ABUSE TRACKER

UNITED STATES
NJ.com

By Mark Mueller | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

A lawsuit filed in Illinois claims the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a group instrumental in exposing the clergy sexual abuse crises in the early 2000s, regularly accepts “kickbacks” from lawyers who sue the Catholic Church and puts its own financial interests above the emotional interests of victims.

The suit — filed last week in Cook County, where the national headquarters is based — contends a former employee, Gretchen Hammond, was harassed and ultimately fired after confronting the nonprofit group’s founder and president, Barbara Blaine, its then-executive director, David Clohessy, and its outreach director, Barbara Dorris.

The group, known by the acronym SNAP, “does not focus on protecting or helping survivors — it exploits them,” Hammond contends in the suit. Hammond worked as a fundraiser for SNAP in its Chicago office from 2011 to 2013.

The suit does not allege wrongdoing in local chapters. SNAP, founded in 1988, has chapters in every state, in Canada and in Mexico.

In a statement and in telephone interviews, SNAP officials denied any impropriety, saying Hammond’s claims are false.

“The allegations are not true,” Blaine, the founder, said in a statement. “This will be proven in court. SNAP leaders are now, and always have been, devoted to following the SNAP mission: to help victims heal and to prevent further sexual abuse.”

Clohessy, the longtime public face of the national organization, issuing statements and conducting interviews, called the allegations “preposterous and confusing.”

“As best I can tell, this is the first we’ve heard …

In his telephone interview with NJ Advance Media, Clohessy responded: “I’ve written hundreds of thousands of emails, and I can’t imagine I would say that, That’s just not how we operate. Period.”

He also said he never gave Hammond permission to access his email and that he never gave her his password.

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VATICAN CITY
New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
JAN. 25, 2017

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican said Wednesday it was taking over the embattled Knights of Malta lay Catholic order in an extraordinary display of papal power after the Knights’ grand master publicly defied Pope Francis in a bitter dispute over condoms.

The move marks the intervention of one sovereign state — the Holy See — into the governance of another, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, an ancient aristocratic order that runs a vast charity operation around the globe.

The Vatican said Matthew Festing, 67, offered to resign as grand master Tuesday during an audience with the pope, and that Francis had accepted it on Wednesday.

The statement said the order’s governance would shift temporarily to the order’s No. 2 “pending the appointment of the papal delegate.”

The naming of a delegate signals a Vatican takeover, harking back to the Vatican’s previous takeovers of the Legion of Christ and Jesuit religious orders when they were undergoing periods of scandal or turmoil.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service – Bulletin

Yesterday, 24 January 2017, in audience with the Holy Father, His Highness Fra’ Matthew Festing resigned from the office of Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Today, 25 January, the Holy Father accepted his resignation, expressing appreciation and gratitude to Fra’ Festing for his loyalty and devotion to the Successor of Peter, and his willingness to serve humbly the good of the Order and the Church.

The governance of the Order will be undertaken ad interim by the Grand Commander pending the appointment of the Papal Delegate.

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ROME
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Jan. 25, 2017

ROME The showdown between the Vatican and the Knights of Malta has come to a brusque end, with the leader of the historic sovereign order resigning at the apparent request of Pope Francis.

In a statement Wednesday, the Vatican said the pontiff would also be taking over control of the order with the appointment of a new papal delegate in the coming days.

News of Grand Master Matthew Festing’s resignation was first reported late Tuesday evening by the Reuters news agency, which said Francis had asked for Festing’s resignation in a meeting at the Vatican earlier that day.

The resignation caps an unusually tense month for the prestigious Catholic lay order, which had been openly resisting a Vatican investigation into Festing’s firing of one of their top officials. At times it seemed that one of Catholicism’s most storied organizations was challenging the authority and power of the pope.

Festing’s resignation appeared to surprise the order’s headquarters, which was unable to answer questions about the leader’s status with the group until mid-Wednesday morning. The order’s website was down throughout the morning, with visitors receiving a message that the server hosting the site was overloaded.

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AUSTRALIA/SCOTLAND
BBC News

An extradition hearing for a former Catholic monk accused of child abuse at a Scottish school has been adjourned until next month.

A magistrate in Australia allowed Father Denis “Chrysostom” Alexander more time to make a bail application.

He has always denied allegations that he abused boys at the former Fort Augustus Abbey boarding school in the Highlands.

He was remanded in custody with the next court hearing due on 13 February.

The magistrate is then expected to decide whether or not there will be a contested extradition hearing

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VATICAN CITY
Headlines from the Catholic World

Vatican City, Jan 25, 2017 / 07:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Wednesday the Vatican announced the appointment of two priests from Milwaukee – Fr. Jeffrey R. Haines and Fr. James T. Schuerman – to serve as auxiliary bishops for the archdiocese.

The priests have been appointed titular bishops of Tagamuta and of Girba, according to a Jan. 25 Vatican communique.

With their appointment, the bishop-elects will serve under Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki, who oversees the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and will replace Bishop Emeritus Richard J. Sklba, who retired in 2010 after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75.

In a press release on the appointments, Archbishop Listecki said it is a “proud moment for the Church in southeastern Wisconsin. By choosing two of our own priests as our new auxiliary bishops, the Holy Father has paid a high compliment to all the priests from this archdiocese.”

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on the resignation of David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP):

Just days after SNAP was sued by a former employee for accepting kickbacks from Church-suing attorneys, its leader, David Clohessy, quit.

He said he “voluntarily resigned” last month, but that is an incomplete, if not dishonest, account. Had it not been for a string of lawsuits and bad publicity, he would have stayed for years. He will now be remembered for running when the going got tough, leaving behind a shell of an organization that is broken both morally and financially.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Christian Today

Ruth Gledhill EDITOR 25 January 2017

The British-born head of the Knights of Malta, a chivalric and charitable order, has resigned in the latest twist in the Vatican condoms row.

Grand Master Matthew Festing, 67, was asked by Pope Francis to stand down after he refused to cooperate with a Vatican commission set up to investigate the sacking of one of his knights, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager.

“The Pope asked him to resign and he agreed,” a spokesperson for the order told Reuters.

Boeselager was fired by Festing because he had supported the use of condoms in a project for the poor. Festing then opposed the Vatican’s enquiry into the dismissal of Boeselager because he said it was interference in the order’s sovereign affairs. …

Festing is from an old British Catholic “recusant” family on his mother’s side. He was educated at Ampleforth and has served as a Deputy Lieutenant for Northumberland and is a trustee for Northumbria Historic Churches.

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WASHINGTON/MINNESOTA
Noaker Law

NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact Info:

Patrick Noaker Cell (612) 839-1080
Noaker Law Firm LLC
333 Washington Avenue N., #341
Minneapolis, MN 55401
Patrick@Noakerlaw.com
@Noakerlaw
cvernon@jvwlaw.net

Leander James Cell (208) 818-6775
Craig Vernon Cell (208) 691-2768
James Vernon & Weeks P.A.
1626 Lincoln Way
Coeur D’Alene, ID 83814
ljames@jvwlaw.net

Cult Appears to Have Left Minnesota and Reorganized in Spokane, Washington

WHAT: Press Conference Where Survivor of Cult Sexual Abuse and her Attorneys Will Discuss Lawsuit Against Victor Barnard, River Road Fellowship, its Trustees and Leaders and Concerns that the Cult May Have Reorganized in Spokane, Washington

WHO: Jane Doe 118, Coeur d’Alene Attorney Leander James and Minneapolis Attorney Patrick Noaker

WHERE: Historic Davenport Hotel
Worthy Room
10 South Post Street
Spokane, WA 99201

WHEN: 10:30 am, Wednesday, January 25, 2017

DETAILS:

Cult’s Leader David Barnard Pled Guilty to Raping Girl When She Was 13 Years Old

One of the victims of sexual assault by River Road Fellowship Cult leader Victor Barnard has filed a civil lawsuit against Barnard, the cult and other cult leaders alleging they were complicit in the operation of the cult that maintained a household of 12 to 18 year-old “maidens” who were required to have sex with Barnard as part of the religion.

Click Here for Civil Complaint

The River Road Fellowship is self-described as a Christian non-denominational biblical research, teaching and fellowship ministry that is an offshoot of The Way International. The River Road Fellowship set up a camp near Finlayson, Minnesota. One particular section of the camp was called “Shepherd’s Camp.”

In July 2000, Barnard gathered a group of young females at Shepherd’s Camp that were referred to as the Maidens Group. The Maidens Group ranged in age from 12-24 years old. As part of the Fellowship’s Teachings, Barnard gave sermons about the Maidens Group giving themselves to God, remaining unmarried, and being a privileged and honored group.

Barnard spent a lot of time with the Maidens, both individually and in groups. He taught them that he represented Jesus Christ to them. Barnard did not live in the house with his wife. Instead, he lived in a home referred to as the Lodge on the Shepherd’s Camp property.

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GUAM
Guam Daily Post

Neil Pang | Post News Staff Jan 25, 2017

Six of the 15 sexual abuses cases filed in the local court against Guam priests and the Archdiocese of Agana have been moved to the federal court in Guam, the attorney for the alleged victims confirmed Wednesday.

Attorney Gloria Rudolph said the six civil cases filed in the U.S. District Court of Guam are for Norman Aguon, Anthony Vegafria, James Bascon, Leo Tudela, Bruce Diaz and Vicente Perez.

The cases for these men, who said they were young children when allegedly sexually abused, haven’t found a judge who would hear their cases in the Superior Court of Guam. Several judges have recused because of conflicts or potential conflicts of interest.

“We expect to find a judge in District Court who will hear our cases,” Rudolph said.

The federal cases seek at least $75,000 for each of the men.

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

Jasmine Stole, jstole@guampdn.com Jan. 25, 2017

Archbishop Michael Jude Byrnes is seeking a court order, affirming the church’s control over the Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Yona, according to a lawsuit filed in Superior Court of Guam.

A hearing in the case Wednesday morning was pushed back until May 3 because none of the defendants have received the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed on Nov. 18, 2016. Nine days before that, Byrnes signed a decree canceling, repealing and rescinding the 2011 declaration of deed restriction that allowed the Yona seminary to be controlled by the Neocatechumenal Way indefinitely, Pacific Daily News files state.

The Redemptoris Mater Seminary, the Redemptoris Mater House of Formation, the Blessed Diego Luis de San Vitores Catholic Theological Institute for Oceania and 50 unnamed others are identified as defendants.

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

Haidee V Eugenio, heugenio@guampdn.com Jan. 25, 2017

Six former altar boys on Guam filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits in federal court Wednesday afternoon against former island priest Louis Brouillard, the Archdiocese of Agana and the Vatican over allegations that Brouillard sexually abused them decades ago.

The lawsuits were filed in the District Court of Guam after at least eight Superior Court of Guam judges recused themselves from hearing any of the 15 clergy sex abuse lawsuits so far filed in the Superior Court, Attorney Gloria Lujan Rudolph, of the law firm Lujan & Wolff, said Wednesday.

As many as nine other lawsuits, also alleging rape or sex abuse by other former and current Catholic priests on Guam, including Archbishop Anthony S. Apuron, will be filed in the District Court of Guam in the days ahead, Attorney David Lujan said.

The six former altar boys on Guam who filed the lawsuits on Wednesday afternoon include Leo B. Tudela, 73; James A. Bascon, 60; Norman J.D. Aguon, 56; Anthony J. Vegafria, 56; Vicente G. Perez, 51; and Bruce A. Diaz, 47.

They each seek not less than $5 million in general damages, for a total of at least $30 million, plus attorney’s fees, and other costs and fees, their federal lawsuits state. Each also demands a jury trial.

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GUAM
Pacific News Center

Written by Janela Carrera

Although the church’s legal counsel says the lawsuit is a protective measure, they do have reason to believe that the RMS may attempt to claim interest or ownership in the property.

Guam – Archbishop Michael Byrnes has taken legal action against the Redemptoris Mater Seminary and if successful would force the RMS to completely give up any interest or ownership of the disputed property where the RMS sits on.

It’s been silent on the hill on any kind of actions on the Yona seminary property since Archbishop Michael Jude Byrnes took critical steps to take back ownership of the multimillion dollar property.

But now, even amid silence from either parties, a lawsuit was filed against the Redemptoris Mater Seminary operators who had previously held a deed restriction that conveyed the title to their name.

Attorney Ignacio Aguigui, who’s representing the Archdiocese of Agana and Byrnes in this matter, says this lawsuit was filed as “protective action.”

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GUAM
Pacific News Center

Written by Janela Carrera

Out of the 15 lawsuits filed against the catholic church for sexual abuse, six have been filed in the District Court of Guam.

Guam – Six of the 15 lawsuits that have been filed by several former altar servers against various clergy members of the catholic church for sexual abuse have now been taken to the federal court and unlike the lawsuits that were filed in local court, the federal lawsuits all ask for $5 million in damages each.

The six plaintiffs who filed separate suits against the Archdiocese of Agana for civil claims of sexual abuse are Anthony Vegafria, Vicente Guerrero Perez, Bruce Diaz, James Bascon, Norman J.D. Aguon and Leo Tudela.

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FRANCE
La Croix

Anne-Benedicte Hoffner, Celine Hoyeau and Marie Malzac

justice turn in Le MansAn alleged case of paedophilia is under investigation in the diocese of Le Mans, in the northwest of France.

Fr Max de Guilbert, who has always denied any wrongdoing, was detained on remand in June 2015 accused of the crime of rape and sexual assault by a person in authority of a minor under the age of 15.

The crimes were alleged to have been committed between 1993 and 2007 on young boys when de Guilbert was stationed in the parishes of Mamers (from 1993 to 1995) and Bonnetable (from 1995 to 2007) in the north of the department of Sarthe.

After a year of pre-trial detention, the priest was placed under house arrest and sent to an abbey in Brittany before being placed under judicial supervision.

The complainants are now thought to number around a dozen. In 1995, a family filed a complaint about improper touching, but the case was discontinued for lack of sufficient evidence.

The priest was transferred; his bishop, Jacques Faivre (who died in 2010) took no particular action.De Guibert’s file was sent to Rome, and an expert opinion by Fr Tony Anatrella (which is currently the subject of a canonical review) concluded that the priest was “an immature but non-paedophile personality”.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Sentinel

By P_Cullinane | Posted: January 25, 2017

Shamed Methodist minister Bryan Gates was arrested for historic sex offences – years after church leaders carried out their own investigation into his sordid past.

The 63-year-old retired in 1998 and had previously raped a woman in Stoke-on-Trent during his time at Longton’s Central Hall.

He was one of 1,885 people investigated by the Methodist Church after concerns were raised about thier past.

Now Gates has been jailed for 15 years after being convicted of one count of rape and two counts of attempted rape.

It has emerged Staffordshire Police approached his victim after being handed the church file.

Judge David Fletcher told Gates: “You are frankly an embarrassment to the church for whom you worked. You should be deeply ashamed of the behaviour and the offences you perpetrated.”

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ILLINOIS
Daily Herald

Harry Hitzeman

A 50-year-old former Aurora priest accused of sexual abuse plans to fight prosecutors’ attempts to have child abuse experts testify at a future trial that “inconclusive exams and/or cultures do not disprove abuse.”

Alfredo Pedraza-Arias of Rockford was arrested in early 2016 on charges he sexually abused two girls younger than 13 — one at her Aurora home and another in an office at Sacred Heart Church in Aurora — between January 2009 and November 2014.

Defense attorney David Camic is seeking any and all possible emails that were sent between police and investigators and four proposed experts.

“If the police and experts communicated, we need to know about it,” he said. “It’s a statement of witnesses in the case.”

Camic also expressed skepticism of testimony from four experts who, according to court records, would testify as to “how inconclusive exams and/or cultures do not disprove abuse.”

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GUAM
KUAM

Updated: Jan 25, 2017

By Sabrina Salas Matanane

Several cases of alleged clergy sexual abuse have now been filed in federal court seeking millions of dollars in damage against the local church and the Vatican. All of the cases filed against the local catholic church in the superior court will be filed in the District Court of Guam. Just today six cases out of the 15 local cases have been filed in federal court.

According to attorney David Lujan, who represents the alleged victims, the cases were and are being moved because all the judges in the Superior Court disqualified themselves. The local Catholic church is being sued for the alleged sexual abuse, knowing about it and not doing anything.

Several priests, including Archbishop Anthony Apuron, have been accused of sexual molestation. Fr. Luis Brouillard, who is no longer is with the local church, confessed during an interview with KUAM News last year that he sexually molested boys while he was a priest here decades ago because he thought it made them happy. In a videotaped confession he said he told the bishop at the time about it, but was told to do prayer as as penance.

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PHILIPPINES
RT

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has unleashed his colorfully-worded wrath on the Catholic Church again, saying the organization is corrupt, “full of sh*t,” and accusing priests of sexual abuse.

Duterte on Tuesday accused the Church and its bishops and priests of corruption, womanizing and said he was abused by a priest as a student of Ateneo de Davao University. He also said three Cabinet secretaries had been molested.

Speaking to the families of Special Action Forces who died in Mamasapano in 2015, Duterte advised the crowd to read “Altar of Secrets” by Aries Rufo to discover the truth about church officials, saying he would resign if its allegations were untrue. He added he might pen his own book about the Church, entitled “Hypocrisy.”

“I challenge the Catholic Church,” he said. “You are full of sh*t. You all smell bad, corruption and all.”

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ALABAMA
AL.com

by Anna Claire Vollers

It was a case that almost didn’t make it to trial.

“Everybody, from Alabama, Maine, Dallas, Houston, New York – it was a herculean task and it took a lot of people at the DA’s office working hard to make it happen,” said Keith Blackwood, Mobile County assistant district attorney, “to make sure I had what I needed to prove my case.”

In the end, three leaders of a religious Alabama bootcamp for troubled teens were convicted on multiple counts of aggravated child abuse for what they did to the children in their care.

The convictions were thanks in large part to the testimony of five former students, who told the court about the physical and mental abuse they suffered at the school.

Despite multiple investigations by the Mobile County DA’s office, local law enforcement and the Alabama Department of Human Resources, it took officials five years to close down the school and another seven months to arrest the employees accused of the worst of the abuse.

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UNITED STATES
Chicago Tribune

Manya Brachear Pashman
Chicago Tribune

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests announced Tuesday that its longtime national director, accused by a former SNAP employee of referring potential clients to attorneys in return for financial kickbacks to the group, resigned at the end of last year.

The announcement that David Clohessy, of St. Louis, left the Chicago-based organization comes a week after he and other leaders were named in a lawsuit filed by a former employee who said she was fired shortly after asking superiors whether SNAP was referring victims to attorneys in exchange for donations to the organization.

In addition to Clohessy, defendants named in the lawsuit are the organization itself, Barbara Blaine, its founder and president, and Barbara Dorris, outreach director. Dorris could not be reached for comment.

In a statement sent to volunteers Tuesday morning, Mary Ellen Kruger, the chairwoman of the board, thanked Clohessy for his nearly 30 years of service to the organization.

“His passion, his voice and his kindness have touched us all,” Kruger said. “We will miss David, and we wish him much happiness. David will always be a friend and an inspiration to SNAP and its many dedicated and hardworking volunteers.”

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UNITED STATES
Chicago Sun-Times

Andy Grimm
@agrimm34

A longtime leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an advocacy group that has for decades publicized allegations of sexual abuse by priests, left the organization at the end of 2016, according to a statement issued Tuesday by SNAP’s chairman.

The announcement that David Clohessy no longer is SNAP’s national director comes just days after a former SNAP staffer filed a lawsuit in Cook County, claiming the Chicago-based organization steered clergy sex abuse victims to lawyers who in turn sued the Catholic Church and then donated large sums back to SNAP.

In the lawsuit, former SNAP fundraiser Gretchen Rachel Hammond claims she saw emails from Clohessy to “prominent” lawyers in several states coordinating press events and in at least one case directly asking when SNAP could expect a donation after referring a victim. Hammond said she was fired from her job as development director for SNAP after she expressed qualms about the group’s ties to lawyers, who provided donations that in most years accounted for 50 to 80 percent of the group’s funding.

Clohessy “voluntarily resigned” from SNAP “effective Dec. 31,” according to a two-paragraph email from SNAP Board Chairwoman Mary Ellen Kruger. According to his profile on the SNAP website, Clohessy had served as the group’s national director since 1991.

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JAMAICA
Jamaica Observer

MANCHESTER, Jamaica — Head of the Centre for Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA) Superintendent Enid Ross confirmed that the Moravian ministers who were yesterday charged for carnal abuse and indecent assault will be making an appearance in court on February 1.

Former Moravian Church president Dr Paul Gardner and his deputy Jermaine Gibson will appear in the Manchester Parish Court.

The charges were reportedly laid against the men because of sexually-related incidents involving a minor that allegedly occurred in the parish years ago.

The men are currently on bail.

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AUSTRALIA
WA Today

Emma Young

Child Abuse Squad detectives have charged a former Perth Catholic school teacher, who then became a police officer, with indecently dealing with four eight-year-old boys in the 1980s.

Officers charged the 56-year-old man last Thursday as a result of their investigation into the alleged offences.

They will allege he committed them between 1984 and 1985, while teaching at a CBD Catholic college.

At the time of his arrest he was employed as a sergeant in the Central Metropolitan police district.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
The Canary

Former army information officer and whistleblower Colin Wallace has condemned the findings of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry. The inquiry found no evidence that security agencies were complicit in child sex abuse that took place at Kincora Boys Home, Northern Ireland.

But Wallace claims that the British government knew about security services’ alleged involvement in the abuse for decades and did nothing. And The Canary has seen documents which appear to back up his claims.

The Kincora scandal

Joseph Mains, Raymond Semple and William McGrath ran Kincora boys’ home in East Belfast. The latter was a leader of Tara, an extremist Protestant paramilitary organisation. All three were jailed in 1981 for abusing 11 boys.

Special Branch officers reportedly saw the former head of Britain’s MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, associating with boys from Kincora. And former intelligence officer Brian Gemmell has alleged in the past that MI5 used Kincora as a blackmail lever. Gemmell claims that, in 1975, MI5 put a stop to an investigation into the abuse. Also, attempts by Royal Ulster Constabulary officers to interview a senior MI5 official about the scandal failed.

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JAMAICA
The Star

Livern Barrett
January 24, 2017

Fifty-five-year-old Kingston pastor Paul Hanniford has been convicted in the Home Circuit Court for having sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.

The in-camera trial which ended a short while ago featured testimonies from the victim who is now 15 years old, and her then five-year-old brother who witnessed the incident at the pastor’s home.

Prosecutors led evidence that Hanniford, the pastor of a Pentecostal church, took the two children to his house under the pretence that they were going for a “drive out”.

According to the prosecution, the pastor gave the five-year-old boy cornflakes and put him around a dining table.

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VATICAN CITY
International Business Times

By Lara Rebello
January 25, 2017

The leader of the Knights of Malta has resigned from his position following a bitter dispute with the Vatican. Prince and Grand Master Robert Matthew Festing was asked to relinquish his role in the Rome-based Catholic chivalric and charity institution, by Pope Francis.

“The Pope asked him to resign and he agreed,” a spokesperson for the order said. The group’s Sovereign Council will now be required to approve the highly unusual resignation. Grand masters normally keep their positions for life.

The spokesperson added that Festing met with the Pope on Tuesday (24 January) to discuss the ongoing conflict between the order and the Holy See and asked him to formally step down. The move comes after Festing fired senior knight Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager in December for allowing the use of condoms in a medical project for the poor through Malteser International, the order’s humanitarian aid agency.

Von Boeselager appealed to the Pope and a five-member commission was appointed to look into the unusual circumstances of the sacking. However, Festing refused to cooperate and called the commission illegitimate and said that it was interfering in the order’s sovereignty and right to govern its internal affairs.

The grand chancellor on his part said that the condom issue was an excuse by Festing and Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, an arch-conservative, to increase the power of the institution. He said that he had closed two medical aid projects after discovering that they distributed condoms, but kept a third one running in Myanmar to continue providing basic medical services to poor people in the Asian country.

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (UK)

Reuters

The head of Catholic order the Knights of Malta has resigned over a bitter dispute with the Vatican about free condoms that become a test of the authority of liberalising Pope Francis.

The Rome-based chivalric and charity institution said Grand Master Matthew Festing, 67, resigned after Pope Francis asked him to step down at a meeting on Tuesday. Grand masters of the institution, which was founded in the 11th century, usually keep their positions for life.

“The pope asked him to resign and he agreed,” the spokesperson said, adding that the next step was a formality in which the group’s Sovereign Council would have to sign off on the highly unusual resignation.

Festing and the Vatican have been locked in a bitter dispute since one of the order’s top knights, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, was sacked in December after the charity distributed condoms as part of a medical project for the poor.

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

By Philip Pullella | VATICAN CITY

The head of the Knights of Malta, who has been locked in a bitter dispute with the Vatican, has resigned, a spokesperson for the Rome-based Catholic chivalric and charity institution said on Wednesday.

The spokesperson said Grand Master Matthew Festing, 67, had resigned after Pope Francis asked him to step down at a meeting on Tuesday. Grand masters of the institution, which was founded in the 11th century, usually keep their positions for life.

“The pope asked him to resign and he agreed,” the spokesperson said, adding that the next step was a formality in which the group’s Sovereign Council would have to sign off on the highly unusual resignation. The order would be run by its number two, or grand commander, until a new head is elected.

Festing and the Vatican have been locked in a bitter dispute since one of the order’s top knights, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, was sacked in December in the chivalric equivalent of a boardroom showdown – ostensibly because he allowed the use of condoms in a medical project for the poor.

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PERU
RTE News (Ireland)

Some of the known survivors of abuse at the hands of an elite Catholic society in Peru have rejected offers of compensation, branding them “ridiculous and offensive”.

Meanwhile, the influential Sodalitium Christianae Vitae announced it had reached a $2.84 million-plus reparation agreement with 35 victims of the organisation’s former leaders.

The SCV, which was founded in the country in 1971 is composed of two bishops, three dozen priests and 248 brothers and was running 39 parishes, according to the latest available official figures from 2014.

The Peruvian prosecutor’s office has filed 27 complaints against the SCV’s founder, Luis Fernando Figari but the Attorney General said this week that no charges would be pressed due to a lack of evidence.

Last April, the SCV admitted Figari was guilty of accusations of sexual and physical abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

A 56-year-old Perth police sergeant has been charged with child sex offences that he allegedly committed while he worked as a school teacher during the 1980s.

Police say the man assaulted four boys, who were eight years old at the time, between 1984 and 1985 when he worked as a teacher at a Catholic school in the Perth CBD.

He has been stood down from work, charged with four counts of indecent treatment of a child under 14 and is due to appear before the Perth Magistrates Court on Wednesday.

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UNITED STATES
New York Daily News

REUVEN BLAU
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, January 24, 2017

A nonprofit set up to help sex abuse victims of priests gets financial kickbacks for referring cases to attorneys seeking to sue the Catholic Church, a new lawsuit alleges.

A former employee of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) brought up the case, saying the group fired her in February 2013 after she complained to bosses about the collusion.

“Attorneys and SNAP base their strategy not on the best interests of the survivor, but on what will generate the most publicity and fundraising opportunities for SNAP,” the suit filed last Thursday in Illinois federal court says.

The fired staffer, Gretchen Rachel Hammond, was hired in 2011 to do fundraising for the group, according to the suit.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service

By David Gibson

(RNS) A fixture in the organization working for children sexually abused by Catholic priests has resigned his post, a development that coincides with a lawsuit from a former employee alleging the group colluded with lawyers to refer clients and profit from settlements.

David Clohessy, longtime executive director of SNAP, or the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Tuesday (Jan. 24) that he left in December and his departure had nothing to do with the lawsuit, which was filed in Illinois on Jan. 17.

“Not at all,” Cohessy said by phone from his home in St. Louis, where SNAP has its main office. “My last day was five weeks ago, before this lawsuit ever happened.”

The lawsuit by Gretchen Rachel Hammond names Clohessy and other SNAP leaders as defendants and alleges that “SNAP does not focus on protecting or helping survivors – it exploits them.”

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FRANCE
L’Eveil

[According to a quantitative survey published by the Conference of French Bishops (CEF), nine clerics (priests or deacons), out of about 15,000 are currently “imprisoned in France for acts of sexual violence committed against minors. Thirty-seven others served their sentences and were released from prison and 26 are under indictment.]

Nouveau guide antipédophilie, publication de chiffres – en stagnation voire repli – sur les prêtres impliqués: l’Église catholique en France a une nouvelle fois affiché lundi une volonté de “transparence” sur les abus sexuels, après les mois de scandales qui l’ont secouée.

Selon une enquête quantitative publiée par la Conférence des évêques de France (CEF), neuf clercs (prêtres ou diacres), sur environ 15.000, sont actuellement “emprisonnés en France pour des faits de violences sexuelles commises sur des mineurs”.

Trente-sept autres “ont exécuté leur peine et sont sortis de prison”, et “26 clercs font l’objet d’une mise en examen, soit moitié moins qu’en 2010”.

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FRANKREICH
religion@orf

[The French bishops conference published figures on abuse. Nine clergy were currently detailed for sexual offenses against minors and 37 priests have already served their sentences while 26 clergy are now in court proceedings. Seven years ago, the number of judicial procedures was twice as high. According to the bishops, 222 victims were reported and more than half the cases relate to alleged incidents that happened before 1970. Thirty-five percent of statements from victims relate to incidents between 1970 and 2000 and four percent relate to the period after 2000.]

Die Französische Bischofskonferenz hat Richtlinien im Kampf gegen sexuellen Missbrauch herausgegeben. Das sei eine der Maßnahmen, um die Kirche zu einem sicheren Ort für Kinder und Jugendliche zu machen, teilte die Bischofskonferenz am Montag in Paris mit.

Das Dokument umfasst etwa 60 Seiten mit rechtlichen Informationen zu dem Thema sowie Hinweisen zum Verhalten bei der Arbeit mit Kindern und Jugendlichen.

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JAMAICA
The Star

As far back as 2002, Pastor Jermaine Gibson had sexual relation with a young woman who was 12 years old at the time, the police Corporate Communications Unit alleged yesterday.

The communication arm of the police force said that two years after Gibson allegedly abused the teen, another pastor, Paul Gardner, allegedly had sexual relations with her.

Following investigations by detectives from the Centre for Sexual Offences and Child Abuse, both pastors were yesterday charged with carnal abuse.

The alleged victim, Stacy*, has welcomed the latest development.

“I am happy that they have both been charged and my resolve to see it through is even greater, especially given their insistence on saying the charges are unfounded as per the statement issued by their lawyer,” Stacy told THE STAR.

“I know that it will not be an easy journey, but I am prepared to travel to the end. Whatever the result … . I am grateful for an opportunity to put that on the record,” the alleged victim added.
Gardner and Gibson are booked to appear in the Manchester Parish Court next week.

ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT

Gardner quit as president of the Moravian Church in Jamaica and The Cayman Islands earlier this month amid allegations of sexual misconduct within the organisation. Gibson, who was his deputy, also resigned.

Lambert Johnson who is representing Gardner and Gibson, has dismissed the allegations against his clients as “vile and malicious”.

The foundation of the Moravian Church has been shaken by recent allegations of sexual misconduct by its leaders.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Socialist Worker

[Kincora Material – Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry]

by Simon Basketter

Children suffered decades of sexual, physical and emotional abuse in homes run by the state, charities and churches in Northern Ireland, an inquiry found last week.

Sir Anthony Hart chaired the four-year Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry. He said payouts of up to £100,000 should be made to those who suffered the worst abuse or were sent to Australia.

Hart found “systemic failings” at 20 of the 22 institutions probed over allegations from 1922 to 1995.

But he rejected claims that a paedophile ring involving British establishment figures abused boys at the Kincora home in Belfast.

There have long been suspicions that security services protected William McGrath—who ran the home and did abuse children—because of his links to Loyalist paramilitaries.

Among the first to voice concerns was former Army information officer Colin Wallace in 1975. He was swiftly moved from his post.

Colin said, “The astonishing claim by the authorities, including the Intelligence Services, that they knew nothing about the allegations surrounding McGrath’s sexual activities until 1980 is a total travesty.”

Security services refused to give evidence. It emerged in the inquiry that files about Kincora have been “lost”.

Colin Wallace’s statement in full

Although I initially offered to give evidence to the Hart Inquiry, I later decided not to mainly on the grounds that the Government repeatedly refused to give it the same legal powers as the corresponding Inquiry in London. I believe that both the perception and the reality of the Government’s decision is one of unfairness to the victims.

Despite my decision, I did, however, provide the Hart Inquiry with 265 pages of comment and supporting documents, drawing attention to false or misleading information contained in the transcripts of the public hearings. My reason for doing so was to enable the Inquiry to investigate and corroborate the accuracy of my past comments about Kincora and related matters, and to provide the Inquiry with the opportunity to correct the relevant errors in the its published transcripts.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Derry Journal

The Historical Abuse Inquiry has upheld an allegation from a former resident at Nazareth House that she was sexually abused at the age of four or five by a Sister at the Bishop Street home.

The Inquiry team found that the incident was not reported to the police when the victim related it to another Sister many years later.

The Inquiry also accepted testimony from another witness that she was persistently abused from the ages of eight to 12 by a priest, including during one episode in a Confessional Box and another in a Sacristy. The priest sometimes gave her a mint after abusing her.

Two witnesses gave testimony that they were sexually interfered with after being placed with families in the country during the summer months and the Inquiry found there was a systematic failure on the part of the Sisters to report the allegations to the authorities.

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JAMAICA
Jamaica Observer

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Former Moravian President Paul Gardner and his deputy Jermaine Gibson who were both arrested and charged with carnal abuse and indecent assault have been granted bail.

The men’s attorney Lambert Johnson confirmed the release moments ago.

After news of their charges became public earlier today, Johnson told OBSERVER ONLINE that his clients said the accusations are being done “out of sheer malice, with the intention of destroying their good name.”

The attorney said that the men’s arrest is “based on vile, malicious and tenuous allegations” adding that based on allegations “the available evidence is riddled with inconsistencies and is bereft of credibility, cogency or corroboration.”

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MISSOURI
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

By Jesse Bogan St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS • The advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests has for decades pressured Catholic church officials and helped expose clergy sex abuse cases that resulted in large payouts to victims and their attorneys.

Now the table is being turned on SNAP.

A former development director for the nonprofit organization claims that SNAP fired her in retaliation for confronting the organization for “colluding with survivors’ attorneys.”

Gretchen Rachel Hammond, 46, of Chicago, who raised money for SNAP from July 2011 until February 2013, filed the lawsuit last week in Cook County, Ill.

Hammond alleges that the advocacy organization, which was based in Chicago until moving to the Central West End in late 2016, didn’t have grief or rape counselors on the payroll and that SNAP ignored some victims seeking help. …

Reached by telephone, Clohessy said the idea that SNAP was getting kickbacks was “utterly preposterous.”

Asked about the specific email, he said: “I have written tens of thousands of emails. I can’t imagine that that’s true.”

Clohessy, of St. Louis, started with SNAP in the late 1980s. In 2007, he received the Lifetime Achievement in Advocacy Award from the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, according to the SNAP website. He’s been interviewed by “60 Minutes” and countless media outlets across the country.

He confirmed Monday that he no longer works for SNAP. He said he quit about five weeks ago. He said the recent lawsuit had nothing to do with his departure.

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ILLINOIS
Daily Herald

An ex-church deacon accused of sexually assaulting a young girl over a 10-year period pleaded guilty Friday in DuPage County court and waived his rights to a jury trial.

Timothy Peltz, 52, entered blind pleas of guilty to four counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a child. Nineteen other charges were dismissed. Peltz faces between 24 and 120 years in prison on the consecutive counts.

Authorities said Peltz frequently assaulted the girl when she was between 3 and 13 years old. Officials from Living Hope Bible Church in Roselle, where Peltz worked as a deacon until early 2016, said the abuse did not take place on church grounds or during any church activities.

The assaults stopped when the girl was 13 “because she was able to physically resist,” but began again last year, according to Assistant State’s Attorney Jennifer Lindt.

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VATICAN CITY
Rome Reports

[with video]

After a 10 year hiatus since their last Ad Limina, which usually takes place every five years, the Irish bishops came to Rome to discuss the state of the Church in Ireland.

They met with nearly all the major departments of the Roman Curia and Pope Francis, where open discussions took place about issues such as migration, secularism, women in the Church and outreach to the poor. However, one main topic of interest was the clerical sex abuse in the country.

ARCH. EAMON MARTIN
Archbishop of Armagh (Ireland)

“We have shared the determined efforts we have been making to put in place robust procedures of safeguarding in the Church in Ireland. We also spoke a lot about the efforts to try to bring healing to those who have been abused and all people who have been affected by the awful trauma of the sins and crimes of people in the Church and others in society.”

The archbishop said since their last meeting with Benedict XVI, they have been working on four steps of healing and recovery: to establish the truth, to put procedures in effort to prevent future abuse, to adhere to principles of justice and to bring healing.

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JAMAICA
Loop

Two ministers of religion were on Monday charged with Carnal Abuse and Indecent Assault by investigators assigned to the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA).

They are 36-year-old Jermaine Gibson of Lyndale Close, Kingston 20 and 54-year-old Paul Gardner of Burbank Avenue, Kingston 19. Both men are senior members of the Moravian Church, the same church as Rupert Clarke who was charged with rape after he was in December allegedly caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl.

Gibson allegedly had a sexual relationship with a minor as far back as 2002, when the alleged victim was a 12 year-old girl. Gardener, allegedly, later also developed a sexual relationship with the teen.

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ROME
TheTablet

19 January 2017 | by Christopher Lamb

Inside the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace hangs an icon of the Virgin Mary holding a finger to her lips. Titled Our Lady of Silence it was placed there on the instructions of Pope Francis. It was a not so subtle hint that those who work for the Church should not gossip, but it could equally be seen as an image for the way the Church has responded to clerical sexual abuse.

That scandal reared its head again this week with a new book by Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi. Lussuria (Lust) reveals that roughly 1,200 abuse cases have been filed with the Holy See during Francis’ papacy, maintaining a depressingly similar pace to the last couple of years of Benedict XVI’s time in office. Mr Fittipaldi was one of the journalists threatened with jail by the Vatican for publishing sensitive documents that exposed financial mismanagement by Vatican officials: now he’s turned his attention to the abuse issue, alleging that Francis is doing very little to tackle the problem. Is this fair?

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ILLINOIS
Catholic Herald (UK)

by Catholic News Service
posted Monday, 23 Jan 2017

Gretchen Rachel Hammond accused organisation of being motivated by an ideological hostility to the Catholic Church

A former director of development for Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (Snap) has said that the organisation is more interested in fundraising and taking kickbacks from lawyers suing the Catholic Church than in helping survivors.

Gretchen Rachel Hammond, has filed a lawsuit against the organisation in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, further accuses Snap of being “a commercial organisation” and “premised upon farming out abuse survivors as clients for attorneys, who then file lawsuits on behalf of the survivors and collect settlement checks from the Catholic Church.”

Hammond worked for Snap from July 2011 to February 2013, and is now a journalist for the Windy City Times. She claims she was fired in retaliation for a series of discoveries she made about the way settlements were being handled, and that the stress caused by Snap’s treatment of her sent her to the hospital four times and resulted in a series of health problems.

She also asserts that Snap “is motivated by its directors’ and officers’ personal and ideological animus against the Catholic Church.”

In 2011, Snap helped publicise the attempt in Europe to bring charges against Pope Benedict XVI for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

Lambert Johnson, the attorney for Moravian ministers Dr Paul Gardner and Jermaine Gibson, has described the arrest and charge of his clients as vile, malicious and tenuous.

Johnson says the allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and are bereft of credibility, cogency and corroboration.

He asserts that the case is doomed to fail.

The attorney also says Dr Gardner and Reverend Gibson maintain their innocence.

Johnson says the Moravian ministers have given instructions to file a suit for defamation, malicious prosecution and false imprisonment.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

Two more clergymen have been charged with carnal abuse.

Dr Paul Gardner and Jermaine Gibson were today charged following investigations by detectives from the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA).

Superintendent Enid Ross Stewart, head of CISOCA, said Gibson, 36, of Lyndale Close, Kingston 20 and Gardner, 54, of Burbank Avenue, Kingston 19 were today charged with carnal abuse and indecent assault.

According to the police, the incidents, which date as far back as 2002.

They allege that Gibson had a sexual relationship with the girl who was twelve years old at the time.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

Hours after detectives from the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse charged former president of the Moravian Church in Jamaica and Grand Cayman, the Rev. Dr Paul Gardner, and former vice president, the Rev. Jermaine Gibson, for carnal abuse and indecent assault, the alleged victim vowed to press for justice even as an attorney representing the churchmen says the case is “doomed to failure”.

The woman who accused both Gardner and Gibson told The Gleaner yesterday that she was happy that the men have been charged, noting that “my resolve to see it through is even greater, especially given their insistence on saying the charges are unfounded as per the statement issued by their lawyer.”

The alleged victim, whose identity has been withheld, said she was prepared to seek justice. “I know that it will not be an easy journey, but I am prepared to travel to the end. Whatever the result, I know that they are (alleged) sexual predators, and I am grateful for an opportunity to put that on the record.”

At the same time, the Reverend Phyllis Smith-Seymour, the acting president of the Moravian Church in Jamaica, said the latest development in the sex scandal plaguing the church was regrettable.

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JAMAICA
Jamaica Observer

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Former Moravian President Paul Gardner and his deputy Jermaine Gibson have been both arrested and charged with carnal abuse and indecent assault.

The attorney-at-law representing the men told OBSERVER ONLINE that his clients said the accusations are being done “out of sheer malice, with the intention of destroying their good name.”

The attorney said that the men’s arrest is “based on vile, malicious and tenuous allegations” adding that based on allegations “the available evidence is riddled with inconsistencies and is bereft of credibility, cogency or corroboration.”

“[Our] clients are steadfast in their declarations of innocence and having regard to the circumstances we have been instructed to file suit for defamation, malicious prosecution and false imprisonment,” the attorney’s law firm said in a statement Monday.

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JAMAICA
The Star

January 23, 2017

Former president of the Moravian church, Dr Paul Gardner, has been charged with carnal abuse.

Gardner as well as Jermaine Gibson, who was vice president of the church, were today slapped with the charges following investigations by detectives from the Centre for Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA).

Superintendent Enid Ross Stewart, head of CISOCA, said the clergymen were charged about midday. She said that a court date has not yet been set.

Dr Gardner quit as president of the Moravian Church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands earlier this month amid allegations of sexual misconduct within the organisation. Gibson, who was his deputy, also resigned.

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JAMAICA
Jamaica Observer

FORMER Moravian Church President Dr Paul Gardner and his deputy, Jermaine Gibson, yesterday instructed their attorney to file a suit for defamation, malicious prosecution and false imprisonment after they were slapped with sex charges in relation to the alleged sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl 14 years ago.

Defence attorney Lambert Johnson, who is representing both men, told the Jamaica Observer that the allegations and subsequent arrest are out of “sheer maliciousness and sheer malevolence”.

While saying that he could not go into details, Johnson said that the allegations against his clients were riddled with inconsistencies, lacked credibility, cogency and corroboration and that the case was doomed to fail.

Gardener, 54, of Burbank Avenue, Kingston 19, and 36-year-old Gibson of Lyndale Close, Kingston 20, were yesterday arrested by the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offence and Child Abuse (CISOCA) and charged with carnal abuse and indecent assault.

According to a report from the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Corporate Communications Unit, in 2002 Gibson allegedly engaged in a sexual relationship with the girl while he was a minister in the church.

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AUSTRALIA
Roman Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle

The Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle has this morning announced the launch of the Diocesan Protection and Safety Council – a new body formed to advise the Bishop.

The Diocesan Protection and Safety Council (Council) will provide independent advice to the Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle on a range of issues, including promoting the protection of children and vulnerable adults within the Diocese, developing the Diocesan capacity to continue to support those who have been affected by child sexual abuse and working to rebuild a sense of trust within the community about the Diocese’s commitment to protect children and vulnerable adults.

Bishop Bill Wright says the formation of the Council will foster a culture of continuous improvement throughout the Diocese, in all matters relating to the protection of children and vulnerable adults:

“The Diocese has a particularly troubled history of failing to protect children from sexual abuse and through these failures, allowed predatory individuals to continue to abuse. It is this sad history which sees us now at the forefront of safety and protection as we aim to continually push forward with any activities which minimise the risk for people suffering in the future.”

“The newly formed Council will offer independent advice to ensure that the Diocese continues to develop its policies and practices in the field of professional standards.”

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AUSTRALIA
news.com.au

JANUARY 23, 2017

Australian Associated Press

A new council has been set up to help improve trust between the NSW Hunter community and the Catholic diocese of Maitland-Newcastle by providing independent advice on child abuse matters.

The body will also aim to promote the protection of kids and vulnerable adults in the community.

Bishop Bill Wright, who will receive the advice from a group of Catholic and non-Catholics, acknowledged the diocese had a troubled history of failing to protect children from sexual abuse.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
The Irish News

Fionnuala O Connor
24 January, 2017 01:00

Hearts and minds are already being appealed to; the battle for immortal souls cannot be far behind.

In the election campaign effectively under way already, the DUP will try desperately to stop the handling of public money being issue Number One. Politicians competing to represent the other main community will be quizzed not only on the point of having a Stormont, but also about their personal faith and morals.

Nationalist parties need to rethink positions and strategies – post-Martin McGuinness, post-Brexit, and maybe post that imaginary, unreal ‘power-sharing’ Stormont. For now Sinn Féin and the SDLP must just do the best they can with a messy set of circumstances. Perhaps the majority of their possible voters want another Stormont executive. Maybe they couldn’t care less.

But at meetings organised by passionate lay-people, and in letters from bishops read at Mass, carried in parish newsletters, Sinn Féin and the SDLP will be asked where they stand on abortion, criticised for supporting gay marriage. The doorsteps will ask if they’re about to defy the Church, or are they good Catholics.

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AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

Joanne McCarthy
24 Jan 2017

HUNTER Catholic Bishop Bill Wright has appointed a new body to advise him on protecting children and vulnerable adults after a public apology in September for the diocese’s “particularly troubled history” of failing to protect children from sexual abuse.

The nine-member diocese protection and safety council will help “rebuild a sense of trust within the community about Maitland-Newcastle diocese’s commitment to protect children and vulnerable adults”, said a statement released on Monday.

It came four months after devastating evidence at a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse public hearing in Newcastle which revealed systemic failings in the church’s responses to child sex offenders including Father Vince Ryan and Marist Brothers Romuald (Francis Cable) and Patrick (Thomas Butler).

Bishop Wright said the Council would foster a culture of continuous improvement throughout the diocese on the protection of children and vulnerable adults after a history which includes “allowing predatory individuals to continue to abuse”.

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CANADA
Toronto Star

By The Canadian Press
Mon., Jan. 23, 2017

OTTAWA—Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett says it is very important that the Anglican Church has agreed to work on a national public apology for the legacy of Ralph Rowe — a former priest who flew into indigenous communities and sexually abused children during the 1970s and 1980s.

Following a long-standing call from indigenous leaders, the church acknowledged Friday that its actions helped create a legacy of brokenness in some communities.

Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, who represents 49 communities in northern Ontario, says the church must also provide resources, as well as words, to address the intergenerational impacts of Rowe’s abuse, including suicide and addiction.

Fiddler notes it was determined during court proceedings that Rowe preyed upon more than 500 children.

Wapekeka First Nation — a community that garnered national headlines this month following the suicide of two 12-year-old girls — was one of the communities affected by the legacy of the former priest and Boy Scout leader.

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OHIO
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: James Kiffmeyer was ordained for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati in 1985. He taught at Fenwick High School in Middletown OH while assisted in two subsequent area parishes. In 1991 he was assigned to Elder High School in Cincinnati, residing for several years in a nearby parish.

In April 2002 Kiffmeyer went on personal leave after an allegation surfaced that he had engaged in “sexual misconduct” with a Fenwick High senior in 1986. Soon thereafter the mother of another Fenwick graduate reported to the county prosecutor’s office that Kiffmeyer had molested her son as a Fenwick senior, too, in 1990. That case was quietly settled by the archdiocese in 1997. Kiffmeyer denied both accusations. During his leave he taught pharmacy at a local college. In 2006 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrination of the Faith reinstated Kiffmeyer, instructing him “to avoid situations and persons which might endanger his living up to his priestly commitment…. .” Kiffmeyer proceeded to help out in area parishes and in 2008 was installed as pastor of Holy Family. In July 2012 he resigned, telling the bishop he had no intention of returning to priestly ministry.

Ordained: 1985

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SCOTLAND
Scotsman

ANGUS HOWARTH
Monday 23 January 2017

A former Catholic monk accused of child abuse at a Scottish school has been arrested in Australia, it has been reported.

The BBC said Father Denis “Chrysostom” Alexander had been remanded in custody in Sydney pending his extradition back to Scotland to face trial.

He is one of several monks accused of abusing boys at the former Fort Augustus Abbey boarding school in the Highlands.

The Crown Office declined to comment. Father Alexander has always denied the allegations. In 2013, he was confronted by BBC Scotland in Sydney as part of a documentary which led to a police investigation.

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SCOTLAND
The Times

Marc Horne
January 24 2017
The Times

A former Catholic monk accused of abusing children at a Scottish school has been arrested in Australia.

Father Denis Alexander was one of several monks who were alleged to have sexually and physically abused boys at the former Fort Augustus Abbey boarding school.

In 2013 a TV investigation uncovered evidence that staff had preyed on vulnerable children at the institute on the banks of Loch Ness.

Mr Alexander, 80, has been remanded in custody in Sydney and is expected to be extradited to Scotland to face trial. He is due to face a hearing tomorrow, when it will become clear whether he intends to oppose the extradition and seek bail.

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SCOTLAND
Daily Record

A former Catholic monk accused of child abuse at a boarding school in the Highlands has been arrested in Australia.

Father Denis “Chrysostom” Alexander, who is now 80, was one of several monks accused of abusing boys at Fort Augustus Abbey.

The BBC has reported that he has been remanded in custody in Sydney pending extradition to Scotland to face charges.

Father Alexander has always denied the allegations.

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ROME
ANSA

(ANSA) – Rome, January 20 – A Rome prosecutor on Friday asked for sentences of one year in jail for former Vatican Bank (IOR) Director-General Paolo Cipriani and 10 months for his former deputy Massimo Tulli a trial into suspected breaches of Italy’s anti-money-laundering norms linked to two suspicious operations that led to the 2010 seizure of 23 million euros, later returned to the Holy See’s bank.

The Vatican Bank, or Institute for Religious Works (IOR), operated in Italy without authorization for 40 years, Rome prosecutors say in the case.

Investigators say 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. At that point, IOR moved some of its banking activities to Germany.

However, Italian banks effectively stopped dealing with the IOR in 2010 after the Bank of Italy ordered them to enforce strict anti-money laundering criteria to continue working with it.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee | Jan. 23, 2017

VATICAN CITY

The head of the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency has revealed that the city-state began pursuing prosecutions against people accused of financial crimes for the first time in 2016, in what may be seen as a breakthrough for Pope Francis’ continuing reforms.

In an NCR interview Jan. 10, the president of the Vatican’s Financial Intelligence Authority said the first prosecutions had begun without public announcement in 2016 and would continue at a faster pace in 2017.

“The work there is increasing and we are definitely making progress on that end,” said René Brülhart, speaking about the process carefully.

Lack of prosecutions against those accused of financial crimes has long been a concern of international experts who have examined the Vatican’s financial system.

While the watchdog agency has released annual reports since 2012 detailing possible suspicious activity, for example marking 544 activities as questionable in 2015, there had as yet been no prosecutions of those responsible.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Derry Now

Monday 23rd of January 2017

A Derry man who was the victim of institutional abuse has praisd the Bishop of Derry after he embraced him during emotional scenes in the city yesterday.

The Bishop, Dr Donal McKeown, delivered a homily during two services over the weekend at Eugene’s Cathedral and Long Tower, where he addressed the final report into the findings of Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA), which was set up in 2013 to look at historical abuse claims at homes throughout Northern Ireland

These included former children’s residential homes in Derry at St Joseph’s Home at Termonbacca, the Sisters of Nazareth’s children’s home at Bishop Street, Fort James and Harberton House.

The inquiry also dealt with institutions run by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Derry, Belfast and Newry.

The 2,300-page report was published at an event in Belfast on Friday morning.

In the wake of the publication, Bishop McKeown told Mass goers that the ‘focus has to be on accepting the pain and loss suffered by those who, through no fault of their own, were scarred for life by the way they were treated and let down’.

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FRANCE
Liberation

[Pedophilia in the church: About 60 cases are in the hands of justice.]

Les 106 diocèses de l’Hexagone ont été priés de livrer leurs données dans le cadre d’une enquête interne de la Conférence des évêques de France. Des chiffres inédits mais qui ne disent qu’une partie de la réalité.

Pédophilie dans l’Eglise : une soixantaine d’affaires aux mains de la justice
Surtout pas de triomphalisme. «Neuf, c’est toujours neuf de trop», s’empresse de dire Ségolaine Moog, déléguée pour la lutte contre la pédophilie à la Conférence des évêques de France (CEF). Neuf ? C’est le nombre de clercs (c’est-à-dire des prêtres ou des diacres, le grade en dessous) actuellement incarcérés pour des faits d’abus sexuels sur mineurs. D’un point de vue judiciaire, les affaires de pédophilie concerneraient, selon une enquête interne de la CEF, une soixantaine de clercs catholiques. Parmi eux, 37 ont déjà purgé leur peine et 26 font l’objet d’une mise en examen. Depuis plusieurs mois, les évêques catholiques promettaient de donner des chiffres à la suite du scandale qu’a provoqué, à Lyon, l’affaire de l’abbé Bernard P. Aucun bilan n’avait été établi par l’institution depuis 2010 et les 106 diocèses de l’Hexagone ont donc été priés (non sans réticence pour certains) de livrer leurs données.

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DEUTSCHLAND
TP-Presseagentur

The victim organization Netzwerk B today declared the “zero tolerance” strategy of Pope Francis against sexual abuse is nothing more than paper.] :

Die Opferorganisation netzwerkB erklärte heute zur „Null-Toleranz“-Strategie von Papst Franziskus gegenüber sexuellem Missbrauch:

„Papst Franziskus hat „Null-Toleranz“-Strategie gegenüber ‘sexuellem Missbrauch‘ versprochen. Dass die Wirklichkeit in der katholischen Kirche anders aussieht – behauptet der Enthüllungsjournalist Emiliano Fittipaldi in seinem Buch „Lussuria“ (Unzucht).

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ITALIEN
Main-Echo

“Francis is hypocritical.” Italian lawyer Sergio Cavaliere, 46, has represented ten victims of sexual abuse by priests in Italy. He laments the church is not actively combatting abuse in the church and he criticized Pope Francis.]

Der ita­lie­ni­sche An­walt Ser­gio Ca­va­lie­re, 46, hat zehn Op­fer se­xu­el­len Miss­brauchs durch Pries­ter in Ita­li­en ver­t­re­ten. Er be­klagt die man­geln­de Be­kämp­fung von Miss­brauch in der ka­tho­li­schen Kir­che und kri­ti­siert den Papst. Papst Fran­zis­kus ging hart mit Miss­brauch­stä­t­ern in der Kir­che ins Ge­richt und traf ei­ni­ge wich­ti­ge Ent­schei­dun­gen.

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GUAM
Guam Daily Post

Neil Pang | Post News Staff

Coadjutor Archbishop Michael Jude Byrnes arrived back in Guam yesterday to resume his duties as head of the Archdiocese of Agana.

Byrnes was installed as the coadjutor archbishop of the archdiocese by Pope Francis in late October 2016 and made his first trip to Guam on Nov. 26. Chancery officials said he made the trip to Guam in time for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, or Santa Maria Kamalen, on Dec. 8.

Unfinished business

Church officials explained that Byrnes had to return to Detroit, where he last served as an auxiliary bishop, to wrap up unfinished business. Now that he has tied up loose ends, chancery officials said that he will be able to focus completely on his duties as the head of Guam’s largest faith community and the many issues it currently faces.

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ZAMBIA
Zambia Reports

Peter Adamu | January 23, 2017

Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu has revealed that there are 120 cases recorded at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka related to abuse of children below 8.

Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu has called for a change in attitude saying the numbers shows that this was a tragedy.

Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu called the church and Zambians at large to come together and protect children.

BELOW IS THE FULL STATEMENT BY BISHOP MPUNDU

NEWS RELEASE
For immediate publication
Date: 23rd January, 2017

CATHOLIC BISHOPS CALL FOR PROTECTION OF CHILDREN.

Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops (ZCCB) president Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu has called on the protection of Children and minors.

Speaking on behalf of other Catholic Bishops of Zambia during the opening of a one day workshop on Child protection held at Kapingila house on Monday 23rd January, 2017, Archbishop Mpundu described the statistics on reported cases of abused children as a tragedy.

Archbishop Mpundu further called for the reversal of the situation and announced that that the church stands in a singular position to spearhead the campaign.

“[I am informed that] every single month at the University Teaching Hospital 120 children below the age of 8 are abused. And these are numbers of children whom we know about. These cases reported to the police and followed up. But a greater number is not even known. This is a tragedy which must be reversed, and the church stands ready in a singular position to spearhead this campaign,” he said. …

And Secretary for the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors Monsignor Robert Oliver commended the Catholic Church in Zambia on its stance on the protection of children and minors.
The one day Child Protection workshop at Kapingila house in Lusaka which drew 46 participants from all the 11 dioceses of Zambia was organised by Pope Francis’ 2014 set Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

The Pontifical Commission goes around the world to promote local responsibility by assisting bishops, religious superiors and there conferences to develop guidelines, norms, and establish safe environments for children through mutual sharing of best practices.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on an editorial in today’s Washington Post:

“On the most explosive and morally subversive challenge facing the Roman Catholic Church—clerical sexual abuse of children, and the bishops who tolerate it—Pope Francis has said the right things but done too little.”

This remarkable comment is the first sentence in an editorial in today’s Washington Post. The newspaper is living in a time warp. It cited not a single piece of new evidence, resting solely on a book by an Italian journalist that covers cases extending back over a half century ago. To make matters worse, Crux editor John Allen Jr. noted the author’s “sloppiness with facts,” about which the Washington Post is either unaware of or simply doesn’t care to mention.

NEWSFLASH: THE SCANDAL ENDED OVER 30 YEARS AGO

What’s the source of my comment? The Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Independently, they represent the most authoritative accounts of priestly sexual abuse.

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SCOTLAND/AUSTRALIA
BBC News

By Mark Daly
BBC Scotland Investigations Correspondent

A former Catholic monk accused of child abuse at a Scottish school has been arrested in Australia.

Father Denis “Chrysostom” Alexander was one of several monks accused of abusing boys at the former Fort Augustus Abbey boarding school in the Highlands.

The BBC has learned he has been remanded in custody in Sydney pending his extradition back to Scotland to face trial.

The Crown Office here said it would not comment on legal matters elsewhere.

Father Alexander has always denied the allegations.

In 2013, he was confronted by BBC Scotland in Sydney as part of a documentary which prompted a major police investigation.

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ZAMBIA
Lusaka Times

Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops (ZCCB) president Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu has called on the protection of Children and minors.

Speaking on behalf of other Catholic Bishops of Zambia during the opening of a one-day workshop on Child protection held at Kapingila house on Monday 23rd January, 2017, Archbishop Mpundu described the statistics on reported cases of abused children as a tragedy.

Archbishop Mpundu further called for the reversal of the situation and announced that that the church stands in a singular position to spearhead the campaign.

“[I am informed that] every single month at the University Teaching Hospital 120 children below the age of 8 are abused. And these are numbers of children whom we know about. These cases reported to the police and followed up. But a greater number is not even known. This is a tragedy which must be reversed, and the church stands ready in a singular position to spearhead this campaign,” he said.

The ZCCB president further said that the cry of the Church is to mobilise everyone in the Church to fight the abuse of children.

“Let us put together whatever we have in terms of reflections to that we can move ahead. Our cry is to mobilise everyone in the church beginning from the family. Children are most abused by the people who know them,” he said.

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TEXAS
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has nominated Msgr. Michael J. Boulette as the new auxiliary bishop of San Antonio, Texas (USA), assigning him the titular see of Geron.

He is the founder and director of ‘St. Peter upon the Water’, a center for spiritual direction and formation located in Ingram.

Msgr. Boulette was born in Hudson Falls, New York to French Canadian and Italian parents on 4 June 1950. In 1959 his family moved to Fredericksburg, Texas.

He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Saint Mary University in 1971 and his Master’s in Psychology from Trinity University in 1972.

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GEORGIA
Radar Online

By Melissa Parrelli
Posted on Jan 23, 2017

Paula Deen’s “pedophile” priest brother-in-law may have victimized countless helpless children, the rep for a national sex abuse survivor’s network told RadarOnline.com. And even though he committed suicide, they’re not giving up the fight for justice!

As Radar reported, Deen’s brother-in-law Henry B. Groover III was slapped with a molestation lawsuit last week, and committed suicide days later. Now, a director from SNAP, the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests revealed exclusively to Radar that the organization is launching a campaign to find other possible victims.

“We will be in Savannah the first and second day of February to work with the media [in a press conference] in hopes of reaching thousands of people, and therefore, other possible victims,” Barbara Dorris, SNAP outreach director, told Radar exclusively.
Dorris said what disturbed her the most about this case was that “Groover was living behind the victim’s family” and that he “lived in a neighborhood where nobody knew what horrifying things he was capable of.”

Indeed, the lawsuit accused Groover of being a “pedophile” who had moved within sight of one of his alleged victims. And Radar previously spoke with other people who had lived near Groover in Savannah, who said they were “shocked” and “saddened” to hear that an accused “sexual predator” was in their neighborhood and so close to their children for all these years.

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GUAM
KUAM

Jan 23, 2017

By Krystal Paco

He’s back for good. Coadjutor Archbishop Michael Byrnes arrived on island from Detroit early Monday morning and he’s getting right to work. Byrnes was Vatican-appointed and given full authority of the Archdiocese of Agana late last year.

His appointment follows allegations of child molestation made against Archbishop Anthony Apuron. Apuron faces a canonical trial in Rome as well as civil suits here at home.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Altoona Mirror

A former bus driver for the company that transports students within the Altoona Area School District has filed a federal lawsuit claiming religious discrimination, stating she was terminated from the job she had for 14 years after refusing to be fingerprinted.

In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Johnstown, Bonnie F. Kaite of the Juniata section of Altoona, said she was required to undergo a criminal background check 14 months ago as part
of a recently passed state law.

The background investigation included a fingerprint check.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Alice Ross

Monday 23 January 2017

The UK’s main Jehovah’s Witnesses charity has dropped efforts to block an investigation into how it handled allegations of sexual abuse, including of children, after a legal fight lasting more than two years.

The Charity Commission launched an inquiry into safeguarding at the religion’s main UK charity in May 2014 after receiving allegations that survivors of rape and sexual abuse, including people abused as children, were forced to face their attackers in “judicial committees”.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, resisted the investigation into the Watch Tower Bible Tract Society of Great Britain (WTBTS), which oversees the UK’s 1,500 congregations and is believed to play a key role in deciding how claims of abuse are handled.

The WTBTS, which had a turnover of more than £80m last year, launched a series of legal challenges to the inquiry. These included an attempt to challenge in the supreme court the commission’s decision to start an investigation. The charity also fought in the lower courts against production orders that would oblige it to give the commission access to records showing how it handled the allegations.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

Government has taken steps to assist the St Elizabeth family at the centre of the sexual abuse case involving 64-year-old Moravian minister, Rupert Clarke.

Clarke was arrested and charged for allegedly having sex with a 15-year-old member of the family.

Two weeks after the arrest, the then president of the Moravian Church in Jamaica, Rev Dr Paul Gardener along with his deputy, the Rev Jermaine Gibson, resigned their positions amid damning allegations in an email that was made public.

Minister of Gender Affairs, Olivia Grange, says the family will be provided with housing by the charity organisation Food for the Poor.

Grange says the government will ensure that it is placed in an area where they will be safe and comfortable.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE
Seacoast Online

Editorial

We are hopeful a New Hampshire House committee will do the right thing and reject a bill that would make it more difficult to prosecute people charged with sex assault.

The legislation calls for a higher level of proof than other crimes for a heinous offense that is already underreported because of the pain it causes victims to come forward and testify. House Bill 106 states “that a victim’s testimony in a sexual assault case … requires corroboration only in cases where the defendant has no prior convictions for sexual assault.”

That is outrageous.

No one is in favor of anyone going to jail or having their reputation damaged for a crime they didn’t commit. However, this bill offers sexual abuse suspects a special shield from prosecution.

Sgt. Sean Ford of the Concord Police Department testified at the Statehouse on Tuesday and summed it up perfectly: “It’s really nothing short of the nation’s first pedophile protection act,” he said, according to an Associated Press report on the hearing that drew a large crowd to Concord.

State Rep. William Marsh, R-Wolfeboro, is the sponsor of the bill. His argument is people are perceived as guilty as soon as they are accused of the crime and he points to the 2016 aggravated felonious sexual assault conviction of Concord psychologist Foad Afshar, who is serving 3 to 6 years for touching the genitals of a 12-year-old child during an appointment. Marsh argues Afshar was convicted with little evidence other than the victim’s word and says the case could mean psychologists and psychiatrists may hesitate to treat children in the future.

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Editorial Board January 22

ON THE MOST explosive and morally subversive challenge facing the Roman Catholic Church — clerical sexual abuse of children, and the bishops who tolerate it — Pope Francis has said the right things but done too little. Even now, 15 years after the explosive revelations of church complicity in enabling and covering up the predations of American priests who damaged so many young lives, not a single bishop has been explicitly held accountable and stripped of his title.

The pope’s sluggish, inadequate and compromised stance in the face of this outrage is the subject of a new book, “Lust,” by a respected Italian journalist, Emiliano Fittipaldi. The book, published last week, is an indictment not just of a papal policy that has failed to live up to its ringing promises about “zero tolerance” for clerical sexual abuse, but of Francis’s papacy.

Mr. Fittipaldi reveals that the pace of complaints about sexual abuse filed with the Holy See has been virtually unchanged in the nearly four years since Francis became pope, compared with his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who was deservedly condemned for his inaction. More damningly, the book details repeated instances where church officials implicated in allegations of abuse and coverups were promoted, often to top positions in the church’s sprawling hierarchy.

One example is Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, former archbishop of Santiago, Chile, elevated by Francis to the elite, nine-member Council of Cardinal Advisers, a sort of papal kitchen cabinet in Rome. Errázuriz has long been accused of ignoring accusations of sexual abuse against a priest under his jurisdiction. Another is Cardinal George Pell, formerly an Australian bishop, who serves as the Vatican’s top finance official. He has long been accused of having shrugged off pedophilia among priests during his time in Australia. When questioned about it last year by an investigative commission in his home country, he fell back on the old canard about the church being no better or worse than society at large, a facile formulation often used by Vatican officials to avoid any admission of the church’s ingrained pattern of institutional complicity.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

The man in charge of reviewing Victoria’s controversial bail system was responsible for flipping a murderous hitman who went on to testify against notorious Melbourne gangland boss Carl Williams.

Today, with his government under incredible pressure following the bloody Bourke Street massacre, Victoria’s Premier turned to the cool, pragmatic head of Paul Coghlan, QC.

Coghlan was Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions in troubled times, from 2001 through to 2007, and launched a wave of prosecutions during the state’s infamous “Underbelly” gangland war.

The former top silk was also known for reopening the case against pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale so he could prosecute him with more sex abuse charges, eventually adding 13 years to his jail term.

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GUAM
Radio New Zealand

The Catholic Church in Guam is being accused of rewarding a priest who shielded its Archbishop from abuse allegations.

The Concerned Catholics of Guam has written a letter to the church questioning the decision to send Father Adrian Cristobal to study in Canada.

Its President David Sablan told Jo O’Brien Father Cristobal is also a member of an alternative movement within the Church that has caused division and abused its resources.

TRANSCRIPT

DAVID SABLAN: Father Adrian Cristobal was the chancellor during the reign of Archbishop Anthony Apuron who was allegedly accused of numerous sexual abuse of young altar boys when he was the pastor prior to being elevated to bishop. I would believe that Father Cristobal knew about some of these allegations but basically did not say much about it and again that’s just my opinion knowing how he interacted with the Archbishop. But our concern primarily is that he has basically lied about numerous issues and now we find that this new Archbishop, Archbishop Byrnes has basically decided to send him off to study Canon Law in Canada, which in the opinion of many in Concerned Catholics it’s basically a reward for his misdeeds, that’s the only way we can look at it.

JO O’BRIEN: When you say a reward for his misdeeds, do you mean that he has effectively been rewarded for protecting Archbishop Apuron?

DAVID SABLAN That’s kind of how we view it because of the fact that he has really been one of the individuals that has caused this division within our church here because he is a member of this Neocatechumenal Way, and he has been giving them many favours and, you know, he was also very instrumental in providing them resources from our Archdiocese to continue their religious practices here on the island and of course there’s a seminary that was taken over by the Neocatechumenal Way and that has been funded by the Archdiocese and in the end we felt that he should be disciplined rather than being sent off to go study Canon Law.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
News Letter

The report from an official inquiry into widespread child sex abuse has delivered “a day of justice long overdue for those who suffered in these institutions run by church and state”, according to a priest who was also a victim.

Fr Patrick McCafferty was speaking after the report was published on Friday from the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry. It studied allegations of abuse in 22 homes and other institutions from 1922 to 1995.

He said: “They are vindicated at last and the report’s recommendations must be speedily implemented, including financial compensation, a small gesture by church and society towards recognition of the losses and sufferings endured by victims and survivors.

“My own experiences of abuse, in childhood and young adulthood, perpetuated by church and non-church related persons, has always given me a sense of solidarity with all survivors of sexual abuse – whether as children or vulnerable adults.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

A Catholic bishop has said the recommendations of Northern Ireland’s child abuse inquiry should be implemented with goodwill.

Noel Treanor hoped the report will help others who have been abused to find the strength and courage to come forward and report it to the authorities.

The independent probe recommended compensation payments of up to £100,000, funded by the state and voluntary institutions responsible for the residential homes where the harm occurred, with payments beginning later this year.

Those who suffered in state, church and charity-run homes should also be offered an official apology from government and the organisations involved, the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry led by retired judge Sir Anthony Hart found.

Bishop Treanor said: “Let us pray that in response to the HIA inquiry and report, our local church in this diocese and all involved in the statutory and voluntary sectors will have the grace and strength to respond with honesty, integrity and goodwill to the report’s recommendations and their implementation so that the light of justice, truth and peace may shine upon us and facilitate in our society the cultivation of a civilisation of love, courtesy and care for all.”

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

[Module 6 – Father Brendan Smyth – Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry]

The Finglas Episode, a chapter in the sordid life of Brendan Smyth, raises questions for the force

Maeve Sheehan
PUBLISHED
22/01/2017

The remit of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland did not extend across the Border. If it had, An Garda Siochana would almost certainly have come under scrutiny over suspicions that it covered up the crimes of notorious paedophile Brendan Smyth.

Sir Anthony Hart, the chair of the inquiry, called it ‘The Finglas Episode’.

It refers to a time when Smyth apparently had a brush with the law in the north Dublin suburb three decades ago. However, his “crime” appears to have been hushed up so successfully that the reason why the paedophile came to the attention of Finglas garda station was never established by the inquiry.

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UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Betty Clermont

“Evangelicals helped Trump in states he was mostly going to win anyway. Catholics? Now we’re talking about Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. And that was the election.”

White Catholics voted 60% for Trump while he received only 46% of the national popular vote.

“Trump won the highest percentage of Catholic voters (52%) for a Republican candidate since 2004. White Catholics supported Trump by a wide, 23-point margin (60% to 37%). Both white and Latino Catholics cast more ballots for Trump than for Romney in 2012.” …

Vatican ready to do business with Trump

The second highest Vatican official, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, congratulated Trump the day after the election, noting that the election “was characterized by a large turnout at the polls.” (See “Voter turnout at 20-year low in 2016.”) He praised the president-elect: “[T]he future leader has already spoken like a leader.”

Parolin said the first issue on which the Vatican would “collaborate” with Trump was peace. The second was “the internal [i.e. domestic] issues” of the US Church such as “religious freedom.”

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SOUTH AFRICA
Eyewitness News

Shamiela Fisher

CAPE TOWN – Women’s rights group Matla A Bana has praised a 1970 rape survivor for speaking out more than five decades after the attack.

A Kraaifontein pastor was this week found guilty on two counts of rape for crimes committed in 1970.

The court found the church leader raped his accuser when she was eight years old.

The woman, now 54 years old, says the accused gained her trust because he was a senior member of her father’s church.

But the 78-year-old grandfather maintains his innocence, saying the church would have acted against him if he was guilty.

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JAMAICA
Jamaica Observer

The Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society (JCHS) has waded in on the controversy surrounding Moravian pastor Rupert Clarke, recommending that all institutions establish systems for protecting the children under their care and with whom they come in contact.

In a news release issued on January 11, the JCHS extended sincere sympathies to the young girl involved and to her wider family.

“The nation must mourn and be enraged about any and every instance of abuse against our children and especially where people of faith are the alleged perpetrators,” the JCHS said.

“We await the outcome of the investigations but we say emphatically that the law must be allowed to take its full course in this matter,” the organisation added.

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JAMAICA
Jamaica Observer

Christopher Burns

Sunday, January 22, 2017

There is everything frightening about the spate of church-related, sex abuse cases in Jamaica involving teenage children — mostly girls. What’s even more disturbing is that, although all too familiar, evidence suggests the occurrences are largely unreported.

Everything about these sexual maladies and horrifying trends should impel us to abominate, in the strongest terms, all forms of sexual abuse of our boys, girls and young women. We should condemn all forms of sexual violence, even as we accept the imperfections of men — especially men of the cloth.

Nevertheless, accepting human imperfections and failings is not an excuse for the kinds of wicked penetrative invasion or transactional relationships some of these men (and women) are foisting on our vulnerable and innocent children. Besides the serious criminal breach, there is a lasting desecration of these children’s ambition, body and promise — it is a defilement that no amount of therapy or passage of time may ever cure. Pastors or not, we cannot allow gaps in our personal economies to lull us (parents or guardians) into complacency or cause us to conjure convenient sorry-ass explanations as conduits to assist us with wriggling our way out of taking responsibility for sanctioning such terrible deeds — inadvertently or not, or on the basis of financial opportunity.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

Published:Sunday | January 22, 2017

Ian Boyne

The problem of child sexual abuse is an endemic in Jamaica. And it has been for a long time. It is just that we are more sensitive about, and morally outraged by, this issue than previous generations.

It was a couple of years ago that it dawned on me forcefully that a very large percentage of our women were sexually molested as children. As I began to make enquiries, almost every woman I spoke to had some story about some sexually inappropriate action by an adult when she was a child. I began to make enquiries about some supposedly decent persons whom I knew as a child, and I realised that people could tell me stories about these seemingly straight-laced, holy churchmen.

One of them had come to me saying how he had been framed for molesting a little girl he was helping and he needed me to put him on to one of my big-name lawyer friends to get him off. I did. It was after he won the case that I discovered what that wretch had been up to for many years while carrying out his gospel grinding. My anger was indescribable.

My daughter, who is senior attorney with the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, has prosecuted many carnal abuse and incest cases in several parishes across Jamaica. And she reports that there is a very high tolerance level for this perversion and criminality. Jurors are more eager to blame the “bad pickney dem”, the “force-ripe gyal dem” who “a push it up pon the decent man them” and a “rub butter a puss mouth”. These perverts can easily get character witnesses from upstanding members of their community or church.

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CANADA
NetNewsLedger

Posted 21 January 2017

THUNDER BAY – Yesterday, January 19, the Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, Alvin Fiddler, noted that the Anglican Church of Canada shares responsibility for the crisis in the communities he serves, and especially for the tragic number of young people who have died by suicide. We acknowledge that our past actions have helped to create a legacy of brokenness in some First Nations communities, and we express our willingness, in spite of failings and false starts in the past, to renew our commitment to dialogue and discernment that will help us understand more deeply and act more effectively on our responsibilities.

Over a period that spanned the 1970s and 1980s, Ralph Rowe, then an Anglican priest and a Boy Scout leader, abused young Indigenous boys in more than a dozen communities in Northwestern Ontario. We know that the trauma he inflicted was not only on persons, but also on communities, and that its impact is intergenerational.

The Anglican Church of Canada has, since it became aware of the nature and scope of Ralph Rowe’s abuse, been actively concerned about its impact.

Ralph Rowe was trained as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and served with the Ontario Provincial Police on Manitoulin Island in the 1960s. He served as a missionary pilot prior to studying at Wycliffe College, and was ordained in 1975. He also served as a Scout Master with the Boy Scouts of Canada.

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UNITED STATES
Crux

John L. Allen Jr. January 21, 2017
EDITOR

Two stories broke this week regarding the Church’s clerical sexual abuse scandals, one in Italy and the other in the States, and in different ways, each speaks to a missed opportunity.

In Italy, a book came out titled Lussuria: Peccati, Scandali e Tradimenti di una Chiesa Fatta di Uomini (“Lust: Sins, Scandals and Betrayals of a Church Made of Men”) by journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi, one of the five defendants in last year’s “Vatileaks 2.0” trial pivoting on leaked documents from a papal commission on Vatican finances.

In the States, a former employee of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the country’s best-known advocacy organization for survivors of clerical abuse, has sued the group, charging that in reality it’s a commercial operation funded by kickbacks from lawyers who sue the Church.

Here’s why each story suggests that chances to promote real reform have slipped through the cracks.

With Fittipaldi’s book, because he writes on Church finances, people expected he would expose more money-related skullduggery. Instead he focused on the sex abuse scandals, largely recycling well-worn material. (In retrospect, probably the title, “Lust,” should have been a clue about what was coming.)

Fittipaldi goes back over Cardinal George Pell’s multiple appearances before an Australian Royal Commission. He covers the scandal in Chile of Fernando Karadima, that country’s most notorious abuser priest, and Pope Francis’s appointment of a bishop known as a Karadima apologist. He recounts the story of Lawrence Murphy, an American priest believed to have molested around 200 boys at a school for the deaf up to the mid-1970s.

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TEXAS
San Antonio Express-News

By Elaine Ayala, San Antonio Express-News

January 21, 2017

In a move that surprised members of Our Lady of the Atonement parish, the Archdiocese of San Antonio replaced Father Christopher Phillips as pastor, citing “pastoral concerns” about the former Anglican priest ordained as a Catholic in the 1980s.

Several church members said they were “heartsick” about the removal and fearful of a potential shift from the parish’s traditional Anglican-styled worship services.

The archdiocese’s decision was effective Thursday. It has appointed Msgr. Frank Kurzaj as parish administrator to assume Phillips’ role. Kurzaj, most recently pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Floresville, has served in several other parishes in the archdiocese.

A few parishioners credited Phillips with increasing the flock and focusing on Scriptural study and sacred music. He also has been managing a major expansion of its school, Atonement Academy, they added.

Many of the founding members of the parish were former Episcopalians who converted to Catholicism. Phillips, the parish’s first and only pastor, was ordained by then-Archbishop Patrick Flores, who died Jan. 9.

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AUSTRALIA
PerthNow

Gary Adshead, PerthNow
January 21, 2017

EVEN after the ups and downs, which inevitably come with eight years in power, the Barnett Government hopefully learnt a lesson the hard way this week.

It managed to turn an immensely worthy cause – something it could have taken the lead on to have enshrined in law – and relegated it to just another election promise.

The issue is child sexual abuse and the existing statute of limitations that prevents victims from taking civil action against the perpetrator or an institution.

As it stands the victim, regardless of how old they were when abused, has only six years from the time of the crime to lodge a civil case.

Simply put, if a boy or girl aged six, for example, were traumatised by a paedophile employed by a church or government agency, then they must have filed a writ in the court against the institution by the time they reach the age of 12.

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JAMAICA
The Gleaner

The St Elizabeth family at the centre of a sexual abuse case is to be relocated.

The family came to national attention after one of the children was reported to have been sexually abused by Moravian pastor, Rupert Clarke, in a case that is now before the court.

Gender Affairs Minister, Olivia Grange, and Member of Parliament for South Eastern St Elizabeth, Franklyn Witter, on Thursday visited the family, which is headed by a single mother.

She says she observed that the women and children were living in an uncompleted and unsecured two bedroom house which is in need of repair.

Grange says Food for the Poor will provide them with housing and the government will ensure it’s on lands where the family will feel safe and comfortable.

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CANADA
CBC News

By Jody Porter, CBC News Posted: Jan 21, 2017

The Anglican Church of Canada says it will continue working with First Nations in northern Ontario to confront the “legacy of brokenness” created by a pedophile priest who worked in remote communities in the 1970s and 80s.

Ralph Rowe worked as a priest and boy scout leader and flew a plane with the Anglican Church logo into remote First Nations in northern Ontario where his “abuse was massive in its scope and horrendous in its impact,” said a statement on Friday from Michael Thompson, general secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada.

First Nations leaders referred to Rowe’s legacy of abuse in Wapekeka First Nation during a news conference on Thursday about two 12-year-old girls who died by suicide within days of each other earlier this month.

Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler said Rowe was a “monster” who abused more than 500 children during his time working in northern Ontario and leading to an intergenerational suicide crisis in Wapekeka.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Schwaebische

[Abuse: Ulrich Weber takes over investigation of the scandal at the Regensburger Domspatzen.]

Wilhelmsdorf sz Es kommt wieder Bewegung in die Aufarbeitung des Missbrauchsskandals der Brüdergemeinde. In den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren wurden in den Heimen der Diakonie der Evangelischen Brüdergemeinde Korntal in Korntal und Wilhelmsdorf Kinder gedemütigt und sexuell missbraucht. Die Mediationsgruppe, in der Vertreter der Brüdergemeinde, des Netzwerks Betroffenenforum und der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Heimopfer sitzen, hat sich auf Ulrich Weber als Aufklärer verständigt. Anfang Februar soll er offiziell in das Amt gewählt werden.

Der Jurist ist auch Chefaufklärer des Missbrauchsskandals bei den Regensburger Domspatzen. Webers Arbeit in Regensburg wird als vorbildlich gelobt. So nannte beispielsweise der Missbrauchsbeauftragte der Bundesregierung, Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, die Aufarbeitung „wegweisend“.

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ROM
Katholisch

[In the church, sexual abuse by priests continues to be systematically hushed up – at least the revelation of journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi.]

Rom – 20.01.2017

Emiliano Fittipaldi ist im Vatikan berüchtigt. Vergangenen Sommer saß der italienische Enthüllungsjournalist noch auf der Anklagebank im Gerichtssaal hinter dem Petersdom, weil er vertrauliche Unterlagen veröffentlichte. Mit seinem neuen Werk “Lussuria”, zu deutsch “Wollust” oder “Unzucht”, klagt er nun den Vatikan an. Sein Vorwurf: Papst Franziskus rede zwar von einer “Null-Toleranz-Strategie”, im Vatikan und in der katholischen Weltkirche werde sexueller Missbrauch durch Priester jedoch bis heute weiter systematisch vertuscht.

Das rund 200-seitige Werk, das am Donnerstag in den italienischen Buchhandel kam, enthält keine spektakulären Neuigkeiten oder Überraschungen. Der Redakteur der Zeitschrift “L’Espresso” stützt sich weitgehend auf bereits bekannte Informationen. Anders als in seinem vorherigen Buch über die vatikanischen Finanzen kann Fittipaldi diesmal offenbar kaum auf interne vatikanische Unterlagen zurückgreifen.

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ROM
Neue Zurcher Zeitung

von Andrea Spalinger, Rom 20.1.2017

Emiliano Fittipaldi ist nicht der Typ von Journalist, der sich einschüchtern lässt. Die Publikation seines Buches über Korruption und Geldverschwendung in der katholischen Kirche hatte dem 42-jährigen Neapolitaner einen Prozess im Vatikan wegen Veröffentlichung geheimer Dokument beschert. Nach Monaten wurde er im Juli schliesslich freigesprochen. Zu dem Zeitpunkt arbeitete der Enthüllungsjournalist bereits an einem neuen, nicht weniger brisanten Buch über sexuellen Missbrauch durch Geistliche und das Versagen der Kirche, dagegen vorzugehen. Am Donnerstag ist das Buch mit dem Titel «Lussuria» («Wollust») erschienen.

Kultur des Schweigens

Fittipaldis Quellen sind diesmal keine Whistleblower und geheimen Dokumente, sondern öffentlich zugängliche Gerichtsakten, Briefe aus Kirchgemeinden und lokale Medienberichte. Daraus zeichnet der Journalist vor allem ein ziemlich düsteres Bild über die Lage in Italien. In den vergangenen zehn Jahren wurden hier 200 Priester wegen Missbrauchs von Kindern und Jugendlichen angezeigt oder verurteilt. «Die bekanntgewordenen Fälle sind jedoch nur die Spitze des Eisbergs», betont Fittipaldi in einem Gespräch mit der NZZ.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

By Claire McNeilly
PUBLISHED
21/01/2017

1. Tax-free lump sum payment to survivors of abuse, including in homes/institutions that were not covered by the HIA inquiry. The spouses or children of the 12 people who have died since giving evidence should receive 75% of the total lump sum. Sir Anthony said the minimum payout should be £7,500 to anyone who was abused, including those who experienced a harsh environment, or who witnessed such abuse. An additional payment of £20,000 would be made to anyone sent to Australia under a migrant scheme. An extra enhanced payment would be made to anyone who was more severely abused.

2. Hundreds of victims in Northern Ireland who suffered in state, church and charity-run homes should be offered a public apology from Government and the organisations involved. Sir Anthony said: “The inquiry also identified failings where institutions sought to protect their reputations and individuals against whom allegations were made, by failing to take any action at all, failing to report matters to, or deliberately misleading, the appropriate authorities and moving those against whom allegations were made to other locations.”

3. Institutions where systemic failings happened may be asked to contribute to the compensation payments. Sir Anthony said the four-year inquiry found “evidence of systemic failings” in the institutions and homes it investigated. He said the organisations that ran the abusing homes should make a financial contribution to the Stormont Executive-run scheme.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

By Claire O’Boyle
PUBLISHED
21/01/2017

Hundreds of victims of historical abuse should each receive compensation of up to £100,000, an inquiry has said.

Crimes against children were widespread at State, church and charity-run homes between 1922 and 1995, with Catholic Church-run facilities the worst offenders, the long-awaited Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry report found.

As well as substantial State-funded compensation, victims should be offered a “wholehearted and unconditional” government apology for spectacular failures in their care, it said.

Sir Anthony Hart, who chaired the four-year inquiry, stressed that mistakes made by authorities directly enabled abusers to carry on ruining children’s lives, even after their cruel and often depraved behaviour had been identified.

“There was evidence of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, neglect and unacceptable practices across the institutions and homes examined,” the inquiry chairman said.

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