ABUSE TRACKER

AUSTRALIA
PR Web

Adelaide, Australia (PRWEB) June 11, 2012

An insider’s perspective can sometimes be the most clear. Father James Valladares takes a hard look at recent child abuse allegations against the Catholic church in his new book, “Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast: A Research Study on Procedural Justice for Priests-Diocesan and Religious” (published by iUniverse).

The book is a culmination of intense research and hours of candid conversations that Fr. Valladares facilitated among both priests and religious superiors. The goal, he says, was to determine a procedure for dealing with abuse allegations that would not compromise priest’s basic right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty as well as the sacred relationship between a priest and his superior.

“The deadliest attacks to the Catholic church are coming from within its own walls,” Fr. Valladares says. “I conducted this study to show that society is effectively tarring all priests with the same brush, using the allegations against a select few to discredit others.”

The procedure that Fr. Valladares developed, which is outlined in the book, is based on Scripture, Church traditions and teachings, as well as canon law, moral theology, and pastoral praxis. Using this procedure, allegations can be promptly addressed without compromising the basic right of presumed innocence.

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GERMANY
netzwerkB

[ICH BIN IM HUNGERSTREIK]

With the occurrence of the scandals about sexualized violence in the year 2012, much has been discussed, but so far, little has happened. Instead of addressing seriously the problem of sexualized violence in Germany, the parties have issued programs, which were supposed to impede sexualized violence in the public space, but do not tackle its causes. Sexualized violence still happens in secret.

In reverse, netzwerkB (networkB) has championed for the abolition of the statute of limitations in order to ensure a continued debate about its causes. As the experiences of violence are so dramatic regarding sexualized violence, the affected victims never find true, inner peace. Therefore, it represents a deeply incisive injustice when the victims, in the course of their lives, finally are ready to file suit, and evidence is available – yet they may not file suit. The state establishes legal peace solely on behalf of the perpetrators. Also an extension of the statute of limitations does not stop this injustice.

Because of these facts, we at networkB cannot join the compromise to extend the statute of limitations in order to then keep silent. We see abolition as the only correct step. None of the political parties wants to take this step because, allegedly, we must bygones let be bygones. networkB sees this differently: of course, we must face the past because the past, and especially in the case of sexualized violence, determines our actions. Without the consistent processing of our past, we have few chances to change society in a sustained manner and to liberate it from sexual violence.

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ITALY
BBC News

Italy’s Catholic Church faces an annual multi-million euro bill over government plans to strip it of its tax-exempt status.

Prime Minister Mario Monti has announced the Vatican must pay taxes on non-religious property, from which it previously enjoyed an exemption.

The annual cost could be up to 720m euros ($945m; £598m) according to municipal government bodies.

Italy’s Catholic Church has 110,000 properties, worth about 9bn euros.

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UNITED STATES
SBC Plodder

William Thornton

We are autonomous; always have been and always will be.

Every church that identifies with the SBC, with any state Baptist convention, with any local association of Baptist churches hires and fires their own clergy and any crime committed by the pastor or staff is a local church matter, Responsibility and liability fall to the individual and perhaps the church.

Right?

Yes, maybe, sort-of. But not always.

Last month a jury in Florida held the Florida Baptist Convention and the Lake County Baptist Association partially liable for a pastor of two FBC church plants who was convicted of abusing a boy. (My blog on this case is here.) The FBC and association provided funding and training and were found to have been negligent in checking the perpetrator’s former churches.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

Vatican seeks ‘reciprocal understanding’ with visiting US nuns over Rome’s crackdown

By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, June 11

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican says it’s hoping to forge a “reciprocal understanding” with U.S. nuns over its recent crackdown on the largest umbrella group of American sisters.

Sister Pat Farrell, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, is to meet Tuesday with the head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, American Cardinal William Levada, as well as with the bishop who has been named to oversee a Vatican-mandated overhaul of the group.

The Vatican in April accused the nuns of promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

The LCWR says the Vatican inquiry was “flawed” and said Farrell will raise the group’s concerns with Levada.

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WAUKESHA (WI)
Fox 11

WAUKESHA (AP) – The Archdiocese of Milwaukee says it has placed a Waukesha priest on leave while it investigates an allegation of sexual abuse.

The archdiocese’s move comes two weeks before Father John Schreiter is scheduled to retire. The archdiocese says he has denied the allegations and is cooperating with the investigation. The accusation surfaced as part of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy filing. Schreiter is accused of sexually abusing a minor three decades ago. The incident was reported to the Waukesha County district attorney, who declined to prosecute.

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UNITED STATES
Injury Board Blog Network

Video Worth Watching Concerning Priest Abuse Fallout in Philadelphia, Boston

Posted by Mike Bryant
June 10, 2012

Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org was recently interviewed by NECN.com and it is worth watching. She discusses the legal cases of Jesuit priest Donald McGuire in Boston and Philadelphia Monsignor William Lynn.

[video – NECN]

These are each stories that show how far the fight for survivors has come. As she says:

I think what we’re learning is that when prosecutors are determined they’re gonna find a lot to get these enablers I think prosecutors and more willing to get any dollars these days. Basically what I’m seeing how — did is what Bradley — did they knowingly kept child molesters in ministry so we have tough brave prosecutors. These — enablers can finally be held accountable.

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LOGANVILLE (GA)
Patch

When Kathryn R. Byrne, M.P.M., a Life Coach in Loganville, was developing a capstone project as a requirement for her Master of Pastoral Ministry (M.P.M.) from the University of Dallas, she had no idea it would become a published book, let alone an award-winning one. The 2012 Indie Excellence Awards have just released their winners and finalists, and Byrne’s book, Understanding the Abuse of Adults by Catholic Clergy and Religious, earned a Finalist rating in the “Psychology” category. This is the third time Byrne’s book has become an Award-Winning Finalist.

Last year, the same book was an Award-Winning Finalist with both the 2011 International Book Awards, and the USA Book News “Best Books of 2011” Awards. Each of these awards were given in the “Psychology / Mental Health” category.

So what’s so special about this book?

A lot is written about the abuse of children by clergy – and rightfully so! Children who endure sexual abuse at the hands of trusted clergy are deeply harmed, and can suffer for years as a result. But what about adults? Are they abused by clergy, too? Yes!

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WISCONSIN
SNAP Wisconsin

SNAP Responds: Vicar General of Milwaukee Archdiocese assails clergy abuse victims during Mass

Statement by Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director (Milwaukee)

CONTACT: 414.429.7259

In condescending, hurtful and, at best, deeply confused remarks announcing the removal this morning of Fr. John Schreiter as pastor of St. John Neumann’s parish for reports of sexually abusing a minor, the Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee attacked victims for their “antics” in coming forward and speaking publically about their abuse and expressing their concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability from church officials (read a transcript of Kohler’s remarks or listen to the audio).

Fr. William Kohler, who is also the pastor of St. Leonard’s in Muskego, was explaining why Schreiter—who Kohler clearly believes is innocent—had to unfortunately be removed from his post: “We will pay for it [if we don’t remove Fr. Schreiter], we will pay in the court of public opinion, you know that the victims have lawyers and you know they are watching us. You watch television; you see the kinds of things they say about the church on the courthouse steps. You don’t want that kind of antic to take place against you…”

The parishioners of St. John’s Neumann’s, however, are not on trial in the court of public opinion for raping, sexually assaulting and abusing children and then covering it up. In fact, it was parishioners of St. John’s who alerted victim/survivors and advocates of Schreiter’s removal and who were upset with Kohler’s remarks. Kohler’s paranoid presentation is a perfect illustration of why the archdiocese is in such deep trouble and has lost so much credibility.

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HAWAII
Star-Advertiser

By Derrick DePledge

Victims of childhood sexual abuse in Hawaii will have more time to bring civil lawsuits under a new state law that recognizes that many are often too afraid or ashamed to confront their abusers sooner.

The law provides victims who have been unable to file civil lawsuits because the statute of limitations has expired a two-year window — or until April 2014 — to go to court. Victims can sue their alleged abusers and churches, community groups or businesses that were grossly negligent at preventing sexual misconduct

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

EXCLUSIVE Joseph Catanzaro and Kate Bastians, The West Australian
Updated June 11, 2012

More than 20 WA institutions have been implicated in cases of child abuse and neglect, The West Australian can reveal.

Religious orders and government agencies are among the long list of organisations behind the facilities that have been linked to claims including sexual, physical and psychological abuse.

The State Government has confirmed that 22 institutions were named by child victims in successful applications alleging abuse lodged under the Redress WA scheme.

Ex-gratia payouts of up to $45,000 have since been offered to victims who attended those facilities.

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WAUKESHA (WI)
Fox 6

[with video]

June 10, 2012, by Henry Rosoff

WAUKESHA — A Waukesha priest has been removed from ministry for allegedly sexually assaulting a minor several decades ago. This is the second time in 10 years John Schreiter has been pulled from his parish.

Schreiter is not facing charges in a criminal court, but he is the subject of a review by the church.

Schreiter currently serves as priest at St. John Neumann Church in Waukesha, though he is now on administrative leave.

The announcement was made to the congregation during masses Saturday night and Sunday morning at St. John Neumann Parish.

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HOLYOKE (MA)
WSHM

[with video]

HOLYOKE, MA (WSHM) –
Members of Mater Dolorosa gathered both inside and outside of the church Sunday afternoon.

They showed solidarity in ending their 24/7 vigil 20 days shy of a full year.

The decision followed a directive issued by the Vatican earlier this month that stated those who occupied the church must leave.

However, in the same announcement, the Vatican also said they will hear an appeal on the status of the church building, which helped make the decision easier for the parishioners.

“The Vatican is like our Supreme Court in the United States,” said church spokesman Vic Anop. “They need not take your case if they don’t think it is meritorious. It has to meet a threshold before it goes before the entire Supreme Court. We met that threshold with the information we sent to Rome.”

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HOLYOKE (MA)
WWLP

Anaridis Rodriguez

HOLYOKE, Mass. (WWLP) – Nearly a year after holding an on going prayer vigil inside the Mater Dolorosa church, hundreds gathered to announce they will abide by the Vatican’s request to vacate the parish. “I used to be an altar server here before it closed and yesterday when I was here I was trying to relive the moments when I did,” said 10-year-old Kathryn Fydenkevez Sunday morning inside the church.

For five generations, Fydenkevez’s family has known Mater Dolorosa Church as their second home. On Sunday she and her brother were among the legion of parishioners ready to show they will fight to keep their church open.

Kathryn’s mother, Sharon, told 22News exposing her children to this experience was an easy decision. “They’ve been involved right from the start, right from the start, they didn’t want to leave.”

But a Vatican decree says otherwise. On May 25th, the Vatican tribunal issued a ruling ordering parishioners to leave the parish which has been part of the Holyoke community since the late 1800’s.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

By Edel O’Connell

Monday June 11 2012

JUST more than half of an expected 20,000 pilgrims descended on Dublin’s RDS yesterday for the opening event of the International Eucharistic Congress.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin and the Papal Legate Cardinal Marc Ouellet addressed an audience made up largely of overseas pilgrims from 123 countries, in a ceremony where numbers were noticeably less than anticipated.

The attendance is a far cry from 1932 when more than a quarter of the population,or one million, attended the international event.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

By Edel O’Connell

Monday June 11 2012

THE country’s second most senior cleric, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, has insisted the Catholic Church is on a path of renewal but admitted it would be a “lengthy journey”.

Addressing the opening ceremony of the 50th Eucharistic Congress at the RDS in Dublin, Dr Martin said the past 50 years of the Irish Catholic Church had been marked by a “darker side”.

Remembering “all those who suffered abuse and who still today bear the mark of that abuse”, Dr Martin said that the church had engaged in “criminal abuse and neglect of those weakest in our society”.

Children, who should have been the “object of the greatest care, the greatest support and Christ-like love”, he said, had suffered.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 9 June 2012 (VIS) – The Holy See Press Office released the following communique yesterday afternoon:

“The Holy See was surprised and concerned to learn of recent developments involving Professor Gotti Tedeschi. It has the greatest confidence that the Italian judicial authorities will honour and respect the sovereign prerogatives which the Holy See is recognised as having under international law.

“Moreover the Holy See confirms its complete confidence in the people who, with great commitment and professionalism, dedicate their labours to the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), and it is carefully examining the possibility that any harm, to its own rights or to those of its institutions, may have arisen from the current circumstances.

“Finally, it must be reiterated that the motion of no confidence passed against Professor Gotti Tedeschi by the Administrative Board of the IOR was founded on objective reasons concerning the governance of the IOR. It was not determined by any purported opposition to the policy of transparency which, in fact, the Holy See authorities and the IOR itself have very much to heart”.

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NEW YORK
WABC

[with video]

Lucy Yang

CROWN HEIGHTS (WABC) — Sex abuse is a pretty tough topic anywhere. But in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Crown Heights, it is even more difficult to address.

The community has their own rabbinical courts, and traditionally don’t report their own to outside authorities. Now there is an effort to change that.

Mordechi Feinstein says he was sexually abused by a man he once admired – a rabbi. Worse yet, he says his elders protected the rabbi and by doing so sacrificed innocent children like himself.

On Sunday in Crown Heights, survivors, along with the Brooklyn District Attorney are trying to change an age-old practice in the ultra-Orthodox community that keeps victims from reporting any such crimes to the authorities.

Victims can be severely victimized again by their own people if they notify the police or District Attorney instead of the rabbi.

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NEW YORK
CBS New York

NEW YORK(CBSNewYork) — Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes and a panel of community leaders met to discuss sex abuse cases within the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

DA Hynes and civil rights attorney Norman Siegel appeared at a public town-hall meeting in Brooklyn on Sunday, along with child advocates, rabbis, and molestation victims.

Hynes has come under fire in the past for his handling of sexual assault allegations in the community.

The District Attorney defended his policy and said that it was unacceptable for anybody with knowledge of sex abuse to fail to report it to the authorities.

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NEW YORK
WNYC

By Brigid Bergin : WNYC Producer

Mordechai Feinstein felt obligated to tell his story. The 19-year-old stands nearly 6-feet-tall with square shoulders and an unmistakable Brooklyn inflection in his voice. When he was 15, he joined a group led by a local rabbi in Crown Heights who mentored at-risk youth.

“I went there for Sabbath meals. He was the spiritual guide and mentor I would go to when I had questions. He helped get me into different religious schools,” explained Feinstein. “So in effect, he was my personal rabbi.”

This rabbi also became his abuser.

Feinstein shared his story with the approximately 100 ultra-Orthodox that attended the public meeting at the Ohel Nosson Shul in Crown Heights on Sunday. He joined a panel of speakers, including Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, child advocates and rabbis, to talk about how to prevent child sex abuse in the community — and what people could and should do when faced with it.

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NEW YORK
New York Post

By REUVEN FENTON and CHUCK BENNETT

Angry members of the city’s ultra Orthodox Jewish community heckled Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes yesterday over his handling of sex-abuse cases in their insular community.

Hynes has been criticized over his controversial decision to not name accused sex offenders from Brooklyn’s Orthodox community in a bid to encourage victims to come forward.

He said since he started his program in 2009, more than 130 victims have reached out to his office because the alleged abuser’s name is kept confidential.

“I have no plans to change that policy,” he said, because it’s working.

One man in the 100-person audience shouted, “Not true! Not true! Your policy is failing!” as others murmured agreement.

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NEW YORK
New York Daily News

By Reuven Blau / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes shot back Sunday at critics of his controversial practice of not naming ultra-Orthodox Jewish sex-abuse defendants, saying, “My policy is succeeding.”

Hynes came under fire at a Crown Heights town hall meeting for treating accused Orthodox Jewish sex offenders differently from other such suspects.

“If something like this happened in the Italian community, you would give out the names,” civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel told Hynes.

Joel Engelman, 26, a victims advocate, made Hynes bristle when he yelled, “Your policy is failing!”

“My policy is succeeding,” Hynes responded. “Anyone who expresses outrage is not being practical.”

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NEW YORK
Failed Messiah

Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

Brooklyn’s ethically challenged District Attorney Charles Hynes now says his office has brought 130 haredi pedophiles to justice since he opened his special haredi hotline, Kol Tzedek, in 2009.

That figure is 34 pedophiles higher than it was May 19 when Hynes claimed the number was 96 and 31 higher than the 99 figure he used in during the past two weeks.

Moreover, Hynes claimed during that time span that the 99 cases were all prosecutions.

But The Jewish Week, The Guardian, the New York Post and the New York Times have all shown that close to half those cases have not been prosecuted and that many of the others were plea bargains made to very reduced charges.

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NEW JERSEY
Gloucester County Times

By Joe Green/Gloucester County Times

BARRINGTON — A youth mentor at Grace Bible Church here is accused of sexually assaulting a boy he met while volunteering with the church, Camden County Prosecutor Warren W. Faulk announced today.

Samuel Bangs, 23, of Bellmawr, was charged with sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a minor and two counts of criminal sexual conduct.

Authorities allege he engaged in “illegal sexual conduct” with the boy, who was under age 16, “over the past two months,” a statement released by the Prosecutor’s Office said.

Some of the encounters occurred at public parks, investigators said, adding that Bangs was no longer a mentor to the boy when the assaults took place.

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MICHIGAN
Upper Michigan Source

[Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People]

by Dustin Bonk

MARQUETTE — Saint Peter Cathedral in Marquette held a special prayer service Sunday afternoon.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of when the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church was revealed. Sunday’s prayer service was to commemorate the event and to pray for healing for the victims of sexual abuse and all others that were affected.

After the sexual abuse crisis began, United States bishops devised the charter for the protection of children and young people.

“We are trying very hard to be very vigilant and work very hard to protect children and young and to prevent something like this from ever happening again,” said Bishop Alexander Sample.

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NEW JERSEY
Patch

By Sean McCullen

A Bellmawr man was arrested Saturday and charged with sexually abusing a juvenile boy he met while serving as a “youth mentor” at a Barrington church, authorities announced on Sunday.

Samuel Bangs, 23, has been charged with two counts of criminal sexual contact and single counts of sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child.

Authorities noted the Bangs was no longer a mentor to the victim at the time the alleged sexual assaults occurred.

The victim was identified in a statement issued Sunday by the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office as a juvenile male under the age of 16. He came forward to authorities with the allegations of sexual abuse on Friday.

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UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

Monday, June 11, 2012

Bryan Cones

Am I to judge a mentor and friend only by his greatest sin?

A death in the family is often an occasion of mixed emotions—sadness and gratitude, maybe even a little regret. I felt all that and more when I heard of the death of my former bishop, Anthony J. O’Connell, the first bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee, who welcomed me as a seminarian in 1993 and was a fixture in my life for many years after. He moved to the Diocese of West Palm Beach, Florida in 1998, where his past caught up with him. When news of his abuse of a high school seminarian in the 1970s came to light in 2002, he resigned and spent the rest of his life in a monastery in South Carolina.

When I got the news of my bishop’s resignation, I remember feeling both disbelief and shock. How could the man we called “OC”—my mentor—have been an abuser who admitted to lying naked with and fondling a teenage student multiple times over several years as rector of St. Thomas Seminary, a now-closed high school seminary in Hannibal, Missouri?

On my way to college seminary I had actually met O’Connell’s victim, then a priest of the Diocese of Jefferson City, Missouri, who was then a teacher at St. Thomas. I also encountered O’Connell’s successor as rector, who later was also accused of abuse. And I met Jefferson City’s vocation director, who, it turned out, was in an abusive relationship with the 21-year-old president of our seminary college student body. That “relationship” had been going on for at least six years and would continue for three more before the whole thing finally blew up.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

[with audio]

By Lexi Metherell

One of the Catholic Church’s most outspoken and loved leaders has encouraged his fellow clergy to keep the pressure on the Vatican to reform, as he prepares to retire.

Father Pat Power has resigned after more than 25 years as the bishop of Canberra and Goulburn.

He has become known as one of the church’s more progressive leaders, questioning the need for priests to be celibate and for women to be excluded from senior roles.

Father Power says the sexual abuse scandals have diminished the authority of the church and warns that unless there is reform, parishes will continue to shrink.

“There’s been the whole question of sexual abuse, which has brought a terrible stain on the life of the church,” he said.

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UNITED STATES
Rutland Herald

[Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People]

This week marks 10 years since the United States’ Catholic bishops met in Dallas to create sweeping reforms in response to a wave of lawsuits and media reports on child sex abuse by multiple priests and a decades-long cover-up by the leaders in the church. The bishops created the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which developed a “one-strike” policy to remove priests credibly accused of a single act of abuse, and started steps to allow for swifter defrocking of predatory clerics. The bishops also allowed the abusive priests’ personnel files — cataloging more than 10,000 instances of abuse — to be studied for evidence of patterns by John Jay College of Criminal Justice. All of this was welcome and constructive.

But — and this is a big but — while the church has reached many settlements with victims of the abuse, including a major one here in Vermont, and many priests who were part of this travesty have been jailed, censured, removed from the priesthood and otherwise punished, there remains one group of Catholics who have escaped any accountability: the bishops themselves.

The bishops are at the heart of what is wrong with the Catholic Church. In practice they are accountable only to the Pope — not to the people they are supposed to serve. And the truth is, American Catholicism has moved far beyond the rigid, unaccountable and irrelevant Vatican hierarchy.

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IRELAND
Sky News (Australia)

An international conference celebrating Roman Catholicism has opened in Ireland against a backdrop of anger over child abuse cover-ups and evidence of declining faith in core church beliefs.

About 12,000 Catholics, many from overseas, gathered for an open-air mass in a half-full Dublin stadium on Sunday at the start of the Eucharistic Congress, a week-long event organised by the Vatican every four years in a different part of the world.

The global gathering, begun in the 19th century and last held in Quebec in 2008, highlights the Catholic Church’s belief in transubstantiation, the idea that bread and wine transforms during mass into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.

An opinion poll of Irish Catholics found that two-thirds of Irish Catholics don’t believe this, nor do they attend mass weekly.

The survey, published in The Irish Times with an error margin of three points, also found that just 38 per cent believe Ireland today would be in worse shape without its dominant church. And just three-fifths even knew the Eucharistic Congress was coming to Ireland.

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WISCONSIN
WTMJ

[with video]

By Lacey Crisp and the WTMJ News Team

CREATED Jun. 10, 2012

ST. FRANCIS – A Waukesha Catholic priest is now on leave after a sexual abuse allegation. The allegation dates back 30 years.

Parishioners are stunned by the news. However, this is not the first time Father John Schreiter has been accused of sexual abuse.

The Catholic Diocese says he is now on leave, just one week before he was set to retire.

“People looked upset. I saw people crying. People looked shocked,” one parishioner told us.

St. John Neumann Catholic Church parishioners were too upset to show their faces on camera. They say they are in shock that their priest, Father John Schreiter, is now under investigation for sexual abuse.

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IRELAND
Lez Get Real

Posted by: Bridgette P. LaVictoire on June 10, 2012.

The Catholic Church in Ireland has never been in as tenuous a situation as it is now. As with much of the world, the people of Ireland are tired of the Catholic Church being intrusive into the nation’s politics as well as the manner in which they covered up the sexual abuse of children. Some 20,000 Catholics, mostly from outside of Ireland, gathered for the open-air Mass held in a Dublin stadium to mark the start of the Eucharistic Congress, which is set to last a week.

The gathering has been held every four years since 1926. Prior to that, it was held ever year from its inception in 1881. It was last held in 2008 in Quebec.

The Church is facing problems with some of its core beliefs. A recent poll of Irish Catholics found that two-thirds of them do not believe in the transubstantiation of the bread and wine during Mass. They do not believe that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ. The polling also found that just 38% of Irish believe that the nation would be in worse shape without the church being in dominance. What is worse, only three-fifths of Catholics knew that the Eucharistic Congress was even going to be in Ireland.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star

By MARY SANCHEZ
The Kansas City Star

Each Monday afternoon, the priest dutifully drives to keep his 4:15 appointment.

Many people will consider it a meeting with the devil.

The Rev. Chuck Tobin travels to the maximum security federal jail for pretrial defendants in Leavenworth to visit the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, the only Kansas City area priest recently charged in local criminal courts as part of the church sex abuse scandal.

Hate the sin. Love the sinner.

Accusations of pedophilia challenge that spiritual calling perhaps more than any other crime. Even the other inmates despise Ratigan, Tobin said.

Ratigan, he says, is kept in isolation but often endures hours of verbal abuse. Other prisoners scream insults, taunting Ratigan to slit his own throat with a razor the next time guards allow him a shave and a shower. Pedophiles are at the bottom of the food chain in prisons.

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PITTSFIELD (MA)
Berkshire Eagle

Monday June 11, 2012

Berkshire Eagle Staff

PITTSFIELD — A former New York priest convicted of raping two altar boys in the Berkshires in the 1980s is being sued by one of his victims.

The victim, whose name is not being revealed, is suing former Pastor Gary W. Mercure and the Albany Roman Catholic diocese, according to a report in the Albany Times Union.

Mercure, 68, who served in Glens Falls and Queensbury, N.Y., was convicted in a Pittsfield court in 2011 on three counts of forcible rape and one count of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. He was sentenced to 20 to 25 years in prison.

Mercure has been accused of similar crimes in New York and Vermont, but those cases could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run out in those states.

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NEW YORK
Albany Times Union

By Brendan J. Lyons

The Albany Roman Catholic diocese’s handling of sexual abuse complaints against priests has the potential to be laid bare in a Vermont federal court where a Glens Falls man has filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the priest who was convicted of taking him across state lines to rape him when he was a young altar boy.

The federal lawsuit is filed against both the diocese and a former pastor, Gary Mercure, in U.S. District Court in Burlington. It was filed there, in part, because Vermont’s statute of limitations, unlike New York’s, allows child abuse victims to sue for damages within six years after they discover any emotional or physical problems attributable to abuse.

“This lawsuit is at an early stage and motions are pending. The claims against the Albany diocese have no factual or legal basis. We intend to vigorously contest them,” Ken Goldfarb, spokesman for the Albany diocese, said Friday.

The victim suing the diocese, now 36, testified last year at Mercure’s criminal trial that the priest raped him several times at the rectory of a Queensbury church, Our Lady of Anunciation. He also accused Mercure of raping him in a car on a ski trip and during a swimming trip to Lake Saint Catherine in Poultney, Vt., in the late 1980s. The identity of the alleged victim, who could not be reached for comment, is being withheld by the Times Union, which refrains from identifying sexual assault victims without their consent.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

POPE BENEDICT XVI will not now be making a live broadcast to the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin next Sunday, as had been expected. A pre-recorded message from him will be shown at the closing Mass in Croke Park instead.

Congress general secretary Fr Kevin Doran said yesterday that weather factors influenced the decision to pre-record the message, although it had never been confirmed that a papal broadcast would be “live”.

He said numbers attending the congress were expected to increase as the week progressed, with a full house in Croke Park next Sunday. Tickets remain available for all congress events.

At a press conference at the RDS yesterday, Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin said there was an awareness among the estimated 7,000 pilgrims from abroad attending the congress “that the Irish church has been through difficult times”.

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WAUKESHA (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Gitte Laasby of the Journal Sentinel

June 10, 2012

A Waukesha priest has been put on administrative leave just two weeks before he was scheduled to retire because allegations surfaced that he sexually abused a minor three decades ago, Milwaukee Archdiocese officials announced over the weekend.

Father John Schreiter was scheduled to retire June 24 from his position as a pastor at St. John Neumann Parish in Waukesha until the allegations surfaced last week as part of the archdiocese’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, spokeswoman Jule Wolf said Sunday.

Vicar General Bill Kohler announced the accusations Sunday morning during Mass at St. John Neumann, calling them “a shock” and “very painful business.”

The allegation was reported to the district attorney’s office, but the DA declined to prosecute, so according to its sexual abuse policy, the Archdiocese has initiated its own investigation, officials said. A private investigator will research it and report to the Diocesan Review Board, which will make a recommendation to Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki, who will decide what will happen to Schreiter, Wolf explained.

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WAUKESHA (WI)
SNAP Wisconsin

Waukesha priest removed from ministry for sexually assaulting minor; Fr. John Schreiter had been suspended and reinstated once before

June 10, 2012

Waukesha priest removed from ministry for sexual assaulting minor
Fr. John Schreiter had been suspended and reinstated once before

CONTACT
John Pilmaier, SNAP Wisconsin Director, 414.336.8575
Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director, 414.429.7259

Fr. John Schreiter, pastor of St. John Neumann parish in Waukesha, has been removed from ministry for reports of sexually assaulting a minor several decades ago by Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki. The announcement was made this morning at the conclusion of mass by Fr. Bill Kohler, Vicar General of the Archdiocese. Schreiter had been previously suspended from ministry for sexual abuse allegations in 2004 when he was pastor of St. Bruno’s Church in Dousman. The report was ruled “unsubstantiated” at the time by the archdiocese and Schreiter was reinstated.

“This obviously raises serious questions as to the previous investigation and why Schreiter was put back in ministry in 2004 and allowed to have further access to children,” says John Pilmaier, the Wisconsin Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPwisconsin.com). “But more importantly,” according to Pilmaier, “why has Schreiter been removed and investigated when there are allegedly dozens of more newly named clergy reported to have sexually assaulted children as part of the Milwaukee Archdiocese bankruptcy filing in federal court? Who is vetting the mechanisms and procedures that are supposed to be in place to investigate these dozens of newly alleged child molesters? ”

Schreiter’s previous assignment before becoming pastor of St. John Neumann in June 2010 was St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Beaver Dam. Schreiter worked in several assignments over the course of his career, including St. Gall Parish in Milwaukee’s inner city where Schreiter was Vicar of Inner City Parishes for the archdiocese.

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VATICAN CITY
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)

Anti Mafia prosecutors have asked the secretive Vatican Bank to disclose details of an account held by a priest in connection with a money laundering and fraud investigation, it emerged on Sunday.

By Nick Pisa in Rome
10:25PM BST 10 Jun 2012

The official request was made more than a month ago but so far the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, has refused to disclose any records of the account held by father Ninni Treppiedi – who is currently suspended from serving as a priest.

Investigators want to know more about vast sums of money that are said to have passed through his account to establish if they were money laundering operations by on the run Mafia Godfather, Matteo Messina Denaro.

The reports emerged in the Italian media and came just two weeks after the head of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was sacked amid claims of power struggles and corruption within the Holy See which have been linked to the leaking of sensitive documents belonging to Pope Benedict XVI.

More in line with a Dan Brown thriller, it is not the first time that the Vatican Bank has been embroiled in claims of Mafia money laundering. Thirty years ago this month financier Roberto Calvi was found hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge with cash and bricks stuffed into his pockets.

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NEW YORK
The Wall Street Journal

Associated Press

NEW YORK — The abuse went on for nearly three years before the schoolgirl told anyone that her spiritual adviser was molesting her while he was supposed to be mentoring her about her religion, authorities said.

But in Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community, 53-year-old Nechemya Weberman has been embraced and defended as wrongly accused. The girl has been called a slut and a troublemaker, her family threatened and spat at on the street.

The rallying around Weberman, who goes on trial this month, and ostracizing of his accuser and her family reflects long-held beliefs in this insular community that problems should be dealt with from within and that elders have far more authority than the young. It also brought to light allegations that the district attorney was too cozy with powerful rabbis, a charge he vehemently denies.

“There are other people that claim misconduct and they can’t come out because they’re going to be re-victimized and ostracized by the community,” said Judy Genut, a friend of the accuser’s family who counsels troubled girls.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

PATSY MCGARRY and GENEVIEVE CARBERY

The papal legate to the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin has prayed that the event will “bring a special blessing to Ireland at this turbulent time”.

In a homily at the opening Mass at the RDS this evening, attended by about 12,500 people, Cardinal Mark Ouellett acknowledged that the Church in Ireland is “suffering” and “faces many new and serious challenges” of the faith.

“Well aware of these challenges, we turn together to Our Lord, who renews, heals and strengthens the faith of His people,” he said.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

PATSY MCGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

A number of small protests were staged at entrances to the Eucharistic Congress at Dublin’s RDS today.

Separate protests were staged by abuse survivors, a Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) group, Atheist Ireland and a parent and former Dublin school board member who wants his school named after someone other than former arcbishop of Dublin Dermot Ryan.

At the main entrance to the congress site, abuse survivor Paddy Doyle said nobody was listening to the protests. “Priests and bishops are just walking by,” he said.

It was “offensive” to hold the congress in Ireland at this time, he claimed. “There’s s still an awful lot of rawness out there where the abused are concerned. We’re still smarting…after the Redress Board, all the reports,” he said.

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IRELAND
RTE News

A number of protest groups have gathered outside the RDS in Dublin this afternoon to demonstrate against the holding of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin.

About ten people representing Survivors of Child Abuse and survivors of the Magdelene Laundries are demonstrating to highlight their disgust at the refusal of Cardinal Seán Brady to resign as Primate of All Ireland.

SOCA spokesperson John Kelly said it was a small dignified protest. He said thousands of people had wanted to come but as emotions were running so high they felt it would be wrong to do so.

But he said they wanted to send a clear message to the Vatican that no longer would people be able to get immunity from crimes that happen in this country.

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IRELAND
AFP

DUBLIN — Around 20,000 pilgrims on Sunday attended the start of an international Catholic festival of faith and culture in Ireland where the church has been hit by child abuse scandals and falling attendance.

The 50th International Eucharistic Congress began with an open-air mass in the Royal Dublin Society on the southside of the city which has been transformed into a religious village for the week-long event.

Some 10,000 pilgrims from more than 120 countries are attending the Congress which is an international gathering held every four years.

However, there were also a number of protest pickets at the opening mass, including victims of child abuse.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, who is president of the Congress, said the abuse of children by priests was a “travesty”.

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IRELAND
Houston Chronicle

SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press
Updated 01:47 p.m., Sunday, June 10, 2012

DUBLIN (AP) — An international conference celebrating Roman Catholicism opened Sunday in Ireland against a backdrop of anger over child abuse cover-ups and evidence of declining faith in core church beliefs.

About 12,000 Catholics, many from overseas, gathered for an open-air Mass in a half-full Dublin stadium at the start of the Eucharistic Congress, a weeklong event organized by the Vatican every four years in a different part of the world. The global gathering, begun in the 19th century and last held in Quebec in 2008, highlights the Catholic Church’s belief in transubstantiation, the idea that bread and wine transforms during Mass into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.

An opinion poll of Irish Catholics found that two-thirds of Irish Catholics don’t believe this, nor do they attend Mass weekly. The survey, published in The Irish Times with an error margin of 3 points, also found that just 38 percent believe Ireland today would be in worse shape without its dominant church. And just three-fifths even knew the Eucharistic Congress was coming to Ireland.

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IRELAND
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin

Most Rev. Diarmuid Martin
Archbishop of Dublin

Gaudet Mater Ecclesia: Our Mother the Church rejoices. These were the first words of the homily preached at the opening of the Second Vatican Council by Blessed Pope John XXIII, almost fifty years ago.

Today the Church in Ireland rejoices. It rejoices not in triumphalism or external festivities. It rejoices in the gift of this Eucharistic Congress which has been attentively prepared throughout the length and breath of Ireland through prayerful reflection on the great Mystery of our Faith: the sacrificial death and the life-giving resurrection of Jesus, present in the Church wherever the Eucharist is celebrated and worshipped.

The Church in Ireland rejoices today in the presence of pilgrims from many parts of the world who witness to the universality of our Catholic faith and who show their faith-filled fellowship and solidarity with the Church in Ireland. …

The Church in Ireland is a Church on the path to renewal. The fifty years since the Second Vatican Council have brought many graces to the Church in Ireland. The message and teaching of the Council still constitute the blueprint for our renewal.

But those fifty years have also been marked with a darker side, of sinful and criminal abuse and neglect of those weakest in our society: children, who should have been the object of the greatest care and support and Christ-like love. We recall all those who suffered abuse and who still today bear the mark of that abuse and may well carry it with them for the rest of their lives. In a spirit of repentance, let us remember each of them in the silence of our hearts.

The Church in Ireland is on the path to renewal. It will be a lengthy journey. It requires renewed and vigorous New Evangelization, a renewal in faith and in coherent and authentic witness to that faith in the world and in the culture in which we live.

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IRELAND
The Press Association

One of the most senior members of the Catholic Church in Ireland has called on thousands of pilgrims to remember victims of clerical abuse.

As 50 protesters picketed the RDS where the 50th Eucharistic Congress opened on Sunday, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin reflected on the “darker side” of the Church.

“The 50 years since the Second Vatican Council have brought many graces to the Church in Ireland,” said Archbishop Martin. “But those 50 years have also been marked with a darker side, of sinful and criminal abuse and neglect of those weakest in our society: children, who should have been the object of the greatest care and support and Christ-like love.”

As the Archbishop made his opening address, clerical abuse victim campaigners Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (Irish SOCA) staged a peaceful protest at the gates of the RDS, where the Eucharistic Congress is being held over the next week.

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HOLYOKE (MA)
The Republican

By Jeanette DeForge, The Republican

HOLYOKE – Protesters have decided to comply with an order from the Vatican’s highest court and end a round-the-clock prayer vigil at the Mater Dolorosa Church.

“We are starting our systematic withdrawal today,” said Victor Anop, of Chicopee, an organizer for the vigil.

The group must remove some personal property people have brought in for over the past 12 months but they should be finished in a day or two. The members plan to notify the security officers for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield before they leave.

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ROME
Corriere della Sera

ROMA – «Lei si sente come l’uomo nero che voleva fare male a Ettore Gotti Tedeschi?».
A ben vederlo, maglietta Lacoste a mezze maniche, mocassino fuori ordinanza, capelli cortissimi, l’aspetto dell’uomo nero non ce l’ha neppure un po’. Si scusa subito per aver violato il dress code del dirigente di banca. «Vengo da casa, sa, è sabato pomeriggio». Eccolo qui, quello che Gotti avrebbe descritto nel suo memorandum come il suo nemico numero uno, quello che avrebbe tramato per cacciarlo dalla banca. L’appuntamento è alle 18 a Porta Sant’Anna, i piazzali sono vuoti, senza una macchina parcheggiata, si sale su, al Cortile di San Damaso, poi un piccolo portoncino con un campanello che sembra quello di una casa. È Paolo Cipriani, direttore generale dello Ior dal giugno 2007, dopo aver avuto un’esperienza internazionale per banche italiane in Lussemburgo, a New York e a Londra. Un protagonista centrale del caso che ha portato il 24 maggio all’uscita traumatica di Gotti dall’Istituto. Parla per la prima volta.

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ROME
CNBC

Published: Sunday, 10 Jun 2012

ROME (Reuters) – A senior official of the Vatican’s bank denied on Sunday a reports that prominent Italian lay clients including politicians held secret numbered accounts at the institution, which is caught up in a money laundering investigation.

The Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) has been in the spotlight since 2010 when Italian investigators froze 23 million euros ($28.75 million) of its funds in Italian banks as part of their inquiry.

In a newspaper interview published on Sunday, IOR’s Director General Paolo Cipriani denied allegations which have surfaced since its president was abruptly ousted.

“There are no numbered accounts or accounts of politicians,” Cipriani told Corriere della Sera. “The only non-clergy Italians that hold accounts are employees or pensioners of the Holy See.”

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

Jun. 10, 2012
By Joshua J. McElwee

ST. LOUIS — Mercy Sr. Margaret Farley addressed for the first time publicly Friday evening the Vatican’s harsh criticism of one of her books, saying it points to “profoundly important” questions facing the Catholic community regarding the roles of truth and power.

Speaking slowly, and at times faltering for words, Farley, a prominent moral theologian, addressed the issue during a session at the 67th annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) that saw some 300 colleagues gather to ask what the Vatican’s critique might mean for the future of their discipline.

Ultimately, said Farley on Friday, the critique of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of her book Just Love, indicates different understandings of the role of theologians in the church and how our tradition changes and grows over time.

“We clearly have grown in many spheres of knowledge — about humans, about the way the universe runs,” said Farley. “It seems reasonable … that if we come to know even a little bit more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions that we had previously drawn need to be developed. Or maybe even let go of.

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ROME
Chiesa

In a Church that has its most promising “market” not in Europe but in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and even in the United States, the signs are pointing to a single candidate: Canadian cardinal Marc Ouellet

by Sandro Magister

ROME, June 10, 2012 – The Catholic Church is like Fiat-Chrysler. Slumping in Italy and Europe, it is coming back strong in the United States and has its most promising market in the rest of the world. With a clue about who the future pope will be.

The nation that has the largest number of Catholics today is Brazil, with 134 million, more than Italy, France, and Spain put together. Catholicism there has successfully confronted fierce competition, which in recent decades inflicted serious damage on it. Because when liberation theology was in fashion among the neo-Marxist Catholic élite, the faithful did not convert en masse to their message. They went over by the millions to the new Pentecostalist Churches, with their festive celebrations, music, singing, healings, speaking in tongues. But now this exodus has stopped. In the Catholic Church as well, the faithful are finding the warmth of participation and firmness of doctrine that three and four centuries ago brought success to the Reductions, the Jesuit missions among the Indians. Next year, world youth day will be in Brazil. Pope Joseph Ratzinger has promised that he will be there.

Then there are the Asian tigers. South Korea is the emblem of these. There the number of Catholics is rising at an astonishing rate, with tens of thousands of adults baptized each year. They were the soul of the popular movement that peacefully overthrew the military dictatorship. And they are an active part of the productive classes that produced the Korean economic miracle. In the capital, Seoul, they are now 15 percent of the population, when only half a century ago they didn’t even exist. And as in a big company, the Korean Catholic Church has set itself the goal of converting 20 percent of the population by 2020: “Evangelization Twenty Twenty” is the title of the program.

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UNITED STATES
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

June 10, 2012

By Ann Rodgers / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Sister Janet Mock, a Pittsburgher at the center of the dispute between the Vatican and an umbrella group for nuns, is perplexed at the order for an archbishop to oversee her work.

She acknowledges that a few sisters have moved so far outside church tradition that it’s difficult to recognize them as Catholic. But the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, of which she is the executive director, didn’t encourage that, she said.

“I have been actively involved in LCWR for over 20 years and, for the life of me, I don’t know what the myth is that makes it such an ogre in the church,” said the Sister of St. Joseph of Baden.

On Tuesday she will meet in Rome with Cardinal William Levada of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle, who is slated to oversee a reform of the LCWR. They will discuss the sisters’ concerns that the evaluation is unfair.

“Somebody, and we don’t know who, is behind all of this questioning of our organization,” she said. “If we could just sit down with whoever has a question, I think it would be easier. This comes close to maligning the organization, painting everybody in it with the same brush.”

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer

By John P. Martin
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The notes trickled out, a few each day, from the jury room behind Courtroom 304.

Define attempted rape. Explain endangerment and pedophilia. Send in the files, a marker board, and easel.

Trying to interpret the signals during deliberations in the landmark child sex-abuse trial of two Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests may be a fool’s errand, experts say. What was clear after one week was that the Common Pleas Court jury was immersed in its task.

“This is a jury that’s been asking a lot of questions, which means that they are engaged,” said Edward D. Ohlbaum, a professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law.

The seven men and five women met for nearly 25 hours over five days to consider the charges against Msgr. William J. Lynn and the Rev. James J. Brennan. They sent more than a dozen questions and requests to Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina in their first four days, seeking guidance on the law or pieces of evidence.

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VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast

Barbie Latza Nadeau

The recently ousted head of the Vatican bank may have evidence that the organization is involved in money laundering—and now he’s afraid for his life. By Barbie Latza Nadeau

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi feared for his life when he was ousted as head of the Vatican bank after a vote of no confidence May 24.

The 67-year-old Italian was brought in by the pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in 2009 with a mandate to turn the troubled bank around and help “facilitate transparency” with an eye toward quashing rumors that the bank was a den of iniquity. The Vatican had hoped that through Gotti Tedeschi’s guidance, the tiny city-state could finally earn a coveted spot on the global Financial Action Task Force “white list” of states whose financial practices can be trusted.

In reality, Gotti Tedeschi says he found the bank’s record much worse than he could have imagined, and that he spent the last two years struggling endlessly against the Vatican’s powerful Vatican forces, whom he says blocked his every attempt at transparency. He stormed out of his final meeting of the board of the Vatican bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), even before they cast their no-confidence vote against him. The bank says it dismissed him due to lack of management skills and “progressively erratic personal behavior.” But Gotti Tedeschi says he was ousted because he got too close to the truth about the bank’s alleged shady dealings. He told a Reuters journalist moments after he was sacked, “I have paid the price for transparency.”

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UNITED STATES
Toledo Blade

BY MARILOU JOHANEK
BLADE COLUMNIST

Fundamental fever grips the Vatican. The affliction is evident in the renewed mission of the church to separate the wheat from the chaff among Roman Catholics in the United States, to cull the conservatives from the liberals who cause so much trouble.

Under Pope Benedict XVI, a paternalistic pattern of crackdowns, censorship, and intolerance for dissent is emerging. The largest Christian denomination in America, and one of the world’s largest religions, has taken a hard turn to the right.

The Catholic Church is on a path toward imposed orthodoxy. Like a father who pulls unruly children into line, the mission of Benedict and his bishops is to regain control over freethinking faithful who dare to question their authority.

This is miter muscle. Power is maintained through dictate, not dialogue. No one but the church hierarchy has the wisdom to decree the right words to pray, what to think on issues from contraception to gay marriage, why to believe, or who can belong.

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AUSTRALIA
WPEC

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An Australian bishop who ruffled the Vatican’s feathers by calling for reform says his decision to retire early is his alone and is unrelated to his differences with Catholic Church leaders.

Pope Benedict XVI last week accepted Bishop Patrick Power’s resignation five years before the mandatory retirement age of 75.

The auxiliary bishop of the Australian capital Canberra said Sunday he has long planned to retire at 70 and will continue to work as a priest.

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ATLANTA (GA)
Charlotte Observer

By KATE BRUMBACK
Associated Press

ATLANTA The 15-year-old daughter of megachurch pastor Creflo Dollar told authorities her father choked and punched her, and hit her with his shoe during an argument over whether she could go to a party, according to a police report.

Dollar’s 19-year-old daughter corroborated most of her sister’s story, but Dollar disputed it, telling a sheriff’s deputy he was trying to restrain her when she became disrespectful. When she began to hit back, he wrestled her to the floor and spanked her, according to the police report.

Dollar is one of the most prominent African-American preachers based around Atlanta. His World Changers Church International has 30,000 members in the Atlanta area, and the ministry has satellite churches across the U.S.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

James Robertson
June 10, 2012

A DISSIDENT Catholic bishop who criticised the church’s ”authoritarian” nature and doctrines on celibacy and female priests has resigned.

Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Patrick Power, an auxiliary bishop of the Canberra-Goulburn archdiocese, on Thursday, five years before he reached the church’s mandatory retirement age of 75.

Bishop Power had criticised the church’s response to sexual abuse scandals and called for its systemic reform.

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UNITED STATES
Erie Times-News

Editorial

The Erie County Courthouse at 140 W. Sixth St. and the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte are about 200 miles apart. The Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, in turn, is approximately 200 miles from Bellefonte. But long distances don’t matter. Throughout Pennsylvania, many eyes are focused on high-profile courtroom cases alleging sexual abuse of youngsters, and the price that is paid when such travesties occur.

On June 1, a federal jury in U.S. District Court in Erie awarded $8,654,769 to Kenny Bryan, 20, who sued two Erie County Office of Children and Youth social workers. The lawsuit claimed that Bryan’s civil rights were violated when the social workers place a sexually aggressive 14-year-old foster child with the family that adopted Bryan, a former foster child. This lawsuit was about the “very broken child-welfare system” that harmed Bryan, said his adoptive mother, Bonnie Bryan, after the verdict. …

The Associated Press reported that the Philadelphia archdiocese spent $11.6 million in legal fees in the last two fiscal years, most of it on priest abuse sex cases. Additional money has been spent on a criminal case in which one priest was charged with raping a 14-year-old boy and another was charged with helping to cover up sexual assaults of children. “It’s a great sadness that people were hurt and that the costs have been so great for the people of Philadelphia,” Archbishop Charles Chaput said.

For victims, families and society, the true toll of sexual abuse can never be measured in dollars spent in the courtroom. We can only hope that these high-profile cases raise awareness about sexual abuse, perhaps preventing such trauma from occurring in the first place, and then also helping professionals learn how to help victims heal.

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ALBANY (NY)
Albany Times Union

By Brendan J. Lyons
Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Albany Roman Catholic diocese’s handling of sexual-abuse complaints against priests has the potential to be laid bare in a Vermont federal court where a Glens Falls man has filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the priest who was convicted of taking him across state lines to rape him when he was a young altar boy.

For the full story buy a copy of the Sunday Times Union at your favorite newsstand. It will appear later this week on timesunion.com.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Chronicle

Written by BISHOP LEONARD P. BLAIR

Friday, 08 June 2012

When you are in a position of leadership or authority, it is a great cross sometimes to know firsthand the actual facts of a situation and then have to listen to all the distortions and misrepresentation of the facts that are made in the public domain.

Having conducted the doctrinal assessment of the entity known as the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), I can only marvel at what is now being said, both within and outside the Church, regarding the process and the recent steps taken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to remedy significant and longstanding doctrinal problems connected with the activities and programs of the LCWR.

The biggest distortion of all is the claim that the CDF and the bishops are attacking or criticizing the life and work of our Catholic sisters in the United States. One report on the CBS evening news showcased the work of a Mercy Sister who is a medical doctor in order to compare her to the attack that she and sisters like her are supposedly being subjected to by authoritarian bishops. The report concludes with a statement that the bishops impose the rules of the Church but the sisters carry on the work of the Church.

Unless the sister in question is espousing and/or promoting positions contrary to Catholic teaching—and there was no reason given to think that she is—then the Holy See’s doctrinal concerns are not directed at her or at the thousands of religious sisters in our country like her to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for all that they do in witness to the Gospel.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

[Reality check: The LCWR, CDF and the doctrinal assessment – Catholic Chronicle]

by Joshua J. McElwee on Jun. 09, 2012 NCR Today

One of the three bishops appointed by the Vatican to oversee the group representing the majority of U.S. women religious says the that the bishops “have a legitimate cause for doctrinal concern” about the group.

Bishop Leonard Blair of the Toledo diocese, who was appointed in April along with Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain and Springfield, Ill., Bishop Thomas Paprocki to oversee the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), made the comments in a column in the Toledo diocesan newspaper Friday.

Appearance of the column by Blair, who undertook the “doctrinal assessment” for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which led to the appointment of the bishops to oversee LCWR, comes as two of the LCWR’s leaders are expected to meet in Rome with the head of the congregation, Cardinal William Levada, and Sartain June 12.

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DUITSLAND
Katholiek Nieuwsblad (Nederland)

Seksueel geweld treft volgens de Duitse misbruik-expert Ursula Enders de Evangelische Kerk in Duitsland net zo hard als de rooms-katholieke.

“De Evangelische Kerk heeft zichzelf lange tijd in slaap gewiegd en geloofd ‘bij ons gebeurt dat niet, want het ligt aan het celibaat’”, aldus de therapeute tijdens een bijeenkomst over misbruik in instellingen.

Dat is volgens haar een mythe. “Misbruik heeft met het celibaat weinig te maken.” Enders is directrice van ‘Zartbitter’, een instelling tegen seksueel misbruik van meisjes en jongens in Keulen.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

Intrigue mounts over Vatican bank chief ouster; leaks show board, psych questioned behavior

By Associated Press, Updated: Saturday, June 9

VATICAN CITY — Intrigue is mounting over the controversial ouster of the Vatican bank’s president, with leaked documents showing the bank’s board members and even a psychiatrist questioned his behavior and fitness for the job months before he was fired.

The board ousted Ettore Gotti Tedeschi on May 24, firing a man handpicked by the pope’s No. 2 to help turn around a bank plagued for decades by scandal.

The board has already made public a scathing denunciation of Gotti Tedeschi’s failings as bank president. On Saturday an Italian newspaper reproduced a letter from the bank’s in-house psychiatrist who in March wrote the bank’s general director with concerns about Gotti Tedeschi’s personal behavior. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter Saturday.

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IRELAND
Vatican Insider

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin hopes it will promote ‘reconciliation’ and encourage ‘renewal’ in the Catholic Church in this island that has suffered greatly from the sexual-abuse of children by priests’ scandal

Gerard O’Connell
Rome

Cardinal Marc Ouellet, representing Pope Benedict XVI, will preside at the opening Mass of 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, on Sunday, June 10. Some 230 cardinals and bishops together with 12,000 priests will join in the opening celebration that will be attended by some 25,000 Catholics including over 7,000 pilgrims from 120 countries. The event will be broadcast on national TV and be given wide media coverage. Pope Benedict has recorded a message for the occasion.

The week-long ceremony will focus on the theme of “Communion” – a central concept of the Second Vatican Council, in 160 workshops, talks, discussions, group reflections. It will showcase Irish spirituality and culture in over 100 stands, and celebrate it with a rich contribution of Irish song and music.

It is only the second time the Congress is being held in Ireland and, significantly, each time it has taken place after an event that has shook the country. The first one was held in 1932, also in Dublin, not long after the end of a bitter civil war that divided the country and families. This time too it comes after another bitter event: – more than two decades of revelations of the terrible abuse of children by clergy and religious men and women that shocked the nation and brought the Catholic Church and its leadership to its knees.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Jun. 08, 2012
By Joe Orso

Essay

The Eucharist will live only if we find a way for it to live outside the Mass. I heard this from a Catholic sister last year, who was quoting a lay parish worker.

Another sister told me this about a decade ago: The hierarchy is like a dying dragon, breathing fire on those around it as it flails through its final collapse. But don’t worry, she said, it is dying and someday something else will resurrect.

I believe both of those statements, I love both of those sisters, and the recent news about the Vatican’s actions toward the Leadership Conference of Women Religious does not stir anger in me one bit.

I am not shocked by the Vatican’s bad manners in handling the incident, nor by the hypocrisy of these so recently scandalized Catholic authorities attacking some of the most admired members of our Catholic family. At this point I, like many, expect such behavior.

Even more than a dragon, the church hierarchy looks to me like a senile old man, babbling, impotent and chastising anyone within earshot. What I struggle to understand is why anyone with a congruent perspective still listens to the old man. Why do thinking Catholics become outraged by the absurd actions of a hierarchy that holds little moral or practical authority in the world?

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CITTA DEL VATICANO
Il Fatto Quotidiano

Uno psicoterapeuta osservò durante una festa il comportamento dell’ex presidente della banca vaticana. Poi la “diagnosi” arrivò sulla scrivania di Bertone. Seguita dalle lettere del vicepresidente e del segretario dello Ior: “O il banchiere o noi”

di Marco Lillo | 9 giugno 2012

I documenti che pubblichiamo in esclusiva oggi sarebbero una buona base per un legal thriller dentro le mura leonine. Nemmeno John Grisham e Dan Brown avevano ipotizzato la seguente scena descritta in una delle lettere: Pietro Lasalvia, “psicoterapeuta e ipnoterapeuta”, come scrive nell’incipit della sua roboante carta intestata (nella quale prosegue vantando le seguenti specializzazioni: “psicoterapia occupazionale; perfezionato in psichiatria di consultazione, e clinica pscicosomatica; specializzazione in psicoterapia; iscritto nell’elenco degli psicoterapeuti presso l’Ordine dei medici; professore a contratto presso il corso di laurea nella professione sanitaria, seconda facoltà di medicina e chirurgia La Sapienza”) nel marzo scorso arriva a scrivere una sorta di diagnosi a scoppio ritardato sul conto del presidente dello Ior. Lasalvia è un medico che si occupa della salute sul lavoro dei dipendenti dello Ior ed è in ottimi rapporti con Paolo Cipriani, il direttore generale, il vero uomo forte dello Ior, che è in forte contrasto con Gotti Tedeschi.

La festa di Natale
Prima delle feste di Natale 2011 viene invitato a un rinfresco allo Ior e, casualmente, per tutta la serata osserva a sua insaputa il comportamento del presidente dello Ior sotto il profilo medico per poi stilare un rapportino che finisce però solo tre mesi dopo, caualmente quando infuria lo scontro su Gotti, tramite la direzione generale dello Ior, sul tavolo della Segreteria di Stato. Questa sorta di certificato diventa così un’arma che i nemici del presidente brandiscono sulla sua testa e che dà forza e fondamento medico ad altri due documenti che pubblichiamo: la lettera del segretario del consiglio dello Ior Carl A. Anderson e la missiva del vicepresidente Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz. Entrambe le lettere dei due uomini forti dello Ior sono dirette a Tarcisio Bertone e contengono accuse pesantissime a Gotti Tedeschi.

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VATICAN CITY
AFP

ROME — Vatican bank board members plotted to oust their director, letters leaked to an Italian newspaper on Saturday showed, as prosecutors investigated possible money-laundering operations at the bank.

The board dismissed Ettore Gotti Tedeschi on May 24, a day before Vatican police arrested Pope Benedict XVI’s butler for allegedly leaking sensitive papal documents to the press in an apparently unrelated case.

Ahead of the board meeting, according to letters in the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that could not be independently verified, the bank’s vice president Ronaldo Schmitz threatened to resign if Gotti Tedeschi was not dismissed.

Gotti Tedeschi “does not have the necessary qualities to guide the Institute,” Schmitz wrote in the letter, referring to the bank’s official name, the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR under its Italian acronym.

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ROME
The Guardian (United Kingdom)

Tom Kington in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 June 2012

She is the American nun who after 15 years spent working with war refugees in El Salvador now leads the majority of the 57,000 Catholic sisters in the US. He is the American cardinal who marched in San Francisco protesting against gay marriage and was accused of turning a blind eye to paedophile priests before he took over the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the modern version of the Inquisition.

On Tuesday, Pat Farrell and William Levada will clash in Rome at the climax of a raging row over what Catholicism means for women. It will be a confrontation that pits America’s increasingly independent and broad-minded nuns against the Vatican’s male guardians of the faith. “Pat Farrell knows it will be daunting, but she sees the importance of this meeting for the whole Catholic community,” said her spokeswoman, Sister Annmarie Sanders.

The showdown follows the claim by Levada’s department that Farrell’s Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella organisation for most US orders, has been promoting “radical feminism” and glossing over the Vatican’s hard line on gay marriage and abortion.

To set the sisters straight, Levada plans to send an archbishop to rewrite the group’s statute and institute re-education programmes to combat heterodox thinking. The reaction from Farrell, the group’s president, was swift, denouncing the Vatican move as causing “pain and scandal”. “We’re all hurt by this,” she told the National Catholic Reporter.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

[memorandum – Carl Anderson]

The method used to get rid of the Vatican bank’s former head have created an image of the Vatican divided by power struggles

Andrea Tornielli
Vatican City

Looking back at the flurry of events that have shaken the Vatican in recent weeks and the recent developments in the case of the Vatican bank’s former director, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, one had to admit that the Vatican could not have chosen a worse time to get rid of him. The banker’s dismissal – which was decided by the supervisory council, a board of laymen made up of a German, Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz, an American, Carl Anderson (the Knights of Columbus leader), an Italian, Antonio Maria Marocco and a Spaniard, Manuel Sotoserrano – was announced the day after Benedict XVI’s butler was arrested on charges of possessing confidential documents he was not authorised to.

The Cardinal Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, had tried to mediate to remedy the rift within the Vatican bank (IOR), but in the end, the board of laymen decided to proceed anyway. In terms of media strategy, the decision to “dismiss” Gotti Tedeschi with such a harsh document that destroyed him both morally and professionally, which led to believe that he was also implicated in the document leak by Vatican poison pen letter writers, was not a wise one. Carl Anderson’s letter (which listed nine reasons for the no-confidence vote) was intended as an official response to the explanation Gotti Tedeschi had leaked beforehand, linking his abrupt removal to clashes over the anti-money laundering laws in force and the rescue of Milan’s Saint Raffaele hospital. That the IOR should intervene to explain the reasons for the no-confidence vote in Gotti Tedeschi was perfectly understandable. What was not was the fact that they did this by publishing an excessively harsh document, written in a style that was nothing like that typically used by the Holy See.

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ROME
Vatican Insider

The Franciscan Brothers Minor have sent an open letter to Rome asking for the rules of the Catholic Magisterium to be respected

Maria Teresa Pontara Pederiva
Rome

Some are talking about a “boomerang effect” but it is still early days. The reactions triggered by the Vatican’s investigations into the LCWR show no sign of ceasing. After letters and demonstrations – such as last week’s one in Washington, during which the city’s Apostolic Nuncio, Viganò, opened the doors of the Vatican embassy to some LCWR demonstrators – and after stands were taken by important figures from the world of culture, journalists and individual clerics such as the Jesuit, James Martin, it is now the turn of the Franciscan Brothers Minor of the United States to do their bit. The organisation sent an open letter, dated 31 May, to Rome which is now being published across U.S. and foreign media.

The fact that the letter was signed by the heads of all 7 American Provinces and that the minister general was also an American – the only one in the Order’s history – proves it is an influential document. The minister general, Fr. John Vaughn from the Province of Santa Barbara (which comprises all Western American states) had lived in Rome from 1985 to 1991.

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KENTUCKY
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on June 08, 2012

We applaud Rep. Burch for his courage. It’s always tough to disclose horrific childhood trauma, especially at the hands of a trusted clergyman.

But each time a victim speaks publicly, he or she makes the road to recovery a little less lonely for others who are suffereing.

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KENTUCKY
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on June 08, 2012

We are grateful that a victim of Rev. Louis Francis Piskula has stepped forward and is cooperating with law enforcement. When victims stay silent, nothing changes. But when victims find the courage to take action, there’s at least a chance for prevention, healing and justice.

If you were hurt by this priest – or any church employee – suffering in shame, isolation and self-blame won’t fix it. Only by stepping forward, speaking up and getting help can you both recover personally and help others. Now’s the time to do it.

We hope that every person who has any information or suspicions that could shed light on these allegations will find the courage and strength to call police so that the full truth might become clear.

We especially hope that every person who suffered clergy sex crimes and cover ups in Kentucky will find the courage and strength to speak up, call police, expose wrongdoing, protect kids and start healing.

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SACRAMENTO (CA)
The Record Searchlight

SACRAMENTO — The preliminary hearing scheduled today for a suspended Redding priest charged with seven felony counts of child molestation was continued until July 20, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento County district attorney’s office said this afternoon.

The Rev. Uriel Ojeda, 32, was arrested Nov. 30, 2011, after surrendering to law enforcement officials in Sacramento County after the diocese received a complaint from a parishioner’s family.

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SAN DIEGO (CA)
The Worthy Adversary

Posted by Joelle Casteix on June 8, 2012

San Diego, California: Fr. Jose Alexis Davila was arrested in January 2012 and pled guilty in April for battery and “unlawful touching of an intimate part of a victim’s body.” He is serving three years’ probation.

Parishioners tried to accost the victim’s mother at prayer group in an attempt to get her to recant her story, confronted her other family members and called the 19-year-old a liar in the media.

The diocese put Davila back into unresricted ministry in May, saying

“All legitimate and pastoral concerns have been addressed as regards his case.

Consequently, we have no reason to believe that women or children are at risk because of his return to ministry. He returned to St. Jude at the beginning of May.”

When SNAP asked that Davila (who is still on probation), be taken out of the parish and assigned to a remote and secure facility where he would have no contact with women and children, parishoners defended the priest … who PLED GUILTY. (Hello? Anyone home?)

No one at the church or the diocese has publicly said a prayer or a word of support of the victim. (but I am grateful for the whistleblower at the parish who called to tell me that Bishop Brom snuck Davila back into ministry. I mean, if Davila is so awesome, why not make a public announcement about it?)

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MILWAUKEE (WI)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel

June 8, 2012

Legal fees and expenses approved to date in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy are approaching $4 million, according to court records. And hundreds of thousands dollars in additional fees are pending approval or have yet to be filed.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley called the fees “astronomical” at a hearing this week and threatened to bring in a mediator if the parties could not come to some agreement in the coming weeks.

“The legal fees in this case are over the top. . . . And the pleadings being filed . . . don’t show me that we are getting to a resolution,” said Kelley. “It looks to me like it’s all-out war.”

Assistant U.S. Trustee David Asbach echoed Kelley’s concerns, calling the fees a sign of a “scorched earth” legal battle.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

Pope OKs early retirement of Australian bishop who questioned celibacy, church teaching on sex

By Associated Press, Published: June 8

VATICAN CITY — The pope has agreed to give early retirement to an Australian bishop who ruffled the Vatican’s feathers by calling for a total reform of the Catholic Church, questioning mandatory celibacy for priests along with church teachings on sexuality.

Pope Benedict XVI accepted Monsignor Patrick Power’s resignation on Thursday. Power, an auxiliary bishop in Canberra, asked to retire five years before the mandatory retirement age of 75 for bishops.

In a 2010 article penned at the height of the renewed clerical sex abuse crisis, Power said the church needs to be totally reformed since it had strayed from the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

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OSTERREICH
Tiroler Tageszeitung

Von Wolfgang Otter

Thiersee – Seit öffentlich bekannt geworden ist, dass der verstorbene Pfarrer und Ehrenbürger von Thiersee Buben sexuell missbraucht haben soll, gehen im Passionsspieldorf die Wogen hoch. Viele fragen sich: Kann jemand, der solche Übergriffe getätigt hat, noch weiter Ehrenbürger eines Dorfes sein? Der Gemeinderat von Thiersee hat sich (wie berichtet) nicht dazu durchringen können, diese Frage zu beantworten. Der Tagesordnungspunkt wurde nach einer zweistündigen hitzigen Debatte im Gemeinderat mit 7:8 abgesetzt.

Wie nicht anders zu erwarten, war das für manche Betroffene zu wenig. Daher erwartet sich Bürgermeister Hannes Juffinger, dass in einer der kommenden Gemeinderatssitzungen das Thema neuerlich behandelt wird.

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OSTERREICH
Petebrosman’s Blog

Die Plattform „Betroffener kirchlicher Gewalt” hat neun römisch-katholischen Bischöfen eine Liste mit 40 Beschuldigten geschickt, denen sexuelle Gewalt gegen Kinder und Jugendliche vorgeworfen wird. Die Beschuldigten sind laut Plattform nach wie vor unbehelligt im Amt. Jetzt müsse es Konsequenzen geben, so die Plattform.

In der Vergangenheit seien Beschuldigte oder Verurteilte einfach nur versetzt worden, kritisiert Philipp Schwärzler. Das sei definitiv zu wenig, auch für die Betroffenen. “Deren Leben ist ja in vielen Fällen durch die sexuelle Gewalt massiv beeinträchtigt worden. Sie leiden zum Teil bis heute unter diesen Folgen.” Auf der anderen Seite jene Männer sehen, die ihnen das angetan haben, nach wie vor in Amt und Würden und hätten ehrenvolle Aufgaben. “Das empfinden diese Menschen als massiv ungerecht.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Tribune-Democrat

Kathy Mellott kmellott@tribdem.com

BEDFORD — The trial of a traveling minister accused of having sex with an 11-year-old girl in a motel has been delayed again.

Bedford County Judge Thomas Ling on Friday granted a continuance to defense attorney Thomas Crawford of Pittsburgh. Crawford had requested additional time to line up and subpoena witnesses to testify on behalf of the Rev. Walter Donald Bradshaw.

The trial, expected to last two or three days, had been scheduled next week. It has been rescheduled for Sept. 19 and 20.

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ALABAMA/TEXAS
WAFF

[with video]

By Stephen McLamb

MARSHALL COUNTY, AL (WAFF) –
A Marshall County pastor now facing child sex abuse charges in Texas spent nearly a decade in the Texas state prison system before he was hired to pastor a church in Albertville.

41-year-old Mark Allen Green is jailed on a half million dollar bond in Texas and faces sexual abuse and aggravated sexual abuse of a child charges in Ellis and Navarro counties involving two victims under the age of 18.

Looking at his criminal background, his life of crime appears to have begun before the age of 20. Over the years, he’s faced numerous charges in at least six counties in Texas.

State prison officials said Green first entered the state system in 1996 on theft and burglary of a vehicle charges.

He was released in 1998 but was put back into the system in January 2001, and that’s where he stayed until late 2007.

Earlier this year, Green was hired to pastor the Cowboy Church of Marshall County in Albertville.

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NEW JERSEY
The Star-Ledger

By Julia Terruso/The Star-Ledger

ELIZABETH — There’s no way a popular pastor could have sexually assaulted young girls at a crowded church camp without anyone knowing, George Benbow’s attorney told jurors just before they began deliberations Thursday.

But prosecutors say that’s exactly what happened. They say Benbow would approach girls in private corners of the camp — the basement, an empty pool and the kitchen — pull them onto his lap and move against them. On some occasions, prosecutors say, Benbow would go to the bathroom immediately afterward.

Now, after listening to four weeks of emotional and sometimes graphic testimony, jurors must decide whom to believe: Benbow or five girls who have accused the former Plainfield pastor of molesting them.

“This was sexual intent,” Assistant Prosecutor John Esmerado said. “It wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t innocent.”

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ATLANTA (GA)
Charlotte Observer

By KATE BRUMBACK
Associated Press

ATLANTA Megachurch pastor and televangelist Creflo Dollar – who has drawn scrutiny for his flashy lifestyle and preaching that prosperity is good – was arrested early Friday after authorities say he slightly hurt his 15-year-old daughter in a fight at his metro Atlanta home.

Fayette County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a call of domestic violence at the home in unincorporated Fayette County around 1 a.m., said investigator Brent Rowan. The pastor and his daughter were arguing over whether she could go to a party when Dollar “got physical” with her, leaving her with “superficial injuries,” Rowan said.

The 15-year-old was the one who called authorities, and her 19-year-old sister corroborated the story, Rowan said.

Dollar faces misdemeanor charges of simple battery and cruelty to children. He bonded out of Fayette County jail Friday morning.

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KENTUCKY
Tristate Homepage

[with video]

By: David Shepherd

Updated: June 8, 2012

OWENSBORO – (UPDATED 8:31 P.M.) — A former priest at Blessed Mother Catholic Church in Owensboro was arrested Friday morning after a grand jury indicted him on charges of sodomy and sexual abuse on a child under the age of 12, according to city police.

72-year-old Louis Piskula of Owensboro is in the Daviess County Jail on those charges.

This is not the first time Blessed Mother Church has drawn fire. Last year a man committed suicide in the church’s parking lot claiming he had been a victim of sexual abuse by a priest there. No charges were filed in that case but this new incident puts the church in the spotlight once again.

For Owensboro native, Aaron Layson, the thought of a priest molesting a child in his neighborhood is shocking.

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KENTUCKY
Indianapolis Star

Written by
Mike Wynn and Peter Smith
The Courier-Journal

FRANKFORT, KY. — State Rep. Tom Burch said Friday he stepped forward with his story of alleged sexual abuse as a child at the hands of a Roman Catholic priest to defend nuns from Vatican criticism.

Burch, D-Louisville, first publicly claimed that he suffered the abuse as a sixth- and seventh-grader in a letter last month to The Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader that questions the Vatican’s assertion of control over an umbrella organization for most American Catholic women’s religious orders.

A Vatican report earlier this spring criticized the Leadership Conference of Women Religious over challenges to church doctrines and male church leadership that speakers had made at its meetings. It put an American archbishop in charge of making changes in the organization’s structure.

Burch said the nuns deserved better treatment.

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UNITED STATES
Social Science Research Network

Steven H. Resnicoff
DePaul University College of Law

June 1, 2012

Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2012

Abstract:
Jewish law requires a person to exert one’s energies and expend one’s financial resources to prevent the commission of interpersonal crimes and to protect or rescue victims of such crime. By contrast, American law generally permits a person to watch another bleed to death without offering any assistance at all. Most Jewish law courses place great emphasis on this difference, and commentators frequently cite it as proof of Jewish law’s moral superiority.

However, with respect to the tragedy of child sexual abuse, the systems seem to have switched roles. American law imposes a variety of affirmative duties on individuals and organizations to protect prospective victims. These obligations include conducting fingerprint-based criminal background checks on employees and reporting reasonably suspected or reasonably believed child abuse to public authorities.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

by Robert McClory on Jun. 08, 2012 NCR Today

The roots of the boiling conflict between U.S. Catholic sisters and the Vatican can be understood, I think, as an unfortunate assault by advocates of one image of the church on the proponents of another image. It is a case of outright ecclesiastical bullying, I believe.

In his classic book, Models of the Church, the late Avery Dulles proposes five legitimate ways of viewing the Catholic church: as institution, as community, as sacrament, as herald or proclaimer of the good news, and as servant. When asked what comes to mind when the word “church” enters a discussion, many Catholics immediately choose institution — church as organization founded by Christ and directed through the centuries by popes and bishops who have divine authority to teach, sanctify and rule the faithful. It’s what was handed down, preached, put into catechisms and memorized for ages. But other models are not of lesser value, Dulles says. They express other aspects of the church that church as institution does not express.

Among these others, the idea of church as servant is most intriguing and perhaps the most powerful because its practitioners mirror precisely what Jesus did in his public ministry. It is also the only one of Dulles’ models in which the agenda, the object of its activity, is not set and determined by the church itself, but by the needs of human beings, especially the poor and suffering.

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UNITED STATES
PBS – Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

[with video]

KIM LAWTON, Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly: After a two-year-long investigation, the Vatican strongly condemned a 2006 book on sexuality written by a prominent American nun. The Vatican’s doctrine office said Just Love by Sister Margaret Farley reflects a “defective understanding” of church teaching on issues including masturbation, homosexuality, marriage and divorce. Sister Farley taught Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School for more than 30 years. She said her book was not intended to be an expression of official Catholic teaching, but rather an “exploration of contemporary interpretations.” With this week’s news, the book has shot up the bestsellers charts. Many lay Catholics around the country have been rallying in support of US nuns. Last week, the umbrella group representing the majority of American Catholic sisters pushed back against a Vatican rebuke of them. In April, the Vatican accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) of having “serious doctrinal problems” and ordered the group to place itself under the authority of Seattle’s archbishop. Conference leaders will go to Rome Tuesday (June 12) for a meeting with church officials to discuss the situation.

Meanwhile at the Vatican, the investigation continues in the so-called “VatiLeaks” scandal in which private papal documents have been leaked to journalists. The pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was formally questioned this week. Under Vatican law, he faces up to six years in prison on charges of aggravated theft of the documents. But after Gabriele’s arrest, more documents were leaked, along with an anonymous note threatening still more unless certain church officials resign, including Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state. Bertone, who has been targeted in many of the leaks, accompanied Pope Benedict XVI to Milan last weekend for a huge event—the World Meeting of Families. An estimated one million people attended a special Mass there. Benedict announced the next World Meeting of Families will be in Philadelphia, in 2015. He said he looks forward to taking part “God willing.” He’ll then be 88 years old.

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UNITED STATES
Time

By Tim Padgett | June 8, 2012

If you want some perspective on just how benighted the Roman Catholic Church looks today on the subject of women, consider Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was a German Benedictine nun in the 12th century and a leading feminist writer of her time. But even though that time was the 1100s, the Vatican rarely hassled her for asserting that men and women are equal — that God’s true nature, in fact, is maternal — or that nonprocreative sexual pleasure is O.K.

In the 21st century, however, Hildegard would no doubt receive the same censure that Sister Margaret Farley is facing this week after the Vatican denounced her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Farley, a Sisters of Mercy nun, a retired Yale divinity professor and a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, condones practices that have been morally acceptable to most U.S. and European Catholics for quite a while, including divorce, homosexuality, nonprocreative intercourse and masturbation. But Rome’s doctrinal bulldogs are sternly reminding her that those acts are “disordered,” “deviant” and “depraved.”

Sadly, it’s the church that’s looking unhinged these days. The Vatican was apparently just warming up in 2010 when it declared, astonishingly, that ordaining females into the all-male Catholic priesthood would be a “grave sin” on par with even pedophilia. Since then, as if scapegoating women for the escalating dissent among Catholics toward its hoary dogma, the church seems to have embarked on a misogynist’s crusade. Its legal assault on the Obama Administration’s requirement that Catholic institutions like colleges and hospitals make contraception available to female employees as part of their health coverage is, ultimately, less about religious freedom than about women’s freedom. Then there’s the U.S. bishops’ absurd probe of whether the Girl Scouts are selling feminist theology as well as fattening thin mints — and Rome’s accusation of “radical feminism” within the Leadership Conference on Women Religious (LCWR), which represents most of the U.S. nuns doing genuinely Christ-inspired work with the poor and the sick.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

Jun. 08, 2012
By Joshua J. McElwee

ST. LOUIS — Problems of discrimination and exclusion are so manifest within the Catholic community today that the church “totters on the brink of compromising its self-identity as the basic sacrament of salvation,” a theologian told his peers here Friday.

Speaking frankly to some 300 colleagues assembled for an annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), Jesuit Fr. Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator said that of particular concern is the disregarded role of women in the church.

Saying that women are often the “face of redemption turned visibly” toward those the church serves, but are often “banished beyond the borders of relevance,” Orobator said the state of their participation in the church community leads to an uncomfortable question.

“As a church, so long as we surreptitiously but tenaciously rehearse the politics of discrimination and exclusion, we stand before God, as Cain was, befuddled by a question that we simply cannot wish away at the wave of a magisterial wand,” said Orobator.

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KENTUCKY
SurfKY

OWENSBORO, KY (6/8/12) – According to an Owensboro Police Department press release today, an investigation that began in February of 2011 has resulted in the arrest and indictment of 72-year-old Father Louis F Piskula. The alleged victim claims that he was sexually abused in 1978 by Piskula, who was a priest at Blessed Mother Church.

A Detective completed an investigation and forwarded all case information to the Daviess County Grand Jury, where Piskula was indicted on charges of: Sodomy in the 1st Degree, (victim less than 12 years of age)–Class A Felony and Sexual Abuse in the 1st Degree (victim less than 12 years of age)–Class C Felony. The Indictment Warrant was served on Piskula this morning, and he is lodged in the Daviess County Detention Center.

The Diocese of Owensboro provided SurfKY News with a press release that claims the alleged victim approached the diocese last year concerning the matter:

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NEW YORK
Zaakah

Rabbi Yaacov Behrman wrote an op-ed in The Forward on Friday where he says that, although he doesn’t agree with Agudah’s stance that cases of sexual molestation need rabbinical permission to be brought to the authorities, he also doesn’t agree with Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes recent move that would make rabbis mandated reporters of such crimes.

Rabbi Behrman sets out to argue against DA Charles Hynes new push to make rabbis mandated reporters, but before he gets to that point he takes a long detour and first defends Agudah’s policy.

He begins by explaining Agudah’s reasoning behind their stance that cases of child molestation must be brought to rabbis first:

“Although in the overwhelming majority of cases, abuse allegations turn out to be accurate, there has been a minority of cases in which innocent individuals were wrongly charged with abuse crimes. These individuals were vindicated only after lengthy proceedings. Therefore, some rabbis feel that in a case where there are no witnesses to the abuse and there is only one victim, who is a minor, a rabbi should assess the validity of the allegations before the accusations are brought to the police.”

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IRELAND
The Anglo-Celt

Paul Neilan

An American abuse survivor has criticised the apology of Fr Brendan Smyth’s former abbot, which The Anglo-Celt printed last week, and has launched her search for answers.

Attorney Helen McGonigle, who features in our lead story this week, has sent a fax addressed to the former abbot, Fr Kevin A Smith, at Holy Trinity Abbey, Kilnacrott, Ballyjamesduff, requesting the abbey “provide[s] me with a copy of the entire file at the abbey on Fr Brendan Smyth”.

The fax, which has an accompanying letter, is dated May 31, two days after Fr Smith released a statement apologising to victims of the paedophile Brendan Smyth. Smyth started abusing McGonigle in 1967, in Rhode Island, when she was six before Kevin Smith became abbot.

“Having had some time in prayer and reflection in Medjugorje on the past when I was Abbot and Superior of Holy Trinity Abbey, Kilnacrott, Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, I wish to acknowledge and apologise to all those who were abused in any way, their family, friends and fellow priests for mistakes which happened within the Church and various Institutions from August 1969 – March 1995, when I retired,” said the abbot’s statement.

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NEW YORK
Failed Messiah

Writing as an “individual” but not as an official spokesman for Chabad, an official Chabad spokesman says that making rabbis mandatory reporters of child sexual abuse is wrong.

Rabbi Yaakov Behrman, the director of media relations for the official Chabad Lubavitch News Service, writes in the Forward:

…As the law currently stands, victims and their families have the ability to seek the advice of a rabbi with confidence that their allegations will not be disclosed. Parents of victims are often terrified of the psychological effect a public trial would have on victims and their families. Victims often go to the rabbi for support, afraid to report the abuse directly to the authorities, afraid of being intimidated or impugning the reputation of an otherwise-respected member of the community, and afraid that public knowledge will hurt their chances of finding a suitable bride or groom in their community. It is in such cases that the rabbis play an invaluable part; they are often able to persuade a reluctant victim to come forward and testify. To paraphrase what one rabbi told a victim: “I do not say that you may report this crime to the police, I say you must report it to the police.”

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KENTUCKY
Tristate Homepage

By: David Shepherd
Updated: June 8, 2012

OWENSBORO – Owensboro police have arrested a priest accused of molesting a male child back in 1978, according to a news release from the department Friday.

72-year-old Louis F. Piskula was a priest at Blessed Mother church in Owensboro when the alleged abuse took place.

Details are sketchy at this hour but police say the arrest comes after an investigation in to the matter.

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VATICAN CITY
WOI

VATICAN CITY (AP) – The Vatican has chastised Italian authorities for seizing documents intended for Pope Benedict XVI during a raid on the home of the recently ousted Vatican bank chief.

The Vatican said in a statement Friday that it is an internationally recognized sovereign state and that it expects Italian judicial authorities will respect that in any proceedings concerning Ettore Gotti Tedeschi.

Italian paramilitary police raided Gotti Tedeschi’s Piacenza home on Tuesday as part of a corruption investigation into Italy’s state-controlled aerospace giant Finmeccanica.

During the raid, police seized a memorandum Gotti Tedeschi had prepared for the pope concerning his controversial May 24 ouster.

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AUSTRALIA
The Freethinker

By
Barry Duke
– June 8, 2012

A CATHOLIC priest, charged in 2005 with 28 counts of indecent assault and one of buggery, had earlier been appointed “spiritual advisor” to a fellow priest charged with multiple child sex offences.

According to this report, in 1994 the then Vicar-General of the Melbourne archdiocese, Gerald Cudmore, oversaw the appointment of Father Frank Klep as spiritual director to Father Victor Rubeo after child sex abuse allegations about Rubeo were first reported to the archdiocese.

At that time, Klep had been charged by police with child sex offences. He was convicted of indecent assault in December 1994. Despite his conviction, Klep continued to act as Rubeo’s spiritual adviser during 1995.

Since the 1980s, Klep had been the subject of repeated child sex abuse complaints from parents of students attending the Salesian order’s school at Rupertswood in Melbourne’s outer north-west. He was sentenced to perform community service for his 1994 conviction and sent to Samoa by the Salesian order in 1998, when it became clear he was to be charged with more child sex offences.

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IRELAND
Breaking News

The “spiritual Olympics” of the Catholic Church will be staged in Ireland next week, attracting thousands of pilgrims from around the world.

Final preparations are under way for the 50th International Eucharistic Congress, which will begin with an open-air Mass for 25,000 people on Sunday.

Some 230 cardinals and bishops and 12,000 priests and deacons will attend events in Dublin throughout the week of celebration. …

The Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (Soca) plan to stage a “dignified” protest outside the RDS on Sunday to highlight its disgust at Cardinal Brady’s refusal to step down as Primate of All Ireland over the recent Father Brendan Smyth scandal.

Cardinal Brady acted as a note-taker during a probe into the notorious paedophile priest and was given a list of children’s names who were being abused – but failed to inform Gardai and their parents.

Spokesman John Kelly said the protest will be about the Vatican interfering with Irish sovereignty and its laws.

“The Ireland of 2012 is not the country of 1932 when fear of and deference to the Church was the norm,” said Mr Kelly.

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KENTUCKY
Messenger-Inquirer

Posted: Friday, June 8, 2012

By James Mayse Messenger-Inquirer

A former priest at St. Mary of the Woods Catholic Church in Whitesville and other Daviess County churches was arrested this morning by the Owensboro Police Department on charges of first-degree sodomy and first-degree sexual abuse.

The Rev. Louis Francis Piskula, 72, of the 7100 block of Kentucky 815 was indicted Tuesday by the Daviess Grand Jury on charges of first-degree sodomy, victim under 12, and first-degree sexual abuse. The sodomy charge is a class A felony, punishable upon conviction by a sentencing range between 20 years to life in prison. First-degree sexual abuse is a class D felony punishable upon conviction by one to five years in prison.

In a prepared statement, Chancellor Kevin Kauffeld, chief administrative officer for the Diocese of Owensboro, said diocese officials received a report from a man that he had been sexually abused by Piskula “in incidents dating from 1978.” The statement says diocese officials reported the man’s statement to the Daviess County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office and has cooperated with the investigation.

The Diocese statement says counseling services have been offered to the person who made the abuse allegations.

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