to submit the request for retirement to Pope Francis in September since he will be 75 years old.]

Die Ergebnisse werden allerdings erst im Oktober der Öffentlichkeit bekannt gemacht.

Hildesheim (kath.net) Das Gutachten über die Missbrauchsfälle im Bistum Hildesheim liegt jetzt der Bistumsleitung vor. Die Ergebnisse werden aber erst im Oktober der Öffentlichkeit bekanntgemacht, wie der NDR berichtete. „Wir werden das Gutachten jetzt genau lesen und schauen, welche Schlüsse wir aus den Ergebnissen ziehen müssen“, erläuterte dazu Weihbischof Heinz-Günter Bongartz. Das Bistum hatte das Gutachten vor einem Jahr selbst beim Münchner Institut IPP in Auftrag gegeben, es geht nicht zuletzt um Missbrauchsvorwürfe gegen den 1988 verstorbenen früheren Hildesheimer Bischof Heinrich Maria Janssen und gegen den pensionierten Priester Peter R. zu prüfen.

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DETUSCHLAND
WDR

[The Wittgenstein Protestant Church District has dismissed its senior youth counselor. The 54-year-old is said to have sexually abused a teenager.]

Der Evangelische Kirchenkreis Wittgenstein hat seinen leitenden Jugendreferenten entlassen. Der 54-Jährige soll eine Jugendliche sexuell missbraucht haben.

Die Tat soll sich in einem Reisebus auf der Rückfahrt von einer Jugendreise ereignet haben, wie am Freitag (18.08.2017) bekannt wurde. Laut Siegener Staatsanwaltschaft und Kirchenkreis hat sich der Mann selbst angezeigt. Die Ermittlungen wegen des sexuellen Missbrauchs einer Schutzbefohlenen laufen.

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RHODE ISLAND
GoLocalProv

Friday, August 18, 2017
GoLocal News Team

United Nurses and Allied Professionals (UNAP) general counsel Christopher Callaci released the following statement today after GoLocal Prov unveiled the bankrupcty on Friday:

“We are deeply troubled by the potential impact this receivership may have on our members and their families who, for years, have been told they would be able to rely on this fund when they needed it the most.”

We expect the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence to be transparent about how the fund has been bled and left with a $43 million shortfall and what they plan to do to about it. There is a moral obligation to act soon so that people may retire with dignity and the financial stability the plan was supposed to provide.

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TENNESSEE
Tennessean

Anita Wadhwani and Holly Meyer, Knoxville Aug. 18, 2017

At the center of allegations that a 12-year-old boy was raped in 2015 in the locker room of an elite Brentwood Christian school are questions about how school officials respond to student misconduct.

A review of a Brentwood Academy student handbook reveals a biblical-based approach to student conduct.

Sexual abuse prevention advocates said portions of that guidance may be sending a troubling message to students.

And a comparison of Brentwood Academy student conduct and discipline guidelines to other local Christian and public schools shows a different approach to communicating how the academy responds to allegations of sexual misconduct.

‘Treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt taxpayer’

The academy’s “Student Conduct and Discipline” policy begins by quoting this version of Matthew 18:15-17 as its model:

“If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won the person back.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Aug 18, 2017
by Brian Roewe

A defamation case brought against Bill Donohue by a Kansas City man, whose account of clergy sexual abuse the Catholic League head doubted, closed Aug. 17 after the plaintiff opted not to appeal its dismissal by lower courts to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In April, the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a federal district court’s October 2015 ruling to dismiss charges of defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress brought by Jon David Couzens. The claims against Donohue traced to past press statements he issued about Couzens with regard to a 2011 lawsuit he brought against the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, Diocese.

The 90-day window to appeal the appeals court’s ruling closed on Thursday.

Both the district and appeals courts ruled that because the statements originated in New York, where Donohue and the Catholic League are based, that the case was subject to the state’s one-year statute of limitations, rather than Missouri law and its two-year statute of limitations. Couzens’ attorney argued that the Missouri statute applied because the state was the site where he sustained the alleged injuries.

Rebecca Randles, Couzens’ attorney, told NCR in an email an appeal was not pursued due to a belief that the case presented more of a state, rather than federal, issue, and the “slim chance” the Supreme Court would take it up. While she disagreed with the courts’ ruling on the statute of limitations, she added, “The opinion of the lower court is pretty clear that Donohue defamed my client.”

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RHODE ISLAND
GoLocalProv

Friday, August 18, 2017
GoLocalProv News Team

GoLocalProv has learned that the St. Joseph Health Services of Rhode Island pension fund has filed for receivership — the filing puts thousands of pensions at risk.

This is one of the largest pension failures in Rhode Island in recent history. It will take months to determine the total financial impact on the pensioners.

Kilmartin Signed Off

According to sources close to the matter, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 pension accounts will be impacted, but the exact number of individuals affected is not known.

The triggering event was a decision by the Diocese of Providence to exit the system. The fund is not connected to CharterCARE or their parent company, Prospect.

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GUAM
The Guam Daily Post

Mindy Aguon | The Guam Daily Post

“Brouillard would swim completely naked and routinely instructed V.Q. and the other boys to remove their clothes. Brouillard would grope and touch their private parts.”

– Lawsuit filed by attorney David Lujan on behalf of “V.Q.”

In 1977, “V.Q.” – using initials in recent court documents to protect his identity – joined the Mongmong Troop 18 Boy Scouts in hopes of participating in new activities and learning new things.

V.Q. said he was 14 when he joined the organization. He recalls attending meetings several times a week at the Nuestra Señora De Las Aguas Catholic Church in Mongmong to study the scout oaths and laws, and to practice marching, drills and map reading.

During those troop meetings, the boy met Father Louis Brouilard, who not only served as a priest for the Archdiocese of Agana but also as scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts.

According to a civil complaint filed yesterday in the District Court of Guam, during weekly outings with Brouillard to earn his swimming merit badge, V.Q. said he was sexually molested and abused on “numerous occasions” by the priest.

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UNITED STATES
Baptist News

BOB ALLEN | AUGUST 18, 2017

U.S. immigration officials have deported a former British Baptist minister and convicted sexual predator wanted for additional alleged sex crimes in the United Kingdom.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Aug. 16 that upon his release from a Virginia prison, 53-year-old Robert John Dando was accompanied by deportation officers on a commercial flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Heathrow Airport in London and turned over to authorities there.

Dando, one-time unpaid traveling assistant to British Baptist leader David Coffey when Coffey served as president of the Baptist World Alliance, appeared at Banbury Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday. He is charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse relating to nine victims over 23 years. Charges include rape and sexual assault of boys in the south of England and Wales between 1986 and 2009.

At the time senior minister at Worcester Park Baptist Church in suburban London, Dando entered the United States in July 2010 under a program that allows citizens of certain countries into the country for tourism, business or while in transit up to 90 days without having to obtain a visa.

He was arrested in Oakton, Va., on July 24, 2010, and eventually pleaded guilty to four counts of sexually molesting the young sons of family friends while on visits to their Northern Virginia home over a period of several years. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in Fairfax County Circuit Court in 2011.

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AUSTRALIA
National Catholic Reporter

Aug 18, 2017

by Kieran Tapsell

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has just released its Criminal Justice Report in which it deals with many matters relating to the way child sexual abuse within institutions is handled by the Australian criminal justice system. In the course of that report, it recommends mandatory reporting of all suspected child sexual abuse within institutions and the creation of new offences of failing to take proper care to prevent such abuse.

One recommendation that understandably created some media interest is that there should be no exemption to the reporting requirements for information provided in confession.

The commission’s report produces convincing evidence, not only in Australia, but also overseas, that priest sex abusers used confession as a means of assuaging their guilt. It made it easier for them to repeat their crimes because confession was always available.

In a response to the report, Jesuit Fr. Frank Brennan stated that a civil law requirement for priests to break the seal of confession was unlikely to lead to better protection for children because abusers would not confess such matters if they knew they had to be reported. Brennan said that he would disobey any such law and accept the consequences.

Archbishop Denis Hart, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, in his response said that the secret of the confessional is a “fundamental part of the freedom of religion…and it must remain so here in Australia.” In an interview on ABC Radio, Hart said he would go to jail rather than breach the secret.

It is surprising that no church representative has mentioned a way in which the church could significantly reduce the risk of breach of the seal by a fairly simple change to canon law based on a problem that has a long history.

Ever since private confession became the practice in the church in the early Middle Ages, there has been a continual problem of priests soliciting sex in the confessional. The church was so worried about the practice that the Council of Treves in 1227 required such priests to be excommunicated. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV required penitents to denounce such priests to the Inquisition or to the bishop, and that confessors should advise penitents of their obligation to do so. In 1741, Pope Benedict XIV confirmed this decree, and added that absolution should be refused to solicited penitents until they denounced their confessors. He also decreed that only popes could give absolution to penitents who falsely accused priests of soliciting.

The persons solicited were mostly women, less so men, but rarely young children because until 1910, they did not go to confession until they reached the age of 12 to 14 years. In 2010, Pope Pius X reduced the age to 7 years thus broadening the opportunities for paedophiles to find their victims. A number of case studies examined by the Australian Royal Commission confirmed that such soliciting of young children in the confessional had occurred in Australia.

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AUSTRALIA
The Weekend Australian

August 19, 2017

GREG CRAVEN
Columnist
Melbourne

Have things ever seemed worse for the Catholic Church in Australia? If it were a boxer, it would look tangled in the ropes, sliding towards the canvas and spitting blood. The past four years have been horrendous. Endless, horrifying accounts of historical child abuse. A royal commission relentlessly critiquing failures of bishops and processes. The media baying for yet more blood. Cardinal ­George Pell charged with abuse offences. The cardinal has the full presumption of innocence, but the communal trauma is palpable.

And now, a report from the commission eviscerating the Catholic sacrament of confession. How much worse can this get?

The entire spectacle has been relished by journalists, activists and downright bigots praying fervently to a non-existent God for the implosion of the Catholic Church. It would not be fair to say such critics have no interest in child abuse. No one can stomach the victimisation of children, by Catholics or others.

But to inveterate enemies of the church, the appalling reality of the scandal is incidental. They have battled Catholicism bitterly for decades on issues such as abortion, euthanasia and same-sex marriage. To anti-Catholic enthusiasts such as David Marr and Peter Fitzsimons, Catholicism has stood — if not alone, then lonely — against their self-focused creed of secular politics. This is their opportunity to kick the church hard when it is down. In normal circumstances, you could make these points without tarring and feathering. But these are not normal times.

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BOTSWANA
Mmegi blogs

By KGOSIETSILE NGAKAAGAE Fri 18 Aug 2017

It often takes a lifetime to build a reputation and a moment to have it all come crumbing down. Sexual scandals, in particular, make interesting reading but behind each, there is a hurting human being who may very well be totally innocent.

When news surrounding the resignation of the Roman Catholic Bishop broke out in a screaming headline last Friday, and went viral in social media, I paused to think of the hurt that the man was inevitably going through. I focused on him not out of lack of empathy for his accusers but because he was, at that moment, the one at the wrong end of the stick. Overnight, he had moved from being a symbol of all things right to one of all things wrong with the Catholic Church and the Christian clergy. His fate was sealed before his trial commenced. He stood disgraced, his reputation in tatters and social media gnawing at whatever remained of it.

I don’t know the Bishop from Jack. I have heard of him but I have never seen or met him. I do not purport to speak for him but purely for principle. Further, I do not know if he actually did the things he is alleged to have done. My point is that whilst it is impossible not to be concerned at such allegations, it is important to refrain from judgment on matters affecting people’s reputations until all facts are on the table. Any person would ask for that, similarly circumstanced. The need is especially pronounced in his case where, ex facie, the complaint as narrated, elicited more questions than answers. Let us consider the allegations, briefly.

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NEW YORK
New York Post

By Emily Saul August 17, 2017

These Yeshiva school “suppers” were definitely not kosher.

Two former leaders of a prestigious, Brooklyn-based chain of Yeshivas are facing up to 20 years prison for claiming they were serving kids federally subsidized suppers five nights a week — and instead pocketing the $3 million in subsidies, the feds said Thursday.

Elozer Porges and Joel Lowy, formerly executive director and assistant director of Central United Talmudic Academy, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and fraud at their arraignment in Brooklyn federal court.

The yeshiva bigwigs had submitted phony documents claiming that between 2014 and 2016, low-income and at-risk children stayed late and ate supper every weeknight at three of their schools — at 762 Wythe Ave., 25 Franklin St. and 84-88 Sandford St. — the charges allege.

But while many of the schools’ kids ate federally subsidized breakfasts, lunches and snacks, they wouldn’t stay for supper, the feds said.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the Boston Globe’s selective concern about fatherless children:

The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team is out with another attack on the Catholic priesthood: this one a two-part series on “Children of Catholic priests” who “live with secrets and sorrow.”

Using a few highly publicized cases, and several anecdotal stories, reporter Michael Rezendes concludes that by “any reasonable measure, there are thousands” of children around the world “who have strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests.” Yet as he acknowledges, with over 400,000 priests worldwide, even if the unsubstantiated “thousands” estimate is accepted, that could amount to as little as one percent or less of priests having fathered a child. And as he further acknowledges, some of these priests “took their responsibility seriously.”

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TENNESSEE
Tennessean

Holly Meyer, USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee Aug. 18, 2017

A Nashville priest reminded his congregation recently that suspected child abuse within their church community should be immediately reported to civil authorities.

Prompted by news of a lawsuit filed against Brentwood Academy, the Rev. Thomas McKenzie, who leads Church of the Redeemer, sent a letter to members reiterating the church’s reporting policy.

“This is just one of those moments where it’s now in the public consciousness and so I felt like we need to remind people of how this is supposed to be done,” said McKenzie, whose church is not connected to the school.

The lawsuit accuses the prestigious Christian school of not protecting a 12-year-old boy from repeated sexual assaults by teen boys in a locker room at the school.

McKenzie emphasized that he did not know what happened at Brentwood Academy, but the allegations prompted the need to revisit the congregation’s responsibility to children in its care.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

BY
ANDREW KESHNER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, August 17, 2017

Two ex-administrators at a Brooklyn Hasidic school system are accused of taking food out of the mouths of children.

Elozer Porges, 43, and Joel Lowy, 29, formerly of the Central United Talmudic Academy, were indicted Thursday on charges that they bilked a federal school meal program out of $3 million — putting in claims on food that was never served.

Brooklyn federal prosecutors said the unreal meal scheme took place between 2013 and 2015. They said the pair padded reimbursement claims so they could reap larger checks from the U.S. Child and Adult Care Food Program — a program meant to feed at-risk children.

The FBI and the city Department of Investigation launched a joint investigation into the reimbursement process in 2014 — specifically looking at whether dinners were actually served at the Williamsburg schools.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Esquire

A new Spotlight investigation in The Boston Globe shows it’s high time.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
AUG 17, 2017

Now that all that pesky Oscar Buzz has died down, it’s important to note that my old Boston Phoenix running buddy, Mike Rezendes, is Still On The Case. As part of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, Mike has written a sad and remarkable series about people who are the sons and daughters of purportedly celibate Roman Catholic clergy, and the shameful abandonment of those people by the institution for which their fathers worked.

Jim Graham couldn’t know in that moment that the stunning secret which had seemed his alone was not that unusual. By any reasonable measure, there are thousands of others who have strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests, though most are unaware that they have so much company in their pain. In Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Paraguay, and other countries, in American cities big and small — indeed, virtually anywhere the church has a presence — the children of priests form an invisible legion of secrecy and neglect, a Spotlight Team review has found. Their exact number can’t be known, but with more than 400,000 priests worldwide, many of them inconstant in their promise of celibacy, the potential for unplanned children is vast.

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MINNESOTA
KEYC

By Kelsey Barchenger, Morning/Midday Anchor

A retired priest with the Diocese of New Ulm faces an allegation of sexual abuse.

A statement from the diocese says police and parishioners have been notified.

The alleged abuse dates back to the 1990s when Fr. James Devorak was assigned to the St. Pius X parish in Glencoe.

A statement from Bishop John LeVoir goes on to say Fr. Devorak’s last assignment in the Diocese of New Ulm ended in July of 2015 and the Diocese is unaware of any other abuse allegations.

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

Haidee V Eugenio, heugenio@guampdn.com Aug. 18, 2017

A former Boy Scout accused former priest Louis Brouillard of sexually abusing him around 1977 or 1978 at Lonfit River, according to a lawsuit filed in the District Court of Guam.

The accuser, identified in court documents only by his initials V.Q., filed a $10 million lawsuit Friday afternoon against Brouillard, the Archdiocese of Agana, the Boy Scouts of America and its Aloha Council Chamorro District.

V.Q., represented by attorney David J. Lujan, is the 98th person to file a childhood sexual abuse lawsuit on Guam involving the Catholic Church.

As Scouts, V.Q. and other boys were required to meet several times a week at the Nuestra Senora De Las Aguas Catholic Church in Mongmong, the complaint says.

The lawsuit says Brouillard’s sexually predatory practices included weekly outings in which he would take V.Q. and other Scouts to the Lonfit River in Ordot Chalan Pago to compete for their swimming badges.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
BBC News

Victims of institutional abuse have said they are angry that NI Secretary James Brokenshire will not to use his powers to make interim compensation payments.

The Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) Inquiry recommended a state apology and compensation for victims.

The collapse of Stormont in January meant the process was put on hold.

A spokesperson said Mr Brokenshire had made “no decisions” on the issue.

The government spokesperson added that it “remains a devolved issue” and that abuse compensation was “one of the many reasons (Mr Brokenshire) remains determined to get an NI Executive back up and running”.

“He continues to urge the parties to seek urgent resolution to restore the executive so that a response can be provided to Sir Anthony’s (HIA) report at the earliest opportunity.”

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

Lisa Martin
AAP

The royal commission into child sex abuse may need to have separate public and confidential volumes in order to avoid prejudicing Cardinal George Pell’s legal case.

The final report is expected to be in the order of 15,000 pages long and goes to the federal government on December 15.

AAP understands the commission and government are grappling with potential legal issues over the Pell case.

The royal commission has only examined Pell’s handling of abuse allegations against other clergy in the church while he was Melbourne Archbishop and a Ballarat priest and not claims against him personally.

Pell, Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic official and ranked number three in the Vatican, was charged in June with multiple historical sex offence charges involving multiple complainants.

There has been speculation in legal circles that the public release of the final report and Melbourne and Ballarat case studies may have to be delayed.

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AUSTRALIA
Wollondilly Advertiser

The region’s highest-ranking Catholic does not believe priests should be compelled to report child abuse admissions made during the sanctity of Confession.

Bishop Peter Ingham, head of the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong – which encompasses the entire Macarthur region – says Catholic faith dictates the Seal of Confession “cannot be broken” and it is equally important to “preserve the sanctity” of confession and “protect, defend and help children”.

He said it was not an “either or” situation, but rather a “both and”.

The Bishop has clarified his position in response to a recent recommendation out of the Royal Commission into child abuse within the Catholic church.

The recommendation suggested priests should be compelled by law to report to authorities any instances of child abuse admitted to them during Confession.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Editorial

It is understandable that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Australia is resistant to the recommendation by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that priests be legally compelled to report to police information received via the confessional. But the church’s hostility is not reasonable, and legislators should implement this and other recommendations in the commission’s Criminal Justice Report, one of the publications flowing from the four-year investigation.

Transgression of the centuries-old seal of the confessional (the duty of priests to never divulge what penitents have confessed) is penalised with automatic excommunication. The commission has heard evidence of the misuse of the confessional. Priests guilty of serial child rape have used it to seek absolution before repeating their crime. Predatory paedophile priests have used it to groom victims. The commission concludes: “The report recommends there be no exemption, excuse, protection or privilege from the offence granted to clergy for failing to report information disclosed in connection with a religious confession.”

That is a just and logical proposal. Notwithstanding the separation of church and state (which protects religious freedom, entrusts lawmaking to the polity and enshrines a secular society), priests, like everyone else, are not above the law. Mandatory reporting is seen as effective in other professions that work with children. Tradition per se is an insufficient argument against change. The priority is the protection of children. The seal of the confessional has protected paedophile priests.

The commission’s other recommendations include: allowing multiple victims to give evidence against a single alleged abuser; increased sentences for historical offences; criminalising an institution’s failure to protect a child or report abuse; and stronger anti-grooming laws. The rule of law – and the associated principles that we are all equal under the law and that justice is blind – is fundamental to our social, economic and political stability. In this case of a clash between canonical law (law stemming from papal edict) and statute, it is in the public interest that child protection trump all other considerations.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Claire Fox and Cillian Sherlock
August 17 2017

A Magdalene Laundries campaigner has called for the removal of a statue dedicated to the Sisters of Mercy outside a former laundry in Dublin.

Patricia McDonald, founder of Justice for Magdalene Laundries, told Joe Duffy on RTE Radio One’s Liveline that the statue of a nun welcoming a poor woman and baby outside the Sisters of Mercy convent does not reflect the suffering that women experienced at the laundry.

“It does not record the actual reality of suffering and distress experienced by generations of women. It’s inappropriate. I’m not decrying the piece. It’s a nice piece of art,” she said.

Ms McDonald grew up in the Baggot Street area of Dublin and recalled how she would see the women emerging from the back of laundry but didn’t understand the significance of what they were doing.

“I remembered as a child seeing huge wooden doors open occasionally and steam coming out and women in uniforms appearing out in the lane way. As a child I didn’t know the significance of that and that it was in fact a laundry,” she added.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Church Militant

by Stephen Wynne • ChurchMilitant.com • August 17, 2017

New investigation uncovers more evidence of Church in crisis

BOSTON (ChurchMilitant.com) – Fifteen years after its bombshell report on clerical sex abuse, the Boston Globe is again throwing light on a dark corner of the Church — this time exposing the plight of children fathered by unchaste priests.

In a two-part series published Wednesday and Thursday, the paper released findings from an investigation led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Rezendes, who in 2002 first unmasked the sexual abuse crisis in the Church.

Rezendes’ new report reveals that across the world, thousands of people are uncovering “strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests.” The prevalence of the phenomenon is such that in 2014, Vincent Doyle, the son of an Irish priest, established Coping International, an organization devoted to providing support to offspring of Catholic priests and religious.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Nick O’Malley

Father Michael McArdle was reportedly so distressed by his acts of child sexual abuse in Queensland that he would often seek the succour of the confessional. Over a 25-year period, before he was convicted in 2002, he confessed to sexually assaulting children an estimated 1500 times to 30 different priests. In keeping with Catholic tradition in Australia, the priests did not report to his crimes to authorities, but moved him on to different parishes, to greener pastures.

McArdle’s case resonates this week because on Monday the royal commission into child sex abuse released 85 recommendations on improvements to the criminal justice system. Among them was the proposal that the seal of the religious confessional be broken and that clergy who fail to report child abuse revealed in confession face criminal prosecution, just as anyone else in Australia would. Since the Catholic Church is the only major religion in Australia that still insists its canon law be held above secular law in this regard, this was rightly seen as a challenge, and the Catholic Church, defensive of its significant privileges, responded.

On Tuesday Melbourne’s archbishop, Denis Hart, told the ABC: “I believe that this is an absolutely sacrosanct communication of a higher order which priests by nature respect, they don’t ever want to do anything that would hurt children,” he said.

Writing for Fairfax Media this week, Father Frank Brennan said he would go to jail before abiding by such a law and sought to explain his reasoning. “Common sense tells me that a sex abuser would be even less likely to present for confession if he knew that the confessional seal did not apply,” he wrote. “If the seal of the confessional were maintained, there is a chance, just a chance, that a child sex abuser might be convinced by the priest to turn himself in. Take away the seal, and that ever so slim chance will be snuffed out.”

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CONNECTICUT/NEW HAMPSHIRE
The Connecticut Law Tribune

ROBERT STORACE, The Connecticut Law Tribune
August 17, 2017

A 48-year-old California man allegedly raped as a teenager by an employee at the Connecticut-based Legion of Christ has filed a federal lawsuit seeking millions of dollars in damages.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, claims the victim identified only as John Doe was first sexually assaulted at the now-defunct Immaculate Conception Apostolic School in New Hampshire when he was 13 years old. The teenager was allegedly raped every two to three weeks for about three and half years at the Roman Catholic boarding school for boys grades 7-12.

Cheshire-based Legion of Christ oversaw the school.

It’s alleged that a man known as Brother Fernando Cutanda abused John Doe and another boy at the school, and that officials did nothing to stop it, according to the lawsuit. John Doe claims he told Father Patrick O’Carroll about the alleged abuse during confession, he was told to pray “five rosaries for his sins, gave him penance and said ‘God will take care of things.'”

Jeffrey Herman, one of John Doe’s three attorneys, said his client “is strong, but deeply damaged. He thought it was time to come forward.”

Herman said Cutanda allegedly “groomed” the boy for sex. Herman said he does not know where Cutanda is today.

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ARGENTINA
Associated Press

BY ALMUDENA CALATRAVA
ASSOCIATED PRESS

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The general director of an elite school founded by the Marist Brothers in Argentina has admitted he sexually abused a student 38 years ago, an official for the order said Thursday.

Gonzalo Santa Coloma, the order’s official for protecting children in Buenos Aires province, told The Associated Press that Brother Angel Duples acknowledged the abuse after the order began an investigation following a report by a former student who had talked with the victim.

At the time of the abuse, Duples was a lay brother working at a branch of the Champagnat school on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. He has been director of the school’s main branch in downtown Buenos Aires over the past decade.

“I asked him: Did this really happen or is it just another tale? And he told me that it had happened, that there was fondling,” Santa Coloma said in recounting a conversation he had with Duples.

“He realizes the seriousness of this issue and the evil that he might have done,” the official said, adding that Duples asked to be removed from his duties at the school.

Santa Coloma declined to let AP contact Duples, saying he is “depressed and medicated” and has been sent to a nursing home owned by the Marist Brothers where he has no contact with children.

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UNITED STATES
America

The Editors

In a scene reminiscent of many Hollywood movies, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne has announced that he would rather go to prison than report an allegation of sexual abuse he heard during a sacramental confession. “It is a sacred trust,” Hart told a radio station in Melbourne on Aug. 15. Archbishop Hart’s defense of the confessional seal was prompted by a report released the day before by Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that included a recommendation to criminalize priests’ failures to report sexual abuse heard during confession. While the commissioners noted the Catholic mandate that the seal never be broken, “we heard evidence of a number of instances where disclosures of child sexual abuse were made in religious confession, by both victims and perpetrators,” the report added.

In 2012 in Ireland, horror at the extent of sexual abuse of minors (as well as a gimlet eye toward a church that had long operated with a heavy hand in Irish civic life) led legislators to propose a similar law. Here in the United States, legislative battles have been waged from Louisiana to Massachusetts to California over “confession carve-outs” in laws that allow for exemptions to mandated reporting for sacramental confessions.

Such stories always draw media attention, in part because of our cultural obsession (and not just among Catholics) with the mysteries and terrors of the confessional box. Nary a cop drama has existed in the history of television without a police officer hiding in a confessional to hear evidence of a crime. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film “I Confess” has as its major plot point a priest who hears a murderer’s confession; the 1994 film “Priest”also features a cleric who is unable to act on a confession of sexual abuse because of the inviolability of the seal.

To the secular mind, the confessional seal is madness—a loophole in the law, a violation of state neutrality with regard to religion, a “medieval law” (to quote a member of the Australian Parliament), a tool for institutional corruption and coverup. And who, after all, wants to see abusers hide behind the sacraments?

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a lawsuit brought against him and the Catholic League:

At every step of the way, a lawsuit filed by Rebecca Randles against me and the Catholic League was knocked down by the courts. I never libeled anyone, and she knows it. She lost in the U.S. District Court, and then lost again in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She wisely decided not to appeal her bogus lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court, though it would have been fun to watch her lose again.

Randles tried to silence me, and she failed. She should have known better.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Mary-Rose MacColl

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart has said he’ll risk going to jail rather than report what’s said to him in the sacrament of confession, even if what’s confessed relates to child sexual abuse.

His latest comments, made on ABC radio, were responding to a recommendation from the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse to make reporting child sexual abuse allegations mandatory in institutions including when an allegation is made in religious confession. Failure to report would be a criminal offence.

The recommendation is one of a suite of proposed reforms to improve transparency and reporting of sexual abuse and improve the law’s effectiveness to apprehend sexual abusers and protect children.

Archbishop Hart wouldn’t report something said in confession by a child who’s been abused or by an abuser. Non-Catholics don’t understand confession, he said. Confession is sacrosanct, above the law, which is what makes it different from other forms of telling. It’s communication with God of a higher order.

Like many Catholics, I spent my childhood in fortnightly confession and frankly I don’t understand confession either. I recall the queasy light and the slightly creepy whispering of the priest in that little tardis of shame that sat on one side of the church. I got the same penance every fortnight by making up the same sins. I’d say I lied, I stole, because I couldn’t think of any actual sins. My penance was always a couple of Hail Marys.

The seal of confession, its secrecy, was important, we were told in religion class at school. A priest was hanged for a murder he didn’t commit because he wouldn’t reveal the murderer’s true identity, which he’d learned through confession. That’s how tight the seal was. It amazed us.

When I was 16, I went to confession for real. I’d been sexually abused by a Catholic high school teacher and her husband. I went to see a priest on the suggestion of one of my abusers, because I was so upset.

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MINNESOTA
Hutchinson Leader

BY JEREMY JONES jones@hutchinsonleader.com Aug 17, 2017

Glencoe Police Chief Jim Raiter confirmed Thursday morning that police are investigating an accusation of sexual abuse against the Rev. James Devorak.

Devorak was assigned to St. Pius X parish in Glencoe from 1985 to 1995, and at St. Anastasia parish in Hutchinson and St. Boniface parish of Stewart from 1995 to 2000.

According to the New Ulm Diocese, he has been accused of sexual abuse while serving in Glencoe. Raiter said he could provide no other details about the investigation.

“Police, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and affected parishes are being notified of this allegation,” Bishop John M. LeVoir of the Diocese of New Ulm said in a statement. “Fr. Devorak is a retired priest of the Diocese of New Ulm. His last assignment in the Diocese of New Ulm ended in July 2015. From July 2015 to July 31, 2017, he was assigned within the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis as a parochial vicar.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Canary

AUGUST 17TH, 2017 Kerry-anne Mendoza

The Guardian has published a call that confidentiality rules should protect Catholics who admit to child sexual abuse in confession. While the author rightly calls on us to consider our own humanity, she neglects entirely the issue of widespread child abuse within the church. Abuse is about shame, and silence. And it’s time to break both.

The priest abuse scandal

First, we need to set the piece in the context of the priest abuse scandal. Representatives of the Roman Catholic church have engaged in child sexual abuse on an industrial scale.

The church abused children in the US, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Malta, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, Ireland, the Dominican Republic and Australia. From local priests to cardinals, church leaders conspired to rape and sexually assault children; and protect each other (and the church) from justice. In 2012, experts advised the Vatican that there could be 100,000 victims of clerical child sexual abuse in the US alone.

Australia provided one of the most robust responses to the scandal. It launched a royal commission into both the abuse and the cover up, with extraordinary powers of subpoena. And it found that, between 1950 and 2015, 7% of Australian priests were accused of abusing children. In some orders, up to 40% of brothers had allegations of abuse against them. The commission later established a key reason that so few accusations ever made it to the police.

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UNITED STATES
The Worthy Adversary

August 17, 2017 Joelle Casteix

Rita Milla had a horror story.

It was a story that no one could believe.

It was 1978. The California teenager said she was being sexually abused by seven priests from the Philippines. She was 16.

Who would believe a horrible story like that?

The abuse continued.

Then she got pregnant. One of the priests, Santiago Tamayo, urged her to have an abortion. When she wouldn’t, he and the father of the child, Father Valentine Tugade, convinced Rita’s mother to send the now-19-year-old to the Philippines, where she could have the child in secret. Rita’s mother didn’t know her daughter was pregnant.

Rita gave birth to a healthy and beautiful daughter. In 1983, Rita went public.

Milla and her family demanded answers from the Archdiocese. All hell broke loose.

Scattered priests

The priests scattered … All under the protection of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and bishops in the Philippines.

Why? Rita’s allegations had merit.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

CHRISSIE FOSTER
The Australian
August 18, 2017

This week saw the publication of the Criminal Justice report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It calls for sweeping change to the Catholic Church’s seal of confession.

The confessional seal can be hideous: it has been proven to be so in the case of former Catholic priest Michael McArdle and shows emphatically why change is needed.

This case is not from some far-away Third World country; it is from here in Australia, in Queensland. It is an expose of blatant criminal behaviour that can be hidden by the confessional seal — a noxious secret between a priest and a pedophile colleague that facilitates and enables heinous crimes to continue and be swept under the carpet at the expense of children, their lives and their wellbeing, all of which neither sinner nor holy forgiver give a damn about.

It is rare to obtain powerful insight into a pedophile’s private, secret confessions because the “good” priest will not tell and neither will the criminal priest … usually. That’s what makes the Mc­Ardle case gold; this one example we have needs careful examination because it exposes what happens behind the private and closed seal of the confessional for criminal child clergy rapists.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

By Michael Rezendes
Photos by Suzanne Kreiter, Globe Staff August 17, 2017

This is one story in a two-part Spotlight series. Click here to read part one.

HE CARRIED HIS DOUBTS and disappointment across miles and decades, from childhood to adulthood, and finally at the age of 48 to the kitchen table of a modest house outside of Buffalo. There, he would ask an elderly aunt and uncle to help him answer the question that had troubled him all his life: Why had his father always seemed to dislike him so much?

With his parents already dead, Jim Graham pleaded with his Aunt Kathryn and Uncle Otto to tell him the truth about his family. Finally, Kathryn unfolded a newsletter published by a Catholic religious order and slid it across the table. She jabbed a finger at a picture of a sad, balding figure wearing a priest’s clerical collar.

“Only the principals know for sure,” she said, “but this may be your father.”

Jim Graham studied the picture. Those were his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Then he skimmed the obituary of the priest, the Rev. Thomas Sullivan, a cleric who had graduated from Boston College and trained for the priesthood in Tewksbury.

If a life can have a crystallizing moment, for Jim Graham that 1993 meeting was it, discovering that his father might have been a Catholic priest, rather than John Graham, the distant man who raised him with scarcely a kind or comforting word.

Jim Graham couldn’t know in that moment that the stunning secret which had seemed his alone was not that unusual. By any reasonable measure, there are thousands of others who have strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests, though most are unaware that they have so much company in their pain. In Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Paraguay, and other countries, in American cities big and small — indeed, virtually anywhere the church has a presence — the children of priests form an invisible legion of secrecy and neglect, a Spotlight Team review has found.

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MISSISSIPPI
Sun Herald

BY JEFF CLARK
jclark@sunherald.com

AUGUST 16, 2017

A former pastor at a Pearl River County church is facing jail time after pleading guilty to two sex crime charges in Hancock County.

The Sea Coast Echo reports that David Matthew Thorne, 35, of Picayune, on Monday pleaded guilty in Hancock County Circuit Court to one count of sexual battery and one count of touching a child for lustful purposes. He will be sentenced Sept. 25.

Thorne was arrested in March 2016 for molesting a 15-year-old girl in a church van while he was the youth pastor at Goodyear Baptist Church in Picayune.

He was also arrested on a charge of sexual battery, his third sex crime charge, in Pearl River County less than 24 hours after his arrest in Hancock County. The alleged crimes came under investigation after the child’s parents notified law enforcement officials.

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UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Betty Clermont

The phrase Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam – For the Greater Glory of God – is the motto of the Jesuits and their founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola. The point of Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro and Presbyterian pastor Marcelo Figueroa’s July 13 article in the Jesuit weekly, La Civiltà Cattolica, is the greater glory of Pope Francis. He is the “courageous” pontiff opposed to the “ecumenism of hate” formed by American “Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists.”

Spadaro is an Italian theologian and editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, the content of which is approved by the Vatican Secretariat of State. Spadaro’s book, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet, was published in 2012. He built a website in the early ‘90s, then a blog, “was on Twitter in 2005 and Facebook pretty much as soon as it opened to the public,” he said in an interview.

Spadaro was contacted by Pope Francis shortly after his election. His first interview with the pope eventually took place soon after “Who am I to judge,” taken out of context, made headlines and went viral. The comment by the pope in Spadaro’s interview that “It is not necessary to talk about abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods all the time,” extracted from a very lengthy interview, also made headlines.

Spadaro did several more interviews with Pope Francis becoming his “mouthpiece” and one of his “trusted advisers.”

The Argentine Figueroa is a longtime friend of Pope Francis. The pope was not satisfied with the Spanish edition of the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, as directed by the Argentine Silvina Pérez, according to Vatican reporter, Sandro Magister. He wanted an edition just for Argentina to “promote direct access to [his] actions, gestures and texts,” wrote papal biographer, Austen Ivereigh.

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AUSTRALIA
The Courier-Mail

Terry Sweetman, The Courier-Mail

POLITICS is where good ideas go to die, to be crushed by raw numbers, suffocated by belief or prejudice, or left to perish in the face of expediency.

One such good idea is the recommendation by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse that priests be forced to accept the same legal responsibilities as the rest of us.

Among its wish list of 85 recommendations was that failing to report child sexual abuse be a criminal offence and there should be “no excuse, protection, nor privilege” for priests who fail to alert police because the information was received in confession.

The commission noted evidence of multiple cases in which priest penitents went unreported, unpunished, and protected.

Worse, it heard of cases where abuse disclosed by child victims was kept close to the confessional chest.

“We are satisfied that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt,’’ it said.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

Joanne McCarthy
17 Aug 2017

IN October, 1995 a Hunter Catholic priest took down a short statement from a woman who had been sexually abused by a priest from when she was eight, once while he was hearing her confession.

The child sex offender priest was Denis McAlinden, an Irish cleric sent to Australia at the age of 26.

The woman told of repeated sexual abuse over three or four years.

I’ve spoken with her many times. I’ve spoken with two other McAlinden victims who were also sexually assaulted by him while in the confessional.

If you go to the Vatican website and find the Code of Canon Law it includes Canon 1387. It says that a priest who “under the pretext of confession solicits a penitent to sin against the sixth commandment” – thou shalt not commit adultery – “is to be punished . . . by suspension, prohibitions and privations”. In graver cases “he is to be dismissed from the clerical state”.

It’s accepted by some theologians that the sixth commandment covers the whole of human sexuality, and not just the strict interpretation of adultery. In other words, sexually abusing a child in the confessional could invoke Canon 1387.

Documents show retiring Maitland-Newcastle Bishop Leo Clarke, Father Brian Lucas, incoming bishop Michael Malone and the priest who took the statement had roles to play in an unsuccessful attempt to defrock McAlinden in 1995, with his “good name protected by the confidential nature of this process”.

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AUSTRALIA
Australian Jewish News

RABBI Meir Shlomo Kluwgant has resigned as principal and CEO of Melbourne’s Adass Israel School.

The AJN can reveal that Rabbi Kluwgant tendered his resignation because of concerns raised by child sexual abuse survivor Dassi Erlich, who met with the board last month.

Erlich was sexually abused by former Adass principal Malka Leifer, who was spirited out of the country by members of the Adass community in 2008 after allegations of her abuse became public.

Welcoming news of Rabbi Kluwgant’s resignation, Erlich told The AJN, “I feel heartened that I was able to speak out for the students past and present of the school and the school board heard my concerns and acted. It really gives me hope that the school is moving in the right direction and positive change is happening.”

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CANADA
Regina Leader-Post

Jennifer Ackerman, Regina Leader-Post

Conrad Weenie was diagnosed with diabetes in 1997. Now 53 years old, he has lost a leg due to complications and is close to losing another. Once that happens, he’ll go from getting around on crutches into a wheelchair.

He said the results of a recent study that show a link between hunger and malnutrition in residential schools and long-term health issues, such as obesity and diabetes, in Indigenous peoples doesn’t surprise him at all.

“My grandfather raised me … He went to he Delmas residential school and he told me stories about what they ate, the nuns and priests, they had all the good food and (the students) were just given porridge all the time,” said Weenie who attended the North Central Health Fair and BBQ on Wednesday.

“They only ate good once a year and that was Christmastime he told me. But most of the time it was just the church, the priests and the nuns, that ate all the good food and the Indians were … hungry all the time,” said Weenie.

He attended the health fair, which focused on diabetes risk awareness, after a home care worker told him about it. Hosted by Diabetes Canada at the Rainbow Youth Centre in the North Central neighbourhood, the fair provided an opportunity for residents to get a diabetes risk assessment done as well as get information about resources available to them in the community.

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CANADA
APTN National News

August 16, 2017

Shirley McLean
APTN National News

Emma Shorty still remembers her days at the Chooutla residential school and more specifically, the hunger that went along with it.

“There was hardly any food,” Shorty told APTN National News.

According to a study by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the severe hunger and malnutrition students faced at residential schools are still causing health issues for Indigenous peoples today including diabetes, and obesity.

Co-author Ian Mosby said previous research on malnutrition in schools, along with testimony from survivors, was the basis for the report.

“What we found was what many survivors have talked about is this unending hunger,” said Mosby.

Read the CMAJ Report here: Hunger was never absent

Shorty was born on her family trap line in 1933.

At the age of four, she was taken from her family and placed in Chooutla in Carcross, Yukon.

“The food wasn’t good and they said it was because of world war two but we could have eaten better,” said Shorty.

According to the Shorty, students often had to fend for themselves to eat.

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CANADA
CBC News

By Murray Brewster, CBC News Posted: Aug 17, 2017

The Canadian military’s marching orders for chaplains who counsel perpetrators or victims of sexual misconduct is causing a crisis of conscience for some clergy, federal documents reveal.

A series of morale and welfare reports obtained by CBC News under Access to Information legislation show the issue of pastors being compelled to testify in court has become a matter of increasing unease among military clergy.

“There is concern by chaplains that they are potentially breaching the confidentiality of those receiving spiritual care,” said a March 2015 summary prepared by the military chaplain general’s office. Moreover, the report said, “the existing framework for legal assistance to chaplains does not provide legal advice for them.”

Pastors on bases along the West Coast seemed the most concerned about the ethical dilemma, and at one point they consulted with the regional prosecutor’s office to review legal issues related to chaplain confidentiality in courts martial.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philly.com

A former parochial-school teacher, whose conviction of sexually abusing a 10-year-old altar boy from Northeast Philadelphia years was thrown out amid questions about his accuser’s truthfulness, has pleaded no contest to a lesser crime, a decision that allowed him to be released from prison.

Rather than face a new trial, Bernard Shero, 54, a former teacher at St. Jerome school, pleaded no contest Monday to less serious child rape and assault charges and was sentenced to the roughly four years in prison he has already served.

In 2013, Shero was convicted in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court of rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, child endangerment, corruption of a minor, and indecent assault, and sentenced to eight to 16 years in prison. He was released Wednesday.

George Bochetto, one of Shero’s lawyers, said he was “deeply, deeply concerned with the way the prosecution took place in this matter.”

Prosecutors declined to comment on the ruling or the plea, citing ongoing litigation in related cases.

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AUSTRALIA
Bendigo Advertiser

Emma D’Agostino
@amassedmedia

17 Aug 2017

SANDHURST Bishop Les Tomlinson has defended the sanctity of confession, despite recommendations to prioritise children’s safety from sexual abuse.

The bishop’s comments were prompted by a report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

One of its 85 recommendations was to enforce failure to report offences for information about child sexual abuse that was disclosed during, or in connection with, religious confession.

“There should be no excuse, protection nor privilege in relation to religious confessions for the failure to report offence,” the report states.

The writers said they understood the significance of confession. But they said they had heard evidence of confessions relating to child sexual abuse that were not reported to police, and resulted in re-offending.

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ROME
Christian Today

James Macintyre 17 August 2017

Pope Francis has branded the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests an ‘absolute monstrosity’ and pledged action against the perpetrators as well as bishops and cardinals who have protected them.

The Pope made the comments in the foreword of a new book entitled Father, I Forgive You: Abused But Not Broken, written by a Swiss man, Daniel Pittet, who was first raped by a priest when he was eight years old.

Pope Francis, whose repeated promises of zero tolerance have been criticised by victims who say the Vatican needs to do much more, called sexual abuse ‘an absolute monstrosity, a terrible sin that contradicts everything that the Church teaches’.

The Pope’s foreword was published on Wednesday by the German daily newspaper Bild.

Francis said that the fate of abused children, especially those who had taken their own lives, weighed on his soul.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Metro

Described by a Philadelphia grand jury in 2005 as one of the most notorious serial abusers in Philadelphia, Catholic priest Rev. James J. Brzyski was never charged. Now, a man who says he was one of his victims is speaking out.

John-Michael Delaney, 46, of Sevierville, Tennessee, grew up in the Fox Chase section of Northeast Philly and attended St. Cecilia’s Catholic school where he lived with his mother and stepfather, as well as his little sister, who is now a Philadelphia police detective.

“My earliest memory of church was my first confession. I became an altar boy. Father James J. Bryzski was the head of the altar boys. That’s when the abuse started,” said Delaney. “I was raped by the time I was 13. He befriended my family and was at our house a lot inviting us to the rectory all while he was molesting me and at least a dozen other boys in St. Cecilia’s.”

This shocking and detailed information is told in graphic detail in the 2005 Philadelphia grand jury report. Delaney was identified as “Sean” in the report.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Review

STEPHEN HUBA | Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2017

A group of Catholic lay people and clergy is calling on Greensburg Bishop Edward C. Malesic and other church hierarchs to acknowledge that the clergy sexual abuse scandal is feeding the opioid epidemic.

“He’s got to take some responsibility,” said Tom Venditti, founder of Faithful Catholics Against Pedophilia.

Venditti of Bolivar said he founded FCAP earlier this year to help victims of clergy sexual abuse and encourage them to stay in the Catholic Church.

The group held a news conference Wednesday prior to the last of seven Summer Diocesan Drug Education and Prayer Service Evenings led by Malesic. The final event was held at St. Thomas More University Parish in Indiana Borough.

Venditti said he wanted to address “Malesic’s failure to acknowledge clerical sexual abuse as a doorway to heroin abuse and death.”

“We’re here specifically because one of the things you’re not going to hear tonight … is that the majority of victims of clergy sexual abuse become addicts, whether it’s to alcohol or heroin or other hard drugs,” he said.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Aug 17, 2017
by Peter Feuerherd

Emboldened by Pope Francis, church reformers are endorsing a call by the Brazilian bishops for a Year of the Laity, expanded to include conferences and observances around the world from November of this year until November 2018.

The meetings will focus on why “the people of God need to be treated equally in the church” and “the people taking the Gospel out into the world,” Rene Reid, director of Catholic Church Reform International, told NCR.

Groups lining up in support of the Year of the Laity include Catholic Church Reform International as well as Call to Action, she said. Participants from those groups will be urging an increased role for the laity in the church. They will promote lay participation in the selection of bishops, an end to mandatory celibacy for clergy and openness to allowing the Eucharist for divorced and remarried Catholics as well as the LGBTQ community.

Reid said the impetus for the movement comes from Pope Francis. “He wants the people of God to step up and take a leadership role, and we are,” she said.

Catholic Church Reform International began in 2013, after Reid took a pilgrimage to Spain, walking the Camino de Santiago and reflecting upon Pope Francis’ call for change in the church. A writer, former religious and director of religious education, Reid, based in Reno, Nevada, was inspired to connect church reform groups around the world. Thanks to the internet, she has made extensive connections.

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MASSACHUSETTS
CBS Boston

BOSTON (CBS) – One of the Boston Globe reporters made famous in the movie “Spotlight” has a new bombshell story on the Catholic Church – thousands of people claim they were fathered by priests.

Globe Spotlight reporter Michael Rezendes appeared on CBS This Morning Wednesday to discuss the first part of his report, “Children of Catholic Priests Live with Secrets and Sorrow.”

“We know there are many more than people assume, probably in the thousands. Just recently, about two years ago, a son of a priest in Ireland set up a website called Coping International and he’s heard from scores of people from all over the world who are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests,” Rezendes said.

Rezenedes first heard from a man named Jim Graham, who’s profiled in the Globe story.

“Jim spent many years tracking down evidence that a priest was his father. I was impressed with what he suffered, the pain he endured, and I was impressed with his detective work, but still it was just one person and it wasn’t until Vincent Doyle called me and gave me the information he collected through his website that I realized this was a systemic situation and deserved my full attention,” Rezendes said.

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UNITED KINGDOM
International Business Times

By William Watkinson
August 16, 2017

A south London pastor who blindfolded children then hit them with belts and wires while shouting “Jesus” at them has been spared jail.

Croydon Crown Court heard how Rose Amadasun, from Beauchamp Road, South Norwood,
The investigating detective said that he came up against “resistance” from the congregation “as they closed ranks to protect their religious leader” before she was convicted.

An investigation was triggered after two members of the public said they had witnessed the 49-year-old hitting children with a belt while shouting “Jesus” aggressively at them.

It was then that detectives from the Metropolitan Police’s Child Abuse and Sexual Offences Command began their investigation.

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JAMAICA
Loop

A pastor and businessman from the Corporate Area has been charged with five sexual offences in relation to a minor.

The accused is 55-year-old Kenneth Blake of a Kingston address.

Officers from the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA) charged the minister with rape, forcible abduction, sexual touching of a child, sexual intercourse with a person under age 16, and grievous sexual assault.

The allegations are that he had repeated sexual relations with an underage girl between 2015 and 2017.

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TEXAS
CBS DFW

NORTH RICHLAND HILLS (CBSDFW.COM) – Police have arrested a 52-year-old man for sexually abusing two women when they were children.

Jose Francisco Bernal was taken into custody at his home in the 7200 block of Deville Drive in North Richland Hills and charged with two counts of Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Child.

The charges were the result of a criminal investigation where two adult females made outcries of numerous sexual abuse incidents at the hands of Bernal.

The women were children living in the city of Hurst between the years of 2007 and 2013 when they met Bernal. He was their pastor at the Tabernaculo De Vida Pentecostal Church on W. Dickson Street in Fort Worth.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
San Francisco Chronicle

ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE, ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 16, 2017

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A former Catholic school teacher convicted of raping a child was released more than a decade early from prison on Wednesday after a judge threw out his conviction amid questions about his accuser’s truthfulness.

Rather than face a new trial, however, Bernard Shero, 54, pleaded no contest on Monday to less serious child rape and assault charges and was sentenced to the roughly four years in prison he’s already served. He originally was sentenced in 2013 to up to 16 years.

The accuser had helped to convict three other church officials, including a monsignor who became the first to be criminally charged for mishandling complaints about sexual abuse by priests.

Retired detective Joseph Walsh, who had worked on the case for the district attorney’s office, told prosecutors several times that he could not corroborate the accuser’s story. But the detective said they dismissed him, with one assistant district attorney going so far as to tell him “you’re killing my case,” according to a court filing.

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MASSACHUSETTS
CBS This Morning

[with video]

The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team is unveiling a report on what it calls a worldwide and “systemic problem” within the Catholic Church: priests fathering illegitimate children.

Reporter Michael Rezendes, who was depicted in the 2015 Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight,” writes thousands of people across the world – “in Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Paraguay, and other countries, in American cities big and small” – have “strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests.” The children say they’re often neglected or shamed into silence.

Here’s an excerpt from Rezendes’ report:

He carried his doubts and disappointment across miles and decades, from childhood to adulthood, and finally at the age of 48 to the kitchen table of a modest house outside of Buffalo. There, he would ask an elderly aunt and uncle to help him answer the question that had troubled him all his life: Why had his father always seemed to dislike him so much?

With his parents already dead, Jim Graham pleaded with his Aunt Kathryn and Uncle Otto to tell him the truth about his family. Finally, Kathryn unfolded a newsletter published by a Catholic religious order and slid it across the table. She jabbed a finger at a picture of a sad, balding figure wearing a priest’s clerical collar.

“Only the principals know for sure,” she said, “but this may be your father.”

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

Read Cardinal O’Malley’s statement on children of priests

Children of Catholic priests live with secrets and sorrow

By Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff August 16, 2017

Their father was a priest who left their mother to die

James Perry was watching the news for snow cancellations on a December evening back in 2002, when a story unexpectedly caught his eye. The Boston Archdiocese had released records showing that a local priest had fathered two children and later abandoned their mother to die, after she overdosed on sleeping pills.

The woman had lived in Needham, just like Perry’s mother. And she died in 1973, the same year as Rita Perry. Perhaps most telling, the TV reporter said the woman had undergone a lobotomy — a procedure similar to one that Perry’s mother had undergone.

That’s how James and Emily Perry discovered their real father was not the man who raised them, but the Rev. James D. Foley, a deeply troubled priest who admitted in an interview with the Globe to his “ugly and tragic” involvement with Rita Perry. What’s more, church records show that Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston’s former archbishop, allowed him to remain in ministry for nine years after he admitted to fathering the children and playing a role in their mother’s death.

“The thing that stuck out to me when I read the documents is, what is the responsibility to the children? Anything?” said Emily Perry, who was 3 years old and sleeping in an upstairs bedroom the night of her mother’s death.

The only comfort for the siblings was the revelation that their mother had not deliberately taken her own life, abandoning her children.

“My mom didn’t commit suicide on purpose,” said Emily Perry. “This idiot was there and didn’t do anything about it.”

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IRELAND/ARGENTINA
Irish Times

Patsy McGarry

Pope Francis has phoned a man in Argentina following reports the man was sexually abused by an Irish priest who was chaplain at an elite Christian Brothers’ school in Buenos Aires.

Allegations have also been made against an Irish Christian Brother who served there.

Twenty other former pupils have made similar abuse allegations against the priest and the brother at the school, while at least four former pupils have given media in Argentina accounts of witnessing or suffering abuse there.

Both alleged abusers are deceased but their names are known to The Irish Times.

Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri is a past pupil of the same school, the Colegio Cardenal Newman, opened by the Irish Christian Brothers in 1948.

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AUSTRALIA
The New Daily

Lucie Morris-Marr

It’s little wonder an alarming tantrum by the Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, has gone global this week.

The president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference said protections for confession should be respected – even if details of child abuse are raised.

The long-time supporter and friend of Cardinal George Pell said he would rather go to jail than break the holy “seal” of confession.

His comments came after the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse detailed 85 proposed sweeping changes to the law in a report – including the recommendation that clergy who failed to report information about child abuse would face criminal charges.

Instead of accepting or even considering this change, Archbishop Hart immediately retorted that confession was a “fundamental part of the freedom of religion”.

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MONTANA
Great Falls Tribune

Seaborn Larson, slarson@greatfallstribune.com

HAYS – For decades, even lifetimes, the Catholic Church refused to turn in priests with known pasts of sexually abusing children, women and men. The story is known in as many corners of the world as the Catholic Church exists, including Montana’s two dioceses.

In the Pacific Northwest, however, the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Order have been accused of using Indian Reservations as their “dumping grounds” for the worst recidivist priests accused of sexually abusing children throughout the 1900s. Here, church officials reportedly determined predatory priests could remain undetected. Here, the church that acted as an anchor for the communities, and the victims lived with the abuse in silence.

Attorney Vito de la Cruz said Montana reservations were no different: They were the church’s rural and remote sites for hiding predatory priests. Cruz’s Seattle law firm has represented victims from Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana, and he said the systematic issue is told from church documents revealed in cases already settled, and the active one against the Great Falls-Billings Diocese.

“I think the evidence points to that,” Cruz told the Tribune. “Those who had problems in respect to abusing kids, it’s easy to hide in the reservations; people won’t complain much, it’s isolated there, and there are massively disproportionate balances of power.”

In the case against the Great Falls-Billings Diocese, a majority of those who have come forward with names and locations were allegedly abused on the remote Indian reservations. Off the reservations, victims who have come forward came largely from the former Catholic orphanage in Great Falls, two parishes in Billings and far flung communities in eastern Montana.

In many instances, the church has boosted conditions in reservation towns, but with the past practice of splitting Indian children from their parents to boarding schools often operated by the church, the history of Catholicism on the Montana reservations is complicated at best. Fort Belknap Tribal President Mark Azure previously knew about the abuse by priests, but was furious to learn of the church’s designs to continuously funnel bad priests to the reservation during the 1900s, a recently added layer to a complicated history.

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MONTANA
Great Falls Tribune

Seaborn Larson, slarson@greatfallstribune.com

HAYS – For decades, even lifetimes, the Catholic Church refused to turn in priests with known pasts of sexually abusing children, women and men. The story is known in as many corners of the world as the Catholic Church exists, including Montana’s two dioceses.

In the Pacific Northwest, however, the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Order have been accused of using Indian Reservations as their “dumping grounds” for the worst recidivist priests accused of sexually abusing children throughout the 1900s. Here, church officials reportedly determined predatory priests could remain undetected. Here, the church that acted as an anchor for the communities, and the victims lived with the abuse in silence.

Attorney Vito de la Cruz said Montana reservations were no different: They were the church’s rural and remote sites for hiding predatory priests. Cruz’s Seattle law firm has represented victims from Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana, and he said the systematic issue is told from church documents revealed in cases already settled, and the active one against the Great Falls-Billings Diocese.

“I think the evidence points to that,” Cruz told the Tribune. “Those who had problems in respect to abusing kids, it’s easy to hide in the reservations; people won’t complain much, it’s isolated there, and there are massively disproportionate balances of power.”

In the case against the Great Falls-Billings Diocese, a majority of those who have come forward with names and locations were allegedly abused on the remote Indian reservations. Off the reservations, victims who have come forward came largely from the former Catholic orphanage in Great Falls, two parishes in Billings and far flung communities in eastern Montana.

In many instances, the church has boosted conditions in reservation towns, but with the past practice of splitting Indian children from their parents to boarding schools often operated by the church, the history of Catholicism on the Montana reservations is complicated at best. Fort Belknap Tribal President Mark Azure previously knew about the abuse by priests, but was furious to learn of the church’s designs to continuously funnel bad priests to the reservation during the 1900s, a recently added layer to a complicated history.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

Children of Catholic priests live with secrets and sorrow

AUGUST 16, 2017

Read the statement from Cardinal Sean O’Malley regarding the Boston Globe Spotlight story about children of Catholic priests.

“The gift of life must be protected and cared for in any and all circumstances. Every child is a precious gift from God, deserving the respect accorded to all people.

At their ordination, Catholic priests make a promise of celibacy, a commitment to the Church and the people they serve. If a priest fathers a child, he has a moral obligation to step aside from ministry and provide for the care and needs of the mother and the child. In such a moment, their welfare is the highest priority.

In 2016 ‘The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors’ received correspondence regarding the children or priests. After careful consideration of this important issue, it was judged to be beyond the Commission’s mandate. The Commission functions as an advisory body to the Holy Father, proposing norms and practices for protecting minors from sexual abuse. In particular, the Commission seeks to assist dioceses and religious orders throughout the world as they implement education and training programs for the prevention of sexual abuse. It is not within the charge of the Commission to become involved with individual cases.

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GERMANY
Premium Times

Pope Francis on Wednesday asked for forgiveness from the families of child sex abuse victims who had killed themselves as a result of their trauma.

He equally commended one survivor for telling his story.

In comments published in German tabloid Bild, the pope described Daniel Pittet’s memoir “Father, I Forgive You’’ as a testament to “how deeply embedded evil can be in the heart of a servant of the church.’’

Pittet was subjected to repeated rape and sexual abuse by a Capuchin friar as a child.
Today, he is a priest and campaigns against paedophilia in the Catholic Church.

The pontiff expressed his “love and pain’’ to families who had lost abused loved ones to suicide, asking them “with full humility for forgiveness.’’

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DEUTSCHLAND
Bild

[Pope begs abuse victims for forgiveness.Daniel Pittet was just eight years old when he was raped by a Capuchin monk.Over the hell of his childhood and his path of liberation and forgiveness, the 58-year-old has written a book that makes one speechless. The special thing: No less than Pope Francis (80) has encouraged him. Moreover, in a preface, the Holy Father begs forgiveness for the crimes of priests. BILD prints it exclusively.]

Daniel Pittet war gerade acht Jahre alt, als er von einem Kapuzinermönch vergewaltigt und zu Porno-Aufnahmen gezwungen wurde. Über die Hölle seiner Kindheit und seinen Weg der Befreiung und Vergebung hat der heute 58-Jährige ein Buch geschrieben, das sprachlos macht. Das Besondere: Kein Geringerer als Papst Franziskus (80) hat ihn dazu ermutigt. Mehr noch: In einem Vorwort bittet der Heilige Vater um Vergebung für die Verbrechen von Priestern. BILD druckt es exklusiv.

★★★

Es ist eine große Herausforderung für die Opfer pädophiler Gewalt, das Wort zu ergreifen und davon zu berichten, was sie aushalten mussten, zu beschreiben, wie die traumatischen Erlebnisse von einst noch Jahre später sie quälen.

Aus diesem Grund ist das Zeugnis von Daniel Pittet so notwendig, so kostbar und so mutig. Ich habe Daniel Pittet im Jahr 2015, im Jahr des geweihten Lebens, im Vatikan kennengelernt.

Daniel war damals mit großem Eifer dabei, ein Buch mit dem Titel „Lieben heißt alles geben“ zu verbreiten. Für das Buch wurden Zeugnisse von religiösen Männern und Frauen, Priestern und Ordensleuten zusammengetragen.

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GERMANY
US News

By Andrea Shalal

BERLIN (Reuters) – Pope Francis – in comments in the foreword of a new book – has branded sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests a “monstrosity” and pledged action against perpetrators and bishops who protected them.

The book titled “Father, I Forgive You: Abused But Not Broken” was written by Swiss man Daniel Pittet, 58, who was first raped by a priest when he was eight years old.

Francis, whose repeated promises of zero tolerance have been criticized by victims who say the Vatican needs to do much more, called sexual abuse “an absolute monstrosity, a terrible sin that contradicts everything that the Church teaches”.

The foreword was published on Wednesday by the mass circulation German daily Bild.

Francis said the fate of abused children weighed on his soul, especially those who had taken their own lives.

“We will counter those priests who betrayed their calling with the most strenuous measures. This also applies to the bishops and cardinals who protected these priests – as happened repeatedly in the past,” the pope wrote.

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NEW YORK
News 12

[with video]

WEST NYACK –
A News 12 investigation has revealed a shocking legal loophole that could allow registered sex offenders to work as counselors at children’s camps.

The Turn to Tara investigation revealed that if a child attends a camp that is focused on a single recreational program like baseball, ballet or basketball, for example, they could be at risk due to an outdated New York state law.

Single-purpose camps are not regulated despite their growing popularity. This means that the camps are not legally required to check counselors against the sex offender registry the same way that traditional and sleepaway camps are. Regular camps are also subjected to frequent Health Department inspections, staffing ratios and minimum age requirements for counselors.

Sen. David Carlucci has introduced legislation that would legally hold single-purpose camps to the same standards as all the others, which would include background checks on all employees.

“We have a sex offender registry for good reason. We want to make sure they are not around our kids,” says Carlucci.

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UNITED KINGDOM
This is London

Riley Krause

A South Norwood pastor who would blindfold children before hitting them with belts and wires has avoided jail.

Rose Amadasun, 49, of Beauchamp Road, was sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment, suspended for 18 months at Croydon Crown Court on August 9.

She had admitted five counts of child cruelty at a previous hearing.

On Saturday, August 2, 2015 police were called by the manager of South Norwood Leisure Centre stating that two members of the public had informed her they had witnessed the female leader of a church group hitting children with a belt.

Officers spoke to the members of the public who stated they had seen a group of children being assaulted by a woman with a belt and shouting “Jesus” as she did so.

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AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

16 August, 2017

Two new research reports, released by the Royal Commission, suggest that a significant proportion of reports to police of child sexual abuse in institutional settings involved another child as the person of interest.

The research reports, Child sexual abuse in Australian institutional contexts 2008-13: Findings from administrative data and the follow-up study Child sexual abuse in institutional contexts: The reliability of police data, nature and allegations reported to police, and factors driving reporting rates were released today.

Prepared by researchers from the University of South Australia’s Australian Centre for Child Protection and the University of New South Wales’ Social Policy Research Centre, the reports explore the nature and extent of child sexual abuse in contemporary institutional settings.

The reports are based on administrative data from a range of sources including police and education departments.

The research found that police data was the most useful source of information to explore the nature and extent of child sexual abuse in institutional contexts across states and territories.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

August 16, 2017

JACK THE INSIDER
ColumnistCanberra
@JacktheInsider

Gerald Ridsdale, the former Ballarat priest has pleaded guilty to a further 20 offences against 11 victims and his conviction formally handed down.

On the basis of convictions, numbers of victims and number of offences, Ridsdale is the worst sex offender in this country’s history. While Ridsdale’s defence team laughably called for the prospect of parole, he must die in jail.

I read a copy of one man’s victim impact statement over the weekend. It made me weep. It was no surprise that, when he delivered it to the court yesterday, County Court Judge Irene Lawson also broke down in tears. The court adjourned briefly while the judge composed herself. In all ten of the 11 victims in this round of prosecutions provided statements, detailing lives in disarray, filled with emotional, lifelong pain, surviving rather than living.

Despite having their moments in court, the mystical, magical word ‘closure’ and all it connotes continues to elude them.

The obvious question is how did a pedophile priest, active for thirty years or more, with more than 60 victims having now come forward, escape justice for so long? Ridsdale had been offending against children from the moment he became a priest in 1962. He was first convicted of child sex offending in 1993.

The answer, in part, lies in the conduct of the Ballarat diocese under Bishop Mulkearns and his predecessor, Bishop James O’Collins. These senior figures within the Church, effectively the chief executive officers of the Ballarat diocese were aware of Ridsdale’s offending and merely shuffled him around the diocese to new parishes and new groups of children.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

The Irish Times View

Ireland received a “could do better” report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture, following detailed hearings in Geneva last July. Concern was expressed about the limited nature of an investigation into Magdalene laundries, in spite of recommendations made by the committee in 2011. And the authors worried that a similar approach was being taken in relation to the operation of mother and baby homes.

On a positive note, the committee welcomed Government efforts to support those who were abused in residential care and it regarded the Citizens’ Assembly as a creative initiative. On improving accountability and transparency, it identified the Protected Disclosures Act as important.

The glass was less than half-full, however, in relation to policing and prisons. In view of the internal problems besetting the Garda Síochána; funding difficulties and the intractable nature of prison reform, that does not surprise. But there was positive news there too. Efforts to end “slopping out” in prisons were praised and the report recognised “significant progress” was being made elsewhere. However, it recommended that solitary confinement should only be used as punishment in extreme cases and never for juveniles. It proposed that “appropriate facilities” should be provided for asylum seekers and called for a fundamental review of the prison healthcare system; an increase in staff numbers and greater funding and independence for the Inspector of Prisons.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Rhiannon Shine

A Tasmanian survivor of clergy abuse is demanding answers after his friend, a fellow victim, suicided before disciplinary action was taken against a senior Anglican Church figure.

Beyond Abuse spokesman and survivor Steve Fisher said his friend, a victim of convicted paedophile priest Louis Daniels, took his own life last week.

Mr Fisher said his friend’s death increased frustration over the slow progress of an internal review into findings involving retired Tasmanian bishop Philip Newell.

Earlier this year the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released a report that referred to evidence Newell was made aware in 1987 that now-convicted paedophile Daniels had sexually abused three boys.

Bishop Newell allowed Daniels to stay in the church and subsequently promoted him to a high-ranking position on the basis he amended his life.

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ARGENTINIEN
euro news

[More than 20 former students of the Catholic private school Cardenal Newman in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires have gone public with accusations of sexual abuse by the clergy.]

Mehr als 20 ehemalige Schüler der katholischen Privatschule Cardenal Newman in der argentinischen Hauptstadt Buenos Aires sind mit Vorwürfen des sexuellen Missbrauchs durch den Klerus an die Öffentlichkeit gegangen.

Einer der ersten, der offen darüber sprach, ist Rufino Varela. Er war zwölf, als er einem Priester von sexuellem Missbrauch zu Hause erzählten wollte.

Varela sagt: “Ich habe also angefangen, Pater Alfredo davon zu berichten, was mir ein Bekannter zu Hause antat. Doch der Pater sagte, ich sollte meine Hose und Unterhose ausziehen und mich auf sein Bett legen, mit dem Gesicht nach unten. Er legte ein Kissen über meinen Kopf, zuerst schlug er mich mit einem Gürtel auf den Hintern, dann begann er, mich anzufassen.” Danach habe Pater Alfredo ihm Süßigkeiten gegeben und gesagt, was geschehen sei, müsse ein Geheimnis bleiben.

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CHILE
Spiegel

[The boys were raped, the girls beaten, opponents of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet were tortured and killed: The site of the German secret settlement Colonia Dignidad was a place of brutal crimes. In 2005 the founder of the sect, Paul Schäfer, had been arrested in Argentina. In 2010, he died in prison. Other leaders denounced Chilean judges as long-term imprisonment in recent years.]

Von Martin Knobbe

Die Jungen wurden vergewaltigt, die Mädchen geschlagen, Gegner des chilenischen Diktators Augusto Pinochet wurden gefoltert und getötet: Das Gelände der deutschen Sektensiedlung Colonia Dignidad war ein Ort brutaler Verbrechen. 2005 war der Gründer der Sekte, Paul Schäfer, in Argentinien festgenommen worden, 2010 starb er im Gefängnis. Andere Führungsmitglieder verurteilten chilenische Richter in den vergangenen Jahren zu langen Freiheitsstrafen.

Nun hat auch das Landgericht Krefeld den Weg für eine Bestrafung eines der Täter bereitet: Es entschied, dass eine in Chile verhängte Freiheitsstrafe gegen den langjährigen Sektenarzt Hartmut Hopp in Deutschland vollstreckt werden kann. Hopp war bereits im November 2004 in Chile wegen Beihilfe zu sexuellem Missbrauch und Vergewaltigung in mehreren Fällen zu fünf Jahren und einem Tag Gefängnis verurteilt worden. Im Januar 2013 hatte der Oberste Gerichtshof in Santiago de Chile das Urteil bestätigt. Da aber lebte Hopp mit seiner Frau Dorothea, einst Krankenschwester der Siedlung, schon längst unbehelligt in Krefeld. Er hatte sich dem Gefängnis 2011 durch eine schnelle Flucht entzogen.

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ARIZONA
Salt Lake Tribune

By Felicia Fonseca | The Associated Press

Flagstaff, Ariz. • The number of lawsuits alleging Mormon church leaders failed to protect children from sexual abuse has grown to include two more Navajos and a member of the Crow Tribe.

Thousands of American Indian children, most of whom were Navajo, participated in a now-defunct church-run foster program from the late 1940s until around 2000. The program was meant to give children educational opportunities that didn’t exist on the reservations.

The lawsuits contend certain foster families harmed children.

One of the latest Navajo plaintiffs, identified as A.H., said at a news conference Tuesday in Phoenix that she told her local lay bishop about the abuse by her foster father but was told to keep quiet and that it would be handled.

“Understand that you are not alone. It is not your fault,” she wrote in a statement. “The shame is not yours. Rather, the shame belongs to those who abused, as well as those who allowed the abuse to happen.”

The latest three lawsuits were filed in Navajo Nation court and Washington state. Five others have been filed since 2016 on behalf of Navajo tribal members, seeking monetary damages, written apologies and a guarantee that Mormon leaders will report suspected abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Andrew West for The Religion and Ethics Report

The senior Australian businesswoman appointed to supervise the Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis says she is “pessimistic” about the Church’s willingness to reform.

Elizabeth Proust, the head of the Church’s own Truth, Justice and Healing Council, fears the institution will emerge from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse only “partially cleansed and unreconstructed”.

“I fear there’s a view that once the royal commission reports, and the publicity around what will be a fairly dire report all dies down, that life will go back to what it was,” Ms Proust told The Religion and Ethics Report.

“I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to think that the possibility for real transformation of the Church exists, but it’s an institution that’s been very slow to change on a whole range of issues.”

She wants the Church to establish permanent and independent protocols to deal with future cases of abuse.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

Read Cardinal O’Malley’s statement on children of priests

By Michael Rezendes
Photos by Suzanne Kreiter | Videos by Emily Zendt, Globe Staff August 16, 2017

This is the first of a two part Spotlight series.

HE CARRIED HIS DOUBTS and disappointment across miles and decades, from childhood to adulthood, and finally at the age of 48 to the kitchen table of a modest house outside of Buffalo. There, he would ask an elderly aunt and uncle to help him answer the question that had troubled him all his life: Why had his father always seemed to dislike him so much?

With his parents already dead, Jim Graham pleaded with his Aunt Kathryn and Uncle Otto to tell him the truth about his family. Finally, Kathryn unfolded a newsletter published by a Catholic religious order and slid it across the table. She jabbed a finger at a picture of a sad, balding figure wearing a priest’s clerical collar.

“Only the principals know for sure,” she said, “but this may be your father.”

Jim Graham studied the picture. Those were his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Then he skimmed the obituary of the priest, the Rev. Thomas Sullivan, a cleric who had graduated from Boston College and trained for the priesthood in Tewksbury.

If a life can have a crystallizing moment, for Jim Graham that 1993 meeting was it, discovering that his father might have been a Catholic priest, rather than John Graham, the distant man who raised him with scarcely a kind or comforting word.

Jim Graham couldn’t know in that moment that the stunning secret which had seemed his alone was not that unusual. By any reasonable measure, there are thousands of others who have strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests, though most are unaware that they have so much company in their pain. In Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Paraguay, and other countries, in American cities big and small — indeed, virtually anywhere the church has a presence — the children of priests form an invisible legion of secrecy and neglect, a Spotlight Team review has found.

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AUSTRALIA
The Standard

Adam Cooper
16 Aug 2017

Notorious paedophile priest Gerard Ridsdale has served enough time in prison, his Legal Aid defence lawyer says.

The claim comes despite Ridsdale admitting this week that he sexually abused 12 more children while a priest in regional Victoria.

The 83-year-old has now pleaded guilty over the course of five court cases to abusing 64 children.

He has been in jail since 1994, serving an effective total sentence of 28 years.

On Tuesday he pleaded guilty to 23 charges, including rape and buggery, for sexual assaults against 11 boys and a girl between 1962 and 1988 while he was a priest in Ballarat, Mildura, Horsham, Edenhope and other locations.

County Court judge Irene Lawson must now decide whether to add to Ridsdale’s existing sentence, under which his earliest possible release would be April 2019, when he will be eligible for parole. If he served his current full term he would be due for release in 2022.

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MONTANA
Great Falls Tribune

Seaborn Larson, slarson@greatfallstribune.com Aug. 15, 2017

The Great Falls-Billings Diocese this month is working through the claim review and settlement process with victims alleging sexual abuse and their attorneys. Church officials believe the settlement won’t directly affect the parishes, although some are waiting to believe it until the final settlement amount is announced.

Since the deadline to file a claim in the case, 86 people have come forward to enter claims of sexual abuse by priests, nuns and brothers, according to Vito de la Cruz, a Seattle attorney representing 38 of them. The dates of abuse range from 1947 to 1994. Attorneys for the victims say the Great Falls-Billings Diocese is the 15th to file for bankruptcy en route to settling with sexual abuse victims.

Bishop Michael Warfel said before negotiations that the settlement will impose a loss of resources, and already has.

“I used to have a person staffed in the office of worship, I don’t anymore, and I’m not planning on hiring anyone right now for that position. That would be an example,” Warfel said. “There would be a curtailing of some [services], realistically, until we get back on our feet.”

The Great Falls-Billings Diocese covers approximately 94,158 square miles, almost 64 percent of the state. The region contains approximately 400,000 people, 35,000 of them members of Catholic parishes spread throughout the region.

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MEXICO
National Catholic Register

According to the archdiocese, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera instructed his episcopal vicars ‘immediately to notify the appropriate authorities.’

CNA/EWTN News

MEXICO CITY — The Archdiocese of Mexico has countered claims made by two former priests that Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera covered up the actions of pedophile priests, calling the allegations an “orchestrated farce.”

The communications office of the Mexico City Archdiocese reported that Cardinal Rivera had spoken to a Public Ministry official July 26 in response to the June 2 complaint filed by Alberto Athié and José Barba.

Athié and Barba filed their complaint with the Attorney General of the Republic’s Office, accusing Cardinal Rivera of the alleged cover-up of 15 pedophile priests. In the 1990s, Athié had brought allegations against Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ. Father Maciel was later removed from public ministry after it was verified he had committed sexual abuse and fathered several children.

The Archdiocese of Mexico indicated that Athié and Barba based their charges on a Dec. 19, 2016, news brief published in El Universal “in which a meeting was made known that the cardinal had with journalists where the archbishop mentioned that during his administration as head of the Primatial Archdiocese of Mexico he had sanctioned 15 priests — not all for the crime of pederasty, but with other illicit acts classified in canon law.”

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NORTH DAKOTA
News-Monitor

by Frank Stanko franks@wahpetondailynews.com Aug 9, 2017

The State’s Attorney’s Office of Richland County, North Dakota, will not be bringing criminal charges against the Rev. Thomas Feltman, pastor of two Richland County parishes. An investigation by the Richland County Sheriff’s Office was launched regarding concerns over Feltman’s interaction with youth following an incident reported in Wyndmere, North Dakota, in May 2017.

In a Friday, July 28 statement, State’s Attorney Ron McBeth said it was reported that as Feltman would go to hug young women, his hand would allegedly touch the women on the side of their breast or on their behind.

“Although this made the girls feel uncomfortable and this touching was socially inappropriate, there is no evidence the touch was done by Rev. Feltman for sexual reasons, which would be necessary in order to prove an element of a sex offense crime,” McBeth continued. “The State’s Attorney’s Office, by way of its prosecutorial discretion, has declined to charge Feltman with any crime based on that evidence.”

Prior to the investigation, Feltman was pastor at St. John the Baptist’s Catholic Church, Wyndmere and St. Arnold’s Catholic Church, Milnor. He was placed on paid administrative leave from both parishes by the Diocese of Fargo.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Somerset Live

BY DANIEL MUMBY
15 AUG 2017

A retired priest who was cleared of sexual assault has spoken out about his experience for the first time.

The Reverend Dr Roy Catchpole was arrested at his home in Sherborne in 2014 after being accused of sexually assaulting a female member of his congregation.

After two trials, he was “set free as an innocent, falsely accused person”. He was subsequently offered an apology by Dorset Police and awarded costs.

Now the retired reverend, 71, has spoken out about how the legal process has affected him and his family, and what should be done to protect people who are wrongfully accused of sex crimes.

Following his arrest in 2014, he spent two years going through the Dorset courts.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
The Irish News

ALLISON MORRIS
15 August, 2017

The funeral of west Belfast community stalwart John Leathem will take place today, leaving from his Divis flats home where he passed away after a battle with cancer on Saturday.

A former chairman of the Divis Tower Falls Residents’ Association, he had told friends that he did not want to spend his final days in the hospice but instead chose to die in his flat on the 19th floor of the tower block surrounded by family and friends.

The 59-year-old, who spent much of his childhood in Catholic Church run care homes gave evidence to the Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry about his time in Nazareth Lodge where he was subjected to horrific abuse.

He was also credited with being one of the first people to speak out about the stigma and lasting impact of church child abuse and the the depression and self harm that blighted his late teens and early 20s as a result.

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AUSTRALIA
Newsweek

BY SOFIA LOTTO PERSIO ON 8/15/17

An Australian court heard harrowing details of historic child abuse perpetrated by former priest Gerald Ridsdale, one of Australia’s most notorious pedophiles.

Eighty-three-year-old Ridsdale pleaded guilty to 23 charges Tuesday, including two counts of rape and one of buggery, for abusing 12 children, aged six to 13, between 1962 and 1988 in the Victoria state city of Ballarat and the surrounding area.

Ballarat is considered to be one of Australia’s worst affected areas for incidents of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It is named in Vatican Cardinal George Pell’s charges of historic sexual abuse as he served in the diocese first as an assistant parish priest in 1972 and later, between 1973 and 1984, as an episcopal vicar. Pell pleased not guilty in a first hearing at a Melbourne magistrate’s court in July and will return to court in October.

One of Ridsdale’s victims was a girl whose father woke her up on two occasions to see the priest, who then sexually assaulted her, the court heard on Tuesday.

“[Her] father carried her to the confessional booth and took her clothes off her, then carried her to the altar and lay her down,” crown prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said of the second occasion, in 1974, quoted in the Australian Associated Press.

According to the prosecutor, Ridsdale indencently assaulted her, then told her: “Jesus died for our sins so we could be forgiven and if I confess to this sin I might be forgiven,” before kissing her on the cheek.

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CANADA
Medical Xpress

The severe hunger and malnutrition that many Indigenous children suffered at Canadian residential schools have contributed to Indigenous peoples’ elevated risk of obesity and diabetes, according to University of Toronto public health and anthropology researchers.

“Hunger has always been central to survivors’ accounts of their residential school experiences, and we strongly believe that this testimony must be taken more seriously by researchers and medical practitioners,” said Ian Mosby, a food historian who is an adjunct lecturer at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Mosby and Tracey Galloway, an assistant professor of anthropology, at U of T Mississauga, published their findings in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. They found that for most of the history of the residential school system, Indigenous children were fed poor quality, often rotting food.

Based on survivor testimony, they estimate that the typical diet described by survivors delivered, on average 1,000 to 1,450 calories a day, with moderately active children requiring between 1,400 and 3,200 calories a day.

“We can now be fairly certain that the elevated risk of obesity, early-onset insulin resistance and diabetes observed among Indigenous peoples in Canada arises, in part at least, from the prolonged malnutrition experience by many residential school survivors,” said Galloway.

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CALIFORNIA
The Worthy Adversary

August 15, 2017 Joelle Casteix

A former vocal coach for Orange County’s All-American Boys Chorus—and a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted List—can be sent back to California from the UK, a judge there ruled this week.

Roger Alan Giese, 42, according to KABC:

has been charged with five counts of lewd acts upon a child under the age of 14, 10 counts of lewd acts upon a child age 14 or 15, three counts of anal penetration by a foreign object and one count of oral copulation of a person under 18 years of age, and a sentencing enhancement allegation for substantial sexual conduct with a child.
He escaped to England in 2007.

Once there, Giese changed his name, started a public relations company, and claimed that he couldn’t be sent back to the U.S. because of our “civil commitment” laws.

According to the OC Register:

Under civil commitment, a convicted sex offender who has served his sentence can be committed to a state mental hospital indefinitely if medical experts believe that person is likely to reoffend. The law exists in 19 other states.

The British courts agreed. Until this week.

Chorus has a record of abuse

Giese is the second All-American Boys Chorus official to be accused of child sexual abuse.

The first, founder Fr. Richard T. Coughlin, has been accused by numerous former singers, removed for allegations of abuse, and put on the Diocese of Orange’s list of credibly accused clerics.

Call me a broken record, but just think about this: the same people who covered up for Coughlin and Giese still run The All-American Boys Chorus.

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ILLINOIS
eNews Park Forest

Measure Initiated by Madigan to Eliminate Criminal Statutes of Limitations for Felony Child Sexual Abuse and Assault Crimes Becomes Law

Chicago —(ENEWSPF)—August 13, 2017. Attorney General Lisa Madigan today announced Illinois has now eliminated the statutes of limitations for felony criminal sexual assault and sexual abuse crimes against children. Senate Bill 189, initiated by Madigan, was passed by the General Assembly unanimously and signed into law by the governor Friday.

Sponsored by Sen. Scott Bennett and Rep. Michelle Mussman, the legislation eliminates Illinois’ criminal statutes of limitations for all felony child sexual abuse and child sexual assault crimes that can allow predators to go unpunished. The law, effective immediately, applies to future felony child sex crime cases as well as current criminal cases in which the previous statute of limitations has not expired.

“Sex crimes against children are a horribly tragic violation of trust that can take a lifetime to recover from,” Madigan said. “This new law will ensure that survivors are provided with the time they need to heal and seek justice.”

Prior the new law, Illinois’ statutes required that the most egregious sexual offenses against children must be reported and prosecuted within 20 years of the survivor turning 18 years old. Two exceptions existed for cases in which the crimes were committed on or after Jan. 1, 2014 and either corroborating physical evidence exists or a mandated reporter failed to report the abuse. The then-law restricting a survivor’s ability to come forward prevented former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert from being prosecuted for allegations of abuse against minors while he was an Illinois high school coach decades ago. Scott Cross, a survivor of Hastert’s abuse, joined Attorney General Madigan in advocating for today’s change in the law, recounting his experience before lawmakers and urging them to pass Senate Bill 189.

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ILLINOIS
ABC 7

By Sarah Schulte
Monday, August 14, 2017

MOKENA, Ill. (WLS) — Illinois is making it easier to prosecute sex abuse crimes against children. Governor Bruce Rauner signed legislation that removes the statutes of limitation for those crimes.

Sex abuse victims are calling the new law a great step forward. They say pursuing justice criminally will help with the closure process.

Survivors of abuse say eliminating the statutes of limitations will give them the time they need to come forward and report a crime to police.

During his first confession at St. Mary’s Parish in Mokena, David Rudofski said he was sexually abused by Father James Burnett when Rudofski was just 8 years old. But, it wasn’t until he was in his mid-30’s when Rudofski reported the abuse.

“It takes years – sometimes decades – to have the courage to come up and talk about or even realize what happened,” Rudofski said.

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IRELAND
Longford Leader

Aisling Kiernan
14 Aug 2017

Last month, as part of Cruthú Arts Festival, Ambroise Donnelle launched his exhibition ‘Reborn’ at Longford Library.

The exhibition has been inspired by the artist’s mother Ann who was born at the mother and baby home in Castlepollard in 1950.

“It’s my mother who has always been the main influence in my life and still is,” said the 38-year-old Armagh native.

“We are alike in so many ways; she even likes to dabble in pastels and watercolours occasionally – so the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

And indeed it appears that his sentiments are true because Ann is a wonderful artist and a person who, it has to be said, has dealt with more challenges in her 67 years than most.

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MINNESOTA
KDUZ

(KWLM/New Ulm MN-) A priest who served at several area churches has been accused of sexual abuse.

In a letter sent to parishioners by Bishop John Levoir of the Catholic Diocese of New Ulm, Levoir says they have received notice of an allegation of sexual abuse against Father James Devorak when he was assigned at St. Pius X parish in Glencoe in the 1990s.

Devorak, who retired two years ago, was senior associate at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Willmar and assisted at Our Lady of the Lakes at Spicer, St. Thomas Moore in Lake Lillian and St. Patricks in Kandiyohi in 2013 and 2014.

During his 43-year career, Devorak also worked at churches in Clara City, Montevideo, Granite Falls, Hutchinson, Stewart and many more.

He was also an associate at St. Mary’s in Willmar in 1975 and 76.

Looking at Devorak’s resume provided by Bishop Levoir, it appears Devorak was moved to a different church in the New Ulm Diocese every two or three years.

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SOUTH CAROLINA
WYFF

Carla Field

ANDERSON COUNTY, S.C. —
Former megachurch pastor Perry Noble is not being given a second chance by the church he founded, so he is giving himself a second chance with a new church, despite church leaders saying he no longer meets Biblical standards to be a pastor.

Noble, the former pastor of NewSpring church, filed paperwork July 14 with the South Carolina Secretary of State to incorporate Second Chance Church. The filing shows the request as made by a nonprofit in good standing.

Noble founded NewSpring more than 20 years ago after holding services in a living room, according to the NewSpring website. The church grew to 17 campuses with more than 30,000 members.

In July 2016, Pastor Shane Duffey announced that the leaders of NewSpring had removed Noble from the pulpit because of his “personal behavior, which included alcohol, and marital issues.”

Duffey read a statement from church officials that said, “Perry has made some unfortunate decisions,” and that he “is no longer qualified” to continue as pastor.

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SOUTH CAROLINA
Christian Post

By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter | Aug 15, 2017

Former NewSpring Church senior pastor Perry Noble revealed in a Facebook video details about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, which left him struggling with “soul destroying” shame.

“I am a victim of sexual abuse,” Noble said in the video, posted on Sunday.

“I remember like it was yesterday. It happened when I was about 5 years old. There was an older guy in the neighborhood” who coerced him, the former pastor revealed.

“The whole time it was going on, I knew it was wrong. It just felt wrong, but I felt helpless, and afterwards I felt hopeless. A few years later, it happened again, I was sexually abused by a different person,” he said, revealing that for “years and years I felt the chains of shame were wrapped around me.”

“I thought it was something I had caused, and because of that I held it inside and I didn’t tell anyone. As I look back now I see what was happening was that my soul was being destroyed through the chains of shame,” he said.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

The Catholic Church believes the seal of confession must remain intact despite the prospect of its priests facing criminal charges for failing to report child sexual abuse.

The child abuse royal commission wants a new crime of failure to report child sex abuse in institutions, including when the information came from religious confessions.

Australian Catholic Bishops Conference president, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, says confession is a fundamental part of the freedom of religion that must continue to be recognised by Australian law.

‘What goes on in the confessional is between God and the person and I am there for them to know that they are forgiven,’ he told Sky news.

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AUSTRALIA
BBC News

By Claudia Allen
BBC News

Priests who suspect child abuse after hearing confession should report it to the authorities – or face criminal charges. That is one of the conclusions reached by Australia’s four-year Royal Commission investigating child sex abuse.

The proposal applies to the suspicion of child abuse in an institutional context – for example within an organisation which provides services to children or cares for them, such as a church or a children’s home.

But the Roman Catholic Church in Australia is opposed to the proposal, despite saying that outside of the confession it is “absolutely committed” to reporting all offences against children to the authorities.

So what is different about confession?

Surely priests would have a moral duty – if not a legal one – to report any concerns, in order to protect children?

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane appeared to recognise that it can be hard for non-Catholics to understand why this is not the case:

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ISRAEL
Jerusalem Post

BY BENJAMIN DUKAS AUGUST 15, 2017

Watchdog groups claim pedophiles who immigrate can live in communities with children nearby and even get jobs at schools.

A global Jewish children’s advocacy group has accused Israel of providing a safe haven for dozens of child sex offenders.

Shana Aaronson, director of the Jewish Community Watch (JCW) office in Israel has told The Jerusalem Post that the group found there are 42 suspected or convicted child sex offenders who moved to Israel from the Diaspora.

“Because Israel has the concept of the Law of Return, and Israel being a national homeland for the Jewish people, and the numerous legal rights that Jews have: to be here, to come here, to seek safe haven here, this is a particular issue with Israel, where you are going to come here and by and large you’re going to be granted automatic citizenship, and as the case may be, safe haven,” Aaronson said.

The Jewish Agency denied the allegations and said any candidates for aliya with either the Agency or the Nefesh B’Nefesh organization had to face extensive background checks before they could immigrate.

The JCW is a global group that seeks to expose offenders and warn communities about potentially dangerous people in their neighborhoods. In addition to 42 child sex offenders it says who have taken residence in Israel, the group has also identified several offenders who regularly travel in and out of Israel with ease.

Founded in 2006 by a child sex abuse survivor, the JCW is active in the US, Canada and Israel, and is dedicated to the prevention of child sexual abuse.

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CONNECTICUT
New Haven Register

By Randall Beach, rbeach@nhregister.com @rbeachNHR on Twitter

NEW HAVEN >> Rabbi Daniel Greer, accused of sexually assaulting a student of his at a religious school, made a brief appearance Monday in Superior Court and had his case transferred to the Part A courthouse on Church Street, where more serious charges are handled.

Greer was in front of Superior Court Judge Karen Nash Sequino for only about 30 seconds. He did not speak and did not enter pleas to the charges of second-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a child.

Greer’s not guilty pleas probably will be entered during his next court appearance Aug. 29.

Greer’s attorney, William Dow III, said after he left the courtroom with Greer: “We will try our case in court.” Greer, acting on Dow’s advice, made no comment.

Greer was dressed in a black suit, red tie and yarmulke.

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CONNECTICUT
News 12

[with video]

NEW HAVEN –
The New Haven rabbi accused of raping and molesting a teenage boy made bail Monday.

Rabbi Daniel Greer, 77, was arrested last month and charged with sexually assaulting the victim at a New Haven yeshiva school between 2001 and 2005. Greer was a founder and principal of the school, which opened in 1977.

A federal jury awarded $15 million in damages to the teen in a civil lawsuit in May.

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