ABUSE TRACKER

SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests)

February 4, 2021

It appears that Catholic officials in the US plundered the American taxpayer by accepting payroll protection program funds in dioceses that had billions in assets and cash.

According to the AP, “112 Roman Catholic dioceses in the U.S. collectively had over $10 billion in cash and other funds when they received at least $1.5 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program.” It is disturbing that an entity with so much already in the bank was able to so much of the money intended to keep small businesses afloat. It is even more concerning considering that these dioceses have billions more in property and real estate that was not included in the AP calculations.

There are 178 Catholic dioceses and nearly 200 Catholic religious orders in the United States. That the AP only analyzed 112 of them and did not have access to the financials of some of the richest, such as the Archdiocese of New York, shows that that the AP’s stunning assessment is only a partial look and that the reality is probably even more egregious.

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

WEST VIRGINIA
West Virginia Public Broadcasting

February 5, 2021

By Duncan Slade

The Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston received an almost $2 million loan from federal COVID-19 relief, according to an audit released Friday.

As the church faced a considerable revenue decline due to the pandemic and corresponding economic recession, it applied for a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan in April and secured $1,996,372 through the program.

“There was no reason for our church employees, who pay taxes, to lose their jobs and possibly their homes when the government was making funds available precisely to keep people at work,” wrote Bishop Mark Brennan in a letter released with the audit Friday.

The funds were used to pay employee salaries and healthcare, according to accompanying documents. PPP loans are eligible for forgiveness if used for payroll and other select expenses, and the diocese plans to apply for forgiveness from the federal government.

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

JACKSONVILLE (FL)
News4JAX

February 5, 2021

By Kelly Wiley

Top leaders with the Diocese of St. Augustine did not disclose to state prosecutors investigating sex abuse within Florida churches that one of its priests was the subject of two local criminal investigations until after the state concluded its investigation.

Now, the Florida Attorney General’s Office is looking further into Fr. David Terrance Morgan, a retired priest.

Morgan, 72, is a former religion teacher at Bishop Kenny High School and was last assigned to Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine before retiring in 2019.

The Florida Attorney General’s Office announced it was beginning an investigation into sex crimes inside Florida’s Catholic churches in October 2018.

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

ENGLAND
Daily Mail

February 5, 2021

By Matt Drake

— Henry Balkwill, 33, was arrested at Saint John’s Seminary in Guildford, Surrey
— It followed a tip-off from the US Department of Homeland Security, a court heard
— But the case was dropped due to lack of evidence and he was free to go

A trainee priest accused of downloading indecent images of children wearing nappies had the case thrown out by a judge due to lack of evidence.

Henry Balkwill, 33, was arrested in his room at Saint John’s Seminary in Guildford, Surrey, following a tip-off from the US Department of Homeland Security, a court was told.

He denied a charge of printing off 12 indecent images before scrapping them later.

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

NEWCASTLE (AUSTRALIA)
Newcastle Herald

February 6, 2021

By Sage Swinton

When Maitland Pastor Bob Cotton’s hard-fought push to increase penalties for concealing child sex abuse became a reality, he thought things would change.

He thought the NSW government agreeing to increase the maximum jail term from two to five years in November 2018 would mean more people who covered up child abuse in church hierarchies would be sent to prison.

But more than two years later, there’s little to show for it.

Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research data shows that since the sentencing reform was introduced, there have been six charges for concealing child abuse in NSW, three of which resulted in guilty verdicts.

None of the convictions resulted in prison terms.

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

GERMANY
The Tablet

February 4, 2021

By Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has begun an investigation of Maria 2.0, a group of German Catholic women.

At the same time, the CDF has decided to drop its centuries-old title of “Inquisition”.

According to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ),the reason for the investigation is connected with Maria 2.0’s protests against the Archbishop of Cologne’s refusal to publish an abuse report.

Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki initially promised to publish the report he commissioned on the handling of abuse cases in the archdiocese of Cologne by an independent Munich law firm, but in the end refused to publish it.

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

CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Sun-Times

February 5, 2021

By Robert Herguth

The Archdiocese of Chicago has been getting explicit details from religious orders on problem priests in the area for over two years. But it’s keeping that information secret. Some orders won’t release it, either.

Two and a half years after the latest sex abuse scandal rocked the Catholic church and prompted new pledges of transparency, the church in the Chicago region has yet to make a full accounting to the public of its problem priests.

Cardinal Blase Cupich has demanded for more than two years now that Catholic religious orders that operate in his territory fully disclose to him any information on their clergy members who now face or previously have faced accusations of child sexual abuse.

But Cupich — who heads the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which covers Cook County and Lake County, and who reports to Pope Francis — has kept those findings secret. The archdiocese won’t say how many clerics from orders in the Chicago area have faced such accusations or make public any information about them, such as where those clergy members are today.

That’s despite Cupich’s stepped-up behind-the-scenes demands on the semi-autonomous religious orders to produce detailed reports on predator priests and other problem clergy in their ranks — information that some orders have made public but that others have declined to.

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

KENYA
The Washington Post

February 4, 2021

By Max Bearak and Rael Ombuor

NAIROBI — Some coincidences are impossible to ignore.

Margaret Ruto, a Pennsylvania nurse in her mid-30s, thought she was returning to the rolling green hills of Kenya’s tea-growing region to care for her ailing mother-in-law.

Instead, a fluke of fate awaited her: A man who lived just 10 minutes from her home in the United States had opened an orphanage not 10 minutes from her ancestral village in Kenya — and children were saying they had been sexually abused there.

It was the summer of 2018, and she found the village in uproar. Two girls, 12 and 14, had recently escaped and shared horror stories of sexual abuse at the hands of the orphanage’s director, Gregory Dow.

Ruto was led to a rumpled patch of earth behind the orphanage. Former employees said a 9-month-old boy buried there had died a few years earlier after choking on something while he’d been left unsupervised.

Standing over the grave, she felt dizzy. It was a moment that would divide her life into a before and an after: a transformation from an “ordinary woman” into a detective.

Dow, whom she would spend the next year chasing, had already fled back to Pennsylvania after members of the community confronted him and alerted authorities. Kenyan police say they missed catching him at the airport by just a few hours.

Locals told Ruto they feared that this entitled, White foreigner claiming to be a devout Christian was going to evade justice.

“I was meant to know about this,” she remembered thinking. “And I was meant to do something about it.”

Turmoil lay ahead that Ruto, a dual U.S.-Kenyan citizen, could scarcely have imagined: sleuthing on two continents, constantly looking over her shoulder, working through the trauma of child sex abuse survivors, and sobbing uncontrollably in her car, all while compiling a shocking investigation that would eventually make it into the hands of FBI agents, splash across the front pages of every Kenyan newspaper and dramatically alter Kenya’s child services policies.

The only hint of her involvement until now has been an official acknowledgment that the FBI was “acting on a tip.”

After agreeing to a plea deal, Gregory Dow, now 61, was sentenced Thursday in a U.S. federal court to 188 months in prison on four counts of “engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places.” Dow will be nearly 80 years old if he makes it to the end of his sentence.

Dow’s plea deal acknowledges guilt on all charges brought against him. His attorneys did not make Dow available to respond to the allegations of deaths at the orphanage, saying only that he had never publicly addressed those claims. A special clause in the U.S. penal code allows for prosecution of child abuse cases committed by Americans overseas.

During the sentencing hearing Thursday, Dow apologized “for the pain that I’ve caused.” Judge Edward G. Smith called him “a missionary from hell.”

Ruto is coming forward with her story because she — and the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office that prosecuted Dow — hope it will inspire similar sleuthing instincts in others.

“Ultimately, Ms. Ruto’s information found its way to a team of dedicated FBI agents, who … gathered the evidence required to charge Dow and hold him accountable for the monstrous abuse he perpetrated on his victims,” William M. McSwain, the U.S. attorney at the time in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “This case is a textbook example of the ways in which the public can assist law enforcement in bringing sexual predators like Dow, and other criminals, to justice.”

Separately, Kenyan police exhumed and autopsied the body of the 9-month-old, James Kipkirui, as part of an ongoing investigation into the circumstances of his death, according to Johansen Oduor, the government’s chief forensic pathologist.

Three summers ago, Ruto made a silent, solemn promise that nothing would stop her — not corrupt authorities in Kenya and not sticky-slow bureaucracy in the United States — from pursuing justice for the children at the orphanage.

“I’m just an ordinary woman, a nurse, a mother,” she recalled recently. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”

The main building of the former Dow Family Children’s Home, where Gregory Dow carried out acts of sexual abuse. He pleaded guilty to four charges of illicit sexual conduct and was sentenced Thursday.

‘Will someone believe me?’

Kenya has a vast array of missionary-run institutions, including nursing homes, schools and orphanages. Often, impoverished families avoid extra financial burden by sending their children and elderly to live at these charitable institutions.

When the Dow Family Children’s Home opened in 2008, foreigners were not required to submit to background checks. It is possible that no one in Kenya was aware Dow had been a registered sex offender in the United States until 2006.

Dow’s case was the latest abuse scandal linked to White missionaries in Kenya. In 2016, for instance, a 21-year-old Oklahoma man named Matthew Durham was sentenced in a U.S. federal court to 40 years in prison for molesting eight children at a Nairobi orphanage. Years earlier, a prominent Italian Catholic priest was accused of molesting boys in his care, and while Kenyan authorities dropped charges for a lack of evidence, suspicion still lingers.

At least 83 children ages 9 months to 18 years lived in Dow’s home before it was closed in 2017, after two girls escaped and their parents filed cases with the police.

Those tip-offs and others led to the arrest of Dow’s wife, Mary Rose, who ran the orphanage with him, on child abuse charges. Dow, however, “managed to escape” to the United States, where he insisted on his and his wife’s innocence, according to Simon Chelugui, Kenya’s minister of labor and social services. Kenyan authorities said that they informed Interpol, the international policing body, of the allegations against Dow, but that he remained free in Pennsylvania, where he continued to deny any wrongdoing.

A repossession notice hangs in a window at the former Dow Family Children’s Home.
In an email to his funders and supporters in September 2017, Dow explained his wife’s arrest and his decision to flee Kenya as resulting from “an orchestrated effort by a number of disgruntled youth, dysfunctional family members, a former employee and some family members” who had “fanned a fire of rebellion and hatred over the locals and authorities.”

On her trip back to Kenya, Ruto took stock of the community’s anger. She gained the trust of the abused girls and their parents and took down their gut-wrenching version of events in notepads and videos on her phone.

Twelve- and 14-year-old girls told her about being taken by Mary Rose to a clinic to have “matchsticks” put in their upper arms. Recognizing them as the birth-control implant Norplant, Ruto began to understand the extent of the crimes that the husband and wife who ran the home might have committed.

Kenyan and U.S. investigators would later confirm Ruto’s hunch, with McSwain describing the procedure as a way for Dow to “perpetrate his crimes without fear of impregnating his victims” in a Department of Justice news release on the case.

“The girls would tell me how Dow would take the older ones, a different one each time, and force them to have sex with him,” she said on a trip back to Kenya last year. The girls spoke of being forced to drink alcohol or eat soap if they disobeyed any advances Dow made. Court documents in the U.S. trial against Dow as well as the Kenyan trial for Mary Rose include testimony from girls relaying the same experiences.

Mary Rose was found guilty in January 2018 on four counts of child abuse, but was released after paying a fine of about $500 in lieu of two years’ imprisonment. During the trial, in which she pleaded not guilty, she told a Kenyan court that she took girls to get birth-control implants because they were “promiscuous.” (Mary Rose has since left Kenya. She did not respond to a request for comment, and U.S. law enforcement authorities would not say why she wasn’t charged alongside her husband.)

That same year, from her home just down the road from Dow’s in Pennsylvania, Ruto sought what information she could about him, using his public Facebook page to contact people in his network. She even knocked on Dow’s door, but he didn’t open it. She enlisted a Facebook group called KWITU — Kenyan Women in the United States — to help raise public outcry in Pennsylvania.

When Ruto approached the police in Lancaster, they referred her to the district attorney’s office, which passed her to the State Department and ultimately the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.

“I hit a wall there. Nobody would commit to following it up,” she said. “For the longest time, I wondered, will someone hear me, will someone believe me? Dow had been saying Kenyans are volatile people, jealous people — that people made this all up to try and take his land. I was afraid people were going to believe that.”

After several months of trying, Ruto changed course and took her investigation to the LNP, a newspaper in Lancaster. She believes that is what it took to get U.S. authorities more seriously involved. Just days after the LNP piece published, she got a call from the FBI requesting a meeting. Dow was arrested months later after the FBI concluded its own investigation.

Coping with the trauma

To cooperate with that investigation, Ruto kept her involvement mostly to herself at the request of law enforcement officials.

But locals who live in the area around the orphanage say they knew of her involvement and admired her decision to help instead of just returning home to the United States. In Kenya, it often takes money or status to spur the police to file cases or otherwise pursue justice. She had influence in a way few in the village did.

“If it were not for Maggie’s extreme efforts, everybody and everything would have been in darkness,” said Davis Bett, who used to work as a gardener at the orphanage.

Bett and other employees had confronted Dow about his abusive behavior and also tried to alert local social services officials, but say they were rebuffed.

“At one point, I reached out to the children’s department and one of the officials told me that the home was ‘a small America in the village’ and that I should leave Gregory alone,” Bett said.

Ruto, Bett and others say that, based on their conversations with girls from the home, Dow sexually abused more than the four in whose cases he was convicted. They also say Kenyan authorities have been slow to investigate the deaths of children at the home like 9-month-old James.

Local officials say that James’s body was exhumed and that an autopsy was performed in June 2019. But no cause of death was determined and the body was not returned to his family members, who say they are still waiting for communication from the government.

“I allowed my daughter to take her children to the White man because of poverty,” said Lucia Langat, 50, James’s grandmother. “I do not think any person in this village can ever give their children out to a White man again.”

After the orphanage closed, the children were sent to other homes or back to parents who had left them there as infants and toddlers.

Since then, Kenya has imposed a moratorium on foreigners opening orphanages, and requires more-stringent background checks to be done during the processing of missionary visas. Locals supported those moves and were pleased that Dow will potentially spend the rest of his life in prison, but they expressed bitterness at being left alone to cope with the trauma.

Dow “deserved a life sentence. These children called him ‘Dad.’ That was a deep betrayal,” said Mary Rotich, Langat’s neighbor. “What can ease the suffering of these families is compensation to make their lives better.”

Ruto, too, is haunted by the cases the FBI was ultimately unable to corroborate. It is part of what spurred her to enroll this year in an online criminal justice course, which she attends in between grueling shifts taking care of coronavirus patients at a Lancaster nursing home.

“It was not just four girls,” Ruto said. “The rest of the victims and their families deserve so much better. You can’t say that justice has been fully done yet.”

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

LOUISIANA
WWL-TV

February 4, 2021

By David Hammer, WPO-TV, and Ramon Antonio Vargas, The New Orleans Advocate

https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/crime/priest-at-catholic-retirement-home-in-mandeville-convicted-of-battery-on-recently-widowed-resident/289-7193340b-f1ee-411d-92de-191cc036bae6

Weeks after commending her dying husband’s soul to God, the chaplain at a Catholic retirement home in Mandeville forcefully reached under an elderly woman’s blouse multiple times in an unsuccessful attempt to seduce her, according to authorities.

The Rev. Michael Mulenga was convicted of a simple misdemeanor battery charge Wednesday and was immediately sent to prison for five months, officials said.

Mulenga — who reports to a diocese in the East African nation of Zambia, but was in the area as a visiting priest — met Lynn Michler in 2019 while working as the chaplain of Rouquette Lodge, an independent living facility run by an Archdiocese of New Orleans nonprofit that provides affordable housing to low-income seniors.

Michler’s husband of more than 50 years, George “Butch” Michler, was dying at the time. Mulenga administered the Catholic sacrament known as the Anointing of the Sick — or the “last rites” — to the 74-year-old Butch Michler before his death on Nov. 4, 2019, according to records filed in 22nd Judicial District Court in St. Tammany Parish.

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FLORIDA
News4Jax

February 4, 2021

By Kelly Wiley

Archives show church didn’t tell state about allegations against retired priest during its investigation

Since the early 1990s, at least four women have repeatedly come to the Diocese of St. Augustine with complaints of how now-deceased priest William Malone molested and fondled them, impregnating at least one of them, in the 1980s.

His victims were young girls, the youngest just 11 years old.

The Diocese of St. Augustine told its parishioners in 2019 — for the first time — it knew of credible allegations against Fr. Malone. Church leaders didn’t specify how many victims came forward or what they knew.

The archive records, provided by the Diocese of St. Augustine to the Florida Attorney General’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, reveal the diocese — specifically late Bishop John Snyder — knew about Fr. Malone’s problems at least starting in 1991.

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MARYLAND
Maryland Matters

February 5, 2021

By Hannah Gaskill

Former Senate Judicial Proceedings chairman Robert A. Zirkin (D-Baltimore County) returned to his former committee this week to testify against a high-profile bill that’s a follow-up to a measure he once championed.

The woman who replaced Zirkin in the Senate last year, Sen. Shelly L. Hettleman (D-Baltimore County), has joined Del. CT Wilson (D-Charles) in his fight to eliminate the statute of limitations for child sex abuse survivors to launch civil suits. The bill was up in the Judicial Proceedings Committee, where Hettleman serves, on Tuesday.

But in lieu of a packed room full of survivors comforting each other and crying as they waited to testify, almost 200 pages of testimony were submitted to the panel, detailing heartbreaking stories of childhood shame, abuse, molestation and rape.

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WASHINGTON D.C.
Washington Post

February 4, 2021

By Candida Moss

Actually, the pope isn’t always infallible — and Francis isn’t a liberal.

For the second time in its history, the United States has a Catholic president. The 2020 election season was distinctive for the ways Joe Biden’s Catholic credentials were challenged by his opponents even as they were highlighted by his own campaign. Though there have always been misconceptions about the beliefs of Roman Catholics — the second-largest religious group in the country — the last year has underscored the considerable confusion about what the Catholic Church teaches and what it means to be Catholic.

Myth No. 1: Celibacy and homosexuality caused the pedophilia scandal.

For the last two decades, the biggest scandal in the Catholic Church has been the child sex abuse crisis. In explaining the genesis of the abuse, a number of Catholic leaders and organizations have claimed that it was caused by the presence of gay priests among the clergy. In 2005, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued a document arguing that ordaining gay men would be “absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from the pastoral point of view, very very risky.” A statement by Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi to the United Nations in 2009 sought to recategorize the child abuse as “a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.” Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, claimed in an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2010 that the pedophilia crisis was “a homosexual crisis all along.”

Others have traced the problem to the church’s insistence on celibacy. A 2019 op-ed for the National Catholic Reporter suggested that celibacy creates a culture of secrecy and lies that protects pedophiles as well as sexually active priests. And a number of letters to the NCR have said that sex abuse among the clergy will end when celibacy does.

But sexual orientation, sexual abstinence and child abuse are in no way linked to one another. An independent study overseen by Margaret Smith at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found no connection “between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse.” In her report to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Smith said: “We have not found that the problem [of sexual abuse of minors] is particular to the church. We have found it to be similar to the problem in society.” Writing in Psychology Today, Thomas Plante, a psychiatry professor, cited further evidence that celibacy “doesn’t increase the risk of child sexual abuse.” At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if priests want to break their vows of celibacy, there are many consenting adults with whom to do so.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Stylist

February 4, 2021

By Kayleigh Dray

“If we’re looking for monsters, we’ll never find them.”

On 2 February, Evan Rachel Wood took to her official Instagram account to name Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner) as her former abuser.

“He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years,” alleged the Westworld actor, who met Manson at the age of 18, when he was 36 and married to Dita Von Teese, according to a 2016 Rolling Stone profile.

“I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.”

Standing alongside four other women, all of whom have accused Manson of abuse, Wood added: “I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander, or blackmail.

“I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives.”

In light of these disturbing allegations, which he has emphatically denied, Manson has been dropped from his recording label, Loma Vista Recordings, as well as an upcoming episode of fantasy drama series American Gods.

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UNITED STATES
Freedom from Religion Foundation (blog)

February 4, 2021

Another new bombshell report by the Associated Press shows once again that churches are stealing from the American taxpayer:

“As the pandemic began to unfold, AP reveals today, “scores of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection Program while sitting on well over $10 billion in cash, short-term investments or other available funds, an Associated Press investigation has found. And despite the broad economic downturn, these assets have grown in many dioceses.”

AP reports that “[t]he 112 dioceses that shared their financial statements collected at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed aid. A majority of these dioceses reported enough money on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses, even without any new income.”

The PPP is not even a year old and already the grift and abuse by church has been enormous. And unfortunately we’ll see more: The Paycheck Protection Program was reopened on January 11, 2021.

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AUSTRALIA
Catholic Leader

February 5, 2021

By Mark Bowling

THE Australian Federal Police has found no criminal misconduct after completing an investigation into huge payments made from the Vatican to Australia.

There were claims that money transfers of almost $3million sent to Australia could have been connected to an international money laundering and fraud scandal.

The Australian international financial watchdog, AUSTRAC, referred the transfers during the last six years to the Australian Federal Police as “actionable financial intelligence”.

However the AFP has released a statement confirming that it had “completed analysis of the financial intelligence provided by AUSTRAC” and found “no criminal misconduct… to date.”

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AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation

February 4, 2021

By Giselle Wakatama

A “mafia-like” code of silence among “dark networks” within the Catholic Church has begun to emerge from a world-first project mapping clerical paedophile networks, says an academic behind the project.

The research builds on work done by Sally Muytjens, one of Dr Death’s doctoral students, who mapped Catholic paedophile networks in Victoria.

The mapping will now include other hotspots such as Newcastle and the role of women in the church, nuns and seminaries.

The Victorian project identified 99 clergy members as abusers linked to 16 paedophile networks in the Melbourne and Ballarat dioceses.

It found there was a “mafia-like” code of silence among clergy perpetrators who formed dark networks (DNs) within the Victorian Catholic Church.

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GERMANY
Catholic News Agency

February 5, 2021

A German cardinal facing calls to resign confirmed on Thursday that he would release an eagerly awaited report on abuse cases in his archdiocese next month.

Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki told the Kölnische Rundschau newspaper on Feb. 4 that he stood by his promise to release the Gercke Report on clerical abuse on March 18.

He also said that an independent commission would be granted access to another report, by the Munich law firm Westphal Spilker Wastl, which the Archdiocese of Cologne controversially declined to publish.

Woeki, the Archbishop of Cologne since 2014, has been asked repeatedly to resign by journalists in recent weeks. He has also been sharply criticized by clerics and Catholic associations for his handling of abuse reports and cover-up allegations, according to CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.

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GERMANY
Anadolu Agency

February 4, 2021

By Ayhan Şimşek

Nuns sold orphaned children to priests, businessmen to serve as sex slaves, new confidential report reveals

Germany’s Catholic Church covered up the sexual abuse of orphaned children for decades, a new confidential report has revealed.

Nuns in the western city of Speyer sold orphaned children to priests and businessmen to serve as sex slaves between the 1960s and 1970s, but the scandal was covered up by the church authorities, The Daily Beast reported.

According to the 560-page report obtained by the US media outlet, at least 175 children, mostly boys between the ages of 8 and 14, were sexually abused over two decades.

The report was commissioned by the German church after a lawsuit was filed by more than a dozen victims against the Archdiocese of Cologne last year, but authorities have so far kept the report under wraps.

According to the findings of the internal investigation, around 80% of the victims of systematic abuse were male and 20% were female.

The investigation also found that 80% of the abusers were now dead, and 37 had left the priesthood or religious order.

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Patheos.com (blog)

February 4, 2021

By Barry Duke

AFTER reading a report about the sexual abuse suffered by orphans at boarding houses run by Germany’s Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer, Karl-Heinz Wiesemann, above, Catholic Bishop of Speyer, reportedly had to take a month’s sabbatical to recover from the shock.

According to this Daily Beast report, the investigation into the activities of nuns who rented out orphans – mainly boys – to paedophile priests, politicians and businessman in the 1960s and ’70s, led to a report that the church then attempted to quash.

The details of that investigative report were so horrific that Archbishop Reiner Maria Woelki, above, refused to make it public, demanding that any journalists who see it sign confidentiality agreements.

Eight German journalist stormed out of a press conference in January after being denied access to the church’s investigation unless they agreed not to publish its cont

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BERLIN (GERMANY)
Associated Press

February 5, 2021

The head of the German Bishops’ Conference has criticized the handling by one of Germany’s most prominent Roman Catholic archbishops of a report on past child sexual abuse by clergy.

Cologne Archbishop Rainer Maria Woelki faces mounting discontent in his diocese over his decision to keep under wraps a study he commissioned on how local church officials reacted when priests were accused of sexual abuse. Woelki has cited legal concerns about publishing the study conducted by a law firm.

The head of the national bishops’ conference, Limburg Bishop Georg Baetzing, criticized Woelki at a news conference on Thursday.

German news agency dpa quoted Baetzing as saying the “crisis that has arisen because the report is not now public was not well-managed, from my point of view.”

The law firm that prepared report has offered to publish the document on its website and to take sole responsibility for it, but the diocese has rejected that idea.

Woelki has drawn fierce criticism from Catholics in Cologne. The local diocesan council called last month for “full transparency” and said the confidence of the area’s Catholic faithful in church leaders had been damaged.

“After years of secrecy and denial, people in our diocese finally expect plain talk and concrete steps of responsibility,” the council said. “That is always possible. And it is high time.”

Woelki said Thursday he was “painfully aware that confidence had been lost” and acknowledged that he had made mistakes.

He pointed to the planned March 18 publication of a new report he also commissioned, and said that “after that, those affected and then everyone who is interested will get an insight into the first report.”

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

SALEM (MA)
Salem Film Fest and BishopAccountability.org

February 4, 2021

As part of its winter series preceding its festival dates, Salem Film Fest is presenting the World Premiere of the documentary Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood. Streaming of the film will be available starting on Saturday, February 20, 2021, at 4:00 p.m. EST on Salem Film Fest’s streaming channel. The one-hour film is produced by Zingerplatz Pictures and BishopAccountability.org. A free live panel with the wife, friends, and scholars of the subject, Richard Sipe, will take place at 8:00 p.m. EST on Saturday, February 20th, with a live chat function. The film and discussions will then be available via Salem Film Fest’s video-on-demand channel through Thursday, March 4. Ticket link and information can be accessed at SalemFilmFest.com.

The documentary, directed by Joe Cultrera (Hand of God, Frontline, 2006), explores the life and work of the late A.W. Richard Sipe (1932–2018), the revolutionary scholar of sex, celibacy, and clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church. Sipe’s key role in the Boston abuse crisis was dramatized in the Academy Award-winning movie Spotlight (2015).

Long before 2002, when the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team made it headline news, Richard Sipe was a key figure in the Catholic church and its problems with sex. As a Benedictine therapist-monk, Sipe helped hundreds of priests in their struggles with celibacy. Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood, takes us back to those days and Sipe’s upbringing in Minnesota, and forward to his work with survivors and his groundbreaking books: A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy and Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis.

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UNITED STATES
Associated Press

February 4, 2021

By Reese Dunklin and Michael Rezendes

When the coronavirus forced churches to close their doors and give up Sunday collections, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte turned to the federal government’s signature small business relief program for more than $8 million.

The diocese’s headquarters, churches and schools landed the help even though they had roughly $100 million of their own cash and short-term investments available last spring, financial records show. When the cash catastrophe church leaders feared didn’t materialize, those assets topped $110 million by the summer.

“I am gratified to report the overall good financial health of the diocese despite the many difficulties presented by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Bishop Peter Jugis wrote in the diocese’s audited financial report released last fall.

As the pandemic began to unfold, scores of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection Program while sitting on well over $10 billion in cash, short-term investments or other available funds, an Associated Press investigation has found. And despite the broad economic downturn, these assets have grown in many dioceses.

Yet even with that financial safety net, the 112 dioceses that shared their financial statements, along with the churches and schools they oversee, collected at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed aid. A majority of these dioceses reported enough money on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses, even without any new income.

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LOUISIANA
KATC-TV

February 3, 2021

The Lafayette attorney accused of rape in an investigation related to the Boy Scouts held a press conference Wednesday to deny the allegations made against him.

“I want to begin by making it very clear. I completely deny any and all charges made against me by an anonymous alleged victim,” Barry Rozas said during the press conference. “It simply did not happen. And there are no circumstances that can ever be misconstrued as inappropriate in all of my years as being a scout leader. While I’m sympathetic to true victims of sexual abuse. There’s no victim in this case, as it relates to me, because I never abused anyone.”

Rozas, 52, was booked with one count of first-degree rape yesterday and released on a $25,000 bond, records show. The victim has alleged that he was raped by Rozas at a location in the 400 block of Cajundome Boulevard. This is the block where the Cajundome is located, as well as much of the UL Athletics complex. The records are not specific as to location; they just list the 400 block of that street. The complaint was one of 28 turned over to the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office in November by the Evangeline Council after the council received them from a commission working on the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy case.

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

NORTH DAKOTA
KXnet.com

February 3, 2021

By Maddie Biertempfel

A trio of bills meant to give victims of child sexual abuse more time to seek justice heard gut-wrenching testimony this morning from survivors, prosecutors, psychologists and more.

“My dentist was a prolific pedophile,” Jeffrey Dunford said.

Dunford recounts horrific memories of sexual abuse from his childhood dentist in Fargo.

“This particular office manager suggested she had witnessed 400 boys abused in her tenure at the dental office, so I was just one of that section,” Dunford said.

He wasn’t the only one to share his experience.

“I was sexually abused by a priest at Selfridge when I was about 10. Five other boys told me they were also abused by the same priest,” Ted Becker said.

Memories of abuse from priests, parents and other trusted figures filled the hearing room.

“I had one child victim who, her perpetrator had showed her pictures of his wife and his kids and at 7 years old she said, ‘I was worried he would lose his wife and kids and wouldn’t get to see them again.’ That was in the mind of a 7-year-old child,” Assistant Attorney General Britta Demello Rice said.

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SANTA ROSA (CA)
The Press Democrat

February 3, 2021

By Kaylee Tornay and Nashelly Chavez

A Santa Rosa man in jail on suspicion of repeatedly sexually assaulting a minor over a period of five years knew his victim socially through a family connection, police said Wednesday.

Drue James Mordecai, 55, remained in the Sonoma County Jail, held on $3 million bail, and faces several felony charges related to the statements of a teenage victim, who reported to police that the man had abused them, said Sgt. Chris Mahurin, a spokesman for the Santa Rosa Police Department.

Court records listed 27 felony charges and two enhancements against Mordecai in the case, which included nine charges of assaulting a minor with the intent to commit a felony and five counts of committing a lewd act with a child.

Mordecai was arrested Jan. 28, after investigators with the Police Department determined they had gathered enough evidence to arrest him, police said.

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CALIFORNIA
Sacramento Bee

February 3, 2021

By Maddie Capron

A California church leader is accused of sexually abusing a child for four or five years, officials said.

The Santa Rosa Police Department investigated Drue Mordecai, a 55-year-old Santa Rosa resident and “small group leader” at New Vintage Church, for sexual assault, the department said in a Wednesday news release.

“As a result of the investigation, probable cause was established that the suspect sexually abused a juvenile victim for approximately four to five years,” police said in the release. “The abuse began when the victim was 12 years old.”

Mordecai was one of six volunteers who worked with high school students at the church, police said. Officials are investigating if there are other victims.

“As soon as we found out [about the allegations], we proactively began calling families to make sure children were safe,” Lead Pastor Darren Youngstrom told the police department.

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SANTA ROSA (CA)
Santa Rosa Patch

February 3, 2021

Police said they’re working with leadership of the Santa Rosa church to determine whether there are more potential victims.

A 55-year-old Santa Rosa man is accused of sexually abusing a minor he met while volunteering at a local church, police said.

Drue Mordecai was arrested Thursday on suspicion of 12 charges related to the investigation and remains behind bars in lieu of $3 million bail, according to a Santa Rosa Police Department news release.

The day prior to Mordecai’s arrest, the Santa Rosa Police Department’s Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Team began a sexual assault investigation that involved a “Small Group Leader” at New Vintage Church and a juvenile victim, police Sgt. Christopher Mahurin said.

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CALIFORNIA
Legal Examiner (law firm’s blog)

February 3, 2021

New revelations of disturbing sexual abuse at a seminary are coming to light after a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Diocese of Oakland settled last year.

According to a local NBC affiliate, “The accusations come from a former seminarian, 28, who had previously alleged in 2019 that he was raped by Livermore priest Fr. Michael Van Dinh three years ago. He does not wish to be identified, so NBC Bay Area is calling him John Doe.

A police report obtained by NBC Bay Area shows Livermore police found a meth pipe and sex toys in the priest’s living quarters while investigating the alleged assault. Detectives recommended two felony charges, including sodomy by force, but the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office said there wasn’t enough evidence. After going through therapy for the alleged assault at the hands of Fr. Van Dinh, Doe’s attorney said he later disclosed being sexually abused by two other priests within the Diocese: Fr. Luis Lopez and Fr. Ricardo Chavez, who is now retired. Lopez is currently assigned to Fremont’s Corpus Christi Church, according to its website.

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NORTH DAKOTA
Associated Press

February 3, 2021

By James MacPherson

Several adult victims of child sexual abuse appealed to lawmakers in emotional testimony Wednesday to back legislation that would give survivors more time to sue their alleged perpetrators for crimes that could date back decades.

The bipartisan legislation, HB 1382, would provide a two-year window to suspend the statute of limitations to file claims against alleged abusers or institutions that protected them.

“I appeal to you to bring justice to victims of child abuse in North Dakota,” West Fargo Republican Rep. Austen Schauer, the bill’s sponsor, told the House Judiciary Committee, which took no immediate action.

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MALTA
Malta Today

February 3, 2021

By Laura Calleja

Psychologist who followed 80 patients with drug problems who experienced child and adolescent abuse never opened up about their abusers

Victims of child and adolescent abuse rarely report their abuse, meaning many perpetrators are still within the community, a 2000 study by psychologist Mariella Dimech of 80 people with drug problems had found at the time.

‘Numbing The Pain’ focused on the link between child and adolescent abuse and drug addiction by following 80 people who had drug problems over time – 90% of these vicims had been abused during childhood and adolescence.

“The abuse was sexual, physical, and emotional and or neglect,” Dimech said, who was asked to comment on the recent arraignment of two Gozitan priests for the alleged rape of an altar boy.

“100% of the victims never reported their abuse. This means that no help was given, offered or perceived as being available. This also means that all the perpetrators are still out there,” Dimech said.

In 2019 there were 26 court cases related to paedophilia, whose perpetrators were in the main male (24). Every month, social welfare agency Appoġġ receives two to five sexual abuse cases.

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MALTA
Lovin’ Malta

February 3, 2021

By Tim Diacono

Two former Xagħra priests were recently charged with sexually abusing an altar boy, but a third clergy member who served in the same parish managed to escape similar charges despite the Church deeming the allegations credible.

Eucharist Sultana, a former Xagħra parish priest, was suspended from the priesthood in 2018 after being accused of sexually abusing a former altar boy over 16 years earlier.

He allegedly groomed the boy for four years, summoning him for sexual encounters in return for gifts. The abuse is believed to have lasted for four years and ended when the victim was 17 years old.

The Church’s Safeguarding Commission referred this case to the police, who launched an investigation. However, a police spokesperson has now confirmed with Lovin Malta that they were legally prohibited from prosecuting Sultana because the case was time-barred.

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ENGLAND
The Tablet

February 3, 2021

By Catherine Pepinster

The victim of a priest sentenced to serve more than a decade in jail for child sexual abuse has attacked the Archdiocese of Birmingham for trying to dissuade him from reporting the assaults to police.

Last week, Fr Joseph Quigley was jailed for 11 years and six months for sexually and physically abusing a young man. At one stage he locked him in the crypt of a church as a punishment for supposed wrongdoing.

The priest, who was once a national education adviser to the Catholic bishops, groomed the boy during tutoring sessions in his presbytery which eventually led to assaults, involving sexual touching. The judge described the priest as a sexual sadist. During the trial, Warwick Crown Court heard the abuse took place in the 2000s when Quigley was serving at a parish in Warwickshire within the Archdiocese of Birmingham. The victim eventually told his mother in 2009

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GERMANY
Religion News Service via America

February 3, 2021

By Claire Giangravé

Germany’s Catholic bishops will resume discussions this week to plan the Synodal Path, a set of conferences slated to address controversial questions such as women’s roles and LGBT acceptance, even as the country faces yet another scandal of sexual abuse by clergy.

Many churchmen believe that the social questions and the abuse crisis are related. “The abuse crisis hurts the church very deeply,” the Rev. Martin Maier, a Jesuit priest and former editor at the German Catholic magazine Voices of the Time ( Stimmen der Zeit ), told Religion News Service. “One of the most painful consequences is the loss of trust. One of the goals of the Synodal Path is to restore trust, which is crucial and vital.”

Started in 2019 and scheduled to last two years, Synodal Path was put on hold in September 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its purpose is to debate questions of power structures in the Catholic Church, priestly life, sexual morality and the role of women in the church.

“The abuse crisis hurts the church very deeply,” said the Rev. Martin Maier. “One of the most painful consequences is the loss of trust. One of the goals of the Synodal Path is to restore trust, which is crucial and vital.”

While the bishops’ summit officially considers only Germany’s local dioceses and parishes, the discussions and decisions will likely have consequences around the global church. Bishops from Australia to South America and Ireland are grappling with the devastating impact that the sexual abuse crisis has had, as well as with mounting secularization that has depleted church attendance and vocations.

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ROME (ITALY)
Catholic News Agency

February 3, 2021

By Hannah Brockhaus

The Australian Federal Police said on Wednesday that it had found no evidence of criminal misconduct in its investigation into money transfers from the Vatican to Australia.

Australian authorities have been investigating the suspicious payments, equivalent to about $7.4 million, for several months.

The federal police (AFP) said in a statement on Feb. 3 that “no criminal misconduct has been identified to date.”

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LIVERPOOL (ENGLAND)
Liverpool Echo

February 3, 2021

By Jonathan Humphries

The teacher was never convicted after a judge ruled there had been an “abuse of process”

A Catholic brother who was allowed to live on school grounds was the former head of a school accused of abusing multiple children.

The man spent several years living in France before moving onto accommodation connected to St Francis Xavier’s (SFX) College in Woolton.

The ECHO has since learned that the man, a member of the French Catholic order the Brothers of Christian Instruction, was charged with 10 counts of indecent assault against seven victims, some under 13, at a school outside the Merseyside area.

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GERMANY
Catholic News Service via National Catholic Reporter

February 3, 2021

The Archdiocese of Cologne, which has the largest membership in the German-speaking world with almost 2 million Catholics, is sliding into a crisis of confidence.

The German Catholic news agency KNA reports that parish councils, priests and most recently the diocesan council have criticized Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki for his handling of an abuse investigation, and the ferocity of their criticism is unusual.

Tim Kurzbach, archdiocesan council chairman, said in late January that Woelki had “failed as a moral authority” and was not confronting the problem. In protest, the council, made up of elected representatives of Catholic laypeople, said it was suspending its cooperation on diocesan reforms.

It was a rare step, and it was taken despite the cardinal’s pledge to conduct a rigorous investigation.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Spotlight PA

February 2, 2021

By Angela Couloumbis and Cynthia Fernandez

When Republican state Rep. Jim Gregory learned Monday from Gov. Tom Wolf that an administrative error will delay a decision on whether survivors can sue for decades-old sexual abuse, he broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.

“That’s where I had to leave it with him — to hope he understood the gravity of what this means to victims, to know that we could be so close to achieving something for them that has been decades in wait,” Gregory, a survivor of child sexual abuse, said of his conversation with Wolf. “To now have to say, again, you’re going to have to wait. I would believe that my emotions mirrored the emotions of other victims.”

The Department of State recently discovered that it failed last year to advertise a proposed change to the state constitution that would create a two-year window so victims of decades-old abuse can sue perpetrators and the institutions that covered up the crimes.

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PENNSYLANIA
Philadelphia Inquirer

February 2, 2021

By Maria Panaritis

For years, Pa. Republicans stalled on expanded rights to sue abusers. Now “human error” by Democratic Gov. Wolf’s administration has derailed a long-awaited law.

If an 860-word column could hope to convey speechlessness, this one would be it.

Hours after news broke of a bureaucratic blunder in Harrisburg that resulted in further damage to victims of child sexual abuse in Pennsylvania, it remained hard to know what to say.

“It just never ends,” State Rep. Mark Rozzi put it moments after answering my call Monday night. I couldn’t have agreed more with those four words.

For 16 years in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, people like Rozzi, who was molested as a child within a corrupt institution that knowingly harbored and hid pedophiles, were told they could not sue as adults. After the Catholic abuse scandal broke open in 2002, lawmakers in Harrisburg began blocking legislative efforts to alter the civil statute of limitations so that victims could sue as adults many years beyond what the merciless law had allowed.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WPXI-TV

February 2, 2021

PA Attorney General urges lawmakers to take action and support abuse survivors

By Rick Earle, WPXI-TV and Greg Deffenbaugh, WPXI.com

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is sending a strong message to the state legislature: support survivors of sexual abuse by passing critical legislation that would allow them to seek justice over a two-year window.

The attorney general spearheaded the groundbreaking grand jury report on clergy sex abuse in Pennsylvania’s Catholic Dioceses.

In an interview with Channel 11′s Rick Earle, Shapiro voiced his disappointment with the secretary of state’s office, after the department mismanaged the process to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would allow abuse survivors a two-year window to file civil lawsuits.

”This conduct at the department of state was truly shameful and these survivors deserve better. I can tell you, I’ve had some productive conversations with the governor and legislative leaders about trying to remedy this error and trying to get the victims in a position where we can bring justice as quickly and humanly possible,” said Shapiro.

According to the Associated Press, the proposed amendment, which is in response to the child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, first passed the Legislature as House Bill 963 in November 2019. The Department of State was constitutionally required to advertise the wording of the proposed constitutional amendment in two newspapers in every county, in each of the three months before the next general election when members of the General Assembly are elected.

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SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests)

February 2, 2021

A self-admitted pedophile and ex-priest from a Chicago-based Catholic group has made the news again in East Timor as he evades criminal justice in the United States. We fear for the vulnerable children that this serial abuser may still have access to and call on those that hired, trained, and ordained him to use every resource at their disposal to bring this disgraced cleric home to face justice.

For decades, Richard Daschbach ran an orphanage called Topu Honis, a shelter for homeless children, disabled adults, and women fleeing domestic violence in East Timor. In 2019, he was arrested for abusing young girls at this facility, a year after he admitted to sexually abusing the children under his care. Daschbach has since been defrocked by the Vatican, but despite these arrests and his own admissions, he apparently continues to enjoy “celebrity status” in East Timor, one of the poorest and most Catholic countries in the world.

Prior to his exodus from the US, Daschbach was ordained at St. Mary’s Mission Seminary in Chicago and was a member of the Chicago-based Society of the Divine Word (SVD). We believe that both of these institutions have far more resources at their disposal than their counterparts in East Timor. They should be using those resources to bring the abuser they hired, trained, and ordained home so that he can no longer use his status to abuse children.

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HONOLULU (HI)
Diocese of Honolulu via Hawaii Catholic Herald

February 3, 2021

Kristin J. Leandro, director of the diocese’s Safe Environment office announced Jan. 12 the appointment of the new diocesan victim assistance coordinator, the person who provides support and services for adult survivors of child sexual abuse by clergy, religious or church workers.

Lora Daniel, a licensed mental health counselor at Catholic Charities Hawaii, takes the place of Elizabeth Lyons who moved to the Mainland this month.

Daniel is a therapist in Catholic Charities’ Child Sex Abuse Treatment Program and Child Victims of Crime Program. She also works with other families and individuals in need of counseling.

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YOUNGSTOWN (OH)
Diocese of Youngstown

February 1, 2021

The Most Reverend David J. Bonnar, Bishop of Youngstown, has promulgated the Safe Environment Policy for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults of the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown, effective immediately. This policy replaces the 2008 Child Protection Policy while incorporating the vast majority of its policies and procedures. Significant additions include an explicit reference to vulnerable adults, a specific section relating to social media and electronic communication, and updated resources for those seeking to report misconduct or abuse.

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NEW ORLEANS
Legal Examiner (law firm blog)

February 2, 2021

Sexual abuse allegations and claims against priests in New Orleans made headlines throughout 2020, especially after the Archdiocese of New Orleans filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May – a response due to the costs of their legal troubles. The bankruptcy prompted a March 1, 2021 deadline for claims against the church. Since the deadline was set, more victims have overcome their silence and fear to pursue justice for abuse at the hands of religious leaders.

The number of clergy with claims against them has grown steadily since the scandal broke, with victims coming forward about abuse and sexual advances that took place, many of them decades ago. The types of claims range from rape and molestation to sexually inappropriate letters and text messages.

In October, a survivor made abuse claims against two priests who taught at his Catholic school in the 70s. He claims the church gave him unlimited therapy, but no actions were taken against the priests at the time.

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VATICAN CITY
Religion News Service

February 2, 2021

By Claire Giangravé

The news media is plagued by four sins, the pope told reporters: disinformation, calumny, defamation and ‘coprophilia,’ by which he apparently meant love of scandal.

Addressing the current challenges of the U.S. Catholic Church, Pope Francis warned against the polarization in the country and the “sins” of the media.

“The church in the United States is a church that has been courageous — the history it has and the saints — and has done so much,” Pope Francis said during an impromptu interview with journalists from Catholic News Service on Monday (Feb. 1) at the Vatican.

The audience marked the 100th anniversary of the news agency, which is an arm of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“A divided church is not the church,” the pope told the CNS reporters, while at the same time making a distinction between unity and uniformity. “Unity with differences, but one heart,” Francis he said.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service via National Catholic Reporter

February 2, 2021

By Carol Glatz

Established almost 500 years ago, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is no longer “the Inquisition” — rather, its main focus is handing down the teachings of the apostles, said the office’s prefect.

“Our mission is to promote and protect the doctrine of the faith. It is a task that will always be necessary for the church, which has the duty to transmit the teaching of the apostles to the next generation,” Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, congregation prefect, told Vatican News Feb. 1.

Called the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition when it was instituted in 1542, the congregation was initially a tribunal exclusively for cases of heresy and schism, but soon its responsibilities were expanded to include “everything relating directly or indirectly to faith and morals,” according to the congregation’s website.

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ROME (ITALY)
Daily Beast

February 2, 2021

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

SICK SISTERS: A report German authorities tried to silence shows how Catholic nuns peddled orphaned boys to predatory priests and perverts for decades.

A jarring report outlining decades of rampant child sex abuse at the hands of greedy nuns and perverted priests in the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany, paints a troubling picture of systematic abuse in the German church.

The report is the byproduct of a lawsuit alleging that orphaned boys living in the boarding houses of the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer were sold or loaned for weeks at a time to predatory priests and businessmen in a sick rape trade. The men involved in the lawsuit say as boys they were denied being adopted out or sent to foster families because selling them for rape lined the sisters’ coffers for their “convent of horrors.” Some of the boys were then groomed to be sex slaves to perverts, the report claims.

The alleged abuse went on for years, with one of the males claiming the nuns even frequently visited their college dorms after they had left the convent. He said the nuns often drugged him and delivered him to predators’ apartments. The Order of Sisters of the Divine Redeemer did not answer multiple requests for comment about the allegations.

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ALBUQUERQUE (NM)
Albuquerque Journal

February 2, 2021

By Pilar Martinez

St. Pius X High School may soon have to find a new home, according to a letter sent by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe announcing that it may be forced to sell the West Side campus as part of its bankruptcy reorganization.

The letter sent to members of the St. Pius community by Archbishop of Santa Fe John C. Wester in January said the school’s campus, as well as buildings used by archdiocesan staff, may be sold as a result of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in 2018 following hundreds of settlements with victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members.

“We deeply regret the distress that this possible marketing of the campus will cause in the St. Pius X community of students, parents, alumni, staff and the surrounding communities,” Wester wrote in the letter.

Wester said bankrupt organizations are required to monetize assets deemed non-essential to the organization’s primary mission and the St. Pius campus and archdiocesan buildings fell under this category.

He said church staff are looking at ways the archdiocese can monetize the campus to avoid listing it on the open market, but he did not provide details.

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AUSTRALIA
Australian Associated Press via Yahoo News

February 3, 2021

By Tim Dornin

Unjustly convicted but later acquitted on charges of covering up child sex abuse, former Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson felt no self-pity or rancour, but rather accepted the cross he was forced to bear, his funeral service has been told.

The 70-year-old, who died last month, served as the eighth archbishop of Adelaide from 2001 until his resignation in 2018.

At a service in St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral on Wednesday, Bishop Greg O’Kelly described him as a warm and compassionate man who was devoted to those who sought his ministry.

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AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation

February 2, 2021

By Sara Tomevska

Former Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson has been farewelled at a funeral at St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral.

The Catholic Church paid its respects to the 70-year-old, who died unexpectedly last month.

Several church leaders spoke including Apostolic Nuncio Adolfo Tito Yllana, who also read a statement from Pope Francis.

“His holiness Pope Francis was saddened to learn of the death of Archbishop Emeritus Philip Wilson, and he sends heartfelt condolences,” he said.

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ENGLAND
The Tablet

February 2, 2021

By Richard Scorer

Last Friday Joseph Quigley, Catholic priest and former religious education advisor, was sentenced to 11-and-a-half years in prison for serious offences against children. The police investigation which resulted in his conviction began in 2017, following a complaint from one of Quigley’s victims, who was encouraged to go the police by his therapist. As The Tablet reports today, this same victim alleges that several years earlier he had discussed the possibility of reporting his allegations about Quigley to the police with Jane Jones, the then Archdiocese of Birmingham Safeguarding Advisor. He says she actively discouraged him from taking his allegations to the police, telling him: “You won’t win.”

If this victim’s story is true – and his account of what Jane Jones said to him is corroborated by another family member present at the same meeting – then this is appalling. However it is not surprising. After 25 years of representing victims and survivors of clerical sex abuse, I have heard countless examples of victims being discouraged, subtly or not, from taking their allegations to the authorities.

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

SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests)

February 1, 2021

A priest has been jailed in the UK for physically and sexually torturing a young student for years, enabled by Catholic officials. We are glad that these allegations came to light and that this dangerous abuser has been identified and removed. We now call on law enforcement to investigate the disturbing decisions that allowed this perpetrator to go unchecked and untethered for so long.

The abuse that this young boy suffered at the hands of Fr. Joseph Quigley has been termed a “gothic horror.” Our hearts break for the victim and we hope that he is getting the help and support he needs. In addition to the appalling tortures this youth experienced, we are outraged at the indifference shown by UK Catholic officials to the allegations against Fr. Quigley. Accusations of abuse by the priest first came to light in 2008, and in response, Church leaders shipped him off to St. Luke’s for six months, a “treatment center” for abusive priests.

We are not sure what is worse – that Catholic officials truly believed that six months was enough time to treat someone with violent abusive tendencies, or that Church leaders allowed Fr. Quigley to routinely visit schools following his return to the UK. Catholic officials had been made aware of allegations against Fr. Quigley more than once and still saw fit to send him as a representative of their institution to schools full of vulnerable children. Hundreds of children were exposed to unnecessary risk due to these decisions and we hope that law enforcement officials are investigating to determine whether any other laws were broken.

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

BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe

February 2, 2021

By Shelley Murphy

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has paid alleged victims millions of dollars in recent years to resolve claims that they were sexually abused by priests working in local parishes. Yet, the names of many of those priests are missing from the Archdiocese’s public roster of clergy accused of sexually abusing children, an accounting that began a decade ago under pressure from victims.

Their exclusion has angered survivors of abuse, particularly in light of Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley’s longstanding pledge to be transparent about clergy sexual abuse after decades of secrecy.

“It just seems like they’re trying to cover up,” said David, who in November received a settlement in “the high five figures,” from the archdiocese, according to his attorney, Mitchell Garabedian. It was awarded after David underwent painful questioning from church lawyers and an arbitrator tasked with corroborating his claims against John H. Curley, who died in 1999.

David, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he was frustrated by Curley’s absence from the Archdiocese’s list because the priest ruined his life by sexually assaulting him in 1981 when he was 12 and living at a home for troubled boys in Braintree.

“They’re trying to hide that the person is a pedophile,” he said.

Curley routinely brought groups of boys from the Pilgrim Center on trips to the park or to play basketball that ended with an overnight stay at his home, David said. While the group watched television, Curley would “bring kids up to his bedroom one at a time,” he said.

He said he was sleeping one night when Curley awakened him and told him “we had to do penance.” He said the priest told him to pray as he sexually assaulted him. He said he refused to go on any more trips with Curley.

Garabedian, a longtime advocate for sexual abuse victims who has settled claims involving more than 340 clergy and church personnel, has identified 20 priests whom the Boston Archdiocese does not list as accused child molesters although it has paid settlements totaling more than $1.2 million to their victims since 2011. In that time, the archdiocese also paid about $1.3 million to the victims of nine clergy members listed as accused of “unsubstantiated” claims of child sexual abuse, according to Garabedian. Several of those priests were accused of sexual abuse by multiple victims, he said.

“Why would they pay us a settlement if the priest didn’t do it?” Garabedian asked. “They’re hoping the clergy sexual abuse crisis is going away when it isn’t. You’re dealing with an entity that has engaged in coverup, so they’re not changing their stripes now.”

Attorney Tyler Fox said two of his clients who were sexually abused by priests decades ago while working as altar boys at churches in the Boston Archdiocese were paid settlements of $85,000 and $99,000 last year, yet both priests are absent from the church’s roster of accused abusers.

Terrence Donilon, an Archdiocese spokesman, declined to comment on specific cases and would not disclose how many settlements involved claims against priests who are omitted from the Archdiocese’s roster or listed as being accused of “unsubstantiated” allegations.

He said archdiocesan leadership has been actively considering whether its criteria for identifying accused clerics should be updated.

“In many situations, choosing to resolve an allegation by reaching a settlement is often the best decision financially for all the parties involved,” Donilon said. “In many ways we are acknowledging the harm that was done by offering compensation and counseling services.”

He said the Archdiocese immediately reports allegations of clergy sexual abuse of minors to law enforcement and publicly discloses when a clergy member is removed from active ministry after a conviction or during an investigation into an allegation of child abuse.

The Boston Archdiocese’s website lists 132 clerics in various categories, including those convicted of child sexual abuse in criminal or church proceedings, those who left or were suspended from the church pending investigations, and those who died before victims came forward. Another 38 priests are listed as “unsubstantiated cases” because a review board concluded the allegations were unfounded or the priest was cleared of wrongdoing during church proceedings.

The Boston Archdiocese settled agreements with 33 people for $2.3 million in the last fiscal year to resolve sexual abuse claims, Donilon said. The year before, it settled 20 allegations totaling $1.2million, he said. It also paid $2.4 million in each of those years for “abuse-related prevention, outreach, healing, and reconciliation efforts as a whole to both new and ongoing survivors,” he said.

In 2011, O’Malley released the first list of clerics who were accused of sexually abusing children, saying the Archdiocese’s “commitment and responsibility is to protect children and to ensure that the tragedy of sexual abuse is never repeated in the Church.”

At the time, he said some names were excluded to balance “the critically important need to assure the protection of children” with “the due process rights and reputations of those accused clergy whose cases have not been fully adjudicated.”

He omitted the names of many deceased priests because they were unable to respond to the allegations. He also excluded the names of dozens of priests from religious orders and other dioceses who were accused of abusing children while assigned to the Boston Archdiocese. It was the responsibility of the priest’s order or diocese, he said, to investigate allegations against them.

Those guidelines remain in place today. O’Malley has been urging religious orders to identify accused priests, Donilon said.

Fox represents a man who was awarded $85,000 last year to settle a sexual abuse claim against Lawrence Buckley, a Redemptorist priest who worked for the Boston Archdiocese and was described in his 2008 obituary as a champion for social justice.

The man, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Chris, said he was a 7-year-old altar boy at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Roxbury in 1987 when Buckley first sexually assaulted him in the sacristy, where priests change into their robes before Mass. He said the abuse continued for four years, even on the day that Buckley came to his home to deliver the news that his father had died.

He said he never told anyone until he became a father himself, fiercely protective of his two little girls. Two years ago, he disclosed the abuse to the Boston Archdiocese.

“It’s frustrating,” Chris said of the Archdiocese’s omission of Buckley’s name from its list of accused priests because he belonged to a religious order. “It was a Catholic church and I was a Catholic altar boy. I just wish they owned up to something that happened here.”

The Redemptorists have not released a list of clergy accused of molesting children and did not respond to inquiries regarding Buckley.

Terry McKiernan, founder of Bishop-Accountability.org, a volunteer group that tracks clergy sexual abuse, said it’s a “glaring peculiarity” that some of the worst offenders have been left off the Boston Archdiocese list. Recent high-profile investigations into clergy sexual abuse and court settlements have prompted more dioceses and religious orders to release lists identifying abusers. Currently, 152 of the nation’s 178 Roman Catholic dioceses and 24 religious orders have done so, he said.

David O’Regan, Massachusetts leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said identifying abusive priests helps their victims heal and often gives those who have suffered in silence the courage to come forward because they realize “that happened to somebody else. It wasn’t just me.”

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

BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe

February 2, 2021

By Shelley Murphy

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has paid alleged victims millions of dollars in recent years to resolve claims that they were sexually abused by priests working in local parishes. Yet, the names of many of those priests are missing from the Archdiocese’s public roster of clergy accused of sexually abusing children, an accounting that began a decade ago under pressure from victims.

Their exclusion has angered survivors of abuse, particularly in light of Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley’s longstanding pledge to be transparent about clergy sexual abuse after decades of secrecy.

“It just seems like they’re trying to cover up,” said David, who in November received a settlement in “the high five figures,” from the archdiocese, according to his attorney, Mitchell Garabedian. It was awarded after David underwent painful questioning from church lawyers and an arbitrator tasked with corroborating his claims against John H. Curley, who died in 1999.

David, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he was frustrated by Curley’s absence from the Archdiocese’s list because the priest ruined his life by sexually assaulting him in 1981 when he was 12 and living at a home for troubled boys in Braintree.

“They’re trying to hide that the person is a pedophile,” he said.

Curley routinely brought groups of boys from the Pilgrim Center on trips to the park or to play basketball that ended with an overnight stay at his home, David said. While the group watched television, Curley would “bring kids up to his bedroom one at a time,” he said.

He said he was sleeping one night when Curley awakened him and told him “we had to do penance.” He said the priest told him to pray as he sexually assaulted him. He said he refused to go on any more trips with Curley.

Garabedian, a longtime advocate for sexual abuse victims who has settled claims involving more than 340 clergy and church personnel, has identified 20 priests whom the Boston Archdiocese does not list as accused child molesters although it has paid settlements totaling more than $1.2 million to their victims since 2011. In that time, the archdiocese also paid about $1.3 million to the victims of nine clergy members listed as accused of “unsubstantiated” claims of child sexual abuse, according to Garabedian. Several of those priests were accused of sexual abuse by multiple victims, he said.

“Why would they pay us a settlement if the priest didn’t do it?” Garabedian asked. “They’re hoping the clergy sexual abuse crisis is going away when it isn’t. You’re dealing with an entity that has engaged in coverup, so they’re not changing their stripes now.”

Attorney Tyler Fox said two of his clients who were sexually abused by priests decades ago while working as altar boys at churches in the Boston Archdiocese were paid settlements of $85,000 and $99,000 last year, yet both priests are absent from the church’s roster of accused abusers.

Terrence Donilon, an Archdiocese spokesman, declined to comment on specific cases and would not disclose how many settlements involved claims against priests who are omitted from the Archdiocese’s roster or listed as being accused of “unsubstantiated” allegations.

He said archdiocesan leadership has been actively considering whether its criteria for identifying accused clerics should be updated.

“In many situations, choosing to resolve an allegation by reaching a settlement is often the best decision financially for all the parties involved,” Donilon said. “In many ways we are acknowledging the harm that was done by offering compensation and counseling services.”

He said the Archdiocese immediately reports allegations of clergy sexual abuse of minors to law enforcement and publicly discloses when a clergy member is removed from active ministry after a conviction or during an investigation into an allegation of child abuse.

The Boston Archdiocese’s website lists 132 clerics in various categories, including those convicted of child sexual abuse in criminal or church proceedings, those who left or were suspended from the church pending investigations, and those who died before victims came forward. Another 38 priests are listed as “unsubstantiated cases” because a review board concluded the allegations were unfounded or the priest was cleared of wrongdoing during church proceedings.

The Boston Archdiocese settled agreements with 33 people for $2.3 million in the last fiscal year to resolve sexual abuse claims, Donilon said. The year before, it settled 20 allegations totaling $1.2million, he said. It also paid $2.4 million in each of those years for “abuse-related prevention, outreach, healing, and reconciliation efforts as a whole to both new and ongoing survivors,” he said.

In 2011, O’Malley released the first list of clerics who were accused of sexually abusing children, saying the Archdiocese’s “commitment and responsibility is to protect children and to ensure that the tragedy of sexual abuse is never repeated in the Church.”

At the time, he said some names were excluded to balance “the critically important need to assure the protection of children” with “the due process rights and reputations of those accused clergy whose cases have not been fully adjudicated.”

He omitted the names of many deceased priests because they were unable to respond to the allegations. He also excluded the names of dozens of priests from religious orders and other dioceses who were accused of abusing children while assigned to the Boston Archdiocese. It was the responsibility of the priest’s order or diocese, he said, to investigate allegations against them.

Those guidelines remain in place today. O’Malley has been urging religious orders to identify accused priests, Donilon said.

Fox represents a man who was awarded $85,000 last year to settle a sexual abuse claim against Lawrence Buckley, a Redemptorist priest who worked for the Boston Archdiocese and was described in his 2008 obituary as a champion for social justice.

The man, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Chris, said he was a 7-year-old altar boy at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Roxbury in 1987 when Buckley first sexually assaulted him in the sacristy, where priests change into their robes before Mass. He said the abuse continued for four years, even on the day that Buckley came to his home to deliver the news that his father had died.

He said he never told anyone until he became a father himself, fiercely protective of his two little girls. Two years ago, he disclosed the abuse to the Boston Archdiocese.

“It’s frustrating,” Chris said of the Archdiocese’s omission of Buckley’s name from its list of accused priests because he belonged to a religious order. “It was a Catholic church and I was a Catholic altar boy. I just wish they owned up to something that happened here.”

The Redemptorists have not released a list of clergy accused of molesting children and did not respond to inquiries regarding Buckley.

Terry McKiernan, founder of Bishop-Accountability.org, a volunteer group that tracks clergy sexual abuse, said it’s a “glaring peculiarity” that some of the worst offenders have been left off the Boston Archdiocese list. Recent high-profile investigations into clergy sexual abuse and court settlements have prompted more dioceses and religious orders to release lists identifying abusers. Currently, 152 of the nation’s 178 Roman Catholic dioceses and 24 religious orders have done so, he said.

David O’Regan, Massachusetts leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said identifying abusive priests helps their victims heal and often gives those who have suffered in silence the courage to come forward because they realize “that happened to somebody else. It wasn’t just me.”

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

NEW ORLEANS
WDSU-TV

February 1, 2021

By Greg LaRose

The probe follows a November complaint against Rev. John Asare-Dankwah

The New Orleans Police Department confirmed Monday that it is investigating claims that a local priest raped a 10-year-old boy in 2008.

The probe follows a complaint this past November from the accuser against the Rev. John Asare-Dankwah, who the NOPD mentioned by name in response to questions about the case.

The priest was named in a lawsuit filed last week that details allegations involving a religious retreat in Montgomery, Alabama. Asare led the retreat and approached the boy during the sacrament of confession, according to the suit.

“This will be over soon,” the priest told the boy before raping him, court documents allege. The lawsuit says Asare pulled the boy out of bed that night and took him to another location alone. The lawsuit alleges that Asare accused the boy of being gay, calling him a sinner, then prayed over the boy and beat him.

Asare, who is currently out of the country in Ghana, denied the allegations in a statement to reporters last week.

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

NEW ORLEANS
WDSU-TV

February 1, 2021

By Greg LaRose

The probe follows a November complaint against Rev. John Asare-Dankwah

The New Orleans Police Department confirmed Monday that it is investigating claims that a local priest raped a 10-year-old boy in 2008.

The probe follows a complaint this past November from the accuser against the Rev. John Asare-Dankwah, who the NOPD mentioned by name in response to questions about the case.

The priest was named in a lawsuit filed last week that details allegations involving a religious retreat in Montgomery, Alabama. Asare led the retreat and approached the boy during the sacrament of confession, according to the suit.

“This will be over soon,” the priest told the boy before raping him, court documents allege. The lawsuit says Asare pulled the boy out of bed that night and took him to another location alone. The lawsuit alleges that Asare accused the boy of being gay, calling him a sinner, then prayed over the boy and beat him.

Asare, who is currently out of the country in Ghana, denied the allegations in a statement to reporters last week.

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

BOSTON (MA)
Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian

February 1, 2021

[Includes Assignment Record]

Summary:

Father Merle Fisher, S.M. was accused of sexually abusing a male minor child on at least six occasions from approximately 1967 to 1970 when the boy was approximately 8 to 11 years old. During the period of sexual abuse, Father Fisher was assigned to Holy Cross Church in Kalaheo, Hawaii.

The sexual abuse by Father Fisher occurred in the rectory affiliated with Holy Cross Church and included the following: Father Fisher smacked and squeezed the boy’s buttocks, skin-on-skin, and Father Fisher fondled the boy’s penis and testicles, skin-on-skin.
The claim settled in 2020 in the low six figures.

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

BOSTON (MA)
Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian

February 1, 2021

[Includes Assignment Record]

Summary:

Father Merle Fisher, S.M. was accused of sexually abusing a male minor child on at least six occasions from approximately 1967 to 1970 when the boy was approximately 8 to 11 years old. During the period of sexual abuse, Father Fisher was assigned to Holy Cross Church in Kalaheo, Hawaii.

The sexual abuse by Father Fisher occurred in the rectory affiliated with Holy Cross Church and included the following: Father Fisher smacked and squeezed the boy’s buttocks, skin-on-skin, and Father Fisher fondled the boy’s penis and testicles, skin-on-skin.
The claim settled in 2020 in the low six figures.

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

ANCHORAGE (AK)
Anchorage Daily News

February 1, 2021

By Elizabeth Klemm, Stephen Gemmell and Brandon Boylan

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Copper Valley School, the first integrated boarding school in Alaska. Located near Glennallen, “Copper,” as many referred to it, aimed to prepare its students to become the next generation of leaders in Alaska.

In a time when Alaska village schools were understaffed and high school availability was limited, many parents chose to send their children away from home for a high-quality education. Both Native and non-Native, Catholic and non-Catholic, village and city students attended Copper. While schools throughout the country were still grappling with integration, Copper welcomed Aleut, Athabascan, Iñupiaq, Yup’ik and white students, as well as several students from Africa. To this day, several alumni claim that the merging of cultures was a success of the school, allowing students to learn to appreciate other backgrounds and cultures and work with one another in collaborative ways. One former student recently described the school as a “mini-United Nations.” Many students made lifelong friendships, and the school’s alumni organization, the Copper Valley Student Association (CVSA), continues to connect former students.

The school had a remarkable beginning. In the 1940s, Father Buchanan, a young Jesuit priest, began serving in western Alaska. As he traveled throughout his 74,000-square-mile parish, he realized the need for a Catholic school in the area and dreamt of opening a school that would prepare Alaska Natives for leadership positions. As his vision attracted attention, the U.S. Congress provided a land grant of 460 acres at the junction of the Copper and Tazlina Rivers, south of Glennallen, for educational purposes. A Jewish architect provided plans for the school without charge. To help with the school’s construction, a variety of businesses donated materials or provided them at cost. Donations came from throughout the country. Even Bing Crosby donated a truck to the school.

On Oct. 13, 1956, Alaska Airlines launched Operation Snowbird, an effort to ferry students from Holy Cross, the site of one of the original Catholic missions and home to a closing Catholic school, to Copper. Holy Cross students joined others from across Alaska at the newly opened school. Seventy students and staff were at the school in its first winter, living and learning in the unfinished facility. Upon the school’s completion several years later, Copper featured classrooms, dormitories, staff quarters, a cafeteria, a gym and a chapel. Enrollment peaked at more than 150 in the late 1960s.

The school offered a rigorous Catholic education, led by the Sisters of Saint Ann and Jesuit priests, Scholastics and Brothers. Lay volunteers from throughout the country rounded out the staff — filling teaching, administrative and maintenance positions. Educational expectations were high: Teachers challenged students to build their art, mathematics and writing skills. Students from Copper regularly participated in academic competitions, such as debate tournaments, with other regional schools. Each weeknight, students had mandatory study hall, with individual tutoring available. The boarding school environment also served to build community as the students worked together on school tasks.

In addition to schoolwork, each student had assigned chores: washing dishes, peeling potatoes, plucking chickens, hunting and butchering caribou (and the occasional buffalo), cleaning bathrooms, buffing floors, hauling garbage or unloading coal. The school also offered a variety of extracurricular activities, including Civil Air Patrol, basketball, track and skiing. Students could join various organizations such as Sodality of Our Lady of Sorrows, Glee Club, Library Club, Hobby Club, Movie Club, Pep Club and others. When they needed to escape, students took long expeditions on trails through the school site’s hundreds of acres, walked the mile to Brenwick’s store to buy candy and sodas, or took weekend expeditions, trekking the six miles to Rosent’s at the Hub if they craved a hamburger and milkshake.

The school closed in 1971, owing to a combination of financial struggles and shifts in diocesan priorities. In the environment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, parents had also begun to question the value of sending their children away to boarding schools and were working to establish village high schools (a right later affirmed in the “Molly Hootch” case in 1976), reducing the need for boarding schools across the state. After the school’s closing, the church explored several options for the massive facility. The diocese eventually sold it at auction to a group of local businessmen, who were considering turning the facility into a shopping mall before the school burned down in 1976.

Copper students’ experiences were not universally positive. One study found two incidents of abuse. The rigorous Catholic education allowed little room for traditional Alaska Native education; as a result, several Native students struggled to maintain their connections with their Native cultures, a problem some alumni continue to grapple with today. Students wrestled with homesickness and loneliness.

Nonetheless, Copper’s focus on education and the strong community of both students and staff provided a protective layer for most students. Many alumni think highly of the Copper Valley School, stating that their education and experiences at the school prepared them for their future careers in the military, education, politics, nursing, corporate management, and other professions. Some Native graduates went on to serve as leaders within the state, their village communities, and the Native Corporations established by ANCSA.

Students made lifelong friendships during their time at the school, not only among the students but also between the students and staff. In an effort to foster these friendships, in 1985, Theresa “Tiny” Demientieff Devlin started an alumni newsletter called “The Scuttlebutt” in honor of the school’s newsletter of the same name. In 1986, alumni organized to meet for a reunion, a tradition that carries on to this day. Alumni have come from across Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, and Australia. The annual reunion has served as a forum for friends to reconnect, sit around a bonfire, reminisce, share a meal and remember those who have passed away. Former staff also attend these reunions, and alumni often thank them for their teaching, dedication and inspiration. In 1993, alumni formed the nonprofit Copper Valley School Association. The association has supported scholarships and raised funds to bring guests, such as former teachers, priests and students, to reunions.

Believing that the school holds an important role in Alaska’s education history and has had a significant impact on Alaska’s history in general, CVSA is sponsoring two research projects at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The Arctic and Northern Studies (ACNS) program at UAF is an interdisciplinary program that studies the history, policy, culture and other issues related to the Arctic and the Circumpolar North. CVSA is sponsoring a graduate student researcher in the ACNS program. This student, Elizabeth Klemm, is currently researching Copper’s legacy and will write a historical narrative of the school. CVSA is also working with UAF’s Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives (APRCA) to archive documents related to the school.

If you attended Copper Valley School or otherwise have information about Copper that you would like included in the history, please contact Elizabeth Klemm at CVSlegacy@gmail.com.

[Elizabeth Klemm lives in Anchorage and is a graduate student in Arctic and Northern Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Stephen Gemmell lives in Fairbanks and is the president of Copper Valley Student Association. Brandon Boylan, Ph.D., lives in Fairbanks and is an associate professor of Political Science and the director of the Arctic and Northern Studies Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.]

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

ANCHORAGE (AK)
Anchorage Daily News

February 1, 2021

By Elizabeth Klemm, Stephen Gemmell and Brandon Boylan

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Copper Valley School, the first integrated boarding school in Alaska. Located near Glennallen, “Copper,” as many referred to it, aimed to prepare its students to become the next generation of leaders in Alaska.

In a time when Alaska village schools were understaffed and high school availability was limited, many parents chose to send their children away from home for a high-quality education. Both Native and non-Native, Catholic and non-Catholic, village and city students attended Copper. While schools throughout the country were still grappling with integration, Copper welcomed Aleut, Athabascan, Iñupiaq, Yup’ik and white students, as well as several students from Africa. To this day, several alumni claim that the merging of cultures was a success of the school, allowing students to learn to appreciate other backgrounds and cultures and work with one another in collaborative ways. One former student recently described the school as a “mini-United Nations.” Many students made lifelong friendships, and the school’s alumni organization, the Copper Valley Student Association (CVSA), continues to connect former students.

The school had a remarkable beginning. In the 1940s, Father Buchanan, a young Jesuit priest, began serving in western Alaska. As he traveled throughout his 74,000-square-mile parish, he realized the need for a Catholic school in the area and dreamt of opening a school that would prepare Alaska Natives for leadership positions. As his vision attracted attention, the U.S. Congress provided a land grant of 460 acres at the junction of the Copper and Tazlina Rivers, south of Glennallen, for educational purposes. A Jewish architect provided plans for the school without charge. To help with the school’s construction, a variety of businesses donated materials or provided them at cost. Donations came from throughout the country. Even Bing Crosby donated a truck to the school.

On Oct. 13, 1956, Alaska Airlines launched Operation Snowbird, an effort to ferry students from Holy Cross, the site of one of the original Catholic missions and home to a closing Catholic school, to Copper. Holy Cross students joined others from across Alaska at the newly opened school. Seventy students and staff were at the school in its first winter, living and learning in the unfinished facility. Upon the school’s completion several years later, Copper featured classrooms, dormitories, staff quarters, a cafeteria, a gym and a chapel. Enrollment peaked at more than 150 in the late 1960s.

The school offered a rigorous Catholic education, led by the Sisters of Saint Ann and Jesuit priests, Scholastics and Brothers. Lay volunteers from throughout the country rounded out the staff — filling teaching, administrative and maintenance positions. Educational expectations were high: Teachers challenged students to build their art, mathematics and writing skills. Students from Copper regularly participated in academic competitions, such as debate tournaments, with other regional schools. Each weeknight, students had mandatory study hall, with individual tutoring available. The boarding school environment also served to build community as the students worked together on school tasks.

In addition to schoolwork, each student had assigned chores: washing dishes, peeling potatoes, plucking chickens, hunting and butchering caribou (and the occasional buffalo), cleaning bathrooms, buffing floors, hauling garbage or unloading coal. The school also offered a variety of extracurricular activities, including Civil Air Patrol, basketball, track and skiing. Students could join various organizations such as Sodality of Our Lady of Sorrows, Glee Club, Library Club, Hobby Club, Movie Club, Pep Club and others. When they needed to escape, students took long expeditions on trails through the school site’s hundreds of acres, walked the mile to Brenwick’s store to buy candy and sodas, or took weekend expeditions, trekking the six miles to Rosent’s at the Hub if they craved a hamburger and milkshake.

The school closed in 1971, owing to a combination of financial struggles and shifts in diocesan priorities. In the environment of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, parents had also begun to question the value of sending their children away to boarding schools and were working to establish village high schools (a right later affirmed in the “Molly Hootch” case in 1976), reducing the need for boarding schools across the state. After the school’s closing, the church explored several options for the massive facility. The diocese eventually sold it at auction to a group of local businessmen, who were considering turning the facility into a shopping mall before the school burned down in 1976.

Copper students’ experiences were not universally positive. One study found two incidents of abuse. The rigorous Catholic education allowed little room for traditional Alaska Native education; as a result, several Native students struggled to maintain their connections with their Native cultures, a problem some alumni continue to grapple with today. Students wrestled with homesickness and loneliness.

Nonetheless, Copper’s focus on education and the strong community of both students and staff provided a protective layer for most students. Many alumni think highly of the Copper Valley School, stating that their education and experiences at the school prepared them for their future careers in the military, education, politics, nursing, corporate management, and other professions. Some Native graduates went on to serve as leaders within the state, their village communities, and the Native Corporations established by ANCSA.

Students made lifelong friendships during their time at the school, not only among the students but also between the students and staff. In an effort to foster these friendships, in 1985, Theresa “Tiny” Demientieff Devlin started an alumni newsletter called “The Scuttlebutt” in honor of the school’s newsletter of the same name. In 1986, alumni organized to meet for a reunion, a tradition that carries on to this day. Alumni have come from across Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, and Australia. The annual reunion has served as a forum for friends to reconnect, sit around a bonfire, reminisce, share a meal and remember those who have passed away. Former staff also attend these reunions, and alumni often thank them for their teaching, dedication and inspiration. In 1993, alumni formed the nonprofit Copper Valley School Association. The association has supported scholarships and raised funds to bring guests, such as former teachers, priests and students, to reunions.

Believing that the school holds an important role in Alaska’s education history and has had a significant impact on Alaska’s history in general, CVSA is sponsoring two research projects at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The Arctic and Northern Studies (ACNS) program at UAF is an interdisciplinary program that studies the history, policy, culture and other issues related to the Arctic and the Circumpolar North. CVSA is sponsoring a graduate student researcher in the ACNS program. This student, Elizabeth Klemm, is currently researching Copper’s legacy and will write a historical narrative of the school. CVSA is also working with UAF’s Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives (APRCA) to archive documents related to the school.

If you attended Copper Valley School or otherwise have information about Copper that you would like included in the history, please contact Elizabeth Klemm at CVSlegacy@gmail.com.

[Elizabeth Klemm lives in Anchorage and is a graduate student in Arctic and Northern Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Stephen Gemmell lives in Fairbanks and is the president of Copper Valley Student Association. Brandon Boylan, Ph.D., lives in Fairbanks and is an associate professor of Political Science and the director of the Arctic and Northern Studies Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.]

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

NORTHERN IRELAND
National Catholic Reporter

February 2, 2021

By Sahm Venter

The young mother wrapped her baby son in a shawl and carefully pushed a letter to his adoptive parents into a bag stuffed with toys, sweaters and other clothes.

“I lifted him from the nursery, walked up the corridor and handed him to a nun and that was the last I’d seen of him for 40 years,” said Adele, who asked to use a pseudonym because of the sensitive nature of her story.

She said that at the age of 18, she had been “shipped off” to the Good Shepherd Sisters’ Marianvale Mother and Baby Home in Newry in Northern Ireland.

What struck her immediately as she walked in was the smell of lavender wood polish. She still associates it with the trauma of having to give up her name, and her baby, and of being made to perform Irish dances for the nuns with a group of pregnant women and girls.

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

NORTHERN IRELAND
National Catholic Reporter

February 2, 2021

By Sahm Venter

The young mother wrapped her baby son in a shawl and carefully pushed a letter to his adoptive parents into a bag stuffed with toys, sweaters and other clothes.

“I lifted him from the nursery, walked up the corridor and handed him to a nun and that was the last I’d seen of him for 40 years,” said Adele, who asked to use a pseudonym because of the sensitive nature of her story.

She said that at the age of 18, she had been “shipped off” to the Good Shepherd Sisters’ Marianvale Mother and Baby Home in Newry in Northern Ireland.

What struck her immediately as she walked in was the smell of lavender wood polish. She still associates it with the trauma of having to give up her name, and her baby, and of being made to perform Irish dances for the nuns with a group of pregnant women and girls.

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

LIVERPOOL (ENGLAND)
Liverpool Echo

February 1, 2021

By Jonathan Humphries

The man was later found to have been accessing the grounds of St Francis Xavier’s College anyway

A man accused of sexually abusing boys was allowed to live by school grounds because of a “locked gate” – with the knowledge of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, council and police.

The man, a member of French Catholic order the Brothers of Christian Instruction, had been living in accommodation adjoining the grounds of St Francis Xavier’s College (SFX) without the knowledge of the head teacher or governors.

The ‘safeguarding plan’ was only scrapped when it emerged two fellow brothers had been allowing the unnamed man to access school grounds anyway.

The two men, then deputy head teacher, Brother Peter Tracey, and school chaplain, Brother James Hayes, have since departed the school.

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

LIVERPOOL (ENGLAND)
Liverpool Echo

February 1, 2021

By Jonathan Humphries

The man was later found to have been accessing the grounds of St Francis Xavier’s College anyway

A man accused of sexually abusing boys was allowed to live by school grounds because of a “locked gate” – with the knowledge of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, council and police.

The man, a member of French Catholic order the Brothers of Christian Instruction, had been living in accommodation adjoining the grounds of St Francis Xavier’s College (SFX) without the knowledge of the head teacher or governors.

The ‘safeguarding plan’ was only scrapped when it emerged two fellow brothers had been allowing the unnamed man to access school grounds anyway.

The two men, then deputy head teacher, Brother Peter Tracey, and school chaplain, Brother James Hayes, have since departed the school.

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

PENNSYLVANIA
Crossville Chronicle

February 1, 2021

By John Finnerty

https://www.crossville-chronicle.com/news/tennessee_news/botched-handling-of-ballot-question-is-a-kick-in-the-teeth-to-survivors-of-abuse/article_533a689f-a34f-5ddc-8c5d-4977e523a15d.html

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is resigning after administration officials acknowledged Monday that the department had failed to advertise a proposed change to the state Constitution to allow adult survivors of childhood sex abuse to sue the Catholic Church and other organizations that covered up for predators.

Because of the error, the proposed amendment can’t be on the ballot until 2023 due to a requirement that the measure be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions. Failing to properly advertise the proposed change when it first passed the General Assembly in 2019 means that the process must start over at the beginning, the Department of State said in a statement.

Boockvar’s resignation is effective Friday.

Gov. Tom Wolf apologized for the Department of State’s bungling and confirmed that Boockvar’s departure was based on the botched handling of the statute of limitations amendment.

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

PENNSYLVANIA
Crossville Chronicle

February 1, 2021

By John Finnerty

https://www.crossville-chronicle.com/news/tennessee_news/botched-handling-of-ballot-question-is-a-kick-in-the-teeth-to-survivors-of-abuse/article_533a689f-a34f-5ddc-8c5d-4977e523a15d.html

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is resigning after administration officials acknowledged Monday that the department had failed to advertise a proposed change to the state Constitution to allow adult survivors of childhood sex abuse to sue the Catholic Church and other organizations that covered up for predators.

Because of the error, the proposed amendment can’t be on the ballot until 2023 due to a requirement that the measure be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions. Failing to properly advertise the proposed change when it first passed the General Assembly in 2019 means that the process must start over at the beginning, the Department of State said in a statement.

Boockvar’s resignation is effective Friday.

Gov. Tom Wolf apologized for the Department of State’s bungling and confirmed that Boockvar’s departure was based on the botched handling of the statute of limitations amendment.

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

PENNSYLVANIA
Erie News Now

February 1, 2021

By Elspeth Mizner

[Play Video]

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar will resign this week after a crucial crime victim bill, slipped through the cracks on her watch.

This news today is another setback for survivors of sexual abuse.

Paul Lukach, the Executive Director of the Crime Victim Center was stunned when he heard that abuse victims would have to wait years for their days in court.

“I couldn’t believe it. This didn’t just happen, we thought this was gonna come through. We had enough people on board to make it happen. People were understanding and actually hearing the victims”, said Lukach.

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

PENNSYLVANIA
Erie News Now

February 1, 2021

By Elspeth Mizner

[Play Video]

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar will resign this week after a crucial crime victim bill, slipped through the cracks on her watch.

This news today is another setback for survivors of sexual abuse.

Paul Lukach, the Executive Director of the Crime Victim Center was stunned when he heard that abuse victims would have to wait years for their days in court.

“I couldn’t believe it. This didn’t just happen, we thought this was gonna come through. We had enough people on board to make it happen. People were understanding and actually hearing the victims”, said Lukach.

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

[For rape and corruption of minors, they give 65 years in prison to priest Luis Esteban Zavala]

MEXICO
Proceso

January 29, 2021

By Verónica Espinosa

El sacerdote católico Luis Esteban Zavala Rodríguez fue sentenciado a 65 años y tres meses de prisión, al ser encontrado culpable de violación espuria calificada y corrupción de menores

[GOOGLE TRANSLATION: The Catholic priest Luis Esteban Zavala Rodríguez was sentenced to 65 years and three months in prison, when he was found guilty of qualified spurious rape and corruption of minors.]

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PENNSYLVANIA
TribLive.com

February 1, 2021

By Deb Erdley

https://triblive.com/news/pennsylvania/just-sick-over-it-backers-lament-bureaucratic-bungle-that-sinks-constitutional-amendment-to-open-courts-to-old-clergy-sexual-abuse-cases/

Mark Rozzi was crushed Monday when Gov. Tom Wolf called to tell him an amendment seeking to open a window of opportunity in court for old child sex abuse claims would not make the primary ballot this year because of an advertising oversight.

Rozzi, a state representative from Berks County who has recounted how he was raped by a priest in junior high school, has led the charge to change the law for several years. During that time, he’s become a champion of other survivors who stayed in the shadows for decades.

He thought the measure to create a limited period to allow old claims to be heard in court had gained sufficient traction to change the state law, following the explosive 2018 statewide grand jury report. The grand jury’s investigation detailed allegations of hundreds of incidents of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy across the state, going back decades.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WHTM-TV

February 1, 2021

By Tyler Galaskas

PA Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar to resign after department fails to advertise constitutional amendment

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is resigning following news that the Department of State failed to advertise a proposed constitutional amendment that would extend retroactively the timeline for victims to file civil actions against their abusers.

Her last day will be Friday, Feb. 5, according to Governor Tom Wolf. The department will immediately institute new controls, including additional tracking and notifications of constitutional amendments, to ensure similar failings do not occur in the future.

“This change at the Department of State has nothing to do with the administration of the 2020 election, which was fair and accurate,” said Gov. Wolf. “The delay caused by this human error will be heartbreaking for thousands of survivors of childhood sexual assault, advocates and legislators, and I join the Department of State in apologizing to you. I share your anger and frustration that this happened, and I stand with you in your fight for justice.”

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

WASHINGTON D.C.
Catholic News Agency

February 1, 2021

California bishops are asking a judge to overturn a state law that extends the statute of limitations for sexual abuse claims.

The state now allows adult survivors of child sexual abuse to file civil claims in old abuse cases until the age of 40, or five years after an adult survivor realizes they have been abused.

In addition, survivors are eligible under the law for triple damages in the event of an institutional cover up of the abuse. Previously, survivors of child sex abuse had to file civil claims by age 26, or within three years of realizing their abuse.

The new law also created a three-year window for abuse claims beginning on Jan. 1, 2020, in cases where the old statute of limitations had already expired. The legislation, Assembly Bill 218, was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in Oct., 2019, and went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020.

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COLORADO
Colorado Sun

February 2, 2021

By Bri Buentello

The dialogue about the need for accountability following reports of priestly abuse should also be the catalyst for examining other areas where the church presumes moral authority, including health care.

Growing up in the Catholic faith, several guiding principles were instilled in me, including the sanctity of human life and dignity, that our humanity is measured by the compassion we show the poor and our most vulnerable, and that regardless of our differences, we are all God’s children.

And of course, and perhaps most fundamentally, to trust in God, his plans, and in his holy church.

Like so many in my community, I was horrified by the recent follow-up report in December from Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser about the systemic abuse of children in the state by Catholic clergy, following an earlier report issued in 2019. The two reports say 212 Colorado children were sexually abused by 52 priests from 1950 onward.

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ENGLAND
StokeOnTrentLive

February 2, 2021

By Hayley Parker

Father Joseph Quigley – former national education advisor for Roman Catholic schools – also beat the boy

A priest who carried out ‘depraved’ sexual and physical abuse on a boy during a sick six-year ordeal has been jailed for more than 11 years.

Father Joseph Quigley – described as a ‘sexual sadist’ – committed a catalogue of offences against his teenage victim.

These included:

— Rubbing the boy’s inner thigh after making him wear gym kit;
— Making him take showers with the door open;
— Inflicting ‘sado-masochistic’ punishments on him such as locking him in the church’s crypt, a cold and dark room containing tombs;
— Beating the boy with a hurling stick and;
— Making the boy do sit-ups and press-ups as punishments, to stand in the corner and suck paracetamols, which have a bitter taste.

The offences took place while he was the parish priest at a church from 2002 until he was forced to resign in disgrace.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

February 2, 2021

By Daniel Comensoli

I feel uncomfortable writing this; and wondered whether it was even worth it. But I believe the legislation currently before the Victorian Upper House to prohibit LGBTQA+ conversion practices in Victoria is too important an issue to remain quiet.

The debate on the bill is an issue that is of profound importance to me.

The Victorian Upper House is due to debate the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill 2020. While not being subject to conversion practices myself, this is an issue that is of profound importance to me. Some of my colleagues and friends have been subject to these practices. However, I am a proud gay man. I also happen to be the nephew of the current Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Peter Comensoli.

The bill has been met with fierce opposition by him, as well as other religious leaders and members of the Christian right with the same fear-mongering and disinformation campaign that we have seen before.

While this no longer surprises me, it makes me angry.

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VATICAN CITY
Religion News Service

February 1, 2021

By Claire Giangravé

While the summit officially affects only Germany, the bishops’ discussions will likely have consequences for the global church.

Germany’s Catholic bishops will resume discussions this week to plan the Synodal Path, a set of conferences slated to address controversial questions such as women’s roles and LGBTQ acceptance, even as the country faces yet another scandal of sexual abuse by clergy.

Many churchmen believe that the social questions and the abuse crisis are related. “The abuse crisis hurts the church very deeply,” the Rev. Martin Maier, a Jesuit priest and former editor at the German Catholic magazine Voices of the Time (Stimmen der Zeit), told Religion News Service. “One of the most painful consequences is the loss of trust. One of the goals of the Synodal Path is to restore trust, which is crucial and vital.”

Started in 2019 and scheduled to last two years, Synodal Path was put on hold in September 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its purpose is to debate questions of power structures in the Catholic Church, priestly life, sexual morality and the role of women in the church.

While the bishops’ summit officially considers only Germany’s local dioceses and parishes, the discussions and decisions will likely have consequences around the global church. Bishops from Australia to South America and Ireland are grappling with the devastating impact that the sexual abuse crisis has had, as well as with mounting secularization that has depleted church attendance and vocations.

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TIMOR-LESTE
UCA News

February 2, 2021

By Rock Ronald Rozario

Despite his crimes, American Richard Daschbach enjoys celebrity status in the tiny Catholic-majority nation

Richard Daschbach might be 84, defrocked from the priesthood and under house arrest in Timor-Leste capital Dili, but he continues to make a buzz in the tiny Catholic-majority Southeast Asian nation.

The self-proclaimed pedophile and former priest from the Society of the Divine Word congregation has hit the headlines again in Timor-Leste and beyond.

On Jan. 26, former president Xanana Gusmao visited the American to greet him on his birthday and pose for photos in what some believe was a political stunt by the former guerrilla leader turned politician.

The news of the visit was widely covered by news outlets including state-run news agency Tatoli.

Most reports covered the life and work of Daschbach in detail, including his contributions to the country’s independence struggle and support for marginalized people. However, little to nothing was mentioned about his crimes of sexual abuse of dozens of girls and pornography that led to his dismissal from the priesthood by the Vatican in 2018. Neither did they say that he is wanted in the United States for fraud.

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GERMANY
The Tablet

February 1, 2021

By Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

Anger is increasing in the Cologne archdiocese over Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki’s refusal to publish the results of the investigation into the handling of abuse cases, as record numbers of Catholics opt to quit the Church.

The number of Catholics officially leaving the Church has increased at an unprecedented rate, by 70 per cent, and is now a record 1000 a month.

In order to leave the Church in Germany and stop having to pay 8-9 per cent of net income in compulsory church tax which is collected at source, Catholics have to make an appointment with their municipal office and state that they intend to leave in writing.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League (blog)

January 21, 2021

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the initial success of efforts to protect religious liberty in North Dakota:

Yesterday, I sent a letter to the North Dakota legislature regarding SB 2180. This legislation would break the seal of the confessional and is nothing more than a direct assault on our faith. However, thanks to the support of our members, the sponsors of this bill have come to feel the ire of the Catholic League, and the viability of the legislation is in peril.

Not long after receiving my letter, one of the North Dakota House co-sponsors, Rep. Michael D. Brandenburg, sent me an email stating he will no longer support the bill and intends to vote against it. Rep. Brandenburg’s heroic decision to reverse course and stand with those who support religious liberty delivers a severe blow to this anti-Catholic legislation and harms its ability to become law.

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NORTH DAKOTA
InForum

February 1, 2021

By Rob Port

People who are committed to protecting children actually protect them. They don’t hide behind religious dogmas, however long-standing.

MINOT, N.D. — Catholics and other supposed proponents of “religious liberty” are crowing about the defeat of Senate Bill 2180.

The legislation introduced by Sen. Judy Lee, R-Fargo, would have crossed out a clergy exemption to a state law mandating reporting of child abuse. Lee ultimately withdrew the bill after a pressure campaign organized by lobbyists for the Catholic Church and other interests.

If you want to understand why so many Americans have turned away from religion, generally, and Catholicism, specifically, one need look no further than the Diocese of Fargo’s Bishop John Folda spiking the football because his priests won’t have report child abusers.

“It really was an assault on our practice of the faith, not just for Catholics but for any people of faith,” he said, according to my fellow columnist, Roxane Salonen.

“It’s not the first time in history civil authorities have tried to use the life of the church for their own ends, and that’s kind of what was going on here,” he continued, adding that his church is “utterly and completely committed to protecting children.”

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SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests)

February 1, 2021

Statute of limitations (SOL) reform has hit another obstacle in Pennsylvania, this time due to a devastating clerical mistake that will set back recently-passed reforms until at least 2023. While this news is awful and disheartening, we hope that this terrible situation will not damper the spirits of the survivors and advocates who have fought for this critical reform.

Due to a failure to advertise the proposed constitutional amendment that would pave the way for survivors of sexual abuse to have their day in court, the Pennsylvania Department of State has dealt a serious blow to SOL reform efforts in Pennsylvania.

“This is numbing news,” said Mike McDonnell, leader of SNAP Philadelphia. “But I want to encourage survivors who have fought for this reform to hang in there. We have been through other fierce battles and kept fighting, and this one is no different.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
Spotlight PA via Philadelphia Inquirer

February 1, 2021

by Angela Couloumbis

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/pennsylvania/spl/kathy-boockvar-resign-pennsylvania-election-official-constitutional-amendment-20210201.html

Pennsylvania’s top election official will resign after her agency made a mistake that will delay a statewide vote on whether survivors of decades-old sexual abuse should be able to sue the perpetrators and institutions that covered up the crimes.

Secretary Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw a tense and difficult presidential election in the battleground state, will resign Feb. 5, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday. Spotlight PA first reported the news.

The resignation follows the discovery that the Department of State did not advertise, as required, a long-sought amendment to the state constitution that would open a two-year window for litigation by survivors of child sexual abuse who have aged out of the statute of limitations.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Associated Press

February 1, 2021

By Mark Scolforo and Marc Levy

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Some victims of child sexual abuse might have to wait two years or more to pursue legal claims because of a major bureaucratic bungle that prompted angry denunciations across the political spectrum Monday and the resignation of Pennsylvania’s top state elections official.

A proposed state constitutional amendment allowing lawsuits for otherwise outdated claims was not advertised as required and so cannot appear on the ballot this spring, the Wolf administration disclosed.

The Pennsylvania Department of State in a news release called it “simple human error” and apologized, saying the mistake was discovered late last week. As a result, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar is leaving her job, and both the inspector general and the Legislature will be looking into the matter.

“The delay caused by this human error will be heartbreaking for thousands of survivors of childhood sexual assault, advocates and legislators, and I join the Department of State in apologizing to you,” Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said in a statement. “I share your anger and frustration that this happened, and I stand with you in your fight for justice.”

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

PENNSYLVANIA
New York Post

February 1, 2021

By Steven Nelson

The Pennsylvania secretary of state who emerged as a villain to supporters of former President Donald Trump said Monday she will resign for failing to comply with an unrelated state election law.

Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, will leave office on Feb. 5. Her office botched the handling of a state constitutional amendment that would allow more sexual abuse victims to sue their alleged abusers.

In a statement, she said, “I’ve always believed that accountability and leadership must be a cornerstone of public service. While I only became aware of the mistake last week, and immediately took steps to alert the administration to the error, I accept the responsibility on behalf of the department.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

February 1, 2021

By Julian Routh and Peter Smith

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar will soon resign after her department failed to advertise an amendment to the state’s constitution extending the statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims to file actions in civil court against their abusers, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday.

Her resignation will take effect on Friday, Mr. Wolf said.

The omission is a stunning setback in an effort by victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and others to gain a window of time in which they could sue over abuse that happened years or decades ago, beyond what the current statute of limitations allows.

The effort, building on grand jury reports in 2016 and 2018 on the long histories of abuse in Catholic dioceses around the state, would have enabled victims to sue dioceses or others deemed complicit in the abuse.

“We trusted the process, and it failed us again,” said James Faluszczak, a former priest of the Diocese of Erie and himself a survivor of clergy sexual abuse, who was a witness before a grand jury that issued a report on six dioceses in 2018.”

The department was constitutionally required to advertise the proposed constitutional amendment — which voters would have eventually decided at the ballot box — in each of the three months before the 2020 general election, but never did, Mr. Wolf’s office said in a statement.

If the resolution would have been advertised by the state and greenlighted by voters, it would have amended Article I of the state’s constitution to say, “An individual for whom a statutory limitations period has already expired shall have a period of two years from the time that this subsection becomes effective to commence an action arising from childhood sexual abuse, in such cases as provided by law at the time that this subsection becomes effective.”

“The delay caused by this human error will be heartbreaking for thousands of survivors of childhood sexual assault, advocates and legislators, and I join the Department of State in apologizing to you,” Mr. Wolf said. “I share your anger and frustration that this happened, and I stand with you in your fight for justice.”

Veronica Degraffenreid, a special adviser to the department on election modernization, will serve as acting secretary of the commonwealth, Mr. Wolf’s office said. In response to the failure, the state department will institute “additional tracking and notifications of constitutional amendments,” according to the statement, and the Pennsylvania Office of State Inspector General will review what happened.

The amendment was in its final stages before going to voters. The state House had given its final approval last month, giving it approval in the second consecutive legislation session, as required. If the state Senate were to follow, the proposal could have been on the election ballot for approval by voters in the May 18 primary.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro called the state department’s failure “shameful,” and said “all options must be on the table to fix this immediately.”

“Too many institutions have failed survivors of sexual abuse for far too long, and I am determined for that disgraceful streak to end and to make sure justice is no longer denied,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement.

The governor said he’d commit to working with the state legislature to reach a solution legislatively — if they wanted to create a window in civil court for victims of child sex abuse to file claims.

Mr. Shapiro echoed that sentiment, and said he made clear from the beginning that the constitutional amendment process was an “unnecessary hurdle.” He urged the Legislature to pass the reform into law.

Democrats in the state Senate said that instead of starting over the constitutional amendment process again — which would require passing a bill in its identical form in two consecutive sessions — the legislature should statutorily create the window for claims. They plan to introduce the bill themselves that would “establish a 2-year civil window for survivors of childhood sexual assault with expired claims to bring suit against their abusers,” according to a legislative memo uploaded to the chamber’s website on Monday.

“If we continue with the constitutional amendment process, it will be at least another 2 years until the window would be created and that’s simply too long,” said Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills, calling the state department’s failure a “disappointing setback in the process to create the window to justice.”

“A legislative solution can create the window immediately,” he said, “and I’m encouraging bipartisan and bicameral support for the bill that members of our caucus is going to introduce. Survivors need justice now.”

According to the Democrats’ memo, the legislature debated last session whether a constitutional amendment was necessary for the issue at hand, and opted not to adopt an amendment that would have established the civil window statutorily.

“Since then, subsequent court cases have demonstrated the legality of providing a retroactive window statutorily, rather than through a constitutional amendment,” the memo read. “The civil window is supported by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General and has been upheld in seven other states.”

The 2018 grand jury report accused 300 priests of sexual abuse across seven decades in six dioceses, including Pittsburgh and Greensburg. It followed a similar report in 2016 on a seventh diocese, Altoona-Johnstown.

Legislative efforts to pass a window in the statute of limitations failed in 2018, in part due to objections that such a look back would violate the state constitution, although other states have allowed them. That led to a new strategy in 2019 to initiate a constitutional amendment, even though some doubted its need.

“The goal of survivors has always been to have a window,” Mr. Faluszczak said on Twitter. “Most of us said we’d give the … amendment process a chance, even though it was constitutionally unnecessary.”

The Diocese of Pittsburgh and most other Pennsylvania dioceses launched compensation funds after the 2018 grand jury report, seeking to reach out-of-court settlements with victims that would, among other things, reduce their exposure to lawsuits if a window were authorized.

Many victims, meanwhile, have already sued over long-ago abuse under a legal theory that alleges long-running conspiracy and fraud by dioceses. The state Supreme Court is weighing those arguments in a precedent-setting case.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

February 1, 2021

By Elisabeth Auvillain

A Vatican office has acknowledged that the Catholic Church erred over previous decades in asking its members to keep silent when they heard about priests fathering children.

“Before our times, the Church did like most institutions and avoided addressing publicly matters regarding its members’ behavior, about which it kept silent,” Norbertine Fr. Bernard Ardura, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, said in a document published last week.

“This was a mistake, which can be explained by the context, but it remains a mistake,” said Ardura.

The priest, whose office is responsible for fostering cooperation between the Vatican and outside historians, was writing in a letter to Vincent Doyle, the child of a priest in Ireland and the leader of Coping International, a global campaign for the recognition of priests’ children. Doyle’s organization has posted the letter, written in French, on its website.

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MINNESOTA
Duluth News Tribune

February 1, 2021

By Roxane Salonen

Under canon law, Catholic priests are forbidden from breaking the “seal of confession” by revealing what they’ve heard in the confessional. Doing so leads to automatic excommunication. Additionally, removing the assurance of confidentiality would have inhibited criminals from coming forward to confess their sins, and deter others from this sacrament of healing.

North Dakota Senate Bill 2180 was withdrawn for legislative consideration Friday, bringing a victory for religious freedom. The bill, if approved, could have turned some pastors into criminals, not for their own sins, but for complying with the divine duty of hearing other’s sins — and not divulging them.

Prior to the withdrawal, Chris Dodson of the North Dakota Catholic Conference said North Dakotans had been responding “en masse against this bill,” while “the eyes of the nation …” watched.

The bill zeroed in on the reporting of abuse, removing an exemption for clergy who garner such information specifically in their role as spiritual adviser. Spiritual ministers are already included among those mandated to report knowledge or suspicion of abuse.

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ENGLAND
Grimsby Telegraph

February 1, 2021

New charges were put to Father Terry Atkinson who worked previously at the Shalom Youth Project, on Grimsby’s East Marsh

A former Church of England priest accused of sex attacks on young boys faced further new charges when he appeared before Lincoln Crown Court.

Father Terence Atkinson, 68, is now accused of offences against seven different complainants over a 21 year period..

He was formerly involved with St Johns and St Stephens Church Centre, which is now known as the Shalom Youth Project, on the East Marsh estate in Grimsby.

Atkinson, of Tetney Road, Humberston, pleaded not guilty to a total of 13 charges of indecent assault on a male person at his court appearance today, Monday, February 1.

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MALTA
Malta Today

February 1, 2021

Court rules there is enough evidence for Attorney General to issue a bill of indictment against Fr Joseph Sultana and Fr Joseph Cini, accused of sexually abusing an altar boy

By Kurt Sansone

A magistrate has ruled that there is enough evidence for the Attorney General to issue a bill of indictment against two priests accused of sexually abusing an altar boy.

Fr Joseph Sultana, 84, and Fr Joseph Cini, 70, were remanded in custody as the compilation of evidence against them continued today.

Cini is also charged with raping the boy, who is now 24. The abuse happened when the victim was eight or nine.

At the end of today’s sitting, Magistrate Monica Vella said the court had seen sufficient evidence for a bill of indictment to be issued by the Attorney General.

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GERMANY
Irish Times

January 31, 2021

By Derek Scally

Decision to suppress a critical report opposed by over 30 priests in the archdiocese

Priests in Cologne’s Catholic archdiocese are demanding their archbishop resign for suppressing a critical report into clerical sexual abuse in the western German diocese.

The growing crisis in the powerful western diocese has taken on fresh urgency after claims that Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki ignored church guidelines rather than report a friend’s sexual abuse record to Rome.

The case involves a priest friend who had convictions for sexually abusing young boys in the 1970s. Instead of reporting that and other abuse cases to Rome, in line with new church guidelines, Woelki reportedly held back his friend’s file, citing the poor health of the priest – who died in 2017.

A steady drip of allegations prompted a priest in the Cologne archdiocese to write a letter, published

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SPAIN
El País English

February 1, 2021

By Iñigo Domínguez and Julio Núñes

After the Jesuits admitted to cases of pedophilia, other religious orders have followed suit, for a total of 126 priests and more than 500 victims, according to EL PAÍS’ count

More cases of child abuse by the Spanish Catholic Church are slowly coming to light. After the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, recognized 81 victims since 1927 and announced plans for compensation, other religious congregations have begun to follow the order’s example. EL PAÍS spoke to 10 of the main Catholic orders in Spain, of which seven said they had carried out or were in the process of investigating past cases of abuse, and were equally open to compensating victims.

These investigations, however, are not in-depth internal inquiries, but rather a review of existing archives. Importantly too, the findings have not been made public and are still far from reflecting the extent of the abuse by the Catholic Church, compared to the advances made in other countries such as Germany, where an external audit found that 3,677 minors had been abused by members of the Church.

Of the 10 orders consulted, three – the Marist Brothers, De La Salle Brothers and the Order of Saint Augustine – continue to refuse to investigate allegations of abuse. The remaining seven admitted to 61 cases of pedophile priests, 42 of which were unknown until now. If this number is added to the findings from the Jesuits’ inquiry – 65 cases, 54 of them unknown until now, according to EL PAÍS’ estimates – the Catholic orders have admitted to 126 cases of pedophile priests. Of this figure, 96 had been buried until now. The figures elevate the number of victims of the Spanish Catholic Church to more than 500, according to a count from EL PAÍS, based on criminal sentences, media reports and the newspaper’s own investigations.

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AUSTRALIA
Reuters

February 1, 2021

By Sonali Paul

A dozen Australian media firms have agreed to plead guilty for breaching a suppression order on reporting on the trial and conviction of former Vatican treasurer George Pell in 2018 for child sexual assault, a court heard on Monday.

Pell was cleared last year of the sexual abuse charges after spending 13 months in prison.

The cardinal was found guilty by a jury in December 2018 of sexually assaulting two choirboys, making him the highest-ranking Catholic official convicted on child sex crimes.

Reporting on the trial and verdict was gagged Australia-wide by the County Court of Victoria to ensure the cardinal got a fair trial on further charges he was due to face. Those charges were later dropped.

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NEW ZEALAND
NZ Catholic

February 1, 2021

Catholic Church leaders in New Zealand will carefully study the interim reports of the Royal Commission on Abuse in Care, to learn lessons that will help the Church continue to better address the way it deals with complaints and prevent abuse.

The royal commission published its first interim reports on December 16.

“These reports will contain much important information and guidance that follow on from what survivors have told the commissioners about their experiences,” said Catherine Fyfe, chair of the Church’s Te Rōpū Tautoko agency.

“Church leaders will be discussing these reports widely, with the aim of looking at how we can continue to improve the way we help people who have been abused, and the systems we have in place to prevent further abuse.”

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NEW ZEALAND
NZ Catholic

February 1, 2021

By Rowena Orejana

The New Zealand Catholic Church needs to show mercy, take responsibility, and accompany abuse survivors.

This was the reaction of Te Kupenga – Catholic Theological College lecturer and abuse survivor Dr Rocio Figueroa to the “heart-wrenching testimonies” of abuse survivors at the royal commission on abuse in care hearings held from November 30 to December 4, 2020.

“It caused me deep pain, not only to listen to the stories of each of the testimonies [of people] who suffered the most atrocious abuses when they were innocent kids, but also to listen to the lack of response or hopeless way in which, many times, we have handled the disclosure within our communities,” Dr Figueroa said.

“As a member or the Catholic Church, I regret our poor response, and I apologise for all that we could have done and we have not done,” she said.

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NEW ORLEANS (LA)
WDSU-TV

January 29, 2021

The Rev. John Asare-Dankwah issued a statement Thursday denying allegations of rape and assault made against him in a lawsuit filed the previous day, saying he was “saddened and appalled” by them.

The well-known pastor at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church was in Ghana visiting his family when he was notified Wednesday night of the allegations in the lawsuit, according to the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The organization said Wednesday it removed Asare-Dankwah from service pending their investigation and would notify law enforcement.

The suit claims the alleged rape and assault of the then-10-year-old plaintiff, identified only as “A.A. Doe,” happened during a January 2008 retreat in Montgomery, Alabama. Doe was a member of Blessed Trinity Catholic Church, where Asare-Dankwah was serving at the time.

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NEW ORLEANS (LA)
KLFY-TV

January 29, 2021

By Aaron S. Lee

A day after a lawsuit was filed alleging a New Orleans priest raped and assaulted a 10-year-old boy during a church retreat in Montgomery, Ala., in 2008, Rev. John Asare-Dankwah has issued an official statement in response to the allegations.

At the time of the incident in question, Rev. John Asare-Dankwah worked at Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Broadmoor. The Archdiocese of New Orleans has suspended Rev. Asare-Dankwah from his duties, which includes leading his congregation at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in Treme, pending the outcome of the investigation.

Rev. Asare-Dankwah’s statement reads:

“I am deeply saddened and appalled by the allegations that I’ve just been made aware of. These allegations are false. I have never harmed anyone in my service to God – particularly any child – and I am prepared to fight vigorously to clear my name that I’ve worked for nearly three decades building trust as a man of God. The only time I have been to Alabama is to visit a friend; I have never been to the state in conjunction with any religious retreat.

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NEW ORLEANS (LA)
NOLA.com

January 29, 2021

By Ramon Antonio Vargas

The Rev. John Asare-Dankwah has denied allegations that he raped an underage boy 13 years ago, a claim that prompted the Archdiocese of New Orleans to suspend him from his role as pastor of Treme’s historic St. Peter Claver Catholic Church.

Asare-Dankwah issued his denial in a statement Thursday, a day after a lawsuit was filed in Orleans Parish Civil District Court accusing him of raping a 10-year-old boy while hearing his confession during a weeklong retreat in Alabama in 2008.

“I am deeply saddened and appalled by the allegations,” the statement read. “These allegations are false. I have never harmed anyone in my service to God — particularly any child — and I am prepared to fight vigorously to clear my name that I’ve worked for nearly three decades building trust as a man of God.”

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GUAM
Guam Daily Post

January 31, 2021

By Haidee Eugenio Gilbert

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood on Tuesday approved $476,000 in revised legal fees and costs in the Archdiocese of Agana’s two-year-old bankruptcy case.

Two days later, the judge issued an order approving stipulation for stay of proceedings and suspension of work at least until Feb. 28, 2021, except for certain matters.

The judge, in her Jan. 28 order, said all parties shall make their best efforts to reduce legal fees by limiting work in the main case and the adversary proceeding case for at least a month.

She also ordered the parties to return to mediation before Judge Robert Faris, a U.S. bankruptcy judge.

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NEW ZEALAND
Gisborne Herald

January 31, 2021

By Matthew Epsom

One of New Zealand’s diplomatic relations is actually not with another country, but with a peculiar legal corporate person under international law called the Holy See.

The Holy See is often mistakenly referred to as the Vatican. However, the Vatican and the Holy See are not the same things.

Vatican City is a sovereign country whose ruler happens to be the pope. The pope has absolute unchecked power within his realm which makes Vatican City the world’s only elected non-hereditary absolute monarchy, and the pope, effectively, a king.

The reason why we seldom hear about the king of Vatican City is because while pope and king are two distinct offices, they just happen to be occupied by the same person at the same time.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE
Valley News

January 30, 2021

By Anna Merriman

When trauma resurfaced in Patty Rondeau’s life 50 years ago, it came in a sleek black car rolling up to her sister’s Hartford home.

The day had been beautiful; sunny and bright, just before a christening party one of her sisters was throwing. Rondeau, then in her 30s, was sitting among the lilacs and grass outside, turning the sandy dirt into small castles with her children.

The arrival of the Rev. Daniel Roberts dashed the idyllic moment.

“I lost it. I started shaking and crying,” Rondeau said. It was the first time in years that she’d seen the priest who she says sexually assaulted her as a young girl in White River Junction. “It was like it happened all over again.”

She told her older sister that she refused to go inside as long as Roberts was there. But, in the 1970s, decades before news about sexual abuse within the Catholic Church would make headlines across the country, and long before the #MeToo movement would draw attention to the prevalence and lasting trauma of sexual violence, Rondeau’s sister only sighed.

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