ABUSE TRACKER

MEXICO
e-Oaxaca

Diversas voces han señalado que Norberto Rivera Carrera, cardenal de México, no debe de asistir al cónclave en el que se elegirá al nuevo pontífice.

La oposición a su presencia en el Vaticano surge después de la transmisión de un video en el que el funcionario católico confiesa no haber actuado contra Nicolás Aguilar, acusado de pederastia.

“El cardenal Norberto Ribera Carrera protegió a Marcial Maciel a Nicolás Aguilar aquí en México y fue culpable al autorizar su traslado a Los Ángeles donde el padre Aguilar abusó de al menos de 26 niños. Exigimos que el cardenal Norberto Rivera no participe en el cónclave y además exigimos que públicamente responda por sus actos”, sentenció Alberto Athié, quien ha denunciado casos de abuso sexual contra menores cometidos por religiosos católicos.

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MEXICO
El Universal

Ante las cartas de víctimas de presunto abuso sexual por sacerdotes en las que se pide que el cardenal Norberto Rivera Carrera no participe en el próximo cónclave para elegir nuevo Papa, la Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano (CEM) dejó en claro que se trata de una decisión personal.

“La Constitución Apostólica señala que todos los cardenales menores de 80 años tienen el derecho y el deber de participar en el cónclave, y si alguien encontrara una causa para no hacerlo tiene derecho de no participar”, señaló el secretario general de la CEM, Eugenio Lira.

Es decir, agregó, depende de cada circunstancia y debe ser una decisión personal, cada uno sabe cómo está la situación y debe tomar la que vea conducente.

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MEXICO/ROMA
La Prensa of Minnesota

A cuatro días de que concluya el pontificado del Papa Benedicto XVI, el rector y dean de la Catedral Metropolitana, el obispo Manuel Arellano, pidió a los feligreses, rezar por el Sumo Pontífice para que en este periodo de Cuaresma “pueda salir renovado completamente” de este proceso.

En ausencia del cardenal Norberto Rivera Carrera, Manuel Arellano, informó a los feligreses que el Arzobispo Primado de México viajó a Roma para participar en la ceremonia de elección del próximo Papa.

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MEXICO
Proceso

Rodrigo Vera
28 de febrero de 2013

MÉXICO, D.F. (apro).- La Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano (CEM) aclaró hoy que el cardenal Norberto Rivera Carrera deberá decidir si se abstiene de participar en el cónclave para elegir al nuevo Papa, como se lo han pedido organizaciones que lo acusan de proteger actos de pederastia sacerdotal.

En conferencia de prensa, monseñor Eugenio Lira Rugarcía, secretario general de la CEM, señaló:

“La normas internas de la Iglesia señalan que cualquier cardenal con menos de 80 años de edad, puede participar en el cónclave. Y el cardenal Rivera Carrera cumple con ese requisito. A él solo lo rigen las leyes de la Iglesia”.

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MEXIKO
Kipa

Mexiko-Stadt, 1.3.13 (Kipa) Die Mexikanische Bischofskonferenz verwahrt sich gegen Forderungen, Kardinal Noberto Rivera Carrera (70) solle auf die Teilnahme am Konklave verzichten. Ob er zur Papstwahl nach Rom reise, bleibe allein seine persönliche Entscheidung, sagte der Generalsekretär der Bischofskonferenz, Weihbischof Eugenio Lira, der Tageszeitung “Jornada” (Freitag).

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DEUTSCHLAND
Frankfurter Allgemeine

02.03.2013 · „Es war wie ein Tsunami“: Der langjährige Missbrauchsbeauftragte des Vatikans, Charles Scicluna, fordert Konsequenzen aus der großen Zahl von Fällen sexueller Gewalt von Klerikern gegen Kinder, Jugendliche und Schutzbefohlene. Ausdrücklich lobt er Ratzingers Rolle bei der Aufarbeitung.

Der langjährige Missbrauchsbeauftragte des Vatikans hat Konsequenzen aus der großen Zahl von Fällen sexueller Gewalt von Klerikern gegen Kinder, Jugendliche und Schutzbefohlene gefordert. „Alle müssen lernen, Geistlichen nicht blind zu vertrauen“, sagte Charles Scicluna, heute Weihbischof in Malta, der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung (F.A.S.). „Sie sind Menschen wie Du und Ich, mit Stärken und Schwächen.“

Als Verwalter einer Sache, die Gott ihnen anvertraut habe, müssten sie Rechenschaft ablegen über ihr Handeln. Weil Übergriffe nie ausgeschlossen werden könnten, „müssen wir die Familien, Gruppen und Gemeinden in die Lage versetzen, die Anzeichen von Missbrauch zu erkennen und nicht wegzuschauen, sondern rechtzeitig und gut zu reagieren und die Wahrheit ans Licht zu bringen“, sagte Scicluna.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Focus

Der Missbrauchsbeauftragte des Vatikans sieht zwar keinen Zusammenhang zwischen Zölibat und sexueller Gewalt, aber Defizite in der Priesterausbildung. Zölibatäre müssten ihre sexuellen Impulse kontrollieren können. Den Medien spricht er bei der Aufklärung eine wichtige Rolle zu.
Der langjährige Missbrauchsbeauftragte des Vatikans, Charles Scicluna, sieht angesichts der Skandale um sexuelle Übergriffe in der katholischen Kirche Defizite in der Priesterausbildung. Es gebe zwar keinen direkten Zusammenhang zwischen dem Zölibat und sexueller Gewalt, sagte Scicluna der „Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung“. Es stelle sich aber die Frage, warum der Zölibat keinen zusätzlichen Schutz gegeben habe. „Ein Zölibatärer sollte gelernt haben, seine sexuellen Impulse zu kontrollieren. Daher haben wir es mit einem Defizit in der Priesterausbildung zu tun“, sagte er.

Als Konsequenz aus der großen Zahl sexueller Gewalttaten von Klerikern gegen Schutzbefohlene sagte Scicluna: „Alle müssen lernen, Geistlichen nicht blind zu vertrauen. Sie sind Menschen wie Du und Ich, mit Stärken und Schwächen.“ Weil Übergriffe nie ausgeschlossen werden könnten, „müssen wir die Familien, Gruppen und Gemeinden in die Lage versetzen, die Anzeichen von Missbrauch zu erkennen und nicht wegzuschauen, sondern rechtzeitig und gut zu reagieren und die Wahrheit ans Licht zu bringen“.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 2, 2013

Rome —
John Allen is offering a profile each day of one of the most frequently touted papabili, or men who could be pope. The old saying in Rome is that he who enters a conclave as pope exits as a cardinal, meaning there’s no guarantee one of these men actually will be chosen. They are, however, the leading names drawing buzz in Rome these days, ensuring they will be in the spotlight as the conclave draws near. The profiles of these men also suggest the issues and the qualities other cardinals see as desirable heading into the election.

Let’s assume you’re a big-time Hollywood producer, and you’re developing a movie about a pope who makes the Catholic church seem fresh and hip. If you were to call Central Casting to fill the part, whoever they send up would probably look a lot like Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa in Honduras.

Now 70, Rodriguez was just 58 when he was named a cardinal in 2001, and he took the world by storm. We’re talking about a tall, handsome prelate who plays both the saxophone and the piano, who’s trained as a pilot, who speaks six languages comfortably, who’s got a wide smile and genuine charisma, and who’s seen as a ferocious champion of the poor. He’s a massive hit on the lecture circuit and in media circles worldwide.

In Honduras itself, Rodriguez has long led the pack in terms of moral authority and social influence. In the 1990s, for instance, he was asked to lead a commission to restore the police force to civilian control. At one point during the deliberations, Rodriguez flew to Houston for a dental emergency, and awoke to discover that he had been named police chief! He scrambled to convey his regrets.

The story is illuminating: In a time of crisis, he was seen as the only figure most Hondurans would trust.

Rodriguez Maradiaga has been such an outspoken opponent of the drug trade in Central America that he’s had to move around with a military escort, given how often narco-terrorists have threatened his life.

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
National Catholic Reporter

by Thomas Doyle | Mar. 2, 2013

Viewpoint
Way back in 2004, in the early days of the seemingly endless struggle for justice by the victims of several priests from Los Angeles, I had a conversation with one of the attorneys who represented several of these men and women. He said, “By the time this is over we are going to find out just how much Roger Mahony’s cardinal hat is worth.” I suspect that neither of us realized that this was truly a prophetic statement. In the end, the cost was calculated in dollars, trust, respect and faith.

The cost must also include the loss of truth.

The media responses to the final order to disclose all the files of predator priests and descriptions of the 10-year saga that preceded the court’s decision on Jan. 31 do not come close to telling the full story of the nightmare that led up to that day. The last major act, Archbishop Jose Gomez’s meaningless censure of Mahony and Mahony’s whining retort on his blog, is all about them and not about the real core of this almost incredible decade of events. At the heart of it all are the victims of Los Angeles priests, several hundred men and women. Yet the legal battle that went on and on not only overlooked them but continued to heap pain on their already scarred souls.

The media could not possibly recount the massive toll this took on so many people. The price of Mahony’s red hat is certainly steep in dollars. He retained an army of expensive lawyers to defend his intentional mishandling of reports of sexual abuse, and then to create legal roadblocks to the disclosure of the culprits’ files. The real cost of his hat was in people.

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VATICAN CITY
The Tablet

Austen Ivereigh – 2 March 2013

The period prior to the conclave is crucial for cardinal electors to discuss the central issues facing the Church and to help them determine who would best address them as pope. A former senior aide to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor recalls past pre-conclave meetings and how influential they have been

Voting in the Sistine Chapel, with all the accompanying drama and historical resonance, overshadows, in the popular perception of the papal transition, the period preceding it, when the world’s cardinals gather daily to take the temperature of the world, the Church and each other. These “general congregations” are vital for shaping the way the votes will go once the conclave itself begins.

What happens in the Sistine Chapel itself is more like a retreat, or a liturgy, than a discussion: the cardinals sit on tiered rows, conversing briefly with their neighbours, or saying Rosaries – but the focus is on the voting itself. So, too, are the conversations over lunch and dinner back in the Vatican residence where they stay during the voting, the Casa Santa Marta: what matters is the voting maths.

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ROME
National Catholic Reporter

by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 2, 2013

Rome —
Back in 2004, a veteran Italian Vatican writer published a front-page piece predicting the end of the Lefebvrist schism in conjunction with the celebration of a Latin Mass at Rome’s St. Mary Major Basilica. When it didn’t happen, I jokingly asked him what had gone wrong.

His answer was lapidary: In giornalismo, ogni tanto si deve rischiare, which, loosely translated, means, “In journalism, every now and then you’ve got to take a shot.”

I mention this in light of the predictable round of speculation and analysis currently filling the Italian papers in the run-up to the election of the next pope, which, as always, is wildly entertaining, but not necessarily meant to be taken literally.

One story making the rounds is that the cardinals will forge a pact among themselves that whoever the next pope is, he will pledge never to resign. The idea is that some cardinals see resignation as both destabilizing and, in some sense, a blow to the majesty of the papal office, and to the notion that it’s not just a job but a form of spiritual paternity.

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VATICAN CITY
CNN

By Richard Allen Greene, Hada Messia and Laura Smith-Spark, CNN
updated 8:39 AM EST, Sat March 2, 2013

Rome (CNN) — The cardinals who will elect the new pope following the historic resignation of Benedict XVI are continuing to make their way to Rome, the Vatican said Saturday, with some likely to arrive only Monday or Tuesday.

The first of a series of meetings known as general congregations takes place Monday morning — and a priority for the cardinals attending will be setting a date for the special election, or conclave, held to pick the next pope.

The Vatican has said it’s not sure whether a date will be agreed on as soon as Monday.

If cardinals are still arriving as the general congregations start, the timetable may be delayed.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Irish Central

Vatican invited Cardinal Keith O’Brien to conclave despite knowledge of sexual allegations by Catholic priests

by Cahir O’Doherty

When news broke this week that Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, had been accused by four priests of sexual exploitation both his critics and supporters were instantly suspicious of the timing.

Why now, they asked? Pope Benedict’s dramatic resignation was barely a week old and the papal conclave was already looming. How could accusations this damning have come to light just at this moment (especially considering O’Brien had Britain’s only vote for Pope)? It was an a reasonable question.

The answer, which came yesterday, probably isn’t going to satisfy the conspiracy theorists, but it’s a fairly convincing one. In a desperate attempt to minimize the impact, the pope moved quickly to stem the crisis before it could snowball.

That led to O’Brien standing down as archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh the day after the Observer newspaper published accusations about his conduct during the 1980’s.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

March 3, 2013

Richard Baker, Nick McKenzie

One of Australia’s most senior rabbis has revealed he did not inform police after a young boy contacted him to detail allegations of sexual abuse.

Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, who heads the Organisation of Rabbis of Australasia, said he received an anonymous phone call from a boy more than 20 years ago about the alleged abuse at Sydney’s Yeshiva.

Rabbi Gutnick, who was based in Strathfield in Sydney’s west at the time, said he alerted senior members of the Yeshiva about the boy’s allegations, but did not contact police.

”Knowing what I know now, I would have probably called the police,” he said.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

The 2005 papal election Conclave followed the myopic media hysteria about Pope John Paul II’s funeral. The 2013 Conclave follows the pathetic Vatican escape of Joseph Ratzinger, now the first Shadow Pope, with Georgeous Georg, and the continuing media shock at the magnitude of the Vatican’s moral chaos. The scandals just keep on coming with no end in sight, one more troubling than the next.

As an experienced international lawyer, I have counseled in tough crises many top executives in multinational organizations. I am quite confident that, despite the silly spin that the simplistic media and their shallow and opportunistic “experts” love, Conclave Cardinals are more worried about recent criminal convictions for child sex related crimes of senior officials, like Opus Dei’s Bishop Finn, Canada’s Bishop Lahey and Cardinal Rigali’s aide, Monsignor Finn, than they are about their theological convictions about birth control, clerical celibacy, gay marriage or woman’s ordination. Fear of handcuffs will always trump fear of the “morning after pill” among senior Church executives!

James Weiss, a Boston College church historian, recently reported on NPR that the Vatican clique tried to get a dozen or so Cardinals to stay home from the Conclave, apparently to minimize media attention on their alleged possible “crimes”. Cardinals O’Brien and Mahony are known; who else were discouraged? Meanwhile, Cardinals’ apologists try to spin away from trouble with comments like “it is old news” or “maybe it was just a friendly kiss”. Cardinals who cavalierly condemned couples to Hell for wanting to plan their families are now begging for some “moral slack”. Sorry, guys, you will now reap what your have sown!

Unfortunately, the fundamentally flawed Conclave’s medieval procedures almost guarantee the Cardinals’ concerns about criminal convictions will not be adequately addressed. The agenda is set by the same octogenerian successors to petty Italian princes that orchestrated the current mess. Cardinals have inadequate access to relevant candidate information and are fatally dependent on the unreliable and biased Vatican clique for data. Cardinal candidates are not fully vetted now, as they surely will be by the media if one of them is elected.

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UNITED STATES
Enterprise News

By Michael Kryzanek
GateHouse News Service

Posted Mar 02, 2013

COMMENTARY —
As a practicing Catholic, I find it a bit tawdry – but certainly not surprising in our world where making a buck is paramount – that there are now betting lines on who will be the next pope. Our own Sean Cardinal O’Malley has a 40/1 chance, according to an Irish outfit called PaddyPower.com. No matter what proud Catholics in the Boston Archdiocese are saying, Cardinal Sean is a long shot as the money heads elsewhere.

Las Vegas odds makers are not taking any wagers on the next pope but foreign gaming companies are alive with betting action. Most of the money wagered is not from the United States, since technically Americans are denied the opportunity to place Internet bets through foreign gaming firms. This regulatory roadblock has not stopped bettors here in the states from dropping a twenty or fifty on Cardinal O’Malley using “back channels.”

By the way, if you’re interested, the “smart money” is on Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson at 11/4 with Milan’s prelate Angelo Scola on the rise at 7/1.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

By Jason Horowitz
Published: March 1

VATICAN CITY — Minutes after Pope Benedict XVI retired from office on Thursday evening, his former second in command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, received a scepter symbolizing his role as chamberlain with operational authority over the church during the interregnum.

Pope Benedict XVI: Before he became the pope: Pope Benedict XVI will step down at the end of this month, ending this chapter in a life devoted to the Catholic Church. Here are some key moments in his life.

For many close observers of the church, the tall, lanky and polarizing prelate represents the dysfunction in the Roman hierarchy and the dangers of over-staffing the universal church’s government with too many Italians.

Benedict’s last year in office was overshadowed by leaks exposing Italian prelates engaging in turf wars and battles to influence the Italian government. Even as Benedict’s helicopter, emblazoned with the words “Repubblica Italiana,” lifted over the Vatican walls and spirited him away to a hidden life of retirement, an Italian magazine reported that in the midst of the leak scandal, Bertone had authorized wiretaps, that most Italian of pastimes, to root out potential moles among clergy in the Vatican. The Holy See confirmed that it had ordered the bugging of some phones.

The very notion that Italy is a contagion marks a historical departure. For 455 years before the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, an uninterrupted chain of Italian popes led the church. Now the scandals that haunted the German Benedict also loom over Italian candidates hoping to reclaim the papacy.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by Joshua J. McElwee | Mar. 2, 2013

Rome —
Among several questions cardinals ask when electing one of their peers as the new leader of the global Roman Catholic church, said Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, is simply: “Can he govern?”

Speaking to CNN Friday, George, who participated in the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, said the secret meeting of cardinals to select a new pontiff is “a very quiet time.”

“You have a chance to contemplate the beginning of the world on the ceiling and the end of the world on the wall,” said George, referring to the paintings of the Genesis accounts and of the Last Judgment on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave is held.

George said cardinals choose who to vote for by talking to peers who know those being mentioned as papal possibilities.

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VATICAN CITY
RTE News

Cardinals who enter the Conclave to vote on a new pope are forbidden to tweet on threat of excommunication, according to one of the last edicts Pope Benedict signed before his resignation.

Most of the 117 Cardinals who are eligible to vote for a new pope are not on Twitter, but the the ranks do include at least nine active tweeters.

In the unlikely event that the Cardinals disobey the order, the Santa Marta residence where the cardinals will be staying has an electromagnetic shield that will reportedly block any signals.

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VATICAN CITY
Daily Herald

Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn is a soft-spoken conservative who is ready to listen to those espousing reform. That profile that could appeal to fellow cardinals looking to elect a pontiff with widest-possible appeal to the world’s 1 billion Catholics.

His nationality may be his biggest disadvantage: Electors may be reluctant to choose another German speaker as a successor to Benedict XVI.

A man of low tolerance for the child abuse scandals roiling the church, Schoenborn himself was elevated to the its upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy after his predecessor resigned 18 years ago over accusations that he was a pedophile.
___

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the Roman Catholic Church prepares to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, The Associated Press is profiling key cardinals seen as “papabili” _ contenders to the throne. In the secretive world of the Vatican, there is no way to know who is in the running, and history has yielded plenty of surprises. But these are the names that have come up time and again in speculation. Today: Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.
___

Multilingual and respected by Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Benedict XVI’s friend and former pupil was one of the cardinal electors in the 2005 papal conclave that chose the German as head of the Catholic church. A scholar who is at home in the pulpit, Schoenborn also is well connected in the Vatican _ and appears willing to make it his home, if reluctantly.

Asked if he would like to succeed Benedict on news of the pontiff’s plan to step down, he said: “my heart is in Vienna, my heart is in Austria _ but naturally with the whole Church as well.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Ian Jack
The Guardian, Friday 1 March 2013

When we were boys and girls, did we have any idea what priests got up to? Perhaps some Catholic children did, when they came across those now identified as bad apples, but for the rest of us they remained rarely seen, black-clad figures who (we were told) exercised a severe power over their congregations. Old films showed them as shrewd and humorous characters played by the likes of Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy, and though as Protestant or at least non-Catholic children we never swallowed that sunny version, they appeared sinister to us only in the most general way. I remember a moment of teenage speculation when, looking at the drawn curtains of a priest’s house one winter’s night, one of us wondered about the female housekeeper’s role. A dozen years later, post-midnight in the lounge of a grand Dublin hotel, I saw a group of bibulous priests getting pie-eyed in what one of Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s accusers would call a “late-night drinking session”. To anyone raised with the purse-lipped notion that men of God should always be sober, this was a memorable scene, and for quite a few years after, maybe even until the advent of Father Ted, it represented my idea of “inappropriate behaviour” in the priesthood. That the same priests might end up undressing one another would then have been a preposterous suggestion.

We knew so very little. The clerical uniform successfully erased the individual inside it, so that instead of seeing a 25-year-old man of amiable intention and uncertain sexuality – quiet Pat Flannery, say, from the next street – we saw a member of a secret society with a lineage that went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition. But then, we were on the outside. As a family of non-believers, we rarely saw the inside of the village kirk, but we knew the minister and the Bible he read from. The Catholic church – “the chapel”, we called it – was a different matter. It had wooden sides and a corrugated iron roof and lay on the outskirts of the next village, where it had been built for migrant Irish workers at the beginning of the last century. On Sundays, our Catholic neighbours would put on their best clothes and walk over the hill to reach the hut’s Latin ceremonies, which, when we occasionally heard them as passers-by, seemed to us superstitious and foreign.

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IRELAND
Paddy Power Blog

By Michael Kelly | Editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper
@MichaelKellyIC

Trying to predict who the next Pope will be is a notoriously tricky business. In the early 1990s as Pope John Paul II’s health declined, the renowned Vatican-watcher Peter Hebblethwaite wrote a book entitled The Next Pope. In the book he predicted John Paul’s imminent demise and speculated on who would succeed the Polish Pontiff. Unfortunately for him, Hebblethwaite died in 1994 causing wags in Rome to speculate that the Pope – who reigned for another 11 years – was working on a book to be titled The Next Peter Hebblethwaite!

Candidates for the Papacy tend to keep their desire for the job secret. When mentioned as ‘Papabile’ (a potential Pope) it is considered poor form not to dismiss one’s own chances. This may be due in part to the Italian proverb that “he who enters the conclave as a Pope always comes out as a cardinal”.

So, with the above-mentioned health warning in mind, who are the front-runners to replace Benedict XVI in Catholicism’s top job? Geography will be crucial. In 2005, many observers thought the cardinals would look to the developing world; instead, they opted to stick with Europe and elect Joseph Ratzinger. Indications are that they will look farther afield this time around.

1. Cardinal Angelo Scola, Italy (71) — 3/1

The Italians are pinning most of their hopes on Scola, he is one of the few Papabile that have an active presence on Twitter, almost a prerequisite now since Benedict took to the social networking site late last year. He is considered conservative and close to Italian politicians. He was hand-picked by Pope John Paul II to lead an institute in Rome leading the Church’s opposition to divorce, contraception, homosexuality and abortion. He worked as an adviser to Pope Benedict in his previous role in the Doctrine watchdog and is likely to lead the conservative charge in the conclave. He is a former Patriarch of Venice and now Archbishop of Milan – two dioceses that remarkably have produced five of the eight Popes who reigned during the 20th Century. That’s quite the record.

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UNITED STATES
Talk Radio News Service

By LUKE VARGAS

UNITED NATIONS (TRNS) – The legal team representing thousands of individuals abused by Catholic priests has published a new report in response to comments made by the Vatican to the United Nations last year.

The latest report by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) comes on the heels of an appeal to the International Court of Justice earlier this month to take the Vatican to trial over its alleged complicity in cases of child sexual abuse worldwide.

According to CCR estimates, up to 100,000 individuals have been the victims of sexual violence by clergy between 1981 and 2005.

With the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI now underway, and the selection of a new pontiff in the coming weeks, the issue of criminal behavior by the Catholic clergy is poised to dog the church for years to come.

According to the CCR report, the Vatican overlooked its gravest abuses when it provided a 2011 report assessing its compliance with the U.N.’s Convention of the Rights of the Child human rights treaty.

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UNITED STATES
The Patriot News

By Ivey DeJesus | idejesus@pennlive.com
on February 12, 2013

Benedict XVI may be nearing the end of his papacy, but survivors of clergy sexual abuse say he still has plenty of time to ensure predator priests are brought to justice and ensure children are protected.

“It may sound naive, but we haven’t yet given up on this one. He does have 15 or 16 days in office,” said David Clohessy, director of the the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests.”

Benedict on Monday stunned the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics with his announcement that he would resign his at the end of the month. The frail 85-year-old pontiff cited poor health as reason for his decision.

In the wake of his announcement, victims advocates like Clohessy — as well as experts on the Catholic Church — have criticized the German-born pope for failing to do what he once promised: to have the church do “all in its power” to bring predator priests to justice and protect children.

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VATICAN CITY
CBS News

[with video]

The Catholic Church of the United States is now on “thank God, the right track” in the wake of the scandal surrounding decades of child sexual abuse by priests and senior clergy’s moves to hide it from public view, Cardinal Timothy Dolan tells CBS News.

Speaking to CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey at the Vatican, where he and all other cardinals have been summoned to elect a new pontiff following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday, Dolan acknowledged the “torture the Catholics went through in the United States.”

He told Pizzey the Church in the U.S. had learned from its mistakes in handling the abusive priests and tackled the problem during the last decade. “We didn’t do it right back then, but now I think we are.”

Dolan conceded that the global Church, however was still feeling the aftershocks as the “tsunami” of allegations of abuse was still hitting clergy in other nations.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Conservative Home

By Roger Scruton.

Our society has not come to terms with the sexual revolution, and one proof of this is the extent to which people seem now free to accuse each other of sexual misdemeanours and ‘inappropriate’ advances, without knowing or caring whether these constitute a crime. This matter is of great concern to conservatives who, for all their reticence in the matter, are well aware that sexual life ought not to be a free for all, and that conventions, manners and a certain distance between the sexes are fundamental to both individual happiness and social peace. Like other modern people, however, they stumble through this dangerous territory without the light of religious principle to guide them, and leaning, when it is necessary to lean, on an entirely makeshift philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that the absence of a robust view of sex is one reason for the ideological weakness of the Conservative Party. The hesitation over family values, the sudden and unexplained enthusiasm for gay marriage, the easy toleration of ‘non-discrimination’ laws that marginalise the old morality – all these are ways of papering over an enormous hole in the conservative vision, and one that simply did not exist when the founding fathers of conservatism wrote in the 18th century. …

Even worse, it seems to me, is the case of Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who is accused of entirely unspecific acts that occurred during his younger days. None of his accusers suggests that anything the Cardinal did amounts to a crime in law. Perhaps they are such virtuous people that they have never got drunk and attempted to kiss the attractive person sitting next to them. Indeed, one hopes that, being priests, they have behaved in the exemplary way that Cardinal O’Brien may not have been able always to live up to. But what a fuss, and with what consequences, not only for the Cardinal himself, but for the Church to which the primary loyalty of his accusers is owed!

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UTAH
Deseret News

By Emiley Morgan, Deseret News

Published: Friday, March 1 2013

CENTERVILLE — A Centerville man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing one child and exposing himself to another was sentenced to jail and probation Friday.

Timothy William Bothell, 43, pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony; and lewdness involving a child, a class A misdemeanor, in December. Friday, 2nd District Judge Glen Dawson ordered the man to spend two consecutive years in jail followed by five years probation during which time the man is to have no contact with his victims or any other children under the age of 18 without court approval.

Dawson sentenced the man to three years to life in prison but suspended the jail time. He said he would also consider giving Bothell work release after he serves one year in jail. He is to report to the Davis County Jail March 8.

Bothell came to police attention after being confronted by his wife and admitting that he had inappropriate sexual contact with at least one child of a family friend. Bothell later contacted Child Protective Services, which then involved police.

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UTAH
The Salt Lake Tribune

By Kimball Bennion
The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Mar 01 2013

Bountiful • A 43-year-old Centerville man who is a former LDS Church employee was sentenced Friday to two years in jail for sexually abusing one child and showing his genitals to a second child last year.

Timothy William Bothell was charged in 2nd District Court with two counts of first-degree felony aggravated sexual abuse of a child stemming from incidents at a home between Dec. 1, 2011, and Aug. 9. He was also charged with four counts of lewdness involving a child, a class A misdemeanor.

Bothell pleaded guilty in December to one count of first-degree felony attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child and one count of lewdness involving a child.

The felony count carries a potential prison term of up to life, and the lewdness count is punishable by up to a year in jail.

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UTAH
Standard-Examiner

By Loretta Park
Standard-Examiner staff

Fri, 03/01/2013

BOUNTIFUL — A former employee of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was sentenced to jail instead of prison on Friday on charges of child sex abuse.

Timothy Bothell, 43, of Centerville, pleaded guilty in December to one count of attempted aggravated sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony; and one count of lewdness involving a child, a class A misdemeanor. He was originally charged with two first-degree felony counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child and four counts of Class A misdemeanor charges of lewdness involving a child.

The plea deal was made so the girls, sisters ages 11 and 13 at the time of the abuse, would not have to testify, attorneys said.

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DELAWARE
The Star Democrat

WILMINGTON, DEL. – In the next few weeks, the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington will begin a three-year capital campaign to raise funds for pensions, diocesan ministries and current and future parish needs.

The campaign, titled “Sustaining Hope for the Future,” is designed to meet the needs created by the diocesan bankruptcy settlement that was finalized in September 2011 and paid $77.4 million to survivors of clergy sexual abuse to settle their claims against the dioceses and 29 parishes. The settlement drained diocesan reserves and requires the diocese to reinforce its lay employees’ pension plan with a $10 million infusion by the end of 2017.

Catholic school teachers, parish secretaries, Catholic Charities staff, cemetery workers, parish maintenance staff and others will have their pensions secured by the “Sustaining Hope for the Future” campaign. The campaign will also help retired priests who have dedicated their lives to the spiritual needs of their parishioners to have health insurance coverage and a dignified retirement. A percentage of the funds will be used by parishes to meet their various needs.

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IRELAND
Global Dispatch

Just two hours after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, Irish bookmaker Paddy Power was out with their odds and within 48 hours, they saw more than $200,000 in bets.

More than 20,000 people have bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on the papal change and international bookmakers expect that dollar figure to quickly move into the millions.

It’s illegal to place bets on the pope in the United States, even in Nevada, because it’s considered an election.

Plenty of foreign bookmakers, however, are capitalizing on what they say could be the biggest moneymaker ever outside of sporting events.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Spy Ghana

An openly gay former Dominican friar insisted today that homosèxuality is the ‘ticking time bomb in the Catholic Church’ and that homosèxual men are ‘massively over-represented’ within the Church.

Mark Dowd, who is now a journalist, said research for his 2001 Channel 4 documentary Queer and Catholic suggested that at least half of people attracted into seminaries in the priesthood are gay.

His comments came as the former leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, said the scandal-hit Catholic Church must undergo renewal and reform.

Mr Dowd told CNN: ‘When you have this culture of secrecy and guilt and repression, you have conditions which foster the potential for blackmail and for manipulation.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Saturday, March 02, 2013

A priest has accused RTÉ of imbalance and inappropriateness after he became embroiled in a blazing radio row on sex abuse in the Catholic Church on the day Pope Benedict XVI resigned

By Caroline O’Doherty

Fr Joe McDonald says RTÉ should have taken a decision to “lay off the Church scandals” on the day and he wants the makers of the Late Debate programme to respond to his criticisms.

The Thursday edition of the late night RTÉ 1 current affairs show became increasingly heated after Fr McDonald, of St Matthew’s Parish, Ballyfermot, and senator Ronan Mullen complained they were not being allowed raise the positive points of Pope Benedict’s reign.

They questioned the right of journalist and former rape crisis counsellor Susan McKay to be on the panel as she was a declared atheist, and they took issue with abuse survivor and long-time campaigner, Marie Collins’ view that the Church’s leaders still failed to grasp the severity of the problem.

Ms Collins, a devout Catholic who exposed the failings of Cardinal Desmond Connell on the abuse scandal, tweeted afterwards she was “shattered” by the encounter.

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CANADA
Huffington Post

By Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press

MONTREAL – Word that a Canadian cardinal is a presumed contender to succeed Pope Benedict XVI has been met with a mixed response in his own Quebec backyard.

Advocates for victims of sexual abuse by priests and even some members of the clergy aren’t quite in Marc Cardinal Ouellet’s cheering section.

While the idea of a global icon emerging from here has stirred the local imagination, that excitement is tempered by the fact that Ouellet’s once-religious home province has become intensely secular and even anti-clerical.

Rev. Raymond Gravel suggested Tuesday that for the Roman Catholic church to stem its decline in Quebec, and elsewhere in the world, it should avoid making another theologian or university professor its next pontiff. Ouellet is both — a theologian and a longtime professor.

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UNITED STATES
America Magazine

March 4, 2013
From CNS, Staff and other sources

Irish bookmakers have ranked Cardinal Angelo Scola of Italy, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana and Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada as favorites among the papabili (literally “pope-ables”). Has Cardinal Turkson already blown his chances by saying that he would be happy to take the job? Is New York’s Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan out of the running because he is, well, an American? Such are the speculations of “papabili watching” as the conclave that will elect the new pope approaches in March.

If you would prefer to let your reason, rather than an Irish bookie, be your guide, here are some short bios of the leading candidates for the job.

Cardinal Angelo Scola (Italian, born Nov. 7, 1941). Archbishop of Milan since 2011, Cardinal Scola, a respected theologian, was patriarch of Venice, where he earned a reputation as an energetic pastor, raising the church’s profile in the civil arena. He was created a cardinal in 2003. In 2004 he started Oasis, an international foundation that serves as a forum for dialogue and a bridge of support for Catholics in the Middle East.

The son of a socialist truck driver, Cardinal Scola took to his assignment in Venice with relish, visiting local communities in an effort to help restore the parish as a spiritual and social meeting ground. Cardinal Scola has argued that if the church wants to reach people where they live, it has to move out of the sacristy and into all sectors of civil society. “As Christians,” he said, “that means we must have the courage to show our face, to say what freedom really is…and to propose to civil society an ideal of the good life.”

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MARYLAND
Patch

By Nick Gestido

The deacon of a local church has been arrested and charged with possession of child pornography, according to a news release from the Baltimore County Police Department.

William Steven Albaugh, of the unit block of Treadway Court in Perry Hall, was arrested at his home at 7:45 a.m. March 1, police said in the news release.

Albaugh is the deacon of St. Joseph’s Fullerton church on Belair Road, the release states.

He was charged with one count of possession of child pornography and released from the Baltimore County Detention Center in lieu of $75,000 bond, according to police.

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MARYLAND
The Baltimore Sun

By Jessica Anderson, The Baltimore Sun
7:17 p.m. EST, March 1, 2013

A longtime deacon at a Fullerton church was charged Friday with possessing “numerous files of child pornography,” Baltimore County police said.

William Steven Albaugh, 67, a deacon at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Belair Road, was arrested at his Nottingham home at 7:45 a.m. Police had searched Albaugh’s Treadway Court home and said they found images of children on his Verizon Online account and on thumb drives.

Police do not believe that children at St. Joseph’s were victims.

Albaugh declined to comment when reached by phone Friday.

He told police he has viewed child pornography since the 1970s, when he would go to adult bookstores in Baltimore, according to charging documents. Albaugh told police he saved the images to his computer but said he would never harm a child, the documents say.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

•EXCLUSIVE by JORDAN BAKER
•From:The Sunday Telegraph
•February 17, 2013

THE new Pope must save the Catholic Church from waning influence amid the evils of modern society – and may well be an Italian – says Cardinal George Pell, one of the 117 men who will elect a new pontiff next month.

In an exclusive interview, Cardinal Pell said the vote was “enormously important for the Church”.

“If we go under, we surrender to the tides that are breaking up families, decreasing the birth rate, the challenges of alcoholism and drugs and pornography. If we collapse or we wobble disastrously, it won’t be for the good of the western world at all,” he said.

Cardinal Pell will fly to Rome on Friday, where he will meet other cardinals before being secluded inside the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel to choose a replacement for the retiring Pope Benedict.

There are factions – Cardinal Pell describes it as “different schools of thought” – and this will be evident in the discussions among cardinals, although he says the lobbying has not yet begun.

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SCOTLAND
Daily Mail

Drunken parties at the seminary, crushes on young ‘pups’ and a gay mafia accused of bringing down Britain’s top Catholic

By Guy Adams

Almost invariably, it was late at night by the time the parties started. After dinner and prayers, the residents of St Andrew’s College would gather around candlelit tables in the refectory or head upstairs to the billiard room to talk, drink and laugh into the wee hours.

The tight-knit group, mostly in their early 20s, had been drawn to the 19th-century baronial mansion near the village of Drygrange, a stone’s throw from the River Tweed, on the Scottish borders, by a calling. They wanted to devote their lives to serving God as priests in the Catholic Church.

St Andrew’s was a seminary 30 miles south-east of Edinburgh, where at any time several dozen young men were being prepared for the priesthood. They spent their days studying, praying, meditating, debating theology and learning how to run a parish.

In their six years at the secluded institution, the future priests made lifelong friendships and formed intimate cliques.

They even shared a common language: dinner was ‘rat pie’, communal bathrooms were ‘jakes’ and younger colleagues ‘pups’. On religious holidays, copious amounts of beer and wine (but never spirits) were served from lunchtime onwards. The raucous parties that ensued, bringing merriment to every tower and turret of the redbrick building, were known as ‘ragers’.

Sometimes, as with many an event involving too much alcohol, a ‘rager’ would end badly. And it’s one such occasion, said to have occurred at St Andrew’s 33 years ago, that this week brought scandal to the highest echelons of the Catholic Church.

On Monday, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, 74-year-old Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Britain’s most senior cleric, shocked the nation’s five million Catholics by announcing his sudden resignation.

The news came 24 hours after a Sunday newspaper revealed that three priests and a former priest have filed an official complaint accusing him of various counts of ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, stretching back more than three decades. Perhaps the most colourful alleged incident occurred at St Andrew’s in the spring of 1980.

A 20-year-old, who had joined the seminary two years earlier, claims that O’Brien, then 42, made a drunken attempt to seduce him.

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CANADA
Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA — An elderly Ottawa priest and former school board trustee is facing new sex abuse charges.

Jacques Faucher, 76, stood with his hands in his pockets as he appeared on video from the courthouse cells accused of new allegations of sexually abusing three men between 1969 and 1974.

Faucher was first arrested in February on sex allegations and released. He was arrested again Thursday.

Court documents show he is now facing a dozen charges, including six counts each of gross indecency and indecent assault on a male on four alleged victims.

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FLORIDA
Herald-Tribune

By J. David McSwane

Published: Friday, March 1, 2013

SARASOTA – A Catholic priest could face up to life in prison after a jury found him guilty Friday of eight counts of illegal sexual activity with a teenage boy.

William C. Wert, now 56, had a recurring sexual relationship with a 14-year-old Nokomis boy in which the two exchanged explicit text messages that became key pieces of evidence for the prosecution.

“What was interesting of course was that we had the text message back-and-forth which showed kind of the context of the relationship,” said Assistant State Attorney Dawn Buff, who prosecuted the case before Circuit Court Judge Frederick Mercurio.

“You see how he’s wooing him and how he’s engaging this child in a relationship.”

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BRAZIL
Business Ghana

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation is an act of desperation in the face of the “moral disaster” that has swamped the Roman Catholic Church and the “internal intrigues” in the Roman curia, Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff told dpa in an interview.

According to Boff, a leading exponent of Liberation Theology, which holds that the church should be closer to the poor, Benedict XVI is to leave to his successor a negative legacy. The outgoing pontiff has been “a pope with no charisma who was unable to lead the Church.”

“He resigned out of desperation, because he could no longer control the Roman curia and bear the moral disaster of pedophilia and of cardinals’ internal intrigues,” said Boff, a former Franciscan friar.

Boff met Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI in the 1960s as they both enjoyed discussing theological issues with each other in Germany.

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MISSISSIPPI
Associated Baptist Press

By Bob Allen

The Mississippi Board of Pharmacy recently revoked the license of a convicted child molester who had worked at a drug store in Clinton, Miss., since resigning as music minister at a prominent Southern Baptist Church in 2011.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests reported the regulatory board accepted the voluntary revocation of John Langworthy’s pharmacy license during a public meeting Feb. 21. An agency official did not respond to a reporter’s e-mail seeking confirmation, but in recent days Langworthy’s record no longer appears in a search of a license-verification database on the Mississippi Board of Pharmacy website.

Langworthy, 50, served 22 years at Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Miss., before resigning as associate pastor of music and ministries. After his resignation from the church, Langworthy confessed to the congregation Aug. 7, 2011, his sin of having “sexual indiscretions with younger males” while serving churches in Mississippi and Texas in the 1980s.

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ROME
CBS Chicago

CHICAGO (CBS) — One day after Pope Benedict resigned, the Vatican is in a state of flux, with no clear indication who among a dozen or more possible contenders might be elected a successor.

On Friday, life went on, people strolled through St. Peter’s Square, they lined up to buy commemorative sede vacante stamps and even got engaged.

CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine reports, Francis Cardinal George has four or five names in mind.

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said he hasn’t narrowed it down that much, saying his list “might be a little longer. Cardinal George knows the cardinals a little better than I do.”

“While nobody would campaign and nobody’s jockeying, there would be some honest conversation, saying, ‘What’s your read on this guy,’ ” Dolan said.

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UNITED STATES
Global Post

The Catholic priest and lawyer offers counsel to US nuns battling the Vatican as well as church leaders grappling with the sex abuse crisis.

Dan Ward is by any measure a complex man. The lawyer-priest righteously helps nuns on property matters and how to deal with a Vatican investigation.

A canonist and civil lawyer, he has also done extensive defense work for clergy sex offenders and their communities. He refused interview requests.

“It’s a little like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality — doing good for the nuns, while helping bishops or religious superiors deal with their sex offenders,” said Pat Wall, who was a young protégé to Ward at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota in the early 1980s.

Back then, Father Ward was advising religious communities in the early wave of abuse litigation. He told Wall “to get any case settled before it’s filed. You do not want to get involved in the civil discovery process.”

Ward, who leads the legal team of the Resource Center for Religious Institutes (RCRI), has ended up opposite his former student, Wall, in several civil cases. Ward’s work for nuns, says Wall, has been secondary to “his biggest role in the last 25 years — as a consultant lawyer to various monasteries, dioceses and churches in defending them in cases of sexual abuse. Ward has functioned on every single level on the defense side.”

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MARYLAND
WJZ

NOTTINGHAM, Md. (WJZ) — A church deacon has been charged with possession of child pornography.

William Steven Albaugh, 67, was arrested at his home Friday morning. Albaugh is the deacon at St. Joseph Catholic Church Fullerton in Nottingham, near White Marsh.

Albaugh is charged with one count of possession of child pornography. He was released on $75,000 bond.

Detectives began the investigation last month when Verizon Online notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that one of its subscribers had stored images of child pornography on the online “cloud” storage system.

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MARYLAND
CT Post

FULLERTON, Md. (AP) — A Maryland church deacon has been charged with possession of child pornography.

William Steven Albaugh was arrested at his Fullerton home Friday morning.

Baltimore County police say the 67-year-old Albaugh stored images of child pornography on thumb drives and on his Verizon Online account.

Albaugh is the deacon of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Nottingham. The Archdiocese of Baltimore says Albaugh has been suspended from all public ministries. Police say there’s no indication any children at St. Joseph were victims.

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MARYLAND
WBAL

Friday, March 01, 2013
Phil Yacuboski

Police in Baltimore County have arrested a 67-year-old Fullerton man and charged with him with having child pornography.

William Steven Albaugh, of the unit block of Treadway Court, was arrested Friday morning just before 8 o’clock. Albaugh is the deacon of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in 8400-block of Belair Road in Nottingham.

He’s charged with one count of possession of child pornography and was released on $75,000 bond.

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MARYLAND
WMAR

NOTTINGHAM, Md. (WMAR) –

Baltimore County Police have arrested and charged a deacon with possession of child pornography.

William Steven Albaugh, 66, was a deacon at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Nottingham. Albaugh was arrested at his home in the unit block of Treadway Court at about 7:45 a.m.

Albaugh is charged with one count of possession of child pornography and was released on a $75,000 bond.

Detectives began to investigate the deacon last month when Verizon Online notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that one of their subscribers had stored images on the online ‘cloud’ storage system.

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UNITED STATES
The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

Virginia Jones

Friday, March 1, 2013

I saw the blurb on Abuse Tracker from Bill Donohue about an opinion piece in the New York Times criticizing the author, Paul Elie, as another Catholic malcontent.

My first thought was, We are all Gods hands on this earth. Maybe the malcontents are actually God speaking to Church leadership and telling them they need to shape up.

My second reactions is that sometimes we don’t recognize the help God sends to us.

I am reminded of the story of a man who was stranded during a flood. Before he was stranded, a policeman came to his door and told him to evacuate.

The man said, “God will take care of me.”

The flood waters rose to his doorstep and then into his house.

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MARYLAND
NBC Washington

A 67-year-old Fullerton, Md. man – who also serves as a church deacon – has been charged with possession of child pornography, Baltimore County police said.

William Steven Albaugh of Treadway Court was arrested at his home at about 7:45 a.m. and charged with one count of possession of child pornography. He was released on $75,000 bond.

Police said detectives were alerted by Verizon Online, who told the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that one of its subscribers had stored images of child pornography on Verizon’s online cloud storage system.

Police said a further investigation found that Albaugh saved images of child pornography on his Verizon Online account as well as on thumb drives.

Albaugh is the deacon of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Nottingham, Md., police said. There is no evidence that children at the church were victims.

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FIJI
The Fiji Times

Repeka Nasiko
Saturday, March 02, 2013

A CATHOLIC priest accused of rape and multiple allegations of sex related crimes was yesterday placed in police custody for his own safety.

The Magistrates Court in Tavua was told that Father Nemesio Kolikoli, 50, should be held in protective custody as tension was high in Vatukoula, where he served as parish priest.

State prosecutors told Magistrate Samuela Qica the clergy would be harmed if he was released back into the community because of the tension created by his alleged acts.

Father Kolikoli was charged with one count of rape and three counts of indecent assault following a complaint lodged by a 21-year-old on February 24.

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ROME
Voice of America

Reuters

March 01, 2013

ROME — Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana is not “running” for pope but he clearly has supporters who think enough of him that they have plastered posters with his picture around Rome.

“Vote Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson at the conclave!,” was written in bold on posters above a photograph of the cardinal, a favorite among bookmakers to succeed Benedict, who on Thursday became the first pope in six centuries to resign.

The posters were plastered over banners that had been used for candidates in Italian elections earlier this week.

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CANADA
CBC News

Ottawa police have laid six additional counts of gross indecency and indecent assault against a retired Roman Catholic priest already facing charges related to the alleged sexual assault of a boy in the early 1970s.

Jacques Faucher of Gatineau, Que., was charged and appeared in court via video on Friday to face the additional charges.

Faucher, 76, was already facing one count each of gross indecency and indecent assault on a male in relation to incidents alleged to have occurred in Ottawa between 1971 and 1973. The complainant in that instance was seven years old in 1971, police said.

The new charges come after police asked anyone with information about the incident or other incidents to contact them.

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CANADA
CFRA

Alison Sandor and Sarah Anderson
Friday, March 1, 2013

A 76-year-old retired priest charged with sex crimes against children is now facing additional charges.

Ottawa Police have charged Jacques Faucher with six accounts of gross indecency and indecent assault.

Faucher, was already charged with one count each of gross indecency and indecent assault in allegations of sexual abuse that date back to the early 1970’s.

In November, Ottawa police began investigating a series of alleged incidents involving a retired priest and a seven-year-old boy. The incidents allegedly occurred in Ottawa between 1971 and 1973.

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CANADA
CBC News

Ottawa police have laid six additional counts of gross indecency and indecent assault against a retired Roman Catholic priest already facing charges related to the alleged sexual assault of a boy in the early 1970s.

Jacques Faucher of Gatineau, Que., was charged and appeared in court via video on Friday to face the additional charges.

Faucher, 76, was already facing one count each of gross indecency and indecent assault on a male in relation to incidents alleged to have occurred in Ottawa between 1971 and 1973. The complainant in that instance was seven years old in 1971, police said.

The new charges come after police asked anyone with information about the incident or other incidents to contact them.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

The media nonsense has already gotten out of hand, especially on TV. Uninformed pundits, aided by opportunistic so-called “experts”, are already reporting the Vatican power struggles as if it were the Papal Kentucky Derby. The important matter is not the horserace; it is the Vatican structure. If that is not addressed by the Cardinals seriously now, the Pope who makes the “Winner’s Circle” will surely rule as a Papal Loser. It is just common sense.

Within a short period recently, (1) the ex-Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, left all the Cardinals his “final” marching signals, (2) his oldest colleague, Hans Kung, gave his informative assessment and a final warning , (3) a senior German diplomat, solely on a personal basis and not in any official capacity, indicated perceptively that the deteriorating situation in the Catholic Church was adversely affecting desirable cooperation among Christian denominations and benefiting indirectly some militant Islamic factions, and (4) a major human rights group filed a comprehensive report with the well regarded UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on the Vatican’s worldwide cover-up of priest rape of children supporting the Committee’s pending summons to the Vatican to account shortly. The Vatican is subject by international treaty to the Committee’s juridiction and has for over a decade failed to comply fully with its treaty oligations

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MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

by Jessica Mador, Minnesota Public Radio
February 28, 2013

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A bill that would eliminate the statute of limitations for childhood victims of sexual abuse to sue their abusers got its first hearing Thursday.

The Minnesota Child Victims Act would eliminate the requirement that victims file civil suits within six years of becoming an adult. Supporters of the measure say it can take decades for people who were sexually abused as children to come forward.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill on a vote of 5-3, and sent it to the full Senate. The House Civil Law Committee will take up the bill next Wednesday.

Grace Keliher from the Minnesota School Boards Association said the association supports strengthening penalties against abusers. But the proposal as it is written would make it difficult for school districts to defend against claims of past abuse in cases where detailed records may not have been kept, she said.

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UNITED STATES
Rockland County Times

Posted March 1st, 2013

BY DIANE DIMOND

I don’t pretend to know why Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign in almost 600 years. But I’m going to bet it had something to do with the constant drumbeat of scandal that marked his eight-year reign.

Before he became pope, he was Joseph Ratzinger, a German cardinal. You may not know, however, that he had long been in charge of the Vatican office to which all reports about sexually misbehaving priests were directed. In other words, for years, every single complaint about sexual abuse by a priest crossed the desk of Cardinal Ratzinger.

Agreed, he was just one man within the vast Vatican framework. But he was at the top. He was the man within the organization who was in a position to know about every accusation and what action (if any) had been taken to learn the truth about allegations of sexual abuse.

The information about priests with multiple complaints against them was at Ratzinger’s fingertips. He could easily have looked up information about all those priests who had been transferred from parish to parish — and the children who claimed they, too, had been abused.

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VATICAN CITY
Rome Reports

[with video]

March 1, 2013. (Romereports.com) In his first hours as Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI was very serene and calm. After saying farewell from his balcony, he had dinner, prayed and took a walk. According to the Vatican’s spokesman, he also slept quite well.

“I spoke with Benedict XVI’s secretary over the phone, and he told me the Pope was very calm, relaxed and had slept very well. He told me this with a very friendly tone of voice, which gives me the impression that it has been a time of peace for him,” said father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s spokesman.

With the Pope’s resignations all heads of Vatican Departments temporarily lose their posts.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is also the so called chamberlain is responsible for the management and day to day affairs of the Holy See until a new Pope is elected.

Through a letter, all nunciatures have been officially informed about Benedict XVI’s resignation. His Papal apartment was sealed as was the elevator that leads to it.
Also, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the Cardinals, sent an official letter to every cardinal summoning them to Rome, as soon as possible to elect the next Pope.

The next meeting will be held on Monday March 4th at 9: 30 a.m.

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WILMINGTON (DE)
The Dialog

By Joseph Ryan
Dialog editor

Bishop Malooly has approved a three-year capital campaign called “Sustaining Hope for the Future” to address the current and future financial needs of the Diocese of Wilmington.

The campaign, to begin during the next few weeks, will focus on four areas — reinforcing the diocesan lay employees’ pension plan that is under a court directive to be funded with an additional $10 million by the end of 2017, securing priests’ retirement fund, strengthening diocesan ministries and sustaining current and future parish needs.

“I need to get the diocese back on an even keel and out of debt,” Bishop Malooly said Feb. 25 in announcing the campaign.

The major fundraising project was spurred by the diocesan bankruptcy settlement in February 2011 (finalized in September 2011) in which the diocese paid $77.4 million to settle 150 claims of survivors of sexual abuse by priests, as well as honoring claims of pensioners and other creditors.

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WILMINGTON (DE)
The Republic

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 01, 2013

DOVER, Delaware — The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington is embarking on a major fundraising campaign, 18 months after emerging from bankruptcy.

The diocese on Friday announced a three-year campaign to raise funds for pensions, ministries and parish needs.

Officials said the campaign is designed to meet the needs created by a $77 million bankruptcy settlement with survivors of sexual abuse by pedophile priests. The diocese said the settlement drained its reserves and requires it to add $10 million to its lay employees’ pension plan by the end of 2017.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 1, 2013 All Things Catholic

Now that the papacy of Benedict XVI is over and the sede vacante has begun, the period before the white smoke rises over the Sistine Chapel will be filled with commentary and speculation about the looming conclave, much of it based on time-honored conventional wisdom about how these things work.

Here are three common bromides you’re likely to hear over and over again in coming days:

“He who enters as pope exits as a cardinal.” The idea is that too much attention before the fact can hurt more than it helps, and that the actual results of conclaves are always a surprise compared to what people had expected.

“You follow a fat pope with a thin one.” The gist is that after a particular style has had its day for a while, cardinals will be in the mood for something different, so they’ll elect a pope who contrasts with the previous one.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Birmingham Mail

Maureen Messent

Were I a simpleton believing shock headlines and doom-laden news bulletins, I’d get the idea the Roman Catholic Church ‘is in crisis’ and has been shattered by the resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien.

That isn’t the case. What we are seeing here is an epidemic of selective media indignation.

Indeed, this is an excuse for wheeling out the old adage of events turning out all for the best.

The church isn’t in crisis, simply realising that great change has been forced on it.

Had the Pope not been resigning, it is likely that the cumbrous and slow-moving Vatican would not have moved against O’Brien for months.

Then, after his retirement, a few months would have elapsed, at which stage, out of the blue, the Vatican, with O’Brien now safely retired, would have told us that accusations of inappropriate behaviour had been made against him.

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NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand Herald

Yesterday was Pope Benedict’s last day in office, but the words customarily used to announce that we have a new Pope, “Habemus Papam”, are likely to be a long time in coming. For much has changed in a short space of time.

The forced resignation this week of Cardinal Keith O’Brien as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh demonstrates the intensity of the events through which the Catholic Church is passing. The College of Cardinals that will shortly assemble to make the choice has a difficult task.

One characteristic of the papacy that will be hard to maintain is the dogma of papal infallibility. The Vatican Council of 1870 defined it in the following terms: the Pope is “possessed of infallibility” when “he defines … a doctrine concerning faith and morals to be held by the whole Church”. Once the Pope has spoken, the Vatican Council agreed, his definitions “are irreformable of themselves”.

But the resignation of the Pope, an unprecedented act in modern times, makes the notion of infallibility look distinctly odd. Does it mean that Pope Benedict was possessed of infallibility yesterday but not now since he has begun his retirement? No wonder the Church delayed many centuries before clothing the idea in legal form.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Gay Star News

01 March 2013 | By Joe Morgan

Another priest has accused Cardinal Keith O’Brien of initiating ‘inappropriate behavior’.

It is the fifth such allegation to be made public against the former leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, after O’Brien resigned on Monday (25 February).

The complaint is said to have given other men confidence to come forward with allegations against the cardinal, the Times (£) reports.

The priest wrote directly to Rome late last year because he felt he could not trust the church hierarchy in Scotland to handle the matter.

His allegation was taken seriously, and O’Brien was allowed to resign a month earlier than he had already planned.

Other allegations of ‘acts’, made by three other priests and a former priest was revealed six days ago by The Observer newspaper, and date back over 33 years.

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By PAUL ELIE

Published: February 28, 2013

The conventional wisdom has it that Benedict’s resignation sharply reduced the aura of the papal office, showed a tender realism about old age, and made clear that even ancient Catholic practices could be changed. That is all true, but the event’s significance is more visceral than that. It has caught the mood of the church, especially in North America.

Resignation: that’s what American Catholics are feeling about our faith. We are resigned to the fact that so much in the Roman Catholic Church is broken and won’t be fixed anytime soon.

So if the pope can resign, we can, too. We should give up Catholicism en masse, if only for a time.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue speaks to the latest New York Times hit on the Church:

Counting both blogs and op-ed articles, today’s op-ed piece by Paul Elie is the 11th condemnatory article on the Catholic Church to have been published by the New York Times in the past 19 days.

As with so many Catholic malcontents, Elie’s parochialism allows him to think that his unhappiness is shared by everyone. “Resignation,” he says, is “what American Catholics are feeling about our faith.” He should speak for himself—most of us do not share his Commonweal affliction.

Elie has long been predicting that the Church is teetering. Two decades ago he was lamenting the fate of pro-abortion Catholic women, arguing that their voice needs to be heard. In 1994, after maintaining that the laity were in “deep dissent” over such issues, he appeared positively dazed over the success of a best-selling book by Pope John Paul II.

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DEUTSCHLAND
BR

[Video]

Der Skandal um sexuellen Missbrauch in Einrichtungen der katholischen Kirche ist mittlerweile drei Jahre alt. Was ist aus den hehren Aufklärungszielen der bayerischen Kirche geworden?

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OSTERREICH
HPD

WIEN. (hpd) Das vielfach beschworene katholische Österreich präsentiert sich heute als besonders kulturkatholisch. Gleichzeitig hat es vor wenigen Tagen eine herbe Niederlage eingesteckt, die das Land gar nicht mehr so katholisch aussehen lassen wie es manche gerne hätten. Eine angesehene katholische Einrichtung wurde vom Nationalrat vor die Tür gesetzt.

Um 20 Uhr wird die katholische Kirche bis in den letzten bewohnten Winkels des Landes ihre Präsenz zeigen. Oder besser hören lassen. Alle Kirchenglocken werden läuten, wenn die letzte Minute der Amtszeit Joseph Ratzingers im Vatikan verstrichen ist. Sogar die Pummerin, die außer an hohen Feiertagen nur bei außergewöhnlichen, im Regelfall tragischen, Ereignissen zum Einsatz kommt. Wenn ein Bundespräsident zu Grabe getragen wird, etwa.

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BRASILIEN
Merkur (Deutschland)

Der Missbrauchsfall soll sich in Niteroi in der Nähe von Rio de Janeiro zugetragen haben. Der Priester ist vorerst suspendiert.

Eine 19-jährige Frau wirft dem Geistlichen nach Polizeiangaben vor, sie seit ihrem 13. Lebensjahr missbraucht zu haben. Vergangenes Jahr habe sie nach eigenen Angaben gemeinsam mit einer 15-jährigen Freundin auf Video festgehalten, wie der Priester mit beiden Geschlechtsverkehr gehabt habe. Dieser soll zudem die damals siebenjährige Schwester der Frau vor drei Jahren unsittlich berührt haben.

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OSTERREICH
Betroffenen Gagen Kirchenprivilegien

(Wien, 28.2.13, PUR) “Wir weinen Papst Ratzinger sicher keine Träne nach. Er war die Zentral-Figur der Vertuschung von sexuellem Missbrauch“, sagt Sepp Rothwangl von der Plattform Betroffener kirchlicher Gewalt. Insbesondere in seiner langjährigen Funktion als Chef der vatikanischen Glaubenskongregation hat Ratzinger die weltweite Vertuschung der Missbrauchsfälle organisiert. U.a. mit einem Schreiben 2001, in dem er unter Androhung der schwersten Strafe, die die kath. Kirche aussprechen kann, angeordnet hat, dass alle Unterlagen zu Missbrauchsfällen nach Rom zu senden sind. Somit sind weltweit kaum Unterlagen zu diesen Fällen in den örtlichen Diözesen mehr vorhanden und die Täter können daher kaum rechtlich verfolgt werden. “Ratzinger ist eine Schande für die Kirche“, so Rothwangl weiter. “Und es ist eine Schande für die Politik weltweit, die diesen Papst so lange akzeptiert und respektiert hat, anstatt ihn für seine Vertuschung zur Verantwortung zu ziehen.“

Will Ratzinger durch Einbunkern im Vatikan einer Bestrafung entgehen?
Aus diesem Grund ist gegen Ratzinger beim Internationalen Strafgerichtshof (ICC) ein Verfahren anhängig, das von der weltweit aktiven Betroffenen-Organisation SNAP 2011 unter österreichischer Beteiligung eingebracht wurde. “Sein Rücktritt vereinfacht die Ermittlungen, da nun seine Immunität als Staatsoberhaupt aufgehoben ist“, erklärt SNAP-Chefin Barbara Blaine. Sepp Rothwangl ergänzt: “Herr Ratzinger soll jetzt Anstand zeigen und sich vor dem ICC verantworten und sich nicht im Vatikan einbunkern um der Strafverfolgung beim ICC und in den USA zu entgehen. Und Kardinal Schönborn soll jetzt gleich seinen Aufenthalt im Vatikan nutzen um die österr Missbrauchs- Geheimdokumente ausheben zu lassen und diese den Betroffenen sowie der heimischen Justiz zu übergeben.“

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 1 March 2013 (VIS) – The director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., related some information regarding the Sede Vacante and the first hours of Benedict XVI after having left the pontificate in a press conference this afternoon.

Fr. Lombardi spoke this morning with Benedict XVI’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein, prefect of the Papal Household, who told him that, yesterday, His Holiness, who was very calm and serene, had watched several news programs and expressed his appreciation for the work of the journalists as well as for the participation of those who had assisted in his departure from the Vatican and his arrival at Castel Gandolfo. After a brief walk through the Apostolic Palace he went to bed and slept very well.

Today, as always, His Holiness celebrated Mass at 7:00am and then prayed the Liturgy of the Hours. In the afternoon he has another walk planned at 4:00pm, through the gardens of the Castel Gandolfo Apostolic Palace, to pray the rosary. Benedict XVI brought with him various books on theology, history, and spirituality. At the moment he is reading from a book by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Yesterday at 8:00, Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, substitute of the Secretariat of State sent a letter to all the diplomatic representatives to the Holy See informing them that, during the period of the Sede Vacante, all matters will be dealt with by the substitute and by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano.

Moreover, this morning, the papal apartments in St. John Lateran were sealed.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 1, 2013

Rome —
We now know that the first meeting of the General Congregation, which brings together all the cardinals during the run-up to the conclave, is set for 9:30 a.m. Monday in Rome. In a break with practice from the last time around, the cardinals will also go back into the General Congregation on Monday afternoon.

The sessions will be held in the Vatican’s synod hall, where meetings of synods of bishops take place. Among other things, it’s among the few Vatican venues properly equipped to provide simultaneous translation.

(Another is the Vatican Press Office, but it’s probably unlikely the cardinals would choose to do the heavy lifting in full public view.)

As a reminder, all the cardinals are eligible to participate in the General Congregation meetings, not just the 115 under 80 who will actually cast ballots in the conclave. At the moment, there are a total of 207 cardinals, after the death Thursday of French Cardinal Jean Marcel Honoré at 92. Not all 207, however, will participate in the General Congregations; we’ll know Monday how many actually showed up.

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UNITED STATES
National Survivor Advocates Coalition

Editorial

We have a simple question for the Vatican today: why is it briefing the news media on what Pope Emeritus Benedict did after 8 PM last night and what he’s going to do today?

The Vatican has felt some compuction to let the world know that the Pope Emeritus watched television, slept, said a rosary – and brought a heavy tome of a theology book with him from his previous palace.

The Benedict XVI papacy is over – and the Pope Emeritus said he was withdrawing.

The Vatican should leave it where the Pope Emeritus left it right before he turned from the window of the Castle Gandolfo balcony and slipped from view –“Thank you and good night.”

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IRELAND
RTE News

The victims of a former Christian Brother, who indecently assaulted them when they were schoolboys in the 1980s, have said the trial was all about being believed.

The three men, now in their late 30s and early 40s, welcomed Edward Bryan’s conviction and the five-year prison sentence imposed on him at Cork Circuit Criminal Court today.

Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin said the 59-year-old, with an address at Martinvilla, Athboy Road, Trim in Co Meath, had not shown a shred of remorse, which the judge found alarming.

It was the third time the former Christian Brother at the North Monastery School in Cork City had stood trial on the indecent assault charges.

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IRELAND
TV 3

A former Christian Brother who indecently assaulted three boys at the North Monastery school in Cork has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Edward Bryan was found guilty on eight charges of indecent assault in the 1980s. The 59-year-old former principal and basketball coach abused the boys during one-on-one training sessions in the school gym.

The victims now in their 30s gave emotional evidence in court this morning – they said Bryan “zeroed in on them and preyed on them.”

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

A former Christian brother has been sentenced to five years in jail after he was found guilty of indecently assaulting three boys at the North Monastery School in Cork in the 1980s.

Passing sentence the judge said Br Edward Bryan had not shown a shred of remorse.

Last week a jury at Cork Circuit Criminal Court found him guilty on seven counts of indecently assaulting the three boys between 1984 and 1990.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

BARRY ROCHE, Southern Correspondent

A former Christian Brother had shown not a shred of remorse for his victims, a judge today as he jailed the man for five years for indecently assaulting three boys in the North Monastery Secondary School in Cork in the 1980s.

Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin noted Edward Bryan (59) formerly Br Bryan, of Martinvilla, Athboy Road, Trim, Co Meath had been convicted following the most careful, prolongued and exhaustive consideration of the evidence by a jury at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

He said there were several aggravating factors to the case including the fact that there were multiple victims, that the victims were all young boys at the time while he was an adult and a teacher in a position of trust and the fact that the abuse went on over a prolonged period.

Bryan, who became deputy director of Oberstown juvenile detention centre after he left the Christian Brothers, was convicted of one count in June 2012, retried in October 2012 only for the trial to collapse and then convicted of seven more counts following another second retrial.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Ralph Riegel– 01 March 2013

A FORMER Christian Brother was jailed for five years today for putting three boys through “hell” in a five year campaign of sexual abuse.

Edward Bryan (59) was jailed as Judge Sean O’Donnabhain warned Cork Circuit Criminal Court that the former cleric hadn’t shown one shred of remorse for what he had put the boys through in the 1980s.

Bryan of Athboy Road, Trim, Co Meath had vehemently denied indecently assaulting the boys at the North Monastery secondary school in Cork in the late 1980s.

Mr Bryan denied a total of 11 counts which related to various dates between 1987 and 1990.
– See more at: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/former-christian-brother-jailed-for-five-years-for-sexual-abuse-of-three-boys-29103615.html#sthash.d9DYFjZz.dpuf

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PENNSYLVANIA
Catholics4Change

March 1, 2013 by Susan Matthews

ONE CALL TO SAVE CHILDREN FROM SEXUAL ABUSE– please call PA Rep. Ron Marsico TODAY and tell him to place House Bills 237 and 238 on the agenda for the March 12 Judiciary Committee! CALL 717-652-3721.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 1 March 2013 (VIS) – Today, the first day of the Sede Vacante, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, has begun to summon the cardinals to the first of the General Congregations, as provided for by the Apostolic Constitution “Universi Dominici Gregis”.

This first General Congregation will take place on Monday, 4 March, at 9:30am in the Synod of Bishops Hall. A second General Congregation is also scheduled for 5:00pm in the same place.

Following is the text of the letter:

“As prescribed in the Apostolic Constitution “Universi Dominici Gregis” of 22 February 1996 at No. 19, analogous to the case of the death of the Supreme Pontiff, I have the duty to officially communicate to Your Eminence the news of the vacancy of the Apostolic See from the renunciation presented by Pope Benedict XVI effective from yesterday evening, 28 February, at 8:00pm in Rome.”

“On communicating this to you I fulfil my duty of summoning Your Eminence to the first of the General Congregations of the College of Cardinals, to be held on Monday, 4 March, at 9:30am in the Synod of Bishops Room in the Paul VI Hall.”

“The General Congregations will then continue normally until the complete number of Cardinal electors is gathered and the College of Cardinals decides the date for those Cardinal electors to enter into Conclave on the basis of what the recent Motu Proprio of 22 February established regarding modifications in the norms relating to the election of the Roman Pontiff.”

“On my part, I am pleased to take this opportunity to send you my fraternal greetings.”

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial

Friday, March 1, 2013

By Ralph Cipriano
For Bigtrial.net

In July 2012, Michael J. McGovern was preparing for the upcoming trial of his client, Father Charles Engelhardt, on charges that he had raped a former 10-year-old altar boy.

The phone rang. A high-ranking official at the district attorney’s office was on the line, wanting to know why McGovern was refusing to even discuss a plea deal on a case scheduled to go to trial in early September 2012.

I’ve got a problem, McGovern recalled saying. My client’s been a priest since 1967. If he even pleads no contest to a misdemeanor, such as corrupting the morals of a minor, and just gets probation, he can’t be a priest anymore. And that’s the only thing that matters to him. He also happens to be completely innocent.

The response he got surprised him, McGovern said. The high-ranking official on the other end of the line said, well there’s a split opinion over here [in the district attorney’s office] about whether the complainant is credible.

“He’s incredible,” McGovern recalled telling the official about the former altar boy identified in the 2011 grand jury report as “Billy Doe.” “He’s a lying sack of shit.”

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UNITED STATES
Fox News Radio

[with audio]

While many will be paying close attention to the selection of the next Pope, there may be no group here in the U.S. more interested in what happens than victims of priest sex abuse.

FOX News Radio’s Jessica Rosenthal reports in our ongoing series:

Victims of priest sex abuse in California say ideally the next Pope…

(Miller) “Whoever it’s going to be must continue to expose child molesting clerics and more importantly cooperate with law enforcement.”

But Esther Miller who was abused by a priest in the ’70′s doesn’t believe that’ll happen. Neither does abuse victim Joelle Casteix…

(Casteix) “These continued scandals in their eyes do not show a need for the protection of children, but instead a need to cover up the wrongdoings of the past and the present.”

She points to the long fought legal battle, years after the church settled abuse claims here in LA, that finally resulted in the release of court documents. They showed how Cardinal Roger Mahony covered up abuse by transferring and moving priests around.

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IRELAND
Highland Radio

01 Mar 2013

A man who was sexually abused at school by a Catholic priest in 1976 has told a court that his parents felt powerless but responsible for sending him into a lion’s den.

76 year old Patrick McCabe, who is a subject of the Murphy Report, pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting the then 13 year old boy in a car in Kildare.

The court heard former priest Patrick McCabe molested the 13 year old boy on a visit to his school in January 1976 when he introduced himself as a friend of the family.

When interviewed by Gardai in California in 2007 prior to his extradition the 76 year old said the young teenager was handsome and had matched up with his ‘fetish’.

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MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

Minnesota is an outlier, compared with other states, when it comes to giving victims of child sexual abuse only until they reach age 24 — six years after becoming an adult — to file a civil lawsuit.

But under a proposal before the Legislature, they could file a lawsuit at any time, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred. Under the Minnesota Child Victims Act, Minnesota would remain an outlier — but 180 degrees the other way, as the only state to give victims the right to pursue civil lawsuits without a time restriction.

Measures seeking to give victims more time to bring civil suits have gone before state lawmakers repeatedly since a Supreme Court ruling in 1996 interpreted the six-year time limit.

Thoughtful people on both sides make compelling points about the proposal. They deserve attention from lawmakers and citizens who want to do right by victims and yet consider what’s at stake for institutions that include churches, schools or youth organizations.

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VATICAN CITY
Worldcrunch

By Andrea Tornielli
LA STAMPA/Worldcrunch

VATICAN CITY – One of the cardinals getting ready to enter the upcoming conclave knows that he himself is not papabile — that is, his is not one of the names being considered as a possible next pope.

Perhaps for this reason he has taken the time to lay out to La Stampa, in a letter written with an old-fashioned silver fountain pen, what he believes is the ideal profile for the successor to Pope Benedict XVI. Other cardinals have spoken to us in confidence, and a few have even spoken in public, about the man they will be seeking when the conclave begins later this month. While an ideal picture begins to come into focus, so too does the challenge of finding one man to meet all the requirements.

“What we want in a new pope is someone who isn’t too old and has good physical stamina, which is what Benedict XVI indicated to us in his own statement of resignation,” wrote the anonymous Cardinal. “That he is not too young has been repeated by many of my fellow cardinals so that we avoid another reign of 30 years. (a reference to John Paul II’s 27-year reign) That we need a pontiff able to reform the Curia (Vatican government) is something many think; that the faithful expect a shepherd pope who is able to bring forth a positive message is something we all know.

This time, age and physical strength are likely to weigh in. Just like they were important in the second conclave in 1978 after the sudden death of Pope John Paul I, when the cardinals chose a 58-year-old cardinal as his successor: Karol Wojtyla. As he announced that he would be stepping down, Benedict XVI said: “In today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary.”

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by Joshua J. McElwee | Mar. 1, 2013

Rome —
While the Vatican confirmed Friday that the members of the college of cardinals will begin meeting Monday following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, it remains unclear when they will enter the secret meeting where they will elect the pope’s successor.

Speaking during a press conference, Basilian Fr. Thomas Rosica, who was providing English translation during the event, warned “not to expect the date of the conclave on Monday.”

Before setting the date, Rosica said, the cardinals need to determine “the rhythm of the sessions.”

“In the course of next week will be able to announce the beginning date of the conclave,” Rosica said.

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SCOTLAND
Daily Record

Joan Burnie

NO doubt by resigning, Cardinal O’Brien has done the right thing, at least by his church.

And, anyway, it had zilch to do with those unfortunate allegations over the weekend.

Nothing whatsoever. Just a happy, or possibly, unhappy coincidence.

As if we ever thought anything else.

But whether the Catholic Church – and indeed throughout his time in office, the Cardinal has done itself any favours with its strident obsession with sex and peripheral issues, such as gay marriage, is debatable.

I’m not religious but I have long thought that if the hierarchy had concentrated more on matters of social injustice instead of a downright unhealthy, if publicity-generating, interest in what consenting adults do with each other in private, they might be more respected.

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Irish Central

Editorial

Published Friday, March 1, 2013

The intrigue around the papal conclave reached new heights this week when Irish-born Cardinal Keith O’Brien of Scotland abruptly resigned after allegations of inappropriate behavior made by four priests against him surfaced.

The priests apparently were determined that O’Brien would not vote at the conclave, and made representations to the British-based papal nuncio even though the incidents occurred 30 years ago in some cases.

The Pope acted with alacrity and essentially forced O’Brien to reign.

Still unanswered is whether Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles will vote in the conclave, as his refusal to prosecute pedophile priests in his archdiocese led to horrific consequences.

There are also simmering questions about Irish Cardinal Sean Brady, who covered up the dreadful Father Brendan Smyth scandals, and even about Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who was examined by lawyers last week on events in Milwaukee when he was archbishop there.

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FIJI
FBC News

Fri Mar 01, 2013

A priest has appeared before a packed Tavua Magistrates Court this afternoon on sex-related charges.

Tavua Police Prosecution Office told FBC News, Father Nemesio Kolikoli appeared before Magistrate Samuela Qica.

Father Kolikoli is charged with one count of Rape and a count of Indecent Assault.

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SCOTLAND
Scotsman

Published on Friday 1 March 2013

THE Vatican knew of allegations against Cardinal Keith O’Brien five months ago, it was claimed today.

Reports said a priest lodged a complaint in October about “inappropriate behaviour” by the former Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 2001.

The priest is said to have written directly to Rome because he did not think he could trust the church hierarchy in Scotland to handle the matter.

His claim is said to have been taken seriously and led to the Vatican contacting Cardinal O’Brien and a “deal” being brokered by Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Montreal for the departure of the leader of Scotland’s Catholics.

Cardinal O’Brien quit as archbishop on Monday following revelations at the weekend about allegations from three other priests and one former priest of inappropriate behaviour dating back to the 1980s. The cardinal contests the allegations.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Pink News

by Scott Roberts
1 March 2013

It has emerged that a fifth claim of “inappropriate behaviour” towards a male priest has been made against Cardinal Keith O’Brien.

The 74-year-old, who denied the first set of allegations last weekend, resigned as leader of the Scottish Catholic Church on Monday.

He was due to retire this month but the resignation was brought forward.

The allegations surfaced last Saturday one day after Cardinal O’Brien told the BBC that male priests within the Catholic Church should be able to marry female partners.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Barney Zwartz
Religion editor, The Age

The great baroque builder Bernini produced many masterpieces in Rome, but none exceeds the twin colonnades that sweep from St Peter’s Basilica around most of St Peter’s Square, designed to be a pair of great arms in a gesture of embrace to the world.

Today half of one of the arms has an ugly grey cover protecting restoration work, making it look wounded and weakened. As a metaphor for the Catholic Church, this too is apt. The church has just entered the interregnum, as the period between popes is called, with many leaders and commentators saying it is in crisis, making the choice of the next Pope, the 266th, more vital than usual.

Benedict XVI himself spoke of the ”turbulent waters and rough winds” he experienced during his papacy in his final public address on Wednesday, and was unusually trenchant in other recent speeches, excoriating the divisions that ”disfigure” the church. Before his election he denounced ”filth in the church”, an apparent reference to clergy sex abuse.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Australian Times

By Thomas Jones on 28 February, 2013

He will still wear the white robes, still be addressed as ‘Your Holiness’ and still live in the Vatican city-State, with a view of the dome of St Peter’s Basilica. But when his retirement becomes official later today Pope Benedict XVI will lose one important entitlement.

As Head of State, Pope Benedict has absolute immunity from legal action. When he becomes ‘Emeritus Pope’ that immunity will wither away, leaving him open to potential legal action.

UK-based Australian human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson predicts “that some victims of priests whom he (Pope Benedict) has refused to defrock, and who have gone on to commit crimes against those victims, may seek to sue him for damages for negligence.”

Mr Robertson made the comments in relation to Pope Benedict’s response to cases of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

March 2, 2013

Jane Lee

MANY Christian Brothers still refuse to believe convicted paedophile Robert Best is guilty, a brother has told a state inquiry.

The disgraced Catholic brother was convicted in 2011 and jailed for 14 years and nine months for sex crimes against 11 boys at schools in Ballarat, Box Hill and Geelong.

Best was ordered to serve 11 years and three months in jail before he would be eligible for parole.

Brother Barry Coldrey told the parliamentary inquiry into the handling of child abuse that he was not a spokesman for any religion. But he said he believed that a culture of denial still pervaded the Christian Brothers order in Australia. ”Even at this minute there are many brothers who refuse to believe Robert Best is guilty despite overwhelming evidence,” he said.

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VATICAN CITY
Chiesa

by Sandro Magister

ROME, March 1, 2012 – The chair of Peter is empty. Joseph Ratzinger has left it with a clean break, and has left the future governance of the Church to a successor who is unknown to him, just as he is still unknown to the very cardinals who will elect him.

One cannot recall, in the last century, a previous conclave so much in the dark and so vulnerable to external and internal pressure.

But today it is the “fourth power,” that of the media, that is granting no truce to the cardinals called to conclave.

One of them has already fallen, the Scottish Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien. In one of his last acts as pope Benedict XVI expedited his resignation as archbishop of Edinburg, and he himself has announced that he will not go to Rome for the election of the new pontiff.

Another is former archbishop of Los Angeles Roger Mahony, censured by his own successor, José Horacio Gómez.

A third is former archbishop of Brussels Godfried Danneels.

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VATICAN CITY
NPR

[with audio]

by Sylvia Poggioli

February 28, 2013

Today is the last day of the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI. Just two weeks ago, the German-born pope stunned the world by announcing he would be the first pope to resign in 600 years. After eight years on the throne of St. Peter, Benedict leaves behind a church in crisis.

Since the announcement, bulletins issued by the Vatican have ranged from the lofty — how Benedict will retire to a life dedicated to prayer and study — to the mundane, such as the details of packing the pope’s personal belongings and what he’ll leave behind.

In a sign that even the Vatican was totally unprepared for the resignation, it took two weeks to decide Benedict’s new title and what he would wear.

And while the cardinals publicly praise Benedict for his courageous act, privately many are reassessing his legacy. …

David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests (SNAP), says Benedict has been credited for meeting with and apologizing to victims, and issuing new guidelines on handling cases, but he has not sanctioned one bishop for covering up abuse cases.

“Pope Benedict came into office knowing more about abuse than any other Catholic official on the planet, and I think many victims and many Catholics had some real hope that he would clean house, and he clearly didn’t,” Clohessy says.

The sex abuse cloud will hang over the conclave to elect the new pope. As will a confidential report on last year’s embarrassing leaks of private papers that revealed corruption and turf battles within the Vatican. Benedict has left the report for his successor’s eyes only, but many cardinals are already asking to be briefed on its contents.

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ROME
The Daily Beast

Jul 27, 2010

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. But a recent exposé is rocking the Catholic Church.

In the basement dining room of Le Mani In Pasta, a trattoria in central Rome, a young, glossy-eyed couple stare at each other across a table for two. They smile and blush over a private joke. There is no handholding or kissing, but they are clearly more than friends, even though they are both wearing dark shirts and the telltale white clerical collar.

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. The phenomenon is a well-known secret here, and one that was largely ignored until last weekend, when the Italian weekly magazine Panorama published a shocking exposé called “Le Notti Brave Dei Preti Gay,” or “Good Nights Out for Gay Priests.” Investigative journalist Carmelo Abbate spent 20 days undercover posing as the boyfriend of a man who ran in gay clerical circles, secretly videotaping the sexual escapades of three Rome-based priests. Abbate caught the priests on hidden camera dirty dancing at private parties and engaging in sex acts with male escorts on church property. He also caught them emerging from dark bedrooms in time to celebrate mass. In one postcoital scene, “Father Carlo” parades around seminaked, wearing only his clerical vestments. Abbate’s “date” even had sex with one of the priests to corroborate the story. “This is not about homosexuality,” Abbate, who is not gay, told NEWSWEEK. “This is about private vices and public virtues. This is about serious hypocrisy in the Catholic Church.”

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