ABUSE TRACKER

A former altar boy filed a lawsuit against a Colorado priest, the Archdiocese of Denver and a Fort Collins church alleging he was sexually assaulted by the priest as a minor.

The civil lawsuit filed by former altar boy Scott Verti, 38, alleges Rev. Timothy Evans raped and committed more than 100 instances of sexual assault against Verti inside church offices and inside Evans’ apartment.

According to the attorneys representing Verti, Evans is known as one of Colorado’s most notorious sex abusers. Evans is also the only Colorado priest to serve prison time for rape while serving as a Catholic priest.

Verti was 14 years old when he was an altar boy at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Fort Collins and was physically and sexually assaulted more than 100 times in the span of three years, the suit said.

“I want other abuse survivors to know they are not…

View Cache

2021 Colorado law created ‘lookback window’ for victims to seek damages

A Colorado man who said he was raped and sexually assaulted more than 100 times by a Roman Catholic priest in Colorado between 1998 and 2003 sued the priest, the Archdiocese of Denver and a local parish.

Scott Verti, 38, says the church knew Timothy Evans, then a priest at St. Elizabeth Ann Seaton Church in Fort Collins, was a threat. 

Evans was convicted in 2007 on sexual abuse charges and sentenced to 18 years in prison but was paroled in 2020. The Vatican removed him from the priesthood in 2013.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Denver County District Court, did not list requested damages, but it did ask for a jury trial.

Mr. Verti was able to file the lawsuit, his attorneys said, because of a 2021 Colorado law creating a “lookback window” during which victims can sue over past abuse…

View Cache

A man who says he was repeatedly sexually abused as a teen by his Catholic priest more than two decades ago filed a lawsuit against the now-defrocked priest and the Archdiocese of Denver on Thursday, taking advantage of a recently passed law that allows victims to sue even if the statute of limitations has expired.

The lawsuit targets Timothy Evans, a priest convicted in 2007 of sexually abusing other teens in two Colorado counties around the same time frame. The Vatican laicized Evans, essentially removing him from the priesthood, while he was in prison. He was paroled in 2020 with plans to live with family and find work in Grand Junction, Colorado.

The lawsuit was filed in state court by Scott Verti, alleging about 100 instances of abuse while he was an altar boy at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Fort Collins from 1998 to 2003. Verti, 38, was…

View Cache

A man who says he was sexually abused more than 100 times by a former Fort Collins priest as a teen has filed a lawsuit against him, the church he was employed at when the alleged abuse occurred and the Archdiocese of Denver.

The former priest, Timothy Evans, was one of four priests from different parishes in Fort Collins and Loveland named in a special report from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office released in 2019 detailing credible claims of abuse by Catholic priests and the Archdiocese of Denver’s handling of the acts. Evans’ was the only Larimer County case that led to criminal charges.

Evans was sentenced to 14 years to life in prison in 2007 for sexually assaulting a teen boy who worked at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, where Evans was a pastor. He was also convicted of the same charge for a separate incident in Jefferson County.

View Cache

This commentary is by Maura Labelle of Colchester, who was a resident of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in the 1960s.

Ihave read with interest VTDigger’s recent coverage of the potential destruction of the former Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Burlington.

In my view, the building is ugly, but I completely understand why Preservation Burlington is concerned with the secrecy of the Diocese of Burlington regarding its buyer for the property. We all know that the diocese is good at keeping secrets, as for decades it covered up child abuse by pedophile priests. 

Just as the public had the right to know the names of credibly accused pedophile priests, residents of Burlington should also be told who is buying the property and what its new purpose will be.

The diocese has been steadfast in its view that the property should not be used for any purpose that would violate the morals…

View Cache

[VIDEO]

A non-profit group is protesting the Catholic diocese in Portland, claiming it’s “retraumatizing” sexual abuse victims.

A member representing the group protested outside the diocese offices Wednesday, calling on Bishop Robert Deely to stop contesting new lawsuits filed by people claiming sexual abuse at the hands of clergy.

The lawsuits follow a change to Maine law that lifted the statute of limitations for sexual abuse claims.

The diocese is accused of covering up claims of sexual abuse for decades.

Now, a New Jersey non-profit says it’s time to hold abusers, and enablers, accountable.

“They committed crimes they covered up,” Roads to Recovery President Dr. Robert Hoatson said. “Their priest committed crimes. They abused children. And these guys have a playbook. The playbook is this: don’t really take allegations seriously. Don’t promise any kind of justice for these people. And third, we need to protect the image and assets of…

View Cache

An apostolic visitation by two bishops is a signal church authorities are concerned, a Jesuit priest told Knox News

• Two bishops conducted a fact-finding visit to the Knoxville diocese late last year.
• A former church employee and a church member have filed sexual abuse lawsuits against the diocese.
• Two priests told Knox News they spoke to church officials. The priests are not the targets of the lawsuits.
• Parishioners and an activist have written letters of complaint about diocesan leadership to church authorities.

High-ranking Catholic clergy conducted a fact-finding visit to the Diocese of Knoxville late last year, three sources confirmed to Knox News, as two lawsuits targeting the local church over its handling of sex abuse allegations are ongoing.

The visit – known as an apostolic visitation – was headed by Bishops Barry Knestout of Richmond and Michael Burbidge of Arlington, according to one of two priests with direct knowledge of the…

View Cache

WA lawmakers propose bill requiring clergy to report child abuse, citing InvestigateWest reporting

In response to InvestigateWest reporting on Jehovah’s Witnesses covering up allegations of sexual assault, Washington state lawmakers introduced a bill last week that would make clergy mandatory reporters of child abuse or neglect. 

Senate Bill 5280, and its companion bill in the state House, would make it illegal for clergy not to report sexual abuse allegations to authorities unless the information came in the form of a confession. Currently, Washington is one of a handful of states in the country that do not list clergy as mandatory reporters of child abuse or neglect at all. 

The bill was introduced by Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, who said she was motivated to change the law after reading InvestigateWest’s reporting last year examining alleged sexual assault cover-ups by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Washington’s relatively weak state laws regarding clergy’s reporting requirements.

“I just…

View Cache

Paris Archdiocese tightens the 2018 restrictions it placed on Tony Anatrella’s ministry following investigation of allegations that he sexually abused male patients

The Vatican has banned one of its longtime priest-advisors on sexual and moral issues, Tony Anatrella, from practicing psychotherapy, following longstanding allegations that the Paris cleric abused male adult patients.

The decision, which was taken last month by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) and announced Tuesday by the Archdiocese of Paris, left Anatrella’s accusers deeply disappointed. They had hoped the priest – who will be 81 next month – would be removed from the clerical state.

The Paris archdiocese said the DDF “ordered the interested party to immediately renounce any professional activity as a therapist”. But the DDF did not place any restrictions on Anatrella’s priestly ministry. The archdiocese had already done that in 2018.

It was announced on Tuesday that Archbishop Laurent Ulrich…

View Cache

The approach of Catholic Schools Week gives us an opportunity to revisit the efforts the Archdiocese of Chicago has been taking to keep our children safe.

First, we must acknowledge forthrightly the serious mishandling in the past of child abuse in our parishes and schools by clergy and others. The pain caused by these failures is the reason this archdiocese has, for more than 30 years, been at the forefront of creating and continually improving policies and programs to address the scourge of child sexual abuse and support survivors.

Each year, we cooperate with an independent audit to help us measure compliance with those policies, and each year we have been found compliant. We also regularly call on outside experts to review our methods and recommend improvements.

Here is a summary of what we do, year in and year out, to keep children safe in our schools and parishes…

View Cache

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who heads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, and in November was elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, spoke at a press conference during the bishops’ conference in Baltimore. He was asked if he stood by a comment he made in 2018 saying, “there is no question that the crisis of sexual abuse by priests in the USA is directly related to homosexuality.” He did not back down from his stance.

What Broglio said is undeniably true. No matter, those who persist in promoting the myth that homosexuality has nothing to do with the sexual abuse of minors are going bonkers.

Kevin Clarke wrote a piece for America magazine saying that a 2011 study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that “homosexuality was not a cause of abuse by priests, which researchers argued were crimes of opportunity by pedophiles.”

As Bill Donohue pointed…

View Cache

The leader of a network for survivors abused by priests says the Catholic Church’s new promises to change are not genuine.

Earlier this week a 10-point statement was issued by NZ Catholic Bishops Conference president Cardinal John Dew, and Congregational Leaders Conference of Aotearoa president, Fr Thomas Rouse.

It supported independent entities to process complaints of abuse and give redress to survivors, and it requested that Catholic organisations audit any names they have adopted in titles for buildings, prizes and portraits, to ensure they were not named after abusers, or people who had turned a blind eye to abuse.

“It is our expectation and requirement that every person working in the church, paid or voluntary, will adhere to the policies and procedures that have been established to foster a culture of safeguarding and support of survivors,” the statement said.

“As a church, we remain committed to break the cycle of abuse.”

…

View Cache

The Vatican has ordered a prominent French priest who advised the Holy See for years on matters of sex and homosexuality to cease his psychotherapy practice following allegations he sexually abused men in his therapeutic care.

But the Vatican didn’t defrock or otherwise sanction the Rev. Tony Anatrella despite several well-documented complaints against him, in further evidence of the Holy See’s reluctance to punish priests who abuse adults with the harshest measures, especially when the crimes occurred a long time ago.

French and Catholic media over the years have reported claims by several men and seminarians who were sent to Anatrella because they exhibited homosexual tendencies, only to then be allegedly subjected to sexualized therapy with him. Anatrella had been considered one of the Catholic Church’s foremost experts on homosexuality, and had served as a consulting member of the Vatican’s family and health offices.

Church teaching considers homosexual acts to…

View Cache

Campaigners have been tying coloured ribbons to fence of St Mary’s Cathedral ahead of Cardinal George Pell’s mass on Thursday 2 February

Ribbons tied on the fence of St Mary’s Cathedral in support of victims of clergy abuse are being removed ahead of a planned requiem mass in Sydney for Cardinal George Pell.

Coloured ribbons have been placed outside St Mary’s in recent days by campaigners who want to give voice to abuse victims and survivors ahead of Pell’s mass and burial on 2 February.

They have been tied along entire sections of the cathedral’s fence, pictures and video on social media showed.

But the ribbons are being periodically removed. Guardian Australia saw just one when it visited St Mary’s on Wednesday.

The removal prompted critics to say the church’s response was “petty”.

When Jenny arrived at St Mary’s Cathedral on Wednesday morning she spotted a solitary red ribbon. Undeterred,…

View Cache

Shapiro wants to govern all of Pa. He has his work cut out for him

Moments after he became Pennsylvania’s 48th chief executive on Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Josh Shapiro delivered a message to state residents who voted for the competition last November.

“To those who didn’t cast their vote for me, I heard you too. And I will do my best every day to be a governor for all Pennsylvanians,” Shapiro, a Democrat, said, with his wife, Lori, and their four children, looking on from the stage erected outside the state Capitol’s East Wing.

It would be easy to dismiss Shapiro’s extension of an olive branch, tucked neatly into a speech filled with appeals to Pennsylvanians’ better angels, as so much political boilerplate.

What else do you do with this?

“From God’s Country to Gettysburg, I heard you when you said you want good schools for our kids, safe communities, and an economy that…

View Cache

A Middletown man charged last week with child porn had just started teaching middle schoolers at a private Catholic school roughly five months ago.

Todd Philip Napolitano is now on administrative leave.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia said in a press statement the seventh- and eighth-grade teacher at St. Charles Borromeo School had passed all of his background checks and child abuse clearances before he began working at the school in September.

“There was no prior indication that Mr. Napolitano was potentially involved in activity of this nature and no allegations of inappropriate behavior had been lodged against him during his brief time at Saint Charles Borromeo Parish School,” the statement reads in part.

The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office said Napolitano was sharing and downloading child pornography in November.

View Cache

Victims who have waited more than 20 years could receive some money by this fall

A recent court decision has helped focus the claims process for victims of sexual abuse at the former Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, bringing the process much closer for men who have waited more than 20 years to receive financial compensation.

On Jan. 12, Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court Justice Garrett Handrigan filed his decision from a November hearing where lawyers for the Roman Catholic Episcopal Corp. of St. John’s and lawyers for the abuse victims had argued their positions on how the claims process should proceed.

The sides were far apart. The episcopal corporation’s proposed process would have involved individual impact assessments of claimants, while the claimants proposed a process that would not require expert evidence for proof of damages.

Handrigan’s decision has set the procedure that will be followed.

Geoff Budden, representative counsel for the abuse victims,…

View Cache

The state Senate recently passed the new law, despite the report, and proponents are awaiting passage in the state House and approval by the governor.

Efforts to pass a new law that would open a two year window in the Pennsylvania statute of limitations for adult survivors to file child sexual abuse lawsuits is meeting resistance from a conservative think tank, which has suggested the measure would expose Pennsylvania schools to billions of dollars in liability and litigation costs for its role enabling decades of prior assaults.

Pennsylvania’s General Assembly is considering a state constitutional amendment, which would allow childhood sex abuse claims to be pursued by individuals who are now adults, even if their lawsuit previously would have been barred by the statute of limitations. The state senate passed the measure last week, Senate Bill 1, but it must still be passed by the state House and…

View Cache

The head of the Vermont Senate Judiciary Committee says he’s going to introduce a bill in the upcoming legislative session to close an exemption to the state’s child abuse and neglect reporting laws for members of the clergy.

Democratic Sen. Richard Sears of Bennington says he was unaware that the Vermont law requiring members of a number of professions, including doctors, teachers, social workers and the clergy, to report abuse if they become aware of it contains an exemption for members of the clergy if they become aware of abuse during a setting that is considered privileged, such as during confession.

Sears said that under the law it shouldn’t be up to people who are mandated reporters to decide what to do if they learn of potential abuse, they should report it.

“My gut reaction is nobody should get a free pass,” Sears said.

Sears, a longtime chair of the…

View Cache

St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington closed in 1974 and former residents since then have been sharing stories of abuse. Now, an exhibit on display at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington chronicles those stories and a new healing garden at the former site is in the works.

Keislich Park is where part of St. Joseph’s Orphanage used to be. Now, the city is working on a healing garden in honor of the 13,000 children who came through the orphanage. And right now, the “Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage Exhibit” is on display in Burlington.

“It means that we are now visible. You cannot hide us any longer,” said former St. Joseph’s resident Brenda Hannon, who lived at the orphanage on Burlington’s North Avenue from 1959 to 1968.

Hannon is involved in restorative justice to bring stories of abuse of former residents to light. The Voices of St. Joseph’s Exhibit is…

View Cache

An unnamed Oregon woman, “Jane Doe,” who lived in a Catholic orphanage in Massachusetts in the 1950s, has filed a federal civil suit against the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate alleging sexual abuse by priests during Oblate-run retreats in Bar Harbor and Bucksport when she was a young child.

The Missionary Oblates describe themselves as a congregation of Roman Catholic priests and brothers who serve the poor and needy in the U.S. and in 70 countries around the world. The Oblates did not respond to an email inquiry for comment before press time.

The Maine Legislature in June of 2021 lifted a statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse cases, which is allowing the case of “Jane Doe” and a dozen others to move through the Maine civil court system.

The lifting of the statute of limitations allows survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file suit against their accused no…

View Cache

Janet Patterson remembers attending a Catholic mass at her parish near Wichita and hearing the congregation’s newly assigned priest lecture the parishioners.“I remember him saying, ‘You must never criticize the priest,’” she said. “I was sitting there in the church with my son, Eric, and my other kids and my husband. And I remember thinking, ‘Who’s criticizing the priest?’”Only later did Patterson learn about the long list of accusations of sexual abuse levied against the previous priest, Father Robert Larson, who had just been reassigned from this church in Conway Springs to another congregation in Newton.Ultimately convicted of molesting four boys, Larson allegedly molested many more. Five of them died by suicide as young men, including Patterson’s son, Eric.Eric died at age 29 in 1999, a few years before Larson’s conviction.Reassigning priests and keeping their parishioners in the dark about the reasons was just one way the Catholic Church hid…

View Cache

Activists are calling on France to extradite a retired priest to Canada to face allegations he sexually abused Inuit children in Nunavut decades ago.

Nearly a dozen members of BeBrave France, the French section of a global advocacy movement aimed at ending sexual violence against children, demonstrated Monday outside the Johannes Rivoire retirement home in Lyon, France.

They held up signs and banners, painted messages on the sidewalk, and spoke through a microphone to call for justice.

“It’s important to do something,” said Amandine Sanvisens, one of the protesters.

Rivoire, in his 90s, was an Oblate priest in Nunavut from the 1960s until 1993, when he returned to France. He has been wanted on a Canada-wide warrant since he was charged in February 2022 on charges of indecently assaulting a girl in Arviat and Whale Cove, Nvt., between 1974 and 1979, after a complaint was filed in 2021.

Canada’s prosecutors…

View Cache

Cardinal George Pell died in Rome Tuesday, suffering a heart attack after undergoing hip replacement surgery.

The cardinal underwent a hip replacement surgery on Tuesday, several sources told The Pillar, and reportedly died of complications from the surgery at approximately 8:50 p.m. in Rome.

The hip operation was initially deemed a success, with sources close to the cardinal saying that he had been able to make conversation with nurses in his recovery room, before he suddenly went into cardiac arrest shortly before he died.

Pell was appointed in 2014 the first prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, charged with implementing a program of financial reform in the Vatican. He was before that the Archbishop of Sydney, and had been before that Archbishop of Melbourne.

Pell was in 2018 convicted in Australia of committing sexual abuse during his time in Melbourne, but the conviction was in 2020 overturned by the…

View Cache

Leaders of the international “new ecclesial movement” where one alleged abuser is now second-in-command and a French diocese where another transferred respond to exposé

Leaders of the Community of the Beatitudes, a “new ecclesial movement” founded in France in 1973 and now present in 27 countries around the world, have sought to defend themselves after a recent investigative report by La Croix revealed that two members of the community were accused years ago of sexually abusing Catholic boardings school students.

“First of all, we are thinking of the person called Florent by La Croix’s journalist and of all those who are suffering because of this situation. We want to express our compassion for them,”” the community said in a statement issued on Sunday.

It came three days after the paper’s weekend edition Hebdo reported that Florent (a pseudonym) was one of several students who were molested between 1998-2004 at a…

View Cache

Former cardinal Theodore McCarrick is in “significant” mental decline and may not be fit to stand trial for allegedly sexually abusing a 16-year-old boy, his attorneys say in a new court filing.

The legal team for the 92-year-old ex-prelate said it plans to file a motion to dismiss the case, citing a neurological exam conducted by Dr. David Schretlen, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The exam took place on Dec. 5, 2022, at a facility in Missouri where McCarrick is living.

The results show McCarrick to be suffering from “significant neuropsychological deficits” that “appear to have started relatively recently, to be worsening rapidly, and to impair both Mr. McCarrick’s cognition and his memory,” according to the court document filed Jan. 13 in Dedham District Court in Massachusetts. A final report is expected within 30 days.

“Based on preliminary…

View Cache

An award-winning designer and illustrator is bringing together diverse artists and abuse survivors to foster recovery from trauma through experiencing art.

“Healing comes from the arts,” said artist and survivor advocate Erin Hung, interviewed on a video call from Hong Kong. “The church can tend to elevate the mind and the intellect above things like creative expression. Maybe these things all have to come together.”

The online art project titled “The A to Z of Trauma Recovery,” curated by Hung, seeks to reverse this trend—with prominent survivors and advocates contributing. They include survivor-storyteller Lori Anne Thompson, author-artist K.J. Ramsey, former Ravi Zacharias PR spokesperson Ruth Malhotra, and licensed therapist Krispin Mayfield, among others

One contributor, trauma-informed writer and artist Jenai Auman, explains how the arts can be therapeutic. “The ability to delight and dream is often shut down whenever you’re not doing mentally well…

View Cache

Former Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt was hailed Sunday as “one of the greatest pulpiteers in our generation” despite accusations he sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife.

Embarking on a return to ministry, Hunt delivered the sermon Sunday at Hiland Park Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) megachurch in Panama City, Florida. He is also getting top billing for an upcoming Gospel conference series.

Hiland Park’s senior pastor, the Rev. Steven Kyle, was one of four who declared in November that Hunt was fit to return to ministry. On Sunday, Kyle introduced Hunt as “my good friend” just before Hunt began preaching.

“Johnny has preached here several times since I have been your pastor,” Kyle added. “He is one of the greatest pulpiteers in our generation.”

Kyle did not mention the allegations that caused Hunt’s former church—First Baptist Church Woodstock in the Atlanta area—to  View Cache

A year after a report detailing widespread abuse in the region’s Catholic churches, Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx apologized again on Tuesday to those affected.

“For the suffering associated with this, I will always be responsible and therefore I apologize again,” the archbishop of Munich and Freising said on Tuesday. His archdiocese covers the capital of the southern German state of Bavaria and surrounding area.

“I cannot undo what has happened, but I can act differently now and in the future. And that’s what I’m doing.”

He called the church’s “greatest shortcoming” the fact that it initially gave little consideration to the victims. Not only did the church have to admit this, but he did too.

“I have to admit that as archbishop in a self-critical way.”

Even a year after the report, he said, the cases were still shocking.

“The horror has remained,” Marx said at a press conference. “Abuse…

View Cache

Podiumsgespräch in der Katholischen Akademie zu Aufarbeitung und Reformbemühungen

München, 18. Januar 2023. Kardinal Reinhard Marx hat allen Missbrauchsbetroffenen gedankt, „dass sie geredet haben und weiter reden“. Der Mut und die Bereitschaft der Betroffenen, Erlebtes zu thematisieren, sei unabdingbar für die Fortschritte, die im Bereich der Aufarbeitung und Prävention von Missbrauch im kirchlichen Bereich bislang erzielt worden seien und weiter erzielt werden müssen, sagte der Erzbischof von München und Freising bei einem Podiumsgespräch unter dem Titel „Von Aufarbeitung und Reformbemühungen: Was haben die Kirchen und ihre Verantwortlichen für die Zukunft gelernt?“. Zwar sei es weiter ein langwieriger Prozess, die Kirche zu erneuern: „Aber ohne Kampf, ohne Einsatz, ohne dass wir uns jetzt engagieren“, ohne intensive Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema Missbrauch und den Gremien, die die Anliegen der Betroffenen durchsetzen, „werden wir das nicht erreichen“, so Marx am Dienstagabend, 17. Januar, in der Katholischen Akademie in München.

Nach dem Bekanntwerden vielfachen Missbrauchs ab…

View Cache

Das Erzbistum München und Freising will künftig enger mit Betroffenen sexuellen Missbrauchs zusammenarbeiten. Ihre Bedürfnisse und Belange seien entscheidend für Aufarbeitung und Prävention, stellte Kardinal Marx fest und entschuldigte sich erneut.

Der Münchner Kardinal Reinhard Marx hat sich ein Jahr nach Veröffentlichung eines Gutachtens über Missbrauchsfälle in seinem Bistum erneut bei den Betroffenen entschuldigt. “Für das damit verbundene Leid werde ich immer in der Verantwortung stehen und bitte darum nochmals um Entschuldigung”, sagte der Erzbischof von München und Freising. “Ich kann Geschehenes nicht rückgängig machen, aber jetzt und zukünftig anders handeln. Und das tue ich.”

Auch ein Jahr nach dem Gutachten sei das Entsetzen über die Fälle groß. “Der Schrecken ist geblieben”, sagte Marx. “Missbrauch ist und bleibt eine Katastrophe.”

Marx kündigt besser Zusammenarbeit mit Betroffenen an

Marx kündigte an, künftig enger mit Betroffenen sexuellen Missbrauchs zusammenarbeiten zu wollen. Diese hatte sich in der Vergangenheit häufig über zu wenig Zuspruch bei der Aufarbeitung…

View Cache

The proportion of Catholics in Poland attending mass has fallen from 37% to 28% in two years, according to the new figures published by the church’s statistical institute.

The church notes that the latest data – which come from 2021 – are likely to have been affected by the pandemic. But it also admits that “socio-cultural factors” have played a part in the decline.

While the vast majority of Poles are officially identified as Catholic, recent years have seen the status of the church dented by its support for an unpopular near-total ban on abortion and by revelations of child sex abuse by members of the clergy and negligence by bishops in dealing with the issue.

Since 1980, the Catholic church in Poland has conducted an annual study of how many people attend mass and take communion. On one Sunday each year, every parish in the country records figures and submits them to the…

View Cache

No complaints of sexual abuse were registered in the months the priest filled the spot

• Catholic dioceses rely on victim assistance coordinators to take complaints of sex abuse from within the church.
• When the Knoxville diocese’s coordinator died, the diocese filled the spot with a top church official.
• Church watchdogs say the arrangement is troubling.
• The diocese has hired the McNabb Center to fill the victim assistance coordinator position.

The Roman Catholic Church created review boards in the early 2000s, following revelations of widespread sexual abuse by clergy, and victim assistance coordinators have filled at important role in helping victims raise the alarm about predatory priests.

In East Tennessee, the Diocese of Knoxville turned to a licensed therapist, Marla Lenihan, to become its first victim assistance coordinator. Lenihan, who had decades of experience in private practice in Oak Ridge, died in March.

Lenihans’ replacement? Bishop Richard Stika’s right-hand man,…

View Cache

The many incidents of child sexual abuse by predator priests have shamed thousands of good bishops and benevolent clerics who have been justly angered by the rampant salacious acts of their fellow pedophile priests and in some cases by high-profile bishops and high-ranking cardinals. 

They feel helpless when their bishop protects the abuser priest and calls him “his son.” 

They long for justice for the victims and wish to exonerate their own vocation and the blemished priesthood from the tyranny of abuser priests. 

The Church has succinctly stated that every act of sexual abuse against a child is not only a heinous crime in civil law but a violation of Church law. 

Pope Francis says child abuse by a cleric is “a profound wound that cries out for healing.”

There are many occasions when bishops have been scolded by Pope Francis for covering up priest-abuse complaints instead of reaching out…

View Cache

It is the day of balancing in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising: What has happened since the sensational Munich abuse report was published a year ago? The archdiocese takes a position on this today.

Many who were abused by Catholic clergymen as children or young people find that too little has happened. One of them is Rolf Fahnenbruck, who experienced severe sexualized violence as a child in the diocese of Essen and now lives in the diocese of Passau. He is the spokesman for the local Advisory Board.

So far, he has been compensated for his suffering with 25,000 euros. But it’s not about the money, he says in an interview BR24. Because even with the performance notice, a person affected by abuse is alone again with his problem. “You can’t treat people like that,” says Fahnenbruck. “Many people are immensely disappointed in the Catholic Church.”

Affected people feel alone

All…

View Cache

A lawsuit says that the Most Rev. Richard Stika interfered in the investigation, and Knox News has independently confirmed that assertion

Two people who played key roles in a review by the Catholic Diocese of Knoxville into whether a seminarian raped a diocesan employee in 2019 told Knox News that Bishop Richard Stika interfered with the effort, independently confirming allegations that are detailed in a lawsuit by the man who says he was sexually assaulted.

Before a lawsuit was filed in February 2022 by John Doe, a placeholder name to protect the identity of the man who reported the rape, the church’s review board hired retired Tennessee Valley Authority investigator George Prosser to investigate the claims.

Prosser was a true outsider. He’s not Catholic and has no ties to the diocese, which is the spiritual home of about 70,000 Catholics in East Tennessee.

Prosser told Knox News he was hired…

View Cache

French government denied Canada’s extradition request for Johannes Rivoire last fall

A group of demonstrators gathered outside the retirement home of retired priest Johannes Rivoire in Lyon, France, on Monday, demanding the French government extradite Rivoire to face charges of sexual assault in Canada.

“For us as French citizen[s], it’s a real shame that our government refuses to make part of justice for Inuit people,” said Amandine Sanvisens, who was among the demonstrators.

“We wanted to show and to put the light on this place where he lives.”

The allegations against Rivoire stem from his time working as an Oblate priest in Nunavut in the 1960s and 1970s. He was charged last February with one count of indecent assault on a female, who was child at the time of the alleged offence. It happened between January 1974 and December 1979.

Allegations against him date much further back, though — previous charges against him had been outstanding for…

View Cache

The cardinal was smart and determined. His failure to uncover some of the worst cases of child sexual abuse by priests blights his reputation

He was a company man. He did what he did to preserve the power and the assets of the church. If that meant thrashing victims of abuse through the courts and boxing them into tiny settlements, that was fine by him. Duty done.

That’s what made him the right man to clean up the financial mess of the Vatican. High among the achievements for which he deserves praise at this time was the work he and his accountants did to begin tracking the missing billions in the Holy City. Alas, Pope Francis didn’t have the guts to back him. The courtiers brought him down.

Soon after, he was in Melbourne facing a long purgatory in the criminal courts which ended in a…

View Cache

For immediate release January 13, 2023

The surprise death of George Pell came as good news to many survivors of clerical abuse in Australia. SNAP or its network members do not celebrate the death of anyone, even of a man despised and mistrusted by thousands of survivors and supporters in Australia and beyond.

Donald McLeish of SNAP Australia, says “George Pell had become a target and focus for survivors, and seen as the embodiment of the church’s attitude to those sexually abused by clerics, religious brothers and sisters, and lay employees of the Catholic Church in Australia.” The ‘modus operandi’ used worldwide, was to immediately dispel the situation, minimise the damage, and move the perpetrator on to other places where abuse continued almost unabated until recent times.

George Pell was recognised by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, as a witness whose testimony at the…

View Cache

Graeme Sleeman resigned in disgust after complaining about Father Peter Searson in the 1980s and suspects he was then blacklisted

Former Catholic school principal Graeme Sleeman says he still remembers the day George Pell hung up on him.

It was the 1990s and Sleeman was in Grafton, New South Wales, more than 1,500km away from the small Victorian Catholic school he had resigned from in disgust years earlier.

He had given up everything – a lauded, successful career as an educator – to blow the whistle on a notorious paedophile priest, Father Peter Searson, who was abusing children at his school, Doveton Holy Family primary school, in the mid-1980s.

The principal had fought tirelessly to protect his children from the predations of Searson, a paedophile he describes as a “serial offender”, who was known to the diocese for offending in his last parish in Sunbury.

“They knew that he sexually abused…

View Cache

It was in late spring, 1985, when I received a call from NCR’s then-editor Tom Fox. I think he said he hoped I was sitting down.

Fox and I often exchanged calls when we thought that one of our publications had something of interest for the other. At the time, I was news editor of what was then called Religious News Service, headquartered on a floor in the former Jesuit residence at 56th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York.

I was sitting at my desk when he told me that NCR’s next edition would contain an extensive and rather explosive report detailing the abuse of children by Catholic priests and the failure of hierarchy to do anything about it.

That conversation was a jarring introduction to corruption and evil that continue to reverberate to this day. That first national story to be published about the scandal was…

View Cache

[Note from BishopAccountability.org – For more on the allegations against Pell, as well as his trial, see our summary and our detailed timeline: Timeline of the Allegations and Prosecution Faced by Cardinal George Pell.]

Suppression of the truth comes from the Catholic church’s canon law. There is no exposing of hierarchy

To be a sexual assault victim of Catholic clergy is to know the truth – the truth of your own experience. That truth, long suppressed by victim, perpetrator and organisation alike is what keeps the crime of paedophilia alive. Children are easily intimidated and silenced. Paedophilic crimes thrived among Catholic clergy.

Suppression of the truth comes from the church’s canon law 489 which orders every bishop of a diocese and archbishop of an archdiocese, to maintain and keep under lock and key a secret archive. Canon law 489 acknowledges that “criminal cases in matters of morals” could be among the matters held…

View Cache

For five decades, psychologist Diane Langberg has worked with survivors of abuse and trauma. She remains amazed by their courage — and dismayed by the way church leaders have failed survivors of abuse.

Not long after Diane Langberg began working as a clinical psychologist in the 1970s, a client told her that she had been a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Not sure of what to do, Langberg went to talk to her supervisor.

The supervisor, Langberg recalled, dismissed the allegations.

“He told me that women make these things up,” Langberg said. “My job was to not be taken in by them.”

The supervisor’s response left Langberg in a dilemma. Did she believe her client? Or did she trust her supervisor’s advice?

“The choice I made is pretty obvious at this point,” the 74-year old Langberg said in a recent interview.

For the last five…

View Cache

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

There’s a new report on abuse that took place for years in Catholic churches in Kansas. It’s just the latest revelation in a series of investigations across the nation, spurred by The Boston Globe’s reporting two decades ago that exposed widespread sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic Church there. We have Celia Llopis-Jepsen of the Kansas News Service here with us now. Thank you for being with us.

CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN, BYLINE: Glad to be here.

RASCOE: So this is a report by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation after an investigation that took four years. How did that probe come about, and what were the findings?

LLOPIS-JEPSEN: Well, the Catholic Church in Kansas has published the names of priests before where there are substantiated cases of abuse, but the archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas, Joseph Naumann, asked for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to help after…

View Cache

As state lawmakers decide the political costs of opening a two-year window for child sex abuse survivors to sue, much of the debate about the two-year window for those past the statute of limitations has been about the potential financial impact on the catholic church over the egregious abuse claims outlined in those grand jury reports.

But that proposal would open the door for all adult victims of child sexual abuse, and a new study shows how much that could ultimately cost taxpayers.

Last April, the Diocese of Camden in New Jersey agreed to pay $87 million to about 300 victims, an average payout of about $290,000. In November, the Diocese of Rochester in New York agreed to pay $55 million to 475 victims, about $115,000 each.

Both dioceses had declared bankruptcy before settling. How many claims could be filed in Pennsylvania against the…

View Cache

‘Today I am no longer F. I am Paméla Groleau,’ says woman participating in class action against clergy members

The woman who alleges she experienced unwanted sexual touching by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet has revealed her identity, saying she wants more transparency from the Vatican and to encourage others to come forward with their stories of abuse.

Paméla Groleau is one of the more than 130 people taking part in a class action lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Quebec, which includes allegations of sexual misconduct against 96 members of its clergy dating back to 1940. 

“Today, I am no longer F,” Groleau said in a statement to a small group of reporters, referring to the letter used to identify her in court documents. “I am Paméla Groleau.”

Ouellet is a prominent Vatican cardinal, who has been regarded as a potential successor to the Pope. He has denied all the allegations…

View Cache

The disclosure by Michael L. Costello, the diocese’s attorney, came during a public court conference

A longtime attorney for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany inadvertently disclosed during a court conference last week that it had recently offered $20 million toward a “global settlement” involving hundreds of alleged child sexual abuse victims who have filed claims against the organization or the priests and other employees accused of sexually assaulting them.

The amount of the offer — the second by the diocese — was supposed to remain confidential under a court order.

The disclosure by Michael L. Costello, the diocese’s attorney, came during a public court conference before state Supreme Court Justice L. Michael Mackey and revealed how much money the diocese had privately offered to settle the hundreds of remaining lawsuits.

But the recent offer was not accepted because the “plaintiffs liaison committee,” a group of attorneys who were facilitating…

View Cache

[Includes 20-minute audio interview]

The death of Pope Benedict on New Year’s Eve prompted an outpouring of grief among Catholics – but his legacy is a complicated one.

A world-renowned lawyer – who’s represented countless victims of sexual abuse within the church – and was famously depicted in the 2015 film Spotlight – believes Pope Benedict XVI leaves behind a tarnished legacy.

Child abuse in the Catholic church is as bad now as ever, despite the positive impact of bringing such cases to light, Mitchell Garabedian says.

Pope Benedict’s legacy is “disappointing,” Garabedian says.

“Pope Benedict toed the company line, he practised the cover up when he was Archbishop in Munich, or he was leading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which investigated sexual abuse claims.

“As Pope he was more interested in protecting the institution and more interested in doctrine than protecting children and trying to help victims to…

View Cache

Four survivors of childhood sexual abuse revealed details about the worst moments of their lives in a public rebuke of state law that protects pedophiles from criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits.

Backed by a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers, the women emphasized that it can take years before a survivor accepts what happened and is willing to talk about it. Most people who are victimized as children won’t share their experiences until they are over age 50.

Kansas state law requires requires survivors to file a civil lawsuit by age 21. Proposed legislation would remove the statute of limitations for both civil and criminal cases, and open the door to retroactive litigation dating to 1984. The Legislature eliminated the statute of limitations for criminal cases in 2013, but didn’t make the law retroactive.

State law fell under renewed scrutiny last week when a Kansas Bureau of Investigation…

View Cache

In the Yellowstone prequel 1923, Sebastian Roché plays Father Renaud, a Catholic priest who runs a boarding school for Indigenous girls. The series portrays a real and dark time in American history. Native American children were forced to attend these schools and endure horrific abuse. Although 1923 has already shown graphic violence at the boarding school, Roché warns that things will get worse in upcoming episodes.

Father Renaud deals out horrific punishments in ‘1923’

For over a century, the United States funded government boarding schools designed to strip away Native American culture. Indigenous children were forced to attend these institutions, which were often run by Christian church leaders. There they endure horrific treatment and abuse.

In the 1923 premiere, a student named Teonna Rainwater fights back after Sister Mary continuously hits her with a ruler. Father Renaud then physically punishes both Teonna and Sister Mary.

“Father Renaud is one of these extreme ideologists, religious zealots who…

View Cache

James T. Beighlie of St. Louis, Missouri, curated a vile PowerPoint show over many years, but was only caught after he printed out some of his collection of photos and left them in a printer

A paedo priest who regularly updated a slideshow of sick child abuse images for over a decade has been sentenced to five years behind bars.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri said on Tuesday that investigators had found over 6,000 items of child sexual abuse material on a computer belonging to Vincentian priest James T. Beighlie of St. Louis, Missouri.

The priest’s vile stash of images and videos was discovered in May 2021 after he printed out a PowerPoint presentation of some of the images, some of which showed Fr. Beighlie.

At the time, he was working as an associate pastor at St. Vincent de Paul…

View Cache

[Note from BishopAccountability.org – For more on the allegations against Pell, as well as his trial, see our summary and our detailed timeline: Timeline of the Allegations and Prosecution Faced by Cardinal George Pell.]

Former senior Vatican figure George Pell has died in Rome from complications following hip surgery. He was 81.

Pell, often described as a conservative Catholic, was jailed for 13 months for child sexual abuse in Australia in 2019 but maintained his innocence and was acquitted the following year.

Once a top official in charge of reforming the Vatican finances, and also Australia’s highest-ranked Catholic figure, Pell leaves behind a complex legacy.

His death will be sad for the Catholics who held him in high regard but less so for the many critics he attracted in Australia and elsewhere over the course of his career.

It’s hard to believe he will not be remembered most vividly for the trial in…

View Cache

The singer has always followed his instinct – becoming a priest, leaving the priesthood, speaking out about abuse, leaving the Irish Tenors… and, now, revolutionise his garden

When Finbar Wright was a little boy growing up in Kinsale, he spent long hours in his mother’s garden.

“I used to lie down among the rows of peas and pick the pods of peas. It was like eating sweets,” he says with a smile. “I grew up in the garden. It was huge.She had all sorts of flowers like dahlias in the front, and at the side she had a big kitchen garden. If you needed an onion or a carrot, you’d go out and pick it. She grew blackberries and gooseberries and made jams out of them. Our dairy farm was at the back of the house.

“We were self-sufficient – and we only went to the shops for incidentals.”

He has happy memories…

View Cache

In spite of her youth, Blanquita (Laura López) knows she doesn’t want to be a saint. She’s tried it before, she says, and it didn’t work out.

By age 18, she’s seen enough of life’s darkest side to know being good doesn’t mean she’ll be treated justly. She has spent her life living under a care system that’s failed to care for her when she needed it most, allowing men to abuse and exploit her in myriad ways. All she wants now is a place to live with her baby daughter, the identity of the father anyone’s guess considering she’s been sexually abused repeatedly and forced to engage in sex work in order to survive.

Blanquita is the unusual heroine of Fernando Guzzoni’s eponymously titled fourth film, where he was once again inspired by real-life events that transpired in his native Chile to create powerful pieces of…

View Cache

Matt Schlapp, the longtime Republican activist who co-chaired the Catholics for Trump campaign group in 2020 and then parroted the former president’s lies about a stolen election, is accused of making “sustained and unwanted and unsolicited” sexual advances against a former staffer for Herschel Walker’s failed U.S. Senate campaign.

The Daily Beast reported on Jan. 6 that it had interviewed the staffer, a man who alleges that Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and lead organizer for the Conservative Political Action Conference, “groped” and “fondled” his crotch after buying him drinks at Atlanta bars last fall.

The staffer, who was not identified in the story, described Schlapp as behaving inappropriately, not respecting his personal space and telling the staffer that he wanted to spend the evening with him to discuss his future. The Daily Beast article indicated that the staffer presented the outlet with contemporaneous videos,…

View Cache

Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, was notified of his recent laicization, a diocesan official has told CNA, contradicting the ex-priest’s repeated claims that he has not received official notification of the Vatican’s decree dismissing him from the clerical state.

An official with the Amarillo Diocese in Texas, who asked not to be identified by name, told CNA that “the canonical process was followed, including physical and electronic notifications [of his laicization] at their proper time.” 

The official’s account is at odds with Pavone’s prior statements to CNA and other media outlets claiming that he has received no such formal notification.

Pavone, who plans to hold a livestreamed press conference Friday ahead of next week’s March for Life in Washington, D.C., provided CNA a different answer Thursday when asked about the diocesan official’s statement.

“I have no idea what they sent me. The communication broke down a…

View Cache

THE many incidents of child sexual abuse by clerics have shamed thousands of good bishops and priests who have been justly angered by the rampant and tolerated child sexual abuse of pedophile priests and some bishops. They feel helpless when their bishop protects the pedophile priest and calls him “his son.” They hunger for justice for the victims and wish to exonerate their own vocation and blemished priesthood.

Church law now says every act of sexual abuse against a child is not only a heinous crime in civil law but is a violation of church law. (www.preda.org) Bishops have been scolded by Pope Francis for covering up child abuse cases among their priests instead of reaching out to help the victims, find them therapy, healing and justice. Instead, they try to buy off the child-victim and the family with money and promises. This is what happened in a case in…

View Cache

Fr. Marko Rupnik, SJ, was appointed by the Society of Jesus to create mosaics in one of the most important historic sites of the Jesuit order, after he was found guilty of sexual and sacramental misconduct. The mosaics were then dedicated by Rupnik and Jesuit officials after the priest was accused of more canonical crimes: spiritually and sexually abusing several consecrated women.

Rupnik was declared in 2020 excommunicated for the canonical crime of abusing the sacrament of penance to abet acts of sexual misconduct.

But 11 months after the excommunication was declared, the Society of Jesus announced that Rupnik had been commissioned to install a set of mosaics in the Sanctuary of the Cave, a Spanish church connected to the cave where St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder, composed his famous “Spiritual Exercises.”

The church, in Manresa, Spain, is an important site for Jesuits, and a destination for pilgrims…

View Cache

You might have wondered if the recent death of George Pell, who was jailed in 2019 for child sexual abuse and then later acquitted, would bring a sense of relief or closure for victim survivors of Catholic clergy sexual abuse.

After all, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found Pell had failed to do enough during his time in senior church roles in Australia to stop priests who abused children.

In fact, news of Pell’s death may generate a roller coaster of complex and variable emotions among abuse survivors.

This mix of emotions may include sadness for the ongoing consequences of the abuse for fellow victim/survivors, and anger at the lack of justice for so many.

There’s also the potential post-traumatic stress reactions triggered by this recent round of media coverage – such as fear, dissociation, distressing memories and sleep disturbance.

Lifelong impacts

Extensive research reveals how…

View Cache

Un-redacted report released in 2020 revealed how archbishop failed to take proper steps to act on complaints about dangerous priests

• George Pell’s death could renew distress for Ballarat’s child abuse survivors
• Daniel Andrews ‘couldn’t think of anything more distressing’ for victims than a state funeral for George Pell
• Cardinal Pell dies in Rome aged 81
• Obituary: Australia’s most powerful Catholic, dogged by scandal
• Cardinal George Pell divides opinion in death as in life

The child sexual abuse royal commission in 2020 released a bombshell un-redacted report examining the failings of George Pell during his time as an assistant priest, bishop, auxiliary bishop and cardinal in Australia.

The report found he both knew about child abuse, particularly within the Victorian diocese of Ballarat, and failed to take proper steps to act on complaints about dangerous priests.

The findings – which Pell always disputed – were arrived at after an exhaustive, five-year…

View Cache

A Vincentian priest in St. Louis was sentenced Jan. 10 to prison and ordered to pay restitution for possessing 6,000 images of child pornography, an act which one victim told the presiding judge was “depressing and sickening.”

Father James T. Beighlie, a 72-year-old retired member of the Congregation of the Mission, Western Province, was ordered to serve five years in jail after pleading guilty Oct. 12, 2022, to two counts of possessing images depicting child sexual abuse. Following the prison term, Father Beighlie will be on supervised release for life.

U.S. District Judge Matthew T. Schelp also ordered Father Beighlie to pay $26,750 in restitution — $4,750 to one of the victims depicted in the child pornography images, and $22,000 toward other victims of crimes involving children.

“It’s depressing and sickening to know that people were looking at images and videos of my online sexual abuse when I was a…

View Cache

The coverage of the recent death of Pope Emeritus Benedict highlights a persistent problem regarding clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. Unlike most of the Catholic abuse crisis, this problem is one where rank-and-file Catholics can really make a difference. Without getting political, we at Horowitz Law are reminded of a memorable phrase coined by former presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson, “The soft bigotry of low expectations.” He was referring to kids’ education, not kids’ abuse. Gerson claimed that many teachers quietly assume or believe that some groups of kids (primarily minorities) really won’t succeed in the classroom as well as other kids. That assumption, Gerson suggests, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.Regardless of your views on education, his broader point is valid; “If we expect less, we often get less.”

That brings us to how Pope Benedict’s legacy is defined and what it means for Catholic parishioners. Here’s how one veteran…

View Cache

Pope Francis’ own role in the investigation into financial wrongdoing at the Holy See took center stage Friday in the Vatican tribunal, with witnesses saying he encouraged a key suspect to cooperate with prosecutors and a key defendant accusing him of interfering in the trial.

Friday’s hearing was one of the most eagerly anticipated in the Vatican’s “trial of the century,” given it featured testimony from one of the more colorful figures in recent Vatican history, Francesca Chaouqui. The public relations expert was summoned after it emerged late last year that she had played a behind-the-scenes role in persuading a key suspect-turned-star-witness to change his story and implicate his former boss, Cardinal Angelo Becciu.

But the daylong hearing ended with an unexpected bombshell, as Becciu responded to Chaouqui’s testimony by reading aloud an exchange of letters with the pope that suggested Francis himself continued to cast a shadow over the trial,…

View Cache

In dramatic testimony at the Vatican mega-trial on financial corruption Jan. 13, a former Vatican official who spent time in prison for her role in the Vatileaks scandal admitted to influencing the deposition of Msgr. Alberto Perlasca, a key prosecution witness in the current trial.

Her goal, said Francesca Chaouqui, a former Vatican diplomat, was to alert Pope Francis to the brewing financial scandal that is at the heart of the 18-month-old proceeding that has charged 10 defendants with fraud and abuse of office.

“I believed that I had to report to the Holy Father a description of what was happening behind his back,” said Chaouqui.

Chaouqui’s testimony was ordered by Vatican judges overseeing the trial after Perlasca, who once headed the administrative office of the Vatican Secretariat of State, revealed in his own testimony in early December that his deposition was made under pressure from Chaouqui. Perlasca, once a…

View Cache

According to the senator who plans to introduce the legislation, the proposal ‘tries to make clear there [will be] no confidentiality’ exception, regardless of the context in which the clergy member becomes aware of the information.

Legislation that would expand mandatory-reporting requirements for clergy and potentially pose a threat to the seal of confession could be introduced into the Vermont Senate within the next week or two. 

Current Vermont law lists members of the clergy, such as priests, as mandatory reporters, which means they are required to report suspected child abuse or neglect within 24 hours of becoming aware of the information. However, the law provides an exemption for clergy if reporting that information would violate a privilege or disclose confidential communication, such as information learned during a confession. 

Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, plans to introduce a bill that would fully eliminate that exception. The bill has not yet been…

View Cache

The parish fears the school will be targeted, in the wake of the Michigan Supreme Court’s recent reinterpretation of state antidiscrimination laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Amid fears that a Catholic school could be forced to close its doors if it refuses to compromise its beliefs regarding sexuality, a Grand Rapids parish is suing the Michigan attorney general and Department of Civil Rights.

Sacred Heart of Jesus parish, which operates Sacred Heart Academy in the western Michigan city, filed its lawsuit on Dec. 12, after the Michigan Supreme Court reinterpreted the state’s antidiscrimination laws regarding sex. Under the new interpretation, the prohibition on discrimination based on sex also encompasses sexual orientation and gender-identity discrimination. 

The parish worries that this reinterpretation would prevent the school from maintaining its standard-of-conduct policies for employees and its approach to how it helps students who struggle with same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria. The…

View Cache

Robert Shiflet, a former youth pastor at Denton Bible Church in Texas who was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison in June 2021 for child sex trafficking charges, is set to be released next month but will spend the rest of his life under federal supervision.

Shiflet, 51, whose pending release was highlighted by Fox 4, was sentenced in June 2021, on charges of sexually abusing 14 young girls placed under his pastoral care 20 years earlier. The sentence was made after Shiflet made a plea deal which U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky lamented.

“You are a terrible person,” Rudofsky told the former youth pastor at the time, according to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “I don’t believe that you are sorry in the slightest. I don’t believe you have rehabilitated yourself. I believe you haven’t been caught again but I don’t believe you…

View Cache

A 54-year-old Wildomar pastor accused of sexually assaulting two girls numerous times pleaded not guilty Friday to nearly two dozen felony charges.

Fredy Romeo Gonzalez Lopez was arrested in November following a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department investigation.

Lopez is charged with eight counts of aggravated rape of a child, seven counts of lewd acts on a minor, five counts of sodomy of a child and multiple sentence-enhancing allegations of targeting two or more victims in a sex crime.

The defendant was arraigned before Superior Court Judge Elaine Kiefer, who scheduled a felony settlement conference for Feb. 22 at the Southwest Justice Center in Murrieta.

Lopez is being held on $1 million bail at the nearby Byrd Detention Center.

According to sheriff’s Sgt. Joshua Parker, Gonzalez presides at a Wildomar church, but the house of worship wasn’t identified.

Parker said that detectives initiated an investigation during the first week of November,…

View Cache

Editor’s Note: In support of the sixth strategic action of Vision 2025 adopted by messengers to the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting, Baptist Press will continue to report every instance of sexual abuse related to Southern Baptist churches or leaders of which we are made aware.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated after initial publication to include comments from Montana Southern Baptist Convention Executive Director Barrett Duke.

Dean Alan Smith, longtime pastor of Morning Star Baptist Church in Lame Deer, Mt., pled not guilty Tuesday (Jan. 3) to federal charges filed against him last month.

According to local media reports, Smith, 66, was charged with sexually abusing four girls on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation between 2017 and 2019. Morning Star Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation where Smith has been pastor more than 20 years, sits adjacent to the reservation.

The Billings Gazette reported that charges against him include one count…

View Cache

The charge against the 26-year-old is used against defendants who are in a position of authority over a juvenile

Key Points

• Police arrested the former middle school teacher on Monday and took him to Blount County to face charges.
• Joseph “Kade” Abbott was on the Apostolic Christian Academy staff list as recently as August.
• Apostolic Christian Academy, based in Maryville, is the school housed in First Apostolic Church.
• Leaders of the school and church did not return requests for comment about the former middle school teacher.

A former teacher at the Apostolic Christian Academy in Maryville has been arrested on a felony charge that he sexually abused a 14-year-old girl, Knox News has learned.

Joseph “Kade” Abbott was arrested in North Carolina and taken to the Blount County jail on Monday, according to sheriff’s office spokesperson Marian O’Briant. Abbott is being held on a $200,000 bond. His preliminary hearing is Jan. 18.

…

View Cache

A former minister at a New Jersey evangelical church has pleaded guilty to multiple sex abuse crimes, admitting that he blackmailed teenage boys into performing explicit sex acts via webcam.

During a hearing last week at Burlington County Superior Court in Mount Holly, New Jersey, Sean Higgins, 32, of Palmyra, pleaded guilty to four counts of Endangering the Welfare of Children. In exchange for the plea, Higgins is expected to serve 27 years in a New Jersey state prison. Higgins’ sentencing is scheduled for March 3.

According to a grand jury indictment last August, prosecutors say Higgins victimized at least 13 boys, aged 12 to 17, who resided in Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Tennessee.

At the time of the crimes, Higgins was on staff as youth pastor and worship leader at Harbor Baptist Church in Hainesport, according to the…

View Cache

A former pastor and Illinois school district employee has been arrested and charged with two counts of sexually grooming a child, following a months-long investigation.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office posted an update to Facebook announcing the arrest of 28-year-old Garrett S. Biggerstaff of Mcleansboro. 

According to authorities, the investigation into Biggerstaff began last September when “the Benton Police Department received information from a juvenile claiming to be the target of some form of sexual exploitation.”

“Officers handling the complaint in Benton contacted Detectives from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and a coordinated investigation [began],” stated the sheriff’s office.

“Evidence was collected and examined by the Sheriff’s Office member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. From this work, a second juvenile victim was identified.”

After Biggerstaff was arrested Thursday, he was transported to the Jefferson County Jail and booked on felony charges. His bond was set…

View Cache

SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) in Aotearoa New Zealand Responds to Catholic Church’s Public Relations Statements

The statements by NZ Catholic Church leaders on “looking forward from the work of the Royal Commission on Abuse in Care,” and their proposed commitments to handle clergy and religious sexual abuse complaints differently, and support mandatory reporting, simply lack credibility.

For Catholic Church leaders to say they support mandatory reporting “but with exemptions” is a contradiction. Mandatory reporting means there must be no “legal, confessional, and therapeutic privilege,” – only respect for privacy at the sole request of the victim or survivor.

Further, to date survivors have not seen any substantial changes in the application and practical procedures responding to abuse complaints. We have seen nothing to bring the Church leaders’ public commitments to light.

In fact, sadly, survivor evidence demonstrates continued denial and cover up, diversion, a lack of…

View Cache

Here’s the situation all Rome is talking about:

    1) an anonymous text was circulating at the beginning of this year, signed “Demos” (the text is below) (link)

    2) the respected Vaticanist Sandro Magister revealed in a piece he wrote yesterday (link) — following Pell’s death Tuesday night in Rome at the age of 81 — that “Demos” was, in fact… Cardinal George Pell.

    So the “Demos” text suddenly took on heightened importance.

    This was an “insider” text at the highest level, for those of you interested in such things…

    What was Pell saying in his anonymous text, circulating among his fellow cardinals?

    Essentially, that the Church needed strong leadership which would teach clearly and fearlessly the Church’s doctrine.

    The document also was taken to be Pell’s way to begin to form a consensus on what “type” of man would be the man best suited to… be elected…

View Cache

Shortly before he died on Tuesday, Cardinal George Pell wrote the following article for The Spectator in which he denounced the Vatican’s plans for its forthcoming ‘Synod on Synodality’ as a ‘toxic nightmare’. The booklet produced by the Synod, to be held in two sessions this year and next year, is ‘one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome’, says Pell. Not only is it ‘couched in neo-Marxist jargon’, but it is ‘hostile to the apostolic tradition’ and ignores such fundamental Christian tenets as belief in divine judgment, heaven and hell.

The Australian-born cardinal, who endured the terrible ordeal of imprisonment in his home country on fake charges of sex abuse before being acquitted, was nothing if not courageous. He did not know that he was about to die when he wrote this piece; he was prepared to face the fury of Pope Francis and the organisers when it was published….

View Cache

Pope Francis will deliver a final send-off for Cardinal George Pell during a funeral Mass on Saturday, the Vatican said, as revelations emerge of the Australian prelate’s growing concern about what he considered the “disaster” and “catastrophe” of the papacy under Francis.

The Vatican on Thursday said the dean of the college of cardinals, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, would celebrate Pell’s funeral Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. As is custom for cardinal funerals, Francis will deliver a final commendation and salute.

Pell, who had served as Francis’ first finance minister for three years before returning to Australia to face child sex abuse charges, died on Tuesday at a Rome hospital of heart complications following hip surgery. He was 81.

He had been dividing his time between Rome and Sydney after he was exonerated in 2020 of allegations he molested two choirboys while he was archbishop of Melbourne. Australia’s High Court overturned…

View Cache

[Note from BishopAccountability.org – For more on the allegations against Pell, as well as his trial, see our summary and our detailed timeline: Timeline of the Allegations and Prosecution Faced by Cardinal George Pell.]

Instead of flights of angels, the death of Cardinal George Pell provoked another roiling culture war to sing the Cardinal to his rest. It’s what Australia’s most prominent church figure would have wanted. The only certainty, other than death, is that arguments about Pell’s ecclesiastic and cultural legacy will rage for years after his remains are interred in the crypt beneath Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral.

The battleground preferred by Pell’s supporters, most prominently former prime minister Tony Abbott and Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton, is the ill-fated criminal prosecution of Pell for historical child sex offences which saw him jailed for 14 months before the High Court unanimously set aside his conviction and acquitted him of all charges.

…

View Cache

Survivors question why Oblates of Mary Immaculate isn’t identifying the overseer

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic order that operated 48 of Canada’s residential schools, has hired an independent third party to oversee efforts to ensure members who have committed sex crimes do not reoffend.

Some sexual assault survivors have praised the hiring as a positive development — but have also criticized the Oblate’s decision to withhold the monitor’s name.

Tony Charlie, who was sexually assaulted by an Oblate brother during his time at Kuper Island Residential School starting in the mid-1960s, said the hiring of an independent monitor is “a good step.” 

He also said it’s impossible to confirm that the monitor is truly independent if the Oblates are unwilling to release the hire’s name.

“We have no clue who this person is,” he said. “It’s very important that these abusers be accountable and visible and probably monitored closely.”

The Oblates hired the monitor in December 2022 and expect he will begin monthly…

View Cache

Two years ago, ProPublica showcased the remarkable tale of a doctor who saved physical evidence from more than 2,000 rape exams starting in the 1970s, years before police began to preserve forensic DNA. Baltimore County police tested just a tiny portion of the samples decades later and solved more than 80 cold cases; they made dozens of arrests and exposed serial rapists, including a man who assaulted at least 25 women and murdered one. The evidence also exonerated an innocent man and gave survivors life-changing closure.

Baltimore County law enforcement could have prioritized testing such a fruitful trove. Instead, it falls through loopholes in laws meant to preserve rape kit evidence and expedite testing.

Each year, the evidence saved by the doctor in the form of glass slides has been excluded from a state-mandated inventory of untested rape kits. A police spokesperson said they did not list the evidence because they…

View Cache

When accused Bishop Howard Hubbard requested the Vatican remove his status as a priest, among those caught by surprise were his alleged abuse victims and their civil attorneys, along with canon lawyers. Read letters to the editor from NCR readers responding to our reporting below. The letters have been edited for length and clarity.

The title of this article is false. This article isn’t about “victim’s lawyers” but about the lawyers of alleged victims. Both the repeated use of “alleged” and references to “allegations” in the body of the article are implicitly, and I’d imagine purposely, undermined by the inaccurate title. 

Ultimately, the blurring of the distinction between alleged and proven victims is a reminder that irrationalism is not only rising on the right, but is sharply increasing in the Anglosphere more generally.

The issue here is epistemology. How do we evaluate truth claims? One side suggests that we…

View Cache

Key Points

• The Diocese of Knoxville changed last year the rules for how its sex abuse review board operates.
• The change was initiated three months after the diocese and Bishop Richard Stika were named in a sexual abuse lawsuit.
• The diocese says the new rules better protect victims.
• Sex abuse victim advocates say the new rules protect abusers.

Three months after the Catholic Diocese of Knoxville and Bishop Richard Stika were named in an explosive sexual abuse lawsuit last year, leaders made the church’s sexual abuse review board meetings much more secretive, including requiring members to sign nondisclosure agreements, Knox News has learned.

The lawsuit asserted the church did not properly investigate sexual abuse allegations made by a former church employee and instead worked to discredit him. There has since been a separate lawsuit with similar allegations filed by a Sevier County woman.

The diocese maintains a more…

View Cache

A year and a half since the initiative was launched, more than 200 survivors have reported their abuse and two prosecutions have been made. That’s less than one percent.

Ineffective and harmful, that’s how some described a statewide investigation by Wisconsin’s Department of Justice. More than a year and a half after its creation, Attorney General Josh Kaul defends his plan to look into clergy abuse. He says progress is being made to hold religious leaders accountable.

Kaul originally pleaded with survivors, asking them to report their stories of abuse to his office to look into. Some of those survivors say after reporting, they have no idea what, if anything, is actually being looked into.

In April of 2021, standing on the Capitol steps, survivors of abuse put their faith in AG Kaul, faith his initiative would hold clergy and religious leaders accountable by law for past…

View Cache

James T. Beighlie, 72, sparked suspicion after colleagues found “compromising images” of the priest on a church printer, prosecutors said.

A retired priest in St. Louis, Missouri, was sentenced to five years in prison after police discovered he had created a PowerPoint presentation containing thousands of images of child sexual abuse material.

The US Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Missouri announced on Tuesday that James T. Beighlie, 72, had amassed 6,000 pictures containing child sexual abuse on one computer, as well as 236 images and 40 videos of similar content on another.

Officials said that the priest had created two PowerPoint presentations with graphic titles that linked to the material and had revised and edited the presentations more than 200 times since 2008.

“This criminal conduct was part of his daily life,” Assistant US Attorney Colleen Lang said in a statement.

Beighlie’s criminal activity was…

View Cache

[Note from BishopAccountability.org – For more on the allegations against Pell, as well as his trial, see our summary and our detailed timeline: Timeline of the Allegations and Prosecution Faced by Cardinal George Pell.]

[Via Chicago Catholic]

Pope Francis praised the late Australian Cardinal George Pell as a faithful servant of God and of the Catholic Church, who steadfastly followed the Lord even “in the hour of trial” when he was jailed for sexual abuse before his conviction was overturned by Australia’s highest court.

Cardinal Pell died in Rome Jan. 10 at the age of 81 after suffering a heart attack following hip replacement surgery.

The cardinal’s funeral was expected to be celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican with burial to take place in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, but the Vatican did not offer details immediately.

In an interview with Italy’s Mediaset broadcast Dec. 18, Pope Francis…

View Cache

Pope Francis will preside over the final portion of the funeral of the late Australian Cardinal George Pell on Saturday in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Holy See Press Office announced on Thursday that Pope Francis will preside over the rites of Ultima Commendatio and Valedictio at the funeral of Cardinal George Pell.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, Dean of the College of Cardinals, will celebrate the Requiem Mass at 11:30 AM on Saturday, 14 January.

The Mass will take place at the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter in the Vatican Basilica.

A host of other Cardinals and bishops are expected to concelebrate the Mass.

‘Dedicated to the Gospel’

The late Australian Cardinal died on Tuesday in Rome at the age of 81 due to heart complications following a hip operation.

Cardinal Pell had served as the Prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy from April 2014 until February 2019.

Pope Francis expressed…

View Cache

About twenty years ago, in a series of email messages, the late Father Paul Mankowski and I exchanged arguments against the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. This was a private conversation, at first, and since we were old friends, accustomed to speaking freely, the language of the exchange was fairly colorful. Eventually, convinced that our ideas were worthy of a wider audience, we cleaned up that language, removing some of the saltier expressions, and published the result in Catholic World Report.

Before it was published, however, Father Mankowski told me that he had shared the exchange with then-Archbishop George Pell. I was taken aback. Had he sent him the original, uncensored version? Yes, said Father Mankowski, unperturbed. He knew the Australian prelate well, and knew that he would not be flustered by strong language.

In fact, Archbishop Pell shared that exchange with priests in his Sydney archdiocese. I…

View Cache

COMMENTARY: In his last years of life, the Australian prelate became one of the universal Church’s most prominent champions for doctrinal orthodoxy, a mantle others will need to carry forward following his departure.

Immediate reflections following the shocking death of Cardinal George Pell have focused on the Australian prelate’s heroic endurance of false accusations of sexual abuse. And rightfully so. 

Cardinal Pell’s fortitude in the face of such ideologically motivated injustices, which included 404 days of solitary confinement in a Melbourne prison cell before the charges were quashed by the Australian High Court in April 2020, were an inspiration to Catholics across the world, a compelling example of faithfully enduring the kind of persecution that Christ foretold those who follow him would face.

But far less attention has been given to the significant role Cardinal Pell took up after his post-exoneration return to Rome in 2020 — a role that makes his passing…

View Cache

Australian Cardinal George Pell – who was convicted then acquitted of child sex abuse – will not be offered a state funeral in his home state to avoid distress for victims of abuse, Victoria’s premier says.

The former Vatican treasurer died on Tuesday aged 81.

He is Australia’s highest ranking Catholic, and the most senior clergyman ever jailed for child sex offences.

State funerals are frequently offered to notable public figures in Australia.

But the premier of Victoria – where Cardinal Pell was born and spent about half his career – said no such funeral would take place there.

“I couldn’t think of anything more distressing for victim survivors,” Daniel Andrews told reporters on Thursday.

Mr Andrews also said he was unlikely to attend the cleric’s funeral.

Officials in the state of New South Wales, where the Cardinal served as Archbishop of Sydney, have also said they will not offer…

View Cache

Cardinal George Pell, who died this week as a result of complications related to hip surgery, was the poster boy for Pope John Paul II’s “heroic priesthood,” a discernible type of prelate that was common throughout the 20th century. Conspicuous, forceful, determined, dismissive toward contrary opinions, he was a polarizing figure convinced of the need to risk polarization in order to defend the church’s teachings.

“There was nothing bland or half-hearted about George Pell: he was strong, even vehement in his faith, his convictions, his likes and dislikes,” wrote Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Australia, in The Catholic Leader. “He could be a fierce opponent, unafraid to enter the battle. At times this could make him seem an ideological warrior, which did not serve him well. It certainly wasn’t George Pell at his best.”

Coleridge’s heartfelt remembrance of the late cardinal is the best I have…

View Cache

Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, who has been a key figure in the Church’s fight against abuse, defends Benedict XVI’s efforts.

Benedict XVI’s passing has reignited talk about how adequately he addressed sexual abuse in the Church. From being the first Pontiff to meet with abuse victims, to taking action against powerful and guilty priests, to being accused of mismanaging cases in his diocese when he was a bishop in Germany, the Pope Emeritus left a mixed record, according to many observers. 

However, the Archbishop of Malta, Charles Scicluna, has instead strongly defended the Pope Emeritus’ efforts in various statements published by multiple media outlets. The Maltese prelate worked alongside Benedict XVI from 2002 to 2012 as the promoter of justice, like a prosecutor in charge of dealing with serious abuse crimes, for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). 

Cardinal Ratzinger was “instrumental in the lengthy process that updated…

View Cache

[Via Catholic World Report]

Jesuits in Slovenia have asked for forgiveness from the women who have have accused Father Marko Rupnik, S..J, of spiritual and sexual abuse, saying they believe the claims.

Rupnik, a Jesuit priest and artist originally from Slovenia, has been accused of the sexual, spiritual, and psychological abuse of at least nine women from a religious community with which he was formerly connected.

The alleged abuse took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An investigation into the claims was dropped by the Vatican in October 2022 due to the statute of limitations.

“It is obvious that, as a province, in the past we did not know how to listen to the victims and take appropriate action to clear up the issues and put an end to the suffering. We fully accept and understand the indignation, anger, and disappointment of the victims and their loved ones,”…

View Cache

More than 50 years ago, Susan Leighnor says she was raped in the 4th grade by priests at Holy Cross Catholic School in Hutchinson, Kansas.

All told, Leighnor says four priests in her childhood either sexually abused her or helped facilitate abuse against her, including the late William Wheeler, who appears on the Wichita diocese’s list of clergy with substantiated sexual abuse allegations against them. One of them told her she would go to hell if she spoke out, she said.

After repressing what happened for decades, Leighnor, now 67, says she has been recovering memories in recent years that paint a portrait of terrible trauma.

“I was furious that the Catholic Church could get away with this,” Leighnor, who lives in Colorado, said in an interview this week.

Kansas prevents nearly all survivors of childhood sexual abuse from filing lawsuits against their abusers or the institutions that enabled them….

View Cache

[Note from BishopAccountability.org – For more on the allegations against Pell, as well as his trial, see our summary and our detailed timeline: Timeline of the Allegations and Prosecution Faced by Cardinal George Pell.]

Pope Francis on Wednesday paid tribute to Cardinal George Pell, who spent 404 days in solitary confinement in his native Australia before his child sex convictions were overturned, praising his diligence in reforming the Vatican’s finances and his faith “even in the hour of trial.”

Francis sent a telegram of condolences to the head of the College of Cardinals, expressing his “sadness” over Pell’s death and relaying his prayers and sympathy to the Australian prelate’s family.

Pell died Tuesday in Rome, where he had attended the funeral last week of Pope Benedict XVI. Pell suffered fatal heart complications following hip surgery, said Archbishop Peter Comensoli, Pell’s successor as archbishop of Melbourne. He was 81.

He was a…

View Cache

Cardinal George Pell, a conservative theologian who served as the Vatican finance chief for Pope Francis and who was acquitted after becoming the most senior Catholic cleric to be convicted of sexually assaulting children, died Tuesday in Rome. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by Peter Comensoli, one of his successors as the archbishop of Melbourne, who said the cardinal died of heart complications after undergoing hip surgery. Cardinal Pell had been in Rome to attend Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s funeral last week.

Cardinal Pell spent more than a year in solitary confinement in his native Australia after a jury found him guilty in 2018 of assaulting two teenage choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral while he was the city’s archbishop in the 1990s. His conviction was overturned by a top Australian court in 2020.

The cardinal remained a polarizing figure in Australia and the church even after…

View Cache

[Note from BishopAccountability.org – For more on the allegations against Pell, as well as his trial, see our summary and our detailed timeline: Timeline of the Allegations and Prosecution Faced by Cardinal George Pell.]

An adviser to Pope Francis and a prominent figure in Australia, Cardinal Pell went to prison on charges of abusing two boys in the 1990s, but a higher court later acquitted him.

Cardinal George Pell, an Australian cleric and adviser to Pope Francis who became the most senior Roman Catholic prelate to be sent to prison for child sexual abuse and was later acquitted of all charges, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 81.

The cause was complications of hip replacement surgery, according to Peter Comensoli, the archbishop of Melbourne, Australia, who confirmed the death in a post on Twitter. Cardinal Pell had gone to Rome to attend the funeral last week…

View Cache

Pope Francis’ lead clergy abuse investigator has acknowledged survivors’ frustrations with the Vatican’s strict culture of secrecy about Catholic bishops accused of misconduct or cover-up. Victims who bring a claim forward have a right to know how it is handled, said Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna.

In a National Catholic Reporter interview, Scicluna admitted the Vatican is not at what he termed “an optimal point” with regard to how it follows up with abuse victims, calling the matter “something that needs to be developed.”

Scicluna, who serves as an adjunct secretary for the Vatican’s powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and has investigated abuse claims across the world, said, “Most of the suffering I have seen is when victims are left in the dark without any follow-up of the disclosure they have given.”

“We have a law and we have a system which empowers people to disclose abuse or…

View Cache

An Indian Catholic bishop probed by a Vatican-appointed team of bishops for alleged involvement in serious crimes like murder, rape and misappropriation of church funds, has been ordered to “take a period of absence from the ministry.”

Bishop Kannikadass A William of Mysore (now Mysuru) has been replaced by retired Archbishop Bernard Moras of Bangalore as apostolic administrator of southern India’s Karnataka state.

“I wish to inform that The Dicastery of Evangelization has appointed His Grace Most Rev Bernard Moras, Apostolic Administrator sede plena et ad nutum Sanctae Sedis of the Diocese of Mysore for the ordinary administration and pastoral care of that local Church,” Archbishop Felix Machado, secretary-general at the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, said in a Jan.7 communication to cardinals, archbishops and bishops in India.

The appointment became effective from Jan. 7, he added.

Significantly, the Vatican…

View Cache