ABUSE TRACKER

A retired Roman Catholic priest Dennis Finbow formerly from Cambridgeshire has been found guilty of three historic sex offences against a child.

Fr Dennis Finbow, a retired priest of the Diocese of East Anglia, was convicted by a jury at Huntingdon Crown Court.

He gone on trial accused of five counts of indecently assaulting a girl and one of indecently assaulting a boy.

Following a six-day trial, Fr Finbow was convicted of three counts of indecent assault on a child and found not guilty of the remaining three offences.

Fr Finbow, 74, who now lives in Martlesham, Suffolk, denied all six counts of indecent assault.

During his time in Cambridgeshire, Fr Finbow held posts at Littlehey prison, St Joseph’s Church in St Neots and at Dogsthorpe, Peterborough.

The trial was told by the prosecution that when Fr Finbow was interviewed by police he described the allegations as nonsense and “a…

View Cache

A 74-year-old Catholic priest who claimed allegations against him were “nonsense” has been convicted of abusing a child in the 1980s.

Dennis Finbow, who had worked in Peterborough, was found guilty of three counts of indecent assault against a girl aged between 10 and 13.

The trial at Huntingdon Crown Court heard the defendant had touched the girl while she was in bed.

Finbow, of Martlesham, Suffolk, will be sentenced on 8 March.

He was cleared of two other counts of indecent assault against the same girl and one count of indecent assault against a boy.

Following the verdicts, Finbow was granted bail, but the judge, Philip Grey, warned him to prepare for a immediate jail term which was the “almost inevitable outcome”.

In a police interview played to the jury, the female complainant said Finbow was “charismatic” and “everybody loved him”.

Prosecutor Nicholas Bleaney said when he was voluntarily…

View Cache

A report released today concluded that Jean Vanier — a Catholic lay leader and founder of L’Arche, a worldwide network of communities supporting adults with intellectual disabilities — founded the first L’Arche community primarily as a cover for a secretive religious sect with exploitative “mystical-sexual” beliefs and practices.

The report also found Vanier sexually exploited at least 25 nondisabled women from 1952 until just before his death in 2019, far more than previously known.

According to the report, the sect used L’Arche as a “screen” to secretly reunite around their leader, Thomas Philippe, a Dominican priest who had previously been investigated and disciplined by Catholic authorities for his abuse and his manipulative theology.

Tina Bovermann, national leader and executive director of L’Arche USA and a member of L’Arche’s international leadership team, told Sojourners the new report offered a “heavy” look at the “insidious … and strategic” behavior of…

View Cache

Disgraced former Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt found a new venue for his upcoming men’s conference: A church whose pastor Hunt ordained decades ago.

The Johnny Hunt Men’s Conference will take place March 17-18 at New Season Church in Hiram, Georgia, Hunt announced in mid-January. He had previously planned a men’s conference in February at his former church, First Baptist Church Woodstock in the Atlanta area. But details of the event vanished from the conference website after FBC Woodstock said it wasn’t hosting the conference.

Hunt also filled the pulpit this past Sunday at New Season Church—the second time he has preached since being publicly accused of sexually assaulting another pastor’s wife.

Hunt did not mention the accusations during either this past Sunday’s sermon or in his sermon at a different church earlier in January. He briefly alluded to having been out of the…

View Cache

It’s time the bishops’ conferences on the continent form a separate commission for a digital mission

Asian teens are known for churning out terabytes of hypersexual content on a daily basis that makes big waves across all social media platforms with consumers, not necessarily all young, located abroad. It adds to the already available child porn on the dark web at people’s fingertips.

Less surprisingly, the immortal nature of the videos has outpaced efforts to get rid of them, forcing victims of child pornography to live with it forever.

In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country by way of population, the trade in pornographic and sexual videos involving children reached 114.26 billion rupiah (US$ 7.3 million) in 2022.

Indonesia’s Financial Transaction Analysis Reporting Center, which tracks money laundering, said most of the consumers are people based outside the country. Unable to visit Asian nations where child prostitution thrives, pornographers opt for…

View Cache

Pope Francis has forbidden attempts to obstruct justice and asks to turn over clerical child abusers to civil authorities

The institutional Church in the Philippines has never had a priest jailed for child sexual abuse so far because as Cardinal Antonio Tagle told the BBC’s Hardtalk TV program, it was an internal affair handled by Church authorities. That policy is now changing as Pope Francis and the Vatican have forbidden such handling. The days of impunity are past. Or are they? 

In the past, in every case settled out of court, the excessive authority and influence of the Church authorities overwhelmed the victims and their families. The parish community could pressure them to drop charges of sexual abuse against a priest and “not go against the Church.”

Pope Francis has forbidden that and such attempts can be a crime, obstruction of justice and a violation of Vatican rules now in place. The…

View Cache

In July 2020, Fordham led the creation of a project called Taking Responsibility, an interdisciplinary initiative aimed at addressing the Catholic Church’s ongoing sexual abuse crisis.

The project was spurred by a 2018 report by the Society of Jesus that publicly disclosed the names of its members who were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, as well as a report that year by a Pennsylvania grand jury that found similar findings in diocesan priests. It was funded by a $1 million gift from a private donation.

On Thursday, Jan. 26, the group released its final report, featuring research projects conducted by 18 teams from 10 Jesuit universities. In addition to Fordham, the initiative included lay and clergy faculty from Creighton, Gonzaga, Georgetown, Loyola Chicago, Loyola Maryland, Marquette, Rockhurst, Santa Clara, and Xavier universities.

The research projects addressed topics connected to the Society of Jesus, but were not limited strictly to it. There was often…

View Cache

Day in fact may well “increase religious vocation” – priest tells Lusa

The director of the National Department of Youth Ministry (DNPJ) believes the release of the report on child sexual abuse by members of the clergy in Portugal will not affect World Youth Day, but admits that the situation has “shaken” the Church.

In a wide ranging interview he went so far as to suggest that World Youth Day, already creating a fervour of touristic speculation, could in fact increase religious vocation, as he believes it “will touch and awaken the hearts of some young people to give themselves to this Church of Jesus Christ” – and ostensibly ignore completely the issues of previous generations, highlighted by Independent Commission for the Study of Sexual Abuse of Children in the Portuguese Catholic Church. 

Father Filipe Diniz considered all the work that has been done “by…

View Cache

Congolese and foreign activists on Monday (Jan. 30) called on Pope Francis to sanction a priest accused of sexually abusing a minor in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he is to arrive this Tuesday (Jan. 31).

A girl identified as Marie recounted to reporters via video conference how she was raped nearly two years ago by a priest from the Tshumbe diocese in the centre of the country, when, at the age of 14, she was “aspiring” to become a consecrated religious.

Marie said she informed church authorities in DR Congo at the time.

Since then, she claimed she was “not living in safety, everyone around me is under threat.” 

“It’s a serious case,” Tim Law, founder of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA), told a press conference in Kinshasa, where his NGO is seeking to give a voice to victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy.

“It’s your…

View Cache

Four years ago, Pope Francis called for a major global summit to address the problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, promising an end to cover-ups. But the Vatican has often been accused of not doing enough, compared to other countries, to tackle the issue. 

A special panel set up in 2014 to advise Pope Francis on ways to better protect minors from sexual abuse by the clergy faced heavy scrutiny in 2017 when Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor and panel member, left the group citing the Church’s unwillingness to change.

“When I resigned I wanted it to be known that there was resistance,” Marie revealed. “I wanted it to be known that the Commission had been trying to do its work … but stumbling blocks had been put in its way by people within the curia.” 

“Vatican power and politics [were] involved. They wanted to control the commission, to take away…

View Cache

When revelations emerged nine months after his 2019 death that Jean Vanier — a philosopher, author and activist once deemed a living saint — had sexually and spiritually abused women, his legacy was upended.  

Now a massive report, released Jan. 30, seeks to untangle and analyze many pieces of the dark and complex story of Vanier’s decadeslong hidden life, highlighting both the extent of abuse and the “incredible persistence of a perverse nucleus” of abusers.

Produced by an independent, interdisciplinary commission of French academics, the nearly 900-page report validates the claims of 25 non-disabled women against Vanier, who founded a worldwide organization supporting adults with intellectual disabilities. As part of a sectarian group led by Vanier’s spiritual mentor, Dominican Fr. Thomas Philippe, the charismatic Vanier identified people seeking spiritual guidance and exploited them for sexual purposes.

The new report builds upon an investigation launched by Paris-based L’Arche International…

View Cache

Las Vegas police on Tuesday arrested and raided the home of a former “Dances With Wolves” actor turned alleged cult leader accused of sexually assaulting young Indigenous girls during a period spanning two decades, according to police records obtained by The Associated Press.

Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse, who goes by Nathan Chasing Horse, was taken into custody in the afternoon near the North Las Vegas home he is said to share with his five wives. SWAT officers were seen outside the two-story home in the evening as detectives searched the property.

Known for his role as the young Sioux tribe member Smiles a Lot in the Oscar-winning Kevin Costner film, Chasing Horse gained a reputation among tribes across the United States and in Canada as a so-called medicine man who performed healing ceremonies and spiritual gatherings and, police allege, used his position to abuse young Native American girls.

His…

View Cache