ABUSE TRACKER

MASSACHUSETTS
Telegram & Gazette

By Richard Duckett
Telegram & Gazette Staff

Posted Nov. 4, 2015

Although the movie “Spotlight” doesn’t officially open in Boston until Friday, Phil Saviano has already seen it four times.

The first occasion was a private screening for victims of child molestation by Roman Catholic priests who are depicted in the film. The movie dramatizes the Boston Globe “Spotlight” team investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church that won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Mr. Saviano, who grew up in East Douglas, is played by actor Neal Huff.

“Each time I saw it I had a stronger emotional reaction,” Mr. Saviano said. At the red carpet Boston premiere last week, “There were tears running down my cheeks. I was hoping most people wouldn’t see me,” he said. By the same token, “There’s a lot going on in the film, a lot of detail. I was very pleased.”

Mr. Saviano was molested by the late Rev. David A. Holley of St. Denis parish in East Douglas over the course of months in 1964 and 1965 when Mr. Saviano was 11 and 12 years old. Now 63 and living in Roslindale, Mr. Saviano is a founder of the New England chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

In 2001, he met with reporters of the Spotlight team and was “a key reason why the team decided to delve into this scandal in the first place,” said David Clohessy, national director of SNAP.

“They knew of two priests,” Mr. Saviano recalled. “I went in with a list of 13 from Boston and 14 from Worcester (Catholic dioceses).”

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MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2015

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those abused by Priests (314 566 9790, davidgclohessy@gmail.com)

We applaud a Minnesota jury for awarding $8.1 million to a victim of a predator priest. This verdict will protect kids and deter cover ups of child sex crimes.

[KARE]

Victims often stay silent, assuming no one will believe them, help them, or take serious action. Today’s verdict shows that this assumption is no longer true. We hope the wisdom of this jury and the courage of this victim will prod others who are victims of sexual violence to come forward, seek justice, prevent crimes and expose those who commit and conceal heinous abuse against children.

This is a warning to bishops who pretend they’re powerless over religious order clerics working in their dioceses. The jury said that Duluth’s bishop is responsible for most of the harm done by this predator priest, even though the priest’s paycheck was signed by a legally separate entity, the Oblates.

The bottom line is that every bishop is responsible for the safety of every Catholic kid from every Catholic pedophile, whether the offender is a Jesuit, a Marianist, an Oblate or whatever. Hair-splitting may work for bishops as a public relations strategy. It works less well as a legal defense strategy.

The pedophile priest in this case, Fr. J. Vincent Fitzgerald, worked in Missouri, Illinois, Texas, South Dakota and Minnesota. BishopAccountability.org

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MINNESOTA
Northlands News Center

By Dan Branovan

November 4, 2015

St. Paul, MN (NNCNOW.com) – A child sex abuse case against the Diocese of Duluth has garnered an $8.1 million verdict against them in a Ramsey County court room.

Father J. Vincent Fitzgerald was accused of sexually abusing William Weis several times in 1978 at St. Catherine’s Church in Squaw Lake, Minnesota which is part of the Duluth Diocese.

This is the first case under the Minnesota Child Victim Act to go forward.

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MINNESOTA
CBS Minnesota

ST. PAUL, Minn. (WCCO) — A Ramsey County jury awarded $8.1 million Wednesday to a man who was sexually abused by a priest with the Diocese of Duluth decades ago.

According to a statement from Jeff Anderson & Associates, the plaintiff’s attorney, Father J. Vincent Fitzgerald sexually abused William Weis in 1978 at St. Catherine’s Church in Squaw Lake, Minnesota for a period of two weeks.

The two met at St. Thomas More Church in Lake Lillian, Minnesota, but Fitzgerald was working as an Oblate priest with the Diocese of Duluth at the time. After they met, Fitzgerald brought Weis to St. Catherine’s, where the molestation continued.

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MINNESOTA
Seattle PI

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A Ramsey County jury has awarded more than $8 million to a man who says he was molested by a priest in northern Minnesota when he was a boy.

Fifty-two-year-old William Weis (weyes) alleged he was sexually abused by the Rev. James Fitzgerald at St. Catherine’s parish in Squaw Lake in 1978. The lawsuit centered on whether the Diocese of Duluth was negligent in how it supervised Fitzgerald, who died in 2009.

The Associated Press normally does not identify possible victims of sex crimes, but his attorney says Weis agreed to the use of his name.

Minnesota Public Radio News (http://bit.ly/1Opgmh1 ) reports the jury found the diocese was 60 percent at fault. Fitzgerald’s order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, was found to be 40 percent at fault.

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MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Jon Collins Nov 4, 2015

The Minnesota Historical Society has made an offer to buy the Hayden Center in St. Paul from the bankrupt Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, according to documents filed in United States Bankruptcy Court on Wednesday.

The court documents show that the Historical Society has agreed to purchase the property at Kellogg Boulevard West for $4.5 million. An assessment of the property in the summer of 2013 by the real estate company handling the sale for the archdiocese put the property’s value at between $5 million and $7 million, according to the court filing by the attorney for the archdiocese.

“The Archdiocese believes that the sale of the Hayden Center will allow the Archdiocese to operate more efficiently by having all of its staff in one location,” according to court documents filed Wednesday. “The sale of the Hayden Center will also save the Archdiocese money in operating costs, daily maintenance and long-term maintenance.”

The sale is subject to a higher offer from another party during an auction. The archdiocese asked the court to schedule a hearing to consider final approval during the week of Jan. 4. In a statement, the archdiocese said that it expected the property closing to occur between late January and late February.

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ITALY
Gazzetta del Sud

Rome, November 4 – The Vatican Bank, or Institute for Religious Works (IOR), operated in Italy without authorization for 40 years, Rome prosecutors said Wednesday. The city prosecutor is about to notify ex-IOR general manager Paolo Cipriani and his former deputy Massimo Tulli that a probe into alleged wrongdoing at the Vatican bank has ended, a possible prelude to their indictment. Cipriani and Tulli were indicted in a separate case a year ago on money laundering charges after a probe that in 2010 led to the freezing of 23 million euros over two cash transfers involving IOR that were deemed suspicious. That trial is ongoing. On Wednesday, investigators said IOR acted as a bank without central bank authorization until 2011, when the Bank of Italy told credit institutions to consider it a non-EU bank.

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VATICAN CITY
Gazzetta del Sud

Rome, November 4 – The Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA) held assets worth 998 million euros in 2013, including an investment portfolio worth over 475 million eurps, according to figures contained in a new book on the Vatican’s financial affairs to be published Thursday. Unlike the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) – commonly known as the Vatican Bank – APSA’s budget “is not part of the public domain”, L’Espresso news magazine journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi points out in his new book Avarice, one of two books at the centre of a new Vatican document-leaking scandal dubbed Vatileaks 2. Fittipaldi claims APSA acts like a credit institution and cites budget entries detailing loans to banks to the tune of 162.7 million euros, 24.5 million dollars, 8 million pounds, 4.5 million Swiss francs and 29.2 million yen.

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VATICAN CITY
Crux

By Inés San Martín
Vatican correspondent November 4, 2015

ROME — An Italian journalist who allegedly received confidential documents from two members of a now-expired papal study commission on Vatican finances has described the arrest of those figures by Vatican gendarmes as “abnormal,” claiming it’s an effort to obscure the content of his revelations.

It was “an attempt [from the Vatican] to divert attention from the actual issues covered on my book, that are based on documents,” Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of a new book revealing financial abuses in the Vatican, said Wednesday in a Rome news conference.

On Monday, the Vatican announced that Spanish Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda and Italian lay woman Francesca Chaouqui had been interrogated and then placed under arrest on suspicion of having leaked secret material to Nuzzi, author of Via Crucis (in English, “Merchants in the Temple.”)

Both Vallejo and Chaouqui were members of a commission, known by its Italian acronym COSEA, established in the summer of 2013 by Pope Francis to lay the groundwork for his efforts at financial reform in the Vatican.

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VATICAN CITY
CNBC

[with video]

Reuters

Vatican financial investigators suspect a department of the Holy See which oversees real estate and investments was used in the past for possible money laundering, insider trading and market manipulation, according to a report seen by Reuters.

The information in the confidential document, which covers the period from 2000 to 2011, has been passed on to Italian and Swiss investigators for their checks because some activity tied to the accounts allegedly took place in these countries, a senior Vatican source said.

While most of the media focus of the Vatican’s murky finances has for decades centred on its official bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), a department called the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), acted as its own financial powerhouse.

APSA, a sort of general accounting office, manages the Vatican’s real estate holdings in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, pays salaries of Vatican employees, and acts as a purchasing office and human resources department.

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (UK)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Wednesday 4 November 2015

The Vatican acknowledged on Wednesday that a series of explosive allegations at the heart of two new exposés into the inner workings of Vatican finances had to be “studied and interpreted with care” but insisted that Pope Francis was already well aware of the problems.

The Holy See also confirmed it was investigating an Italian banker who may have been involved in questionable transactions involving the Vatican office that handles its vast real estate holdings.

In an effort to address looming questions about church finances, it also released a separate statement saying that a new board of directors heading a foundation connected to Bambino Gesù, a paediatric hospital in Rome, had held its first meeting on Wednesday.

The hospital was at the centre of several allegations in the two books published this week, Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi and Avarice by Emiliano Fittipaldi. The Vatican said the new board was committed to transparency and had “turned a page” on its past.

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VATICAN CITY
Independent (UK)

Michael Day Rome @michael2day

Vatican investigators have accused the shadowy organisation known as the Pope’s merchant bank of money laundering, insider trading and market manipulation, it has emerged.

Details of the alleged crimes committed by the institution, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), said to have been between 2000 and 2011, have been passed to authorities in Italy and Switzerland. Investigators say the illicit activity involved bank accounts held in these countries.

Pope Francis sanctioned the probe into APSA as part of his drive to clean up the Vatican after decades of financial sleaze. The Vatican Bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IoR), has often figured in previous scandals. Italian prosecutors involved in a long-running investigation claimed that the IoR had operated in Italy without authorisation for 40 years.

But concerns have also centred on APSA, which as well as paying the Vatican’s salaries looks after its property, financial and share holdings. The 33-page report by the Vatican Financial Information Authority focuses on a “portfolio” worth more than €2m (£1.5m) sent to Switzerland shortly before the Vatican introduced new laws against money laundering.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Legacy

VASATURO Rev. Anthony J. Age 83, of Medfield, formerly of Boston, June 22, 2013, beloved son of the late Peter P. and Raffaela “Ruth” (DeMichele) Vasaturo. Loving brother of Peter P. Vasaturo and his wife Margaret of Medfield and Marie A. White and her husband James of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Also survived by several nephews and nieces. A Mass of Christian Burial will be concelebrated Friday, June 28th at 10:00AM at St. Edward the Confessor Church, 133 Spring St., Rt 27., Medfield. Burial will follow at Vine Lake Cemetery, Medfield.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on an article posted yesterday by Crux:

Margery Eagan has a long history of ripping the Catholic Church, but her latest salvo shows how utterly unhinged she has become. Her article, “The Church’s Sexual Abuse Crisis is Not Over,” is posted on Crux, a website that reports on Catholic news.

Eagan is delighted that the movie “Spotlight,” which opens Friday, will keep the scandal in the news. [For my analysis of this issue, click here.] She lobs many bombs, her biggest being, “This crisis is not over. Children are not yet safe.”

Her evidence? She offers one anecdote from the U.S. and a few from other countries. That’s it. That’s all she has. Never does she deal with the fact that in the last 10 years exactly 8.4 credible accusations were made against an average of 40,000 priests in any given year.

If this is evidence of a crisis, what would Eagan call it when over 100 Orthodox Jewish rabbis from one New York City borough—Brooklyn—have been brought up on child rape charges in recent years? What would she call it when public school teachers and coaches are regularly being arrested for molesting minors? To top it off, the rabbis instruct their people not to report these crimes to the police—they have their own courts! And molesting teachers are routinely assigned to administrative tasks for years before finally being dismissed; many keep their pensions.

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

By Chao Xiong Star Tribune NOVEMBER 4, 2015

A Ramsey County jury decided Wednesday that the Diocese of Duluth and a Catholic order of priests negligently supervised a predatory priest, leading to the sexual assault of a 15-year-old altar boy more than three decades ago.

The verdict, rendered after less than a day of deliberations, is the first for a trial under the Child Victims Act. The 2013 law has allowed older claims of child sex abuse previously barred by statutes of limitations to be aired in court.

Jurors began deliberating shortly after 4 p.m. Tuesday, and returned their verdicts about 2 p.m. Wednesday.

The jury of three women and three men found that the diocese was 60 percent responsible and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were 40 percent responsible for the negligent supervision of the Rev. James Vincent Fitzgerald. They found that that was a “direct cause” of his sexual abuse of a plaintiff named Doe 30.

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MINNESOTA
KARE

DULUTH, Minn. – In a historic move, a Ramsey County jury returned an $8.1 million verdict in a case of alleged sexual abuse by priests from the Diocese of Duluth.

The case is the first to be tried under the Minnesota Child Victims Act, a 2013 law that lifts the statutes of limitation for victims to file suit in decades-old abuse.

Fifty-two-year-old Bill Weis filed a lawsuit in 2014 claiming he was sexually abused for two weeks in the 1970s by Father J. Vincent Fitzgerald, a now-deceased priest from the Diocese of Duluth. The abuse happened at St. Catherine’s Church in Squaw Lake, Minn. — a parish of the Diocese.

The jury found the Diocese 60 percent at fault, while the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the religious order to which Fitzgerald belonged, was 40 percent at fault. The $8 million verdict was awarded for Weis’ pain, suffering, loss of earnings and medical suffering.

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MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

A Ramsey County jury Wednesday awarded more than $8 million to a survivor of clergy sex abuse in the first lawsuit to go to trial under Minnesota’s Child Victims Act. That law opened a three-year window to file claims for older incidents of abuse.

The 52-year-old plaintiff, identified as Doe 30, alleged he had been sexually abused by the Rev. James Vincent Fitzgerald at St. Catherine’s parish in Squaw Lake, Minn., in the late 1970s. The case centered on whether the Diocese of Duluth was negligent in how it supervised Fitzgerald, who died in 2009.

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MINNESOTA
Duluth News Tribune

By Tom Olsen

A St. Paul jury has ordered the Diocese of Duluth and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate to pay more than $8 million in damages to a man who said he was sexually abused by a priest in the 1970s.

The verdict was handed down Wednesday in Ramsey County District Court in a trial that lasted more than two weeks. It was believed to be the first case filed under the Minnesota Child Victims Act to go to trial.

The plaintiff, known in court documents as Doe 30, filed the suit in February 2014, claiming he was sexually abused by Father J. Vincent Fitzgerald in the 1970s.

Jurors found that the diocese was 60 percent at fault and the Oblates —the religious order to which Fitzgerald belonged — 40 percent at fault.

Fitzgerald at the time was assigned to St. Catherine’s Church in Squaw Lake, Minn., within the Duluth diocese. The suit states that he spent 12 weeks at a pastoral education program in Willmar, Minn., in 1976 and asked the alleged victim to return to Squaw Lake with him.

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WASHINGTON (DC)
The Jewish Week

Some Jewish women in Washington, D.C., who felt violated by the revelations a year ago that a prominent Orthodox rabbi had secretly videotaping undressed women in his synagogue’s mikveh, have taken a step to symbolically take possession of their own congregation’s mikveh, according to the Washington Jewish Week.

About five dozen members of Ohev Shalom – The National Synagogue, last week dedicated a Van Gogh-like mural that features images of water, moons, dancing women and the words of Isaiah [12:3] that “Joyfully shall you draw water from the fountains of redemption.”

The artwork, spearheaded by local artrist Rena Fruchter, was designed “to put the pieces back together” after Rabbi Barry Freundel, longtime spiritual leader of Kesher Israel, pleaded guilty to voyeurism and was sentenced in May to six years in prison.

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ILLINOIS
DNA Info

By Linze Rice | November 4, 2015

WEST RIDGE — The taboo of child sexual abuse spans cultures across the world, but some Orthodox Jewish leaders say it’s particularly difficult for victims of abuse to speak up and seek justice in their tight-knit community.

On Sunday, Nov. 8, some of those leaders will come together in West Ridge to lead a panel discussion on the topic at Congregation Ezras Israel, 7001 N. California Ave., in an event organized by the Decalogue Society of Lawyers.

“The greatest nightmare of any parent, family or community is harm caused to our children,” said Mitchell Goldberg, second vice president of the lawyer society and chair of the event. “It is important for all of us to unite in protecting our most valuable and vulnerable population, our children, from those who would abuse them — including within our own communities. Ignoring the danger is not an option.”

Goldberg thanked the panelists and local Jewish groups, as well as the Cook County State’s Attorney and Chicago Police Department, for their work in “educating the broader Jewish community about the dangers of Child Sexual Abuse and the tools and services available to help victims and their families.”

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UNITED STATES
Los Angeles Daily News

By Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News
POSTED: 11/04/15

A story about a great job of journalism has been turned into a movie that may be the most journalistically scrupulous ever made.

“Spotlight” recounts the Boston Globe’s eponymous investigative reporting team’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the local Catholic Archdiocese’s cover-up of what turned out to be a systemic pedophile priest scandal. The resulting 2002 series of some 600 articles revealed that more than 70 priests had been protected by the church, and triggered revelations of similar abuse by priests in 105 American cities and 102 dioceses throughout the world.

Director Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “The Visitor”) and his co-writer Josh Singer (“The Fifth Estate,” TV’s “The West Wing”) spent months in Boston doing detailed research to create a screenplay and subsequent movie that feels infused with authentic detail about the investigation.

The movie’s Spotlight team is played by Michael Keaton as editor Walter Robinson, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo as reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Michael Rezendes, and Brian d’Arcy James as researcher Matt Carroll. Liev Schreiber is the Globe’s new executive editor Marty Baron, who came from the Miami Herald and on his first day in the newsroom requested Spotlight dig into the story of a single Boston priest, which grew into the much bigger effort.

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MINNESOTA
Jeff Anderson & Associates

News Release

November 4, 2015

Diocese of Duluth Negligent in Supervising Predator Priest

(St. Paul, MN) – A Ramsey County jury handed down an $8.1 million verdict against the Diocese of Duluth today in a sexual abuse case involving Father J. Vincent Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald sexually abused Plaintiff William Weis in 1978 at St. Catherine’s Church in Squaw Lake, MN, a parish in the Diocese of Duluth.

The jury attributed 60% fault to the Diocese of Duluth and 40% to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a religious order based in St. Paul, MN. Father Fitzgerald was an Oblate priest working in the Diocese of Duluth when he sexually abused Weis. Weis met Fitzgerald at St. Thomas More Church in Lake Lillian, MN, and Fitzgerald subsequently brought Weis to St. Catherine’s in the Diocese of Duluth where he molested him for a period of two weeks.

“It’s an important day for all clergy abuse survivors,” said Attorney Jeff Anderson. “This verdict sends a message and a wake-up call to all communities and organizations, near and far, that the most important thing is the safety of our children. Today, a truth was revealed and justice was served.”

Contact Jeff Anderson: Office/651.227.9990 Cell/612.817.8665
Contact Mike Finnegan: Office/651.227.9990 Cell/612.205.5531

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CALIFORNIA
San Diego 6

The Well-Armored Child Author Joelle Casteix on how to protect your children from sexual child abuse.

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UNITED STATES
The Worthy Adversary

posted by Joelle Casteix on November 3, 2015

The next time someone tells you that “Pope Francis is different” when it comes to child sexual abuse, invite that person to think about this:

If you steal a few Vatican documents and expose corruption, you WILL go to Vatican jail.
From today’s LA Times

The books, both by Italian journalists, are based on leaks from the Vatican and follow the arrests over the weekend of a Spanish priest and an Italian public relations consultant suspected of supplying the authors with stolen documents.

Father Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, 54, remains in jail at the Vatican, but consultant Francesca Chaouqui, 33, was released after her arrest by Vatican police.

BUT – If you sexually abuse children or cover up abuse, you will NOT go to the Vatican hoosegow. But the Vatican will put aside money to “accelerate things.”

From The New York Times, June 10, 2015

Father Lombardi said the tribunal would also examine some of the abuse cases perpetrated by clergy members that were “still pending” at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. “They are still very numerous and have accumulated,” he said. The tribunal will “accelerate” matters, he said, noting that money had been set aside to bolster the new section.

If Francis truly wanted to punish child sex abusers or their enablers, he would. But he won’t.

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ROME
Politico

By SILVIA MARCHETTI 11/4/15

The Holy See is about to be rocked by a second “Vatileaks” scandal.

The publication of two books Thursday — “Via Crucis” by Gianluigi Nuzzi and “Avarizia” by Emiliano Fittipaldi — promises to expose new evidence of fraud and misdoings in the Oltretevere, as Romans call St. Peter’s kingdom beyond the Tiber River.

The books appear to be linked to this week’s arrests by Vatican police of Spanish clergyman Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, secretary of a special commission set up by Pope Francis to examine the Vatican’s finances — known by its acronym COSEA — and Francesca Chaouqui, an Italian PR woman who was dubbed the “social media guru”of the Holy See.

They are suspected of leaking to journalists classified Vatican documents, including recordings of private conversations of the Pope, spiritual leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics, and information about Vatican finances.

Chaouqui, who collaborated with investigators, has been released, while the cleric remains in custody. Both face up to eight years in jail.

“Via Crucis” was written by a reporter who was involved in the first “Vatileaks” scandal in 2012 that cast a shadow over the papacy of Joseph Ratzinger, who as Pope Benedict took the historically unprecedented step of resigning in 2013.

In his book, Nuzzi highlights the internal fight being waged by Benedict’s Argentine successor Francis, who was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, against excessive Church spending.

“Expenditures are out of control … there are traps. If we can’t keep under control the money, which is visible, then how can we look after the souls of the faithful, which are invisible?” he quotes Bergoglio as saying in a moment of private distress.

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ROME
Huffington Post

Sébastien Maillard
Vatican Correspondant for La Croix, Rome

“Following Francis” is a monthly blog on the latest happenings of Pope Francis. It is prepared exclusively for The WorldPost by Sébastien Maillard, Vatican correspondent for La Croix, Rome.

ROME — On Oct. 14, Pope Francis started his weekly catechesis in St. Peter’s Square with an unusual declaration: “I would like, before beginning the catechesis, on behalf of the Church, to ask for your forgiveness for the scandals that have happened in recent times both in Rome and in the Vatican.”

He did not specify what he was referring to. But, in fact, these past weeks have been jeopardized by scandals of all kinds, as never witnessed since the beginning of his pontificate in March 2013.

The latest and biggest scandal yet is called “Vatileaks 2.” On Nov. 5, two books will be published by Italian investigative journalists: “Merchants in the Temple” and “Avarice.” Both publications focus on mismanagement of and resistance to the pope’s financial reforms in the Holy See. Before the books reached the bookshelves, a high-ranking monsignor and a laywoman were arrested by the Vatican on suspicion of leaking internal information, including secret recordings of meetings, to the books’ authors. One of them, Gianluigi Nuzzi, led the first “Vatileaks” affair under Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.

The laywoman suspected by the Vatican to have leaked the documents, Francesca Chaouqui, denies her involvement: “I put the Pope before all else.”

She and the monsignor had been appointed by Pope Francis in July 2013 on a committee set up to reform the financial structures of the Roman Curia. Throughout his book, Gianluigi Nuzzi claims to side with the pope and the lay experts who assist him in cleaning up the financial mess in the Vatican’s management.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on disparate treatment of priests:

The media are pushing “Spotlight,” the movie that opens on Friday about the Boston Globe team that exposed priestly sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese prior to 2002. But there is little interest in this issue when non-Catholics are implicated in such crimes. As recent cases show, many courts around the nation evince disparate treatment as well.

When he was first arrested, Rabbi Gabriel Bodenheimer was charged with three felony counts of a first-degree criminal sexual act and one count of first-degree sex abuse for alleged oral and anal sex with a 5-year-old child; he was looking at 25 years in prison. On Monday he was told that he would not serve a single day in prison: he was put on probation for three years. This story was not only ignored by the big media outlets, it received no coverage in the New York Times, even though the child rape took place in a New York City suburb.

In May 2014, Michael Travis, an assistant softball coach at a Nebraska high school was arrested for sexually assaulting two softball players; two more alleged victims came forward in December. This past August he cut a deal with prosecutors: he pleaded guilty to simple assault and was told he would not have to register as a sex offender or spend a day in jail. It received little media coverage.

Last June, Terrence Boone Johnson, a track coach from Utah was arrested for forcible sexual abuse of a teenage girl; it was a second-degree felony. A few weeks ago his one-year jail sentence was suspended and he was put on probation. The media were generally disinterested.

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UNITED STATES
America Magazine

Nov 4 2015 – 9:08am | Maurice Timothy Reidy

‘Spotlight’ revisits the investigation of sexual abuse.

In a revealing moment in Spotlight, the expertly crafted new film about the Boston Globe’s investigation into the clerical sexual abuse scandal, the lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) offers a damning analysis of the unfolding crisis. “Mark my words, Mr. Rezendes,” he tells Globe reporter Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo). “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

Much will be written about “Spotlight” in the months to come. It is already being talked about as a formidable contender for Best Picture of the year. It is also sure to start new debates about what policies led to the widespread abuse of children by priests in Boston and around the world. Some people may feel Tom McCarthy, the writer and director, does not capture every nuance of this tragic and complicated story. But these questions should not distract from his great achievement: “Spotlight” is, at once, a detective story, a love letter to journalism and a sensitive exploration of the ravages of sexual abuse upon an entire community. Catholics who have lived with this scandal for decades will again be scalded by its horrors. And this Catholic, at least, emerged from the film wondering why it took so long to do something about it.

The village at the heart of “Spotlight” is, of course, Boston, the big city that still feels like a small town, ruled for decades by Irish Catholics. McCarthy immerses the viewer in the heart of Catholic Boston, from the palatial residence of Cardinal Bernard Law to the Catholic Charities dinners that sustain the church’s many charitable works. The Globe lives in the shadow of this world, with many editors and writers who still call themselves Catholic in one way or another.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service

By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service
11.4.2015

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Financial wrongdoing at the Vatican, leaked documents and arrests by the Vatican police may make it seem like 2012 all over again, but the situation — while serious — is not the breach of papal privacy that the earlier “VatiLeaks” scandal was.

Gianluigi Nuzzi, the Italian journalist who published documents stolen from Pope Benedict XVI’s private office by his butler, has a new book out based on more leaked documents. “Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’s Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican,” was scheduled for release in English Nov. 5.

Another book, Emiliano Fittipaldi’s “Avarizia” (“Greed”), also is focused on Vatican finances and was scheduled for publication the same day in Italian.

Nuzzi’s book is based largely on confidential documents given to and reports written by members of a temporary commission Pope Francis established in July 2013 — less than four months after his election — to clean up the Vatican’s financial chaos, control costs and eliminate the possibilities for misusing funds. In addition, Nuzzi has what he claims are recordings of Pope Francis discussing the lack of fiscal responsibility and transparency at the Vatican, but he does not claim to have private papal documents like he did in 2012.

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VATICAN CITY
Crux

By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor November 4, 2015

At first blush, the release of two keenly anticipated books promising bombshell revelations about Vatican financial scandals would seem to represent something of a “Casablanca” moment. That is, they seem likely to elicit pro forma professions of shock over things which, for the most part, everyone already knew.

For instance, Gianluigi Nuzzi’s book “Via Crucis” (in English, “Merchants in the Temple”) describes how cardinals live in elegant and spacious quarters, often at zero cost, and that in general Vatican-owned apartments often bring in substantially below-market rents because residents have been cut sweetheart deals.

Meanwhile, Emiliano Fittipaldi’s book “Avarizia” details how commercial operations inside the Vatican walls – a gas station, pharmacy, tobacco shop, and supermarket – generate tens of millions of euro in income by selling products at discounted prices due to tax exemptions.

In theory, those services are reserved to Vatican personnel, but Fittipaldi uses reports from the Government of the Vatican City State to prove that the numbers tell a different story.

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VATICAN CITY
Fox News

AP

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican spokesman has sought to play down a pair of books recounting financial malfeasance and greed within the Vatican, saying many of the disclosures were already known.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi also emphasized Wednesday that the illegally leaked documents that provided information for the books were the result of “data and information put in motion by the Holy Father himself” as part of efforts his efforts to reform the Vatican bureaucracy and finances.

Lombardi said in comments for Vatican Radio that the publication of “a large bulk of information” that referred to events that by now were “outdated” created an impression of “a permanent reign of confusion, of non-transparency and even the pursuit of individual interests” that runs counter to Pope Francis’ efforts to reform the Vatican.

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IDAHO
CDA Press

Posted: Tuesday, November 3, 2015

DAVID COLE/Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — The Southern Poverty Law Center said the Immaculate Conception Church in Post Falls is part of a breakaway and anti-Semitic sect of Catholic church called the Society of Saint Pius X.

The Immaculate Conception Church, at 614 E. Fifth Ave., was where alleged child rapist Kevin G. Sloniker served as a youth camp counselor. Sloniker, 30, of Coeur d’Alene, is a long-haul truck driver, and some of the alleged abuse took place when boys traveled with him.
Court documents said Sloniker met and befriended some boys through the youth camps.
Bill Morlin, a renowned investigative reporter based in Spokane, wrote in a blog post on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website on Oct. 30 that said Sloniker was “affiliated with a hard-core, anti-Semitic church.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, headquartered in Montgomery, Ala., is dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry. One of its founders, Morris Dees, successfully battled the Aryan Nations.

The Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, “was formed in a 1970 breakaway from the Roman Catholic Church over reforms instituted when the Second Vatican Council condemned ‘all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews,'” Morlin wrote. “SSPX leaders contend the reforms were the result of a ‘Masonic plot backed by the Jews.’

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MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

By Nick Woltman
nwoltman@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 11/04/2015

The Minnesota Historical Society has agreed to purchase the Msgr. Ambrose Hayden Center from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis for $4.5 million.

The historical society plans to use the 60,000-square-foot building, which is across the street from the Minnesota History Center on Kellogg Boulevard, for offices, meeting space and storage, the organization said Wednesday in a news release.

The building’s 129-space parking lot was a major selling point — the History Center’s parking lot overflowed at 52 separate events during the past year.

“We see the purchase of this property as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” historical society Director Steve Elliott said in the news release. “The unique location next to the History Center and near the James J. Hill House will help us address parking, space and storage issues.”

The purchase agreement includes a 12-month lease-back provision that will allow the archdiocese to continue to use to building while the historical society finalizes its move-in plans.

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VATICAAN
KerkNet

BRUSSEL (KerkNet/I.Media) – Italiaanse kranten berichten in het vooruitzicht van de publicatie van de boeken van de journalisten Gianluigi Nuzzi en Emiliano Fittipaldi (het boek ‘Hebzucht’) uitvoerig over mogelijk financieel wanbeheer, zowel bij de Heilige Stoel als in Vaticaanstad. Beiden zouden hun boek zonder medeweten van elkaar geschreven hebben. Vandaag woensdag stelt Gianluigi Nuzzi, die eerder al aan de basis lag van ‘Vatileaks’, zijn nieuwe boek ‘Via Crucis’ (Kruisweg) voor. Sleutelfiguur in de hele zaak is de Spaanse Opus Dei-priester Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, die aan het hoofd stond van de commissie die door paus Franciscus belast was met de financiële hervormingen en die besloot een reeks documenten openbaar te maken toen hij aan de kant werd geschoven. De persdienst van het Vaticaan reageerde maandag al erg afwijzend op de publicaties, omdat die slechts een tendentieus en onvolledig beeld geven van het financiële beheer tot aan de hervorming van paus Franciscus. Vandaag zei pater Lombardi, de verantwoordelijke van de persdienst van het Vaticaan, dat de meeste informatie in de boeken door de hervorming van paus Franciscus al lang achterhaald is.

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VATICAAN
KerkNet (Belgie)

BRUSSEL (KerkNet/Rai/Aggi) – De Italiaanse journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, die ook al aan de basis lag van ‘Vatileaks I’, stelt met enige overdrijving dat paus Franciscus, die in bescheiden vertrekken van 50 vierkante meter in het gastenhuis van Santa Marta leeft, de enige is die echt wil veranderen. Meerdere hooggeplaatste prelaten wonen in appartementen van 400 tot 500 vierkante meter en weigeren die kost wat kost te verlaten. Nuzzi geeft in zijn nieuwe boek onder meer een overzicht van de ruimte van de appartementen van deze prelaten en huurgelden, tot 10.000 euro per maand, in de buurt van de Spaanse Trappen in Rome. Hij getuigt ook over spionage (ook van de paus), intriges en initiatieven om in het bijzonder ook de paus in diskrediet te brengen.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By JOANNE McCARTHY Nov. 4, 2015

MAITLAND Newcastle Catholic Bishop Bill Wright has strongly backed Federal Government involvement in a national redress scheme for victims of child sexual abuse in institutions.

‘‘It is a great national concern that we get this right, for the sake of all who were abused as children in Australian institutions,’’ Bishop Wright said on Wednesday after a Turnbull Government undertaking to carefully consider the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommendation for a national scheme.

The NSW Government and the federal opposition have already backed the scheme, where institutions in which abuse occurred would provide billions of dollars to support and compensate victims.

‘‘The involvement of the federal government, however, would be to ensure that victims receive fair and equal treatment, regardless of which state jurisdiction they live in or which institution was responsible when the abuse occurred,’’ Bishop Wright said.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

November 5, 2015

Nick Toscano

Australia’s landmark child sex abuse inquiry has provided for the first time a profile of the most commonly reported instances of abuse from private interviews with thousands of survivors.

In a speech on Thursday, chairman of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Justice Peter McClellan, will outline a statistical overview of the disturbing experiences of almost 2800 sex abuse victims collected so far.

The commission’s analysis reveals the average age of abuse was 10 for males, and nine for females, while the most common decade in which abuse occurred was the 1960s (28 per cent) closely followed by the 1970s (23 per cent).

It also found that just under half of the reported abuse occurred in out-of-home care, including orphanages, children’s homes and foster care.

About 60 per cent of institutions where abuse occurred were faith-based organisations and 23 per cent were government-run.

Half of the abuse involved penetration and about two-thirds fondling. On average, child abuse spanned a period of 2.8 years.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 4 November 2015 (VIS) – The following is the full text of the response given by Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., director of the Holy See Press Office, to questions from journalists regarding the investigations currently underway in Vatican City.

“The Office of the Promoter of Justice of Vatican City State Tribunal, following a report from the Financial Intelligence Authority, initiated investigations in February 2015 regarding operations of the purchase and sale of bonds and transactions attributable to Gianpietro Nattino.

The same Office has requested the collaboration of the Italian and Swiss judicial authorities by letters rogatory sent via diplomatic channels on 7 August 2015”.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 4 November 2015 (VIS) – The new executive board of the Foundation for the Holy See “Bambino Gesu” Paediatric Hospital met this morning for the first time following the appointment of the new executives by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin. During the meeting, held in Rome, the board approved the new statutes of the “completely renovated” foundation, which aim “to guarantee transparency, solidarity and innovation”, according to the president Mariella Enoc.

There are seven new counsellors: the president Enoc, Pietro Brunetti, Ferruccio De Bortoli, Maria Bianca Farina, Caterina Sansone, Anna Maria Tarantola and Antonio Zanardi Landi.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 4 November 2015 (VIS) – The following are reflections by Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., director of the Holy See Press Office, regarding a new chapter in discussions on the economic matters of the Holy See.

“As is known, a significant part of what has been published is the result of the disclosure of reserved information and documents, and therefore of an illicit activity that must therefore be prosecuted forthwith by the competent Vatican authorities. But this is not what we now wish to speak about, given that it is already the object of much attention.

Now, instead, we are interested in considering the content of the disclosures. It can be said that it consists mostly of information that is already known, although often less widely and with less detail, but above all it must be noted that the documentation published relates mostly to an significant effort to gather data and information, initiated by the Holy Father himself in order to carry out a study and reflection on the reform and improvement of the administrative situation of Vatican City State and the Holy See.

The COSEA (Commission for Reference on the Organisation of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See), from whose archive the majority of the published information originates, was instituted by the Pope for the purpose on 18 July 2013 and then dissolved after the fulfilment of its task.

This is not, therefore, information obtained against the will of the Pope or of the heads of the various institutions, but generally information obtained or provided with the collaboration of these same institutions, for a common positive purpose.

Naturally, a great deal of information of this type must be studied, understood and interpreted with care, equilibrium and attention. Often the same data can give rise to different readings.

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (UK)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Wednesday 4 November 2015

Chaos, greed, and financial mismanagement. The Vatican has been rocked by yet another scandal, and it is one that has painted the bureaucracy at the heart of the Catholic church as an institution dead-set against Pope Francis’s reform efforts – in large part because some officials have been free to use the church’s coffers as their own personal piggybank.

From stories of cardinals living in luxury apartments and the questionable use of charitable funds to a complete lack of transparency into how tens of millions of euros are spent within important Vatican offices, two books published this week have sought to shine a bright light on the church’s murky finances.

Although the accounts are based on confidential documents – allegedly leaked by two Vatican insiders sincearrested – the authors of the two books, journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, insist they are trying to help the pope in his mission of cleaning up the church. The Vatican has so far refused to comment on the accuracy of the allegations and said the books were the “fruits of a grave betrayal of the trust given by the pope”.

Vatican finances

Early in his papacy, in 2013, Pope Francis was offered a shocking assessment of Vatican finances. A never-before-seen letter to the pope by auditors who were concerned about the management of the Vatican’s vast financial assets described “a complete lack of transparency in the book-keeping … [that] makes it impossible to provide a clear estimate of the actual financial status of the Vatican”. The letter added: “We only know that the data examined show a truly downward trend and we strongly suspect that the Vatican as a whole has a serious structural deficit.”

After sharing the assessment with a meeting of cardinals, the pope issued a 16-minute indictment that was described as harsher than any that had been expressed by a pontiff to an assembled group of cardinals. In the “scathing, even humiliating” dressing-down, the pope told the cardinals present that he would not tolerate improper financial payments. “An official told me, ‘But they come with a bill and we have to pay …’. No, we don’t pay. If something is done without a tender, without authorisation, it doesn’t get paid,” the pope said, according to a transcript in Nuzzi’s book of a secret recording of the meeting.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Amnesty International

Amnesty International has welcomed an announcement by Northern Ireland’s Historic Institutional Abuse inquiry that it will investigate allegations of abuse at six additional institutions, including a number of Mother and Baby Homes.

Chair of the Inquiry, Sir Anthony Hart, said the Inquiry will investigate Manor House near Lisburn, Millisle Borstal, St Joseph’s Training School for Girls in Middletown, Co Armagh, and three Good Shepherd convents in Derry/Londonderry, Belfast and Newry. It brings the total number of institutions being investigated to 22.

Amnesty has campaigned alongside child abuse victims and women and children from the Mother and Baby Homes for an investigation into allegations of sexual, physical and mental abuse as well as the forced adoption of babies born in the institutions.

Patrick Corrigan, Northern Ireland Programme Director of Amnesty International, said:

“The inclusion of the Mother and Baby Homes and the other children’s institutions in the Abuse Inquiry is very welcome news. Victims of abuse, including those young women and girls who suffered in Mother and Baby Homes, are now a step closer to uncovering publicly the truth of what happened to them and their babies.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry

On Wednesday 4 November 2015, the Chairman of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, Sir Anthony Hart, made a statement reviewing the Inquiry’s progress to date and outlining the Inquiry’s plans for the remainder of its work.

In his statement the Chairman provided a final list of the institutions that the Inquiry will be examining through oral hearings. Although it adds some new names to the original list announced in September 2013 he confirmed that this will not change the Inquiry’s timetable and that hearings will still be completed by mid-July 2016 and the report delivered in January 2017.

Under the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, the report must contain a recommendation on “the requirement or desirability for redress to be provided by the institution and/or the Executive to meet the particular needs of victims”.

From the beginning of the Inquiry, therefore, we have been giving considerable attention to the subject of redress and indeed have asked all those who have given evidence in Banbridge for their views on the matter.

However we realise that those who have given evidence may on reflection have further suggestions or comments and that not all applicants to the Inquiry will have an opportunity to give oral evidence, either because the institution they attended will not be the subject of oral hearings or because they chose to speak to the Acknowledgement Forum only.

We have decided therefore to send a short questionnaire to every applicant to the Inquiry. A copy is also available on the Inquiry’s website and may be downloaded by any applicant. It will only take a few minutes to complete and we hope that every applicant will respond as soon as possible by returning a completed questionnaire. The closing date for the return of questionnaires is Friday 8 January 2016.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
BBC News

A further six institutions are to be investigated by the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA), its chairman has announced.

Sir Anthony Hart said their inclusion would bring the total number to 22.

He stressed that the inquiry, which has held 157 days of oral hearings, will still complete its work by July 2016.

The HIA was set up in 2013 to investigate child abuse in residential institutions in Northern Ireland over a 73-year period, up to 1995.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Irish Times

Gerry Moriarty

Wed, Nov 4, 2015

The North’s Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry is to investigate a further six institutions, bringing the total number to 22, the inquiry chairman Sir Anthony Hart has announced.
The inquiry also wants victims of abuse to be properly compensated, he said.

Sir Anthony, a retired Belfast High Court judge, said despite the additional investigations that the inquiry would complete its work by July next year and submit its report in January 2017. Last year the Northern Executive gave the inquiry an extra year to complete its work.

In drawing up the list of six additional institutions, Sir Anthony said the inquiry had carefully considered information in respect of 54 homes and institutions in relation to which at least one person had made an allegation.

“We recognise that there may be a number of people who will be disappointed that we are not going to hold public hearings into every home or institution against which allegations have been made, but, as we have explained, we are satisfied that to extend the Inquiry for at least another two years at a cost of at least £8 million to the taxpayer would not be justified because it would not add to our understanding of the nature and extent of systemic abuse of children in homes and institutions,” he added.

The inquiry has been running since January last year and Wednesday is its 157th sitting.
The additional institutions to be included are: Manor House, a Church of Ireland children’s home near Lisburn, Co Antrim; Millisle Borstal in Co Down; St Joseph’s Catholic training school for girls at Middletown, Co Armagh; and three Good Shepherd Catholic convents in Derry, Belfast and Newry.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

An inquiry into historical institutional child abuse in Northern Ireland will recommend that victims are paid compensation for the trauma they endured, its chairman has said.

Retired judge Sir Anthony Hart is leading what is one of the UK’s largest inquiries into physical, sexual and emotional harm to children at homes run by the church, state and voluntary organisations.

The inquiry was formally established in January 2013 by the Northern Ireland Executive to investigate child abuse which occurred in residential institutions over a 73-year period from 1922 to 1995.

While the inquiry’s investigative work is not scheduled to finish until next summer, with a report due to be submitted to Stormont ministers the following year, Sir Anthony said he was already in a position to recommend compensation.

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ROME
Buenos Aires Herald

ROME — The scale of the challenge facing Pope Francis as he struggles to overhaul the Vatican’s finances will be laid bare today by the publication of confidential documents and private recordings of his meetings.

Two new books, released in Italy and other countries today, will highlight the secrecy, mismanagement and huge wealth at the heart of the scandal-ridden Catholic Church. They depict a Vatican plagued by mismanagement, greed, cronyism and corruption. One of the books even quotes a secretly recorded conversation involving the pontiff.

“Without exaggerating, we can say that a good part of the costs are out of control,” Pope Francis says in the recording, according to Merchants in the Temple, by Gianluigi Nuzzi.

The author writes of irregularities in the funding of causes to declare saints in the Roman Catholic Church, the purported diverting of funds intended for the poor to plug administrative deficits and the lavish lifestyle of some cardinals.

Interestingly, Nuzzi also comments on the resistance to Francis’ desired reforms, saying the Argentine pontiff often encounters “entrenched and tenacious resistance” to his agenda.

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BOSTON (MA)
WBUR

WRITTEN BY
Joyce Kulhawik

PUBLISHED
November 4, 2015

The scandal broke on Jan. 6, 2002, the Feast of the Epiphany — and what a revelation.

On that Sunday, The Boston Globe Spotlight team released the first in a series of articles that would earn them a Pulitzer Prize and cast light on a story that had been festering in the dark corners of Catholic parishes around Massachusetts for decades: Priests had been molesting children while church officials knew and did nothing to stop it. In fact, the church hierarchy enabled the offenders to have access to more and more victims by hiding the perpetrators’ crimes and shifting them from parish to parish where they could continue “preying upon” instead of “praying for” the families who relied on them most for spiritual help.

The new film “Spotlight” is a killer exposé, a multifaceted, lucid and deeply potent account of what it took for the Globe’s investigative unit to uncover the sex abuse scandal that would culminate in Cardinal Bernard F. Law’s resignation and rock the very foundations of the Catholic Church. It is also a study in communal blindness, willful and accidental. Most important of all, the film is not only gripping but also steadfastly accurate — and we here in Boston would know.

The film was shot on location and many of the key players are still very much around: Boston Globe reporters Mike Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll (now at MIT’s Media Lab) and Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson. Former editor Marty Baron is now at The Washington Post. They must all love their casting here.

Director Tom McCarthy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer, worked closely with the key Globe players to keep it honest, and so the movie begins where it should — at ground zero, with the victims, and never loses sight of them.

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VATICAN CITY
7 News

Vatican City (AFP) – Italian public relations expert Francesca Chaouqui, arrested for allegedly stealing confidential documents from the Vatican, said Wednesday it was her co-accused, a Spanish priest, who secretly recorded the pope’s conversations.

Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, who was also arrested on the weekend, is currently languishing in a Vatican jail, while Chaouqui was released Monday after cooperating with authorities on a case that has embarrassed the Church.

“It was Balda who recorded Pope Francis, I didn’t know anything about it,” the 33-year-old said in an interview published in La Repubblica on Wednesday in which she distanced herself completely from her former friend.

And she said she was not the only one who knew Vallejo Balda, 54, had been recording the pope without his knowledge.

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ROME
CBS – This Morning

NOVEMBER 4, 2015, 7:10 AM|“Merchants in the Temple” author Gianluigi Nuzzi is defending his explosive allegations against the Vatican. His new book accuses powerful members of the church hierarchy of greed and financial mismanagement, saying they are fighting reform efforts by Pope Francis. Elizabeth Palmer reports from Rome, where she sat down with the man behind the charges.

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VATICAN CITY
NDTV

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis is determined to forge ahead with his reform of the Catholic Church despite an embarrassing leak scandal which risks undermining his clean-up bid, according to the pontiff’s chief of staff.

“I have just seen the pope. His words were: onwards with serenity and determination,” Substitute for General Affairs Giovanni Angelo Becciu, whose role is akin to a chief of staff and who sees Francis daily, said Tuesday on Twitter.

Nunzio Galantino, head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, told TV2000 the pope must be feeling betrayed by an affair which lead to the arrest this weekend of two suspected moles for allegedly leaking confidential documents to journalists revealing gross financial mismanagement at the Vatican, including using charity funds to refurbish cardinals’ homes.

Francis was tasked by his cardinal electors to stamp his authority on the bickering Curia, the Church’s governing body, and clean up the Vatican bank but the fresh leaks looked set to fuel criticisms of his reform programme.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KCTV

By Chris Oberholtz, Multimedia Producer
chris.oberholtz@kctv5.com
By Brandon Richard, News Reporter

[with video]

KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) –
The Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph gets a new bishop on Wednesday.

Pope Francis appointed Bishop James V. Johnston Jr., 55, as the new leader in September. He had previously been the leader of the Springfield-Cape Girardeau Diocese since 2008.

The selection comes five months after former Bishop Robert Finn resigned after he was found guilty in 2012 of failure to report suspected child sex abuse and was sentenced to two years of probation. He is the highest-ranking church official in the United States to be convicted of not taking action in response to abuse allegations.

An Installation Mass will be held at 2 p.m. There, Johnston will knock three times on the door of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City where he will be greeted by the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Missouri region, Most Rev. Robert Carlson of St. Louis. …

Some groups, like the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, are concerned about Johnston. They say looking at his record, he has done little for sex abuse victims. They hope it’ll be a different story here.

Those who knew him as the bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau say he has demonstrated he is willing to do what it takes to help people.

“He and his two friends were hiking in National Glacier Park and saved a family from plunging over a waterfall. I think just speaks to the kind of person that he is. He has quite courage, and he has great courage when necessary,” said Leslie Eidson, director of communications, media and publications for the diocese in Springfield.

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SPAIN
Christian Today

[en espanol – El Pais]

Ruth Gledhill CHRISTIAN TODAY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
04 November 2015

“I have been a labor slave and a sexual slave for a group of depraved people, who were protected by Church officials,” an alleged victim of child sex abuse, now aged 36, has written in a letter to the Pope. “In the three years I spent at the mission in Nariokotome, in Kenya, I was treated like a beast of burden. There were around 30 people, and on top of the slave work there was the sexual slavery. They would tell us that an active sexual life is something that God wants, and that He also wants us to go around naked, because that is the way He made us. Help me, Francis. Soothe my broken soul a little. Don’t let other youths endure this hell.”

The distressing testimony of Paulino, a former member of a Barcelona Catholic religious group, The Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle and of Mary (MCSPA), has been published this week by the Spanish newspaper El País.

El País says Paulino’s seven-page letter is significant because it appears to have reached Pope Francis. The Vatican is understood now to be looking into this and other complaints about the group.

Dominick Kimengich, the bishop who issued the licence that allowed MCSPA to operate in Kenya, wrote to El País: “I am aware of several accusations that were put to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and to the Pontifical Council for the Laity, but they seem to involve events that were investigated in 2006.”

The group was founded in Spain by Francisco Andreo, who died of cancer two years ago, and others.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Crawley and Horley Observer

A Sussex school is considering changing its name because the senior clergyman it was named after was revealed as a paedophile who sexually abused a young child.

Eastbourne’s Bishop Bell was named after George Bell, the late bishop of Chichester, who died 57 years ago.

Last month it was revealed the Church of England issued a formal apology for sexual abuse committed by Bell against a young child, whose identity and gender has not been disclosed, in the 1940s and 50s.

The survivor first came forward 20 years ago, but the matter was not investigated or referred to police at the time.

The church settled the claim at the end of September and on Thursday released a letter from the serving bishop of Chichester, Martin Warner, to the survivor expressing “deep sorrow” and apologising for a “devastating betrayal of trust”.

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NEW YORK
National Catholic Reporter

Retta Blaney | Nov. 4, 2015

NEW YORK
Like many people, actor Brian d’Arcy James was aware of news coverage of sexual abuse by clergy in the Boston archdiocese 15 years ago, but he didn’t follow it closely. He had no way of knowing those events would one day be part of his life.

“It was on my radar,” he said. “I received information wholesale and processed it as best could.”

It wasn’t until he read the script for “Spotlight,” the new film based on The Boston Globe’s four-member investigative team that pursued and broke the story, that he understood its magnitude. “For me, it was an education in terms of the size and scope, and the ramifications of the reporting,” he said.

He saw the coverage as “a beacon of sorts” coming as it did from a reputable news source. “People who perhaps had not been heard or believed prior to that could say, ‘This is my story.’ ”

James, 47, discussed the film in his dressing room at Broadway’s St. James Theatre, where he is starring in the zany hit musical “Something Rotten!” A practicing Catholic, James said portraying Matt Carroll, one of the Globe reporters, helped him see the cover-up as “an institutional problem with significant and widespread consequences,” but said he still finds spiritual comfort in Catholicism.

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SPAIN
El Pais

JUAN G. BEDOYA Madrid 4 NOV 2015

“Publish it.” The two words were an entreat (or perhaps an order) made by Pope Francis to the theologian José Manuel Vidal, when the latter handed him a folder containing information about alleged sexual abuses at an organization of religious and lay people created in Barcelona.

The Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle and of Mary, Mother of the Church (MCSPA in its English acronym) has since extended to other countries in Africa and Latin America, where the association carries out significant development work besides its religious outreach.

The founders of MCSPA had already been reprimanded by the Archbishop of Barcelona in 1995.

But now, new testimony in the hands of the pope seems to confirm the existence of widespread sexual abuse within the group.

“I have been a labor slave and a sexual slave for a group of depraved people, who were protected by Church officials,” writes one of the alleged victims, now 36, in his letter to the pope.

“In the three years I spent at the mission in Nariokotome, in Kenya, I was treated like a beast of burden. There were around 30 people, and on top of the slave work there was the sexual slavery. They would tell us that an active sexual life is something that God wants, and that He also wants us to go around naked, because that is the way He made us. Help me, Francis. Soothe my broken soul a little. Don’t let other youths endure this hell.”

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BOSTON (MA)
WGBH News

[with video]

Last week, we brought you three of the reporters portrayed in the movie ‘Spotlight,’ all part of the Spotlight Team which brought this scandal to light. But there were others, too, without whom those stories might not have been written.

Mitchell Garabedian, the attorney who represented many survivors in this sordid tale.

And Phil Saviano (@PhilipSaviano), a survivor himself and founder of the New England chapter of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a group with which he’s still very much involved.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

November 4, 2015

Jorge Branco

A victim of a paedophile at Brisbane Grammar School has accused the serving chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees of repeatedly lying to a royal commission.

He told child sex abuse royal commission hearings in Brisbane of a “culture of covering up anything” that would tarnish the school’s reputation when he was abused in the early ’80s.

The man, known only as BQA, said he and his mother had met with chairman Howard Stack twice roughly a year before fellow victim Nigel Parodi shot three police officers in Chermside.

In the second of those meetings, about the late ’90s, he said Mr Stack was not helpful at all and kept stating his job was to protect the “fabric of the school and the boys who were attending now”.

The witness also accused the police at the time of failing to investigate the “cover-up” of Lynch’s crimes after he committed suicide in 1997, saying “no perp, no case”.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

[with audio]

November 4, 2015

Jorge Branco
Journalist

The solicitor representing Brisbane Grammar School has come under fire for questioning a key piece of evidence from a Kevin Lynch sex abuse victim.

A Grammar old boy had told the child abuse royal commission former headmaster Max Howell had walked in on the student naked from the waist down with Lynch in the paedophile’s office.

Walter Sofronoff QC, acting for the school, questioned the victim, known only as BQA, extensively about the incident.

He noted BQA had not previously referred to the incident in correspondence with the school or legal claims dating back at least 15 years and its first mention came in his submission made to the royal commission this week.

Eventually Mr Sofronoff said: “I suggest to you that it didn’t happen”.

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NEW YORK
The Journal News

NEW CITY – Monsey Rabbi Gabriel Bodenheimer has been sentenced to three years probation with sex offender conditions and banned from schools with children under 18 after his conviction for endangering a child.

Bodenheimer, 72, a respected educator for decades, had faced multiple sex abuse counts involving a 7-year-old boy but pleaded guilty to the lesser misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child. Prosecutors dropped the more serious charges at the behest of the child’s family.

A Rockland grand jury indicted Bodenheimer on Aug. 8, 2014, alleging he abused the boy at the rabbi’s school office between Aug. 1, 2009 and July 31, 2010. The initial charges could have carried a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

He refused to plead guilty and denied touching the boy during a telephone call with the child that was being monitored by prosecutors and police.

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NEW YORK
News 10

NEW CITY, N.Y. (AP) — A suburban New York rabbi convicted of endangering a child has been sentenced to three years of probation with sex offender conditions.

The Journal News reports (http://lohud.us/1QbcsHW ) Rabbi Gabriel Bodenheimer of Monsey was sentenced Monday and banned from schools with children under 18.

A Rockland grand jury indicted Bodenheimer in 2014 of abusing a boy at the rabbi’s school office between 2009 and 2010. The 72-year-old had faced multiple sexual abuse counts involving the 7-year-old boy, but refused to plead guilty and denied touching the boy.

He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Newsweek

By Leah McGrath Goodman 11/4/15

Investigators probing thousands of allegations of child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom set up a website this past summer to gather evidence. They invited survivors to share their stories with the independent inquiry through what was promised to be a secure and confidential portal.

Many survivors did so. But somehow nearly three weeks of submissions were mysteriously deleted, “instantly and permanently,” in what a notice on the site in October said was due to “a change in our website address.”

That message caused survivors, support groups and members of the British Parliament to question whether the survivors’ data was being handled with the utmost care, with attention to privacy and security—not to mention why there wasn’t some kind of data backup. The inquiry’s request for people to resubmit their stories was met with skepticism.

“It is a known fact that it takes survivors of child abuse 20, 30, 40 years to recover or to report it,” says abuse survivor Andrew Kershaw. “They have to trust, and unfortunately many of them will never trust, never tell anyone what happened to them, and take it to their grave. So their information being lost has done irreparable damage, has taken away their trust once more. Many won’t come forward again.”

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VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast

Barbie Latza Nadeau

Secretly bugged priests, missing multimillions, and possible threats to Pope Francis’s life—new allegations deepen the Catholic Church’s VatiLeaks scandal.

VATICAN CITY — There is nothing like a good old Vatican scandal to bring Rome to its knees.

Never mind that the city government is already in complete shambles on the eve of the Vatican’s Holy Jubilee, which could double the many millions of visitors to the Eternal City over the next year. No, instead of finalizing preparations for what should be a feather in the pope’s mitre, the Vatican is bracing itself for the release on Thursday of two books that seek to expose the sinister side of everything from saint-making to the very sanctity of the Holy See.

On Monday, by way of preemptive measure, the Vatican confirmed that laywoman Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, along with a Spanish monsignor named Lucio Vallejo Balda, had been arrested for allegedly leaking documents to journalists. Both had been on a special commission to advise the pope’s men in charge with reforming the Vatican’s broken financial system, which had, under previous papacies, been accused of money laundering and other unholy financial practices.

The Daily Beast obtained advance copies of both books ahead of their Thursday release, and both seem likely receptacles for the latest chapter of the VatiLeaks scandal, which began when Pope Benedict XVI’s butler was arrested in 2012 for stealing secret documents off his boss’s desk.

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VATICAN CITY
National Post (Canada)

Joseph Brean | November 3, 2015

Public admiration for Pope Francis’s expressions of loving tolerance on everything from homosexuality to divorce has helped conceal turmoil in the Vatican, where his push for transparency has set powerful traditionalists at odds with eager reformers. Now, the publication of two books based on leaked and possibly stolen documents, and the arrests of two senior Vatican officials on allegations of leaking the documents, have cast a rare light on the darker corners of the Holy See. The National Post’s Joseph Brean spoke with John L. Allen, Jr., a leading American Vatican watcher and author of papal biographies, about the latest Vatileaks scandal.

Q: What do these new books claim to reveal?

A: What is not clear to me is how much of the scandals documented in these books are genuinely new, versus stuff we already knew about … What we’re getting is maybe additional details. Bear in mind that the primary source material for both books, as we understand it, are documents from the study commission that Pope Francis created back in 2013 to lay the groundwork for the financial reform he’s now engaged in.

Q: Does this threaten the Pope reform agenda?

A: In general, although the Vatican has obviously launched a pre-emptive strike against these books by arresting a couple of people it suspects of being moles, I don’t think that the Vatican or Pope Francis personally has much to fear. If anything, I think it strengthens his hand in making the case for reform. He can point to these books and say, “This is exactly why you need me.”

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UNITED STATES
La Prensa

Washington, Nov 3 (EFE).- The Catholic Church has paid out close to $4 billion in the United States from being sued for the sexual abuse of minors by priests since the 1950s, a higher figure than had been previously estimated.

The report published in the National Catholic Reporter, or NCR, a newspaper for the Catholic community in the United States, raises by some $1 billion the amount of settlements for such cases previously reported in the media.

The document reached the conclusion that the exact accumulated settlements amounted to $3,994,797,060.10, as the result of a three-month review of more than 7,800 articles from the NCR’s own database and that of LexisNexis Academic, as well as from analyzing information from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Figures offered by the NCR are ostensibly higher than the official statistics, due to the fact that there are no uniform reporting standards for Catholic dioceses to disclose their financial records.

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UNITED STATES
New York Times

Frank Bruni

It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.

“Spotlight” — which opens in New York, Los Angeles and Boston on Friday and nationwide later this month — chronicles the painstaking manner in which editors and writers at The Boston Globe documented a pattern of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests and the concealment of these crimes by Catholic leaders.

Because of the movie’s focus on the digging and dot-connecting that go into investigative reporting, it has invited comparisons to “All the President’s Men.”

But it isn’t about journalism. Or, for that matter, Catholicism.

It’s about the damage done when we genuflect too readily before society’s temples, be they religious or governmental. It’s about the danger of faith that’s truly blind.

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ILLINOIS
Daily Ledger

By Hannah Schrodt
Daily Ledger reporter

Posted Nov. 3, 2015

LEWISTOWN

A man convicted of criminal sexual abuse who now faces charges of violating sex offender registry terms received another continuance Monday morning.

Jason Phillips of Glasford was arrested Aug. 6 for being present on the property of a child care facility. The 41-year-old is alleged to have committed this offense, a Class 4 felony, on four separate occasions.

In Fulton County Court Monday, Phillips was scheduled for a new pretrial date of Jan. 4 at 9 a.m.
He was convicted of criminal sexual abuse of a then-minor in 2011.

At the time of his crime, Phillips was a youth pastor and associate pastor at Covenant Community Fellowship Church.

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GEORGIA
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

What may be the first lawsuit filed under Georgia’s new child predator law claims that a statehouse lobbyist abused a boy he worked with as a youth leader at a Toombs County church.

Matthew Stanley claims that Jim E. Collins abused him hundreds of time over the course of several years, as recently as 2002. Collins was a youth pastor at First Baptist Church of Vidalia.

“Jim used his position of authority in my local church to perpetrate his abuse for most of my adolescent years,” Stanley said at a news conference Monday at his lawyer’s Atlanta office.

The advocacy group Voice Today, which works to end child sexual abuse, said Stanley’s lawsuit is believed to be the first since the passage this year of House Bill 17, the Hidden Predator Act. The bill created a two-year window during which victims of past abuse can file civil claims against their alleged abuser, even if the statute of limitations has expired.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic World Report

Pope Benedict XVI, in his September 9, 2009 general audience, noted that the Benedictine monk, cardinal, and Doctor of the Church, St. Peter Damian (1007-72), was “one of the most significant figures of the 11th century … a monk, a lover of solitude and at the same time a fearless man of the Church, committed personally to the task of reform, initiated by the Popes of the time.” St. Peter Damian was born into a poor family (and was orphaned a young age), demonstrated remarkable intellectual skills as a teenager, and by the age of twenty five was a renowned teacher. He then renounced the secular life and became a monk, and eventually became prior of the hermitage at Fonte Avellana.

Between 1049 and 1054, he composed the powerful book Liber Gomorrhianus, or “Book of Gomorrah”, addressing it to the new pope, Leo IX, who himself would eventually be canonized. Pope St. Leo IX praised St. Peter Damian’s work and the monk became a key reformer, addressing widespread excesses and grave sins.

Thomam Books and Media has now published a rigorous and careful translation of The Book of Gomorrah, praised by scholars as “highly readable”, “clear and well-articulated”, and “excellent and accurate”. Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, recently corresponded with the translator, Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, who is a graduate student at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and a regular contributor to a number of Catholic periodicals, including CWR.

CWR: What is The Book of Gomorrah and why did St. Peter Damian write it?

Matthew Cullinan Hoffman: The Book of Gomorrah is letter written to Pope St. Leo IX around the year 1049 in response to an epidemic of sodomy among the priests of Italy, which Peter Damian feared would bring down the wrath of God upon the Church. This plague of sexual perversion was part of a larger crisis of moral laxity in the priesthood, including widespread sexual incontinency and illicit marriages, the simoniacal purchasing of clerical ordination, and the prevalence of a worldly and carnal mentality among the clergy. The laity were outraged by such behavior and were even beginning to rebel against the Church hierarchy in some places, such as Florence and Milan.

The Book of Gomorrah is an eloquent and impassioned denunciation of the vice of sodomy, describing in harrowing detail the devastating spiritual and psychological effects on those who practice it. Damian holds that sodomy is the worst of all sins because it does the greatest harm to the soul, and argues very persuasively that no priest who is habituated to such behavior should be permitted to continue in the priesthood. However, the work is not only a condemnation of evil, but also an outpouring of grief for those who have fallen into such immorality, urging them to “rise from the dead” and return to Christ, and promising them forgiveness and even spiritual glory if they repent and do penance. So the work expresses very profoundly both the justice and the mercy of God. …

CWR: Does The Book of Gomorrah address the sexual abuse of minors as well?

Hoffman: Indeed it connects this epidemic of sodomy with the abuse of “penitential sons” by confessors. It also approvingly quotes an ecclesiastical law that requires any cleric caught in an act of sexual abuse of a boy or adolescent to be publicly humiliated, bound in iron chains, required to fast on barley bread for months while imprisoned in a monastic cell, and then placed permanently in the custody of two other monks to prevent any further harm to children. Damian’s canon provides a stark contrast with the lax attitude that so many modern prelates have shown regarding the sexual abuse of minors, which has caused so much damage to souls and to the Church’s reputation in recent decades.

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ARGENTINA
Noticias Religiosas

Tras la renuncia de Óscar Domingo Sarlinga como obispo de Zárate-Campana, el Papa Francisco ha decidido nombrar a monseñor Pedro María Laxague como nuevo obispo de la Diócesis.

Y es que, tal y como ha confirmado el propio Vaticano y el nuncio apostólico en Buenos Aires, Emil Paul Tscherrig, el reemplazo de Sarlinga será finalmente Laxague, hasta ahora obispo titular de Castra Saveriana y auxiliar de la arquidiócesis de Bahía Blanca.

A sus 63 años, Pedro María Laxague es ingeniero civil en la Universidad Nacional del Sur de Bahía Blanca y fue ordenado el 15 de julio de 1989 en la parroquia Santa Rosa de Lima, de Coronel Pringles, por monseñor Jorge Mayer, arzobispo de Bahía Blanca.

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ARGENTINA
Clarin

Sergio Rubin

Envuelto en denuncias de malversación de fondos, lavado de dinero, abuso de poder y comportamientos inapropiados, presentará su renuncia al Papa el obispo de la diócesis de Zárate-Campana, monseñor Oscar Sarlinga.

Además, Sarlinga apareció involucrado, junto al entonces jefe de Gabinete, Sergio Massa, en una supuesta maniobra para desplazar al cardenal Jorge Bergoglio del arzobispado de Buenos Aires y ocupar su lugar.

Se trata de la segunda vez que un obispo de esa diócesis del Gran Buenos Aires renuncia sumido en un escándalo, ya que a comienzos de 2000 lo había hecho monseñor Rafael Rey, ex titular de Cáritas.

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ARGENTINA
El Dia de Escobar

Presionado por el Vaticano a raíz de múltiples sospechas sobre su conducción eclesiástica, este domingo 1º renunció a su cargo el obispo de la Diócesis Zárate-Campana, Oscar Sarlinga.

“Juntamente con las instancias de la Santa Sede hemos elegido el día de la peregrinación del pueblo de Dios para decirles que es la última misa que celebro con la comunidad diocesana”. De esta manera y contra su voluntad, el monseñor Oscar Sarlinga (52) comunicó a los fieles en la Basílica de Luján su abdicación al cargo que detentaba desde el 18 de febrero de 2006 por designación del entonces Papa Benedicto XVI, no sin mayores problemas.

Su tarea pastoral de nueve años al frente de la diócesis estuvo signada por escándalos económico-financieros (entre ellos, la compra de un semi-piso en el barrio porteño de Recoleta), supuestos maltratos a sacerdotes y laicos y situaciones flagrantes no sólo en la curia sino también en parroquias como la de San Antonio de Areco, en donde los feligreses han denunciado en reiteradas oportunidades al prelado por estar conviviendo con una mujer que sería su esposa y la presunta hija de ambos.

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ARGENTINA
Buenos Aires Herald

In a surprise announcement, first made over weekend to a congregation in side Luján Cathedral, Oscar Sarlinga, the Bishop of Zárate-Campana in Buenos Aires province, has revealed he is resigning his post amid an internal Church investigation into embezzlement, corruption and “abuse of power” within the clergy.

Sarlinga, who has a long history of confrontations with Pope Francis, was appointed to his post by Pope Benedict.

“For several months, together with the chance of being available for my mission as Bishop of Zárate-Campana, I asked Pope Francis for a special time of leave, for me to devote time to prayer,” Sarlinga said, without suggesting specific reasons as to why he had decided to step down.

“I have to say in all fairness that in the subsequent dialogue with the Holy Father he has expressed his understanding and has accepted my request. It will be made effective in the coming days,” he added.

While Sarlinga declined to comment on what had prompted his resignation, the ecclesiastical investigation into allegations of malpractice in the Zárate-Campana parish, including money laundering and abuse within the clergy, was likely a central factor in determining his decision.

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CANADA
Standard-Freeholder

By Greg Peerenboom, Cornwall Standard-Freeholder
Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Sexual assault is the charge behind the arrest of a retired Alexandria-Cornwall Diocese priest, say SDG Ontario Provincial Police.

The diocese revealed Friday that Denis Vaillancourt, 70, had been arrested and charged under the Criminal Code of Canada on Oct. 29. The diocese did not identify the charge or provide any information about the circumstances leading to Vaillancourt’s arrest.

The OPP identified the charge Tuesday, saying it comes out of an incident involving an adult male at a South Glengarry home in September. The OPP investigation began when it received a report of the incident on Oct. 18.

Vaillancourt now lives in Lasalle, Que. He has been released to appear in Alexandria court on Nov. 18.

He had served the diocese in a number of capacities, including as parish priest of Eglise Sacre-Coeur in Alexandria.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe

Aware of Geoghan record, archdiocese still shuttled him from parish to parish

JANUARY 06, 2002

This article was prepared by the Globe Spotlight Team: reporters Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes; and editor Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Rezendes.

Since the mid-1990s, more than 130 people have come forward with horrific childhood tales about how former priest John J. Geoghan allegedly fondled or raped them during a three-decade spree through a half-dozen Greater Boston parishes.

Almost always, his victims were grammar school boys. One was just 4 years old.

Then came last July’s disclosure that Cardinal Bernard F. Law knew about Geoghan’s problems in 1984, Law’s first year in Boston, yet approved his transfer to St. Julia’s parish in Weston. Wilson D. Rogers Jr., the cardinal’s attorney, defended the move last summer, saying the archdiocese had medical assurances that each Geoghan reassignment was “appropriate and safe.”

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MASSACHUSETTS
Boston.com

By Ashli Molina @MolinaAshli
Boston.com Staff | 11.03.15

The film Spotlight will be released November 6. And so we’re bringing back the first story about the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal that was published by The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team in 2002.

For three decades, the Catholic Church was negligent of former priest John J. Geoghan’s compulsive sexual abuse of children, The Boston Globe reported.

More than 130 of Geoghan’s victims had come forward with vivid accounts about how they had been groped or abused (up until the date the report was published).

Since the 1980s, the archdiocese’s top officials had enough evidence of Geoghan’s predatory behavior. But the Church still shifted Geoghan from parish to parish. Geoghan continued working with altar boys and youth groups at each reassignment—one of his victims was as young as 4 years old.

Evidence over the years, which the Globe Spotlight team gathered, included a letter from the aunt of seven boys who had been raped by Geoghan, several suspicions from within the parishes, a record of abuse that dates back to the 1960s, and a letter from Bishop John M. D’Arcy directly to Cardinal Bernard F. Law expressing D’Arcy’s concern about Geoghan. Geoghan even admitted to molesting four boys in 1995.

Read the full story here.

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CHICAGO (IL)
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Accused prominent pastor is arraigned
As recently as last year, he reportedly assaulted girl
SNAP: “High profile minister is still on the job in a church now!”
He’s been in leadership posts with national Baptist organization

WHAT
Holding signs and childhood photos outside an arraignment hearing for an accused, prominent predatory pastor, clergy sex abuse victims will

— praise the brave teen who reported wrongdoing and denounce those who allow the accused to remain in ministry, and
— beg “anyone who may have seen, suspected or suffered” the minister’s crimes to call police immediately.

WHEN
Wednesday, 11/4 @ 9:00 am (Hearing is at 9:00 am. We will speak out just following the hearing.)

WHERE
Outside Cook County Court, 2600 South California Ave. (Room 101) at 26th and California

WHO
Two-three members of a support group called SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, including a Chicago woman who is the organization’s founder and long-time president

WHY
A prominent South Side pastor who’s had leadership positions with the National Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and oldest African-American religious organization, the Biblical Exposition Conference and WHW Ministries is being arraigned for alleged child sex crimes he admitted committing as recently as last year.

He is Rev. George W. Waddles, Sr. and despite his admission and arrest, he remains in the pulpit today.

At least two other church members have reported that Waddles also attacked them.

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SPAIN
The Irish Times

Guy Hedgecoe in Madrid

Wed, Nov 4, 2015

A former missionary has denounced the Catholic religious order he belonged to for overseeing a system of “sexual slavery” in Kenya and he has taken his case to the Vatican.

He claims the Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle (MCSPA), founded in Spain in the 1990s, subjected members of its staff and locals to sexual and labour abuse, El País newspaper has reported.

“I have been the slave and sexual slave of a group of depraved individuals who were covered up by the hierarchy of the [Catholic] Church,” the 36-year-old man, who calls himself “Paulino”, told Pope Francis in a letter outlining his alleged abuse over a three-year period in Kenya.

“They told us that an active sex life is what God wants us to have and that he also wants us to be naked because he created us naked. Help me, Francis. Give my broken soul some relief. Don’t let other youngsters go through this hell.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Joshua Robertson
Tuesday 3 November 2015

A counsellor at a prestigious Queensland private school ritually hypnotised students before masturbating them, slapping them in the face and putting acupuncture needles in one child’s genitals, the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse has heard.

The scores of alleged victims of Kevin Lynch at Brisbane Grammar school included a boy who was sexually abused in a grief counselling session given after learning his father had committed suicide.

The commission hearing in Brisbane is examining the response to abuse claims against Lynch from the 1970s to the 1990s at Grammar and later St Paul’s Anglican school, and another former St Paul’s teacher, Gregory Robert Knight in the 1980s.

Also to come under scrutiny is former South Australian education minister Don Hopgood, who was a member of the same musical group in Adelaide as Knight when he gave him a glowing personal reference on parliamentary letterhead despite allegedly knowing a departmental inquiry found Knight engaged in “disgraceful” conduct with school students.

The royal commission also heard that Hopgood ordered that the South Australian education department rescind its dismissal of Knight and accept his resignation, which enabled him to get jobs in Queensland schools. Knight lost his job at St Paul’s over abuse allegations but then taught in the Northern Territory, where he was eventually jailed over indecent dealing with a student.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Louisa Rebgetz and Leonie Mellor

The father of a former Brisbane Grammar School (BGS) student has told a child sexual abuse inquiry that he informed the school principal in 1981 that his son had been sexually abused.

During hearings in Brisbane yesterday, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard how former counsellor Kevin John Lynch abused students at the school during counselling sessions in his office.

Lynch worked at BGS in Spring Hill and at St Paul’s School in Bald Hills from the 1970s to the 1990s.

He killed himself in 1997 after being charged with abusing a student at St Paul’s, having moved there after Grammar.

At today’s hearing, the father of a BGS ex-student said he had a meeting that lasted about five minutes with then school principal, Max Howell, after hearing Lynch had touch his son inappropriately.

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AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times

November 4, 2015

Jorge Branco
Journalist

A parent who complained to former Brisbane Grammar School headmaster Max Howell his son had been interfered with says he never heard from the school again.

The boy’s father, a retired doctor of 41 years, told the child abuse royal commission in Brisbane he received a panicked phone call from his son in the winter of 1981 saying: “Kevin Lynch is a poofter. He put his hands down my trousers and fiddled with my penis”.

The man, BQH, cleared his schedule for the following day and made a four-hour drive to Brisbane with wife BQI to meet with Mr Howell.

The former headmaster denied until his dying day he was told about the abuse but the father testified it was inconceivable he could have made the trip without telling him.

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TEXAS
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Tuesday, Nov. 3

Statement by Amy Smith, Co-leader of DFW SNAP (watchkeepamy@gmail.com, 281-748-4050)

The high-profile Prestonwood Church of Dallas is selling its ostentatious building.

[Baptist News]

We hope officials at Prestonwood Church are humbled by this sale of their edifice. We suspect that the church would be in better financial shape now had its staff acted responsibly and compassionately and honestly with child sex abuse reports, especially those involving John Langworthy.

We also hope that other church officials are deterred from concealing child sex crimes when they consider what’s happened at Prestonwood.

Finally, we hope that every single person at Prestonwood, including former staff and members, will do the right thing and call police with any information or suspicions they may have about child sex crimes or cover ups at the church. It’s never too late to do the right thing. And we never know what action we take might spare one more child a life of trauma and devastation.

And we are deeply grateful for victims of child sex crimes at Prestonwood for their courage in speaking up, protecting others and exposing wrongdoing. They are heroes.

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UNITED STATES
TheMediaReport

David Pierre

This is the book that Hollywood and the Boston Globe do not want you to read.

On the eve of the Hollywood release of the new movie Spotlight – starring Hollywood heavyweights Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo – which purports to dramatize the Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on sex abuse and the Catholic Church, SINS OF THE PRESS sets the record straight on the Globe’s reporting, its unabashed history of animus toward the Catholic Church, and its past indifference to sex abuse.

Thoroughly researched and meticulously documented, SINS OF THE PRESS exposes:

* How the Globe’s reporting was only the culmination of a relentless, decades-long campaign against the Catholic Church for ideological reasons;

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VATICNA CITY
The Times (UK)

Tom Kington Rome

Securing sainthood is a commercial process that can cost up to €750,000 in fees paid to a Vatican department that refuses to account for its spending.

That is one of the revelations contained in Merchants in the Temple, a new book to be published tomorrow lifting the lid on financial skulduggery and corruption in the Vatican.
It includes tales of double-dealing priests, misused donations, millions of euros in goods that vanish from Vatican shops and a mysterious break-in and theft of documents.

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UNITED STATES
Esquire

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

Ross Cardinal Douthat, primate of the Archdiocese of Dorkylvania, may still be creased because Papa Francesco is determined not to give him the authoritarian church of his dreams, but allowing divorced Catholics to return to the sacraments is small beer compared to what the pope has been doing about the Vatican’s chronically corrupt—and bizarrely non-doctrinal—banking practices. There’s an explosion coming very soon.

While most of the media focus of the Vatican’s murky finances has for decades centred on its official bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), a department called the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), acted as its own financial powerhouse. APSA, a sort of general accounting office, manages the Vatican’s real estate holdings in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, pays salaries of Vatican employees, and acts as a purchasing office and human resources department. One of its two divisions also manages the Vatican’s financial and stock portfolio.

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GEORGIA
Baptist News

By Bob Allen

A Southern Baptist church in Georgia denied allegations of negligence in a lawsuit alleging child sexual abuse by a former church volunteer later named as youth pastor.

A civil lawsuit filed in Toombs County Superior Court alleges sexual abuse between 1996 and 2002 of youth at First Baptist Church of Vidalia.

Filed under Georgia’s new Hidden Predator Act, a law passed in 2015 opening a window of opportunity for victims to sue for injury that otherwise would be considered beyond the statute of limitations for litigation, the lawsuit alleges that church leaders were “grossly negligent in hiring, retaining and/or permitting” the alleged perpetrator to serve as a volunteer and youth pastor while “failing to put in place appropriate protocols” to protect children from sexual abuse.

The lawsuit names up to 50 “John Doe” leaders at First Baptist Church to be named upon learning their names in an amended complaint.

Attorney Barbara Marschalk released a statement on behalf of the church labeling allegations against the congregation as “completely unsubstantiated.”

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MASSACHUSETTS
Crux

By Margery Eagan
On Spirituality columnist November 3, 2015

How can you spend your workdays chronicling thousands of cases of Catholic priestly sexual abuse — and still remain a Catholic?

Before the release of “Spotlight,” the movie detailing the massive abuse cover-up in Boston, I asked that of Anne Barrett Doyle and Terry McKiernan. They’re co-directors of BishopAccountability.org, which documents that abuse from an office in Waltham, Massachusetts practically overrun by floor-to-ceiling files and more than 100,000 pages of Church records, court documents, media reports, letters from mothers of victims, victims themselves, and even abusers detailing their crimes.

Doyle and McKiernan have done this work full-time for more than a decade now. Yet both not only remain Catholic, they say their faith has increased.

Here’s how Doyle and McKiernan explained that a few days back in their Waltham repository.

“Everything good in my life has come from Catholicism. I’ve never been more Catholic than I am now. It’s never been more vivid and important to me to pray every day,” said Doyle, a mother of four married 35 years now. She talked about the shared family rituals — the Masses, baptisms, weddings, Easters — with her kids, father, siblings (all 9 of them) and her Jesuit-schooled husband.

But mostly she talked about her mother, her “hero,” who had a passion for trying to change the Church. She wrote letters to bishops “as a loyal critic,” Doyle said.

“That’s exactly how I feel about our work. We’re loyal critics. I really do feel I’m doing this for justice for survivors, but also for the Church. It’s absolutely crucial that the Church fully owns up to this heinous and deliberate enabling.

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KENTUCKY
WAVE

By Laurel Mallory

LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) – The priest at the center of a child pornography case has been indicted by a grand jury.

Stephen Pohl, former pastor of St. Margaret Mary parish in Louisville, was charged with violating federal child exploitation laws on Nov. 3 in United States District Court.

The indictment accuses Pohl, 57, of knowingly viewing child porn on the internet between Jan. and Aug. 2015.

A parent whose child attends St. Margaret Mary complained the student was uncomfortable when Pohl asked him/her to pose for a picture. Pohl was immediately investigated by the FBI and Louisville Metro Police Department’s Crimes Against Children Unit.

He then resigned from St. Margaret Mary and was arrested in Florida a short time later.

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NEW JERSEY
Road to Recovery

FRED MARIGLIANO TO WALK THROUGH THE LARGEST CITY IN NEW JERSEY, NEWARK, TO COMPLETE HIS 270 MILE WALK ACROSS NEW JERSEY

FRED MARIGLIANO TO CONTINUE TO RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE AND PROMOTE CHANGES IN THE LAWS OF NEW JERSEY (STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS – SOL) THAT DEAL WITH CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE

WHAT
Fred Marigliano will complete his “Walk Across New Jersey” (from Cape May Point Lighthouse to Mahwah) by walking through New Jersey’s largest city, Newark.

WHEN
Thursday, November 5, 2015 at 9:00 am

WHERE
Fred Marigliano and his supporters will assemble at Lincoln Park in Newark, NJ (toward the south end of Newark on Broad Street – not far from Newark City Hall) and walk to Washington Park, Newark, a distance of approximately one and a half miles

WHO
Fred Marigliano, a victim/survivor of clergy sexual abuse in Plainfield, New Jersey; a member of the Board of Directors of Road to Recovery, Inc., a non-profit charity based in New Jersey that assists victims of sexual abuse and their families; a member of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests; and an affiliate of the organization known as Male Survivor; Marigliano family members, and supporters from various organizations in Newark, NJ and other parts of the metropolitan area

WHY
Fred Marigliano has committed himself to supporting victim/survivors of sexual abuse by supporting them, helping them heal, and advocating for changes in the laws in the State of New Jersey regarding the SOL (Statute of Limitations) dealing with childhood sexual abuse. He will complete his 270 mile walk across the State of New Jersey by saving the largest city in New Jersey – Newark – for last. He will be joined by local and state political leaders, City of Newark employees and leaders, fellow victim/survivors and supporters by walking from Lincoln Park to Washington Park in the City of Newark.

CONTACTS
Fred Marigliano, Green Brook, New Jersey – 732-421-0033
Robert M. Hoatson, Road to Recovery, Inc., Livingston, NJ – 862-368-2800

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MASSACHUSETTS
Crux

By Margery Eagan
On Spirituality columnist November 3, 2015

I watched the movie “Spotlight,” detailing Boston’s sex abuse crisis, in a theater filled with Boston Globe reporters I’ve known for years and survivors who understand too well the crimes the Catholic hierarchy enabled.

All the doubts and shame came flooding back.

Why would anyone belong to such a corrupt church, one that put itself before the protection of teenagers and children, most of them from troubled, struggling, even poor families?

Of course, that “anyone” would be me. I belong to such a church. It’s the Catholic Church. And I was grateful leaving the theater last week that nobody stopped me and demanded to know why. At that point, I would have been hard-pressed to explain.

Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who heads up the pope’s anti-abuse commission, released a statement on “Spotlight” making it seem as if the crisis is all over now and that bishops and cardinals are doing all they can.

Yet that’s not true.

Just two years ago, to give but one example, we learned that top archdiocesan leaders in St. Paul and Minneapolis had known for nearly a decade about a child-abusing priest in close contact with children. They kept it secret and acted only after that priest abused the sons, ages 12 and 14, of a parish worker.

GlobalPost just reported about abuser priests who’ve left the United States for Central America and become active priests again, saying Mass, hearing confessions, close to parish children. The watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, which documents and posts on both domestic and international abuse cases, easily located several accused priests still in ministry in Argentina, Pope Francis’ home country. More than 15 victims have accused one of those priests in just the past two years.

Meanwhile, the pope and his cardinals wrapped up the Vatican synod on the family — the family — barely mentioning abuse. How is that possible? Apparently they overlooked their continued enabling of criminals while some actually issued judgmental statements about gays and the divorced and remarried. I guess this is their “logic:” Priests accused of molestation by multiple victims are still okay to say Mass, distribute and receive the Eucharist, but the divorced and remarried aren’t fit to receive it.

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KENTUCKY
WLKY

LOUISVILLE, Ky. —A former pastor of a Louisville parish was indicted on federal child exploitation charges.

According to Tuesday’s indictment, Stephen Pohl accessed and viewed images of child pornography online between January and August of this year.

He was arrested in Florida in August after law enforcement searched his parish office and the rectory at Saint Margaret Mary as well as his home.

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VATICAN CITY
Los Angeles Times

Tom Kington

Financial skulduggery, avaricious priests and suspected corruption at the Vatican are detailed in two books out this week, suggesting that Pope Francis faces an uphill struggle as he weeds out sleaze at the Holy See.

The books, both published by Italian journalists, are based on leaks from the Vatican and follow the arrests over the weekend of a Spanish priest and an Italian public relations consultant suspected of supplying the authors with stolen documents.

Father Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, 54, remains in jail at the Vatican, while consultant Francesca Chaouqui, 33, was released after her arrest by Vatican police.

On Tuesday, she blamed Vallejo Balda for the leaks, telling the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera: “He did everything; I tried to stop him.”

Both were appointed by Pope Francis in 2013 to a committee set up to ferret out financial waste and wrongdoing at the Vatican. One of the books, “Merchants in the Temple” by Gianluigi Nuzzi, reveals how Francis cajoled cardinals to clean up. …

In “Merchants in the Temple,” Nuzzi reveals how the finance committee found $1.75 million worth of stock listed in the inventories of Vatican shops that did not exist, suggesting it had been purloined or invented.

He claims that only 20% of Peter’s Pence — the charitable contributions made to the church by Catholics around the world — are used to help the poor, with much of the remainder paying costs at the Holy See.

The book claims that the Vatican’s real estate holdings are valued at about $3 billion, seven times the value they are given in the Vatican’s accounts. Some 5,000 properties that are rented out, mostly in Rome, yield miniscule rents and sometimes are rented for free, prompting suggestions they are given as favors to friends.

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VATICAN CITY
The New York Times

By GAIA PIANIGIANI
NOV. 3, 2015

ROME — Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978, still holds more than 110,000 euros, or about $120,000, in a Vatican bank account. The Vatican pension fund is running an €800-million deficit. The Vatican’s real estate holdings total €2.7 billion, seven times more than what is listed on its balance sheets. And the Vatican’s governing body had agreed to push Philip Morris cigarettes, for a fee.

If they are to be believed, those are some of the revelations set to be published in a new book by Gianluigi Nuzzi, “Merchants in the Temple.” The sources of the claims are not revealed in the book, an advance copy of which was provided by the publisher to The New York Times, and the claims are impossible to verify.

But the Vatican has apparently taken the leaks of internal documents seriously enough to arrest two people who had worked on a special commission set up by Pope Francis to overhaul the Roman Catholic Church’s deeply troubled financial management.

The arrests over the weekend came just days before the publication on Thursday of Mr. Nuzzi’s book and that of another book, “Avarice,” by an Italian reporter, Emiliano Fittipaldi, who also claims to reveal widespread misuse of Vatican finances.

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VATICAN CITY
Times LIVE

AFP

Ella IDE | 03 November, 2015

The pope’s private conversations allegedly wiretapped by a racy social climber and a Spanish prelate – the latest scandal to hit the Vatican has unearthed claims of theft, debauchery and betrayal within the Catholic Church.

Leaked documents set to be published in two books on Wednesday purportedly reveal how charity money was allegedly spent on refurbishing the houses of powerful cardinals, while claiming the murky Vatican bank continues to shelter suspected criminals.

PR expert Francesca Chaouqui and Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, arrested at the weekend for allegedly stealing and leaking classified documents, risk up to eight years in prison if the case gets to court.

While Vallejo Balda languishes in jail, Chaouqui, 33, was released after assuring investigators of her cooperation in a case which has thrown light on Pope Francis’s struggles to clean up a centuries-old institution unwilling to give up its privileges.

“I am totally innocent and I’ll prove it,” La Stampa daily quoted the dark-haired woman dubbed a “sex bomb” by Italian media as saying, adding that Vallejo Balda “did everything, I tried to stop him”

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

[with video]

VATICAN CITY | BY PHILIP PULLELLA

Vatican financial investigators suspect a department of the Holy See which oversees real estate and investments was used in the past for possible money laundering, insider trading and market manipulation, according to a report seen by Reuters.

The information in the confidential document, which covers the period from 2000 to 2011, has been passed on to Italian and Swiss investigators for their checks because some activity tied to the accounts allegedly took place in these countries, a senior Vatican source said.

While most of the media focus of the Vatican’s murky finances has for decades centred on its official bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), a department called the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), acted as its own financial powerhouse.

APSA, a sort of general accounting office, manages the Vatican’s real estate holdings in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, pays salaries of Vatican employees, and acts as a purchasing office and human resources department.

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UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

By Father Donald Cozzens

Finally there appears an issue that our divided church can agree on. Catholics of all stripes—conservatives and liberals and in-betweens—are declaring a pox on clericalism. From Pope Francis to the back pew widow, from seminary rectors to lay ecclesial ministers, we agree that clericalism is crippling the pastoral mission of the church.

At the same time it is strengthening the secularists’ claim that Catholic clergy are nothing more than papal agents bent on enforcing rigid moral controls that smother our human instinct for pleasure and freedom. So let’s end clericalism in the church.

Yes, of course, let’s end clericalism. It’s just plain right to heed the growing consensus that clericalism must go. But something tells me, “not so fast.”

This cancer crippling the Catholic world—from local communities to Vatican offices—is so deeply embedded in our past and present church fabric that we need a careful presurgery examination. So pull on your surgical gloves and join me in the pre-op room.

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ESPANA
Entorno Inteligente

[A Bolivian said he was a slave to labor and sexual abuse by priests for five years. He was abused by Spanish priests during a mission in Kenya. The priests were with the Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle and Mary Mother of the Church. The situation has been compared to the scandal of Father Maciel and the Legonaries of Christ.]

Un boliviano denuncia que fue esclavo laboral y sexual de sacerdotes durante cinco años / La Razon / Un boliviano denunció que durante cinco años fue víctima de abusos sexuales por parte de curas españoles durante una misión en Kenia, cuando formaba parte de la Comunidad Misionera de San Pablo Apóstol y de María Madre de la Iglesia (MCSPA, por sus siglas en inglés).

El caso, que ha sido comparado con el escándalo del padre Maciel , el fundador de los Legionarios de Cristo que fue cubierto por años por jerarcas de la Iglesia Católica, fue revelado por el teólogo José Manuel Vidal con el aval del papa Francisco.

Según publicó este martes Vidal en el medio Religión Digital, del cual es además su director, el 15 de septiembre, tras conocer los antecedentes del caso que involucra al boliviano, el Papa le pidió su urgente publicación. “Me lo dijo dos veces seguidas, con indignación en la mirada”, describe.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

BY MICHAEL O’KEEFFE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, November 3, 2015

There are plenty of bad guys in Amos Kamil’s powerful and disturbing new book on the Horace Mann sexual-abuse scandal, “Great is the Truth.”

There are the coaches, teachers and administrators accused of raping and assaulting scores of students for three decades, men such as baseball coach/headmaster Inky Clark, football coach Mark Wright and swimming coach Stanley Kops. There are also the officials at the prestigious Riverdale prep school who allegedly ignored and covered up complaints of abuse, leaders such as former headmaster Eileen Mullady and ex-Board of Trustees chairman Michael Hess, the powerhouse New York attorney and a close associate of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Then there are the unnamed villains: The New York legislators and policy makers who have refused to reform the stingy statute of limitations that makes it almost impossible for adult survivors of abuse to pursue criminal charges and civil litigation in the Empire State against sexual predators and the institutions that protect them.

“It’s a joke,” says Kamil, the playwright, investigative journalist and 1982 Horace Mann graduate whose 2012 New York Times Magazine article shoved Horace Mann’s sex-abuse scandal into the public spotlight. “It’s an arcane law that needs to change. The fact that New York does not have the political will to change this is sickening. Where is Gov. Cuomo on this?”

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VATICAN CITY
The Tablet (UK)

03 November 2015 by Christopher Lamb in Rome

Any shake-up of a system is going to face opposition. So it is with Pope Francis and his reforms of the Vatican.

After part one of the Vati-leaks saga: when Paolo Gabriele, Benedict XVI’s butler, released private documents from inside the papal apartment detailing corruption.

Now we have part two.

Two individuals have been arrested and questioned by Vatican police in relation to the leaking of private documents. Both had been key members of a commission overhauling Vatican finances and administration (COSEA) in the early part of Francis papacy. But neither had been given positions in the new economic structures that the Pope then established.

The first is Francesca Chaouqui, a 33 year-old financial PR expert. She is a controversial figure who claimed former Holy See Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone was “corrupt” and posted racy photos of her and her husband on Facebook. She co-operated with Holy See police inquiries and has now been released.

The second is Mgr Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, a Spanish priest associated with Opus Dei (not, it should be stressed, a priest of the personal prelature) who is being detained in a Vatican prison cell. Opus Dei priests are often trusted for their financial and administrative skills and the prelature issued a statement saying they were “shocked and saddened” by the arrest.

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ROME
The Guardian (UK)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Tuesday 3 November 2015

Ever since his election as spiritual head of the Roman Catholic church in 2013, Pope Francis has always said he wants a church for the poor.

But two controversial new books describe a Vatican awash with cash that is woefully mismanaged, where senior officials pour church funds into their already-lavish apartments, and where even the office that researches candidates for sainthood has had its bank accounts frozen out of concerns about financial impropriety.

According to Gianluigi Nuzzi’s Merchants in the Temple, due to be published on Thursday, one high-ranking Vatican official, Monsignor Giuseppe Sciacca, was so keen on improving his apartment that he took it upon himself to knock down a wall separating his flat from his elderly neighbour’s. When the elderly priest returned from hospital, where he had been very ill, he found his things had been packed in boxes.

“As soon as he opened the door he realised something was wrong: his apartment had been modified, and was missing one room, but he was too old to fight back and seek justice,” Nuzzi wrote. The priest died a short time later. Sciacca was demoted a few months into Pope Francis’s tenure, with a new position at a tribunal that handles legal and administrative cases.

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