ABUSE TRACKER

UNITED STATES
New York Post

By Kyle Smith

February 3, 2016

MOVIE REVIEW
THE CLUB
**
In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 97 minutes. Not rated (sex, nudity, profanity, disturbing images)

Picking up where “Spotlight” left off, Chile’s “The Club” wanders through a purgatory where ex-priests reflect upon their many sins.

In a tranquil beach town, four defrocked priests live in the Catholic Church’s version of house arrest, isolated from the community and tended to by an ex-nun (Antonia Zegers). But an act of violence and an investigation by a visiting church official (Marcelo Alonso) shatter their equipoise.

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BOSTON (MA)
Crux

By Abuse survivors and their supporters
Special to Crux February 3, 2016

Over the past 14 years, thousands of survivors of sexual abuse by priests and their supporters have maintained a vigil every Sunday at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in downtown Boston. We have protested lies, broken promises, and survivor re-victimization by the Catholic Church and its hierarchy; we have supported men and women survivors in dealing with the horrors of abuse; we have demanded change in a Church that for too long denied and facilitated and covered up the rape of children.

Yet some parishioners still ask: “Why are you demonstrating? What do you want?”

In January 2002, the Globe Spotlight team published the story of how Cardinal Bernard F. Law, Bishop John McCormack, and others in Boston had transferred priests who had sexually abused children from parish to parish, where they continued to abuse even more young people. The reporters’ skill and courage in exposing the crimes that one of the most powerful institutions in Boston had committed is dramatically presented in the movie “Spotlight,” which is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture this year. Everyone should see it.

But the movie stops with the initial revelation in 2002.

The survivors and their supporters who have stood outside the Cathedral every Sunday for 14 years since then are committed to keeping the issue of sexual abuse of children by priests alive. By their presence, they validated the truth of what survivors were saying and made a commitment that survivors would never be alone again. What this meant to survivors needs to be heard.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Jewish News

by Yehudis Goldsobel, Independent sexual violence adviser for the Jewish community

WE ARE currently marking Sexual Abuse and Sexual Violence Awareness Week across the country and I’m spearheading a campaign to recognise our community is not immune from these horrendous crimes.

We must no longer allow abusers to hide among us and victims must know that they need not suffer in silence.

The whole community has to acknowledge that this has been the status quo for too long. Enough is enough.

Sexual abuse is a universal evil. No community is immune. I’m delighted that the United Synagogue has recognised that sexual abuse is occurring to men, women and children in our community every day. Prompted by Chief Rabbi Mirvis, the United Synagogue is now setting up a support network to encourage victims of these terrible crimes to report their abusers and seek help. It also recently delivered training to community leaders to help them recognise possible signs of abuse, particularly in children and the vulnerable, and teach them the steps that then need to be taken to protect the victims and report the abusers to the police and social services.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Jewish News

by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis

IT’S SEXUAL abuse and Sexual Violence Awareness Week across the UK – the first of its kind, aiming to generate a frank and necessary public conversation about a crime as old as the taboo that has, shamefully, protected it. It is a poor reflection on our society that such an awareness week is necessary. Sadly, it is.

Sexual violence and abuse are among the most insidious of evils, with devastating lifelong consequences.

Let there be no illusions – the campaign to end the scourge of sexual abuse is as pertinent for the Jewish community as it is within all of our society.

The Torah links the way we speak to others, to the prohibition of being an inactive bystander: “You may not go about as a talebearer among your people; neither may you stand idly by the blood of your neighbour” (Leviticus 19:16).

The inference here is that just as harmful speech can sometimes be a killer, so too can silence. If keeping quiet has the effect of allowing others to be victims of cruelty, there is an obligation to speak out against a perpetrator, regardless of the implications on his or her reputation.

The Talmud, based on this verse, defines the role of the bystander in the following way: “One may not stand idly by while others are in danger. One should exhaust all means to rescue people from rape, drowning, attack by criminals or attacks by animals. Until the victim has been fully extricated from the dangerous predicament, the obligation still obtains.” (Sanhedrin 73a). There is no doubt that this unequivocally denotes a responsibility to prevent a child abuser from destroying lives, now and in the future.

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HAWAII
Jeff Anderson & Associates

Kailua Attorney Mark Gallagher and Jeff Anderson & Associates Confirm Representation in More than Two Dozen of These Cases

(Honolulu, HI) – On January 14, 2016, the Diocese of Honolulu filed a lawsuit naming First Insurance as a defendant and releasing information pertaining to ongoing negotiations in a court-ordered mediation between survivors of childhood sexual abuse and the Diocese of Honolulu and other parties. This suit disclosed that dozens of lawsuits have been settled since the mediation process began in September 2015.

Mark Gallagher of Kailua, working in conjunction with Jeff Anderson & Associates, a national clergy abuse law firm based in Minnesota, has represented 36 survivors in this process and been involved in a majority of the resolved cases disclosed by the diocese. These cases involve various priests, teachers and other religious figures who worked in the Diocese of Honolulu.

“We have been working with a large number of plaintiffs to bring resolution to sexual abuse survivors under the supervision of the court and with complete cooperation of the diocese and religious order defendants,” said Mark Gallagher. “The process is completely confidential. We can confirm there have been a number of successful resolutions, but we must refrain from commenting further upon the status of the mediation or any particular settlements. We will continue to work hard with the survivors and the parties, including the diocese, to bring resolution and reconciliation.”

In 2012, the Hawaii legislature passed the Child Victims Act allowing survivors of sexual abuse in Hawaii a two-year window in which to file civil lawsuits against their abusers and institutions that may have allowed the abuse. The window was extended in 2014 for an additional two years and is set to expire on April 24, 2016. We encourage other sexual abuse survivors to come forward before this important deadline.

More information can be found at www.abusedinhawaii.com.

Contact: Mark Gallagher: Office: 808-535-1500; Cell: 808-779-5012
Jeff Anderson: Office: 651-964-3458; Cell: 612-817-8665
Mike Reck: Office: 646-649-4960; Cell: 714-742-6593

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MINNESOTA
City Pages

BY MIKE MULLEN
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2016

The City Pages People Issue celebrates ordinary folks who do extraordinary things. Though their triumphs are rarely acknowledged, they make the Twin Cities a better place.

Madeleine Baran’s phone rings. She wasn’t expecting a call, but this one will take over her life, and the lives of many others, for the next two years.

The woman on the other end, Jennifer Haselberger, is a former high-ranking official within the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It takes just a few minutes for Baran, a reporter with Minnesota Public Radio, to realize that if what Haselberger says is true, the local Catholic church had been involved in a cover-up of sexual abuse by priests that lasted decades.

It was all true, and then some. Baran pursued the complicated tale, peeling back its layers, each one darker and more rotten than the next.

Baran knifed through stacks of court records detailing abuses, occasionally taking breaks from reading the most upsetting passages. She interviewed victims, then their abusers, asking how their superiors in the church let them get away with it. On a trip to Louisiana, she undid the myth of former archbishop Harry Flynn, whose lies about meeting with victims’ families and reforming church practices were believed by Minnesota media.

In the end, Baran’s reporting implicated three archbishops in the conspiracy. The last, John Nienstedt, resigned in June, just days after criminal and civil legal filings were brought against him. For their exhaustive efforts, Baran and MPR shared a Peabody Award, the most prestigious accolade in radio.

But it’s the other, equally unexpected phone calls Baran got that mean most to her. After the investigation aired, abuse victims from across the state started calling. There were hundreds of them. Some were men who hadn’t told anyone, not even their wives of 50 years. They weren’t demanding justice. They just needed someone to listen.

“I’m genuinely honored that someone would tell me that — that I would be that person,” Baran says as her voice catches in her throat.

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UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week

Mon, 02/01/2016

Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz

Just after the giving of the Law at Sinai, the Torah presents us with an assortment of laws, some criminal, some civil and some purely religious.

The civil laws in our Torah portion this week, Mishpatim, regulate how we act with one another. They must have been of immediate, practical use, even in the desert; they dealt with slavery, mayhem, and stealing, among other sins. Even more basic are the foundational principals of justice – some explicit and some implicit, but clear in their meaning. The Torah is clear about equality. No one is above the law. Individuals of all stations in life and society must be treated equally. It does not matter if they are of high rank or not. It is of no concern whether they are men, women or small children: the law is equal to all of them.

These laws are as relevant today as they were in ancient times. Mishpatim makes clear, for example, that Judaism abhors the abuse of children.

As the Torah well understands, child molestation is an ancient vice. It has become much more widely discussed because of several recent scandals, mostly in religious institutions.

There are some objective reasons why such things happen quite often in religious institutions. Children are taught and trained to be obedient and to accept their elders as authorities – which makes it so much more difficult for them to resist abuse or to report it. Unfortunately there is no sex education in some of the schools; nor is the subject discussed in some homes. So when something like this happens, it takes time for a child to understand it and even more than that – to talk about it.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Onetz

[For some, the Regensburg choir boarding school was a place of terror, for the other a formative school of life. How can the experience of the cathedral choir diverge so widely?]

Jürgen Herda

Für die einen war das Internat ein Ort des Terrors, für die anderen eine prägende Schule des Lebens. Wie können die Erfahrungen der Domspatzen so weit auseinanderklaffen? In einem Kuratorium gehen jetzt Bistum und Opfer aufeinander zu.

Weiden/Regensburg. Die Fakten liegen auf dem Tisch. An den Zahlen, die Rechtsanwalt Ulrich Weber vorgelegt hat, kommt keiner vorbei: Nach seinen Hochrechnungen sollen zwischen 1953 und 1992 etwa 700 Buben im Etterzhausener Internat oder im Regensburger Gymnasium der Domspatzen körperlich oder psychisch misshandelt worden sein. Weber hält auch rund die Hälfte der 67 vorliegenden Vorwürfe sexuellen Missbrauchs für “höchstplausibel”.

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OSTERREICH
Nachricten

[A priest accused of abusing minors in Austria has had a stroke and is in a care home, according to the public prosecutor.]

LINZ. Wegen schweren sexuellen Kindesmissbrauchs hat die Staatsanwaltschaft Linz gegen einen 73-jährigen Pater des Stiftes Lambach im Vorjahr Anklage erhoben. Nach einem Schlaganfall ist der angeklagte Geistliche ein Pflegefall.

Der Geistliche soll im Mai 2015 auf einer Toilette am Linzer Bahnhof gegen Bezahlung Sex mit einem zwölfjährigen rumänischen Stricherbuben gehabt haben. Doch einer Verurteilung dürfte der Angeklagte, der ein Geständnis abgelegt hatte, entkommen.

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CALIFORNIA
New York Times

By LIAM STACK and ASHLEY SOUTHALL
FEB. 2, 2016

A young seminary student from Ohio flew across the United States on Friday in pursuit of a goal he had spent weeks discussing online in explicit detail: finding a baby, either through adoption or cash purchase, to sexually assault.

The flight was the first leg of an itinerary that was to lead to Mexico, but the seminarian, Joel A. Wright, was arrested at San Diego International Airport before he could continue the trip.

Unbeknown to him, he had been trading emails with undercover federal agents.

Mr. Wright was arrested by Homeland Security Investigations, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which said he had spent almost two years searching for female children under the age of 4 in Tijuana, Mexico, for a violent sexual encounter.

“This investigation opens a window into a secret world where sexual predators prey on young children around the globe,” Dave Shaw, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said in a statement.

Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Wright on Friday with felony counts of traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor and aggravated sexual abuse of a child, according to the complaint.

The seminarian made his first court appearance on Monday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. He did not enter a plea and remained in custody, said Kelly Thornton, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in San Diego.

Magistrate Judge Bernard G. Skomal appointed public defenders to represent Mr. Wright and scheduled a detention hearing for Thursday. Federal prosecutors filed a motion to keep Mr. Wright in custody, deeming him a flight risk and a danger to the community.

A preliminary hearing in the case was scheduled for Feb. 11.

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Altoona Mirror

February 3, 2016

By Phil Ray (pray@altoonamirror.com) , The Altoona Mirror

JOHNSTOWN – Tuesday was supposed to be the day that Father Joseph D. Maurizio Jr. of Somerset was sentenced for sexually abusing several Honduran children, but instead, the hearing turned into an argument for a new trial based on a victim’s impact statement in which he said the 71-year-old priest did not abuse him.

That statement made by Victim 2, referred to in court as Erick, ran counter to his testimony during last September’s trial in which Maurizio was found guilty of sexually abusing children at the ProNino orphanage in El Progresso, taking improper pictures of a naked child and using funds raised to support the orphanage to pay for sexual favors from the children.

Erick said in his appearance on the witness stand last September that he was one of three boys who, during a March 2009 visit by Maurizio to ProNino, were asked to help transport supplies throughout the large complex.

He was 15 years old at the time, and he told a federal court jury that he had once been a street child.

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OHIO
10TV

[with video]

By Tylar Bacome
Tuesday February 2, 2016

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A man who says a priest abused him as a child believes seminaries should be doing more thorough screenings when accepting individuals.

David Clohessy is the director of the Survivor’s Network for Those Abused by Priests or SNAP.

“I was abused as a kid from age 11 or 12 through 16 by a priest who molested three of my siblings. One of my brothers went on to become a priest and molest kids himself,” Clohessy said.

Clohessy has been following the Joel Wright case and said he fears Wright could have multiple victims who haven’t come forward.

“In our experience there almost always are,” he said.

He is calling on the Josephinum and the Diocese of Steubenville to release whatever background checks and psychological assessments they conducted on Wright and how they differ from those done by the more than 45 other seminaries where Wright reportedly tried to enroll.

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DELAWARE
Delaware State News

February 3, 2016 by Craig Anderson

DOVER — With a precedent-setting determination regarding confidentiality among some church members last week, a Superior Court judge continued a lawsuit against a Sussex County congregation.

Judge Mary M. Johnston did not dismiss a lawsuit filed by the state of Delaware against the Laurel Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses regarding whether it should have reported child abuse allegations in 2013.

The state is suing the congregation and two elders for allegedly not disclosing knowledge of a reported sexual relationship between an adult member and juvenile member, according to court documents. The complaint was filed on July 10, 2014, in New Castle County Superior Court.

The congregation filed a motion for summary judgment on Nov. 9, 2015, which was denied on Jan. 26 by Judge Johnston.

The motion centered around the application of the “priest-penitent in a sacramental confession privilege” and whether conversations among Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders and members were covered in Delaware Code.

According to court papers, the state alleged two elders met with a juvenile and his mother, both congregation members, in January 2013 and a disclosure of a sexual relationship was made.

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UNITED STATES
Failed Messiah

Shmarya Rosenberg

I had a much longer post I was moments away from publishing when my computer crashed and I lost it, so I’ll make this do-over post more concise.

I’ve been working on a deal that would allow me to work on anti-poverty issues and today, after about a year of trying, that deal came to fruition. That means I’ll be leaving FailedMessiah.com, the website I founded almost 12 years ago.

So let me thank all of you who read, commented and debated here, those of you who agreed with me and even those of you who did not, and those of you who sent me stories, tips and pashkvils.

I’d like to encourage all of you to work to stop child sex abuse and to work to stop those who enable it or cover it up. I’d also like to encourage you to do what you can to bring some light to the haredi world which is, sadly, still shrouded in some intense darkness. No kid should go to 13 years of school and leave without a valid high school diploma, proficiency in the language of the country, and extensive knowledge of math, science, history and civics, even if their religious community’s elders claim it is their religious right to deprive them of this much-needed education. Please continue to fight for those kids.

I’d also like to ask you work to equalize and humanize the US Sentencing Guidelines. With very few exceptions, nonviolent criminals should not be incarcerated for decades. Prison should not primarily be a place of punishment. Instead, it should be a place where combined with loss of freedom, inmates also get good regular mental health care and are trained in skills (or given education) that can earn them gainful employment on release. In the long run, it is far cheaper for society to work help inmates than it is to punish them. It is also far better for society because the recidivism rate for inmates who are well treated rather than abandoned and abused is lower. That means fewer victims and fewer losses for all of us.

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ITALIA
Il Messaggero

[Priest Roberto Elici was arrested in Rome and charged with abusing two teenager when he was a pastor in Palermo.]

«Gli ho fatto troppo male nell’animo con i miei modi di amarlo e questo gli ha distrutto il cuore a poco a poco», si confessava così don Roberto Elici, 40 anni, accusato di avere abusato di tre minorenni quando era parroco a Palermo. Non nasconde quanto ha fatto e ammette, chattando su whatsapp con la madre di due delle vittime, le violenze imposte ai suoi figli, due adolescenti di 13 e 15 anni. La polizia è andato ad arrestarlo oggi a Roma, città dove viveva da quasi un anno, su decisione della Curia, avvertita dell’inchiesta, ospite di un centro per sacerdoti con problemi. L’accusa che gli contestano l’aggiunto Salvo De Luca e il pm Claudio Camilleri è pesantissima: violenza sessuale nei confronti di tre ragazzini. A denunciarlo, nel 2014, è stata la madre riuscita a farlo confessare in chat. La donna è andata dagli investigatori e ha raccontato le confidenze raccolte dai figli. Don Roberto li avrebbe molestati sessualmente più volte.

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MISSISSIPPI
WTVA

[with video]

By Courtney Ann Jackson Feb. 2, 2016

JACKSON, Miss (WTVA) — Sex crime victims could soon have more options to pursue charges.

The amount of time that passes before they go to the cops can make a difference.

It doesn’t matter how severe the crime.

Some victims don’t see justice if they don’t speak up soon enough.

Senate bill 2063 would give victims more protection and prosecutors more flexibility.

“It is limited to crimes which are sexual in nature which again are some of our more heinous crimes,” Michael Guest, Madison/Rankin District Attorney, said.

Obscene electronic communications via things like social media and text messages are also common.

But as it stands, there’s a two year statute of limitations.

“We don’t want people who are walking the streets and the only reason that they’re not in jail is because they’ve been time barred by the prosecution and are left to remain out and potentially commit additional crimes,” Guest said.

There are already some crimes like murder and rape– that don’t have a time limit for prosecution in Mississippi. But about half the crimes that would require someone to register as a sex offender–aren’t included.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WJAC

[with video]

BY JILLIAN HARTMANN TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND 2016

JOHNSTOWN, Pa — A federal judge is deciding whether a former Central City priest convicted of having sexual relations with children during missionary trips should be granted a new trial.

Father Joseph Maurizio was found guilty on five of eight counts of abuse, a count of international money laundering, a count of possessing a photo that exploited a child and three counts of illicting sexual conduct with three separate victims.

Prosecutors said the abuse happened during his trips to Honduras from 2004 to 2009.

Defense Attorney, Steven Passarello argued in court that prosecutors withheld a statement by one of the victims claiming he was not abused by Maurizio. Passarello said the statement discredits his court testimony.

Justice Department Trial Attorney Amy Larson disagreed, saying Passarello was focusing on one line in a five-page questionnaire.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Leslie Turner, a retired primary head teacher, was paid £17,000 in compensation by the Irish Christian Brothers, after claiming two priests from the Catholic Order sexually abused him at school in Sunderland in the 1960s. The church has not accepted liability for the alleged abuse. Turner, now 66, has waived his anonymity in a film for the Guardian to allege he was molested from the age of 12 by two Irish Christian Brother teachers at St Aidan’s Roman Catholic Grammar School in Sunderland between 1961 and 1967. Both priests are long dead, but he sued after being diagnosed with delayed onset post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of what he said he suffered.

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WASHINGTON
The Seattle Times

By Seattle Times editorial board

OPEN the secret files, Archbishop J. Peter Sartain.

The Archdiocese of Seattle last month took the long overdue act of naming 77 local clergy accused of sexual misconduct with minors. It should have happened in 2004, when a high-level review board comprised primarily of lay people suggested the diocese come clean.

Better late than never. But this was only a half-step toward repentance.

Two members of that layperson review board — former U.S. Attorney Mike McKay and former King County Superior Court Judge Terry Carroll, both prominent Catholics who’ve devoted their careers to justice — called on the archdiocese to release confidential files on the abusive priests.

Their questions are spot on. When did the abuse happened? To how many youths? At which specific parish?

Most important, the public and parishioners want to know who failed to act on credible reports of child abuse. Who knew what? And when?

Releasing the secret files would answer these questions. A full release — with the names of victims redacted — would also help heal the church and allow victims to move forward.

Other archdioceses already have opened their secret files. Portland and Los Angeles opened files as part of legal settlements. Chicago Archbishop Francis George did so voluntarily in the hopes of “bringing healing for victims.”

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CONNECTICUT
CT Post

By Daniel Tepfer Published Wednesday, February 3, 2016

BRIDGEPORT — Wielding the threat of dark magic, a suspect arrested in a drug probe kept an East Side neighborhood virtually captive, afraid to complain about him, police said.

Felix “Cuba” Delgado, who was already being sought by Massachusetts police for grave robbing, was arrested Tuesday afternoon — but officers weren’t prepared for what they found in his Hallett Street basement.

“We found two human skulls and bones that appear to have come from the remains of two people,” said Police Capt. Armando Perez. “This was like nothing we had ever seen before.”

Perez said they found altars throughout the first-floor apartment and basement, many covered in blood.

“Delgado is a high priest in the Santeria religion and practices the dark arts,” Perez said. “People in the neighborhood are either from Puerto Rico or the West Indies, where this religion is practiced and they were afraid to say anything against Delgado for fear he would put a curse on them.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
Stoke Sentinel

CHURCH volunteer Daniel Nicklin has been locked up after grooming a teenage girl and then having sex with her.

The 28-year-old – who helps out at Hanley Baptist Church – took advantage of the youngster, who was under 16, and encouraged her to engage in sexual activity.

Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard ‘intelligent’ Nicklin asked for pictures of his victim and sent her images of his own body.

The abuse has ‘ruined the childhood’ of the victim, the court was told. Now Nicklin has been jailed for five years and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for the rest of his life.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

[with video]

Jenny Kleeman and Helen Pidd
Wednesday 3 February 2016

The Catholic church continues to quietly pay out compensation to victims of alleged sex abuse at Catholic schools in Britain while refusing to accept liability.

Leslie Turner, a retired primary headteacher, was paid £17,000 in compensation by the Irish Christian Brothers in 2014, after claiming two priests from the Catholic order sexually abused him at school in Sunderland in the 1960s.

Turner, now 66, has waived his anonymity in a film for the Guardian to allege he was molested from the age of 12 by two teachers at St Aidan’s Roman Catholic grammar school in Sunderland between 1961 and 1967. Both priests are long dead, but he sued after being diagnosed with delayed onset post-traumatic stress disorder in 2012 as a result of what he says he suffered as a child.

“After the abuse stopped was actually worse than when the abuse was taking place,” Turner told the Guardian. “I tried to become invisible. It never occurred to me to tell anybody. When the headteacher has been abusing you, who do you tell? I put it into a cupboard in my head and I shut the cupboard door.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Argus

Exclusive by Joel Adams, Reporter

TODAY, for the first time, the victim of George Bell has spoken about the sexual abuse she suffered as a five-year-old child at the hands of the wartime Bishop of Chichester.

Speaking exclusively to The Argus, she described how he repeatedly molested her over a period of four years while telling her that God loved her.

Her testimony brings new clarity to a story which has changed the world’s perception of one of the most revered Anglicans of the 20th century since news of a church payout was announced last October.

Motivated to speak by comments made in the press in defence of Bell’s legacy, she raises fresh questions over the failure of senior church officials to respond adequately to allegations of which they were first informed in 1995.

As the leading bishop in the diocese of Chichester, George Bell was head of the Anglican Church in Sussex for 29 years from 1929 until his death in 1958.

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NEW MEXICO
Albuquerque Journal

By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Journal Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Progress in settling the 26-month-old Diocese of Gallup bankruptcy case has stumbled because an insurer is unwilling to provide detailed financial information demanded by a representative for future sex abuse claims against the diocese, attorneys told a judge on Tuesday.

An attorney for Catholic Mutual Relief Society of America, a church-owned nonprofit that insures the diocese, said the dispute may lead Catholic Mutual to withdraw its offer to pay future claims against the diocese. Attorneys described the future claims fund as a crucial part of the settlement.

“We are very close to saying that someone else should fund their future claims fund,” said David Spector, Catholic Mutual’s attorney. “We would hate to see this deal crater.”

The Diocese of Gallup in 2013 became the ninth Roman Catholic diocese in the U.S. to file for Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy in response to lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of children by clergy. Mediation talks in December led to a tentative agreement on funding a settlement, but unresolved details include setting up a trust fund to pay for future claims.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Peta Carlyon

Former Archbishop of Adelaide Ian George has told the child abuse royal commission he should have done more to help victims.

Bishop George told the hearing of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Hobart, he felt “a deep sense of remorse” the Church did not protect children from notorious paedophile Robert Brandenburg.

Brandenburg took his own life in 1999, days before facing court on 365 charges of child abuse.

Bishop George acknowledged the Church “provided an avenue and an opportunity” for Brandenburg to abuse while failing victims and their families.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC – The World Today

KIM LANDERS: At the child sexual abuse Royal Commission hearings in Hobart, the former governor-general Peter Hollingworth has given a personal apology to an abuse survivor.

Dr Hollingworth told the commission his handling of the man’s abuse complaint, when he was Archbishop of Brisbane in the early nineties, was misguided and wrong.

Samantha Donovan is following the commission hearings and joins me now.

Samantha what has this abuse survivor told the royal commission about his dealings with the then Anglican Archbishop Hollingworth?

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Well Kim the survivor witness BYB has given his evidence to the commission this morning and he told them that he was closely involved with the Anglican Church and the Church of England Boy’s Society in Queensland in the 1970s when he was a boy, and that from the age of about eight to 13 he was sexually abused by an Anglican lay preacher, John Elliot, who later became a priest.

Now BYB gave evidence that when he was in his twenties, he decided to complain to the church about his abuse and alert it to Elliot’s offending. Elliot by then an ordained priest and the rector of the Dalby parish in Queensland.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

AAP

Former Australian governor-general Peter Hollingworth admits that in 1993 he was more worried about the welfare of a pedophile priest than a young victim, and 23 years later has offered a personal apology for his poor handling of the matter.

A 47-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, on Wednesday gave evidence to a royal commission hearing that through his childhood connection with Brisbane’s St Barnabas Anglican Church at Sunnybank and the Church of England Boys’ Society, he was sexually abused by then-lay preacher John Elliot in the 1980s.

As a young adult in 1993, by which time Elliot had been ordained a priest and appointed rector of Dalby parish, the victim took his complaint to Dr Hollingworth who was then archbishop of the diocese of Brisbane.

He told Dr Hollingworth that Elliot was a pedophile who had abused him repeatedly over a number of years and that he should not be permitted to have any further contact with the public.

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AUSTRALIA
Mercury

PATRICK BILLINGS
Mercury

FORMER Governor-General Peter Hollingworth has apologised personally to a victim of child abuse whose allegations he seriously mishandled when he was Anglican Archdeacon of Brisbane.

The victim, known by the pseudonym BYB, was sexually abused by John Litton Elliot over a period of four years from the late 1970s.

At the time Elliot was a Church of Engliand Boys’ Society leader and a lay preacher in Queensland.

In 1993, BYB reported the abuse to Archdeacon Hollingworth as Elliot was by then a priest in Queensland.

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AUSTRALIA
Mercury

PATRICK BILLINGS
Mercury

FORMER Governor-general Peter Hollingworth has told a child abuse inquiry in Hobart how he, as the then leader of Brisbane’s Anglican Church, took “a punt” on a paedophile priest in allowing him to remain a rector in Queensland.

Dr Hollingworth was the Brishbane Anglican Archdeacon in 1993 when he learnt priest Johnt Litton Elliot had sexually abused a boy prior to ordination.

Elliot was a former Church of England Boys (CEBS) leader in Tasmania before he moved to Queensland in the 1960s.

In the late 1970s he started abusing a boy, aged nine or 10, for about four years while working as a lay preacher and CEBS leader.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

February 3, 2016

Adam Morton
Senior Writer

Former governor-general Peter Hollingworth has apologised to a sex abuse survivor and conceded he manifestly failed in his response to an abuse claim while he was Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane in the 1990s.

Giving evidence to the royal commission into institutional sex abuse, Dr Hollingworth said his failures included giving incorrect evidence to a 2002 inquiry into abuse in the Brisbane diocese, while he was governor-general.

In 1993, Dr Hollingworth allowed paedophile priest John Elliot to continue to work as rector of Dalby, on Queensland’s Darling Downs, after hearing allegations the priest abused at least one boy between 1975 and 1981.

The commission heard Elliot had admitted to the abuse and that psychiatrist John Slaughter, who assessed Elliot, had advised Dr Hollingworth that paedophilia was not treatable.

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HAWAII
Hawaii News Now

By Keoki Kerr

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) –
It will cost roughly $20 million to settle lawsuits brought by 63 people — mostly men — who claim Catholic priests and teachers in Hawaii molested them decades ago, sources told Hawaii News Now.

And First Insurance of Hawaii, which provided liability insurance to both the Catholic Church and Damien Memorial School for decades, has refused to fund any settlements in 40 lawsuits that went to mediation last fall and early this year, according to a lawsuit filed by the church and the school.

In its lawsuit, the Catholic Church said it paid First Insurance of Hawaii for liability insurance from 1951 to 1987, but during the last year and a half of negotiations, it’s been unable to get First Insurance to help pay the bill for settlements and legal fees.

The church’s lawsuit, filed January 14, claimed First Insurance “has delayed, obfuscated, and misled its policyholder, consistently putting its interests ahead of the interests (of the church)”

The church said with no help paying the big bill, it has been forced “to consider liquidating assets in order to meet its settlement obligations. The prospect of additional unreimbursed defense and settlement costs puts funding for the ministry and services” provided by the church “in serious jeopardy.”

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AUSTRALIA
Courier Mail

[with vidoe]

Andrew Drummond
AAP

FORMER governor-general Peter Hollingworth is among two senior Anglican leaders who have apologised for the way they dealt with ­reports of child sexual abuse.

Giving evidence to a royal commission hearing yesterday, Dr Hollingworth said his failure to take action against then-priest John ­Elliot heightened the distress for a victim, a man who cannot be named for legal reasons.

“I want to make an apology to (the victim) and to all the members of his family for the way which his complaint of abuse against John ­Elliot was handled when it was first referred to me as archbishop of Brisbane in 1993,” Dr Hollingworth told the commission hearing in Hobart.

“After a great deal of consideration over the past 22 years I acknowledge unreservedly that my actions were misguided, wrong and a serious error of judgment and that I genuinely regret it.”

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AUSTRALIA
ABC – PM

MARK COLVIN: The child sexual abuse Royal Commission has been told that the former Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide, Ian George, disregarded reports of abuse for several years in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Anglican priest Don Owers gave evidence that he lobbied the Archbishop to make a public statement on the abuse but was ignored.

The royal commission is examining how the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide and the Church of England Boys’ Society handled abuse allegations over several decades.

Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: The royal commission has been examining how the Church of England Boys Society, known as ‘CEBS’, and the Anglican Church have handled child sexual abuse in Tasmania.

It’s now turning its attention to what those organisations have done in the diocese of Adelaide.

Survivor witness BYA told the commission today he was sexually abused by five CEBS leaders in the 1960s. The abuse started when he was 15.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

AAP

The former leader of Brisbane’s Anglican church, Peter Hollingworth, admits he poorly handled a complaint of sexual abuse by a priest and has apologised to the victim.

Giving evidence to a royal commission hearing in Hobart on Wednesday, Dr Hollingworth said his failure to take action against then-priest John Elliot heightened the distress for a victim, a man who cannot be named for legal reasons.

“I want to make an apology to (the victim) and to all the members of his family for the way which his complaint of abuse against John Elliot was handled when it was first referred to me as archbishop of Brisbane in 1993,” Dr Hollingworth said.

Dr Hollingworth was head of the Brisbane diocese from 1990 to 2001 and went on to become governor-general until 2003 when he stepped down over the church’s handling of the abuse allegations.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Wednesday was told that Dr Hollingworth was visited by the victim in August 1993.

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CALIFORNIA
NBC San Diego

By R. Stickney

A Vermont man accused of traveling to San Diego to have sex with infant girls appeared in court Monday to face to two felony counts.

Joel A. Wright, 23, was a seminary student in Columbus, Ohio when he flew to San Diego International Airport on Jan. 29.

Special agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) met Wright outside of baggage claim and took him into custody.

According to officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Wright had plans to travel to Mexico to have sex with at least three babies.

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CALIFORNIA
NBC4i

SAN DIEGO (WCMH)–On Thursday, a federal court will determine if former Ohio seminary student Joel Wright should be allowed to bond out or should be incarcerated until his trial.

Wright, who studied at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus for one semester, was arrested at Lindberg Field in San Diego last Friday.

He is now charged with traveling with the intent to engage in a sexual act with a minor and attempting to engage in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign country.

According to federal investigators, 23-year-old Wright’s arrest comes on the heels of a months-long investigation.

He made his first appearance in federal court Monday afternoon in San Diego before U.S. Magistrate Judge Bernard G. Skomal.

The judge appointed federal defenders to represent him, and set the detention hearing for Thursday Feb. 4 at 10 a.m. The government moved for detention based on risk of flight and danger to the community, according to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of California

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UNITED STATES
BuzzFeed

Nicolás Medina Mora
BuzzFeed News Reporter

The blind seminarian got off the plane shortly after noon on Friday and made his way through the San Diego International Airport. When he got to baggage claim, he took out his cell phone and dialed the number of a woman he’d met on Craigslist.

Authorities say the seminarian believed the woman had agreed to take him to Tijuana and find three toddler girls to rape.

The priest-in-training, a 23-year-old named Joel A. Wright, picked up his duffle bag and walked out of the airport into the sunny California afternoon. And then, without warning, he was under arrest.

The woman he’d been talking with online was actually a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations. The feds had been on Wright’s tail for months — and they were ready to charge him with two crimes relating to interstate travel with the purpose of having sex with children.

At his first appearance in U.S. District Court in San Diego, Wright declined to enter a plea and was ordered held. Wright’s court-appointed lawyers could not be reached for comment. And his mother declined to comment to BuzzFeed News.

But the federal criminal complaint filed against him outlines the sordid path Wright allegedly took to San Diego, and the unlikely collaborator who brought him down: A con-artist based in Mexico who trolled Craigslist for gullible Americans to scam.

Originally from Vermont, Wright was diagnosed with severe glaucoma as a young child, according to a profile of him published by the state’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. After graduating high school in 2010, he enrolled as a seminarian at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, where he has since been expelled for what the school called “heinous and reprehensible” allegations.

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ARKANSAS
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016

Statement by Bill Lindsey of Little Rock, Arkansas director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (501-993-7933, wdlindsy@swbell.net)

Arkansas Catholic officials should aggressively seek out anyone who might have seen, suspected or suffered child sex crimes by a Catholic teacher.

[Arkansas Online]

[Arkansas Matters]

Erica Suskie has been arrested for allegedly molesting a boy at Catholic High School.

In nearly every case, church officials do little or nothing to help – and instead sometimes hinder – the investigating and prosecuting of child sex cases. Catholic institutions, however, have many ways they can prod victims, witnesses and whistleblowers to call police and prosecutors. But they rarely use these resources to make sure child molesters are kept away from kids.

We call on Arkansas Bishop Anthony Taylor, and every Catholic employee, to spread the word about the charges against Suskie. We urge them to ask others, especially current and former students and staff at Catholic High School, to call 911 if they have any information or suspicions about this teacher or other child sex crimes or cover ups in Catholic parishes or schools. We beg them to use church bulletins and school mailing lists and parish websites in this outreach effort.

We hope every single person who saw, suspected or suffered crimes by Catholic employees or cover ups by Catholic officials will find the strength to call police, expose wrongdoers and protect kids.

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UNITED STATES
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on February 2, 2016

What made the Stubenville diocese take a potential seminarian that 45 other dioceses and religious orders had previously rejected?

Joel Wright is the 23-year-old Catholic seminarian who has been charged with attempting to adopt or purchase (for cash) a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old. He didn’t want to be a father. He wanted them for the purpose of molesting. Yeah, that’s repugnant.

But the larger story is far more pernicious.

When interviewed, Wright’s mother gave away a bombshell.

From Columbus Ohio’s Channel 10:

[Wright’s mother] said life for her son as one of roughly 15 pre-theology students at Pontifical College Josephenum wasn’t easy. She claims his path to priesthood was a bumpy road filled with dozens of rejections because of his cataracts and glaucoma.

“I stopped counting after 45 rejections of how many diocese and religions orders that declined him for his physical disability, for his vision, for his orthopedic for his health impairment.”

If the Catholic Church in the United States refused to accept men into the priesthood due to visual impairments, they would have a big ADA complaint on their hands. In fact, who better to help and minister to the visually impaired than someone who shares the same struggles? The 45 rejections had nothing to do with his eyesight.

My guess? He failed the psych exams. And Wright kept applying and applying and applying until he found a place desperate (and negligent) enough to take him.

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LOUISIANA
KPLC

CALCASIEU PARISH, LA (KPLC) –
The second day of testimony has begun in former Calcasieu priest Mark Broussard’s sex abuse trial.

Broussard is accused of raping altar boys while he was a priest at Our Lady Queen of Heaven and St. Henry Catholic Church, from 1986-91. Broussard is charged with molestation of a juvenile, oral sexual battery, aggravated oral sexual battery and two counts of aggravated rape.

The mother of one of the men who claims he was sexually abused by Broussard is testifying this morning.

KPLC’s Theresa Schmidt is in the courtroom. Get the latest by following her at twitter.com/KplcTschmidt.

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LOUISIANA
American Press

A state district court jury heard testimony Monday from a man who said former priest Mark Broussard began sexually assaulting him when he was an 8-year-old altar boy at St. Henry Catholic Church.

Broussard is charged with molestation of a juvenile, oral sexual battery, aggravated oral sexual battery and two counts of aggravated rape. The charges — he originally faced 224 counts of child molestation — stem from his time as a priest in Lake Charles in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

The victim’s testimony followed opening statements and testimony from Bishop Glenn John Provost, the first witness called by prosecutors.

Provost, who joined the diocese in 2007, said he met the victim in December 2012, speaking with him about a day and a half after the victim had talked to Monsignor Daniel Torres, the vicar general of the diocese.

“I found him quite presentable,” Provost said. “He was convincing, and the story was quite compelling.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Review

BY LIZ ZEMBA | Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2016

A federal judge on Tuesday delayed ruling on a Somerset County priest’s request for a new trial on his convictions for sexually molesting orphaned boys.

But U.S. District Court Judge Kim R. Gibson took interest in a defense allegation that prosecutors failed to turn over a victim’s statement that might have been favorable to the Rev. Joseph D. Maurizio.

“To me, it’s pretty clear this is favorable to the defense,” Gibson said during the hearing in Johnstown. “Whether it’s material is a separate issue.”

Maurizio is awaiting sentencing on charges he sexually molested boys at a Honduran orphanage between 1999 and 2009. The sentencing was postponed when his attorney, Steven Passarello of Altoona, filed motions seeking a new trial based on newly discovered evidence and an alleged Brady violation.

Passarello said the new evidence is a statement one of the victims gave an investigator on Sept. 20, when the trial was nearly over. In it, the victim indicates he was not “abused” by Maurizio, Passarello said.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Daily American

JOHNSTOWN — The prosecution hid evidence favorable to the defense during the trial of the Rev. Joseph D. Maurizio Jr. in September, defense attorney Steven P. Passarello argued before U.S. District Judge Kim R. Gibson Tuesday.

The defense claims that the U.S. District Attorney’s Office suppressed evidence that a key witness told prosecutors a different version of his story in a statement after his testimony that Maurizio abused him. The prosecution violated a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court landmark case, Brady v. Maryland, the defense said. The high court’s decision requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence to the defense that could be used by a defendant to support his innocence or to cast doubt on his guilt. The defense wants a new trial.

The judge said he would not make his decision from the bench, but would review the arguments and then decide soon on whether the Central City priest will get a new trial.

“It is very clear it (a statement to the prosecution by one of its key witnesses that contradicts his testimony) is favorable to the defense,” Gibson said.

The judge said, however, that whether that information is “material” is a different issue and one that will turn his decision on whether Maurizio should have a new trial.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Lebanon Daily Record

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A federal judge has heard arguments that prosecutors may have wrongly withheld evidence against a Pennsylvania priest convicted of sexually abusing children in Honduras.

The 70-year-old priest, Joseph Maurizio, was convicted in September of molesting two boys during missionary trips.

Tuesday’s hearing concerned a statement given by a boy who, at one point, told investigators he wasn’t “abused.” Federal prosecutors say the boy’s meaning was lost in translation and he later clarified that the priest fondled him.

But the priest’s lawyer says their client could have used the boy’s statement to create doubt among jurors. They say he deserves a new trial.

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Mythicist Milwaukee

January 25, 2016

PETER ISELY ON THE MYTHICIST MILWAUKEE SHOW

Peter Isely is a founding member and longtime Midwest Director of SNAP, The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the world’s oldest organization of survivors of childhood rape and sexual assault by clergy, with over 18,000 survivors in hundreds of chapters worldwide.

A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Peter is a psychotherapist in private practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he established the nation’s only inpatient hospital program for victims of clergy sexual trauma.

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LOUISIANA
KATC

A second alleged victim has come forward to testify against former priest Mark Broussard, who appeared again in court Tuesday morning for trial on molestation charges stemming from the 1980s.

Broussard was living in Duson when he was arrested in 2012 on rape and battery charges after a letter surfaced in late 2011 alleging that the former priest had sexually abused a Calcasieu Parish man as a child.

So far, two alleged victims have taken the stand claiming Broussard sexually abused each of them when he was their priest in Lake Charles.

The first victim sparked the investigation and trial when he wrote a letter to the bishop with molestation accusations. That victim testified about his experiences on the first day of the trial.

Tuesday, a separate victim, who attended a different school and church, testified that Broussard also touched him inappropriately as a child.

The second victim told the court that the former priest molested him at least three or four times a week for more than three years.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Peter Feuerherd | Feb. 2, 2016

Some, but not all, dioceses and parishes are taking a new look at securing offertory collections, and that’s a good thing, say critics of how the church has handled money.

“The bishops are finally recognizing that embezzlement doesn’t help their moral standing,” Charles Zech, the director of the Center for Church Management and Business Ethics at Villanova University, told NCR.

Zech noted that diocesan-wide procedures are in many ways answering long-time critics, such as Michael W. Ryan, who have long argued that collection procedures in parishes needed tightening. “He’s been crying out in the desert,” said Zech.

Such cries are being heard in dioceses and archdioceses as diverse and geographically spread as Boston, Miami and San Bernardino, Calif. Videos on archdiocesan websites for Boston and Miami offer how-tos on best practices for parish collections to assure that cash dropped into the collection baskets each Sunday actually gets to the parish bank account. An estimated 40 percent of Sunday collections comes from cash donations, seen as particularly vulnerable to pilfering.

The Diocese of San Bernardino is presenting a conference in February that will address parish collection security.

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AUSTRALIA
Sky News

By the early 2000s most victims approaching Tasmania’s Anglican church complaining of sexual abuse by priests were seeking financial assistance, a royal commission has been told.

Bishop John Douglas Harrower was the leader of the diocese of Tasmania for 15 years from July 2000 and one of his first moves in the job was to make a public apology for child-sex offences linked to the church.

“I was made aware of what had happened and I thought it was horrendous and I felt it was important to make an apology,” Bishop Harrower said in evidence to the commission on Tuesday.

Subsequently the bishop received 10 complaints from 10 men about their childhood abuse by former priest Garth Hawkins.

While police were investigating the matters, Bishop Harrower said the church could take no disciplinary action against suspects but moved to offer support to the victims by funding counselling and other support.

– See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/local/hobart/2016/02/02/bishop-sought-funds-for-sex-abuse-victims.html#sthash.1cdU8ZWH.dpuf

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AUSTRALIA
The Conversation

Kathleen McPhillips
Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle

It’s a frontrunner to win Best Picture at the Oscars, has cleaned up the critics’ awards and won extraordinarily high ratings from filmgoers.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t seen the recent release Spotlight yet. In a summer dominated by the return of Star Wars, who wants to watch a movie about Boston journalists exposing the Catholic Church for decades of child abuse and cover ups?

But I hope more people do see it, because as the final moments of the film make clear, Spotlight is not just a movie about historic wrongs in one US city. It’s a story about too many people, in too many countries, including my home town of Newcastle, north of Sydney.

Australia’s current Royal Commission into institutional child abuse was set up after years of dogged work by survivors, supporters and journalists to uncover abuse across many institutions but particularly the Catholic Church. Like Boston, Australian towns where the Catholic church is dominant, such as Newcastle, Wollongong and Ballarat, have been badly affected.

When I went to see Spotlight in a Newcastle cinema on a Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t surprised by who else was in the audience: I recognised survivors, families and supporters of victims, and Catholic community members, including a number of priests.

But even as a researcher who’s attended and written about the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission and the NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Spotlight’s finale came as a shock.

Just before the final credits roll, the filmmakers list dozens of other American cities affected by clerical abuse, which have all been tracked by the website Bishop Accountability. That US list is followed by towns and cities worldwide. The names go on and on, over several screens: from Auckland, Beunos Aires and Cape Town, to Manchester to Manila and beyond.

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UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches

BY PATRICIA MILLER FEBRUARY 2, 2016

Fast on the heels of the news that a Bavarian boys choir directed by Pope Benedict’s brother was a hotbed of physical and sexual abuse for decades, comes the allegation that Cardinal Gerhard Müller covered up the abuse when he was the bishop of Regensburg.

According to the National Catholic Reporter, the allegation is being made by the former head of the lay diocesan council in Regensburg, Germany, who said that Müller and a deputy “systematically” covered up the abuse, disbanded the diocesan council to thwart outside investigation, and installed at least one known abuser priest in a parish who then committed more acts of abuse.

Müller has served as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the second most powerful position in the Vatican, since 2012 and has emerged as one of the most outspoken opponents of Pope Francis’ efforts to modernize church practices around marriage and divorce and the treatment of gay Catholics.

He also oversaw the disciplining of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for its supposed disobedience to the Vatican and was widely criticized for the public dressing down he gave the nuns in 2014.

If the allegations hold up, Müller will be the third prefect of the CDF to be accused of turning a blind eye to reports of sexual abuse. Benedict has been accused of allowing serial abuser Father Marcial Maciel to hold an exalted position in the church for decades while he was prefect of the CDF despite credible charges of abuse.

Cardinal William Joseph Levada, who held the position after Benedict, came under fire for how he handled charges of abuse when he was the bishop of Portland and San Francisco. Like Benedict, who was given a report on Maciel that he disregarded, Levada reportedly received a brief in the mid-1980s from a three-priest panel on the brewing U.S. abuse scandal that he ignored.

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AUSTRALIA
The Tablet (UK)

02 February 2016 | by Mark Brolly

The Australian bishops warned it makes uncomfortable viewing but is an opportunity to re-double efforts to support victims

Two Australian bishops have encouraged Catholics to see the film Spotlight, while warning it makes uncomfortable viewing.

Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth said the film about The Boston Globe’s uncovering of sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Boston Archdiocese “is an opportunity for all of us in the Church to acknowledge the extent to which some of our brothers and sisters, including our leaders, have failed so badly, also here in Australia, to be the signs and bearers of God’s love and compassion they were expected, and appointed, to be.

“More importantly it can be an opportunity to re-double our efforts to assist those who have been the victims, and now survivors, of this terrible abuse and for whom the screening of this movie might well open up painful wounds. And it must reinforce our shared determination to make our parishes and other institutions and agencies places of absolute safety for our children and young people.”

Archbishop Costelloe said survivors had lost so much, “including perhaps your faith in the Church”. “Please do not give up on God.”

“The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse continues its vital work of investigating this terrible scourge which is, to our great shame as a nation, far more widespread in institutional settings than any of us have previously realised,” he said.

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ARKANSAS
Arkansas Online

By Jaime Dunaway

A former substitute teacher at Catholic High School for Boys surrendered to authorities Tuesday on a charge of sexual assault in the first degree, prosecutors said.

Erica Suskie appeared in North Little Rock District Court on Tuesday morning and entered a plea of not guilty, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter Scott Carroll said on Twitter.

Suskie was with her husband, former Arkansas Public Service Commission chairman Paul Suskie, at the brief hearing.

The Suskies were friends with the family of the alleged victim, who went to school at Catholic High in Little Rock, Pulaski County Chief Deputy Prosecutor John Johnson said.

Catholic High principal Steve Straessle said he reported the misconduct to a hotline, as required by law, when rumors about it developed in October. He declined to offer details about what the rumors suggested had occurred.

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ARKANSAS
Arkansas Matters

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A substitute teacher at Catholic High School has been taken into custody after surrendering to police on sexual assault charges.

Police say Erica Suskie turned herself in this morning to face charges in the case.

On October 26 of last year, the North Little Rock Police Department received a report from the Arkansas State Police Crimes Against Children unit about the alleged abuse.

Officials with Catholic High School say they addressed the issue three months ago when the allegations were made, and took measures to protect their students.

Suskie’s arrest affidavit says that an alleged male victim said he had sexual contact and intercourse with Suskie, who’s a family friend and was his Algebra tutor.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian

Tara Conlan
Tuesday 2 February 2016

Use of the words “historic”, “victims” and “child pornography” should be avoided when reporting on children who have been abused, according to new media guidelines from the National Association for People Abused in Childhood.

In the wake of revelations about abuse carried out years ago by Jimmy Savile and other celebrities, the term “historic child abuse” has been widely used in newspapers and television as part of broader discussion of the issue. But Napac’s guidelines put forward language survivors would prefer journalists to use and also offer case studies.

As rapes or murders are not referred to as “historic” Napac says the word should be avoided to describe sexual abuse because, “there is nothing historic” for those who survived abuse as many are still living with the consequences.

Instead the organisation suggests reporters use the phrase “non-recent child abuse” or state the decade in which the alleged crime took place.

Napac also says that “many adults who were abused as children prefer to be known as ‘survivors’ rather than ‘victims’”, although it recognises that the word “victim” often has to be used in a legal context.

And the guidelines also ask the media to avoid using the terms “rent boy” and “child pornography” and instead write “indecent images of children or child abuse images” and “sexually exploited child”.

When speaking to those who have been abused, Napac advises reporters to “not generalise or make assumptions about the impact of child abuse on an individual survivor”.

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AUSTRALIA
Manny Waks

2/2/2016

​I have deliberately stayed silent on the proposed governance ‘reforms’ that have been recently disseminated by the Melbourne Yeshivah Centre in response to last year’s Royal Commission. Some of the proposed ‘changes’ are concerning and appear no more than an attempt by the existing trustees to entrench their power when the only proper course of action is for them to resign. But rather than criticise, I wanted to afford the Yeshivah Centre the opportunity to properly consider its position and, to the extent that they’re prepared to speak up, to hear what the rest of the Yeshivah/Chabad community had to say.

However, it now seems that the Yeshivah Centre has been vetoed by the organisation that apparently has always had ultimate power, authority and responsibility: Chabad Headquarters, which is based in Brooklyn New York. It is important to note that since this scandal became public in 2011, Chabad Headquarters have remained silent for the most part, other than a solitary statement issued following the Royal Commission.

The intervention by Chabad Headquarters raises a number of questions about their responsibility for the child sexual abuse cover-ups within Yeshivah and their failure to speak out against the leadership and communal bullying and harassment of child sexual abuse victims, their families and supporters. At the same time, it again exposes the incompetence of the Yeshivah leadership who can’t even seem to clean up their own mess properly. I have briefly addressed each of these issues below, and reproduced the letter from Chabad Headquarters and the 1973 Merkos Guidelines they reference in their letter.

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UNITED STATES
The Mennonite

Anna Groff is executive director of Dove’s Nest and chair of the Sexual Abuse Panel appointed by Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Education Agency.

Ervin Stutzman is executive director of Mennonite Church USA.

Mennonite Church USA Executive Board, Mennonite Education Agency and the Sexual Abuse Prevention Panel are extending a broad invitation to any individuals interested in confidentially disclosing if they have been approached or abused by Luke Hartman, formerly of Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Mennonite Church USA has named Linda Gehman Peachey, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Regina Shands Stoltzfus, Goshen, Indiana, as the individuals to receive any complaints regarding Hartman’s behavior.

Hartman was the former vice president for enrollment at EMU. He also served as a professor in the EMU teacher education program and an instructor in the master of education program for the past 12 years.

With great sadness, we received the news that Hartman resigned from EMU on Jan. 12 as a result of a Jan. 8 misdemeanor charge of solicitation of prostitution by Harrisonburg Police Department. We pray for God’s grace upon Hartman, his family, friends, and the EMU community. At the same time, we feel called to extend an invitation to persons who may have been hurt by Hartman’s actions.

To be clear, this invitation does not presume Hartman’s innocence or guilt regarding the charge of solicitation of prostitution before him. Neither are we accusing Hartman of abuse. We do not have any knowledge that he hurt any individuals connected to his work at EMU or elsewhere.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

AAP

Australia’s former governor-general, Peter Hollingworth, is due to front a royal commission to give his account of how the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane responded to allegations of child sex abuse when he headed it.

Dr Hollingworth, the former Anglican archbishop of Brisbane, is listed to appear in Hobart on Wednesday when he is expected to make an apology to abuse victims, citing a serious error of judgment on the church’s handling of the matters.

Some evidence linked to Dr Hollingworth relates to John Elliot, who was a lay member of the Church of England Boys’ Society from the late 1950s, including in Tasmania.

The first report of Elliot’s misconduct was made to the Brisbane diocese in mid-1993 and was immediately escalated to Dr Hollingworth, the commission has been told.

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OHIO
ABC 22

BY LISA SMITH MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1ST 2016

DAYTON — An unbelievable case of alleged international human trafficking with ties to Ohio. Joel Wright, a former seminary student in Columbus, was in federal court Monday, on charges related to an attempt to adopt a baby in Mexico for sex. Experts on human trafficking here in the Miami Valley say it’s the reality and we shouldn’t be surprised.

“No. It’s not hard to believe,” said Diane Ream, program director for Oasis House in Dayton. “It’s really the world we live in because you can purchase anything on Craigslist, and so, to sell a human being is not unthinkable,” said Ream.

Oasis House is a local organization that helps women get on their feet after escaping human trafficking. Their walls are decorated with drawings by former human trafficking victims. It shows the pain of years of abuse.

“Most people think it only happens in third world countries, but it actually happens here,” said Ream. “A lot of the women that we work with have gone through that life, growing up in that life.”

Ream said the easy access to the interstate highways creates numerous hot spots around the Dayton area where human trafficking takes place. She said children and young girls are targeted by predators through secret gifts.

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OHIO
10TV

[with video]
[timeline]

By Tylar Bacome
Monday February 1, 2016

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Joel Wright appeared on a Vermont CBS affiliate WCAX not once but twice, at 16-years-old and 13-years-old; both times he was excited about a planned trip to a papal mass.

It was a sharp contrast to the 23-year-old seminary student who appeared in federal court on Monday on two felony charges for allegedly planning a trip to Tijuana, Mexico to buy a 1-year-old and 4-year-old for sex.

Homeland Security Agents arrested Wright Friday morning in San Diego between connecting flights.

Speaking to 10TV from the Vermont home where she raised Wright, his mom Teresa Poquette says her son was set up. “He didn’t do it he’s innocent. I still do not believe it’s true,” she said.

When asked why her son was traveling to Tijuana, Mexico when he was arrested on his connecting flight out of San Diego, she responded, “I don’t know.”

Poquette said life for her son as one of roughly 15 pre-theology students at the Josephenum wasn’t easy. She claims his path to priesthood was a bumpy road filled with dozens of rejections because of his cataracts and developed glaucoma.

“I stopped counting after 45 rejections of how many diocese and religions orders that declined him for his physical disability, for his vision, for his orthopedic for his health impairment.”

Wright was eventually admitted to Franciscan University in Steubenville where he spent two years before his studies as a pre-theology student majoring in Philosophy at the Josephenum. Both schools say Wright passed two thorough criminal background checks and psychological assessments before beginning the journey to priesthood he’d spoken about for years.

A Josephenum spokesperson said despite strict rules not to leave campus without permission, Wright emailed the school at 6:00 a.m. the day he was arrested, saying he was traveling for the weekend and would be back Tuesday.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Joe Leogue

The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has cost the State €1.78m to date, Children’s Minister James Reilly has revealed.

The commission, which is due to publish its findings in February 2018, was set up last year to determine whether women and children in mother and baby homes were subject to forced separation or mistreated, and if these abuses were subsequently covered up.

The three-person commission is comprised of chairwoman Judge Yvonne Murphy and commissioners William Duncan, an international legal expert on child protection and adoption, and Prof Mary E Daly, a historian.

Mr Reilly revealed the costs in his reply to a parliamentary question from Renua leader Lucinda Creighton.

He said the €1.78m spent to date includes set-up costs and costs incurred by his department in supporting the commission.

The commission’s terms of reference have been criticised by survivors groups for being too narrow.

In December the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors delivered a letter to the offices of the commission of investigation to demand that the terms of reference be widened.

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IRELAND
Irish Examiner

By Stephen Rogers
Irish Examiner Reporter

Two clerical abuse victims have criticised a homily by the Bishop of Kilmore in which he described the abuse at the hands of the clergy as an “aberration”.

Bishop Leo O’Reilly said the religious of Ireland have experienced “the prophet’s rejection in recent times in a very painful way”.

“Indeed the whole Church in Ireland has experienced it,” he said. “In the media reaction, some years ago, following the publication of the Ryan Report, and in other media productions and commentary since, you could be forgiven for thinking that the story of religious life in Ireland, and indeed of the Church as a whole, was one of unmitigated evil and abuse.

“There was evil and abuse of course, and it was right that it be exposed and condemned. But that evil was a very small part of the story, an aberration and an exception.”

Clerical abuse victim Colm O’Gorman said Bishop O’Reilly’s comments were another example of the Church attempting to rewrite history.

“Too often bishops fail to recognise that they are uniquely responsible for the enormous decline in the authority of the Roman Catholic Church,” he said.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

February 2, 2016

Paul Bibby
Court Reporter

A Catholic priest repeatedly sexually abused three young altar boys in regional NSW in the 1980s, including raping one child at the church’s altar, a court has heard.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is being tried for 17 offences allegedly committed against the boys, aged 11 and 12, between 1980 and 1984.

The court heard the man, who is no longer a priest, has already pleaded guilty to 40 other child sex offences and is awaiting sentencing for those crimes.

In his opening to the ex-priest’s trial in the Downing Centre District Court on Tuesday, Crown prosecutor Bryan Rowe outlined a series of alleged incidents in which the accused groped, molested, raped or forced oral sex on the boys.

He said one of the boys was the victim of 11 separate offences, including repeated indecent assaults during trips to a local swimming pool.

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UNITED STATES
Reveal: The Center for Investigative Reporting

By Trey Bundy / February 1, 2016

In 2013, 30-something Katheryn Harris Carmean White confessed to elders in her Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation that she had repeatedly had sex with a 14-year-old boy.

The two elders didn’t tell police. They, and the congregation, now face a lawsuit from the Delaware attorney general accusing them of violating the state’s mandated reporting laws. The defendants claim the elders were protected from having to report the abuse by a legal exemption for clergy.

The case highlights the struggle of courts to interpret a convoluted web of clergy reporting laws that stretches across U.S. Elevating the tension is the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses explicitly are instructed not to report child sexual abuse to secular authorities unless required by state law.

Clergy are mandated to report child abuse in 45 states, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But laws in 32 of those states contain some version of a loophole called a clergy-penitent privilege. Those exceptions allow clergy to withhold information from authorities if they receive it from members seeking spiritual advice.

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NEBRASKA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release, February 1, 2016

January 27, 2016

Dear Bishop Conley:

We are members of a support group called SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPnetwork.org). Our goal is to protect the vulnerable and heal the wounded.

Recently, we learned that you have invited Bishop Robert Finn into your diocese and are letting him minister to nuns at Lincoln’s School Sisters of Christ the King convent.

As you are well aware, he was convicted of refusing to tell police of suspected child sex crimes by Fr. Shawn Ratigan. He resigned as head of the Kansas City diocese. And he signed a contract

with 40+ victims, agreeing to take steps to prevent future abuse. But he was found by an arbitrator to have broken his word and his diocese was forced to pay $1.1 million to those brave victims.

[BishopAccountability.org]

The Ratigan case is far from the only case of known or suspected child sex crimes in which Finn acted recklessly, callously or deceitfully. For example, another credibly accused child molesting cleric, Fr. Michael Tierney, was kept on the job by Finn for more than six months despite multiple child sex abuse allegations against him in at least two lawsuits.

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AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher, article posted 1 February 2016

Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission will officially inquire in early February 2016 whether Cardinal George Pell is prepared to appear in the witness box in Australia later in February to answer questions about how the Catholic Church, historically, has dealt with clergy sexual abuse in two Australian cities — Melbourne and Ballarat. At present, Pell seeks to remain in the Vatican, instead of re-visiting Australia.

Since May 2015, the Royal Commission has been holding a series of occasional public hearings to obtain information about the archdiocese of Melbourne (covering the Melbourne metropolitan area) and the diocese of Ballarat (covering the western half of the state of Victoria). The Melbourne inquiry is Case Study 35, while Ballarat is Case Study 28.

George Pell, who was born in Ballarat, was originally a priest in the Ballarat diocese. He was later the archbishop of Melbourne (from 1996 to 2001) and then became the archbishop of Sydney before gaining his current senior role in the Vatican.

During a four-weeks public hearing in November-December 2015, the Royal Commission examined a series of submissions concerning clergy sexual crimes in Melbourne and Ballarat. The Royal Commission heard from victims in Ballarat and Melbourne who alleged that church leaders had been ignoring or concealing these crimes. The Commission also questioned priests from Ballarat and Melbourne who replied to many of the Commission’s questions by stating: “I do not remember” or “I cannot recall”.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

Shannon Deery

MELBOURNE’s troubled Yeshivah Centre has been banned from making changes to the school’s leadership in the wake of its sexual abuse crisis.

Following a damning probe by the child abuse royal commission last year the centre announced it would replace its board of trustees and committee of management.

Many of the centre’s leaders were blamed for decades of cover-ups that led to an epidemic of sexual abuse that has shamed the Yeshivah community.

A string of former staff members have been jailed in recent years for heinous crimes committed against children.

A Governance Review Panel was setup to create a new constitution for the centre with all trustees and the interim committee of management expected be stood down by last December.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Review

BY LIZ ZEMBA | Monday, Feb. 1, 2016

The attorney for a Somerset County priest convicted in federal court of sexually molesting boys at a Honduran orphanage is seeking a new trial based on newly discovered evidence and allegations that prosecutors withheld evidence favorable to the defense.

The Rev. Joseph D. Maurizio Jr., 70, was to be sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Johnstown. But the former pastor of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Central City instead will appear before Judge Kim R. Gibson for an evidentiary hearing on motions for a new trial.

Federal prosecutors said Maurizio used a self-run charity based in Johnstown, Humanitarian Interfaith Ministries, to visit the orphanage numerous times between 1999 and 2009, promising candy and cash to boys to watch them shower, have sex or fondle them.

Maurizio did not testify during his trial in September. Through his attorney, Steven Passarello of Altoona, he has maintained his innocence.

Gibson denied an earlier motion seeking a new trial that was based on insufficient evidence but dismissed one of the jury’s five guilty verdicts.

Passarello is again seeking a new trial, this time in two motions filed under seal.

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CANADA
CBC News

By Martha Troian, for CBC News

The Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) has located thousands of people accused of physically and sexually abusing students at Indian residential schools — though the public may never learn any of their identities.

As part of the mandate set out in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement agreement, INAC located 5,315 alleged abusers, both former employees and students at these schools.

To do this, 17 private investigation firms were contracted, at a cost of $1,576,380, beginning in 2005, according to information provided by the department.

The alleged perpetrators were tracked down not to face criminal charges, however, but only to see if they would be willing to participate in hearings to determine compensation for residential school survivors. The Independent Assessment Process (IAP) is the out-of-court process for resolving the most severe abuse claims coming out of the residential schools system

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CANADA
The Daily Courier

TORONTO — A well-known Toronto pastor who officiated at Jack Layton’s state funeral is denying accusations of sex crimes in Nova Scotia that police allege date back four decades.

“I want to be crystal clear: I am innocent of these allegations,” Rev. Brent Hawkes said in a statement on the website of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto.

“The purported events simply did not take place.”

RCMP Staff Sgt. Craig Burnett said Monday that Hawkes has been charged with indecent assault and gross indecency related to allegations of a sexual assault in the 1970s.

Hawkes, 65, and a native of Bath, N.B., officiated over the state funeral for NDP leader Jack Layton in Toronto in August 2011, and has been a senior pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church for decades.

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TEXAS
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

BY DEANNA BOYD
dboyd@star-telegram.com

Days into his trial on charges that he molested a teenage church member more than a decade ago, the former pastor of Cowboy Way Church in Alvarado pleaded guilty Monday to indecency with a child in exchange for seven years’ deferred adjudication probation.

Under the sentence, if Dan William Haby Jr. abides by the terms of his probation, the case will be dismissed with no conviction on his record.

If he violates probation, he can be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison.

Either way, Haby is now required to register as a sex offender for life.

Afterward, the victim, now 31, said Haby’s plea gave him a “freedom that I haven’t had in 16 years.”

“It forced him to tell everyone that he’s guilty and admit to what’s he done, and that is a freedom for me not to have to carry the burden of what’s been 16 years of a lie,” the victim said. “I pray that he finds forgiveness and that he seeks the healing … and the counseling he needs to get better.”

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LOUISIANA
KSLA

By Theresa Schmidt

LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) –
A jury in a former priest’s sex abuse trial heard graphic testimony Monday from a man who said he was sexually assaulted by Mark Broussard.

The witness’s testimony portrayed Broussard as a predator who groomed the boy for sexual activity, eventually accelerating to rape.

Mark Anthony Broussard is charged with molestation of a juvenile, oral sexual battery, aggravated oral sexual battery and two counts of aggravated rape. The allegations revolve around Broussard’s time as a priest at Our Lady Queen of Heaven and St. Henry Catholic Church, from 1986-91. The charges against Broussard are based on allegations of two men who were altar boys. Broussard, who is free on $1.5 million bond, was initially indicted on 224 counts of sexual abuse, but the charges were reduced to five, which reflect the entirety of the accusations.

KPLC’s Theresa Schmidt is covering the trial. Follow her at twitter.com/KplcTschmidt.

The man who took the stand Monday said he was about 8 years old and riding his bike around the parking lot of St. Henry when a stranger stopped him. That man was Broussard.

According to the witness, Broussard befriended him and eventually fondled, molested and raped him as the sexual contact accelerated over the course of about a year.

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AUSTRALIA
The Advertiser

Nigel Hunt

A VICTIM of notorious paedophile Robert Brandenburg was threatened with legal action on two occasions by a senior Anglican Church official when he reported the abuse, an inquiry has been told.

In astonishing evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Adelaide man Mark King detailed how he reported his abuse in 1993 to then Archdeacon Brian Smith — only to be dismissed and threatened with legal action if he spoke about it to others.

Mr King, who was also abused by a Church of England Boys Society leader, fellow members and Brandenburg after he joined the Plympton branch when aged 10, said Archdeacon Smith was “aggressively defensive’’ about Brandenburg and had told him he had known him for more than 30 years.

He said Archdeacon Smith was president of CEBS when Brandenburg was the CEBS Commissioner for South Australia. Archdeacon Smith had also told him that Brandenburg had often been to his house and he vouched for his good character.

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CALIFORNIA
10 News

A seminary student accused of traveling from Ohio to San Diego with the intent of going to Tijuana to have sex with female infants should be held without bail because he is a flight risk and a danger to the community, a prosecutor told a federal judge Monday.

Joel Alexander Wright, 23, was arrested at Lindbergh Field on Friday and charged with traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and aggravated sexual abuse of a child.

The defendant, clad in white jumpsuit with a chain between his ankles, was advised of the charges against him and had an attorney appointed to represent him.

Magistrate Judge Bernard Skomal scheduled a detention hearing for Thursday.

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AUSTRALIA
Mercury

ANDREW DRUMMOND

BY the early 2000s most victims approaching Tasmania’s Anglican Church complaining of sexual abuse by priests were seeking financial assistance, a royal commission has been told.

Bishop John Douglas Harrower was the leader of the diocese of Tasmania for 15 years from July 2000 and one of his first moves in the job was to make a public apology for child-sex offences linked to the church.

“I was made aware of what had happened and I thought it was horrendous and I felt it was important to make an apology,” Bishop Harrower said in evidence to the commission on Tuesday.

Subsequently the bishop received 10 complaints from 10 men about their childhood abuse by former priest Garth Hawkins.

While police were investigating the matters, Bishop Harrower said the church could take no disciplinary action against suspects but moved to offer support to the victims by funding counselling and other support.

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AUSTRALIA
SBS

AAP

More than four decades after the childhood sexual abuse his mind had repressed, a car crash brought the memories flooding back.

The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, on Tuesday told a royal commission that as an Adelaide teenager in the late 1960s he was abused by five men, each with links to the Anglican church.

But he had no recollection of the abuse until 2010, after an accident when his car rolled.

“I started having flashbacks about the car accident and then I started to have flashbacks about the sexual abuse,” the man told a public hearing in Hobart.

“These flashbacks escalated over the next month and began occurring every day.”

It made the man remember the abuse he suffered after joining the Church of England Boys’ Society at St Richard’s in the Adelaide suburb of Lockleys.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Emilie Gramenz

Peter Hollingworth, a former Anglican archbishop of Brisbane and Australian governor-general, was warned a paedophile priest “posed a risk of re-offending”, a psychiatrist has told an inquiry.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is investigating the Anglican Church and its youth group, the Church of England Boys Society (CEBS).

Brisbane psychiatrist Dr John Slaughter told a hearing in Hobart he consulted with Anglican priest John Elliot in 1993.

Mr Hollingworth had asked the psychiatrist to see Elliot after an allegation of abuse, and Elliot allowed information about the sessions to be relayed back to the then-archbishop, Dr Slaughter said.

The inquiry heard Elliot told Dr Slaughter about previous offences, disclosing that he remained sexually attracted to boys and preferred boys who were around puberty.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

AAP

A former NSW Catholic priest accused of molesting young altar boys in churches and pools is already in custody awaiting sentence for 40 other child sex offences, a jury has heard.

The trial of the 61-year-old man began on Tuesday, with Sydney’s District Court hearing allegations he abused three altar boys in the early 1980s, all from the same church.

They were then aged about 11, and the accusations range from grabbing genitals to raping a boy on a church altar.

The former regional priest, who can’t be identified, also repeatedly targeted one victim in a local pool, crown prosecutor Bryan Rowe said.

After drinking tea with the alleged victim’s family the former priest would take the boy to a local pool and during several trips he allegedly pinched the boy’s buttocks, pinned him against the pool wall and rubbed the boy’s penis.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

February 2, 2016

Henrietta Cook
Education Reporter at The Age

Concerned parents and students at a Melbourne Catholic school have boycotted mass after calling for their priest to resign over abuse allegations.

A group of parents at St Patrick’s School in Mentone and St John Vianney’s School in Parkdale have been demanding that parish priest Father John Walshe stand down.

The Catholic priest defended Cardinal George Pell at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and has been accused of sexually abusing an 18-year-old seminarian in 1982.

He was in his early 20s at the time and had been recently ordained. He denied the abuse and said the incident was consensual.

It was revealed in December that the victim received $75,000 in compensation after the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne apologised and accepted that he had been sexually abused by Father Walshe.

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OHIO
WTOV

[with video]

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — A Catholic seminary student who was arrested Friday on child sex charges was confirmed to have attended Franciscan University for two semesters.

Joel Wright, 23, was taken into police custody in California on allegations that he planned to adopt a three-year-old girl from Mexico for the purpose of raping her.

Franciscan University issued a statement Monday. School officials said they are not permitted to go into detail, but Wright was a student in the fall 2015 and spring 2015 semesters.

The statement went on to say “Franciscan University cooperates fully with law enforcement agencies on any issues of concern. Any questions regarding an ongoing criminal investigation need to be directed to legal authorities.”

Wright was a student at Pontifical College in Columbus before he was arrested. He has since been expelled.

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CANADA
CBC News

Brent Hawkes, a prominent Toronto pastor, has been charged with committing sex crimes in Nova Scotia, lawyer Clayton Ruby confirmed to CBC News.

Ruby said his client was charged by the RCMP in December with indecent assault and gross indecency in Kings County, N.S. The incidents allegedly occurred in the 1970s.

The 65-year-old, who delivered the eulogy at former New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton’s 2011 funeral, has been the senior pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto for nearly 40 years.

Hawkes is well-known in the LGBT community and has been recognized for his work by the City of Toronto, the United Nations Toronto Association, York University and the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Emilie Gramenz

Former Tasmanian bishop Philip Newell “must have known about” a paedophile priest who was abusing boys, his son’s former girlfriend has told the royal commission into child sexual abuse.

A public hearing in Hobart is investigating the Anglican Church and its youth group, the Church of England Boys Society (CEBS).

In the 1980s, Catherine Hutchinson dated Christopher Newell, the son of former bishop Phillip Newell.

Their relationship lasted about five years.

Ms Hutchinson told the commission Christopher Newell made comments about the conduct of paedophile priest Louis Daniels in 1984, prior to any official complaints being made.

“He said, when Lou Daniels is around at CEBS camps, there will be CEBS with sore bottoms,” she said.

Counsel Assisting Naomi Sharp then asked “did you ever pursue with Christopher Newell what he meant when he made these comments?”

“No, I didn’t,” Ms Hutchinson said.

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WASHINGTON
Bellevue Reporter

A week after the Reporter revealed that a list of Seattle-area priests who had sexually abused children failed to include employees of the Archdiocese of Seattle who had been accused of the same crime, the organization said they will review the list and determine if more names need to be added.

“We will continue to review the list to determine if additional information or names should be included,” the archdiocese said in a statement. They also encouraged anyone with information about sexual abuse by a member of the clergy, employee or a volunteer to come forward.

The archdiocese had released the list with the aim of transparency, with spokesperson Greg Magnoni telling the Reporter that it is an ongoing effort.

Seven priests included on the archdiocese’s initial list had worked in Bellevue over sexual decades and had been accused multiple times in the past. More priests who had served across the Eastside were named by the archdiocese as sexual abusers, including three with ties to Mercer Island, one in Kirkland, one in Bothell and 13 in Kenmore.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC – PM

MARK COLVIN: At the child sexual abuse Royal Commission hearings in Hobart, a former Anglican bishop of Tasmania has denied both joking about little boys with sore bottoms, and covering up complaints against a priest in the 1980s.

But Philip Newell was forced to concede that he had failed to remove the priest from duties involving young boys.

He admitted that that was “a very serious oversight”.

Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: The Royal Commission is examining how the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania handled allegations priests were sexually abusing boys in the 1980s.

One priest, Louis Daniels, was eventually convicted and jailed for the sexual abuse of 11 boys. He settled a civil claim brought by a 12th boy.

Witness Sue Clayton, a former lay reader of the Church, has told the Commission that in 1987, she accompanied two boys to a meeting with the then-Bishop of Tasmania, Philip Newell.

The boys reported to him they had been sexually abused by Daniels. Ms Clayton gave evidence that Bishop Newell responded to the boys with sensitivity.

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VERMONT
WCAX

By WCAX News

SAN DIEGO –
New details about a former Vermont man arrested for allegedly seeking to have sex with infants and young girls in Mexico.

Investigators say 23-year-old Joel Wright was carrying $2,000 in cash along with baby clothes and a bottle in his luggage when he was arrested in San Diego on Friday. According to the criminal complaint, Wright wrote explicit online messages about what he hoped to do with an infant and a 4-year-old girl.

Wright, who went to Burlington High School, was until recently a seminary student in Ohio.

“Shock and sadness that someone who could potentially be entrusted with such sacred trusts could betray them in such a great way. Again, presently the charges against him are allegations. They’re grave and they’re shocking and they’re serious,” said Rev. John Allen with Pontifical College.

Joel Wright was featured in several Channel 3 News stories when he was a teenager because he was huge fan of the pope and said he planned to become a priest.

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OHIO
10TV

MOUNT VERNON, Ohio – A criminal complaint against a man who was studying to be a priest at a Columbus seminary has revealed appalling new details of how he tried to adopt infants to rape and sexually abuse.

(WARNING: Some of what you are about to read is upsetting and graphic. Discretion is advised.)

July 2014: Joel Wright travels to Tijuana, Mexico after communicating with a person (only known as “reporting person” in a criminal complaint) via Craigslist in hopes of “obtaining” a child. In a Tijuana hotel, Wright paid the person an adoption fee. The person then left the hotel and did not return, scamming Wright out of the so-called “fee.”

Wright returns to the United States the same month.

July 2015: The reporting person began to communicate with Wright again via Craigslist using a different e-mail address. In this case, Wright was looking for a tour guide in Tijuana for “a medical appointment, meeting a woman to marry, and adopting a child.”

Wright explained to the reporting person that he wanted to engage in sex with a female infant. When asked if he had done this before, he stated he never had sex with a child, but had “made it very close.”

November 2015: The reporting person contacts the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about his communication with Wright.

December 3, 2015: Undercover federal agents take over the reporting person’s e-mail and resume communicating with Wright, who goes on to describe in graphic detail how he would rape and molest infants.

He also offers to give the agent a 4-year-old he was planning to adopt and rape “as a present.”

December 10, 2015: The undercover agent buys an airline ticket for Wright to fly to Tijuana with the intent of raping at least two children (ages 4 and 1).

December 11, 2015: Wright suddenly backs out of the travel plans without explanation and tells the undercover agent to have no further contact with him.

December 28, 2015: Wright places a third ad in the community section of the Tijuana Craigslist for a female tour guide.

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LOUISIANA
KATC

Former priest Mark Broussard appeared in court Monday morning for trial on molestation charges stemming from incidents in the 1980s.

Broussard was living in Duson when he was arrested in 2012 on rape and battery charges after a letter surfaced in late 2011, alleging that the former priest had sexually abused a Calcasieu Parish man as a child.

Broussard was a priest in Lake Charles during the 1980s at St. Henry Catholic Church. The victim who wrote the letter claimed most of the sexual abuse occurred in and around the church.

Broussard resigned from the priesthood in 1994, nearly 18 years before his arrest.

On Monday, prosecutors began opening statements, telling jurors that Broussard took advantage of young boys in the congregation who were too young and scared to tell anyone that they were being abused by a priest.

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HAWAII
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release, February 1, 2016

Statement by Joelle Casteix, SNAP Western Regional Director, 949-322-7434, jcasteix@gmail.com

[Hawaii News Now]

We are proud of the brave men and women who came forward to expose their abuse and hold the Diocese of Honolulu accountable. In the next few weeks—when previously secret documents are made public and we learn more about the scope and scale of the crimes—these survivors will also receive the justice and vindication they deserve.

These victims are no longer forced to suffer in shame and silence. By coming forward, they are a source of pride for their families. They stood up, stopped the cycle of abuse, ensured keiki safety, and held wrongdoers accountable to the law.

There is still time for the child victims of Hawai’i to come forward and seek justice. No victim of child sex crimes should ever be denied the opportunity to use the court system for justice.

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

By David Clohessy

On Sunday in Georgia, we leafletted a church about pedophile priests. (Thanks Barb!)

[SNAP]

On Monday in California, we exposed public school officials who are putting young victims through legal hell even though their predator has been convicted AND in Georgia, we outed seven predator priests.

(Thanks Tim L, Melanie S, Tim S, Michael S and others.)

[SNAP]

[WTOC]

On Tuesday in Michigan, Florida and South Carolina, we did three separate outreach Greg, Phillip, Bill, David, Linda, Alan S & others!)

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

AAP

An overseas witness will give evidence to a royal commission that a member of senior Anglican clergy in Australia knew of sexual abuse rumours linked to the Church of England Boys’ Society.

British woman Catherine Hutchinson will on Tuesday be beamed by video link into a Hobart public hearing to give her account of dinner conversation at the home of former state leader of the Anglican diocese, Bishop Phillip Newell.

In 1984 and 1985, when Ms Hutchinson was aged about 18 and dating one of Bishop Newell’s sons, she said quips were made around the family’s Hobart dinner table of CEBS boys having “sore bottoms”.

She alleges Bishop Newell responded to the comments, telling his sons “let’s not have that at the dinner table”.

But in evidence on Monday the bishop denied any such conversation took place.

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UNITED STATES
Huffington Post

Kerry Walters
William Bittinger Professor of Philosophy and Peace and Justice Studies, Gettysburg College

I rarely cry at movies. But I did a few days ago while watching Spotlight, the film about the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposure of Roman Catholic priests who sexually abused children and the prelates who covered up for them.

The Globe’s story was only the first wave of what became a tsunami of scandal. Fifteen years later, hundreds of similarly sordid cases of clerical misconduct and ecclesial concealment have come to light, not only in the United States but also throughout Europe, Australia, and Canada.

Watching Spotlight brought back all the shame, anger, and grief that seared me fourteen years ago when the scandal first broke. The sexual exploitation of children is horrible enough. But that the predators were priests, servants of God revered, trusted, and upheld as role models by the very families they betrayed, was a body blow no one saw coming.

For generations of American Roman Catholics, it was simply unimaginable that priests were capable of such things. As one man abused as a child told the Globe, “We were taught that priests were God’s representatives on earth. A priest would walk in and nuns would bow.”

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Michelle Boorstein January 31

God, what are you calling me to do here, prayed the priest. Come out, or stay in the closet ?

After 23 years in Chicago parishes, the question had pushed its way to the surface.

He weighed his options. He thought about his parishioners. Many, he knew, were accepting of gay people, even of same-sex marriage, but others — less so. He had grown up in a large Catholic family; he understood what people’s faith meant to them. He didn’t want to harm his flock, or the Catholic Church.

He wondered if he could be penalized in his job. And, in truth, he considered his status. He knew many Catholics had what he might call a romanticized view of the priesthood: Priests are supposed to be pure, almost above the world of sexuality, selflessly willing to give up creating a family of their own to serve God. This would mean falling from that pedestal.

Then, he weighed these factors against the impact his coming out could have on the lives of young gay people in treatment for addiction or who are suicidal, on the parents and grandparents who feel they must choose between their gay child and their church. For some, knowing their priest is gay — and at peace with it — could be healing, he felt.

He thought of his complex feelings. He had no ax to grind, and he wasn’t an advocate.

He set the rules at the outset: He did not want to be identified in this article. But at the end of the first conversation, he said: I’m leaning towards using my real name.

At a time when the phrase “coming out” is starting to sound almost quaint, the Catholic priesthood may be one of the last remaining closets — and it’s a crowded one. People who study gay clergy believe gay men make up a significant percentage of the 40,000 ordained priests in the United States, including some who believe they may even be the majority. Meanwhile, the number who are out is minuscule.

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LOUISIANA
KPLC

By Theresa Schmidt

Testimony begins today in the trial of a former priest accused of molesting altar boys.

Mark Anthony Broussard is accused of sexually assaulting boys when he was a priest in Calcasieu between 1986 and 1991. He faces five sex charges – two counts of aggravated rape, one count of aggravated oral sexual battery, one count of oral sexual battery and one count of molestation of a juvenile.

Jury selection lasted a week and was completed on Friday.

Broussard, who is free on $1.5 million bond, was initially indicted on 224 counts of sexual abuse, but the charges were reduced to five, which reflect the entirety of the accusations.

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CANADA
CTV

The Canadian Press
Published Monday, February 1, 2016

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — The federal government is attempting to settle a lawsuit from more than 1,200 Metis, Inuit and Innu plaintiffs seeking an apology and damages for abuse and cultural losses at residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The lawsuit was adjourned Monday morning as opposing lawyers meet Tuesday with a retired judge in an effort to settle the case.

If no agreement is reached, the federal lawyers will begin their defence arguments on Feb. 29. The suit alleges both sexual and physical abuse.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer said the settlement efforts reflect a dramatic shift in attitude following the change of government in Ottawa.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on remarks made by “Spotlight” stars on the occasion of the SAG Awards Saturday night:

“Spotlight,” which is about the Boston Globe’s coverage of the abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston, has given rise to a steady stream of wild statements about the Catholic Church. The latest irresponsible comment was made at the SAG Awards by star Mark Ruffalo. “Many of the archdioceses that have had molestations happening in them still haven’t released the names of the priests who are known to be child molesters and rapists.”

Between 1950 and 2002, 4 percent of Catholic priests had an allegation made against them; only half of the allegations were substantiated. Moreover, between 2005 and 2014, an average of 8.4 credible accusations were made against roughly 40,000 priests. Ergo, it is a monumental smear to tar the entire Catholic Church. That is what many pundits, and some of those associated with “Spotlight,” are doing.

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VATICAN CITY
Yahoo! News

AFP

Vatican City (AFP) – Pope Francis told gossip-loving priests and nuns to bite their tongues on Monday, and warned those breaking their vow of obedience to fall into line sharpish.

“If you get an urge to say something against a brother or a sister, to drop a gossip bomb, bite your tongue! Hard!” the pontiff said in an improvised speech to members of the clergy marking the end of the Year of Consecrated Life.

The Argentine warned against those abusing their religious vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, describing “anarchy” as the “daughter of the devil”.

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MICHIGAN
Lansing State Journal

– Greg Guggemos is a former longtime East Lansing resident and adjunct professor of law at Cooley and Vermont Law Schools. He is a standing member of SNAP.

I recently saw the movie “Spotlight,” along with my wife, Mary. It’s a suspenseful, accurate portrayal of how a team of dedicated Boston Globe reporters began exposing what eventually became more than 250 accused child molesting clerics in one archdiocese and the shrewd cover up of those crimes for years by top Catholic officials. “Spotlight” made a lasting impression on us for many reasons. First, it emphasized the absolute necessity for a free press. Second, it spoke to the courage of editors and their dedicated journalists to a commitment for investigative reporting. Third, it exposed the hypocrisy of the Catholic church leadership and its centuries-old policy of protecting pedophile priests and its complete disregard of the emotional trauma suffered by countless children who were and continue to be victims of this insidious policy.

Just last week an incident occurred in Western Michigan again demonstrating the need for a free press and investigative reporting. John Nienstedt, a recently resigned former Archbishop from Minnesota, was appointed as pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic parish in Battle Creek. After announcement of the appointment, representatives of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) issued two press releases denouncing the appointment. Following considerable public pressure after the announcement, Paul Bradley, Bishop for the Kalamazoo diocese, which includes Battle Creek, rescinded Nienstedt’s appointment and publicly apologized to his parishioners.

While Bradley’s recession appears laudatory, the real question is why would the hierarchy of the Catholic church allow Nienstedt’s reassignment to occur in the first place? Nienstedt has been credibly accused of committing several acts of sexual abuse in Minnesota. The Archdiocese of Minnesota currently faces criminal charges for refusing to report child sex crimes by pedophile priests which occurred during Nienstedt’s watch. Victims of this sexual abuse have filed affidavits in these criminal proceedings, detailing the suffering they sustained as a result of Nienstedt’s conduct as Archbishop. Was Bradley, the Bishop for the Kalamazoo diocese, not aware of the widely reported criminal proceedings in Minnesota and Nienstedt’s resignation?

I was sexually abused by a priest when I was 5 years old and living at St. Vincent’s orphanage in Lansing. The exposure by the Boston Globe and its courageous reporters of the scandal in Boston, together with the assistance of SNAP, gave Mary and me the courage in 2010 to publicly share the sexual abuse I suffered as a child, after I settled my sexual abuse claim with the Lansing diocese.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service

By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service
2.1.2016

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Although the number is not high, it is no longer “exceptional” to have priests turn down an appointment as bishop, said Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.

Speaking Feb. 1 about the annual course his office sponsors for new bishops, the cardinal was asked about rumors that more and more priests are saying they do not want to be a bishop and declining an appointment even when the pope, on the recommendation of Cardinal Ouellet’s office, has chosen them.

“Yes, that’s true. Nowadays you have people who do not accept the appointment,” he said, adding that he would not provide statistics on how often it happens, although he insisted the number was not huge.

Priests decline for a variety of reasons, Cardinal Ouellet said, pointing to the example of a priest who was chosen, but then informed the congregation that he had cancer and had not told others of his illness. “It was a sign of responsibility not to accept the appointment,” he said.

Others decline because of something in their past or because they think they cannot handle the responsibility, he said. In the latter case, he said, “normally we insist” because often people are not the best judges of their own abilities. But when a person makes “a decision in conscience,” the Vatican respects that.

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MARYLAND
Leon J. Podles

Note: Mr. Podles sent this letter in December but has yet to receive and answer. The YouTube link cited in the letter is no longer operational. Mr. Podles is author of Sacrilege and writes a blog called Leon J. Podles: Dialogue.

December 2015

Most Rev. William E. Lori, Archbishop of Baltimore
The Catholic Center
320 Cathedral St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

Dear Archbishop Lori,

While the Church has made progress in dealing with sexual abuse and other irregularities, I think that the situation of a recently-reinstated priest in the archdiocese, Dominic Cieri, needs scrutiny.

**********************************************************************************
For some reason he came up in conversation and I googled him to see what had happened to him. I discovered that had had been reinstated as a priest and was in the chaplaincy at St. Joseph’s hospital. He also has public web sites, and on his You Tube site (https://www.youtube.com/user/241Doow/feed)

he lists many sexually-explicit channels to which he subscribes, including this one:

BoyonBoyLoving. A selection of clips with boy on boy loving.

In his autobiographical blog he discusses his homosexuality, and among the You Tube channels he subscribes to are ones such as:

Cute Males Studio: In Between Men – Episode 5 – Muscles and Manbags by PIANETAGAY

MANTASTICMALES2011.This is a gay channel, featuring videos with homosexual or hot guy content. Slide vids, fan vids, gay themed music vids, short films and excerpts with a similar theme.

The reason he had left the archdiocese was financial irregularity. The Baltimore Sun (July 7, 2007) reported:

“The Rev. Domenic L. Cieri, who led St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Severn for nearly 15 years, received salary and Mass stipends above the scales approved by the archdiocese, according to an audit conducted in October. Archdiocese spokesman Sean Caine said Cieri also received a housing allowance to live in northern Baltimore County, although his parish has a rectory.
For the fiscal year that ended last June, Cieri earned nearly $48,000 a year, about 70 percent more than the $28,122 that the archdiocese says he was to earn as a pastor ordained for 25 years.
In addition, Cieri received $6,300 in Mass stipends. Priests have the choice of receiving Mass stipends for individual Masses or a lump sum of $2,000, an amount set by the archdiocese, Caine said.

“He was also reimbursed nearly $36,000 for rectory expenses, though Caine said the priest did not live in the rectory attached to the church but rather at a house in Baldwin, in northern Baltimore County. And he received more than $14,000 as a housing allowance, which Caine said is not normally given to priests assigned to churches with rectories.”

Cieri had been and is still living with the Rev. Larry Johnson in a $458,000 house in Baldwin, far across the metropolitan area from St Bernadette’s.

I question the prudence of assigning a priest to a situation in which he has access to vulnerable people, including boys and adolescent males, when he has publicly demonstrated his sexual interest in young males and has also demonstrated financial manipulation and a disregard for archdiocesan polices.

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UNITED STATES
Catholics4Change

FEBRUARY 1, 2016 BY SUSAN MATTHEWS

Click here to read: “Ohio Seminary student arrested, charged with trying to arrange sex with infants,” by Elizabeth Faugl, abc6onyourside.com, January 29, 2016

Editors note:

This unfathomable crime happens more often than sane people can comprehend. The perpetrators come from all walks of life, but we don’t expect them among our Seminary students or priests. What are the standards for acceptance to Seminaries? With a priest shortage can we expect more or less diligence in screening?

I fear there will be less. We try to keep a narrow focus on this blog. Our topics are within the context of current doctrine and clergy child sex abuse. But perhaps it’s impossible not to discuss the priest shortage in connection with the clergy child sex abuse cover up.

The shortage leaves rectories more empty and with less oversight. It leaves good priests with an enormous amount of responsibility. Elderly priests are coming out of retirement to fill the gaps. Just covering Masses is difficult. What about Last Rites, the parishioner struggling with a crisis or a newcomer with faith questions.

In these situations, does “any priest is better than no priest” mode kick in at the administration level?

The same clericalism that allows child sex abuse to go unchecked will be the same that destroys any opportunity to minister to Catholics when they most need it.

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CHILE/UNITED STATES
YouTube

Published on Jan 31, 2016

Boston SNAP activist and character in movie “Spotlight” offers words of support to the Catholic clergy abuse victims fighting for recognition in the South American country of Chile.

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