ABUSE TRACKER

LOS ANGELES (CA)
LA Observed

By Kevin Roderick | January 21, 2013

Documents ordered released from the sexual abuse files of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles are starting to get out. Today’s LA Times lede is a grabber: “Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, including keeping them out of California to avoid prosecution…”

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Southwest Riverside News Network

By City News Service, on January 21, 2013

Former Archbishop Roger Mahony and a top adviser discussed ways to prevent law enforcement from learning about molestations of children by clergy more than a decade before the abuses became public knowledge, according to internal Catholic church records released today.

Communications penned in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief adviser on sex abuse cases, document efforts by the diocese to keep law enforcement in the dark, the Los Angeles Times reported on its website.

In the confidential letters filed in connection with a civil court case — and obtained by The Times — Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys.

Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent the clergymen from seeing therapists who might alert authorities.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
The New York Times

[links to the documents – Anthony DeMarco, Jeff Anderson & Associates]

By IAN LOVETT

Published: January 21, 2013

LOS ANGELES — The retired archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, and other high-ranking clergymen in the archdiocese worked quietly to keep evidence of child molesting away from law enforcement officials and shield abusive priests from criminal prosecution more than a decade before the scandal became public, according to confidential church records.

The documents, filed in court as part of lawsuit against the archdiocese and posted online by The Los Angeles Times on Monday, offer the clearest glimpse yet of how the archdiocese dealt with abusive priests in the decades before the scandal broke, including Cardinal Mahony’s personal involvement in covering up their crimes.

Rather than defrocking priests and contacting the police, the archdiocese sent priests who had molested children to out-of-state treatment facilities, in large part because therapists in California were legally obligated to report any evidence of child abuse to the police, the files make clear.

In 1986, Cardinal Mahony wrote to a New Mexico treatment center where one abusive priest, Msgr. Peter Garcia, had been sent.

“I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors,” Cardinal Mahony wrote.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
dotCommonweal

January 21, 2013, 9:28 pm

Posted by Paul Moses

Newly released documents detailing how far church leaders in Los Angeles went to conceal clergy sexual abuse in the late 1980s help fill in the story of the scandal and how it developed at the highest level of the nation’s largest diocese. As reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.

The documents also show that in addition to hiding cases from police, an effort was made to avoid having predatory priests get counseling within the state because the California therapists would need to report the abuse to authorities. These scenes from internal records of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles offer further evidence that a coverup was orchestrated at high levels of the church. There is no sense that Mahony and his vicar were misled by therapists. They knew the abusive priests’ conduct was criminal. They may not have known the full scope of the sexual abuse that existed, but they knew it was a gigantic problem and sought to keep it secret.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

CALIFORNIA
Redlands Daily Facts

By Dana Bartholomew, Barbara Jones and Brenda Gazzar, Staff Writers
dailynews.com
Posted: 01/21/2013

Nearly a decade ago, Manuel Vega held a weeklong sidewalk vigil downtown in the hope of persuading the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to come clean about sexual abuse by its priests.

With Monday’s court-ordered release of hundreds of pages of unredacted personnel files, Vega feels that his prayers – and those of other clerical abuse victims – are finally being answered.

“Overall, I think it’s a win-win,” said Vega, a 46-year-old former policeman who lives in Oxnard and who testified more than a decade ago in the early days of the abuse scandal that eventually shattered the church.

“I think this should serve as a model for the release of other (unredacted) files by the archdiocese,” said Vega, a former altar boy whose lawsuit claimed he was abused by Father Fidencio Silva at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Oxnard.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
South Bend Tribune

[links to the documents – Anthony DeMarco, Jeff Anderson & Associates]

Reuters
12:36 a.m. EST, January 22, 2013

(Reuters) – Two Catholic Church officials in California plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement as late as 1987, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday, citing newly released internal Church records.

The records show that Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony, who is now retired, and his top adviser on child sex abuse cases, Monsignor Thomas Curry, worked with other Church officials in 1987 to send priests accused of abuse out of state to avoid prosecution, the newspaper said.

Mahony and Curry also tried to keep pedophile priests from confessing to therapists who would be obligated to report the crimes, the newspaper said, citing the records, which were released on Los Angeles Times’ website.

Curry even suggested in 1987 they send a pedophile priest to “a lawyer who is also a psychiatrist” to put the priest’s “reports under the protection of privilege,” the Times reported.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Anthony DeMarco
Jeff Anderson & Associates

[This site has links to priest files from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.]

January 21, 2013

Because of one survivor’s fight in the California Civil Courts against Father Nicolas Aguilar Rivera and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, never seen before documents containing vital evidence of how clergy abuse cases were handled by the Archdiocese are now available for public view.

Portions of the thousands of documents filed in this case are posted on the web site www.abusedinsocal.com. The documents, which were not a part of the documents involved in the 2007 settlements with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, demonstrate that former Archbishop and now Cardinal Roger Mahony knew from his first days in office that priests under his supervision were sexually abusing children in Los Angeles.

The documents further demonstrate that contrary to Mahony’s past claims, he was imtimately involve in handling the sex abuse scandal of priests in Los Angeles from 1985 to 2011 and communicated directly with priest perpetrators and their therapists–just as his predecessors McIntrye and Manning had done before him.

Also included in the documents is evidence that as Archbishop, Mahony worked with his Vicar for Clergy to thwart law enforcement involvement by ordering Pastors to not give Altar Boy lists to LAPD detectives, while at the same time, cozying up to high ranking officers at LAPD Juvenile Division. …
Priest files.

A Priest cheat sheet

Father Cristobal Garcia O.P. 1985

Father Eleuterio Ramos 1975

Father James Ford 1987

Father Larry Lovell C.M.F. 1985

Father Lynn Caffoe 1975

Father Matthew Sprouffske O.Carm 1986

Father Michael Baker 1986

Father Michael Baker 1987

Father Nicolas Aguilar Rivera 1987

Father Nicolas Aguilar Rivera II 1988

Father Santiago Tamayo 1987

Monsignor Peter Garcia 1984

Monsignor Peter Garcia 1987

Wempe LAARCH 021282

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on January 21, 2013

The complete library of documents can be viewed here.

For years, all we heard from Cardinal Roger Mahony was that he “may have made mistakes” and that “new policies would ensure child safety.”

Now we know that Cardinal Mahony’s role in the cover-up of child sex abuse in the Los Angeles Archdiocese was hands-on, insidious and evil.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“In a letter about Father Michael Wempe, who had acknowledged using a 12-year-old parishioner as what a church official called his “sex partner,” [Msgr. Thomas J.] Curry recounted extensive conversations with the priest about potential criminal prosecution.

“He is afraid … records will be sought by the courts at some time and that they could convict him,”Curry wrote to Mahony. ”He is very aware that what he did comes within the scope of criminal law.”

Curry proposed Wempe could go to an out-of-state diocese “if need be.” He called it “surprising” that a church-paid counselor hadn’t reported Wempe to police and wrote that he and Wempe ”agreed it would be better if Mike did not return to him.”

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

IRELAND
GlobalPost

* Third cleric to face action for challenging teaching
* Called for reconsideration on contraception, celibacy
* Irish relations with Vatican strained over sex abuse

By Stephen Mangan

DUBLIN, Jan 21 (Reuters) – An Irish Roman Catholic priest said he is being threatened with excommunication by the Vatican because of his advocacy of liberal views on some of the Church’s teachings.

Father Tony Flannery is the third cleric in the past three months to face disciplinary action for challenging Roman Catholic teachings, following the expulsion of a priest in the United States and stripping the title of another in Austria.

Flannery, 66, was suspended last year by the Vatican’s watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for calling for a reconsideration of Church teachings on issues such as contraception, homosexuality, women’s ordination and clerical celibacy.

“One of the threats that the Vatican have used against me is the threat of excommunication … my order has told me that I may also be facing dismissal if they are ordered by the Vatican to do so,” Flannery told Reuters on Monday.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

CONNECTICUT
CT Post

Anne M. Amato

Published 5:52 pm, Monday, January 21, 2013

BRIDGEPORT — Looking back there were the usual warning signs, those nagging red flags. In Monsignor Kevin Wallin’s case, there was the weight loss, the change in his usually meticulous appearance and his erratic behavior that concerned his parishioners and others, including church officials.

“He just didn’t look right; he didn’t seem the same,” said Brian Wallace, spokesman for the Diocese of Bridgeport.

Then came the talk about inappropriate sexual behavior by Wallin, then pastor at St. Augustine’s Church. “We became aware that he was acting out sexually — with men — in the church rectory,” said Wallace.

The main concern was to rule out what Wallin, 61, was doing was criminal, in particular that he was doing anything inappropriate with children.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times

The former lead­er of the Los Angeles arch­diocese, Car­din­al Ro­ger M. Ma­hony, and a top ad­visor dis­cussed ways to con­ceal the sexu­al ab­use of chil­dren from law en­force­ment of­fi­cials, ac­cord­ing to in­tern­al church re­cords re­leased Monday.

In memos writ­ten to Ma­hony in 1986 and 1987 con­tained in per­son­nel files for 14 priests and filed this month as evid­ence in a court case, his chief ad­visor on sex ab­use cases pro­posed strategies to pre­vent po­lice from in­vest­ig­at­ing three priests who had ad­mit­ted mo­lest­ing young boys to church of­fi­cials.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony on Monday apologized for the way the L.A. archdiocese dealt with priest child abuse claims after a new round of documents were released.

“I am sorry,” Mahony’s statement concluded.

The new documents show:

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement.

DOCUMENTS: Los Angeles Archdiocese priest abuse files

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement had been known previously. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

OKLAHOMA
Survivors Network of Those

Posted by Barbara Dorris on January 21, 2013

A case against a Victory Christian Church employee is set to move forward tomorrow, but he has filed a motion to get the case dropped.

We hope that the case against Israel Castillo is able to move forward and is not dismissed by some sort of technicality. The charges against him – making lewd comments and indecent proposals to a 14 year old girl – are serious and disturbing. Even more disturbing is the trend of child sexual abuse at Victory Christian Church, where Castillo worked as a janitor. Recently, another Victory Christian Church employee was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the rape of a 13-year-old girl on church grounds. Five other VCC officials stand accused of misdemeanors resulting from their delayed response to reporting that crime.

The victim in the case against Castillo deserves to have her day in court. We hope that the judge in this case will allow proceedings to move forward.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by Joelle Casteix on January 21, 2013

These documents hold the truth that victims have known for years: Archdiocese officials knew their priests were abusing kids and concealed these heinous crimes.

For more than five years since the the LA settlement, victims and the public have been promised the truth of the documents. Instead, we were given delays, legal maneuvers and double talk. And since coming to Los Angeles, Archbishop Gomez has continued this secrecy and betrayal. What is he doing to ensure that crimes like the ones in these files have been stopped? What will we learn when all of the documents promised in the 2007 settlement are released?

We urge law enforcement to carefully evaluate all of these files and do the best they can to deliver criminal indictments to anyone who abused or knowingly endangered a child. It is only when criminals are punished to the fullest extent of the law that children are kept safe from abuse.

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony
Archbishop Emeritus of Los Angeles

January 21, 2013

With the upcoming release of priests’ personnel files in the Archdiocese’s long struggle with the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, my thoughts and prayers turn toward the victims of this sinful abuse.

Various steps toward safeguarding all children in the Church began here in 1987 and progressed year by year as we learned more about those who abused and the ineffectiveness of so-called “treatments” at the time. Nonetheless, even as we began to confront the problem, I remained naïve myself about the full and lasting impact these horrible acts would have on the lives of those who were abused by men who were supposed to be their spiritual guides. That fuller awareness came for me when I began visiting personally with victims. During 2006, 2007 and 2008, I held personal visits with some 90 such victims.

Those visits were heart-wrenching experiences for me as I listened to the victims describe how they had their childhood and innocence stolen from them by clergy and by the Church. At times we cried together, we prayed together, we spent quiet moments in remembrance of their dreadful experience; at times the victims vented their pent up anger and frustration against me and the Church.

Toward the end of our visits I would offer the victims my personal apology—and took full responsibility—for my own failure to protect fully the children and youth entrusted into my care. I apologized for all of us in the Church for the years when ignorance, bad decisions and moral failings resulted in the unintended consequences of more being done to protect the Church—and even the clergy perpetrators—than was done to protect our children.

I have a 3 x 5 card for every victim I met with on the altar of my small chapel. I pray for them every single day. As I thumb through those cards I often pause as I am reminded of each personal story and the anguish that accompanies that life story.

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times

[with links to documents]

[statement from Cardinal Mahony]

Documents from the late 1980s show that Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and another archdiocese official discussed strategies to keep police from discovering that children were being sexually abused by priests.

By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times
January 21, 2013

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

One such case that has previously received little attention is that of Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted preying for decades on undocumented children in Spanish-speaking parishes. After Garcia’s discharge from a New Mexico treatment center for pedophile clergy, Mahony ordered him to stay away from California “for the foreseeable future” in order to avoid legal accountability, the files show. “I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors,” the archbishop wrote to the treatment center’s director in July 1986.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

LOS ANGELES (CA)
Huffington Post

GILLIAN FLACCUS | January 21, 2013

LOS ANGELES — Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files.

The confidential records filed in a lawsuit against the archdiocese disclose how the church handled abuse allegations for decades and also reveal dissent from a top Mahony aide who criticized his superiors for covering up allegations of abuse rather than protecting children.

Notes inked by Mahony demonstrate he was disturbed about abuse and sent problem priests for treatment, but there also were lengthy delays or oversights in some cases. Mahony received psychological reports on some priests that mentioned the possibility of many other victims, for example, but there is no indication that he or other church leaders investigated further.

“This is all intolerable and unacceptable to me,” Mahony wrote in 1991 on a file of the Rev. Lynn Caffoe, a priest suspected of locking boys in his room, videotaping their crotches and running up a $100 phone sex bill while with a boy. Caffoe was sent for therapy and removed from ministry, but Mahony didn’t move to defrock him until 2004, a decade after the archdiocese lost track of him.

“He is a fugitive from justice,” Mahony wrote to the Vatican’s Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. “A check of the Social Security index discloses no report of his demise, so presumably he is alive somewhere.”

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DEUTSCHLAND
Cicero

Vor drei Jahren wurde Deutschland aufgeschreckt durch Missbrauchsfälle in katholischen Einrichtungen. Danach meldeten sich immer mehr Betroffene, die gesellschaftliche Dimension des Themas offenbarte sich. Was hat sich seither getan?

Es ist fast auf den Tag genau drei Jahre her, dass der Jesuitenpater Klaus Mertes, Rektor des Berliner Canisius-Kollegs, in einem Brief an ehemalige Schüler zum ersten Mal öffentlich machte, dass an der Schule Minderjährige durch Patres missbraucht und misshandelt wurden. Kurz danach wurden ähnliche Vorgänge aus der Odenwaldschule bekannt. Es war, als ob sich eine Schleuse geöffnet hätte: Hunderte Menschen meldeten sich und erzählten, wie ihnen als Jugendliche sexuelle Gewalt in kirchlichen und nicht kirchlichen Einrichtungen angetan wurde. Schnell war klar, dass es sich um ein gesamtgesellschaftliches Problem handelt. Die Bundesregierung benannte einen Missbrauchsbeauftragten.

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DEUTSCHLAND
donakurier

Eichstätt (EK) Hat der Bruch der katholischen Bischöfe mit dem Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer, der die Studie zu Missbrauchsfällen hätte durchführen sollen, auch Konsequenzen im Bistum Eichstätt? Wie sieht es aus in der Diözese in Sachen Missbrauchsfällen, deren Aufklärung und der Prävention?

Nach der Entscheidung der deutschen Bischöfe, eine professionelle Studie zu Fällen des sexuellen Missbrauchs in der katholischen Kirche durchführen zu lassen, und der Erleichterung darüber, ist vor einigen Tagen schnell Ernüchterung eingekehrt: Die Kooperation mit Christian Pfeiffer vom Kriminologischen Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen ist unter großem medialen Echo gescheitert. Während Christian Pfeiffer den Bischöfen Vertuschungspraktiken vorwirft, herrscht in den Diözesen Unverständnis über die Arbeitsmethoden des Kriminologen.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

By Joe Holleman jholleman@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8254

A priest who was cited for peace disturbance in STL in 2007 is now a leading theologian in England and in the forefront of the Catholic Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage laws in the UK.

In January 2007, the Rev. Andrew Pinsent was issued a court summons in connection with an incident in front of St. Ambrose Church on The Hill.

Police said Pinsent placed his hands on the shoulders of Barb Dorris of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). Dorris had been distributing fliers in front of the church before Mass, informing parishioners about the group’s concern with two priests who had served briefly at the church.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

OKLAHOMA
Tulsa World

By JARREL WADE World Staff Writer
Published: 1/21/2013

A man accused of making a lewd or indecent proposal to a child at Victory Christian Center is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday where a judge could decide whether the case against him will continue to trial.

Israel Shalom Castillo, 23, has pleaded not guilty and has a pending motion to have the case dismissed, arguing not enough evidence was presented at a preliminary hearing to have him bound over for trial.

The lewd or indecent proposal charge involves a 14-year-old girl Castillo met through the church.

Castillo and Chris Denman, both Victory Christian Center members who worked as janitors for the church, were charged in September with separate child-sex crimes.

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IRELAND
BBC News

A Catholic priest has claimed he has been threatened with excommunication from the church because of his views on matters such as women’s ordination.

Fr Tony Flannery, a high-profile Irish priest, is known for his liberal views on contraception and homosexuality.

Last year, he was disciplined by the Vatican’s watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

He claims he has now been asked to sign a pledge, supporting official church teaching on sexual matters.

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TENNESSEE
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by Barbara Dorris on January 21, 2013

A priest convicted of sex crimes in 2011 is seeking to have his conviction overturned. We are unsure of on what grounds Fr. William Casey is using to try to get his conviction on charges of aggravated rape overturned. Whatever it is, we hope that his appeal is tossed out.

Fr. Casey himself admitted that the accusation was credible and did not protest when he was forced to retire from the Diocese of Knoxville. The fact that he is now trying to get his conviction tossed out is simply legal maneuvering and attempts to exploit legal technicalities.

Tossing out this conviction would not only cause more pain to the victim who bravely stood up and brought these charges, but would undermine the legal system itself by allowing the guilty to get away. We hope that this conviction will be upheld and this painful chapter will be closed.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Sueddeutsche

Eichstätt – Nach dem Ausstieg der katholischen Kirche aus dem Forschungsprojekt mit dem Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer hat der Eichstätter Bischof Gregor Maria Hanke zur Selbstkritik aufgerufen. Die Bischöfe müssten sich der Frage stellen, warum die Probleme, an denen die Zusammenarbeit letztlich gescheitert sei, nicht schon am Anfang im Blick gewesen seien, sagte Hanke am Samstag beim Neujahrsempfang des Eichstätter Diözesanrats. Zu fragen sei auch, warum überhaupt die Wahl auf Pfeiffer gefallen sei. Am heutigen Montag tagt der Ständige Rat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz in Würzburg.

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DEUTSCHLAND
BR

Der Streit zwischen der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz und dem Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer schwelt weiter. Die Aufarbeitung der Missbrauchsfälle ist auch Thema bei dem Treffen in Würzburg. Äußern wollten sich die Bischöfe bisher nicht.

Zum Auftakt des Treffens des ständigen Rates im Kloster Himmelspforten am Montag (21.01.13) gab es keine weiteren Informationen zur Aufarbeitung der Missbrauchsfälle. Es gebe nichts Neues zu berichten, ließ eine Sprecherin ausrichten. Die Zusammenkunft sei nur ein regelmäßiges Arbeitstreffen. Über die Tagesordnung der Klausur teilte die Kirche vorab nichts mit. Es handle sich um eines der regelmäßigen Arbeitstreffen.

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DEUTSCHLAND
kath.net

„Man mag sich fragen, weshalb das Projekt überhaupt mit Christian Pfeiffer geschnürt wurde, der doch von manchen seiner Fachkollegen skeptisch und kritisch beurteilt wird“, sagte der Eichstätter Bischof beim Neujahrsempfang seines Diözesanrates.

Eichstätt-Bonn (kath.net/pl) Der Eichstätter Bischof Gregor Maria Hanke (Foto) kritisierte in seinem Grußwort anlässlich des Neujahrsempfangs des Diözesanrates der Katholiken im Zusammenhang mit der abgesagten Zusammenarbeit mit dem Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer die Deutsche Bischofskonferenz. „Man mag sich fragen, weshalb das Projekt überhaupt mit Christian Pfeiffer geschnürt wurde, der doch von manchen seiner Fachkollegen skeptisch und kritisch beurteilt wird.

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TENNESSEE
Greenville Sun

BY KEN LITTLE
STAFF WRITER
A legal brief filed this week with the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals on behalf of former Roman Catholic priest William Casey seeks reversal of his sex crime convictions in Tennessee, or a new trial.

Casey, 79, was convicted in July 2011 by a Sullivan County Criminal Court jury of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and two counts of aggravated rape in connection with sex abuse of then-altar boy Warren Tucker between 1978 and 1980.

At the time, Casey, a long-time resident of the Camp Creek community of Greene County, was serving as priest at St. Dominic Catholic Church in Kingsport.

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TENNESSEE
WCYB

KINGSPORT, Tenn. –
A former Kingsport Catholic priest convicted of rape, wants a new trial.

William Casey was sentenced to 35 to 40 years in prison after being convicted of molesting and altar boy more than three decades ago. This was after a Sullivan County jury found him guilty.

Casey, a long-time resident of the Camp Creek community of Greene County, was serving as priest at St. Dominic Catholic Church in Kingsport when the victim told authorities the crimes happened.

According to the Greeneville Sun, a brief was filed Tuesday by Casey’s attorneys requesting the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals to “reverse his conviction and dismiss the indictment against him with prejudice.”

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IRELAND
RTE News

An Irish priest has claimed he is being threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church for supporting an open discussion on issues like women’s ordination.

Father Tony Flannery has called on the Irish bishops to state publicly what they think about the disciplining of priests like himself.

He blamed the breakdown of his year-long exchanges with the Church authorities on the intervention of Archbishop Gerhard Muller.

Archbishop Muller who took over as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in July last year.

Fr Flannery told a news conference in Dublin that the German Archbishop had raised the bar for his readmission to active ministry by demanding he accept the Vatican’s ban on debate on women’s ordination and a pledge to support all Church teaching on sexual matters.

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IRELAND
Irish Central

By
PATRICK COUNIHAN,
IrishCentral Staff Writer

Published Monday, January 21, 2013

Outspoken Irish cleric Father Tony Flannery has admitted he faces excommunication from the church for backing the rights of women to become priests.

The 66-year-old priest has told a Dublin press conference that he is considering legal action against the Vatican after he was silenced.

Catholic Church leaders disciplined Father Flannery over his outspoken views last year.

He was also told that he will only be allowed to return to ministry if he ends his leadership of the Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Southern Daily Echo

A HAMPSHIRE paedophile priest who was jailed for life for a catalogue of abuse against young boys, including raping an 11-year-old, has failed in a bid to reduce his sentence.

Perverted Simon Thomas made the challenge at the highest court in England almost seven years after being handed the life term by a judge who said he posed a danger to young boys that might never end.

Aged 44 at the time, he was the ordained minister in the United Reformed Church in Hythe, just a stone’s throw from his home in Atheling Road where he lived with his wife and children. Southampton Crown Court heard how the father-of-four had told scores of boys he met on the Internet that he was gay but in a heterosexual relationship with his wife.

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IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) affirms in the strongest possible terms our confidence in and solidarity with Fr Tony Flannery as he strives to clear his name and we wish to protest against unjust treatment he has received from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The ACP supports Fr. Flannery in his efforts to resist the undermining of his integrity as an individual, a priest and a member of the Redemptorist Order.

The effort to depict him as ‘disloyal’ and ‘dissident’ is unwarranted and unfair, but also extremely ill-advised in the present pastoral context in Ireland.

The ACP is disturbed by the procedures evident in this case: the unwillingness to deal directly with the accused person; the injunction to secrecy; the presumption of guilt; the lack of due process. They suggest a callousness and even brutality that is in sharp contrast to the compassion of Jesus Christ.

The CDF argues that its’ instruction to secrecy protects the priest’s reputation. We believe that the priest himself should be the person to decide whether and with whom he should speak or whether he might decide to remain silent.

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IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

Sunday 20th January 2013

The Irish Redemptorist Community is deeply saddened by the breakdown in communication between Fr. Tony Flannery C.Ss.R. and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Fr. Tony Flannery is highly regarded and respected by many in Ireland, both within and outside of the Redemptorist Congregation. He has been an effective parish missioner all over the country since the mid 1970s and from this context has raised matters which he believes need greater dialogue, debate and consideration. Within the Dublin Province of the Redemptorists there exists a very lively spirit of debate and dialogue; we are and over many years have been, committed to mature discourse. Although not all Redemptorists would accept Fr. Flannery’s views on all matters, we do understand and support his efforts to listen carefully to and at times to articulate the views of people he encounters in the course of his ministry.

As Irish Redemptorists we appreciate the difficulties this situation has created for others, especially for our Superior General in Rome, Fr. Michael Brehl. He has made every possible effort to resolve the matters which have emerged between the CDF and Fr. Flannery.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

Fr Tony Flannery

Three days after my 66th birthday I find myself forbidden to minister as a priest, with a threat of excommunication and dismissal from my congregation hanging over me. How did I find myself in this situation?

I joined the Redemptorist congregation in 1964 and was ordained 10 years later. That was the era of great openness in the Catholic Church. We believed in freedom of thought and of conscience, and that church teaching was not something to be imposed rigidly on the people we served – they were intelligent and educated, and could take responsibility for their lives.

As preachers we must try to present the message of Christ in a way and a language that spoke to the reality of people’s lives. This necessitated a willingness to listen to the people, to understand their hopes and joys, their struggles and fears.

Helping people to deal with the teaching on contraception during the 1970s was a great training ground. Just repeating the official line of Humanae Vitae was no help. During those years priests and people alike learned a lot about how to form their consciences and make mature decisions about all areas of their lives. As priests we learned more from people than they learned from us.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Ireland’s Redemptorists have said they are “deeply saddened at the breakdown in communication” between their colleague Fr Tony Flannery and Rome’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Fr Flannery was removed from public ministry last February by the CDF pending the outcome of its inquiries into views he expressed in the Redemptorists’ Reality magazine.

In a strong statement last night, the Redemptorists said “we do understand and support his efforts to listen carefully to and at times to articulate the views of people he encounters in the course of his ministry”.

They felt “immense regret that some structures or processes of dialogue have not yet been found in the church which have a greater capacity to engage with challenging voices from among God’s people, while respecting the key responsibility and central role of the CDF”.

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INDIANA
The Observer

By John Cameron
News Editor

Published: Monday, January 21, 2013

Leadership and protecting children from sexual abuse will be the focus of a pair of lectures presented this week by Dr. Kathleen McChesney, former executive director of the Office of Child Protection at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

The first presentation in the Provost’s Distinguished Women’s Lecture series, “Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: Where are We Now?” will take place Monday night in McKenna Hall. McChesney said the talk would include an assessment of the problem and a discussion of potential solutions.

“I’m going to discuss the nature and scope of the problem of sexual abuse over time in the U.S. and some of the actions that can be taken by Catholic bishops [and other Church leaders] to respond to allegations of abuse,” she said. “I’m going to talk about, from my perspective, having worked on this issue … why it’s important.”

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GERMANY
Spiegel

The German Catholic Church called off an independent review of allegations of sexual abuse in its ranks this week. The head of the investigation accused the Church of censorship. On Thursday, the two sides traded blame as German commentators largely mourned the end of the examination.

Representatives of the German Catholic Church and independent investigators traded blame Thursday after an agreement to have an independent examination of sexual abuse in the Church broke down earlier this week.

The Church’s Bishops’ Conference called off the investigation — agreed to in 2011 after a nationwide abuse scandal the year before — citing a lack of trust with the investigators. The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) had been tasked with investigating personnel files from churches in all of the country’s 27 dioceses, to look for and examine cases of abuse.

But the Bishops’ Conference was allegedly unable to agree on a way to cooperate with the KFN, with some citing the issues of privacy and data protection. Some dioceses refused to make documents available, reportedly out of fear that private information on those involved could possibly be made public.

Christian Pfeiffer, who as the director of the KFN had led the investigation, told SPIEGEL ONLINE this week that the Church had refused to cooperate with the investigation, and that he had had to remind the Church of its promise of transparency.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Wochenblatt

Die Bischöfe sollen im Streit um die Missbrauchsstudie der katholischen Kirche ihre Unterlassungsforderung gegen den Leiter des Kriminologischen Forschungsinstituts Niedersachsen, Christian Pfeiffer, zurückziehen.

Dazu hat Pfeiffer den Vorsitzenden der Bischofskonferenz, Robert Zollitsch, aufgefordert. Der Verband der Diözesen Deutschlands (VDD) hatte von Pfeiffer verlangt, die Darstellung zu unterlassen, die Kirche habe bei dem Projekt “Zensurwünsche geltend gemacht”. Pfeiffer hatte sich geweigert, die Erklärung zu unterschreiben, und bei den in Betracht kommenden Landgerichten Schutzschriften für den Fall hinterlegt, dass die Kirche ihm die Äußerung gerichtlich verbieten lassen wollte.

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DEUTSCHLAND
NDR

Im juristischen Streit zwischen der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz und dem Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer ist weiter kein Ende in Sicht. Anwälte des Verbandes der Diözesen Deutschlands (VDD) schickten am Freitag an Pfeiffer und sein Kriminologisches Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen (KFN) “eine konkretisierte Abmahnung”, wie der Sprecher der Bischofskonferenz, Matthias Kopp, am Wochenende bestätigte. Die Bischöfe wehren sich gegen Pfeiffers Vorwürfe, sie hätten die Erstveröffentlichung von Forschungsergebnissen verhindern oder zensieren wollen. Pfeiffer reagierte prompt und bezeichnete die Unterlassungsdrohung am Sonntag in einer Vorabmeldung des Nachrichtenmagazins “Spiegel” als “reine Show”.

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GERMANY
Vatican Insider

It was set up in February 2010 and was meant to encourage those who had suffered sex abuse in the Church to come forward. The hotline was apparently shut down due to lack of use

Alessandro Speciale
Vatican City

After the German Catholic Church stopped the KFN’s (Kriminologischen Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen) study into the phenomenon of paedophilia in the Church because of a disagreement that arose between the two, on Thursday German bishops announced they were closing down the special hotline created as a first point of call for abuse victims.

Together with the study, the hotline was one of the key elements of the strategy for countering the paedophile priest scandal which exploded in Germany in 2010. The hotline was aimed at “encouraging victims to talk about their experiences of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.”

The hotline was initially meant to stay open until September 2011 but the project was extended several times, until it was finally shut down last December. The line was closed at the end of 2012 due to “a drop in the requests for advice sent” by post, online and via the telephone, a statement issued by the German Episcopate reads. There was no longer any reason to keep the hotline open.

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UNITED STATES
Pope Crimes & Vatican Evils…

Paris Arrow

The same medieval Reign of Vatican Terror that forced Galileo to sign a “Confession” against his scientific beliefs (read below) is today terrorizing Irish priest Tony Flannery, 66, who is now being forced to write, sign and publish – against his beliefs – a statement agreeing that women should never be ordained as priests and that he would adhere to church orthodoxy on matters like contraception and homosexuality (if he wants to return to ministry). Read more about the Irish priests being terrorized by the Vatican in our related article: Hypocrite Benedict silenced Fr. Tony Flannery, Brian D’Arcy – A compilation… but he does not silence Cardinal Bernard Law and JP2 Army – John Paul II Pedophile Priests

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AUSTRALIA
Moonee Valley Weekly

By NICK TOSCANO
Jan. 21, 2013

A WESTERN suburbs counselling service is dealing with a surge in demand from sexual assault victims as government inquiries trigger renewed trauma for survivors.

The Western Region Centre Against Sexual Assault (WestCASA), which helps hundreds of western suburbs residents a year, has had a 30 per cent statewide increase in demand since the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse began in April and the Royal Commission was announced in November.

WestCASA executive officer Jane Vanderstoel warned that demand was likely to jump further when proceedings begin.

“All our centres have had contact with people who have not talked about this before,” she said.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Big Trial

Friday, January 18, 2013

By Ralph Cipriano
for bigtrial.net

Two moms who volunteered as school lunch room aides told a jury today that they thought former Catholic school teacher Bernard Shero was creepy.

“He’s always been awkward, touch-feely,” Denise Sosalski said. She met Shero when he was a teaching assistant at Nazareth Academy. Sosalski said she volunteered at Nazareth when her son Roman, now 24, was 8 or 9.

While working in the lunchroom, Sosalksi said, she noticed Shero “had a tendency to want to put his hand on their backs,” meaning elementary school kids. Then, when her son was in sixth grade, he was out skateboarding with some friends, Sosalski testified. He came home and said that Shero, who lived in their Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood, had invited the boy and his friends into his house.

Sosalski said she walked over to confront Shero. “He was out on his lawn,” she told the jury. She said she told Shero, “I’m Roman’s mother; stay away from my kid.”

Defense lawyers asked Sosalski when she decided to come forward to testify against Shero about events that happened back in the late 1990s. This week, she said, when a detective knocked on her door.

Apparently the district attorney’s office never stops working a case.

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IRELAND
The Association of Catholic Priests

REDEMPTORIST SUBJECTED TO “FRIGHTENING PROCEDURES REMINISCENT OF THE INQUISITION”

Redemptorist Fr. Tony Flannery is threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church for suggesting that, in the future, women might become priests and calling for this and other matters to be open for discussion. Fr. Flannery, (66) who joined the Redemptorists in 1964 at seventeen and was ordained ten years later, has been told that if he is to remain in the Church and in his Congregation, he must also guarantee not to attend meetings of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) until he has publicly agreed to the conditions laid down.

Fr. Flannery was forbidden to minister as a priest for most of the past year, and this will continue until he meets the requirements of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“I have been ordered not to engage with the media or publish any books or articles,” he told a press briefing in Dublin today. “I have also been ordered not to have any involvement, public or private, with the ACP. I was put under a formal precept of obedience not to attend the AGM of the ACP last November by Michael Brehl, Superior General of the Redemptorists. But he made it clear he’d been instructed by the CDF to issue it.”

Fr Flannery will be allowed back into ministry only if he writes, signs and publishes an article (pre-approved by the CDF) accepting the Catholic Church can never ordain women to the priesthood and accepting all Church stances on contraception, homosexuality, and the refusal of the sacraments to people in second relationships.

“I could not possibly put my name to such an article without impugning my own integrity and conscience,” he said today. “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is orchestrating all this while refusing to communicate with me. I have had no direct communication with them. I have never been given an opportunity to meet my accusers, or to understand why this action is being taken against me when I’ve raised the same issues, consistently, for decades.”

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IRELAND
Irish Times

An outspoken Irish Catholic priest has claimed he has been threatened with excommunication for suggesting that women might become priests in the future.

Fr Tony Flannery said he is being forced to choose between Rome and his conscience and revealed he is taking legal advice under canon and civil law to help defend his rights as a member of the church and as an Irish citizen.

The 66-year-old, who joined the Redemptorists in 1964, said he has been told by the Vatican that if he wants to remain in the church and in his congregation he must stop any involvement with the liberal Association of Catholic Priests (ACP), which he founded. …

Fr Flannery claimed he will be allowed back into ministry only if he writes, signs and publishes an article – to be pre-approved by the CDF – accepting the Catholic Church can never ordain women to the priesthood and accepting all church stances on contraception, homosexuality, and the refusal of the sacraments to people in second relationships.

“I could not possibly put my name to such an article without impugning my own integrity and conscience,” Fr Flannery said at a press conference he called in Dublin.

“The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is orchestrating all this while refusing to communicate with me. I have had no direct communication with them. I have never been given an opportunity to meet my accusers, or to understand why this action is being taken against me when I’ve raised the same issues, consistently, for decades.”

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IRELAND
RTE News

An Irish priest has claimed he is being threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church for supporting an open discussion on issues like women’s ordination.

Father Tony Flannery has called on the Irish bishops to state publicly what they think about the disciplining of priests like himself.

He blamed the breakdown of his year-long exchanges with the Church authorities on the intervention of Archbishop Gerhard Muller.

Archbishop Muller who took over as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in July last year.

Fr Flannery told a news conference in Dublin this afternoon that the German Archbishop had raised the bar for his readmission to active ministry by demanding he accept the Vatican’s ban on debate on women’s ordination and a pledge to support all Church teaching on sexual matters.

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NEW YORK
The Journal News

Written by
Steve Lieberman

NEW CITY — Two members of Rockland’s Orthodox Jewish community have pleaded guilty to charges of sexually abusing children, heartening children protection advocates who have been pushing for increased awareness and prosecutions of such cases. A third man is facing pre-trial hearings in County Court.

A 58-year-old Monsey man admitted in court Friday that he had anal sex with a 14-year-old boy.

The admission came after a judge promised the man a sentence of 10 years’ probation to spare the child from having to testify.

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NEW YORK
Failed Messiah

Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

Two haredim in bedroom suburbs of New York City got sweetheart plea deals earlier this week from judges in Rockland County.

Both haredim pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse charges – one of them involving anal rape.

But even though one of those cases involves repeated anal rape of the child, neither haredi man will serve any time in prison.

Despite this bizarre agreement, Rockland County prosecutors are trumpeting the plea deals as major successes, the Journal News reported.

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

A powerfully insightful observation by Jerry Slevin at his Christian Catholicism blog site:

Having despaired of the loss of papal credibility, more Catholics will now acknowledge the increasingly significant historical and scriptural evidence concerning the Eucharist. This evidence makes clear that for Jesus and his initial disciples, the Eucharist Meal was not intended to be an event mainly to be monopolized and controlled by a “mystical” celibate male priesthood managed tightly by an opportunistic and unaccountable hierarchy. For the current Vatican, the Eucharistic Meal appears too often to be mainly a weekly fundraising event for overly trusting Catholics dominated by low-paid priests that the hierarchy appears to believe must be protected and supported blindly, even when they sexually abuse children.

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IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

Following on from meetings of Catholic lay people in Dublin, Cork and Galway promoted by the ACP, a very successful gathering of up to 60 people took place in Blarney on 9 January 2013 .

The meeting was facilitated by Daithi ó hAoidh, a member of Ballineaspaig Parish Faith in Action group. The aim of the meeting was to allow the Catholic faithful from the Blarney/Inniscarra area the opportunity to dialogue over their particular cares and concerns with regard to faith matters.

As it was an occasion for dialogue the attendees were formed into smaller groups and Daithi the question to them as to why they were here. There was a huge diversity of answers:
◦People being curious
◦A feeling of being disconnected and alienation from the Church
◦Fears that the faith could be lost and concern about our young people.
◦A sense of helplessness that lay people are not being listened to
◦Upset that the teachings of Vatican 11 were not being implemented.
◦Concern that no plans were being made for the future.
◦A feeling of lack of leadership.
◦Some women expressed feelings of being disconnected from the Church.
◦Concern over lack of accountability at every level in the Church.
◦Concern over the treatment of priests and the silencing of priests.

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IRELAND
Corkman

Sunday January 20 2013

An outspoken cleric has claimed he has been threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church for suggesting that women might become priests in the future.

Fr Tony Flannery said he is being forced to chose between Rome and his conscience and revealed he is taking legal advice under canon and civil law to help defend his rights as a member of the church and as an Irish citizen.

The 66-year-old, who joined the Redemptorists in 1964, said he has been told by the Vatican that if he wants to remain in the church and in his congregation he must stop any involvement with the liberal Association of Catholic Priests (ACP), which he founded.

The author, who was stopped ministering as a priest for most of the past year, said he has also been ordered not to engage with the media or publish any books or articles.

“I have served the church, the Redemptorists and the people of God for two thirds of my life,” said Fr Flannery.

“Throughout that time, I have in good conscience raised issues I believed important for the future of the church in books and essays largely read by practising Catholics, rather than raising them in mainstream media.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

By Chelsia Rose Marcius AND Daniel Beekman / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

The “Meth Monsignor” busted for selling drugs after his kinky behavior got him suspended by superiors told his Connecticut flock he was leaving “to make more money,” a parishioner told the Daily News Saturday.

Pastor Kevin Wallin, 61, who could face life in prison for his alleged role in a cross-country methamphetamine ring, resigned from St. Augustine’s Parish in Bridgeport in June 2011, citing health and personal issues, church officials said this week.

But Wallin, who worked as a personal secretary to Edward Cardinal Egan for years when Egan was Bishop of Bridgeport, told parishioners a different story, one said.

“He said he was moving, being transferred,” recalled parishioner Bernedine Jordan, 52, a substance abuse counselor.

“He said he really liked it here but he was going to somewhere where he could make more money.”

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IRELAND
Limerick Leader

By Mike Dwane
Published on Sunday 20 January 2013

SUGGESTIONS to ordain a priest of the diocese as the next Bishop of Limerick had been “taken very seriously” by the Vatican, the papal nuncio to Ireland Archbishop Charles Brown insisted this week.

In appointing Fr Brendan Leahy – a native of Dublin and professor of theology in Maynooth – to lead Limerick’s 170,000 Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI has followed the recent pattern established in Killaloe and Cloyne, where diocesan priests were overlooked in favour of outsiders.

While Fr Leahy formally served as a curate in Clonskeagh, south Dublin, and has held a special pastoral role ministering to young people, he is regarded by colleagues in the priesthood as a theologian first and foremost, as was his predecessor as Bishop of Limerick Dr Donal Murray.

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IRELAND
Irish Times

A well-known Irish Catholic priest plans to defy Vatican authorities today by breaking his silence about what he says is a campaign against him by the church over his advocacy of more open discussion on church teachings.

Fr Tony Flannery (66) who was suspended by the Vatican last year, said he was told by the Vatican that he would be allowed to return to ministry only if he agreed to write, sign and publish a statement agreeing, among other things, that women should never be ordained as priests and that he would adhere to church orthodoxy on matters like contraception and homosexuality.

“How can I put my name to such a document when it goes against everything I believe in,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “If I signed this, it would be a betrayal not only of myself but of my fellow priests and lay Catholics who want change. I refuse to be terrified into submission.”

Fr Flannery, a regular contributor to religious publications, said he planned to make his case public at a news conference today.

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IRELAND
Irish Central

By
PATRICK COUNIHAN,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Sunday, January 20

Controversial Irish cleric Father Tony Flannery is to defy the Vatican and break his silence on the campaign against him by Catholic Church authorities.

Father Flannery was silenced by the church last year over his advocacy of more open discussion on church teachings.

The New York Times reports that the 66-year-old was suspended by the Vatican after a series of public interviews.

He was told that he would only be allowed to return to ministry only if he agreed to write, sign and publish a statement agreeing, among other things, that women should never be ordained as priests and that he would adhere to church orthodoxy on matters like contraception and homosexuality.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

By Simone Weichselbaum / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

He promised to drive her around in a limo, to take her on trips and let her move in with him.

He wanted to know what she wanted to do with a boy — and when she innocently replied that she wanted to hold hands, he responded, “That’s it?”

In a simple but harrowing account, a young woman who claimed she was one of Nechemya Weberman’s former clients recounted her sessions with the corrupt counselor on a blog called “A child’s voice.”

“He painted rosy pictures of the fabulous things we will do together,” she wrote. “He was the first adult that was ever nice to me.”

Sex abuse experts said her account shows how the once-respected religious leader was really a child predator in disguise.

“One way of grooming is to send up a little signal and see how far it goes. Like, ‘Can I take you home?’ It all starts out friendly,” said psychologist Richard Gartner.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

By Charles Hynes / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

The victim in this case showed extraordinary courage during her four days of testimony. This wasn’t just one victim or a case of her word against his. She was speaking for all who have suffered abuse but have been intimidated and forced into silence by scare tactics that support the abuser and discard the victim.

Certainly, it would have made for a better case if more victims were willing to press charges — but she was one of the finest witnesses a prosecutor can have.

Few people are as confident and as intelligent and as clear-thinking as this heroic, young woman. She said it very forcefully: “He was like a God.”

Someone like that shouldn’t be treated with the kind of absolute respect Weberman received. He didn’t deserve it. He was an unlicensed therapist masquerading as someone who cared, someone who wanted to help. In actuality, he was a predator.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

By Oren Yaniv / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

She wasn’t the only one.

Nechemya Weberman, the unlicensed Hasidic counselor slated to be sentenced Tuesday for sexually abusing a Brooklyn girl, violated at least 10 others — including teens and married women he counseled, a Daily News investigation revealed.

The self-proclaimed religious adviser even invoked Kabbalah — a form of Jewish mysticism — to convince his victims that having sex with him was kosher.

“He’s a monster,” said a man whose daughter was repeatedly brutalized by Weberman a couple of years before the victim at trial came forward.

The beautiful, 18-year-old Brooklyn woman testified how Weberman, 54, touched her private parts, forced her to perform oral sex and ordered her to reenact porn during a three-year period that started when she was only 12. The disgraced Satmar counselor was convicted of all 59 counts against him last month.

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UNITED KINGDOM
The Voice

Written by Marcia Dixon
20/01/2013

THE HEAD of a community organisation that works provides mentoring to young black boys and provides support to families has said churches need to play more a role in combatting the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.

Melvyn Davis is Director of Boyz to Men. He told Soul Stirrings: “Churches have an important role to play. Firstly in the area of education and self awareness. Children who attend church are targeted just as much as children on the streets. Church members need to educate themselves about the problems that the children in their communities are facing and gain experience by having members trained as well as volunteering with organisations involved in tackling these issues.”

His comments come in the wake of a number of media stories about sexual exploitation and sexual violence against women which beg the question what pressure can the church bring to bear on this issue?

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Democrat

Ruth Rice rrice@tribdem.com

JOHNSTOWN — The co-founder and president of a nonprofit charity that has been advocating for the sexual abuse victims of Brother Stephen P. Baker in Ohio and Johnstown held a press conference Saturday across from Bishop McCort Catholic High School on Osborne Street in the city’s 8th Ward.

Robert M. Hoatson, who heads Road to Recovery Inc. based in Livingston, N.J., said he suffered similar sexual abuse when he was a teen. He founded the organization as therapy for himself.

“My therapist told me the best thing I could do is help other sexual abuse victims,” Hoatson said. “My salvation has been getting involved. I get so excited and energized because it takes amazing courage for them to talk about it in front of thousands through the media.”

Michael Munno of Lorain, Ohio, accompanied Hoatson on his trip to Johnstown.

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PENNSYLVANIA/OHIO
Youngstown Vindicator

Compiled from local and wire sources

JOHNSTOWN, Pa.

An alleged victim of sexual abuse by a Franciscan brother at Warren JFK high school and the founder of a support group for such victims urged Pennsylvania and Ohio victims of the brother’s purported abuse to come forward and get the help they need.

“We’d love for them to reach out and contact those of us who will support them,” said Robert M. Hoatson, co-founder and president of the Livingston, N.J.-based Road to Recovery Inc. support group, which will be distributing leaflets with that message from 10 to 11:30 a.m. today in front of St. Columba Cathedral in Youngstown.

Michael Munno of Cortland, who said Brother Stephen P. Baker sexually abused him at JFK, appeared with Hoatson at a Saturday morning news conference in front of Bishop McCort High School in Johnstown, Pa.

Munno was one of 11 men who reached an out-of-court cash settlement with Warren JFK concerning sexual abuse they said they suffered as students there between 1986 and 1990 at the hands of Brother Baker, who was then a teacher, baseball coach and athletic trainer at JFK. Some of the abuse was reported to have occurred during massages and whirlpool baths.

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OHIO
Tribune Chronicle

January 20, 2013

By VIRGINIA SHANK Tribune Chronicle (vshank@tribtoday.com) , Tribune Chronicle | TribToday.com

YOUNGSTOWN – A representative from the Diocese of Youngstown said help is available to anyone who has been identified as a victim of sexual abuse in connection with the church.

Nancy L. Yuhasz, chancellor, said that if it is determined someone has been sexually abused by an individual connected with the church in any position or capacity, the diocese provides counseling to the victim at the church’s expense.

Connection to the church could include, but is not limited to, clergy, teachers or other school staff and parish ministers, she noted.

“We always want to talk with (the victims) or, when possible, meet with them,” Yuhasz said Friday. “Some people don’t want to meet face-to-face and that’s fine.”

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AUSTRALIA
7 News

ABC
January 20, 2013

The Catholic Church is defending the reinstatement of a priest who maintained a sexual relationship with a disabled woman for 14 years.

Father Thomas Knowles has returned to full duties at St Francis’ Church in Melbourne after 16 months of “administrative leave” for the relationship he began with the woman when she was 22-years-old.

Fairfax media is reporting the woman was paid $100,000 in compensation.

Father Pat Negry from the Blessed Sacrament Congregation says he believes the decision to return Father Knowles to his position was appropriate “after a prolonged investigation”.

But victims’ advocate Chris McIsaac from Broken Rites says his transgressions are too severe for him to have been let off so lightly.

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IRELAND
The New York Times

By DOUGLAS DALBY

Published: January 19, 2013

DUBLIN — A well-known Irish Catholic priest plans to defy Vatican authorities on Sunday by breaking his silence about what he says is a campaign against him by the church over his advocacy of more open discussion on church teachings.

The Rev. Tony Flannery, 66, who was suspended by the Vatican last year, said he was told by the Vatican that he would be allowed to return to ministry only if he agreed to write, sign and publish a statement agreeing, among other things, that women should never be ordained as priests and that he would adhere to church orthodoxy on matters like contraception and homosexuality.

“How can I put my name to such a document when it goes against everything I believe in,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “If I signed this, it would be a betrayal not only of myself but of my fellow priests and lay Catholics who want change. I refuse to be terrified into submission.”

Father Flannery, a regular contributor to religious publications, said he planned to make his case public at a news conference here on Sunday.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Express

Sunday January 20,2013

By James Fielding

A VICTIM of Jimmy Savile’s satanic abuse told yesterday of her sheer terror as she was tied to an altar and raped by the depraved star during a black mass.

The girl, who we will call Paula Bennett to protect her true identity, was just 13 at the time of the ­sickening attack in 1975.

Now aged 50, Paula still suffers horrific flashbacks and cannot sleep properly. She decided to come forward after we revealed last week how Savile raped two women ­during satanic ceremonies in the Seventies and Eighties.

Recalling her torment, Paula described how Savile was sitting on a throne wearing a mask and robes, clutching a trademark cigar.

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UNITED STATES
Church and State

Editor’s note: The following comes from Chapter 10 of N4CM Chairman Dr Stephen D Mumford’s book, American Democracy and the Vatican.

How does the Vatican influence U.S. policy? In hundreds of ways. Most important in creating many of these opportunities is the Church’s almost unimaginable wealth. Recently Luigi Di Fonzo, a Harvard professor, published an extensive study of Vatican wealth. “The Vatican’s total assets—not including the assets of the Roman Catholic Church, but including stock it controls on the New York and American stock exchanges, and property, gold reserves, and paintings—are probably $50 billion to $60 billion. . . .[43] The Catholic Church in the United States, with “assets of more than $100 billion, today possesses more than ten times the combined wealth of IBM, Exxon, General Motors, and U.S. Steel.”[44] There is no accountability for these funds to anyone except the Vatican. Everything is done in com­plete secrecy.[45] It is simply mind-boggling to see Vatican claims of compassion for the poverty-stricken in Latin America in the face of this fantastic accumulation of wealth. …

As Congressman William Clay (D-Missouri) found (see, note twenty-six, chapter one), whenever any issue arises in Congress that affects Catholic interests, a seasoned lobbyist in priestly garb is likely to appear in a Congressman’s office reminding the legislator that 52 million Catholics in America feel thus and so about this matter. Even when the legislator knows full well that the opinion is actually that of a handful of top-ranking bishops, acting on orders from Rome, he may swallow his convictions and say, “Yes, yes,” because he is aware that in America the powerful bishops speak for American Catholics. Should he not comply, Catholic pressures can be mortally effective in swinging any close election against him.[47]

The hierarchy has learned to act indirectly through Catholic lay­persons. The hierarchy acts through Catholic politicians such as Lindy Boggs (D-Louisiana) and Charles Rangel (D-New York). There are many similar examples directly affecting population growth control. Ravenholt, in his memo, pointed to several acts of Clement Zablocki (D-Wisconsin). Other obvious examples include Tip O’Neill (D-Massachusetts), who killed the Simpson-Mazzoli bil in a thinly veiled act in December 1983, Henry Hyde (D-Illinois), and Jeremiah Denton (R-Alabama). They act through hundreds of bureaucrats such as John H. Murphy and John H. Sullivan, as Ravenholt pointed out in his memo. They act through Catholic laypersons not associated with the government, such as Paul Brown, executive director, Life Amendment Political Action Committee (LAPAC), Phyllis Schlafly, executive director of Eagle Forum, and Peter Donaldson and John Ganly of Family Health International.

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AUSTRALIA
9 News

Alexandra Pleffer, ninemsn

A priest who preyed on a disabled Sydney woman for 14 years has returned to the pulpit.

The Catholic Church apologised to Jennifer Herrick and paid her $100,000 in compensation for the “harm” Father Tom Knowles caused her during their 14-year secret sexual relationship.

But the church has now allowed Father Knowles to return to full duties at St Francis’ in Melbourne after about 16 months of “administrative leave”.

Ms Herrick, who has bilateral congenital hip dysplasia, says she felt powerless to refuse Father Knowles’ sexual advances because of his role as her family priest.

“I now understand that my very severe vulnerability allowed him to exploit me by abusing his priestly powerful position for nearly two decades for his sexual needs,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald.

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CONNECTICUT
The Huffington Post

[with video]

By Meredith Bennett-Smith

The case of a Connecticut priest indicted this week on charges of distributing crystal meth took a bizarre turn as strange new details came to light concerning the religious leader’s life after leaving the priesthood.

Monsignor Kevin Wallin, who went on sabbatical prior to stepping down as pastor of the St. Augustine Parish in Bridgeport, Conn., in 2012, allegedly sold shipments of meth to undercover cops several times between September 2012 and January 2013.

Wallin, a long-time member of the Sacred Heart University Board of Trustees, was arrested Jan. 3. According to the New York Post, the meth Wallin sold during the undercover drug stings tested as 98.5 percent pure.

Now it appears the man some have nicknamed “Monsignor Meth” may have engaged in a host of illicit and unconventional activities, in addition to the drug dealing. New allegations include cross-dressing, having sex in the St. Augustine rectory and laundering meth profits through a North Haven sex shop called Land of Oz.

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ESPANA
El Pais

Natalia Junquera Madrid
17 ENE 2013

El ministerio de Justicia ha presentado hoy una guía de recomendaciones para la práctica de exhumaciones sobre sustracción de niños, después de que el pasado 26 de diciembre la Fiscalía General del Estado remitiese una circular ordenando a todas las fiscalías territoriales agotar todas las vías de investigación y practicar cuantas pruebas fueran necesarias, incluidas las exhumaciones, ante un posible caso de robo de bebés.

La guía, que recoge las conclusiones de un encuentro entre los directores de los institutos de medicina legal de toda España el pasado verano, incide en la importancia de la cadena de custodia y la elaboración de un análisis antropológico completo (especie, edad, estatura, patologías…) de los huesos hallados antes de remitirlos al Instituto Nacional de Toxicología para garantizar “la máxima calidad pericial” de cara a un juicio por robo de bebés. El documento se remitirá a todas las comunidades autónomas, al Consejo General del Poder Judicial y a la Fiscalía, ya que son jueces y fiscales quienes pueden ordenar la práctica de exhumaciones.

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CONNECTICUT
The Catholic World Report

The immoral and demoralizing case of “Monsignor Meth”.

January 19, 2013

By Anne Hendershott

Battered by another scandal involving yet another gay priest in the Bridgeport Diocese, faithful Catholics remain bewildered by the apparent inability of their leaders to protect the Church from such humiliation. While prior cases involved gay priests like Fr. Jude Fay, a pastor in Darien, who had embezzled more than a million dollars from parishioners’ donations to support a lavish lifestyle with his gay partner, this latest case involves something much more sinister.

On Friday, January 18th, Connecticut Catholics awoke to front page above-the-fold headlines in the Connecticut Post claiming: “Meth Priest Case Widens: Clergyman Liked Cross-Dressing, Sex in Rectory.” Reporting that Monsignor Kevin Wallin, a pastor who had been on leave from the Diocese for the past year—but still on the payroll—had been arrested for dealing crystal methamphetamine.

That was just the beginning of the story. Reading further, Connecticut Catholics learned that in the spring of 2011, when Monsignor Wallin served as pastor of St. Augustine’s Cathedral in Bridgeport, rectory personnel became concerned when: “Wallin, sometimes dressed as a woman, would entertain odd-looking men, some who were also dressed in women’s clothing and engaging in sex acts in the rectory.” The Post also reported that “bizarre sex toys” were found in the pastor’s residence within the rectory.

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DEUTSCHLAND
kath.net

Die Deutsche Bischofskonferenz wehrt sich weiter juristisch gegen die Vorwürfe des Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer, die Bischöfe hätten die Erstveröffentlichung von Forschungsergebnissen verhindern oder zensieren wollen.

Bonn (kath.net/KNA) Die Deutsche Bischofskonferenz wehrt sich weiter mit juristischen Schritten gegen den Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer und dessen Vorwürfe, die Bischöfe hätten die Erstveröffentlichung von Forschungsergebnissen verhindern oder zensieren wollen. Anwälte des Verbandes der Diözesen Deutschlands (VDD) haben am Freitag an Pfeiffer und sein Kriminologisches Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen (KFN) «eine konkretisierte Abmahnung gerichtet», bestätigte der Sprecher der Bischofskonferenz, Matthias Kopp, am Samstag in Bonn auf Anfrage der Katholischen Nachrichten-Agentur (KNA).

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

The Pope continually treats the USA as a “damned fool”. And why not? From President Obama on down to Catholic leaders like Joe Biden, Leon Panetta, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the Pope and his subservient hierarchy in the USA get a pass almost no matter how badly Catholics and even political leaders are treated. Meanwhile, the Prime Ministers of Australia and Ireland on behalf of their citizens properly and publicly challenge the Pope, who then reacts to their fair demands. Listen up, please, Mr. President!

How does Pope Benedict XVI treat the USA as a fool and why does the USA permit this, you may fairly ask? Here is how and why. I will tell you. Now President Obama in his new term must stand up to the monarchical Pope and his subservient U.S. hierarchy, at least for the sake of defenseless children in the USA. Enough with the President’s fawning laughter at Cardinal Dolan’s bad humor and with Leon Panetta kissing the Pope’s ring, as he just did publicly. The President won re-election, despite the Pope’s major effort to prevent that. It is time, in the name of religious liberty, for President Obama to help Catholics protect their children from Vatican tyranny and the horrors it visits on innocent U.S. children.

The Pope treats the USA as a fool by his interference is internal U.S. political elections and decisions and in his protection of too many priests who continue to sexually abuse U.S. children. For additional information on the political interference and child abuse cover-ups, please see my, “Will The Next Pope Be the Vatican’s Last Pope?”, accessible by clicking on the heading at the top here or clicking on to: http://wp.me/P2YEZ3-cT

The President must also set up promptly a national investigation commission into child sexual abuse in organizational settings, like Australia’s PM, Julia Gillard, has just done and Ireland’s PM, Enda Kenny, also did. Local states and counties in the USA have failed, and will continue to fail, at adequately protecting defenseless children from priest predators, and they have failed for over a half century now.

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CONNECTICUT
Patch

Federal Investigation Paints Lurid Picture of Bridgeport Priest Involved in Meth Distribution Ring

A 40-year-old Manchester man was also arrested and indicted this week in a cross-country methamphetamine distribution ring that federal investigators said resulted in thousands of dollars in sales of the drug each week.

By David Moran

More questions than answers remained this week after federal investigators and state police broke up a sophisticated cross-country methamphetamine distribution ring that they said involved a Bridgeport priest, a Manchester man and three other individuals that, according to affidavits in the case, often times seemed more bizarre and outlandish than an episode of the popular TV series “Breaking Bad.”

According to a statement released Wednesday by United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut David B. Fein, Drug Enforcement Administration agents and members of the Connecticut State Police’s Statewide Narcotics Task Force joined forces to bust up a methamphetamine distribution ring spearheaded by Bridgeport priest Kevin Wallin, 61, that saw “bulk quantities” of the drug, more commonly known as crystal meth, shipped from California to Wallin’s Waterbury apartment, then re-packed “in various quantities and in color-coded Ziploc bags” and sold locally to users and other dealers.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Heath Aston
Sun-Herald state political editor

A PRIEST accused of sexually abusing altar boys throughout the 1980s was sheltered by the Catholic Church in the parish of Father Finian Egan, who is facing charges of indecent assault and rape.

A report released last week detailed the accusations against the priest, who allegedly assaulted boys in the dioceses of Armidale and Parramatta between 1981 and 1992.

Despite being moved from a number of dioceses and being charged with serious sexual offences against a boy in 1987 – charges that were later dropped – the priest, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was not defrocked until 2005.

The report by Federal Court judge Antony Whitlam, QC, criticised the former bishop of Armidale, Henry Kennedy, who is now dead, for failing to stop the priest after complaints followed him from parish to parish.

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FRANKRIJK
RKnieuws (Nederland)

AMIENS (RKnieuws.net) – Een 38-jarige priester van het bisdom Amiens is gisteren in verdenking gesteld voor seksueel misbruik van minderjarigen. Dat meldt de Franse krant La Croix.

De feiten zouden plaats gevonden hebben in 2010 en 2011 en zouden slaan op drie jongelui. De priester heeft aan de onderzoeksrechter opgebiecht dat hij zich vergreep aan twee van de drie jongeren. De onderzoeksrechter heeft hem na ondervraging in voorlopige vrijheid gesteld tegen het advies van de openbare aanklager in om de geestelijke naar de gevangenis te sturen. De onderzoeksrechter heeft de priester verboden nog contact te hebben met minderjarigen.

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FRANCE
Courrier Picard

[Bing Translator]

Le prêtre Stéphane Gotoghian, âgé de 38 ans, a été mis en examen vendredi à Amiens pour des agressions sexuelles sur trois adolescents.

Le prêtre, qui exerçait jusqu’ici dans la paroisse de Fressenneville (Somme), a reconnu les faits. Il a été mis en examen pour agressions sexuelles sur mineurs par personne abusant de l’autorité conférée par sa fonction, a expliqué son avocat, Me Guillaume Demarcq.

Il aurait abusé sexuellement de trois adolescents, dont l’un aurait été victime des «caresses appuyées» de l’ecclésiastique en 2004-2005 et les deux autres en 2010-2011, selon l’avocat.

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FRANCE
Eglise Catholique de la Somme

Monsieur l’abbé Stéphane GOTOGHIAN a été mis en examen pour des faits très graves qui lui sont reprochés suite à une plainte déposée.

Ma première pensée douloureuse se porte vers les jeunes victimes et leurs familles et tous ceux qui se sentent blessés.

Je pense par ailleurs à tous ceux qui ont fait confiance à un prêtre dans ses paroisses et qui se sentiront blessés et trompés : leur douleur est grande, comme la mienne et celle de l’Eglise.

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UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org

Summary of Case: A religious brother of the Dominican order, Frost has been accused of the sexual abuse of at least four boys. He is known to have worked as a religion and sex education teacher at a Minneapolis parish from 1964-1975, and to have had assignments in Madison WI, Winona MN, Iowa and Louisiana. His modus operandi is said to have been to ply boys with alcohol and marijuana, and to show them pornography. His order has acknowledged his abuse. Frost is deceased.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WJAC

[with video]

By Maria Miller

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. —

There are new details surrounding allegations against a cleric accused of inappropriately touching young boys.

Since allegations surfaced in Ohio against Brother Stephen Baker, former students from Bishop McCort Catholic High School in Johnstown have started coming forward.

Baker was recently accused of molesting 11 young boys in the 1980s while he worked as an athletic coach and trainer at a high school in Ohio. However, he was never criminally charged, settling out of court with the alleged victims.

But now at least 12 former Bishop McCort students have come forward alleging the same things happened to them while Baker served as an athletic trainer and teacher there in the ’90s.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WJAC

By Maria Miller

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. —

Eleven cases of alleged sexual abuse surrounding a Franciscan cleric, now living in Bair County, have grown overnight. At least five more men have come forward alleging they were sexually abused by Brother Stephen Baker while he served as an athletic trainer and coach at an Ohio high school in the 1980s. But they’re not the only ones.

At least 12 former Bishop McCort students have started coming forward alleging the same abuse. They say it happened while Baker served as an athletic trainer and teacher at the Catholic high school in the 1990s.

Since Thursday, four more alleged victims have reached out to Johnstown attorney Michael Parrish, bringing his total up to at least 10. Two others have gone even further, contacting Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston attorney who specializes in clergy sex abuse cases.

“Yesterday two victims contacted me,” said Garabedian. “They were both adult men who claim they were sexually abused by Brother Stephen Baker while attending Bishop McCort High School, and they described repeated sexual abuse by Baker while attending the high school.”

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SPAIN
Expatica

Spanish judges have launched a fresh investigation of a nun accused of stealing newborns in the 1980s, a suspected widespread practice dating from the Franco dictatorship, a lawyer said Friday.

Sister Maria Gomez Valbuena, 87, in April last year was the first person to go before a judge over the “stolen babies” scandal, in which the regime allowed children to be taken from their parents on moral or ideological grounds.

In that case she was questioned by a judge investigating her role in the kidnapping of a newborn girl from a Madrid hospital three decades ago.

Now she is accused by another mother, Purificacion Betegon, of taking away her twins in 1981, said the plaintiff’s lawyer, Alipio Barbero.

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OHIO/PENNSYLVANIA
WKBN

At least 35 former students at both Warren John F. Kennedy High School and Bishop McCort High School in Johnsontown, Pa. have now come forward to allege a Catholic Franciscan friar, Brother Stephen P. Baker, used his position as athletic trainer in both schools to sexually molest them in the in the 1980s and 1990s.

And on Friday, Boston attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who negotiated high five-figure settlements for 11 former JFK students who were allegedly molested, called into question where Baker was during a year-long stretch in 2011 where Baker had no official assignment from the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.

D.C. Nokes Jr., a Johnstown attorney appointed as the spokesperson by the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. The diocese said on Thursday in a statement they contacted civil authorities in November 2011 after learning of allegations. The statement also condemned abuse of any kind.

Garabedian said three new former JFK students, one former St. Mary’s student and four students from Bishop McCort High School in Johnstown contacted him about being sexually abused.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune Chronicle

January 19, 2013

HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa. – Over the past two days, area attorneys received calls from more than a dozen former Bishop McCort High School students, claiming that a Hollidaysburg-based Franciscan brother inappropriately touched them during their high school careers.

Boston-based attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who achieved a settlement for 11 men against Brother Stephen Baker in October, is investigating claims of two former Bishop McCort students who are accusing Baker of inappropriate touching them during his time as a baseball trainer at the school in the late 1990s.

Richard Serbin, who’s defended victims of clergy abuse across Pennsylvania for more than 25 years, said he received a call from an attorney referring at least one alleged victim to him Thursday night.

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CONNECTICUT
CT Post

[with court document]

Daniel Tepfer

Updated 11:22 pm, Friday, January 18, 2013

BRIDGEPORT — Diocese officials might stop paying “Monsignor Meth” his church stipend following accusations he was a cross-dressing drug dealer who sold upward of $9,000 of crystal methamphetamine a week.

“It wasn’t anything he could get rich off of; we were providing just enough to maintain basic sustenance,” said Roman Catholic Diocese spokesman Brian Wallace during discussions Friday about whether to pull Monsignor Kevin Wallin’s pay.

But after reading in the Connecticut Post that Wallin, 61, is accused by federal authorities of making so much money from selling the drug that he purchased an adult sex shop in North Haven named The Land of Oz to launder the money, Wallace said the diocese may stop the payments.

Wallace repeated Friday that he was aware only that parishioners had complained of Wallin acting erratically in spring 2011. He said the complaints came from a number of parishioners, and not all at one time. He said there was a concern about Wallin’s health.

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Tribune-Democrat

Kathy Mellott kmellott@tribdem.com

JOHNSTOWN — The investigation into abuse allegations against Brother Stephen P. Baker is broadening.

An unknown number of men, former students at Bishop McCort Catholic High School, are alleging they were sexually molested by the Franciscan friar, who worked at the Johnstown school for about a decade in the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

The former students say Baker abused them when he was supposed to be treating them for sports-related injuries.

Baker who now resides at the Motherhouse of St. Bernardine Monastery of the Franciscan Friars Third Order Regular, located in a rural setting about two miles outside of Hollidaysburg. From 1992 into the early 2000s, he was employed at Bishop McCort as a religious instructor and sports trainer.

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LOUISVILLE (KY)
TDN

Associated Press

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Five people have joined a Maryland lawsuit that claims a Kentucky-based evangelical church group covered up allegations of sexual abuse against children and failed to alert police and shield children from known sexual predators.

The new plaintiffs join three women who filed a civil lawsuit against Sovereign Grace Ministries in October. The suit accuses church leadership of encouraging parents of alleged victims to refrain from reporting abuses to police and creating “a culture in which sexual predators were protected from accountability and victims were silenced.”

The church moved its headquarters to Louisville last year after three decades in Maryland. The group has struggled in recent years with fractured leadership and criticism over its discipline methods.

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CHARLOTTE (NC)
Sacramento Bee

By GARY L. WRIGHT
The Charlotte Observer

Published: Friday, Jan. 18, 2013

CHARLOTTE, N.C.-A former Gastonia pastor pleaded guilty on Friday to charges he engaged in illicit sexual conduct with two minors while in Haiti working for a church ministry.

As Larry Michael Bollinger, his legs shackled, walked into the courtroom, he smiled and waved to his wife.

“I would not be here if I had not confessed what I had done,” Bollinger, 67, told U.S. Magistrate Judge David Cayer.

Bollinger, struggling to hold back tears, then said: “I am very remorseful -� I am willing to accept responsibility.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Republic

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 18, 2013

JOHNSTOWN, Pennsylvania — A Franciscan friar named in legal settlements with 11 men who say he sexually abused them at a Catholic high school in northeast Ohio three decades was also the subject of complaints he abused boys at a Pennsylvania school in the late 1990s, church officials said.

The undisclosed financial settlements announced Wednesday in Ohio involved Brother Stephen Baker’s contact with students at John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, Ohio from 1986-90.

Ohio Attorney Mitchell Garabedian said the cases there were resolved without criminal charges or lawsuits because of concerns with the statute of limitations.

The settlements were reached after talks involving the school, Third Order Regular Franciscans and Youngstown Catholic Diocese, which said it was unaware of the allegations until nearly 20 years after the alleged abuse.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Daily American

MICHELLE GANASSI
staff writer, @damichelleg
January 18, 2013

A local attorney is looking into whether a Franciscan brother who is accused of sexually abusing 11 boys in Ohio committed similar acts here.

Sexual abuse allegations were made against Brother Stephen Baker, who taught at John F. Kennedy Catholic School in Warren, Ohio, from 1986 to 1990.

The settlements involved the school, Third Order Regular Franciscans and Youngstown Catholic Diocese. Members of those organizations said they were unaware of the allegations until nearly 20 years after the alleged abuse, according to an article by The Associated Press. He was not criminally charged.

Baker taught at Bishop McCort High School in the late 1990s. Johnstown attorney Michael Parrish said potential victims from the Johnstown-area Catholic school contacted his office after the story in Ohio broke.

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CANADA
Vancouver Sun

By Gordon Hoekstra, Vancouver Sun January 19, 2013

The Vancouver Catholic archdiocese argues it shouldn’t have to pay damages in a B.C. woman’s civil suit for alleged sexual abuse by a priest when she was a teenager in the 1980s, claiming the relationship was consensual.

Lawrence Cooper, also known as Father Damian Cooper, and the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Vancouver filed a response in B.C. Supreme Court on Jan. 3 to Kathleen Taylor’s suit.

Last month, Taylor filed a suit seeking damages for sexual exploitation and/or sexual assaults because she said she had suffered psychological damage. She is seeking general, aggravated, punitive and special damages, as well as loss of past and future earnings.

The church “admits that it is vicariously liable” for some of the actions of the priest in the course of his employment, but adds he was “reasonably supervised” and the church had no knowledge of the personal relationship between the priest and Taylor.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

January 20, 2013

Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker

A leading Australian priest who sexually preyed on a disabled and vulnerable woman on Sydney’s north shore for 14 years has been allowed to return to preaching and running community groups at one of the nation’s busiest churches.

The recent decision by the Catholic Church to allow Father Tom Knowles to return to full duties at St Francis’ in Melbourne’s central business district after about 16 months of “administrative leave” has outraged his victim and victims’ groups.

Father Knowles’s reinstatement comes after the church apologised to Jennifer Herrick, paid her $100,000 in compensation and acknowledged “the harm that can be caused to vulnerable people in such a case”.

Ms Herrick’s story highlights a rarely exposed facet of church abuse: vulnerable adult parishioners who are targeted by their priest for a sexual relationship.

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VERMONT
Lez Get Real

Posted by: Bridgette P. LaVictoire on January 18, 2013.

Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is pushing Vermont’s Catholic Bishops to release the names of other accused clerics so that all of the crimes that they have concealed can come to light.

SNAP Director David Clohessy stated “For more than a decade, bishops have been required, by their own national policy, to be open and transparent’ about child sex crimes. Yet for months, perhaps years, Vermont church officials kept secret about apparently credible allegations of child sex abuse against Fr. Joseph Dussault. Parents and the public only know about these accusations because a victim was smart and strong enough to file a suit and persevere to a settlement.”

Recently, the Diocese of Burlington settled eleven civil lawsuits before they went to trial. Now, SNAP is urging the diocese to use all of their available resources in order to reach those hurt by clergy who have been in Vermont.

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CALIFORNIA
LAist

A meth ring that headed up by the now-infamous “Monsignor Meth” in Connecticut got its supply from a couple in Orange County.

Msgr. Kevin Wallin of Connecticut was arrested on suspicion of selling meth and laundering money through a sex shop that he purchased not long after he resigned from the priesthood two years ago, according to the New York Daily News. A federal indictment with conspiracy to distribute meth also named Chad McCluskey, 43, of San Clemente and Kristen Laschober, 47, of Laguna Nigel, as well as Wallin and two other men in Connecticut.

The OC couple allegedly shipped meth across the country six times between September and January. The OC Weekly notes that McCluskey describes himself in his social media profiles as working in “global distribution” for Pure Chip and describes his girlfriend Laschober as a “wardrobe consultant.” They look like any other couple from coastal Orange County. The pair were arrested in Las Vegas on January 10—a week after Wallin. The U.S. Attorney’s office said Wallin sold meth to undercover officers six times.

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FRANCE
Le Parisien

Timothée Boutry | Publié le 08.01.2013

C’était un curé très apprécié dans sa communauté. Un personnage charismatique en qui les parents avaient toute confiance. Bénéficiant encore du soutien de plusieurs paroissiens, le père Patrick Braud, 55 ans, l’ancien vicaire général de la cathédrale d’Angoulême (Charente), devra pourtant comparaître devant le tribunal correctionnel pour des agressions sexuelles « par personne ayant autorité ».

Au terme de ses investigations, la juge d’instruction, dont l’ordonnance de renvoi a été signée le 7 décembre, a identifié trois victimes mineures, de jeunes adolescentes dont deux avaient moins de 15 ans au moment des faits. Certains des agissements dénoncés remontent à la période 1996-1998. « Mon client reconnaît des gestes déplacés, mais il conteste le caractère sexuel des agressions. Il vit très mal cette histoire », plaide Me Patricia Coutand, l’avocate du père Braud.

Il a d’abord reconnu les faits

Les premières plaintes contre l’ecclésiastique remontent à janvier 2009 lorsque trois jeunes filles — deux sœurs et une de leur amie qui se verra finalement objecter la prescription — dénoncent avoir subi plusieurs agressions sexuelles. Il s’agit à chaque fois d’adolescentes élevées dans un milieu catholique traditionnel et qui, souvent mal dans leur peau, avaient su trouver auprès du curé une oreille attentive. Au cours de la procédure, un des plaignantes évoque les « sentiments partagés » que lui inspirait cet homme : « Je l’admirais, il me dominait moralement et intellectuellement, et d’un autre côté il me dégoûtait par les actes sexuels qu’il m’imposait. » Cette jeune fille, âgée de 17 ans en 1996, parle de caresses sur les cuisses, de baisers dans le cou, de succions de doigts et de caresses sur la poitrine. Et même un viol digital qui se serait produit lors d’une virée à la campagne. Sa sœur évoquera des caresses mammaires au domicile familial au cours d’une leçon de violon.

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GERMANY
The New York Times

By MELISSA EDDY

Published: January 18, 2013

BERLIN — A report about child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, based on victim accounts and released by the church this week, showed that priests carefully planned their assaults and frequently abused the same children repeatedly for years.

The report, compiled from information collected from victims and other witnesses who called a hot line run by the church from 2010 until the end of last year, includes the ages of the victims, the locations of the assaults and the repercussions they have suffered since. The accounts were provided in 8,500 calls to the hot line; they are not representative of abuse cases over all and cannot be individually verified. The church said the report contained information from 1,824 people, of whom 1,165 described themselves as victims.

Germany’s bishops have vowed a thorough and impartial investigation into the abuse. Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier, who is looking into abuse cases for the German Bishops’ Conference, told reporters after the report was released on Thursday that it served as an example of that intention.

“I found particularly devastating the perpetrators’ lies to their under-aged victims that their actions were an expression of a loving bond with God,” he said Thursday. Claudia Adams, who said she was assaulted as a child in a preschool run by the church in a village near Trier, works through her trauma by blogging about the abuse scandal. The priest who abused her “told me that I was now ‘closer to God,’ ” she said in a telephone interview on Friday from her home near Trier.

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IRELAND
Derry Journal

Monsignor Eamon Martin, Diocesan Administrator of the Diocese of Derry, tells the ‘Journal’ of his shock at being appointed Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh.

Watch our video to hear his thoughts on his new role.

And get the Sunday Journal for comprehensive coverage of the Archbishop elect’s appointment

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UNITED STATES
Stop Baptist Predators

True evil lies not in the depraved act of the one, but in the silence of the many.” On this day, I am contemplating these words, attributed to a black Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr.

In countless stories of Baptist clergy sex abuse, we have seen the sad truth of King’s words made manifest. Even with childhood histories of horrific abuse – of having been molested, raped and sodomized by Baptist preachers – countless such victims have said that the worst of their experience came when they tried to tell about the abuse within the faith community.

That was when they faced “the silence of the many.”

That was when the relational fabric of community, and often even of family, was torn asunder.

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GERMANY
Reuters

By Tom Heneghan

January 18, 2013

Germany’s Roman Catholic Church has shut a national hotline for victims of sexual abuse by priests because demand for it has dropped since the peak of the scandal in 2010, the bishop overseeing the project said.

The Church plans to continue studying clerical sex abuse and is in contact with potential research partners after sacking the criminologist it originally hired for an independent report on the issue, Bishop Stephan Ackermann told journalists.

Hotline director Andreas Zimmer said his service was flooded with calls when it opened in March 2010 but they soon fell off and only about a dozen a month were made in the second half of 2012. It handled 8,465 calls in almost three years of operation.

“The hotline closed down at the end of 2012,” Ackermann said on Thursday in Trier, according to his statement distributed by the German Bishops Conference. “For some time, the falling demand no longer justified keeping it open.”

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CONNECTICUT
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by Barbara Dorris on January 18, 2013

I feel sorry for priests who resign or take a leave for health or personal reasons. Most of them, I’m sure, are honest when they say and do this. But many of them, I’m also sure, do so under a huge cloud of suspicion. The blame for that falls squarely on the shoulders of their deceptive bishops.

A Connecticut priest used that phrase – resigning “for health and personal reasons” back in 2011. Now, he’s been arrested on drug charges. And his Catholic supervisors allegedly knew that he engaged in bizarre sex acts in the church rectory.

According to the CT Post:

“But sources knowledgeable with the case said the situation with Msgr. Kevin Wallin went deeper than diocese officials will publicly admit.

While pastor of St. Augustine’s, sources said he often disappeared for days at a time, and rectory personnel became concerned and notified diocese officials when Wallin, sometimes dressed as a woman, would entertain odd-looking men (some who were also dressed in women’s clothing) and engaging in sex acts.

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ESPANA
AFP

MADRID — La justicia española investiga un segundo caso de ‘bebés robados’, en el que de nuevo estaría implicada una religiosa española de 87 años, sor María, que fue primera persona en ser imputada en el marco de este vasto escándalo que habría afectado a miles de personas, dijo este viernes el abogado encargado del caso.

La declaración de la monja María Gómez Valbuena en este segundo caso, en el que es acusada por Purificación Betegón de haberle robado a sus gemelas, nacidas en 1981 en Madrid, ha sido pospuesta sine die “por motivos de salud”, anunció el abogado de la demandante, Alipio Barbero.

Purificación Betegón “tuvo en 1981 dos gemelas y cuando avisó a Sor María de que no quería dar sus hijas en adopción, resulta que se murieron”, explicó el abogado a la prensa a la salid del juzgado, sin dar mayores detalles.

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