SCOTLAND
The Tablet
13 September 2013
Parishioners in Scotland have boycotted Mass and withheld their offertory donations in protest at their bishop’s decision to remove a priest who publicly accused another cleric of sexual abuse.
Two hundred people in the parish of St Sophia’s in Galston, Ayrshire, have signed a petition accusing the Bishop of Galloway, John Cunningham, of persecuting and ostracising Fr Patrick Lawson after he issued the priest with a decree of removal last week.
Fr Lawson, who is suffering from cancer, has campaigned for nearly two decades for the Scottish hierarchy to take action against Fr Paul Moore, a retired priest who, he alleges, abused altar boys and made sexual advances towards him when he was a seminarian in the mid-1990s.
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