ABUSE TRACKER

The number of “debaptism” requests have reportedly spiked again after the television series Gotvergeten.

Belgian bishops at the consecration of Archbishop Luc Terlinden of Brussels (second from right) in September – the same month that a documentary on Church abuse provoked public anger.
Belga News Agency / Alamy

The Belgian Church, facing rising protests after a television film on sexual abuse and cover-ups in its ranks, has appealed against a government data protection agency ruling that the Diocese of Ghent must let a person be “debaptised”.   

When Catholics ask to have their names struck from baptismal records, officials usually add a note to their files saying they have renounced their baptism without taking the name off its official registry.

The Church considers baptism a permanent act that cannot be done away with, but the agency ruled in December that the plaintiff’s personal data record overrides the Church’s interest in preserving…

View Cache

The Catholic Diocese of Sacramento has added a name to a list of clergy members accused of sexual abuse that now includes a priest who served in another Northern California diocese but was convicted of molesting a girl while visiting Placer County.

Mark Kristy, once a priest of the religious order Discalced Carmelite Fathers, has been removed from the ministry and lives in Napa County. Kristy was convicted of child sexual molestation and sentenced in 2022 to one year in jail, according to the diocese.

Officials of the diocese were informed of the allegations against Kristy in 2015. Kristy was accused of sexually touching the girl who was younger than 14 and sexually exposing her sometime from 2001 through 2004, according to the diocese. Diocese officials said they reported the allegation to law enforcement and cooperated with authorities in Placer County, which eventually led to Kristy’s prosecution.

On Feb. 16,…

View Cache

Cases involving vulnerable adults who have an imperfect use of reason should be referred to offices of Roman Curia

In cases of a cleric sexually abusing a “vulnerable adult,” the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith investigates and judges only cases involving “persons who habitually have an imperfect use of reason,” the dicastery said in a note published Jan. 30.

Other cases involving vulnerable adults, including those in situations where their ability “to understand or will or otherwise resist the offense” is temporarily limited, should be referred to other offices of the Roman Curia, the clarification said.

While church documents issued in the past 15 years have included “vulnerable adults” as a special category in need of protection from clerical sexual abuse, questions have been raised about whether those persons should always be treated in church procedures in a way equivalent to children under the age of 18. For…

View Cache

Note: This story was updated to reflect Hintze’s position within Bravo Group.

A Cumberland County man and “stake president” of the Harrisburg area Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints was charged Wednesday by Pa. State Police after they say he failed to report child sex abuse accusations against a former bishop, Boy Scout leader and lawyer from central Pennsylvania.

Rhett Hintze, 50, of New Cumberland, was charged with one count of failure to report or refer child abuse in connection to the July 2023 charges against Shawn Gooden, a former bishop for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old boy in French Creek State Park in 2000.

View Cache

A nun linked to allegations of abuse at the Lourdes Home orphanage in Gozo decades ago died on Tuesday.

Mother Superior Carmelita Borg’s death was announced by the Santwarju Madonna ta’ Pompej Facebook page.

The Mother Superior for the Dominican nuns was responsible for the Lourdes Home orphanage in Għajnsielem where alleged abused took place.

Borg was responsible for the Lourdes Home orphanage during the 1970s and 1980s, with victims accusing her of turning a blind eye to the abuse they suffered.

Earlier this month, two women who had lived at the home decades ago, described harrowing experiences of sexual abuse by clergy and savage beatings from nuns in court.

The two women testified in a Constitutional case against the State presided over by Judge Mark Simiana, in which they claim the State had done nothing to safeguard their rights or care at the orphanage.

The women Rosanne Saliba…

View Cache

Some seven months after Daniel Savala, an itinerant minister and convicted sex offender  with ties to the Chi Alpha Campus Ministries sponsored by the Assemblies of God, was arrested for sexually abusing two boys, a Texas father has filed a lawsuit accusing the nation’s largest Pentecostal denomination of negligence that allowed his 13-year-old son to be abused by multiple men.

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit filed in the Harris County Court last Thursday by Stephen Holt on behalf of his teenage son, identified only as L.H., are Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, College Station; North Texas Assemblies of God, and Mountain Valley Fellowship.

Holt is also seeking “monetary relief over $1,000,000” for the “harm” experienced by his son due to “the malice, gross negligence, …. or both of each of the defendants” under Texas law.

Savala, according to CBS affiliate KWTX, was…

View Cache

A survivor of child sex abuse himself, he has worked to extend the statute of limitations for others. He’ll finish out the year in office.

Mark Rozzi got into politics to give survivors of child sex abuse such as himself a voice in Harrisburg.

But after 11 years serving in the Pennsylvania House, including a brief stint last year as House speaker, the Democrat from Reading is leaving politics less hopeful than he was when he started.

Rozzi, 52, quietly ended his auditor general campaign in December and told The Inquirer he has spent the last few months isolating himself during a particularly difficult bout of depression, a yearslong struggle caused by being sexually abused by a Catholic priest when he was a boy. He’ll serve the remainder of his term before leaving office at the end of the year.

“A lot of times, my…

View Cache

Washington state lawmakers are making another attempt to pass a bill that would require clergy members to act as mandatory reporters of child abuse or neglect. Senate Bill 6298 aims to include clergy in the list of mandatory reporters in Washington, addressing a significant gap in the state’s current laws. Last year, the bill faced opposition from Catholic lobbyists, but this time, the bill’s main sponsor, state Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, hopes to find a compromise that will address concerns raised by Catholic representatives regarding the reporting of information obtained during confession.

Washington state currently stands among the five states where clergy members are not legally obligated to report incidents of child abuse or neglect. Recognizing the importance of closing this gap, lawmakers have reintroduced Senate Bill 6298 to rectify the situation. By mandating that clergy members report any suspected cases of child abuse or neglect, the bill aims to…

View Cache

They’ve been talking about married priests on X/Twitter lately.

A Vatican official brought up ending the usual requirement for priestly celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church as a possible way to help priests not feel the need to live “double live.”  He didn’t draw any links between celibacy and sexual abuse, but since he also investigates clerical abuse he mentioned how it’s changed his point of view. And people got to talking. The question was asked, as I’ve often heard it asked: could letting priests have a wife help prevent the horrific sexual abuse scandals that just seem to keep happening? And as I always do when it’s asked, I cringed.

I am all in favor of examining the expectation that priests should be celibate. There are many reasons it might be good to have a married priesthood more like they do in the Eastern tradition. But it’s…

View Cache

Co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a quietly devastating account of unpunished crimes committed by representatives of the Catholic Church.

[Note from BA: The residential school featured in this film was St. Joseph’s Mission. This review mistakenly refers to it four times as “St. John’s.”]

It’s altogether likely that many non-Indigenous people knew nothing about the abuse and disappearances of Native American children that occurred over decades in residential Indian schools throughout North America until those outages inspired a wrenchingly potent subplot last year for the Taylor Sheridan-produced TV series “1923.” But the truth behind that fact-based fiction is even more shocking, and infuriating, as detailed in “Sugarcane,” the remarkable film that received a well-deserved jury prize for documentary direction at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Indigenous filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat and co-director Emily Kassie show restraint and empathy while cataloguing the horrors that were endemic at the…

View Cache

It really is hard to tell what’s going on in Pope Francis’s Vatican, especially these days, but that’s because there’s plenty—too much—to see.

Heading into the weekend, Italy’s Domani published a piece detailing new allegations against the disgraced former Jesuit, Marko Rupnik–inexplicably and intolerably styled Fr. Marko Rupnik—extern of Koper diocese in his native Slovenia, currently resident in Rome and reported to be regularly seen at the Centro Aletti he founded in the early 1990s.

The allegations amount to physical assault and grievous bodily harm.

Basically, the victim alleges that Rupnik broke her right index finger during a “spiritual counselling” session. Maybe he did break the finger, maybe he didn’t. Both Rupnik and Ivanka Hosta (then-superior of the woman’s religious community) allegedly prohibited the victim from seeking medical treatment.

A fracture should show on x-rays, even at many years’ remove from the incident….

View Cache

(ANALYSIS) The hellish relationship began with a kiss — a strange exchange between a teenager preparing to become a Loyola sister and the Slovenian Jesuit who was already her confessor.

“The first time he kissed me on the mouth, telling me that this was how he kissed the altar where he celebrated the Eucharist, because with me he could experience sex as an expression of God’s love,” said “Anna” in an interview with the Italian news agency Domani.

The young priest was Father Marko Ivan Rupnik, who was already an artist on the rise. His artistic skills brought him to the Vatican in the late 1990s, and his sacred art has been celebrated around the world. However, he has been accused of sexual and spiritual abuse of Slovenian nuns, such as “Anna,” in the 1980s and ‘90s.

It was hard, said “Anna,” to grasp the meaning of lingering hugs after…

View Cache

Cardinal Gérald Lacroix of Québec has announced he will temporarily step aside from his duties, after he was named in court documents Jan. 25 in connection with a class-action sex abuse lawsuit filed against the Archdiocese of Québec in 2022.

A Jan. 26 statement from the archdiocese, issued in French, said that the cardinal would be “temporarily withdrawing from his activities until the situation is clarified.”

According to court documents, two incidents allegedly involving him reportedly occurred in 1987 and 1988 in Quebec City, when he was a religious brother. He is accused of inappropriately touching a 17-year-old girl on two occasions. The woman has not been identified.

The archdiocesan statement said Lacroix “categorically denies the allegations against him” and considers them “unfounded.”

“In the coming days,” the statement said, “he will send a personal communication” to the archdiocese “which will be relayed to the media.”

That personal message was…

View Cache

Cardinal Humberto Medeiros served the Church as priest and bishop in Texas and Massachusetts. An immigrant from the Azores he utilized his superior intelligence, administrative ability, and language skills to move up rapidly in Church ranks. His work with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, both nationally and internationally, especially with migrant workers, was notable. Medeiros faced a perfect storm of social, political and religious issues in Boston. The author argues that despite the challenges he faced in Boston, Medeiros was true to the Church and his personal moral code, seeking always to serve others rather than be served by them in imitation of Christ.

Richard Gribble has produced a meticulous portrait of Humberto Medeiros, one of the most notable, yet most frequently overlooked U.S. Catholic leaders of the post-1945 era. Gribble carefully weighs the sources and helpfully explores the various contexts in which Medeiros’ life and ministry unfolded. We…

View Cache