ABUSE TRACKER

AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury

By KATE McILWAIN June 25, 2014

A former Wollongong bishop felt so strongly that a priest accused of child molestation should not be allowed to practise he was willing to “take the matter all the way to the Pope” and resign if necessary, the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard on Wednesday.

Philip Wilson, now the Archbishop of Adelaide, also criticised the Congregation for the Clergy (CFC) – one of the Vatican’s most powerful bodies – for always taking the side of priests accused of abuse.

Archbishop Wilson was being questioned about events in 1997 on day two of the hearing into the Wollongong Catholic Diocese’s response to child sexual abuse complaints against then Father John Nestor.

At that time, Mr Nestor had successfully appealed a conviction of aggravated indecent assault against a 15-year-old altar boy.

However, due to other complaints – including that Mr Nestor had watched boys showering, made boys bathe naked, conducted bodily “soap inspections” and touched a boy “on the penis and the bum” – Archbishop Wilson was seeking to bar him from working in the ministry until further assessments had been done.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC – PM

MARK COLVIN: The Catholic bishop of Wollongong Peter Ingham has appeared before the child abuse royal commission and expressed his frustration with the Vatican at the spent years trying to stop a priest from working in the community, especially with children.

Bishop Ingham said despite Father John Nestor’s eventual acquittal on charges of indecent assault, his past behaviour represented an unacceptable risk and he should not be allowed to work in public ministry.

He also echoed the views of his predecessor who said he would have to resign if John Nestor was allowed to continue to work as a priest.

Emily Bourke has the story.

EMILY BOURKE: The royal commission is continuing to shine a light on internal processes of the Catholic Church, and in particular it’s forced the door open on how the Church investigates and establishes the facts around child sexual abuse allegations brought against priests or religious.

Today, a leading canon lawyer, Kevin Matthews, revealed some serious shortcomings.

Under questioning by Justice Peter McClellan and counsel assisting Angus Stewart, Dr Matthews admitted that cases against priests are frequently tossed out because they can’t be proved through the canon law process.

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IRELAND
Catholic News Service

By Michael Kelly
Catholic News Service

DUBLIN (CNS) — The Irish government is finalizing the parameters of a judicial inquiry into church-run state-funded mother and baby homes.

The inquiry comes amid increased disquiet about some of the reporting of the original story of St. Mary’s Home in Tuam, run by the Bon Secours congregation of nuns.

In May, local historian Catherine Corless revealed her research, which found that between 1925 and 1961, 976 infants died in the home for unmarried mothers and their children. She had found no evidence that they were buried in local cemeteries and instead believed that the children may have been buried in a common grave on the site.

However, several media outlets began reporting that the children had been “dumped” in a disused septic tank on the site. Within days, the international media was gripped by the story — much of which turned out to be factually inaccurate.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) The Financial Intelligence Unit (AIF) of the Holy See and Vatican City State signed a bilateral cooperation agreement with Argentina on Tuesday, in an effort to expand the international network “to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism”.

Read the official statement below:

L’Autorità Informazione Finanziaria (AIF), the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Holy See and Vatican City State, has formalized its bilateral cooperation with Argentina, signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) at the Vatican on Tuesday.

The MOU was signed in the Palazzo San Carlo by the Director of AIF, Rene Bruelhart, and the President of the Unidad de Información Financiera (UIF) of Argentina, José Sbattella.

“We’re very pleased to have signed this MOU with Argentina today,” Bruelhart said. “This is an important step to further expand the network to support global efforts to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism. We’re looking forward to fruitful cooperation with Argentina, which will be beneficial to both parties.”

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CHILE
La Tercera

Llegué tarde a la lectura de “El fin de la inocencia” del periodista y ex seminarista Juan Carlos Cruz, luego de haber abordado muy tempranamente las dos contundentes investigaciones periodísticas que existen sobre el siniestro caso del cura Karadima: “Los secretos del imperio Karadima”, del equipo de Ciper Chile, liderado por Mónica González, y “Karadima, el señor de los infiernos”, de María Olivia Monckeberg, que se publicaron el año pasado. (Leer reseñas: http://noticias.terra.cl/ximena-torres-cautivo/blog/tag/los-secretos-del-imperio-de-karadima/ y http://noticias.terra.cl/ximena-torres-cautivo/blog/2011/04/28/karadima-el-senor-de-los-infiernos-habla-su-autora/)

Por estos días, la gente que lee y compra libros le ha dado la preferencia al testimonio en primera persona de Juan Carlos Cruz, donde relata de una manera transparente y casi ingenua la tragedia de su vida: el abuso sexual y sicológico que padeció en la otrora tan respetable Parroquia El Bosque, donde tenía su imperio Fernando Karadima.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

Thomas C. Fox | Jun. 25, 2014 NCR Today

SAINT LOUIS, MO — Since its inaugural gathering in June 2012, a meeting that drew some 240 priests to St. Leo University northeast of Tampa, Fla, the Association of U.S. Priests, which claims more than 1.000 members, has said it wants to give priests a voice.

Using a numbering system to indicate degrees of support, the association passed eight resolutions dealing with priest support of the new Roman Missal translation, for the late Cardinal Bernardin’s Common Ground initiative, immigration support, married clergy, workers’ pensions, input into the selection of bishops, broadening the association’s membership base and fostering greater dialogue with the bishops.

This is how they fared: With 3 being the highest scored and representing “very strong favor” and -3 being the lowest and representing “very strong disfavor,”

* a resolution to form a task force to keep track up difficulties priests are experiencing with the new translations received a 2.8.
* a resolution calling for more transparency and involvement in the selection of bishops also received a 2.8.
* a resolution calling for the establishment of an immigration working group in support of comprehensive immigration reform received a 2.72
* a resolution calling upon the U.S. bishops to support a married priesthood received a 2.5 score
* a resolution calling for support for worker’s pensions received a 2.1
* and a resolution calling for support of inter-church dialogued based on Cardinal Bernardin’s “Common Ground” initiative received 2.0.

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MEXICO
La Tarde

* La Procuraduría señaló que en caso de ser necesario recurrirán a la Interpol para la ubicación y detención del cura Eduardo Córdova

La Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado de San Luis Potosí (PGJE) dio a conocer que se obtuvo por parte de un juez, la orden de aprehensión contra el sacerdote Eduardo Córdova Bautista, acusado de pederastia.

La Procuraduría señaló que en caso de ser necesario recurrirán a la Interpol para la ubicación y detención de Eduardo Córdova, acusado de abuso sexual de menores cuando se desempañaba como sacerdote de la Arquidiócesis de San Luis Potosí.

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MEXICO
Entorno Inteligente

Vanguardia / Un Juzgado Penal otorgó a la Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado (PGJE) una orden de aprehensión en contra del sacerdote Eduardo Córdova Bautista, acusado de los delitos de abuso sexual calificado, corrupción de menores y privación ilegal de la libertad en agravio de 19 menores.

El procurador estatal, Miguel Ángel García Covarrubias, informó que solicitará el apoyo a todas las Procuraduría de Justicia del país para la localización y captura del religioso.

Dijo que de ser necesario recurrirá a la Interpol mediante la emisión de la “ficha roja”, para su búsqueda internacional.

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MEXICO
Quincy Herald-Whig

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexican authorities say a judge has ordered the arrest of a now-suspended priest accused of sexually abusing minors in the northern state of San Luis Potosi.

The state attorney general’s office said Wednesday that Eduardo Cordova is considered a fugitive.

Earlier this month, 19 people filed a criminal complaint alleging that they were sexually abused by Cordova and that his archdiocese covered up the allegations for years.

The complaint was filed in San Luis Potosi, where Cordova had recently served as the archdiocese’s legal representative.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) In a statement released on Wednesday, the Director of the Holy See Press Office spoke about the situation of two religious orders, the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and the Legionaries of Christ, based on information received from the Secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

The statement said that Father Fidenzio Volpi, who has been appointed as Commissioner to supervise the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, along with all the seminarians of the Order, were received by Pope Francis in an audience at Casa Santa Marta on June 10. The audience was described as “a gesture that demonstrates the interest with which Pope Francis is following the situation of the Franciscans of the Immaculate, and his closeness to the work that the Commissioner is undertaking in the name of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.” The statement said the Holy Father was being kept informed of all that was being taken in regard to the situation. Currently, a residence is being sought in Rome where the student brothers of the Institute who are attending Pontifical Universities in Rome can live in order to continue their studies.

Wednesday’s statement also addressed the situation of the Legionaries of Christ. Following the celebration of a General Chapter, the Legionaries have returned to the competence of the Congregation for Consecrated life. The Legion had been under an Apostolic Delegate, whose work concluded with the General Chapter. As a “gesture of fraternal closeness,” the statement said, the Prefect and the Secretary of the Congregation will visit the headquarters of the Legionaries on 3 July to discuss personally the corrections that should be made to the Constitutions presented to Dicastery, and to announce the name of the Pontifical Assistant.

The statement noted that the corrections to the Constitutions are very few.

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MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

By Richard Chin
rchin@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 06/25/2014

A former top official in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis will have to undergo further questioning in a sexual abuse lawsuit against the church, according to a decision Wednesday by a Ramsey County judge.

The Rev. Kevin McDonough, former vicar general for the archdiocese, had been required to give depositions in a lawsuit about the church’s handling of child-abusing priests.

District Judge John Van de North ruled in a hearing on the lawsuit of a plaintiff known at Doe 1. Doe 1 is suing the archdiocese, alleging former priest Thomas Adamson molested him in 1976 or 1977 when Adamson served at St. Thomas Aquinas in St. Paul Park.

Van de North also said Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt won’t be questioned again by attorneys suing the church.

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MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Statement by Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314 503 0003, SNAPdorris@gmail.com)

We’re glad a high ranking Twin Cities Catholic official will be deposed again and hope his archbishop will also insist that he be questioned by police too.

[Star Tribune]

Fr. Kevin McDonough very likely knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover ups than any church employee in Minnesota. For years he was the “go to guy” in pedophile priest cases in the Twin Cities area. We believe that dozens of kids were assaulted because Fr. McDonough misled parishioners and protected predators. And we believe that Fr. McDonough should be defrocked.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Catholic Review

June 24, 2014

By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON – Parishioners who have occupied a closed Massachusetts Catholic church for nearly a decade said they plan one final petition to Pope Francis to prevent the building from being sold by the Boston Archdiocese.

Jon Rogers, a member of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish in Scituate, said petitioning the pope was a last resort measure. Despite the step, he said he was not sure it would succeed.

“We promised 10 years ago when we started this we would exhaust every avenue of appeal,” Rogers told Catholic News Service June 24.

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini parishioners have kept an around-the-clock presence in the church since October 2004 in the hope that various appeals based on canon law would be successful. The parish was one of 70 that closed beginning in 2004 in a downsizing plan carried out under Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley.

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UNITED STATES
Mennonite Life

Peter Dula
ISSUE 2014, VOL. 68

In 1970, Geoffrey Hartman, a young professor of literature, brought his friend Paul de Man to join him in the English department at Yale. In the ensuing years, the two of them became close colleagues in the American reception of Jacques Derrida for whom, in 1975, they arranged a recurring visiting appointment. The three became close friends and together changed the way American professors and students thought about literature. But they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. At the age of nine, Hartman had been in Kindertransport, the program that evacuated Jewish children from Germany to England in 1939. He didn’t see his mother again for 6 years. Derrida had to leave his school in Algiers when the quota for Jewish students was reduced and Algerian Jews lost their citizenship. De Man, it turns out, was a crassly opportunistic Nazi collaborator who wrote a series of anti-Semitic articles in the Belgian press in the ‘40s1. What does it mean that these three, with such different histories, could agree on so much about literature and philosophy?

Reading the reviews of Evelyn Barish’s new book on de Man2, I couldn’t help but think of John Howard Yoder. As de Man’s students and colleagues have struggled to come to grips with his Nazi past, so Mennonite theologians and others are now, finally, trying to learn how to think about Yoder’s violence against women. We all owe Barb Graber and Ruth Krall a great deal for refusing to let us (by which I mean myself and other Mennonite theologians who write about and teach Yoder) continue to ignore the facts of Yoder’s violence. Graber asked us to do something specific: Welcome, encourage and make efforts to include analysis of the astoundingly ironic disconnect between Yoder’s orthodoxy and his severe lack of orthopraxy.3 In what follows, thanks to Mennonite Life, I take up that invitation. I begin with de Man’s case not to imply that such a task is impossible, but to acknowledge how complex it can be. All ideas are products of a social location. But, as the de Man story shows, how they are so, is an incredibly complex question. There is no straight line of determination between life and work; there are countless crooked and tangled threads. In what follows I try to identify and follow one thread in Yoder.

While I am a theologian, deeply indebted to the work of Yoder, my teaching responsibilities tend to be for EMU’s Religious Studies curriculum. So aside from an essay in our introductory Christian ethics course and an essay in an anthropology of religion course, I have only taught Yoder at length in one class, a topics seminar on political theology in the Fall of 2011. That seminar spent one class period (out of four on Yoder) talking about Yoder’s sexual violence and if and how we should relate that to his work.

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UNITED STATES
Menno Snapshots

Published: June 19th, 2014, Posted by: Annette Brill Bergstresser

The Discernment Group, convened by Mennonite Church USA to address issues related to sexual abuse, has been working hard on multiple fronts.

The group met on June 3 in Elkhart, Ind. Carolyn Holderread Heggen, who serves as an advisor to the group, was able to join us for the entire meeting. We also conferred with Rachel Waltner Goossen, the historian who is researching Mennonite institutional responses to reports of John Howard Yoder’s sexual violations in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Here are several emerging initiatives the group has been tending to:

1. Documenting the scope of Yoder’s abuse and the church’s response to it. An issue of Mennonite Quarterly Review focusing on sexual abuse in Mennonite contexts is planned for early 2015. It will include an article by Goossen on Mennonite church institutional responses to Yoder’s sexual abuse of women. In the meantime, we want to report several findings as we have revisited the legacy of Yoder’s sexual violations. We are discovering from previously unexamined institutional and personal files, which include memos by Yoder himself, additional evidence of sexual violation perpetrated by Yoder on many women, including students, missionaries, church workers and others. We are also learning how long it took church leaders to intervene effectively. There are documented reports of sexual violation by Yoder, including fondling and sexual intercourse. In some instances, women who engaged in sexual encounters were persuaded, at least initially, by Yoder that such behavior was permissible between Christian “brothers” and “sisters.” Many others resisted his unwanted advances, and were perplexed and distressed by his pursuit.

While a four-year church accountability process for Yoder began in 1992, doubt lingers about its outcome since very little about this process was communicated to the general public. In 1996, when the process concluded, recommendations were made for “the continuing use of an accountability plan” and that “the church use his [Yoder’s] gifts of writing and teaching.” Additionally, very little has been communicated about the prolonged and devastating impact that Yoder’s sexual abuse has had on many women. There is much for the church to lament about the harm inflicted on these individuals, as well as the grief experienced by family members of all involved, and by colleagues and administrators who tried to call Yoder to account.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on the second retraction by the Associated Press (AP) over Ireland’s “mass grave” story:

AP issued its first retraction on June 20 regarding its stories of June 3 and June 8 on Ireland’s “mass grave” story. On June 23, AP reporter Shawn Pogatchnik issued a second, more complete, retraction; his article was titled, “Media Exaggerated Horror Tale at Irish Orphanage.” Here is an excerpt of what he said:

“The reports of unmarked graves shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the Irish public, who for decades have known that some of the 10 defunct ‘mother and baby homes,’ which chiefly housed the children of unwed mothers, held grave sites with forgotten dead. The religious orders’ use of unmarked graves reflected the crippling poverty of the time, the infancy of most of the victims, and the lack of plots in cemeteries corresponding to the children’s fractured families.”

“Contrary to the allegation of widespread starvation highlighted in some reports, only 18 children were recorded as suffering from severe malnutrition. While publicly available records are incomplete, sporadic inspection reports indicate that the orphanage’s population exceeded 250 throughout the worst years of child mortality, when overcrowding would have encouraged the spread of infection.”

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UNITES STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Robert McClory | Jun. 24, 2014 NCR Today

The strong public scolding Cardinal Gerhard Müller delivered in April to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious really disturbed many Catholics. It was so obviously out of sync with Pope Francis’ call for dialogue, discernment and especially respect when discussing matters of faith.

Yet, Müller’s blunt, confrontational accusations stirred little immediate reaction. It was as if people were stunned into silence by the contrast between the pope’s approach and that of the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Some wondered if the pope and Müller might be playing a good-cop-bad-cop routine for reasons that were not clear. The LCWR leadership refused to respond to Müller’s specifics and said they somehow had a fruitful dialogue with the cardinal and affirmed their determination to stay at the table despite the cardinal’s opening rant. And several coalitions of reform groups urged the pope to apologize for an outburst so contrary to his own approach.

For more than a month then, there was mostly silence and a turn to other topics. I was not aware of any bishops or priests speaking out until a brisk retort to Müller was issued by the little known Association of U.S. Catholic Priests (AUSCP) at their meeting in Seattle on June 2. The association, formed three years ago, had been docile and relatively invisible until now. In a letter addressed to Francis, however, they expressed “sadness and dismay” at Müller’s “abuse of the process” with the sisters. Here are a few samples from their candid statement.

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MINNESOTA
Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona

[summary page]

[with press packet]

Abuse Summary Release
Monday, June 23 at 11:00 a.m.
Cathedral of Sacred Heart, St. Thomas Room
360 Main St, Winona, MN (SE parking lot entrance)

WINONA, MN – June 23, 2014 – In an unprecedented effort for transparency and healing, today the Diocese of Winona voluntarily released an abuse summary of details and facts surrounding 13 priests who have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse while serving in the Diocese of Winona decades ago. Nine of the thirteen priests on the list are deceased, two have been laicized, and two are pending laicization. No priests of the Diocese of Winona who have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse are still in active ministry. The Diocese concern is for the rights of everyone involved and the abuse summary complies with legal restrictions about privacy of medical and mental health information and protects the victims and the innocent. There is full disclosure of the identity of abusers.

“We are committed first and foremost for the compassionate healing for the victims and their families. We remain steadfast to finding and telling the truth and are vigilantly committed to ensuring these unspeakable crimes against children never happen again,” said Most Reverend John M. Quinn, Bishop of the Diocese of Winona.

Nearly all of the sexual abuse committed in the information made public today happened in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Many of the priests who had sexually abused children were sent for treatment and diagnosis when the accusations of abuse were made known to the Diocese. In many of the cases, priests were assessed, diagnosed and treated by medical professionals and were recommended they could return to active ministry.

“Today, we know much more about the diagnosis and treatment of pedophilia than we did twenty years ago. The compulsion to abuse is present in 4 percent of the general male population, about the same percentage you see in the priest population,” said Nelle Moriarty, Chair of the Diocesan Review Board and member to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) National Review Board. “The USCCB’s Charter for the Protection of Youth and Young Persons recognizes that second chances cannot be given when the safety of our children and young persons are at risk,” said Moriarty.

This knowledge and awareness has empowered the Church to take extensive measures to ensure that our children are safer than ever before. The Diocese of Winona is in full compliance with the Charter, adopted by the U.S. Bishops in 2002 and requires that no priest with even one substantiated allegation of sexual abuse of a minor can serve in public ministry. The Diocese of Winona has a zero tolerance policy for child sexual abuse and has adopted a policy that goes above and beyond the legislature’s mandatory reporting requirement, by reporting all accusations of child sexual abuse to law enforcement, not just those within three years of the report, as required by statute.

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MINNESOTA
Winona Post

By Chris Rogers

For the first time ever — as best as church officials could tell — an American diocese voluntarily released the details of reports of child sexual abuse by its priests and a Winona bishop publicly stated that he believes that the allegations are true.

Following a court order, the Diocese of Winona (DOW) released the names of 14 priests “credibly accused” of child sexual abuse last December. On Monday, the diocese released additional information about reports of abuse the diocese received over decades, including, in many cases, when the reports were made and what was done.

“We have learned that we need to be transparent and honest in order for people to understand that what we’re doing [now] is different and children are being protected,” said Bishop John Quinn, explaining the decision to release the summaries. DOW Director of Communications Joel Hennessy and public relations consultant Laurie Archbold noted the criticism of the diocese in recent news reports, and described the release as an opportunity for the diocese to be honest about the past and demonstrate how it has changed.

Most of the reported abuses took place during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Nine of the alleged abusers are deceased, two have already been laicized, and another two are facing laicization. In most of the cases, reports of abuse were apparently not relayed to law enforcement officials. The Minnesota mandatory reporting law, which requires people who work with children to convey reports of child abuse to law enforcement agencies, was enacted in 1975.

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ITALY
Washington Post

Italian priest charged with soliciting sexual favors from desperate refugees

BY JOSEPHINE MCKENNA | RELIGION NEWS SERVICE June 25

ROME — The Catholic Church in Italy is facing an embarrassing scandal after the arrest of a priest accused of demanding sexual favors from immigrants seeking political asylum in Sicily.

The Rev. Sergio Librizzi, who was also the director of the Catholic charity Caritas in the Sicilian city of Trapani, was arrested at his parish on Tuesday (June 24) as he was preparing for Mass.

Prosecutors charge that Librizzi sought sexual favors from newly arrived migrants fleeing the Middle East and Africa in exchange for help with residency visas, as well as from the poor who sought help from the charity.

The priest’s arrest is particularly embarrassing for the church given Pope Francis’ strong stand in support of the immigrants flooding the area. Soon after his election last year, Francis’ first pastoral visit outside Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, near Sicily, where he called for greater solidarity and an end to the “global indifference” over refugees.

There has been a surge in refugees fleeing conflict and poverty in Syria, Iraq and other countries. Last month, the Italian government said the number of refugees and other migrants reaching its shores had risen to more than 39,000 in the first half of 2014.

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MINNESOTA
Daily Reporter

By AMY FORLITI Associated Press

ST. PAUL, Minnesota — Attorneys for victims of alleged sexual abuse by clergy are asking the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to turn over electronic files about accused priests so they can verify who had information about these priests, and when they had it.

In a hearing Wednesday, Ramsey County Judge John Van de North asked both sides to submit more information before he decides whether the archdiocese has to turn over emails, texts and other computer data.

The documents are being sought in a lawsuit that alleges church officials created a public nuisance by keeping the names of accused priests secret.

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MINNESOTA
KAAL

Attorneys for victims of alleged sexual abuse by clergy are asking the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis to turn over electronic files about accused priests so they can verify who had information about these priests, and when they had it.

In a hearing Wednesday, Ramsey County Judge John Van de North asked both sides to submit more information before he decides whether the archdiocese has to turn over the emails, texts and other computer data.

The documents are being sought in a lawsuit that alleges church officials created a public nuisance by keeping the names of accused priests secret.

The archdiocese says it has already provided the information, but the plaintiffs say it’s not in a format that allows them to see when the documents were created or modified.

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

Article by: JEAN HOPFENSPERGER , Star Tribune Updated: June 25, 2014

Judge rules that the Rev. Kevin McDonough must testify again, but not Archbishop John Nienstedt.

A Ramsey County District judge Wednesday ordered that the former vicar general of the Twin Cities Archdiocese, the Rev. Kevin McDonough, submit to another round of questioning on the church’s handling of clergy sex abuse.

However, Judge John Van de North rejected a move to require Archbishop John Nienstedt to return for further questioning.

The order came during a hearing in which attorneys for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis asked the judge to halt further demands for information from attorney Jeff Anderson. Anderson’s St. Paul firm represents a man whose lawsuit prompted the first round of depositions this spring.

Tom Weiser, attorney for the archdiocese, said the church welcomes the opportunity for McDonough to return to testify, “while it wasn’t our first choice.”

Anderson said the ruling will allow him to continue to unearth information on how the archdiocese has handled abusive priests.

“We’re comforted to know that more information that needs to be revealed is going to be,” he said.

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

For immediate release: Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Statement by Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 503 0003, SNAPdorris@gmail.com )

It’s sad to see Catholic officials exploiting and misrepresenting the First Amendment. It protects belief, not actions.

[Star Tribune]

Minnesota church officials say they should get to continue keeping secrets about clergy sex crimes and cover ups because the First Amendment protects them. But we find it very hard to imagine that the Founding Fathers envisioned that provision would be used to shield powerful officials who repeatedly put kids in harms’ way.

This isn’t complicated. People can think anything they want. They can’t, however, do anything they want. That’s simple common sense. It’s the basis of civilized society.

We hope the judge will reject Minnesota Catholic officials’ argument that their callous actions and incriminating records about helping predators and endangering kids should be kept hidden.

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OREGON
Catholic Sentinel

The Archdiocese of Portland is being sued for $8.1 million by a man who claims to have been sexually abused by a deceased Portland priest.

The man claims that between 1969 and 1972 – when he was between the ages of six and nine – Archdiocese of Portland priest Father Maurice Grammond abused him between 10 and 20 times.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Irish Post

By Niall O Sullivan on June 25, 2014

OUTRAGED crowds are due to gather outside London’s Irish Embassy next week at a vigil for hundreds of babies who died in Ireland’s homes for unmarried mothers.

Organisers said they are expecting a large turnout as the city’s 180,000-strong Irish population gets its first chance to react to the discovery of 800 dead babies at a home in Tuam, Co. Galway.

“Our sense is that people here are very upset about the allegations that have emerged surrounding infant mortality rates in different homes,” said London-based Avril Egan, whose mother was in one of the institutions.

She added that people were particularly “disturbed” by allegations from former residents that nuns refused to give women painkillers during childbirth because they were “sinners”.

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WASHINGTON
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 566 9790, SNAPclohessy@aol.com )

Thirty brave child sex victims have settled their abuse and cover up suits against Seattle Catholic officials. We applaud these courageous and determined individuals and suspect that there are dozens more victims in the Seattle area – from these two parochial schools and other schools – who remain trapped in silence, shame and self-blame.

We hope this settlement will encourage them to step forward, expose wrongdoers, protect kids and start healing.

It’s tough for any abuse victim to speak up. But it’s especially tough when the perpetrator is a powerful religious figure. And it’s especially tough to report abuse in Catholic schools. The classes tend to be closely knit, so many victims fear that if they speak up, others will find out who they are and what happened to them. And many who graduate from Catholic high schools carry a mass of confusing feelings. On one hand, they are convinced they got a good education and they’re grateful for it. On the other hand, they know they should never have been assaulted. But deep loyalty to their alma mater is one added factor that keeps many Catholic school victims quiet.

We are grateful these 30 individuals have worked so hard and long to hold complicit church officials accountable for their reckless actions. It’s a shame that Catholic officials drag these cases out for years, but we appreciate the persistence of these victims who have suffered so much for so long.

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WASHINGTON
MSN

By Eric M. Johnson of Reuters

SEATTLE (Reuters) – The Archdiocese of Seattle has agreed to pay about $12.125 million to 30 men who alleged they were sexually abused as children and teens at two Seattle-area schools from the 1950s until 1984, their attorney said.

The men alleged in lawsuits filed in King County Superior Court that the Catholic district failed to shield them from known abusers at Seattle’s O’Dea High School and at Briscoe Memorial School, in nearby Kent, plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Pfau said in an interview.

The schools were operated jointly by the Christian Brothers of Ireland religious order and the Archdiocese of Seattle, which owned both schools, he said. The settlement agreement, which had been negotiated over the past year, was announced on Tuesday.

The agreement comes weeks after Pope Francis said the Roman Catholic Church had to take a stronger stand on a sexual abuse crisis that has disgraced it for more than two decades.

Media in the U.S began reporting in the early 2000s how cases of abuse were systematically covered up and abusive priests were shuttled from parish to parish instead of being defrocked and handed over to civil authorities.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic Culture

Vatican comments on recent reports on Franciscans of the Immaculate, Legion of Christ

Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Holy See Press Office, has issued a statement in response to questions related to recent media reports on the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate and the Legionaries of Christ.

Andrea Tornielli has reported that Pope Francis met on June 10 with members of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. Father Lombardi confirmed that Pope Francis met on that day with Father Fidenzio Volpi, the community’s commissioner, and all of the community’s seminarians, and stated that the community is searching for a house in Rome so that the seminarians could study at a pontifical university.

In response to reports on the Legionaries of Christ, Father Lombardi said that with the drafting of a new constitution for the community, the work of the pontifical delegate (Cardinal Velasio de Paolis) has concluded and the Legionaries again fall under the purview of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

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MINNESOTA
Austin Daily Herald

By Trey Mewes and Jenae Peterson

Area Catholics and Pacelli Catholic Schools families are left with more questions than answers after the Diocese of Winona revealed Monday that a former priest may have sexually abused a teenager during his time in Austin. Yet local leaders say the news only shows the need for more transparency when it comes to sexual abuse in schools.

“What happened today in Austin has happened in the Twin Cities repeatedly, and every time it is with more feelings of disappointment, a sense of betrayal, a lack of trust,” said Pacelli President Jim Hamburge. “All of those things come to mind because they shouldn’t have happened in the first place and once it happened, [the accused] never should have been in a position to harm anyone else.”

The diocese released more details about 14 priests accused of sexually abusing children earlier this week. The list of priests includes Jack Krough, who served in Austin from 1976 to 1980 and from 1996 to 1998.

Krough taught at Pacelli High School during his tenure in the 1970s. In 1993, he admitted a photo of a nude 16-year-old male found in his home was taken by him in 1978. Krough also admitted he sexually abused a minor between 1979 and 1981 when he was confronted with accusations in 1997, during his second stint in Austin.

He was sent to St. Luke’s Institute after both admissions for treatment and assessment, and went back into ministry each time. He resigned from the ministry in 2002, after he was confronted in another incident involving inappropriate touching.

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MINNESOTA
Fox 9

posted by Mike Durkin

ST. PAUL, Minn. (KMSP) –
Attorneys for the victims of alleged sexual abuse by Minnesota priests are asking a judge to order the release of church emails and text messages related to abuse allegations.

St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson said they need to verify which individuals, at the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona, knew about allegations of abuse and when they knew it.

The electronic records are being sought in a lawsuit that alleges church officials created “private and public nuisances by failing to disclose information about certain priests accused of sexually abusing minors.”

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

Article by: JEAN HOPFENSPERGER , Star Tribune Updated: June 25, 2014

Plaintiff’s attorneys want to question archbishop and get more documents. Church lawyers say some records are protected by First Amendment.

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis went to court Wednesday to try to halt further demands for information about how the church handled priest sex abusers.

Attorneys for an alleged victim of clergy abuse asked a Ramsey District Court judge to approve a second round of depositions from Archbishop John Nienstedt and former vicar general Kevin McDonough.

They’ve also asked that records from the archdiocese’ priest personnel board be included in the documents the archdiocese has been required to submit to them. The archdiocese has said the records are protected by the First Amendment.

The hearing before Ramsey District Court Judge John Van de North is part of a lawsuit filed last year on behalf of a man who claimed he had been abused decades earlier by the Rev. Thomas Adamson, who later left the priesthood.

It contends that church officials here and in the Winona Diocese put children and others at risk by failing to disclose information about priests who had been accused of abuse.

The lawsuit has led to unprecedented disclosure of church filesand the release of names of more than 100 priests accused of child sex abuse in every diocese of the state except New Ulm.

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MICHIGAN
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314 566 9790, SNAPclohessy@aol.com)

A Michigan pastor deceived his flock, claiming that his associate pastor went on leave for “personal reasons” when in fact the associate faces child abuse charges. It is extremely disingenuous and dangerous for church officials to be so misleading in child abuse cases.

[Grand Haven Tribune]

Last Sunday, Rev. Tom Cook of First Presbyterian Church in Grand Haven gave a vague reason to his members for associate pastor Scott Robertson leave.

Church officials have an obligation to tell the truth to their community. Alerting parents about potential predators allows them to properly protect their children. It also encourages victims who are suffering in silence and self-blame to speak up. Rev. Cook should be ashamed of himself and should be disciplined.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

JUNE 26, 2014

Dan Box
Crime Reporter
Sydney

THE Vatican actively prevented bishops taking action against sexually abusive priests as recently as 2000, the royal commission has heard, with the Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide saying that he considered resigning his position over one such case.

Giving evidence yesterday to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Archbishop Philip Wilson said the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Clergy “always came down on the side of the priests” accused of child-sex abuse.

“There was a phenomenon going on where bishops, particularly in the US, were trying to deal with these cases involving abuse and the Congregation for the Clergy consistently made things difficult for them in trying to do that,” Archbishop Wilson said.

“The Congregation for the Clergy always came down on the side of the priests and the instructions they gave to the bishops were (that) what they had done had to be put aside and the priest allowed back into ministry.”

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MICHIGAN
Grand Haven Tribune

BECKY VARGO
GRAND HAVEN
JUN 25, 2014

The Rev. Tom Cook of First Presbyterian Church announced to his congregation on Sunday that Scott Robertson, the Grand Haven church’s associate pastor of Family Life, was on leave dealing with a personal situation.

Members of the congregation said Cook didn’t share any more information, and Cook is on vacation this week and not available to answer questions from the Tribune. Office staff declined to comment.

Robertson, 32, could be arraigned today on a fourth-degree child abuse charge, said Capt. Mark Bennett of the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department. The Grand Haven man is being charged with causing injury to his then 3-month-old son.

The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of up to one year in jail.

Bennett said the county prosecutor’s office likely authorized the lesser charge because the child is almost fully recovered. In addition, the father has no criminal history and is no longer living at home.

Robertson pleaded no contest in May to a Michigan Department of Human Services petition seeking to take the child out of his care.

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OREGON
KOIN

For immediate release: Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314 566 9790, SNAPclohessy@aol.com)

Another clergy sex abuse and cover up lawsuit has been filed against the Portland Catholic archdiocese stemming from crimes by a notorious serial predator, Fr. Maurice Grammond.

[KOIN]

We applaud this brave man for exposing incredibly irresponsible actions by several top Catholic officials who repeatedly refused to tell police, parents or parishioners about a clearly dangerous child molesting cleric.

It’s very tough for child sex abuse victims to disclose their suffering. It’s even harder for them to seek justice and expose wrongdoing in court. But it’s crucial if kids are to be safer and crimes are to be prevented.

We hope that families will learn of this lawsuit and discuss ‘safe touch’ with their kids. We hope that employers will learn of it and work harder to screen potential employees and respond quicker and better when abuse reports are made or abuse suspicions are raised.

Most of all, we hope that this courageous man’s lawsuit will prod others who have been betrayed by child molesting clerics and irresponsible church supervisors to step forward, get help, expose wrongdoers, deter wrongdoing, protect kids and start healing.

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NEW MEXICO
Gallup Independent

Published in the Gallup Independent, Gallup, NM, June 23, 2014

By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Independent correspondent
religion@gallupindependent.com

ALBUQUERQUE – In less than six month’s time, the Diocese of Gallup has racked up more than $600,000 in legal and accounting fees and expenses since it filed its Chapter 11 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

Those “first interim” professional fees, totaling nearly $612,000, were detailed in several hundred pages of court documents.

Quick payment, however, may not be forthcoming.

According to the court file, the Gallup Diocese is not currently able to pay its own bankruptcy attorneys and accountants. Like clergy sex abuse survivors who have to submit their claims to the court by the Aug. 11 deadline, the diocesan attorneys and accountants may have to wait for payment until the diocese sells off property, taps into insurance policies and possibly draws from the financial assets of other Catholic dioceses and religious orders who allowed their sexually abusive clergy to serve in the Diocese of Gallup.

The diocese filed its Chapter 11 petition on Nov. 12, 2013, in response to what Bishop James S. Wall said were mounting clergy sex abuse legal claims and lawsuits.

The diocese had been named as a defendant in 13 such lawsuits in Arizona’s Coconino County Superior Court, and the first case was slated for a jury trial in February of this year. By filing for bankruptcy, Wall halted all those civil cases, spared his church officials from court depositions and testimony, and kept the Gallup Diocese’s child sex abuse history from a jury.

First interim fees

The Diocese of Gallup’s bankruptcy case, however, is proving to be costly in other ways. The diocese’s three currently active law firms and one accounting firm recently submitted their first interim fees and expenses to the court for a total cost of $611,916.63.

*Quarles & Brady of Tucson, the diocese’s lead law firm in the bankruptcy, submitted an application for payment for the period of Nov. 12, 2013 to March 31, 2014. Quarles & Brady requested payment of $450,601.03, which included $426,550 for fees and $24,051.03 for expenses.

*The Albuquerque law firm of Walker & Associates is providing a supporting legal role in the bankruptcy case. Attorney Thomas D. Walker submitted an application for payment of $18,062.40, which includes legal fees, expenses and gross receipts taxes. Walker’s billing period extends through April 30, 2014.

*The Albuquerque law firm of Stelzner, Winter, Warburton, Flores, Sanchez & Dawes, which is listed as special counsel for the diocese, submitted an application for $4,820.69 for legal fees, expenses and gross receipts taxes for a billing period through March 31, 2014. According to the law firm, most of its work for the diocese was related to “routine employment law-related services” rather than to the Chapter 11 reorganization. Prior to the bankruptcy, attorney Robert P. Warburton of the Stelzner firm represented the Diocese of Gallup in many of its clergy abuse lawsuits and legal negotiations.

*Keegan, Linscott & Kenon, an accounting and financial consulting firm from Tucson, submitted its application for payment for $138,432.51, which includes professional fees and expenses. The firm’s interim billing period goes through March 31, 2013.

The Diocese of Gallup is also responsible for paying the legal fees and expenses of the legal counsel for the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, which advocates for the interests of clergy sex abuse claimants in the case.

Tasks and challenges

According to statements made by Quarles & Brady, the Stelzner law firm, and the Keegan accounting firm, the three companies did not charge the Gallup Diocese their full professional rates. All claimed they offered the diocese various financial discounts, and Quarles & Brady stated the firm had written off over $60,000 of its time.

Last week, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David T. Thuma issued orders approving the interim compensation fees and expenses submitted by those three firms. Thuma authorized “such compensation and expenses as and when sufficient funds become available to do so.”

Thuma has yet to rule on Walker & Associates’ application for payment.

In the Quarles & Brady application, the law firm included an itemized list of legal fees by category that is nearly 120 pages in length. Some of the more critical legal tasks include dealing with bank accounts improperly opened by parishes and missions using the diocese’s tax identification number, determining what real estate property the diocese owns because the diocese did not maintain such a list, trying to ascertain market values of property, researching information about insurance coverage, sorting out oil and gas leases, negotiating with various creditors such as utility companies and banks, and reviewing diocesan files to identify potential claims against the diocese.

According to the Keegan accounting firm, it faced a number of challenges because the diocese’s chief financial officer, Deacon James Hoy, resigned two months before Wall made his Chapter 11 announcement.

“The Debtors are currently without a Chief Financial Officer …, and did not have one for several months pre-petition,” the firm stated in its application for payment. “The Debtors also did not have accounting software or systems that were appropriate for their operations.”

The accounting firm stated it “had to perform both high-level analysis and ground-level operational and training functions” as it worked with Hoy’s staff.

Identifying assets

So how will the Diocese of Gallup eventually pay the ongoing fees for all these attorneys and accountants and settlement money to clergy sex abuse claimants?

According to court documents, attorneys for the diocese and the Unsecured Creditors Committee have been working to identify potential diocesan financial assets.

The Gallup Diocese owns considerable property in Arizona and New Mexico, some of which will be sold. Quarles & Brady stated it has been identifying “property that is not critical to the continued mission and ministry” of the diocese that could be sold to fund a plan of reorganization.

Thuma also approved the diocese’s hiring of the Insurance Archaeology Group, a New York company that specializes in the forensic review of insurance assets.

In his diocese’s application to the court to hire the company, the Gallup bishop stated Insurance Archaeology Group “has a team with the required expertise, experience, and resources to locate and recover documentation of missing liability coverage and other historic insurance issues.”

According to Wall, the company “will be able to review the earliest available insurance records, research top priority internal records, investigate related internal record sources, and identify potential outside sources.”

Some of those potential outside sources most probably include other Catholic dioceses and religious orders that allowed their sexually abusive clergy to serve in the Gallup Diocese.

Currently, the Unsecured Creditors Committee has a motion before the court requesting the Diocese of Corpus Christi in Texas be compelled to produce a number of documents concerning the Rev. Clement A. Hageman, a sexually abusive priest who left Corpus Christi and served in the Gallup Diocese for more than three decades. The Corpus Christi Diocese is objecting to the motion, and Thuma has scheduled a final hearing on the matter Wednesday.

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MEXICO
e-Consulta

[Summary: Archbishop Rafael Romo Munoz knew for two years accusations, allegations and complaints against priests for sexual harassment of children and allowed them to continue in the church. Three investigations by various agencies provided enough for the Vatican to order temporary suspension of seven priests. Five were removed from parishes while two continue in the parishes. The archdiocese confirmed suspension of Jeffrey David Newell, pastor of Our Lady of the Incarnation in Camino Verdo; Enrique Tenorio Perez of St. Martin Caballero in Colonia Las Villas; and Aurelio Castillo Aguilar, priest of St. James Church. The archbishop explained that priest Danilo Pietro Zanini continues in his parish because he has not received instructions from the Vatican. The archbishop also denied that pastor Carlos Vastillo was involved in the investigations. These two names appeared as suspected pedophile in the “Dossier Tijuana Saint and Sinner blog.]

Tijuana, Baja California (SinEmbargo/Zeta).– Durante dos años, el Arzobispo de Tijuana, Rafael Romo Muñoz, tuvo conocimiento de señalamientos, acusaciones y denuncias en contra de sus sacerdotes por acoso sexual a menores y les permitió continuar dentro de la Iglesia, mientras víctimas, testigos y clérigos dieron cuenta de las acciones de los párrocos inculpados. Tres investigaciones realizadas por diferentes instancias brindaron evidencia suficiente para que El Vaticano ordenara la suspensión temporal de siete sacerdotes. Cinco fueron removidos de las parroquias que dirigían y alojados en propiedades pertenecientes a la Iglesia, dos más continúan al frente de sus iglesias.

La Arquidiócesis de Tijuana confirmó la suspensión de los padres Jeffrey David Newell, párroco de la iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación en Camino Verde; Enrique Tenorio Pérez, padre de la iglesia San Martín Caballero en la colonia Las Villas y Aurelio Castillo Aguilar, presbítero de iglesia Santiago Apóstol, en la colonia Reforma. El Arzobispo Rafael Romo Muñoz explicó que del sacerdote Danilo Pietro Zanini aún no recibe instrucciones del Vaticano para suspenderlo, por lo que continúa en la parroquia San José de la colonia Durango. Además negó que el párroco Carlos Castillo esté implicado en las investigaciones. Estos dos nombres aparecieron como presuntos pederastas en el blog “Dossier Tijuana: Santa y Pecadora” del laico Teodoro Uckerman, quien denunció el caso públicamente, denuncia que fue retomada por la prensa local.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

Eilish O’Regan
Health Correspondent

THE remains of 474 infants – who died in mother-and-baby homes and hospitals – were used for research and doctors’ training in Irish universities for a quarter of a century, the Irish Independent has learned.

New figures reveal the full extent of the practice of doctors using “unclaimed bodies” for anatomical study up until the mid-1960s with no evidence of consent being obtained.

There were 474 unclaimed infant remains transferred to the medical schools at four universities from 1940-1965 for the “study of the anatomy and the structure of the human body”.

The latest revelations come in the wake of renewed controversy over standards of care in the mother-and-baby homes across the country following the discovery of mass infant deaths at St Mary’s in Tuam, Co Galway.

The baby remains were transferred to UCD, Trinity College Dublin, the Royal College of Surgeons Dublin, and NUI Galway until a campaign by the college professors got under way to encourage voluntary donation.

The infant remains transferred to the medical school in NUI Galway came from two Galway hospitals as opposed to directly from mother-and-baby homes, according to records. It is unclear what the circumstances of the deceased babies’ parents were. The Central Hospital in Galway had a TB ward and was replaced by the Regional Hospital Galway in the early 1950s.

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WASHINGTON
Seattle Times

Posted by Paige Cornwell

The Seattle Archdiocese has agreed to pay $12.125 million to 30 men who say they were sexually abused as children decades ago at Seattle’s O’Dea High School and Briscoe Memorial School in Kent.

In lawsuits filed in King County Superior Court, the men allege the Seattle Archdiocese failed to protect them from known abusers, including two former O’Dea teachers who were members of the Christian Brothers Catholic order, which filed for bankruptcy in April 2011. The Christian Brothers operated O’Dea and Briscoe, a former orphanage and boarding school for boys, but both schools were owned by the Archdiocese.

“I deeply regret the pain suffered by these victims,” Archbishop J. Peter Sartain said this afternoon in a statement. “Our hope is that this settlement will bring them closure and allow them to continue the process of healing.”

Seattle attorney Mike Pfau, who represented the 30 men, said today the settlement puts an “end to the ugly chapter for the Archdiocese.” He said his clients, who range in age from 42 to 68, feel relieved after the decade of litigation in the wake of the abuse, from the early 1950s until 1984.

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CANADA
The StarPhoenix

A Catholic archdiocese in northern Alberta has been linked to a series of alleged sexual assaults dating back to the 1950s by four victims who filed lawsuits this month.

Though the three men and one woman all filed statements of claim against the Catholic Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan, the allegations span three decades and several members of the archdiocese. All four attended St. Bernard Mission School at the time of the alleged abuse. The four lawsuits total $890,000.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

Priest accused of sexual assault asked to preside at funeral of alleged victim’s aunt, court told

June 25, 2014
Adam Cooper
Court reporter for The Age

A man who claims he was sexually assaulted by a priest as a boy reacted with disbelief when told about 40 years later that the same man would conduct his aunt’s funeral, a jury has been told.

Former priest James Henry Scannell is accused of sexually assaulting a boy at the priest’s then home in Kew between August 1970 and July 1972 when the boy was aged between 11 and 13. Mr Scannell, now 88, has pleaded not guilty to one charge of buggery.

Mr Scannell is alleged to have led the youngster into his bedroom and then sexually assaulted him one day when the boy was at the priest’s house working for pocket money.

Prosecutor Kristie Churchill, in her closing submission in the County Court on Wednesday, told the jury the boy was “frozen in fear” and experienced pain and discomfort while being assaulted.

Afterwards, the boy was told to have a shower and give confession before he walked home crying, the jury heard. He never returned to the priest’s home.

But defence counsel Max Perry told the jury it was difficult to prove one person’s allegation against another when so much time had elapsed.

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IRELAND
Journal

THE MINISTER FOR Justice has announced approval for legislation that will support survivors of Magdalene laundries.

Frances Fitzgerald announced that the Government has, this morning, agreed to her proposal for publication of the scheme of a new bill.

Commenting in the Dáil during Parliamentary Questions, the Minister further announced that, to date, lump sum payments totalling €12.8m have been made under the Magdalene Redress Scheme to 357 former residents of Magdalene Laundries, with further offers still being made.

* The bill will give survivors:
* Access to health services;

An exemption from means test criteria for certain State services and schemes (including the Nursing Home Support Scheme)

Fitzgerald added that legal provision is being made for relatives to act on behalf of any of the women who do not have the capacity to act of their own behalf.

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ROME
Matter

If you intend to be a proper Catholic priest, you would be wise to follow the little formalities of the church. When in Rome, for example, you are required to wear your cassock or at least a clergy shirt, and bishops and cardinals are expected to wear their flowing robes. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was cardinal of Buenos Aires before he became known to the world as Pope Francis, hated pomp and ceremony and was not very proper at all. He kept his scarlet robes in a convent founded by an Argentine nun, so he wouldn’t have to carry the damn things back and forth to Vatican City. Before heading for a priests’ residence in central Rome he would stop by the convent, chat for a bit, and pick up the garments, which had been reverently pressed and folded for him by the nuns.

Bergoglio stopped at the convent one last time, last year in March, on his way to the historic conclave of 115 cardinals that would elect him the first Latin American pope and the first from the order of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits. He must have had a very good idea of his chances. Little known beyond Argentina, he had nevertheless finished second in the vote that elected Benedict XVI in 2005. It was understood that he was an outlier, ascetic, unconventional to a fault, but he seemed to be the right kind of pope to clean up the world’s oldest and largest institution, hemorrhaging followers and riddled as it is with ancient vices, and bring it into the XXIst century.

What may not have been so clear to the cardinals who chose him above all others at that conclave is that Francis would enter the Vatican like Jesus into the Temple or a bull into a china shop, knocking over conventions and rules with abandon. And what stunned everyone was that, from the moment he stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter’s for the first time on that drizzly evening, he would channel a ravening hunger for change among millions of people all over the world. He certainly didn’t look like a world-changer. A mild-mannered, slightly stooped, grandfatherly old man dressed in simplest white—no lace and scarlet finery for him—he stood quietly contemplating the crowd for a very long minute before uttering a hearty buona sera! with a pronounced Argentine accent. The effort of bending forward to receive the people’s blessing made Francis’s back tremble slightly, and watching on a screen I, a non-Catholic, was moved, too.

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MICHIGAN
New York Daily News

BY NINA GOLGOWSKI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, June 24, 2014

A Christian radio host in Michigan has allegedly admitted to raping a 12-year-old boy.

John Balyo, 35, formerly of radio station WCSG, was arrested at last Friday’s Big Ticket Christian music festival in Gaylord, Mich. after authorities say he paid to have sex with the boy on May 17.

His accused rape-date organizer, Battle Creek resident Ronald Lee Moser, 42, was later arrested on June 5 after authorities stormed his home and found him with a 12-year-old boy, MLIVE.com reported.

Moser was also found with a cell phone containing photos of the boy wearing a thong in sexually suggestive poses and several online photo albums containing child pornography that authorities believe he traded online.

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WASHINGTON
Q13 Fox

SEATTLE — The Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle announced Tuesday that it reached a $12.1 million settlement involving 30 claims of sexual abuse by members of the Christian Brothers order, which operated The Briscoe School in the Kent Valley and Seattle’s Bishop O’Dea High School.

The most recent cases in the settlement are nearly 30 years old, with some dating back nearly 60 years, the archdiocese said.

The settlement was funded by archdiocese insurance programs.

A teaching order, the Christian Brothers operated The Briscoe School, a boarding and day school for boys in the Kent Valley, beginning in 1914.

The order also staffed and managed Bishop O’Dea, an archdiocese high school, from its opening in 1923.

“I deeply regret the pain suffered by these victims,” Archbishop J. Peter Sartain said in a news release. “Our hope is that this settlement will bring them closure and allow them to continue the process of healing.”

In lawsuits filed in King County Superior Court, the plaintiffs alleged both the Christian Brothers and the Seattle Archdiocese failed to protect them from known abusers.

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CALIFORNIA
The Lookout

By Zina Markevicius
For The Lookout

June 25, 2014 — Egotism and lust for power are not limited to Wall Street. Roger Crane’s thought-provoking play, The Last Confession, demonstrates how politics and personal ambition pervade the Vatican as well.

Based on historical events, the play running at the Ahmenson Theater through July 6, centers on the Catholic church’s most influential leaders, as they navigate the election, sudden death and the replacement of Pope John Paul I in 1978.

Photo. Program Cover. The Last Confession – An Anatomy of Ego and Power LA Ahmenson Theater
Manipulative and power-hungry, these cardinals and other top officials play politics to push their own agendas and careers. They make an unsympathetic bunch.

Among the key players is Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, portrayed by Briton David Suchet, best known for his role as Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Unlike the lovable detective, the scheming cardinal seems ruthless in his pursuit of power, until the death of his friend, John Paul I, after just 33 days as pope.

“I made him pope, and I abandoned him,” confesses Benelli, who pushed his fellow cardinals into selecting the fellow Italian.

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AUSTRALIA
Advertiser

By Katherine Fenech June 24, 2014

A FORMER Marist brother has told a royal commission hearing he had warned church officials a fellow brother was a possible child molester but was ignored.

The commission held a fortnight of public hearings in Canberra, looking at whether the church ignored repeated reports of abuse by two Marist Brothers, moving them to other schools.

One of the brothers, Gregory Sutton, taught at Campbelltown’s St Thomas More primary school in 1984, where he allegedly sexually assaulted two girls and a boy in his year 5 class.

Denis Doherty was principal of a North Queensland primary school in the 1970s, where Sutton also taught.

Mr Doherty said he had raised concerns about Sutton having “pet” students whom he favoured with the provincial of the order, Charles Howard, during an annual visit in 1976. But Mr Doherty said when he asked what would be done about Sutton he was told “none of your business”.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Daily Times

By Alex Rose, Delaware County Daily Times
POSTED: 06/24/14

MEDIA COURTHOUSE — A Parskide Sunday school teacher and youth basketball coach pleaded guilty Monday to one count each of possessing child pornography and criminal use of a communication facility, both felonies of the third degree.

Steven Daniel Almond, a deacon at the Middletown Presbyterian Church, turned himself over to authorities in June 2013 on two counts of disseminating photos or films of child sex acts, 25 counts of sexual abuse of children for possession of child pornography and 27 counts of criminal use of a communication facility.

Almond, 55, of the first block of West Forestview Road, posted 10 percent of $250,000 bail in July.

According to an affidavit of probable cause, Delaware County Detective Joseph Walsh, a member of the county’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, identified a computer sharing suspected child pornography on a peer-to-peer file network on June 6, 2013.

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WASHINGTON
KOMO

SEATTLE — The Archdiocese of Seattle announced Tuesday it has paid $12.1 million to settle 30 claims of sexual abuse by members of two church-run schools in western Washington.

The abuse claims were made by students at schools run by the Christian Brothers, which is a teaching order that operated the Briscoe School in the Kent Valley and Seattle’s Bishop O’Dea High school, according to the Archdiocese.

“I deeply regret the pain suffered by these victims,” Archbishop J. Peter Sartain said in a news release. “Our hope is that this settlement will bring them closure and allow them to continue the process of healing.”

The archdiocese continues to operate O’Dea but the Christian Brothers are no longer involved. Archdiocese spokesman Greg Magnoni says the Briscoe School closed in the late 1960s.

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WASHINGTON
CBS Seattle

SEATTLE (AP) — The Archdiocese of Seattle said Tuesday it has agreed to pay $12.1 million to settle 30 sexual abuse claims filed by men who say they were abused decades ago at two archdiocesan schools operated by the Christian Brothers religious order.

The claims involved O’Dea High School in Seattle and the Briscoe School, a boarding and day school for boys in suburban Kent. The archdiocese continues to operate O’Dea, but the Christian Brothers are no longer involved. The Briscoe School closed in the late 1960s, archdiocese spokesman Greg Magnoni said.

“I deeply regret the pain suffered by these victims,” Archbishop J. Peter Sartain said in a statement.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer Michael Pfau said the archdiocese, under Sartain, “did the right thing and acknowledged the tremendous amount of pain and suffering that our clients, their families and our community have endured.

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GEORGIA
Dawson News

By Michele Hester Staff Writer
mhester@dawsonnews.com
UPDATED: June 25, 2014

A former youth ministry intern from Dawsonville faces nearly three dozen child pornography charges in connection with an investigation that originated earlier this year in neighboring Forsyth County.

According to Dawson County jail records, more than 30 warrants were issued Friday for Sean E. Paul, 28. He was arrested on Monday.

Paul has been charged with 32 counts of sexual exploitation of children and a single count of child pornography, all felonies.

He also faces charges of child molestation, enticing a child for indecent purposes and electronically furnishing obscene material to a minor in Forsyth County.

It was his March arrest in Cumming that led investigators to his Richmond Drive home, where Dawson County Sheriff’s Capt. Tony Wooten said “a significant amount of child pornography” was found on electronic and computer equipment.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)

By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Catholic archbishop of Adelaide says the church needs to discuss the responsibilities of priests to whom a crime is confessed.

Philip Wilson was asked at a royal commission hearing into child sexual abuse what happened if someone confessed to a crime against a child.

The archbishop explained that a firm commitment of amendment would be required before the penitent could be given absolution.

That meant the person had to commit to something that showed the behaviour would stop.

“If you heard that in confession, you have the ability to say to them, ‘as a consequence of this you must fulfil the obligation of the law’,” he said.

The bargaining for absolution was something a priest had to do in the confessional, he told Justice Peter McClellan, who pointed out it left the priest with the knowledge that the person was at least a potential danger to children.

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

Article by: Associated Press Updated: June 25, 2014

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Attorneys for victims of alleged sexual abuse by clergy are asking the church to turn over electronic files about accused priests — so they can verify who had information about these priests, and when they had it.

During a hearing Wednesday in St. Paul, victims’ attorneys will ask a judge to order the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona to turn over emails, texts and other computer data about abuse allegations.

The documents are being sought in a lawsuit that alleges church officials created a public nuisance by keeping the names of accused priests secret.

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CANADA
Timmins Press

By Len Gillis
Tuesday, June 24, 2014

TIMMINS – The new billboard sign that went up in Timmins Tuesday is believed to be the only one of its kind in Ontario. But the fellows who put the sign up are saying one in six men in Ontario should see it.

That’s because the issue of sexual abuse against young males is rampant, they said, and it is something that needs to be exposed and talked about more.

Ray Auclair and Ray Lariviere, both of Timmins, are men who are survivors of sexual abuse from their adolescent years.

Auclair grew up in Timmins. Lariviere grew up in Chelmsford. As young teenagers, even though they were hundreds of miles apart, both were victimized in remarkably similar circumstances by older men; men who gained their trust and confidence and then sexually assaulted them.

One was molested by a businessman, the other by a priest.

The priest went to jail. The businessman committed suicide.

Auclair and Lariviere are now friends who met in a support group. They are also committed to encouraging more men to come forward, to tell their stories of abuse and to expose the abusers. Both men spoke at a special dinner held in Timmins back in February to raise funds for the Timmins billboard project.

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SINGAPORE
The Online Citizen

“When I was fifteen, I came into unfortunate contact with a priest who would engage me in play wrestling and attempt to touch my crotch in the process,” activist and former member of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), Dr Vincent Wijeyshingha, said in a Facebook post on Monday.

“He once brought me to his bedroom and took a stack of pornographic magazines from his wardrobe to show me,” he added, without naming the priest.

Dr Wijeysingha’s online note was in response to a statement by the Catholic Archbishop, William Goh, over the weekend, in which he described the “lifestyle” of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) people as “detrimental to society”.

The Archbishop also said such a “lifestyle” was “not helpful to integral human development and contrary to Christian values.” (See here.)

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MINNESOTA
KSTP

[with video]

By: Cassie Hart

In a deposition released Tuesday, a former priest says he was never disciplined for allegations of abusing children in his decades-long career with the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.
Father Jerome Kern worked at St. Mark’s in St. Paul after being ordained in 1966.

During the April 15 deposition, he was asked when the last time was that he engaged a child in some form of sexual contact; Kern replied it had been 35 years. At the time, he didn’t think his contact with some young boys was sexually abusive.

University of St. Thomas Law Professor, Charles Reid, who is an expert on canon law, religion and the Catholic Church, stopped by KSTP to offer analysis on the case.

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TENNESSEE
Times-News

June 24th, 2014 10:45 pm by STAFF REPORT

KINGSPORT — A former Kingsport Catholic priest accused of molesting a young boy more than three decades ago had his conviction upheld Monday after the Tennessee Supreme Court refused to hear his case.

William Casey, previously of Greeneville, is currently serving a 35-year sentence as a result of his 2011 conviction in Sullivan County Criminal Court on charges of first-degree sexual misconduct and two counts of aggravated rape.

The charges stemmed from the repeated sexual abuse of an altar boy that occurred while Casey was a priest at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in the 1970s.

The Supreme Court denied Casey’s appeal without hearing the case. The action upholds the ruling previously issued by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals.

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

BY ANNETTE BLACKWELL
June 25, 2014

The decision by an Australian bishop to stand aside a NSW priest because of complaints he molested children led to Vatican infighting which pitched powerful bodies against one another.

It also led to a decision that has ramifications across the globe as to how Catholic bishops can deal with priests who are suspected child sexual abusers.

The royal commission into child sexual abuse at a Sydney hearing is looking at how the Catholic Church under its own law – canon law – deals with priests or religious against whom allegations have been made.

In particular, it is looking at the case of John Gerard Nestor, who was a priest in the Wollongong diocese in NSW when he was charged with the indecent assault of a teenage altar boy in 1996. He was acquitted.

The Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson, who was the bishop of Wollongong in the late 90s, stood Nestor aside when he refused to go to a clinic for assessment as recommended by the church’s internal procedure, Towards Healing.

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AUSTRALIA
The Australian

Vatican always sided with priests in abuse cases, archbishop says

JUNE 25, 2014

Dan Box
Crime Reporter
Sydney

THE Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide has said the Vatican actively prevented bishops taking action against abusive priests during the late 1990s, and he considered appealing to the Pope or resigning his position over one such case.

Giving evidence this morning to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Philip Wilson said the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Clergy “always came down on the side of the priests” accused of child sex abuse.

“There was a phenomenon going on where bishops particularly in the US were trying to deal with these cases involving abuse and the Congregation for the Clergy consistently made things difficult for them in trying to do that,” Archbishop Wilson said.

“The Congregation for the Clergy always came down on the side of the priests and the instructions they gave to the bishops were (that) what they had done had to be put aside and the priest allowed back into ministry,” he said.

The commission is investigating the case of one allegedly abusive priest, John Gerard Nestor, who Archbishop Wilson barred from working publicly during his previous appointment as bishop of the Wollongong Diocese in NSW.

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AUSTRALIA
WA Today

June 25, 2014

Rachel Browne
Social Affairs Reporter

Archbishop Philip Wilson was newly appointed to the Diocese of Wollongong when he received some disturbing reports about a local priest, the then Father John Gerard Nestor.

It was 1996 and Mr Nestor was already facing charges of sexually molesting a 15-year-old boy. He would later be convicted and then acquitted on appeal in 1997.

In the meantime, Archbishop Wilson was hearing complaints from other families about Father Nestor’s behaviour on the summer camps he ran in the early 1990s.

Complainants alleged Mr Nestor swam naked with boys, watched them showering and held competitions to “find the ‘hairiest arse’ and the ‘biggest dick’.”

Appearing before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Archbishop Wilson, now the Archbishop of Adelaide, shed light on the inner workings of the Catholic Church and its handling of priests accused of misconduct.

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AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury

By EMMA SPILLETT June 25, 2014

Wollongong lawyer Mark Johnston still remembers the day Frank* wandered into his office, seeking advice about his dealings with the Catholic Church.

The initial meeting triggered a chain of events, which culminated in a year-long legal battle that allegedly exposed the failings of the Church’s ‘‘Towards Healing’’ program.

Fast forward nearly a decade and the Church’s internal settlement regime is now under intense scrutiny by the Royal Commission into the Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse.

Some abuse victims have come forward to blast the Church’s ‘‘healing process’’ and its alleged attempt to steer people away from legal action, in exchange for a financial settlement.

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AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury

By KATE McILWAIN June 25, 2014

A former Wollongong bishop threatened to take the matter of a priest accused of child molestation all the way to the Pope, a hearing into institutional child abuse heard.

On the second day of a public hearing into how the Wollongong Catholic Diocese responded to complaints of child sexual abuse against then Father John Nestor in the 1990s, the now Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson was the first witness.

Following on from his appearance the previous day, Archbishop Wilson was questioned about events in 1997.

At that time, Mr Nestor had successfully appealed a conviction of aggravated indecent assault against a 15-year-old altar boy.

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)

Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Wednesday 25 June 2014

Towards Healing, the process the Australian Catholic church used to deal with allegations of child sexual abuse, did not have Vatican approval, a royal commission has heard.

Archbishop Philip Wilson told the commission on Wednesday how a formal decree he made when he was bishop of Wollongong to stop a priest about whom there had been complaints, was nullified by a powerful Vatican body.

The archbishop is in the box for the second day explaining how he dealt with John Nestor, a priest who was defrocked by Pope Benedict in 2008.

Complaints about Nestor dated back to 1991.

In 1996 he was found guilty of indecent assault of a teenage altar boy but was acquitted on appeal in 1997.

The archbishop said he used the Towards Healing protocol – the internal process set up by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference – to have Nestor assessed after he was acquitted.

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SINGAPORE
Malaysia Chronicle

‘RAPE & BUGGER’ HYPOCRISY: Catholic priest molested me when I was 15 – activist

SINGAPORE – Social activist Vincent Wijeysingha has accused a Catholic priest of trying to molest him when he was a teenager, in a strongly-worded Facebook post on Monday night that attacked the Catholic Church and its stand on homosexuality.

Here is the statement he published on Facebook on June 23:

I see no grounds in Archbishop William Goh’s pronouncement on homosexuality for anything but contempt. Throughout its existence in Singapore, the church has raised its voice in support of little that Christianity has to offer the moral universe. Yet when it does, when one would expect it to affirm its teachings at Matthew 26:27 and in the first Letter to the Corinthians at Verse 13:13, it chooses one within a domain where it has no rights, given its own hideous record.

The universal church is guilty of the systematic rape and abuse of children committed to the care of a clergy ostensibly vowed to celibacy. The response of the magisterium to the thousands of adults now asking it to repair the untold damage done to them in their childhood was first to threaten and coerce into silence and, when that failed, spend billions – yes, billions – of dollars in out of court settlements. Meanwhile, it shielded paedophile clerics from the intervention of the law. In some cases involving senior prelates, it appointed them to sinecures in the Vatican, putting them outside the ambit of local police authorities.

Contrary to what has been put about that this is an isolated phenomenon limited to the United States and Ireland, this is a global phenomenon. While not as extensive as other dioceses, the local church in Singapore is not exempt. Some years ago, it was embroiled in a scandal involving a historical allegation of sexual abuse by a priest. The accused was transferred to another church where his access to children was unimpeded.

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OREGON
Oregonian

By Aimee Green | agreen@oregonian.com
on June 24, 2014

A man in his mid-50s who says he was abused as a boy by Oregon’s most prolific pedophile priest — Maurice Grammond — filed an $8.1 million lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland in federal court Tuesday.

The man, who now lives in California, says that when he was age 6 to 9 he was raped at his home and at the rectory at Our Lady of Victory by Grammond. He estimates he was sexually assaulted 10 to 20 times from 1969 to 1972.

Grammond grew close to the boy and his three brothers after their mother died, said Portland attorney Kristian Roggendorf, who filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Roggendorf said this latest victim to come forward brings the number of Grammond’s victims to about three dozen.

Roggendorf’s client is identified in the suit under the pseudonym Martin Voe. Roggendorf said that as early as the mid-1950s, the archdiocese had received a credible report about Grammond molesting a child.

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SINGAPORE
The Star

SINGAPORE: A Social activist has accused a Catholic priest of trying to molest him when he was a teenager, in a strongly-worded Facebook post on Monday night that attacked the Catholic Church and its stand on homosexuality.

Dr Vincent Wijeysingha’s post was in response to Arcbishop William Goh’s recent statement that restated the Catholic Church’s view of the family unit and that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) relations is “not in accordance with the plan of God”.

It comes amid support by various groups of a Wear White campaign organised by a Muslim religious teacher to protest against homosexuality during this Saturday’s Pink Dot event.

Dr Wijeysingha, 44, a former Singapore Democratic Party member, was Singapore’s first openly gay politician. He quit the party last August to focus on LGBT rights and other civil liberties.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Stanly News and Press

By Tiffany Thompson for the SNAP
CNHI

Tuesday, June 24, 2014 — A civil lawsuit that was pending against Father Michael Joseph Kelleher in Mecklenburg County Superior Court has been dismissed after a trial judge ruled that the case exceeded the statute of limitations. Two unnamed men, who reported that Kelleher sexually abused them while they were in their teens, filed the lawsuit Sept. 28, 2011.

The lawsuit stated that “since at least the mid-1970s, [the Charlotte Diocese] has known or should have known that Father Joseph Kelleher was abusing minors and also that he was spending long periods of time alone with them in the rectory, at other locations and on overnight trips both within and outside the territory of the defendant diocese.”

According to the court’s recent ruling, however, the two men waited too long to report their claims of sexual abuse and therefore exceeded the statute of limitations.

Seth Langson, a Charlotte attorney who represented the two men, confirmed that he has 30 days in which to file an appeal to the judge’s decision.

“It is critical to remember that this ruling did not have anything to do with whether the Diocese had covered up and concealed sexual abuse by priests or whether Father Kelleher and/or Father Richard Farwell had abused our clients,” Langson said in his “A Voice for Victims of Sexual Abuse” blog.

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CALIFORNIA
Fox 5

by Salvador Rivera
Reporter

SAN DIEGO — Priest Jeffrey Newell has been suspended by the Catholic Church for sexually abusing children in Tijuana. This is the second time Newell has been sanctioned for his actions.

Years ago, Newell was involved in the Los Angeles sexual abuse scandal. His victims were promised he’d never be allowed near children ever again. It turns out he had been working in a Tijuana church since 2010.

After a number of allegations, a team of Vatican investigators arrived in Tijuana to look into complaints against Newell and 17 other priests. Seven of them, including Newell, were relieved of their duties.

With disciplinary action pending, Newell fled Tijuana and is reportedly back in California, possibly San Diego.

Richard Sipe, who has researched priest abuse for decades, says the Catholic Church continues to shuffle predator priests, only now, exporting the problem to Latin American countries such as Mexico.

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NORTH CAROLINA
Seth H. Langston

Posted on June 23, 2014

Diocese Sex Abuse Cases

Today the trial judge ruled that our clients had waited too long to bring their claims for sex abuse against the Diocese. It is critical to remember that this ruling did not have anything to do with whether the Diocese had covered up and concealed sexual abuse by priests or whether Father Kelleher and/or Father Richard Farwell had abused our clients.

We were looking forward to presenting our case to the jury and introducing all of the evidence about how the Charlotte Diocese has acted no differently than many other dioceses across the country in dealing with such allegations.

Despite the Judge’s ruling, I encourage anyone who was sexually abused by a priest of the Charlotte Diocese to come forward.

This case also should motivate people to demand that our legislatures extend or abolish the civil statute of limitations for sex abuse.

Please pray for the brave survivors who came forward.

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OREGON
KOIN

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN 6) – A man who says he was repeatedly raped as a child by a priest in Seaside, Ore. is suing the Archdiocese of Portland for $8.1 million.

The man, identified in the complaint under the pseudonym “Martin Voe,” said between 1969 and 1972 – when he was between the ages of six and nine – Archdiocese of Portland priest Father Maurice Grammond abused him between ten and 20 times.

This, while the Archdiocese knew of previous abuse cases committed by Grammond in the 1950s, said Voe’s lawyer, Kristian Roggendorf.

“The Archdiocese knew that Fr. Grammond had been credibly accused of abusing boys as early as the mid-1950s, and the Archbishop had even been contacted by a judge of the Clatsop County Court the year before my client’s abuse started,” said Roggendorf.

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SOUTH CAROLINA
Nonprofit Quarterly

WRITTEN BY RICK COHEN CREATED ON TUESDAY, 24 JUNE 2014

Amid the national controversy around columnist George Will’s view that women who have been sexually assaulted on college campuses occupy “a coveted status that confers privileges,” there is a specific story of one university with an apparently reprehensible policy regarding the treatment of victims of rape.

Bob Jones University in South Carolina lost its nonprofit tax status in a 1983 Supreme Court decision in which the Court decided that the university’s virulent racist policies were incompatible with compelling government public policy and could override the school’s belief that the First Amendment protected its racism. Would the IRS have acted similarly had it known of BJU’s treatment of women at the school who report themselves as victims of rape?

Al Jazeera’s impressive America Tonight program has aired a two-part show on BJU’s approach to the issue of sexual assault on campus. It tells of a woman who, after being raped by her supervisor at a summer job, reported the incident to the dean of students. As the young woman recounts the story, here is what the dean said:

“He goes, ‘Well, there’s always a sin under other sin. There’s a root sin,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘We have to find the sin in your life that caused your rape.’”

The Al Jazeera story covers the allegations of that young woman and others who described at BJU a “culture that heaped on shamed and pushed them to silence…[in which] they were told that their sins had brought on their rapes, that their trauma meant they were fighting God and that healing came from forgiving their rapists.” The details in the story address not only the incidents of sexual abuse, but the trauma (not privilege, Mr. Will!) endured by the victims and the religious counseling offered by the school’s staff, focusing on getting the victims to forgive the rapists and to convince them to remove from their thinking the thoughts that made them unhappy, depressed, in cases, suicidal.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

A bishop from the Dominican Republic has reported that he was shocked to see a former papal nuncio, who is under investigation on sex-abuse charges, walking freely around the center of Rome.

Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, who had been the Vatican’s representative in the Dominican Republic, was recalled to Rome last year. Prosecutors in the Dominican Republic have said that they have convincing evidence that the prelate molested young men there; he has also been accused of abuse in his native Poland.

The Vatican has promised to cooperate with Dominican and Polish prosecutors, and pointed out that as a citizen of the Vatican city-state, Archbishop Wesolowski is also subject to criminal prosecution there. The Vatican has made no further public statement about his case. But when Pope Francis told reporters that three bishops are under investigation, most reporters assumed that Archbishop Wesolowski was included in that number.

However, Bishop Victor Masalles, an auxiliary of the Santo Domingo archdiocese, reported that he saw the Polish bishop during a trip to Rome. “For me it was a surprise to see Wesolowski walking along the Via della Scrofa,” he said.

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POLAND
Catholic News Service

By Jonathan Luxmoore
Catholic News Service

WARSAW, Poland (CNS) — Poland’s Catholic Church has held a penitential service for victims of sexual abuse by priests, after calls for more action to curb molestation in the country.

“It was said this was America’s problem, and then a problem of Anglo-Saxon countries, and then a problem for the West — the frontiers were pushed ever further so we could insist it didn’t affect us,” said Bishop Piotr Libera of Plock, a former bishops’ conference secretary-general.

“As bishops, we must admit that, instead of putting the good of children in first place, we too often allowed ourselves to be deceived by the fraud, duplicity and denial mechanisms of perpetrators of the crime of pedophilia.”

“Ashamed and repentant, we ask for forgiveness,” he said in a June 20 Mass in Krakow’s Jesuit basilica. “We ask God and we ask people who were hurt by the priests.”

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

National Catholic Reporter was named first in “General Excellence” among national Catholic newspapers for the 13th time in 14 years by the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada at the 2014 Catholic Media Conference that ran June 18-20 in Charlotte, N.C.

The judges said NCR provides “simply excellent coverage of the Catholic world in the U.S. and abroad. Challenging in some articles but solid in sourcing across articles. American journalistic standards with a strong sense of the newsworthy.”

NCR also garnered 21 other CPA honors, including four first-place awards for news writing and commentary:

Best online blog: “Distinctly Catholic” by Michael Sean Winters
Best news writing on a national event: “Lack of funding ends lay-run forum” by Megan O’Neil
Best news writing on an international event: Mary Jo McConahay’s coverage of the Guatemala genocide trial
Best investigative reporting: “Contradictions cast doubt on Philadelphia verdicts” by Ralph Cipriano

NCR also took the second- and third-place honors for investigative news writing. Second place went to NCR staff writer Brian Roewe for “Excommunicated: A tangled tale leads to Australian priest’s dismissal.” Third place was awarded jointly to Jason Berry, Joshua J. McElwee and Tom Gallagher for “Anatomy of a cover-up,” “The widow: Deposition shows dedication to order,” and “The banker: insulator and facilitator.”

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MINNESOTA
Jeff Anderson & Associates

Sexual abuse survivor, attorneys will request release of electronically stored information from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis

Ramsey County Hearing Moved to 9:00 AM Wednesday, June 25, 2014

(St. Paul, MN) – On Wednesday June 25, 2014, at 9:00 AM in Ramsey County District Court, Judge John Van de North may decide whether the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona will be required to turn over electronically stored information in the Doe 1 civil lawsuit filed in May 2013.

Doe 1, along with his attorneys are also seeking additional deposition time with Archbishop John Nienstedt and former Vicar General Father Kevin McDonough and records from the Priest Personnel Board.

Please note the time change made by the Court. The hearing will begin at 9:00AM CDT tomorrow in Ramsey County District Court.

• The original Doe 1 complaint and additional information can be found on our website at www.andersonadvocates.com.

Contact Jeff Anderson: Office/651.927.7872 Cell/612.817.8665
Contact Mike Finnegan: Office/651.927.7872 Cell/612.205.5531

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MINNESOTA
WXOW

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – A priest accused of molesting boys says leaders in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis allowed him to remain around kids for decades – even though parents complained about his conduct.

Attorneys for a man who claims he was abused by the Rev. Jerome Kern released documents in the case Tuesday, including a sworn deposition in which Kern says he wrestled with kids and horsed around, but didn’t think his actions were inappropriate.

He says no one in church leadership told him he should stop the behavior and he wasn’t restricted from being around kids. Attorneys for victims say church leaders first got a report about Kern in 1969. He was removed from ministry in 2002.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Francis X. Rocca Catholic News Service | Jun. 24, 2014

VATICAN CITY
The Vatican will name a special “assistant” to advise the leadership of the troubled Legionaries of Christ, whose revised constitutions Pope Francis has still not approved four months after they were submitted to him.

Fr. Eduardo Robles Gil, general director of the Legionaries, made the announcement in a video message sent to the congregation’s members Sunday and now accessible on YouTube.

Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz and Archbishop Jose Rodriguez Carballo, respectively prefect and secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, informed Robles Gil of the plan for an adviser at a recent meeting, the general director said.

“We asked if this assistant would have a role in government, but we were told that no, our government was autonomous,” Robles Gil said in the video.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Mary Minihan

Tue, Jun 24, 2014

Women who worked in the Magdalene laundries and remain resident in Ireland will get a medical card and other supports following Cabinet approval for draft legislation today.

Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald also confirmed payments which have been made by the State to the women will be exempt from means test criteria for services such as nursing home support.

“Following the apology issued in the Dáil by an Taoiseach to former residents of the Magdalene laundries, the Government committed to implementing all of the recommendations made by Mr Justice [John]Quirke in his report,” she said.

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ITALY
National Catholic Reporter

Nicholas Collura | Jun. 24, 2014 NCR Today

It is hard to imagine a more perfect contemporary personification of human evil than the Italian mafia Camorra scattering carcinogenic trash throughout Naples or the ‘Ndrangheta, whose high-placed and diversified criminal activities did not put it above assassinating a 3-year-old in January.

This weekend, Pope Francis found a gesture to rival these mafia organizations’ power, declaring them excommunicated. His prophetic action set off a range of speculations.

Some fear the pope has placed himself in danger. Similar worries began circulating last year, when Calabrian state prosecutor Nicola Gratteri warned that “if the godfathers can find a way to stop” the pope from condemning corruption and reforming Vatican finances, “they will seriously consider it.” At that time, mafia expert John Dickie was more skeptical: “Even a rudimentary projection of the likely consequences of a hit on the head of the Catholic Church,” he said, “would show it to be catastrophic” to the mafia itself.

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OHIO
Toledo Blade

The Little Sisters of the Poor apparently have not agreed to accept convicted murderer Gerald Robinson as a patient at their Sacred Heart Home in Oregon.

In a court filing today, Rick Kerger, attorney for the dying Catholic priest, amended his petition seeking to have Robinson released from a prison hospital to return to Toledo. He informed the court that the Little Sisters “were not asked to care for, and have not made any commitment to care for” Robinson.

Mr. Kerger wrote that the error in his original petition for equitable relief filed on Friday was his own. He declined to comment Tuesday.

Last week, Mr. Kerger asked a federal court judge to release Robinson to the Little Sisters of the Poor or to Robinson’s brother and sister-in-law in Toledo. Robinson, 76, is in a hospice unit at Franklin Medical Center, a Columbus hospital run by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, after suffering “a massive coronary.”

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CANADA
Sun News

TONY BLAIS | QMI AGENCY

EDMONTON – A northern Alberta Catholic archdiocese has been slapped with four separate lawsuits totalling $890,000 relating to alleged historical sexual assaults.

According to the four statements of claim, which were filed June 11, the assaults happened at or near the St. Bernard Catholic Church in Grouard, Alta., in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Two of the lawsuits allege sexual assaults by a priest identified as Father Lambert.

One male plaintiff claims Father Lambert sexually assaulted him in the basement of the St. Bernard Mission School on unknown dates between 1952 and 1961.

The alleged victim says he suffered irreparable psychological harm, recurring flashbacks, betrayal and an aversion towards church settings as a result of the alleged forced masturbation, groping and attempted sodomy.

A second male plaintiff claims Father Lambert put his hands down his pants and fondled his penis on an unknown date in 1952 at the Grouard town hall, which was owned and operated by the St. Bernard Catholic Church.

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OHIO
ABC News

TOLEDO, Ohio — Jun 24, 2014
By JOHN SEEWER Associated Press

A nursing home run by nuns has not been asked or agreed to take care of a dying Roman Catholic priest convicted of killing a nun at a hospital chapel in 1980, his attorney said Tuesday.

The attorney for the Rev. Gerald Robinson wrote in a court filing that his statement last week that the Little Sisters of the Poor were willing to care for the priest was in error.

“The Little Sisters of the Poor were not asked to care for, and have not made any commitment to care for Father Robinson,” attorney Richard Kerger said.

Robinson has been in a prison hospice unit in Columbus since the end of May after suffering a heart attack and wants to die in his hometown of Toledo, Kerger said in a motion filed Friday in federal court.

The motion said that the Little Sisters of the Poor, who run a home for the elderly and dying just outside Toledo, indicated a willingness to care for Robinson during his final days. It also said the priest’s brother and sister-in-law were willing to take him in, Kerger said.

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UNITED STATES
Deliverance

I have observed that many people I know are unsympathetic to the never-ending sex scandals within the Catholic Church. “It’s only Catholics doing bad things to Catholics,” I have been told. “Any people dumb enough to subject themselves to such a gross cult-like authoritarian structure deserve anything that happens to them!”

With the case of Father Timothy Backous, however, the Catholic Diocese of Duluth, the St. Scholastica Monastery, and the corporation of ESSENTIA HEALTH have gone outside the confines of the Church. They have involved the public at large, with potential consequences for Protestants, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Swedenborgians, Buddhists, Atheists, Pagans, whoever.

ESSENTIA HEALTH, corporation-wide, is a public medical entity. They actively solicit and encourage ALL of the public to obtain their services. They engage in a continuous process of advertising and publicity. As a public combination of hospitals and medical centers, and receiving at least partial funding from public monies, ESSENTIA HEALTH is obliged to follow state and federal rules and regulations on a number of issues.

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MINNESOTA
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Statement by Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 503 0003, SNAPdorris@gmail.com )

In a recently released deposition, a predator priest admits the Twin Cities archdiocese took no action against him after abuse allegations were reported. We are not surprised, but we’re deeply disappointed that Catholic officials were and are so reckless with the safety of children.

[Star Tribune]

Fr. Jerome Kern is one of 30 priests the archdiocese recently admitted has credible abuse allegations against them.

We hope, as more and more of these revelations come to light, that parishioners and parents will be able to better protect their children and demand that church officials act legally, responsibly, and in line with their own codes of conduct.

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IRELAND
Catholic World Report

June 24, 2014

While the media rushed to exaggeration, misinformation, and fabrication, the real societal ills behind the deaths of 800 Irish children were largely overlooked.

Michael Kelly

For a month now, sections of the Irish and international media have been convulsed by reports of shockingly high mortality rates at a state-funded, Church-run mother and baby home in the west of Ireland. It has been difficult to separate fact from fiction and too few commentators have sought to get to the bottom of the story, with many instead choosing to focus on salacious exaggerations, misinformation, and untruths.

Yes, there was a shockingly high infant mortality rate in the Tuam mother and baby home run by the Bon Secours congregation of nuns. Between 1925 and 1961, 976 infants died. Many of the children, it appears, were buried at an unmarked grave, which was lovingly tended by local Catholic families for decades. Now, the tragic deaths of so many youngsters should be devastating enough in itself to warrant further investigation. But some media commentators and seasoned campaigners immediately sought to exaggerate the story in the most appalling fashion. The children were soon forgotten in the dash to hang their deaths as a crime around the neck of Catholic Ireland.

In media reports, the common grave soon became a “mass grave” and then a “septic tank.” The nuns were accused of “dumping” the children in the grave, and there have been suggestions that police should open up a criminal investigation into the deaths despite absolutely no evidence that any of the tragic deaths were in untoward circumstances. The government has promised a Commission of Inquiry to look at the issue. However, some are wary that the terms of reference may be set so narrowly as to include only Catholic-run institutions, leaving out so-called “county homes” where many unmarried mothers lived with their newborn babies. Former residents of a Protestant-run home in Dublin have also complained that their plight has been ignored.

The world’s media soon arrived, inevitably adding more heat than light. A Washington Times headline screamed, “Catholic Church Tossed 800 Irish Orphans into Septic Tank”; Salon’s stated: “An Irish Catholic Orphanage Hid the Bodies of 800 Children.” More fuel was added to the fire by Father Brian D’arcy, a liberal priest and darling of the Irish media, who likened the nuns’ behavior to that of the Nazis during the Holocaust.

So quick has been the rush to judgment that an eminent media outlet has been forced to roll back on earlier versions of the story. The Associated Press has issued a correction to earlier stories which included claims that were demonstrably untrue. In a response issued at the weekend, the AP admitted that

in stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not Church teaching. In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926.

Despite the misreporting, it’s important to be clear: the Tuam mother and baby home was a terrible place with awful conditions that reflected a society build on petty snobbery; “illegitimate” children and unmarried mothers were treated in a very unchristian fashion by a country that professed to be a bastion of Catholic virtue. It is unlikely that other, similar homes—whether run by the Church, state, or another religious denomination—were any less harsh.

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UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: John G. O’Flaherty was a Jesuit of the Missouri Province ordained in 1942. He served in parishes in St. Louis and Kansas City, and as a hospital chaplain in Monett, MO. He was also assigned at various times to Pueblo and Denver, CO. He died in 1987. O’Flaherty was accused of abuse in a 2011 civil complaint filed in Pueblo, CO.

Ordained: 1942
Died: June 19, 1987

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OREGON
Oregonian

By Rick Bella | rbella@oregonian.com
on June 23, 2014

The senior pastor of a Happy Valley church is facing sex-crime charges in Multnomah County.

Michael George “Mike” Sperou, 64, of Happy Valley, co-founder of the North Clackamas Bible Community, was arrested by Portland police Thursday. He was booked into the Multnomah County Jail on suspicion of three counts of first-degree unlawful sexual penetration.

Under Oregon law, first-degree unlawful sexual penetration is a Class A felony that falls under Measure 11 and is punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of eight years, four months in prison.

After he was arraigned in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Sperou posted a $35,000 security deposit against bail of $350,000 and was released Saturday.

Sgt. Pete Simpson, Portland police spokesman, said reports on Sperou’s arrest are not yet available and that hadn’t heard any details in the case.

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OREGON
KOIN

[with video]

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN 6) — The pastor of a Clackamas County church is charged with three counts of sex crimes.

Michael Sperou faces three felonies for unlawful sexual penetration. He is listed on the website of BcResources.net as a senior pastor and founding member of the North Clackamas Bible Community.

Michal Mitchell, Sperou’s niece and a member of the church, told KOIN 6 there is no physical church. Instead, members move from home to home. She also said her uncle is innocent.

“I’m convinced. I know him very well. I know that he’s innocent,” said Mitchell. “He’s the most wonderful person that I know, and it’s not just me. A lot of people would say he’s their best friend, and the most wonderful and influential person in their lives.”

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OREGON
KPTV

By FOX 12 Staff

CLACKAMAS COUNTY, OR (KPTV) –
The pastor of a Clackamas County church pleaded not guilty to several sex abuse charges.

Michael Sperou was arrested June 19 on three charges related to sex abuse. Police did not release any details of those charges.

The website for North Clackamas Bible Community lists Sperou as a senior pastor and founding member.

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MINNESOTA
Austin Daily Herald

By Trey Mewes

An Austin priest admitted taking a nude photo of a teenage boy when he served in Austin around 1978 and also admitted to sexually abusing a minor male a few years later, according to information released by the Diocese of Winona.

The diocese released details Monday about 14 priests who have been credibly accused of sexually abusing children, calling their decision an effort to be transparent and promote healing.

One of the 14 was Jack Krough, 64, who was ordained in 1975 and began serving at Austin’s St. Augustine Catholic Church and Pacelli Catholic Schools the next year. Krough transferred to Winona in 1980, but not before he allegedly sexually abused a minor male.

In 1993, Krough admitted he took a photo found in his home of a nude 16-year-old back in 1978 when he served in Austin. He was sent to St. Luke’s Institute for an assessment but was returned to the ministry in New Richland and Waldorf, Minn.

Krough admitted to sexually abusing a minor between 1979 and 1981, after someone reported the crime to the diocese in 1997. Krough was removed from ministry at St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Austin and Our Lady of Loretto in Brownsdale and taken to St. Luke’s for treatment. He resigned from the ministry in 2002, after he was confronted in another incident involving inappropriate touching.

As of December, Krough lived in Barron, Wis.

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MEXICO
National Catholic Reporter

David Agren Catholic News Service | Jun. 24, 2014

MEXICO CITY The archdiocese of Tijuana has suspended seven priests — including one sued for abuse in Los Angeles — over allegations of sexual abuse.

The priests are not allowed to practice their ministries, Mexican media reported.

An archdiocesan spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press the American priest was Fr. Jeffrey Newell, who worked previously in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

No other names were released by the archdiocese.

In a June 17 statement, the archdiocese said: “As a church we make a call to those that have been victims of abuse to minors or witnesses to it to file complaints with the competent civil authorities.”

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MINNESOTA
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis

Updated June 9, 2014

On April 2, 2014, Archbishop John Nienstedt gave his deposition in the case of Doe #1, which is a civil lawsuit against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Diocese of Winona, and Thomas Adamson.

We offer the deposition in its entirety, as part of our renewed commitment to transparency. As you will notice, the Archbishop answered every question asked. The court pre-determined the length of the four hour deposition, and the Archbishop continued to answer questions past the time allotted. There was not a single question asked about Thomas Adamson and the allegations of abuse of Doe #1 in 1976-1977.

You will see a searchable PDF of the deposition below.

You will also see links to the entire video of the deposition (in three chapters) posted below, allowing you to see the questions and answers in context.

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MINNESOTA
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis

On May 8, 2014, Andrew Eisenzimmer, who served the archdiocese as Chancellor for Civil Affairs between 2005 and 2012, was deposed in the Doe 1 case in St. Paul. The case is a civil lawsuit against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Diocese of Winona, and Thomas Adamson for allegations of abuse between 1976 and 1977. We offer the deposition as part of our renewed commitment to transparency and disclosure. However, selected portions were redacted—and others that were ordered sealed have been removed—to protect victims.

PDF:
Deposition of Andrew Eisenzimmer

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MINNESOTA
Star Tribune

Article by: JEAN HOPFENSPERGER , Star Tribune Updated: June 24, 2014

Priest is among those identified as credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors.

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis took no action against the Rev. Jerome Kern when parents complained that he had sexually abused their sons, Kern said in a court deposition released Tuesday morning.

Kern is among more than 30 priests the archdiocese identified last December as being credibly accused of abusing minors. He has been sued several times, including last November as the scandal over the archdiocese’s handling of abuse claims was escalating.

The plaintiff, a man in his 50s who claims Kern abused him in the 1970s, is represented by the law firm of Jeff Anderson & Associates, which has sued the archdiocese multiple times since a change in state law allowed the filing of suits claiming decades-old abuse.

The St. Paul-based firm released the deposition Tuesday as part of a series of public releases of sworn statements in clergy abuse cases, including testimony by Archbishop John Nienstedt and former Archbishop Harry Flynn.

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MINNESOTA
Jeff Anderson & Associates

[Fr. Jerome Kern file]
[Timeline]
[key documents]
[deposition]
[video]

DOE 26
Plaintiff,
Defendants

Videotape deposìtion of FATHER JEROME KERN, taken putsuant to Notice of Taking Deposition, and taken before Gary W. Hermes, a Notary PubIic in and for the county of Ramsey, State of Minnesota, on the 15th day of Àpril, 20I4, at 445 Minnesota street, St. Paul, Minnesota, commencing at approximately 9:31 o’clock a.m.

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MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press

By Richard Chin
rchin@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 06/24/2014

[with video]

Jerome Kern, a Twin Cities priest accused in a 2013 lawsuit of sexually abusing a teenage boy in the 1970s, said he didn’t feel he was doing anything wrong when he had physical contact with children in the past, according to a deposition transcript released Tuesday.

“I never saw anything myself in terms of sexual abuse,” testified Kern, who worked in St. Paul and Forest Lake parishes and is accused by a man indentified as Doe 26 who says Kern “engaged in unpermitted sexual contact” with him in the 1970s when Kern was serving as a priest at Our Lady of Grace in Edina.

Over the decades, at least 20 individuals have alleged that Kern abused them when they were children, according to St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson, who is representing Doe 26 in the lawsuit against Kern and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Anderson’s office released a transcript Tuesday of a deposition Kern gave on April 15.

In his deposition, Kern, a priest since 1966, said his conduct with children was never reported to police as far as he knows, nobody from the archdiocese told him what he was doing was a crime or warned him he could go to jail for touching children, and he was never concerned that he would be arrested for his behavior with children.

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MICHIGAN
Fox 17

[with video]

by Nicole DiDonato
Reporter

WEST MICHIGAN (June 23, 2014) — It’s a hidden crisis in West Michigan. Experts who work with victims of sexual crimes say thousands of minors are sold into human trafficking right in our own communities.

If you think human trafficking only happens in third world countries, think again.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates 300,000 minors are at risk of being sold every year in the U.S. And it’s happening even closer to home.

“Unfortunately the state department estimates in West Michigan alone, there are 2,400 minors for sale at any given time, mostly on the internet. And this is in the land of the free, ” said Rebecca McDonald, founder and president of Women At Risk International. …

WAR gets up to 20 tips a month and turns them over to law enforcement.

Just recently, police arrested WCSG radio personality, John Balyo, and charged him with first degree criminal sexual conduct. McDonald believes this is a wake-up call.

“Law enforcement is there to be the judgement,” says McDonald.

“Our job is to be compassionate and to reach out to the victims of this man who have years of recovery and to even his family members who are victims in this situation.”

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MICHIGAN
Fox 17

by Paul Cicchini
Reporter

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (June 24, 2014) – A former radio host who is now facing criminal sex charges has been removed as a volunteer with the Kent County Sheriff’s Department.

John Balyo had helped the traffic squad since 2004.

The group, which is a 501(c)(3), assisted with community parades and other events.

Balyo was arrested Friday in Gaylord at the Big Ticket Festival.

Monday, he was charged with two counts of criminal sexual conduct involving a child.

According to a police report, Balyo had sexual contact with a 12-year-old boy.

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MICHIGAN
WOOD TV

By Steve Kelso and 24 Hour News 8 web staff

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. (WOOD) — A longtime Christian radio host allegedly admitting to sexual assaulting at least one 12-year-old boy.

John Balyo was arraigned Monday in a Battle Creek courtroom on one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. It’s a felony charge that could land him in jail for the rest of his life.

Balyo shook his head as the charge against him was read.

He was arrested as the result of a federal investigation into Ronald Moser of Battle Creek. Police say Balyo paid Moser to arrange sexual liaisons with young boys for sex and that one of the encounters — involving a 12-year-old — happened in Battle Creek in May.

Calhoun County Prosecutor David Gilbert told Magistrate David Heiss Monday that Balyo confessed to police.

“It is my understanding based on the police report that the defendant did make admissions to count one,” Gilbert said.

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