ABUSE TRACKER

Meta Platforms (META.O) was told by EU tech regulators on Friday to provide more details on measures taken to tackle child sexual abuse material on its photo and video sharing app Instagram by Dec. 22 or risk a formal investigation under new EU online content rules.

The European Commission in October sent a first request for information on measures taken to counter the spread of terrorist and violent content, and a second last month on measures to protect minors.

“Information is also requested about Instagram’s recommender system and amplification of potentially harmful content,” the European Commission said in a statement on its latest query.

The request for information was done under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), new tech rules requiring Big Tech to do more to police illegal and harmful content on their platforms.

Failure to comply with such requests can lead to a formal probe and…

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In 1996, at age 19, “Jane Doe” decided to move to Kansas City to intern with her father’s friend, Mike Bickle. The 42-year-old prophetic pastor’s preaching about King David had touched her heart.

“I just remember feeling like he knew the same Jesus that I knew,” Doe told The Roys Report (TRR) in an exclusive interview.

Soon after she arrived, she said Bickle told her he had a dream about her. After a Sunday service, in front of Bickle’s wife, Diane, Doe said Bickle prophesied that he was David and Doe was Esther.

“He gives me the biggest word of my life,” she told TRR.  “It was, ‘You’re not just an Esther, you are going to lead thousands of Esthers.’”

A few weeks later, Bickle called Doe from Asia to say the Lord spoke to him about her, she said. This time, though, she said he sounded drunk.

“He begins to tell me that…

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About 20 former International House of Prayer Kansas City (IHOPKC) staff led a silent protest today in the ministry’s prayer room to highlight abuse allegations against IHOPKC founder, Mike Bickle, and to stand with victims. Normally, IHOPKC livestreams services in its prayer room, but today’s livestream didn’t show the protest.

“Right now, the understanding of my generation is the church does not protect the sheep,” said Susan Tuma, protest organizer and former IHOPKC staffer. “We want to come in here and say, ‘Be the people you’ve been called to be. You want to change the expression and understanding of Christianity in a single generation? . . . Then do that.’”

Bickle has said that in 1982, he received a prophecy that God was going to change the expression and understanding of Christianity in one generation. In 1999, he founded a 24/7 prayer movement at…

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While Pope Francis has urged diocesan bishops to take more seriously the canonical discipline of clerics, the outgoing chairman of the U.S. bishops’ canonical affairs committee has not taken steps to address canonically reports of public cohabitation by a senior-ranking official in his archdiocese. 

A spokesperson for Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee told The Pillar that the archdiocese has “spoken with” judicial vicar Fr. Mark Payne, who hired as a parish schoolteacher last year a layperson with whom he had maintained a public romantic relationship, and with whom he has shared a condo for decades. 

While Payne’s move has caused concern among some Wisconsin Catholics, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee told The Pillar it has given the priest verbal warnings about his “lifestyle,” but has indicated that it does not plan to initiate canonical investigations into the priest’s conduct, or to use other canonical mechanisms to address the concerns. 

The handling of the case could…

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A Milwaukee priest who maintained an allegedly romantic public relationship with a layman was placed on administrative leave Friday, while a formal canonical investigation into his conduct is initiated. 

The move comes one day after The Pillar published a report about Milwaukee judicial vicar Fr. Mark Payne, who in 2022 hired as a parish schoolteacher a man with whom he had shared a condo for decades.

Earlier this week, the Milwaukee archdiocese told The Pillar that it had given the priest verbal warnings about his “lifestyle,” but did not indicate that it planned to initiate canonical investigations into the priest’s conduct, or to use other canonical mechanisms to address the concerns. 

A spokesperson for  Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee told The Pillar Wednesday that archdiocesan officials had “spoken with Fr. Payne about the necessity for clergy to live a lifestyle that avoids scandal and is faithful to their promises of ordination,” adding that, “he has given…

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The Rev. Richard McGrath’s name belongs on lists of abusers kept by all church districts where he worked, supporters of survivors say.

After being secretive for years, the Augustinian Catholic order has promised to publish early in 2024 a list of priests credibly accused of abuse.

But an advocacy group says one priest accused of child sex abuse and viewing child pornography should not only be placed on the Augustinian’s list, but on lists kept by all of the Chicago-area districts where he worked.

Church officials won’t say if they plan to add the Rev. Richard J. McGrath’s name to their own lists.

But at a news conference Thursday outside a Hyde Park friary that McGrath once called home, survivor advocates demanded his name also be added to the lists of the dioceses where he worked in Chicago, Joliet and Rockford.

The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP)…

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Anti-abuse activists lodged a Vatican complaint Thursday in response to a $2 million lawsuit settled by a New Lenox Catholic school and the Augustinian religious order, alleging that the “actions and inaction” by Chicagoland Catholic leaders in handling the accused priest is endangering kids.

Former Providence Catholic High School student Robert Krankvich filed a lawsuit in April 2018 alleging the school’s longtime principal and president, the Rev. Richard McGrath, repeatedly raped and abused him. Krankvich was between 13 and 15 when he was abused in the school’s gym and wrestling room in the mid-1990s, the lawsuit alleged.

The school and religious order McGrath belongs to finalized the settlement in mid-November, according to Krankvich’s attorney, Marc Pearlman.

McGrath abruptly retired from the school in December 2017 after a student reported she witnessed McGrath view a picture of a naked teenage boy on his phone. The priest…

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In what it called its “best and final” offer to survivors of abuse, the Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York on Monday proposed a plan that offers $200 million to approximately 600 survivors of abuse, the largest-ever settlement offer made in diocesan bankruptcy history.

The new plan includes an immediate cash payout of a minimum of $100,000 to claimants with a lawsuit and a $50,000 minimum to claimants without a qualifying lawsuit.

In a statement released Monday, the Long Island diocese called the plan “the best, most efficient, and most effective means to immediately begin compensating all eligible survivors equitably while allowing the diocese to emerge from bankruptcy and continue its charitable mission.”

The settlement offer includes a diocesan contribution of $50 million as well as a $150 million contribution from “parishes, co-insured parties, and other Catholic ministries,” according to the statement.

“The diocese agrees with…

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A Wisconsin prosecutor has declined to challenge a doctor’s assessment that disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick is incompetent to stand trial, making it more likely the only remaining criminal charge against McCarrick will be dismissed.

McCarrick, 93, was charged with sexual assault in the fourth degree, a misdemeanor, for allegedly fondling an 18-year-old family friend at a Wisconsin lake in the 1970s. If convicted, he would have faced up to nine months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

A Massachusetts judge dismissed a criminal child sexual abuse charge against McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, in August, citing the same reasons.

Prosecutors in Massachusetts had hired an expert to assess McCarrick, and she found significant deficits in his memory and said he has dementia. The Wisconsin court brought in that same expert to assess him again.

At a hearing Nov. 22 in Elkhorn, Walworth County District Attorney Zeke Wiedenfeld…

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Chapter 11 protection is designed to give an organization time to reorganize its finances to pay its debts but victims of clerical abuse feel frustrated by a lengthy and opaque process

• Read part 1 of our series here

This is the second installment of a three-part series exploring how the archdiocese of New Orleans’s bankruptcy stands apart from other cases of its kind. The first installment ran on Wednesday 29 November 2023.

In 2020, facing nearly 40 pending clergy sex abuse lawsuits, New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese took Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, giving the organization time to sell properties or reorganize assets to negotiate debt payment.

The number of people who have gone to bankruptcy court and file abuse-related claims has since eclipsed 500. A 2021 state law opened a “look-back window” enabling the 500 abuse survivors involved in the church’s bankruptcy case to seek redress without concern for previously existing filing…

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