ABUSE TRACKER

ST. LOUIS (MO)
FOX2

August 27, 2018

On the heels of that letter directed at the pope, the investigation into sexual abuse claims at the St. Louis Archdiocese is developing.

We found out today a retired priest is accused of watching child pornography.

Fox 2’s Andy Banker has the story.

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ROME
The Associated Press

August 28, 2018

By Nicole Winfield

An Italian journalist who says he helped a former Vatican diplomat pen his bombshell allegation of sex abuse cover-up against Pope Francis says he persuaded the archbishop to go public after the U.S. church was thrown into turmoil by sex abuse revelations in the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

Marco Tosatti said he helped Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano write, rewrite and edit his 11-page testimony, saying the two sat side-by-side at a wooden table in Tosatti’s living room for three hours on Aug. 22.

Tosatti, a leading conservative critic of Francis, told The Associated Press that Vigano had called him a few weeks ago out of the blue asking to meet, and then proceeded to tell him the information that became the basis of the testimony.

Vigano’s document alleges that Francis knew of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual misconduct starting in 2013 but rehabilitated him from sanctions that Pope Benedict XVI had imposed. The claims have shaken Francis’ five-year papacy.

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ROME
Crux

August 28, 2018

By Inés San Martín

In the run-up to Pope Francis’s intense 32-hour visit to Ireland, the question was if a trip so short could have an impact on the mounting storm of clerical sexual abuse, both in the past two decades and in the past two weeks.

As he has before, Francis had to walk a tight rope – not because of the fear of repercussions for a community facing genocide, for instance, as in Myanmar – but because of the long history of pain caused by the Church in Ireland, the wounds of which were ripped open just before the pope arrived by revelations from Chile, the United States, and elsewhere.

Francis, however, also could not ignore the main thrust of his pastoral visit to the Emerald Isle: The Vatican-sponsored World Meeting of Families, which brought together thousands of families from over 100 countries. They too wanted to hear from the pope, and not exclusively about abuse and the Church’s response, but about family life and the challenges young couples face today.

Francis’s visit to Ireland was, in a way, two trips rolled into one, and the tone of his words and the reception he received demonstrated this, both at the events and in the streets: Thousands cheered him in a stadium on Saturday, but earlier in the morning the prime minister, Ireland’s first openly gay leader, didn’t shy away from listing the Church’s failures.

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WASHINGTON (DC)
Good Morning America

August 28, 2018

By Mark Osborne

The Archdiocese of Washington emphatically refuted claims it was aware of sanctions due to abuse allegations against its former archbishop, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, after a former Vatican official penned a letter making the accusation on Sunday.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Vatican ambassador to the U.S., alleged that both Pope Francis and Pope Benedict knew that McCarrick — who resigned as a cardinal in July after he was accused of abusing adults and minors — was a “serial predator.”

The Archdiocese of Washington released a statement on Tuesday saying Viganò’s claims were “categorically” untrue.

“Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl has categorically denied that any of this information was communicated to him,” the statement said. “Archbishop Viganò at no time provided Cardinal Wuerl any information about an alleged document from Pope Benedict XVI with directives of any sort from Rome regarding Archbishop McCarrick.”

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Penn Live

August 28, 2018

By Ivey DeJesus

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro on Tuesday reiterated on national TV that his office has evidence that the Vatican knew about the widespread and systemic cover-up of clergy sex abuse across the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.

Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show, Shapiro repeated the charge he made on Aug. 14 when he released the findings of a grand jury investigation into clergy sex abuse across six dioceses in Pennsylvania: that the trail of conspiracy at times led all the way to the Vatican.

“Church leaders would lie to parishioners on Sunday, they would lie to the public, they would shield these predators from the public but they would document all of it and place it in these secret archives, feet away from the bishops,” Shapiro said.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
The Independent

August 28, 2018

By Chris Riotta

The prosecutor is not directly implicating Pope Francis, but claims the Vatican was aware of a systematic cover up

Pennsylvania’s attorney general has claimed to have evidence that the Vatican was aware of a systematic cover up for decades of sex abuse carried out by priests in the Catholic Church.

Josh Shapiro described the abuses dating back to 1947 found by a grand jury in an interview with NBC’s Today Show, including “a systematic cover up that went all the way to the Vatican”.

“I can’t specifically speak to Pope Francis,” the attorney general said Monday about whether or not the the pontiff was aware of the abuses. But, he said: “We have evidence that the Vatican had knowledge of a cover up.”

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CHICAGO (IL)
WLS

August 28, 2018

By Chuck Goudie and Ross Weidner and Barb Markoff

In a wide-ranging interview on Monday afternoon, Cardinal Blase Cupich repeatedly said he hopes authorities focus on the victims of all abuse — not just one sector — and not just priests. Cardinal Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, discussed a new church crisis with Eyewitness News investigative reporter Chuck Goudie.

The I-Team last week broke the news that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan was convening a new investigation of how the Chicago Roman Catholic Archdiocese has handled priest sex investigations. This comes in the wake of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that revealed at least seven accused predator-priests with links to Illinois were among 300 clergymen called out by authorities.

Cardinal Cupich says archdiocesan officials “fully support” and are “cooperating fully” with Madigan’s inquiry.

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VATICAN CITY
USA Today

August 28, 2018

By Brett M. Decker

A damning allegation from Catholic leader charges Pope Francis of covering for Cardinal McCarrick despite knowing about his sexual abuse record.

A report released this weekend by a former Vatican ambassador to the United States charges that Pope Francis knew about sexual abuse by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, removed a suspension placed on him by Pope Benedict, and proceeded to make the known abuser one of his most trusted advisors. Pope Francis “knew from at least June 23, 2013 that McCarrick was a serial predator, [but] he covered for him to the bitter end,” wrote Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, nuncio to Washington from 2011-2016, before demanding the pontiff resign.

The pope knew.

That is a damning allegation coming from a very senior church leader. It also corresponds to anecdotal evidence piling up against Francis. Earlier this year, Pope Francis attacked Chilean sex-abuse victims for “calumny” and defended the bishop who covered up for a pedophile priest. The pope ignored complaints about the enabling bishop before promoting him in 2015.

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UNITED STATES
TODAY

August 28, 2018

The Vatican is struggling to respond to claims that Pope Francis helped cover up allegations of sex abuse and protected American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace. Bishops and members of the Catholic Church have been calling for answers since the bombshell Pennsylvania grand jury report that recently detailed decades of child sex abuse at the hands of priests. NBC News chief global correspondent Bill Neely reports for TODAY.

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BOSTON (MA)
The Conversation

August 28, 2018

By Kalpana Jain

The Vatican’s retired ambassador to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano, has accused Pope Francis and other officials of covering up that they were aware of sex abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington.

The accusation follows a grand jury report in Pennsylvania that revealed a long and shocking scale of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Francis, who accepted McCarrick’s resignation last month, after an investigation found the allegations to be credible, has refused to comment on Vigano’s letter.

Scholars writing for The Conversation have pointed out the complex challenges facing the Catholic Church today and why, as a result, it has been hard to address the issue of clergy sexual abuse. Here are four highlights.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
Market Watch

August 27, 2018

By Leslie Albrecht

After the report on systematic sexual abuse in Pennsylvania involving 1,000 children over 7 decades, some worry their donations have been enabling a culture of secrecy

Pittsburgh mom Derya Little is such a devoted Catholic that she wishes she could go to church every day.

But with four small children, she has to limit her Mass attendance to Sundays. Another key part of her faith is the $10,000 a year she and her husband give to Catholic causes. They adhere to a traditional definition of tithing and donate exactly 10% of their gross income to charity per year.

But this week she won’t be leaving a check in the collection plate at her church. In fact, none of the money she and her husband typically donate to Catholic groups will go to her local parish or diocese this year.

Little was so appalled by the Pennsylvania grand jury report detailing how 300 priests sexually abused more than 1,000 children and then bishops systematically covered it up that she can’t stomach giving anymore money to church leaders. Instead, she says, she’ll donate only to Catholic causes she trusts, like Ave Maria Radio and missionaries who work in her native Turkey.

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SEATTLE (WA)
KIRO Radio

August 27, 2018

By Dave Ross

In the Catholic church, priests are not supposed to use the pulpit merely to take stands on what’s happening in the news. They are directed to explain the gospel and apply it to current events, only if there’s a clear lesson there.

On Sunday, the long-time pastor of Seattle’s St. James Cathedral, Michael Ryan, turned to the Biblical story of Jesus falling asleep in his disciples’ storm-tossed fishing boat. From that boat, he moved to the latest sexual abuse allegations against the hierarchy of the Catholic church.

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PORTLAND (OR)
The Oregonian/OregonLive

August 27, 2018

By Fedor Zarkhin

Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample got straight to the point Sunday at a special mass for victims of sexual abuse.

“I am sorry beyond words for what priests and bishops have done to harm the children of God,” he said at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. “I am ashamed of them.”

A recent grand jury report outlined decades of abuse by hundreds of Pennsylvania priests. The report has shaken the country’s Catholic community, already facing regular revelations of sexual abuse.

Sample called for change. Incidents must be fully investigated, he said, and priests and bishops must be held accountable, “no matter how high this goes.”

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SAN ANTONIO (TX)
KTSA

August 27, 2018

By Kareem Dahab

KTSA radio host Jack Riccardi discusses how Pope Francis now faces a crisis of credibility over the cover up of child sexual abuse accusations in the church.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
WESA

August 27, 2018

By Mick Stinelli and Megan Harris

The faithful are still reeling from revelations unearthed a 900-page Grand Jury report implicating 300 “predator priests” across six Pennsylvania dioceses, including 99 in Pittsburgh alone.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington and his local successor, Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik, have both apologized in the wake of what Attorney General Josh Shapiro called a monumental coverup, but some wonder what concrete action will be taken to ensure the safety of children in the church.

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WASHINGTON (DC)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

August 27, 2018

By Tracie Mauriello

He wanted to put the Pittsburgh Diocese on the map.

That’s what Donald Wuerl, now a cardinal, said when he became bishop of the diocese that baptized him and shaped his earliest views of what it meant to be faithful, to be moral, to be Roman Catholic, and to be good.

Thirty years later, everyone is talking about the diocese, but not for any of the reasons he envisioned. Pittsburgh is on the map now because of a sex scandal involving 99 priests accused of abusing hundreds of young parishioners over seven decades.

Cardinal Wuerl had become known as a gutsy but introverted leader who saved the diocese from financial disaster, elevated women in the church, created a well-read adult catechism, withstood downturns in Catholic school enrollment, held his flock together through tumultuous parish mergers, engaged with parishioners in ways predecessors had not, and handled delicate assignments.

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CHARLESTON (SC)
WCIV

August 27, 2018

By Anne Emerson

Instructions from the Vatican detail how church officials should handle allegations of sexual abuse.

ABC News 4 learned more about these instructions when it was included as evidence in a new lawsuit here filed against the Catholic Diocese of Charleston.

The lawsuit accuses former Charleston Priest Fredrick Hopwood of sexually abusing a young boy.

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LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Tablet

August 28, 2018

By Edward Kendall

‘The Church has experienced a paradigm shift in which PR-speak has lost any power it might once have had to reassure’

The Provost of the London Oratory has said recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse has further “hobbled the church’s mission of evangelisation”.

Father Julian Large, former Fleet Street journalist and Provost of the London (or Brompton) Oratory writes that “the recent Grand Jury report on sexual abuse in America details events of such wickedness and depravity as to leave the most cynical tabloid reporter shaken.”

“That pastors who have been ordained to be the living image of Our Lord and Saviour on earth could deliberately do such harm to those little ones whose angels behold the face of their Father in Heaven defies words,” Father Large says in his most recent pastoral letter. He adds that the “resulting crisis of credibility which has hobbled the Church’s mission of evangelisation in recent decades can only have been exacerbated wherever the institutional response has been to issue defensive official statements crafted by expensive lawyers and spin doctors.”

“With the latest revelations, and the promise of worse to come, the Church has experienced a paradigm shift in which PR-speak has lost any power it might once have had to reassure,” he continues.

In light of such revelations the temptation for many might be to leave the Church. But Father Large reminds his readers that despite “the transgressions of Her members” the Catholic Church remains “the Mystical Body of Christ, founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind. She is where we find saving truth in its fullness, and where we encounter Our Lord in the Sacraments and receive Him in His entirety in Holy Communion.”

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STATE COLLEGE (PA)
Centre Daily

August 27, 2018

By Sarah Rafacz

State Rep. Scott Conklin announced at a press conference Monday that he plans to introduce two pieces of legislation in response to the grand jury report, released Aug. 14, on child sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.

According to the grand jury report, more than 300 “predator priests” sexually abused more than 1,000 children, and “we believe that the real number — of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward — is in the thousands.”

The grand jury investigated abuse in six of Pennsylvania’s dioceses (the Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown dioceses were the subject of previous grand juries).

According to the grand jury report, church leaders covered up the abuse, and, as a result of that, almost all of the cases are “too old to be prosecuted.”

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IRELAND
NPR

August 27, 2018

By Frank Langfitt

But his contrition was marred by a new allegation. An ex-Vatican official accused Pope Francis of ignoring for years sexual misconduct allegations against a U.S. cardinal, who has since resigned.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

While speaking at a Mass in Dublin yesterday, Pope Francis made his most abject apology yet for clerical sex abuse and the church’s mistreatment of women and children. Here he is through a translator.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

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UNITED STATES
VOX

August 24, 2018

By Tara Isabella Burton and Daniel Hemel

Recent high-profile cases have cast a spotlight on a decades-long history of abuse, secrecy, and cover-up.

In August, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made public one of the broadest-ever investigations into Catholic clerical sex abuse of minors in the US. The 1,400-page grand jury report, the result of an 18-month probe by Pennsylvania state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, names at least 300 priests accused of child sex abuse by more than 1,000 victims throughout the state.

Five years into Pope Francis’s papacy, the summer has been rocked by scandal for the Catholic Church. In July, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, among the highest-ranking Vatican officials in America, was forced to resign his cardinalship after accusations of sex abuse from both adults and children. And earlier this year, the Vatican’s highest-ranking official, Cardinal George Pell, took a leave of absence to face criminal charges of child sex abuse in his native Australia. These high-profile cases have cast a wider media spotlight on an ongoing story of abuse, secrecy, and cover-up that dates back decades.

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PITTSBURGH (PA)
NPR

August 27, 2018

By Virginia Alvino Young

Right inside the doorway of Courey and Andy Leer’s house just outside of Pittsburgh, you’re met with a golden cross, some palms, “and then we have a little Mary holy water holder,” said Courey, 31. “We got some holy water for our wedding but we never like replenish it. It just hangs out there.”

The Leers are among a number of Catholics in Pennsylvania who told NPR and its Pennsylvania stations that they opted to skip Mass this weekend, following the release of a grand jury report alleging widespread childhood sexual abuse in dioceses across the state.

The Leers were both raised Catholic, and for the past few months were increasingly active in their parish, attending more weekday Masses and even starting a new ministry. While they each said their spirituality is personal, for them, being Catholic is really more about identity and culture.

“I think for the longest time it wasn’t a matter of ‘how does this make you feel, what’s your relationship with Jesus?’ It was just ‘yeah, we’re Catholic.’ It’s what we do. It’s what our family does,” Courey said.

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VATICAN CITY
The Associated Press

August 27, 2018

By Nicole Winfield

The archbishop of Washington on Monday “categorically denied” ever being informed that his predecessor had been sanctioned for sexual misconduct, undercutting a key element of a bombshell allegation that Pope Francis covered up clergy abuse.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl issued a statement after the Vatican’s former ambassador to the United States accused Pope Francis of effectively freeing ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the sanctions in 2013 despite knowing of McCarrick’s sexual predations against seminarians.

Wuerl’s denial corresponds with the public record, which provides ample evidence that McCarrick lived a life completely devoid of ecclesiastic restriction after the sanctions were said to have been imposed in 2009 or 2010. That suggests that Pope Benedict XVI either didn’t impose sanctions or never conveyed them in any official way to the people who could enforce them – or that McCarrick simply flouted them and Benedict’s Vatican was unwilling or unable to stop him.

The claims of the former Vatican ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, have thrown Francis’ papacy into crisis, undermining once again his insistence that he is intent on ridding the church of sex abuse and cover-up.

His record has taken several hits of late, including his extraordinary misjudgment involving a Chilean bishop, for which he has apologized and taken measures to address. But the McCarrick case is something else entirely, implicating the powerful U.S. hierarchy and the Vatican itself.

The core of Vigano’s cover-up charge against Francis rests on what sanctions, if any, Benedict imposed on McCarrick and what if anything Francis did to alter them, when armed with the same knowledge of McCarrick’s misdeeds that Benedict had.

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ALLENTOWN (PA)
WFMZ

August 27, 2018

By Jaccii Farris

The Chairman of Youth Education in the Arts (YEA!) confirms that one of the 300 priests named in the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s grand jury report was a drum corps instructor for Cadets 2, a weekend-only touring branch of YEA!’s drum corps.

The board suspended Father Donald Cramer, who was a priest of the Diocese of Harrisburg, from all YEA! activities within 90 minutes, according to a letter from Chairman Doug Rutherford.

In a letter to the Corps, Rutherford said, “After verifying that Mr. Cramer was, in fact, the same person identified in the report, the board suspended him from all YEA! activities, all within 90 minutes. After reviewing the situation with the Board of Directors, staff and YEA! attorneys, we terminated Mr. Cramer’s contract on the third business day after the story broke without an investigation, as the grand jury report provided sufficient cause.”

Cramer was in an online chatroom and communicated with an individual in Connecticut who was charged criminally for possessing child pornography, according to the grand jury report. In Cramer’s online communications, he mentioned he wanted to go to Mexico where he could “rent” boys.

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BOSTON (MA)
WHDH

August 28, 2018

By John Cuoco

Cardinal Sean O’Malley will meet with Boston-area priests Tuesday to discuss the re-emerging international scandal of child sex abuse in the church and reports detailing decades of apparent cover-ups.

The meeting is set to take place at St. Julia’s Catholic Church in Weston, where protesters are expected to gather.

This comes after Pope Francis visited Ireland over the weekend and addressed the crisis.

“We ask forgiveness for the times that, as a church, we did not show the survivors of whatever kind of abuse compassion,” he said.

Former Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano has since called for the Pope’s resignation, saying he told Pope Francis about sexual abuse allegations made against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and he did nothing about it.

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MADISON (WI)
Roman Catholic Man

August 27, 2018

Fr Richard Heilman

Statement from Bishop Robert C. Morlino of August 27, 2018, regarding ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the Church

In the first place, I would like to affirm my solidarity with Cardinal DiNardo and his statement on behalf of the USCCB, particularly in two respects: 1) In his statement, Cardinal DiNardo indicates that the recent letter of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, “brings particular focus and urgency” to the examination by the USCCB of the grave moral failings of bishops. “The questions raised,” Card. DiNardo says, “deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence. Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusations and the guilty may be left to repeat the sins of the past.” 2) And, Card. DiNardo continues, “we renew our fraternal affection for the Holy Father in these difficult days.”

With those convictions and sentiments, I find myself completely in solidarity.

However, I must confess my disappointment that in his remarks on the return flight from Dublin to Rome, the Holy Father chose a course of “no comment,” regarding any conclusions that might be drawn from Archbishop Viganò’s allegations. Pope Francis further said expressly that such conclusions should be left to the “professional maturity” of journalists. In the United States and elsewhere, in fact, very little is more questionable than the professional maturity of journalists. The bias in the mainstream media could not be clearer and is recognized almost universally. I would never ascribe professional maturity to the journalism of the National Catholic Reporter, for example. (And, predictably, they are leading the charge in a campaign of vilification against Archbishop Viganò.)

Having renewed my expression of respect and filial affection for the Holy Father, I must add that during his tenure as our Apostolic Nuncio, I came to know Archbishop Viganò both professionally and personally, and I remain deeply convinced of his honesty, loyalty to and love for the Church, and impeccable integrity. In fact, Arch. Viganò has offered a number of concrete, real allegations in his recent document, giving names, dates, places, and the location of supporting documentation – either at the Secretariat of State or at the Apostolic Nunciature. Thus, the criteria for credible allegations are more than fulfilled, and an investigation, according to proper canonical procedures, is certainly in order.

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ROME
The Daily Beast

August 27, 2018

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

On his way home from Ireland last night, Francis was stunningly silent about what he knew about new allegations of past criminal sex abuse at the top of the U.S. Catholic Church.

Pope Francis has officially lost control of the American clerical sex-abuse scandal.

On the heels of the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report out this month, he now finds himself facing calls for his resignation over allegations that he was complicit in the cover-up of a different sex-abusing cardinal, this time Washington, D.C.’s Theodore McCarrick, whose abuse was apparently so well known that he once advertised in a church bulletin that young seminarians should seek him out. And now, a BuzzFeed News exposé published Monday about murderous nuns at St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Vermont is sure to feed the fire, or at least prove once and for all—lest anyone doubted—that clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church is endemic.

Francis may actually be making things even worse by refusing to comment. He was widely criticized for his “no comment” remarks in the days after the Pennsylvania case. And last night on the flight back to Rome from Ireland, he did not deny claims of a cover-up involving McCarrick. Instead, he refused to comment once again.

“I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested: Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment,” the pontiff said, according to a transcript of the in-flight Sunday night press conference published on the Catholic News Agency’s website. “I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself.”

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BUFFALO (NY)
Spectrum Local News

August 28, 2018

By Mike Arena

Add Lt. Governor Kathy Hochul to the list of elected leaders calling for Bishop Richard Malone’s resignation.

She joins Congressman Brian Higgins, who was one of the first to do so. Higgins watched Bishop Malone deliver a statement Sunday, announcing he will establish a task force to review the handling of sexual abuse claims.

The congressman says Malone’s comments only confirm he needs to step aside. Higgins says Malone waited too long to act, and has not properly protected children.

Hochul and Higgins are now calling for an external investigation of the Buffalo Catholic Diocese.

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Cardinal Sean O’Malley to meet with Archdiocesan priests in a parish, St. Julia’s in Weston, MA, where Cardinal Law sent Fr. John J. Geoghan, a serial pedophile priest, after Cardinal Law knew about Fr. Geoghan’s sexual abuse of children and where Fr. Geoghan continued to sexually abuse children – how insensitive to the Weston sexual abuse victims

Media Release – August 27, 2018

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who blamed his priest secretary, Fr. Robert Kickham, for supposedly not showing him an explosive letter regarding allegations of sexual abuse against Cardinal Theodore E. Mc Carrick, will hold a meeting with Archdiocesan priests allegedly to discuss the growing clergy sexual abuse crisis and other matters

A recent explosive report from former Papal Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, indicates that Pope Francis and many American Cardinals, including Cardinal Sean O’Malley, and Archbishops/Bishops were fully aware of the allegations against and disciplining of Cardinal Theodore E. Mc Carrick

After decades as a bishop in Florida and Massachusetts, Cardinal O’Malley has called for United States dioceses to work with local law enforcement officials in conducting grand jury investigations. Where has he been? It’s too little, too late

What

A demonstration and press conference calling on Cardinal Sean O’Malley to explain:

1) why he chose St. Julia’s Parish in Weston, MA as the location of his meeting with priests, particularly since the meeting will allegedly deal with the topic of sexual abuse by clergy, and since St. Julia’s Parish in Weston, MA was an epicenter of the scandalous sexual abuse of children by Fr. John J. Geoghan

2) what he knew and when he knew about Cardinal Mc Carrick’s sexual abuse of seminarians, especially since the recent revelations by a former Papal Nuncio that “everybody” in the Church hierarchy from the United States to the Vatican knew about Cardinal Theodore Mc Carrick.

3) why he is now calling on dioceses in the United States to cooperate with law enforcement officials in conducting grand jury investigations of those dioceses when he has not done so for decades. He must agree to release all files in the Archdiocese of Boston to law enforcement and abide by a grand jury’s findings.

When

Tuesday, August 28, 2018 from Noon until 1:30 pm (Press conference at 1:00 pm)

Meeting of priests (1:00 pm – 2:30 pm)

Where

On the public sidewalk outside St. Julia’s Parish, Weston, MA, 374 Boston Post Road, Weston, MA 02495

Who

Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., former priest of the Archdiocese of Newark who was ordained by Cardinal Mc Carrick in 1997 when he was Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, and who founded Road to Recovery, Inc. to help victims of sexual abuse and their families; and members of STTOP, Speak Truth to Power, who have demonstrated in front of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston every Sunday since 2002 to support victim/survivors of clergy sexual abuse and their families

Why

See above

Contacts

Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., Road to Recovery, Inc. – 862-368-2800 – roberthoatson@gmail.com

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IRELAND
Yahoo News UK

August 27, 2018

Christopher Lamb watches a new Ireland try to come to terms with a Church beset by a child abuse scandal

Rising at the crack of dawn and braving pelting rain and driving winds, Irish Catholics made their way for a Mass with Pope Francis in Dublin on Sunday.

The hundreds of thousands of believers who turned out in Phoenix Park must have felt disconnected from a papal visit that was dominated by the sexual abuse scandal inside the Church.

Francis’ two-day visit to Ireland saw him come face-to-face with the rawness of the abuse crisis in the country that has become the Ground Zero for what is arguably the gravest crisis facing the Church in almost 500 years.

It was striking that when John Paul II visited Ireland 39 years ago, more than a million people turned out in Phoenix Park for the papal mass in what was the biggest gathering of people in Irish history. While organisers predicted 500,000 would attend Francis’ Mass, estimates put it the attendance figure at just 200,000.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
KSDK5

August 27, 2018

By Rachel Menitoff

Investigators confiscated the retired priest’s computer.

An investigation is underway after a retired priest was discovered watching what might have been child pornography, the Archdiocese of St. Louis said Monday.

The archdiocese was notified about the incident on Friday, Aug. 24 and reported the incident to police.

Investigators confiscated the retired priest’s computer.

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
KNX 1070

August 27, 2018

A Manhattan Beach woman who says she was sexually abused by a priest is calling out the Los Angeles Archdiocese for allowing him to keep ministering.

KNX reporter Margaret Carrero:

Several years ago, Kate Bergin sued the Archdiocese for allowing Father Nicholas Assi to remain in the ministry at different parishes after he allegedly touched her inappropriately while she was setting up Mass.

Today, he’s at St. Luke’s in Temple City.

Despite settling her lawsuit for about $100,000, Bergin felt a need to speak out because she believes there are probably other victims.

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ST. LOUIS (MO)
KMOV

August 27, 2018

By Stephanie Baumer

The Archdiocese of St. Louis says a retired priest was discovered viewing what was believed to be child pornography.

The Archdiocese says the situation, which they were first notified about on August 24, was immediately reported to law enforcement, who then seized the retired priest’s computer. The incident was also reported to the Missouri Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline.

The Archdiocese of St. Louis says they are cooperating with authorities in the investigation.

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MALTA
manueldelia.com

August 27, 2018

Felix Cini, convicted in 2004 in Italy for molesting 17 children and caught downloading child-porn on his computers by the police, has been permitted by the Maltese Curia to say mass at Bormla parish “on special occasions”.

These photos are from the mass and procession of this year’s Pentecost where Felix Cini and other priests led children who had participated for the first time in the communion ritual. The photographs carry the watermark of the parish church.

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CANADA
LifeSiteNews

August 27, 2018

By John-Henry Westen

Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana Kazakhstan, one of the most outspoken bishops in the world concerning the crisis of faith in the Catholic Church under Pope Francis, has written a document responding to the testimony of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.

Bishop Schneider says there is “no reasonable and plausible cause to doubt the truth content of the document of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.”

Archbishop Vigano, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C. from 2011-2016, detailed in an 11-page letter last week that Pope Francis covered up now ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s abuse.

Bishop Schneider acknowledges that it is extremely grave and rare that a bishop would publicly accuse a reigning pope, but points out that “Archbishop Viganò confirmed his statement by a sacred oath invoking the name of God.”

Bishop Schneider’s document is published in full below.

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AUSTIN (TX)
Texas Standard

August 27, 2018

By Joy Diaz

Plaintiffs in the case against priest Rudy Kos didn’t settle or sign nondisclosure agreements. That paved the way for more priest sex-abuse victims to come forward and seek justice.

Last week, a priest went missing from his Texas parish, and a U.S. cardinal missed his trip to Ireland with Pope Francis. Both have something to do with the latest revelations of pedophilia that continue to plague the Catholic Church. Over the years, some cases have gone to court but none has been as pivotal as the case that was tried in Dallas two decades ago.

Lawyer Windle Turley represented eight of the 11 plaintiffs in the case against priest Rudolph “Rudy” Kos.

Turley says Kos was allowed to go into the priesthood despite objections from the priest who ran his seminary. Kos went on to sexually abuse boys in several parishes in the Dallas area. His crimes included “grooming” boys from as young as age seven, and coercing them into performing various sexual acts. His abuse also involved plying the boys with alcohol and drugs. One boy committed suicide before the trial. Turley says he didn’t realize how damaging sexual abuse could be for a person, before he worked on this case.

“I wasn’t totally aware of how injurious sexual abuse is to an adolescent. It lasts, in most instances…for the rest of their life,” Turley says.

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IRELAND
France 24

August 25, 2018

Irish victims of child sex abuse by the clergy say Pope Francis will need to come up with more than an apology this weekend if he is to restore faith in a deeply tarnished Catholic Church.
Once a bastion of Catholicism, Ireland has changed dramatically since the last time a pontiff visited back in 1979 – when divorce and contraception were banned, gay marriage was unheard-of, and the Church’s grip on a deeply conservative society was near total.

As Pope Francis arrives Saturday in Dublin for a two-day visit, he’s seeing a country led by a gay prime minister, where same-sex marriage was adopted by popular ballot, and in which a large majority of voters chose to revoke one of the world’s most restrictive abortion regimes earlier this year.

Tellingly, such sweeping social change took place despite stiff opposition from the Church.

The Pope’s visit, timed to coincide with the World Meeting of Families (WMOF), a global Catholic gathering, comes at a critical time for the Church in both Ireland and the wider world, with the Vatican mired in a string of abuse scandals that threaten to reshape Francis’s legacy.

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NEW YORK (NY)
Commonweal Magazine

August 27, 2018

By Paul Moses

What Matters Most in the Viganò Letter

Much of the coverage of the letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò concerning the cover-up of sexual misconduct allegations against Theodore McCarrick is focusing on Pope Francis’s potential role in it. That’s just the spin Viganò and conservative critics of the pope were hoping for. But in looking more closely at everything that Viganò alleges, Francis’s immediate predecessors don’t fare very well either: he depicts John Paul II as at best oblivious to the facts of the McCarrick case because of health reasons, and Benedict XVI as so ineffectual that the Curia didn’t bother enforcing the restrictions he allegedly placed on the cardinal.

Viganò’s charge against Pope Francis is not that he created the problem but that he failed to clean it up once he knew. Keep in mind, though, that McCarrick’s situation was one strand in a complex web of curial deceit that Francis inherited when he became pope. Many of the same people now seizing on Viganò’s claims against Francis had criticized the pope for being unfair, in their view, to curial officials his predecessors appointed.

Francis told the Curia about its fifteen “diseases” in a pre-Christmas greeting in 2014, a diagnosis that included “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease,” “rivalry and vainglory,” gossip and back-biting, hoarding material goods, and “the disease of persons who insatiably try to accumulate power and to this end are ready to slander, defame and discredit others, even in newspapers and magazines.” The problem with Francis has not been the diagnosis, but following through on a treatment plan.

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BRADFORD (PA)
NBC News

August 27, 2018

By Corky Siemaszko

The 45-year-old said he was treated as a pariah when he accused a priest of abuse in 1997.

Pennsylvania authorities have opened an investigation into a Catholic priest who was accused of sexually abusing a student 30 years ago but was never questioned because too much time had passed since the alleged abuse, according to the district attorney.

The priest, Monsignor H. Desmond McGee, 71, was not one of the 301 “predator priests” accused of sexual abuse who were named in a recent bombshell Pennsylvania grand jury report.

But investigators in McKean County said Monday that they decided to look into McGee after his accuser, Edward Rodgers, went public following the release of the report — and repeated allegations that the monsignor molested him when he was a student at Bradford Central Christian High School in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

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VATICAN CITY
ABC News Videos

August 27, 2018

Pope Francis said he’d read the document from his former ambassador to the U.S. who also called for the pontiff to resign.

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VATICAN CITY
Yahoo View

August 27, 2018

Pope Francis faced a stunning accusation from a former Vatican official over the weekend. Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who served as Vatican ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement that the pope knew about allegations of sexual abuse.

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VATICAN
Associated Press Videos

August 27, 2018

A letter written by the former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. is raising questions about whether the pope knew about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, but rehabilitated him anyway. (Aug. 27)

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SCRANTON (PA)
The Times-Tribune

August 26, 2018

Editor: The recent Pennsylvania grand jury report documents clergy sexual abuse and a related cover-up by bishops in six Catholic dioceses.

The similarity in cover-up behavior found in each diocese is shocking and obviously systemic. Most parents would never allow a child to be near a person who is a known sexual abuser or even suspected of being one. But, these bishops didn’t hesitate to do so.

Is Pennsylvania the only place where the Catholic Church has behaved so horrifically? Hardly. However, convincing documentation does not exist as clearly as it now does in Pennsylvania. Civil governments must take the lead, as was done in Pennsylvania, and do what the church won’t do. Many more grand juries need to be impaneled and empowered to find and declare the truth because without truth there can be no justice and without justice there will be no healing.

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NEW YORK (NY)
The Island Now

August 23, 2018

By Brian Toale

The recent Pennsylvania grand jury report that covers six of the eight Catholic dioceses in the State of Pennsylvania names 301 “Predator priests” and over 1,000 victims.

The jurors themselves state that in their belief, they have not identified even half of the actual number of victims.

All around the globe for the past half-century, wherever an investigation of the Catholic Church has been undertaken, the same pattern of sexual abuse and cover-up is exposed, and the lengths that the Church’s hierarchy will go to to protect their own reputation and financial holdings is revealed, yet again.

This should come as no surprise.

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SAN JOSE (CA)
Associated Press

August 27, 2018

The Catholic Diocese of San Jose has purchased a five-bedroom, $2.3 million home in Silicon Valley for its retiring bishop despite the 640,000-member diocese’s mission of charity and serving the poor.

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[Documents seized in raid include Ezzati’s letters about accused priest Óscar Muñoz Toledo]

CHILE
La Tercera

August 25, 2018

By Leyla Zapata

El documento sobre el excanciller del arzobispado fue incautado en un allanamiento dirigido por el fiscal Arias.

El pasado 13 de junio, el fiscal Emiliano Arias, en conjunto con el OS-9 de Carabineros, incautaron una serie de documentos en el Arzobispado de Santiago. La inédita diligencia se enmarcaba dentro de la investigación que el Ministerio Público lleva contra el excanciller de la arquidiócesis, Óscar Muñoz Toledo, quien se autodenunció eclesialmente, ante la Oficina Pastoral de Denuncias (Opade), por supuestos abusos. El sacerdote actualmente está formalizado y en prisión preventiva, en la cárcel de Rancagua.

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[Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati’s court hearing delayed]

CHILE
T13

August 20, 2018

La diligencia estaba planeada para el martes 21 de agosto, pero finalmente la Fiscalía accedió a una petición de la defensa.

El cardenal Ricardo Ezzati finalmente no declarará este martes 21 de agosto en la causa que lleva la Fiscalía de Rancagua por una serie de denuncias por abusos sexuales al interior de la iglesia chilena.

Aunque la audiencia estaba agendada para la tarde de mañana, el Ministerio Público —liderado por el fiscal Emiliano Arias— accedió a una petición de la defensa, que requirió revisar los antecedentes de la investigación.

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[Prosecutor Arias says there are more than 100 victims of clergy sex abuse, questions effectiveness of canonical investigations]

SANTIAGO, CHILE
Emol

August 27, 2018

By Leonardo Núñez

El persecutor abordó los avances de la indagación sobre abusos cometido por miembros de la Iglesia Católica y los antecedentes surgidos tras la incautación de documentos en los obispados.

El fiscal regional de O’Higgins, Emiliano Arias, se refirió esta noche a los avances de la investigación que dirige en contra de miembros de la Iglesia Católica chilena por abusos sexuales de menores, indicando que la incautación de documentos, producto de tres allanamientos a obispados, ha permitido no sólo identificar a víctimas, sino que también recopilar importantes antecedentes para las causas. En ese sentido, señaló que a la fecha hay 56 causas abiertas con más de 100 víctimas y 60 imputados, pero que estas cifras podrían ir aumentando, ello porque de forma espontánea se han acercado más personas para hacer denuncias.

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[Archbishop accuses Pope of protecting Barros, Errázuriz and Ezzati]

CHILE
La Tercera

August 26, 2018

By Fernanda Rojas

El arzobispo Carlo Maria Vigano publicó una carta en la que acusa al Papa Francisco y a altos cargos del Vaticano de encubrir escándalos de abusos en Estados Unidos. Pero también lanza dardos contra el Pontífice por su rol en Chile.

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IRELAND
The Irish Times

August 27, 2018

By Sorcha Pollak

Irish data laws preventing full accountability for church sexual abuse, says victim group

The Catholic Church’s culture of secrecy, coupled with Ireland’s “strict protection around defamation and data protection”, is making it impossible to ensure accountability for crimes of sexual abuse, a victim’s support group has said.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the BishopAccountability.org website which runs a public “abuse-tracker” of offending clergy, highlighted on Monday the Irish State and church’s continued failure in making perpetrators of sexual abuse accountable for their actions. Last week, the group launched the Irish leg of its online database which identifies 94 priests and brothers who have been convicted of sexually abusing children.

Speaking outside the former Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott Street on Monday, Ms Barrett Doyle announced that seven new names had been added to the database following Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland over the weekend. The names included in the database are just “a fraction” of the total number of abusers in the Republic and Northern Ireland, she said, adding that Irish data protection laws had prevented the group from adding additional names.

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IRELAND
Irish Independent

August 27, 2018

By Conor Feehan

Survivors of clerical abuse have branded the visit of Pope Francis as “abysmal and appalling” because he failed to identify an action plan about what he is going to do to address the issues of hurt caused by the Church in Ireland.

Speaking after the Pontiff admitted he was not aware of the Magdalene Laundries or the mother and baby homes, they questioned how he could be so out of touch with the deep pain and ongoing anguish that emanated from such institutions.

“It is unbelievable. It’s an inescapable reality and truth to us here in Ireland. No matter what happened he should have been fully briefed about what he was coming to regarding the pain and suffering here,” said Mark Vincent Healy, who was abused by two priests in his time in school in Dublin.

“One thing is for certain, he didn’t know. You can blame it on himself for not asking questions, or those who surrounded him. I can’t imagine that the Archbishop didn’t brief him, and there are other service providers to the Pope who are feeding him information on what he’s coming to in Ireland,” he added.

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IRELAND
Shropshire Star

August 27, 2018

The pontiff’s visit to Ireland focused attention on historic incidents of wrongdoing by clergy.

Victims of clerical sexual abuse have called on the Pope to deliver a plan of action to tackle child abuse scandals.

During his two-day visit to Ireland, Pope Francis begged forgiveness for the crimes of the Church.

But campaigners urged him to take that one step further and take concrete action to solve the issue.

Members of two global groups aimed at holding the Catholic church to account gathered outside a former Magdalene Laundry on Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street on Monday to give their reaction to the pontiff’s trip to Ireland.

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MALTA
The Times of Malta

August 27, 2018

By John Guillaumier, St Julian’s

Ongoing exposures of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests show there is a lot of corruption behind the ‘holy doors’.

In Chile, the police recently raided the headquarters of the Catholic Church’s Episcopal Conference, thus ending “the impunity of the Chilean hierarchy”, as Anne Barrett Doyle, of BishopAccountability.org, said.

In the United States, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC has been asked by the Vatican to cease public ministry after he was accused of molesting minors and seminarians. He is among the highest-ranking of the more than 6,700 Roman Catholic clerics in the US to be accused of sexually abusing children since the Church’s sex abuse scandal broke out in 2002 (BishopAccountability.org.).

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
The Associated Press

August 27, 2018

The Latest on Pope Francis’ trip to Ireland (all times local):

11 p.m.

Pope Francis is facing a lukewarm reception and scattered protests on his trip to Ireland.

Even his vow to rid the church of the “scourge” has been dismissed as a disappointment by some of Ireland’s wounded victims.

But others who met with him in private say they’re heartened that he would respond to their plight, including two of the thousands of children who were forcibly put up for adoption for the shame of having been born to unwed mothers.

Survivors of one of Ireland’s wretched mother and baby homes plan to hold a demonstration Sunday at Tuam, site of a mass grave of hundreds of babies who died at a church-run home.

Francis isn’t scheduled to visit, but he says the description of the site “still echo in my ears.”

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Irish Examiner

August 24, 2018

The US report on child sex abuse and cover-ups in Pennsylvania has led to calls to extend time limits for more victims to bring cases to court, writes Bette Browne.

THE Pennsylvania probe of child abuse crimes and cover-ups that landed like a bombshell before the Pope’s visit here is far from over as US lawmakers fight for legal tools that would give victims more time to bring perpetrators to justice before the courts.

The Pennsylvania probe of child abuse crimes and cover-ups that landed like a bombshell before the Pope’s visit here is far from over as US lawmakers fight for legal tools that would give victims more time to bring perpetrators to justice before the courts.

Investigators and politicians in Pennsylvania are seeking to change time limits for prosecutions under US statute-of-limitation laws. If they succeed it will boost similar moves under way in other states, with potentially devastating consequences for the Catholic Church.

Advocates for victims have been pushing to amend these statutes for some time — after the Pennsylvania revelations, their campaign has become more urgent.

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HARRISBURG (PA)
Penn Live

August 27, 2018

By Jennifer Storm

Attorney General details abuse report findings

These are unprecedented times. Not because there were no victims within the church before today.

Not because there were no cover-ups, bribes, threats, secret marriages and divorces, private stashes of child pornography, golden crosses used to mark children who had already been groomed.

Because today, we stand with these courageous survivors. Today, we don’t “play it safe” as Richard Lavinthal would have us do in his recent op-Ed for PennLive.

Today, the words of the grand jury ring around the world and shatter the darkness with the light of truth. Today, we are proud to be Pennsylvanians led forward in the fight for justice by our citizens, by our communities, by our Attorney General and his office.

Attempting to misrepresent or distract from the true purpose and message of last week’s media release is a tried and true method of further silencing survivors. And we say no.

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BURLINGTON (VT)
Insider

August 27, 2018

By Kelly McLaughlin

– An investigation into Catholic orphanages in the US revealed systematic abuse that many children faced from nuns in the 20th century.
– Former residents said they were forced to kneel or stand for hours, were dangled outside windows and over wells, and were locked in cabinets and closets.
– At St Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, former residents say the abuse sometimes led to death.
– The investigation by Buzzfeed News comes weeks after a Pennsylvania grand jury report accused the Catholic Church of covering up the abuse of 1,000 children.

Former residents of a now-closed Catholic orphanage in Vermont say nuns killed and tortured foster children who were staying at the facility between 1930 and 1970, according to an investigation from Buzzfeed News.

The investigation reveals the systematic abuse many children allegedly faced from nuns at St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage in Burlington, as well as other orphanages across the US.

It comes weeks after a Pennsylvania grand jury report accused the Catholic Church of covering up the abuse of 1,000 children at the hands of hundreds of priests across six dioceses.

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UNITED STATES
CNN

August 27, 2018

By Rosa Flores, Meridith Edwards and Susannah Cullinane

Since the 1980s, the Catholic Church in the United States and its insurance companies have paid out more than $3.8 billion in lawsuits and claims involving allegations of clerical sexual abuse, according to a monitoring group.

BishopAccountability, a non-profit that tracks allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, says the payouts involved cases filed by more than 8,600 survivors who were allegedly sexually abused by an undisclosed number of clergy since the 1950s.

Spokesman Terry McKiernan told CNN the number of associated clergy is difficult to calculate because some settlement announcements omit the number of predator priests.

The monies have not gone solely to survivors, McKiernan said. Attorneys get a cut, too. And not all the money comes out of the coffers of the Catholic Church, because the church maintains insurance policies that cover a portion of the settlement payments.

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BURLINGTON (VT)
The Week

August 27, 2018

By Kathryn Krawczyk

Throughout the early 1900s in Catholic orphanages around the world, children were locked in cabinets and attics for days, government reports have found. They had to eat their vomit. They were sexually abused. Some were even murdered, former residents have said under sworn oath. And while these accusations have led to massive government investigations in Australia, Canada, and beyond, it’s all gone relatively unnoticed in the U.S.

As Catholic priests and leadership undergo a reckoning amid a wave of child sex abuse revelations, attention has largely bypassed American nuns who also had power over children. But a report from BuzzFeed News detailing incredible physical, mental, and sexual abuse at Catholic orphanages might change that.

BuzzFeed News dug up evidence corroborating abuse allegations from children who once lived in orphanages across the the U.S. But the children of St. Joseph’s Orphanage, run by sisters in Burlington, Vermont, were able to truly shed light on their stories with a 1996 court case uncovered by BuzzFeed News. Speaking to a lawyer, Joseph Barquin alleged that a nun forcibly fondled him under a flight of stairs, while other children were beaten or shaken into shock. Another former St. Joseph’s resident, Sally Dale, recalled in a deposition the time she saw a child thrown from a fourth-floor window.

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BURLINGTON (VT)
BuzzFeed News

August 27, 2018

By Elamin Abdelmahmoud

Nuns killed children, say former residents of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage

Good morning,

Take a deep breath, because this is an explosive and difficult story. Millions of American children were placed in orphanages. Some didn’t make it out alive.

After hearing whispers that seemed almost too awful to believe, BuzzFeed News investigative reporter Christine Kenneally embarked on a four-year-long journey to find out what really went on in these institutions. Today, BuzzFeed News publishes her special investigation, with a powerful video, revealing the systematic abuse and even the alleged murder of children by nuns.

Her searing report — part true crime drama, part ghost story — cracks open a secret history of American life, and adds a vast new dimension to the Catholic church’s mistreatment of children.

From a world shrouded in secrecy, she tells the story of Sally Dale, Joseph Barquin, Dale Greene, and other former residents of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, who somehow found the courage to come forward and tell the world what they had witnessed, begging to be heard and believed. The local Catholic diocese put up the fight of a lifetime.

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BURLINGTON (VT)
BuzzFeed News

August 27, 2018

This is the haunting story of children who survived horrors in American orphanages, and their fight to make the world believe them.

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BURLINGTON (VT)
BuzzFeed

August 27, 2018

By Christine Kenneally

It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

“He kind of hit, and— ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.

For just a moment, the room was still. “Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. “Well, I guess you’d call it — it was a bounce,” she replied. “And then he laid still.”

Sally, who was speaking under oath, tried to explain it. She started again. “The first thing I saw was looking up, hearing the crash of the window, and then him going down, but my eyes were still glued—.” She pointed up at where the broken window would have been and then she pointed at her own face and drew circles around it. “That habit thing, whatever it is, that they wear, stuck out like a sore thumb.”

A nun was standing at the window, Sally said. She straightened her arms out in front of her. “But her hands were like that.”

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UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic

August 2018

By Kevin Clarke

After this summer of sex abuse revelations, it is time for a relentless examination of institutional conscience.
This summer the revelations of past assault on children and harassment committed by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick roiled the U.S. church. Other exposés of abuses by individual priests and of institution dysfunction followed including the devastating grand jury report in Pennsylvania that named more than 300 priests who for decades abused thousands of children which six dioceses covered up.

They all make a mockery of clerical formation. In a moment unprecedented for the church, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of McCarrick from the College of Cardinals and soon after that of an Australian archbishop after his conviction for covering up the abuse of children. Will stories of other retired bishops or men in active leadership roles emerge as well?

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times

August 26, 2018

By Soumya Karlamangla and Victoria Kim

Olivia Vela sat in the courtyard of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Sunday as she waited for the 10 a.m. Mass to begin. After a decades-long absence, she said she returned to the church a year and a half ago after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Vela said she is now in recovery and started attending services again because she is so grateful to be alive.

But the 52-year-old nurse is still struggling to reconcile her beliefs with the sex abuse scandals that continue to plague the Catholic Church and the latest news that Pope Francis may have knowingly hid allegations about the now-disgraced American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop in Washington.

“I’m trying to come back. I’m trying to come back,” Vela said, sounding weary.

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BURLINGTON (VT)
The Burlington Free Press

August 27, 2018

By Sam Hemingway

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was first published on May 17, 1998. The Burlington Free Press is republishing stories about sexual abuse that took place at the St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington in the 1950s and 1960s.

For the first time, nuns and priests have confirmed some children at the now-closed St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington were sexually and physically abused.

Their acknowledgments, made in sworn depositions, involve isolated incidents and are much less sweeping than the allegations of systematic abuse made by dozens of former residents of the home.

Nonetheless, the statements by four nuns and two priests who worked at the orphanage weaken claims by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington that abuse charges cannot be corroborated.

More than 100 former St. Joseph’s residents have charged in recent years that they and others were beaten and molested, tormented and humiliated. Twenty-four have suits pending against the diocese and related organizations.

They found some support in court depositions filed last week. Monsignor Edward Foster, for example, worked at the orphanage as a seminarian in the late 1940s. The now-retired priest recalled a young boy, Roger Barber, who was brought to him by two nuns in 1947 or 1948. The boy’s buttocks had been burned so badly by an orphanage janitor that he could not sit down.

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UNTIED STATES
CNN

August 27, 2018

By Michelle Krupa

At night, when her young daughters want a special lullaby, they ask for the Celtic Alleluia, a hymn that most any cradle Catholic could sing by heart.

But in the mornings, as she drives to work, Susan Reynolds finds herself pondering how to articulate her role in a church again battered by revelations of its own clergy sexually abusing children as its leaders hid the alleged crimes.

“One of the most painful things is this deep question I have of: Do I trust my church with my kids?” said Reynolds, an assistant professor of Catholic studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
“And the answer right now is: Kinda, no.”

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IRELAND
BBC News

August 27, 2018

The head of the Catholic Church in Ireland has said that Pope Francis was “moved and shocked” by his meetings with survivors of abuse.

On Saturday, in Dublin, the Pope spent 90 minutes with eight survivors, telling them he viewed clerical sex abuse as “filth”.

Archbishop Eamon Martin said the encounters led the pontiff to write a “personal, handwritten” prayer.

Pope Francis made a two-day trip to Ireland over the weekend.

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VATICAN CITY
Al Jazeera English

August 27, 2018

A senior Vatican official has called on Pope Francis to resign, accusing the pontiff of failing to act sooner on sexual abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Yahoo News UK

August 27, 2018

By Christopher Lamb

Pope Francis says he will “not say one word” in response to explosive allegations from a retired Vatican official claiming the pontiff covered up sexual abuse and should resign.

Talking to reporters on board the papal plane returning to Rome from Dublin, the Pope dismissively said Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s testimony “speaks for itself” and he urged people to read the material carefully and judge for themselves.

In the 11-page memo – released on Sunday during the Pope’s trip to Ireland – the former Vatican ambassador to the United States says he warned Francis about allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse by former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick.

The document was an unprecedented broadside against a pope from a senior figure inside the Church and included a long list of US and Vatican officials of being told about McCarrick’s behaviour.

“I will not say one word on this,” he told reporters during his in-flight press conference. “I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have sufficient journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions.”

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BREMERTON (WA)
Kitsap Sun

August 24, 2018

By Ed Palm

The Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal is back in the news — this time, bigger and more troubling than ever. On August 14, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court released the results of a two-year grand jury investigation revealing what the Washington Post has labeled a “criminal conspiracy” to cover up the abuse of “at least 1,000 victims” by “some 300 priests” in “six of the state’s eight dioceses.”

As a Catholic-school survivor, I’ve had more than a passing interest in this controversy and have even advanced my theory about why this has been happening (“The risk in the old Catholic ‘calls,’” March 13, 2016). More about that anon. My immediate concern is how this latest report hits home, geographically and personally.

Within a few days of Pennsylvania’s blockbuster report, all of us who had graduated from the Salesianum School for Boys in Wilmington, Delaware, received an email from Brendan Kennealey, the school’s current president. Kennealey revealed that two of the priests named in the Pennsylvania report were members of the religious order that had established and still oversees Salesianum, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales (OSFS), and that they had taught at the school. In the interest of full disclosure, Kennealey acknowledged that 12 oblates had been named in 34 lawsuits brought by 39 victims against the school and the Oblates. In 2011, the victims and the order reached a global settlement to the tune of $24.8 million.

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SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
The Catholic World Report

August 26, 2018

By Christopher R. Altieri

The testimony Archbishop Viganò offers is neither perfectly crafted, nor immune to criticism, but it is wide-ranging, detailed, and devastating

The former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, has written a letter alleging systematic coverup of the disordered and abusive behavior of the former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, who has resigned from the College of Cardinals and awaits canonical trial on charges he molested at least one minor. Since that charge became public on June 20th, other accusers have come forward, some of them alleging they suffered abuse in seminary or as priests, while at least one other accuser — the first person McCarrick baptized as a priest — alleges his abuse began when he was aged 11 years.

McCarrick’s behavior appears to have been an open secret, though high-ranking prelates close to McCarrick claim they were unaware of any hint of impropriety. They include McCarrick’s successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and Cardinal Kevin Farrell of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. The records of both men deserve the most careful and relentless scrutiny, but not here.

Here, the concern is the set of assertions Archbishop Viganò has made in his letter, in which he details a nearly two decades’ coverup of McCarrick’s misconduct. It involves three popes and three Secretaries of State, as well as at least a half-dozen other high-ranking Vatican officials.

Archbishop Viganò, who was Nuncio from 2011 to 2016, asserts that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, when he was Secretary of State under Pope St. John Paul II, knew of the allegations against McCarrick. Viganò strongly suggests Sodano was nevertheless instrumental in securing McCarrick’s appointment to the See of Washington, DC. Viganò speculates that Sodano would have been able to pass McCarrick’s nomination across the desk of the weak and sickly Pope St. John Paul II, from whom he would have kept information regarding McCarrick’s habits.

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
The Associated Press

August 25, 2018

By Nicole Winfield and Maria Grazia Murru

Pope Francis declared Saturday as he arrived in Ireland that he shares the outrage of rank-and-file Catholics over the cover-up of the “repugnant crimes” of priests who raped and molested children, and vowed that he was committed to ending the “scourge.”

Seeking to respond to a global outcry over sex abuse by priests, Francis cited measures taken by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, to respond to the crisis. But Benedict never acknowledged the Vatican’s role in fueling a culture of cover-up, and Francis provided no new details of any measures he would take to sanction bishops who fail to protect their flocks from predator priests.

“The failure of ecclesial authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — to adequately address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share these sentiments,” the pope said in a speech to government officials and civil authorities at Dublin Castle.

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

August 25, 2018

I am wondering if the long-standing and thorough concealment of clerical sexual abuse doesn’t have a lot to do with the top-down character of the Roman Catholic Church.

Who appoints and promotes bishops? Well the pope does, or, maybe apostolic delegates and nabobs in the Curia tell him whom to appoint. In any case, in a top-down regime the main thing the higher-ups want from the lower-downs is no trouble.

If everything is running trouble-free, the lower-downs are assumed to be doing a good job. If there is any trouble, even the trouble of cosseted members of the laity or politicians among the clergy complaining against desperately needed reform, the higher-ups will wonder what the lower-down bishop is doing wrong, why things are getting out of hand. He must not be running his diocese very well if the Vatican is receiving complaints from big donors and ultramontane clergy. He must have no skill in the arts of secrecy if scandals in the diocese are getting into the local news media.

So, if his excellency wants to abide in the Vatican’s favor, if he has dreams of advancement to a more prestigious see, if he wants to avoid early retirement, he had better get with the program and keep his diocese trouble-free whatever the price.

Daniel Sheerin • Kirkwood

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NEW CUMBERLAND (PA)
WHTM

August 25, 2018

By Priscilla Liguori

Instead of turning away from God during a time of hurt and sadness, the people at a prayer vigil in New Cumberland turned toward Him. The goal of the ceremony was to heal the community, broken by the truth exposed in the grand jury report on clergy sex abuse, released last week.

“Help us to live gracefully inside this tension,” said Tina Moyer, who spoke at the vigil.

Eight local churches of different denominations prayed together for survivors of clergy sex abuse.

People in the pews of Baughman United Methodist Church wore white ribbons to support survivors and their families.

“What I saw tonight was everybody coming together,” said Bruce Chambers, an Etters resident who went to the vigil. “Hopefully, in this whole situation with the Catholic Church, what we’ll see is some changes.”

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Pittsburgh (PA)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

August 27, 2018

By Mary Lou Walter

Holy smoke! It appears that the ruby red Prada slippers that Benedict XVI wore are now on the other foot.

How ironic that members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops were complicit for decades about protecting known abuser priests. The same feckless organization, however, was totally enthusiastic to participate and endorse the Apostolic Visitation into America’s provinces of nuns — a witch hunt in every sense begun to ease the fears of U.S. bishops that the nuns were running amok, what with their abandonment of religious garments and living independently outside of convents, not to mention forming radical feminist ideas about their organizations.

What were the results of the investigation?

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CHEYENNE (WY)
Wyoming Public Media

August 24, 2018

By Kamila Kudelska

The Cheyenne Police Department is seeking information from any victims or witnesses of sex abuse crimes related to any church official.

It comes after a release from the Roman Catholic Diocese in Cheyenne with new information found in a sex abuse case involving Bishop-Emeritus Joseph Hart between the 1970s through the 1990s. The department has since re-opened that case which has been closed for 16 years.

The announcement comes just a week after a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report accusing 300 priests of sexually abusing over 1,000 victims across the state.

Spokesman officer Kevin Malatesta said this has nothing to do with the Pennsylvania case but it does speak to the nature of what is going on around the country.

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IRELAND
The Times

August 27, 2018

By Katie O’Neill

Thousands of people who gathered in Dublin city centre yesterday to honour victims of clerical abuse were told they represented “the new Ireland”.

The Stand 4 Truth demonstration, organised by Colm O’Gorman, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland and a clerical sex abuse survivor, began at 3pm, the same time as the papal Mass in Phoenix Park.

The singers Hozier, Mary Black and Brian Kennedy, and Marian Keyes, the novelist, were among those to take to the stage outside the Garden of Remembrance.

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IRELAND
UPI

August 25, 2018

By Sommer Brokaw

During a visit to Ireland, Pope Francis spoke Saturday about the Catholic Church’s handlings of clerical abuse — calling it a “grave scandal.”

“I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the Church charged with responsibility for their protection and education,” the Pope told political leaders and dignitaries at Dublin Castle.

“The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community,” he said.

“I myself share those sentiments.”

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IRELAND
Irish Central

August 26, 2018

By George Dillon

Yes, the church did wrong on child abuse and Magdalene Laundries, but there were plenty of Irish in leadership roles who turned a blind eye.

The Irish, from their ruling class right down to the general populace, have created a convenient narrative about these abuses.

In this account, no Irish person bears any guilt or responsibility, save the clerics who carried out the abuse.

That, of course, is self-serving garbage. The mistreatment and abuse could not have occurred without the aid of a whole network of lay people and government officials and politicians. These institutions where the young were mistreated were subject to regular inspection by government officials.

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WATERLOO (IA)
The Courier

August 26, 2018

By Jerry Kopacek

The Catholic parishes in Waterloo will host a forum on the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on Thursday.

The forum is an extension of the parishes’ Summer Forum Series and will be held from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Church Hall at St. Edward Parish.

Dave Cushing, director of adult faith formation for the parishes, said the forum will offer local Catholics an opportunity to express their feelings and concerns about recent reports of extensive sexual abuse in the Catholic dioceses of Pennsylvannia and allegations of abuse against a high ranking retired American cardinal.

A panel of pastoral ministers will be present to respond to participants’ concerns. The panel includes the Rev. Jerry Kopacek, Mary Pedersen, Dr. Len Froyen and Joan Hoffmann.

Although most of the incidents reported in a grand jury report took place prior to 2000, Cushing said many Catholics have grave concerns about why the abuse occurred and why it was not revealed before now.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
The Philadelphia Inquirer

August 26, 2018

By Maria Panaritis

Victims and investigators brought the truth out; Catholic leaders only protected the abusers.

Thank God for the criminal investigators and prosecutors.

Thank God for the grand jury subpoenas. For they extracted — like rotting teeth — clergy-abuse personnel files in unreachable corners of six Pennsylvania Roman Catholic dioceses serving 1.7 million people.

Thank God for the courage of the victims. For without them, Attorney General Josh Shapiro and his team would have had no real cause to root out and unveil decades of depravity and systemic abuse by clergy, overseen by complicit superiors.

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BUFFALO (NY)
WBFO

August 27, 2018

By Michael Mroziak

In light of recent news involving alleged sexual abuse and how Catholic Church leaders have managed it over many years, calls are being renewed to pass the Child Victims Act in New York State. A State Senator who strongly supports the bill says the votes are there but the current leadership in that house won’t bring it up for a vote.

The Child Victims Act would ease current statutes of limitation that currently give victims until the age of 23 to sue for justice in childhood incidents. It has stalled in the State Senate for a dozen years.

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DUBLIN/KNOCK (IRELAND)
Reuters

August 26, 2018

By Graham Fahy and Conor Humphries

Pope Francis on Sunday begged forgiveness for the multitude of abuses suffered by victims in Ireland at the hand of the church over decades as he concluded a tour of the once deeply Catholic country watched by parishioners and protesters.

After meeting privately with abuse victims on Saturday on the first papal visit to Ireland in almost four decades, Francis apologized to mothers estranged from their children in church-run homes, children abused by priests and those exploited in religious schools, calling it a “state of shame.”

“To survivors of abuse of power, conscience and sexual abuse, recognizing what they have told me, I would like to put these crimes before the mercy of the Lord and ask forgiveness for them,” Francis told a mass attended by more than 100,000 people at Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

“We apologize for some members of the hierarchy who did not take care of these painful situations and kept silent.”

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
The Washington Post

August 26, 2018

By Chico Harlan, Stefano Pitrelli, Michelle Boorstein

A former Vatican ambassador to the United States has alleged in an 11-page letter that Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis — among other top Catholic Church officials — had been aware of sexual misconduct allegations against former D.C. archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCar­rick years before he resigned this summer.

The letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was recalled from his D.C. post in 2016 amid allegations that he’d become embroiled in the conservative American fight against same-sex marriage, was first reported by the National Catholic Register and LifeSite News, two conservative Catholic sites.

The accusations sent a shock wave across the reeling Roman Catholic Church, but the letter offered no proof of its claims, and Viganò on Sunday told The Washington Post that he wouldn’t comment further, beyond confirming that he was the letter’s author.

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KNOCK (IRELAND)
New York Post

August 26, 2018

By Ruth Brown

Pope Francis on Sunday begged forgiveness for child sexual abuse in the Catholic church — a day after a former Vatican official accused him of covering up allegations against an American cardinal.

Speaking at the Marian shrine in the Irish town of Knock, the pontiff said the “open wound” of the scandal required the church to be “firm and decisive in the pursuit of truth and justice.”

“I beg forgiveness for these sins and for the scandal and betrayal felt by so many others in God’s family,” he told the tens of thousands gathered at the shrine, according to the Guardian.

“None of us can fail to be moved by the stories of young people who suffered abuse, were robbed of their innocence and left scarred.”

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BUFFALO (NY)
The Buffalo News

August 25, 2018

By Jay Tokasz

Parishioners of St. Mary’s Church in Swormville responded to Bishop Richard J. Malone’s statement of apology Saturday with a mix of anger, disappointment and frustration over his handling of a sexual abuse scandal that has been unfolding in media reports for six months and now includes Malone’s cover-up of a priest who sexually harassed grown men.

“Words only,” said church member Jay Christopher of Clarence. “What that letter said was meaningless to me. I don’t need an apology. I need actions. Do something about it.”

Malone did not show up at the parish. He sent Auxiliary Bishop Edward M. Grosz to read a 10-paragraph statement prior to a 4 p.m. Mass at St. Mary’s. It came the day after a businessman and deacon of the church, a Catholic radio station and three public officials, including U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, called for Malone to resign.

“Let me be clear that the handling of claims from some of our parishioners – which you may have read about in news reports – has fallen short of the standard to which we hold ourselves and each other. We can and will do better,” Grosz said in reading the bishop’s letter.

The statement made no mention of the calls for Malone to step down.

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MALTA
The Times of Malta

August 26, 2018

By Andrew Azzopardi

There is no greater issue in the Catholic Church today than that of child abuse. The Church’s credibility and future depend on how this problem is handled and solved.

The Pennsylvania Grand Jury report detailing claims of sexual abuse of over 1,000 children by 301 priests makes for very painful reading. The accounts are truly horrific and display the pain and suffering experienced by victims. My thoughts are with all the victims, survivors and their loved ones. They have shown great courage by coming forward.

When examining the Church leadership’s response to child abuse cases it’s important to recognise that times have changed and what was acceptable decades ago is considered differently now. This does not excuse the mishandling of cases in the past but it’s important to keep a sense of perspective.

With this perspective in mind, I quote Cardinal Sean O’Malley, President of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, who said: “The clock is ticking for the Church leadership to take action”. This is very true. The Church needs to take firm steps to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and make sure Church leaders take proper responsibility for whatever actions they take or fail to take. This needs to be done today without further delay.

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MALTA
The Times of Malta

August 26, 2018

The Letter to the People of God issued some days ago by Pope Francis in response to the latest developments in the unfolding sex abuse scandal crippling the Catholic Church in America is a remarkable document in many ways. Not surprisingly, it is also controversial. Some have hailed it as a turning point in the public pronouncements by the Church on this issue while others – including some victims – have dismissed it as more of the same.

The language and purpose of the Letter needs to be understood in the context of Pope Francis’s attempted reform of the Church. From the very beginning, Francis has tried to break the culture of ‘clericalism’, meaning attempts to maintain or increase the power of the religious hierarchy and to protect it from any accountability. This struggle has played out in multiple fora, such as in the Church’s finances, and in attempts to bring to justice high-ranking prelates who ignored, protected or perpetrated abuse.

This culture, and the resultant power struggles within the Vatican, was one of the drivers that led to Pope Benedict’s resignation. Pope Francis has regularly publicly admonished his top Curia officials, much to their anger and dismay, about the “cancer” of cliques and plots within the Vatican “that leads to a self-referential attitude” and the hoarding of money and power. Francis once compared the difficulties of reforming the Church to cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush.

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

August 26, 2018

By Peter Smith

Pope Francis began his final Mass in Ireland on Sunday with a litany of repentance for victims of sexual abuse and of abuse “of power and conscience.”

And as the pope was seeking repentance, there was a call for his resignation from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was the papal nuncio to Washington, D.C., before Francis recalled him in 2016.

The archbishop’s letter contended that Francis had allowed former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to retain his influential role despite knowing for years of allegations of sexual misconduct against him. The cardinal was banned from ministry and resigned earlier this year when it became publicly known he sexually abused boys and exploited young adult seminarians.

Francis essentially fired Archbishop Vigano from his diplomatic post. The latter is part of a conservative camp that blames the pope for being part of a liberal group tolerating homosexuality in the church.

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ROME
LifeSiteNews

August 26, 2018

By John-Henry Westen

“The corruption and filth which have entered into the life of the Church must be purified at their roots,” said Vatican Cardinal Raymond Burke in response to a LifeSite request for comment on the release of Archbishop Carlo Viganò’s testimony. The 11-page letter issued by the former papal representative in the United States released to LifeSiteNews and a few other outlets is filled with revelations of scandals within the hierarchy.

“The declarations made by a prelate of the authority of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò must be totally taken to heart by those responsible in the Church,” said Burke. “Each declaration must be subject to investigation, according to the Church’s time-tried procedural law.”

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
The Washington Post

August 26, 2018

A former Vatican ambassador to the United States has alleged in an 11-page letter that Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis — among other top Catholic Church officials — had been aware of sexual misconduct allegations against former Washington, D.C., archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCarrick years before he resigned this summer.

The letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was recalled from his D.C. post in 2016 amid allegations that he’d become embroiled in the conservative American fight against same-sex marriage, was first reported by the National Catholic Register and LifeSite News, two conservative Catholic sites. The letter offered no proof, and Vigano on Sunday told The Washington Post he wouldn’t comment further.

“Silence and prayer are the only things that are befitting,” he said.

The accusations landed as Francis was wrapping up one of the most fraught trips of his papacy, coming face-to-face with the church’s damaged credibility in a country reeling from decades of abuse. In a Mass at Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Francis spoke in Spanish and asked for forgiveness for what he called “abuses of power, conscience, and sexual abuse perpetrated by members with roles of responsibility in the church,” according to a translation of his remarks by Vatican News.

“We ask forgiveness for some members of the church’s hierarchy who did not take charge of these painful situations and kept quiet,” Francis said.

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BUFFALO (NY)
WKBW

August 23, 2018

By Charlie Specht

Editor’s Note: In March 2018, the Diocese of Buffalo released a list of 42 priests accused of abuse. 7 Eyewitness News has learned that two priests who were in ministry at that time were originally considered for inclusion on that list, but were removed before the list was made public.

This is the second part of a two-part investigative series on Bishop Richard J. Malone’s handling of those priests.

You can read part one here

Kyle is a devout, faithful Catholic from Buffalo.

“I have a deep respect for the virtues of piety and obedience,” he said.

Which is why it almost pains him to tell the story of Father Robert Yetter, the longtime pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Swormville.

In 2013, Father Yetter offered Kyle what was supposed to be a helping hand. The young man was 25 and searching for answers in life when Yetter offered to take him to see “Captain Phillips” at the Walden Galleria cinema. The two planned to watch the movie and talk about faith over dinner at Jack Astor’s.

“This was my first opportunity to be able to really ask him some deep questions about the faith so that I could get some answers for what I was searching for,” Kyle said.

But then Kyle said something happened that he never expected.

“We were like lightly laughing about something that was mildly funny and then he just kind of finished the laughter and then just like slaps his hand right here,” Kyle said, pointing to his inner thigh.

His first reaction was to freeze.

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MALTA
manueldelia.com

August 23, 2018

The Bishop of Gozo, Mario Grech, has engaged lawyers to threaten a UK Catholic blogger who commented on allegations already reported by Malta Today in 2015 with criminal and civil action.

The report concerns the case of Gozitan cleric Joseph Bezzina and the allegation Bishop Mario Grech shielded him from any consequence after allegations of abuse of pubescent boys. The blog by Catholic writer Mark Lambert, says the dossier about Joseph Bezzina’s case has “disappeared”.

Mark Lambert’s report also refers to the case of Dominic Camilleri that was convicted by a Malta church tribunal in 2003 but had still not been defrocked by 2015. This was covered in a Malta Today report by Jurgen Balzan from the time.

The blogger says these cases, and a claim by members of the Gozitan clergy that accuse Bishop Mario Grech of “professional misconduct”, raise uncomfortable questions about the Gozitan curia’s commitment to take action on child abuse.

In a letter to Mark Lambert, Mario Grech’s lawyer denies the allegations and threatens “civil and criminal procedures” against the author.

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BUFFALO (NY)
WGRZ

August 24, 2018

Several local lawmakers are calling on Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone to resign for his handling of the on-going priest sex abuse issue in the Diocese.

Several local lawmakers are calling on Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone to resign for his handling of the on-going priest sex abuse issue in the Diocese.

Congressman Brian Higgins tweeted Friday afternoon that Bishop Malone has exhibited poor leadership and knew about children and others put in harm’s way, in calling for the Bishop’s resignation.

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BUFFALO (NY)
WKBW

August 24, 2018

By Charlie Specht and Christine Streich

I-Team investigation revealed current cover-up

Calls are mounting for Buffalo Bishop Richard J. Malone to resign in the wake of a 7 Eyewitness News investigation that revealed a continuing cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.

Three elected officials from South Buffalo — the region’s most heavily Catholic enclave — including a United States Congressman, said Malone must resign immediately because he has lost the trust of much of the region’s nearly 600,000 Catholics.

In addition, they are pushing for a criminal investigation of the Diocese of Buffalo.

Rep. Brian Higgins said, “Overwhelming evidence recently released clearly shows that Bishop Malone has exhibited poor leadership and knew about children and others put in harm’s way. He must resign.”

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

BUFFALO (NY)
The Buffalo News

August 24, 2018

By Dan Herbeck

Public pressure mounted on Bishop Richard J. Malone on Friday as a congressman, two other public officials and a prominent Buffalo businessman who serves as a church deacon called upon him to resign because of his handling of clergy abuse cases.

A Catholic radio station in Buffalo – WLOF-FM, Station of the Cross – posted a statement on its website, saying Malone “covered up for predatory priests” and should resign “immediately” as bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.

Paul L. Snyder III, chief executive officer of the Snyder Corp., told The Buffalo News it is time for thousands of Catholics in Western New York to “rise up” and insist on changes in their church.

Snyder, a longtime church volunteer who serves as a deacon in his parish, said he believes that recent news reports about Malone’s handling of clergy abuse allegations show that he and other top diocesan officials have been involved in a “cover-up” and that it is time for Malone to resign.

In his letter to Malone, Snyder said the bishop’s “conduct to mask the truth from our Community, demonstrates that you have been seriously negligent in your duties as the leader of our Diocese,” Snyder wrote to the bishop. “I … respectfully ask for your resignation from the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.”

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
The Associated Press

August 25, 2018

By Nicole Winfield and Trisha Thomas

Pope Francis faced a lukewarm reception and scattered protests Saturday on his trip to Ireland, with even his vow to rid the church of the “scourge” of sexual abuse and his outrage at those “repugnant crimes” dismissed as a disappointment by some of Ireland’s wounded victims.

But others who met with him in private left heartened that he would respond to their plight, including two of the thousands of children who were forcibly put up for adoption for the shame of having been born to unwed mothers. They said Francis described the corruption and cover-up in the church as “caca” — translated by the Vatican translator for the English speakers as “filth as one sees in the toilet.”

The abuse scandal — which has exploded anew in the U.S. but has convulsed Ireland since the 1990s with revelations of unfathomable violence and humiliation against women and children — took center stage on the first day of Francis’ two-day trip. The visit was originally intended to celebrate Catholic families.

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KNOCK (IRELAND)
The Associated Press

August 27, 2018

11:59 p.m.

Pope Francis says parents of gay children shouldn’t condemn them, ignore their orientation or throw them out of the house. Rather, he says they should pray, talk and try to understand.

Speaking to reporters after closing out a Catholic family rally in Ireland, Francis said: “There have always been gay people and people with homosexual tendencies.”

Francis was asked what he would tell a father of a child who just came out as gay. Francis said he would first suggest prayer.

“Don’t condemn. Dialogue. Understand, give the child space so he or she can express themselves.”

Francis said it might be necessary seek psychiatric help if a child begins to exhibit “worrisome” traits, but that it’s something else if an adult comes out as gay.

He urged parents not to respond with silence. “Ignoring child with this tendency shows a lack of motherhood and fatherhood.”

He said: “This child has the right to a family. And the family not throwing him out.”

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11:45 p.m.

Pope Francis is defending his procedures to hold bishops accountable for covering up priestly sex abuse, saying a tribunal isn’t necessary and that his ad-hoc approach works better.

Francis was asked en route home from Ireland on Sunday about demands from abuse survivors to implement his 2015 decision to create a tribunal section inside the Vatican to judge negligent bishops.

Francis scrapped the idea in 2016 and instead laid out legal procedures to use the existing Vatican bureaucracy to investigate complaints, and then for a college of legal experts to weigh in and advise the pope.

Francis said a full-fledged tribunal “wasn’t viable or convenient because of the different cultures of the bishops who must be judged.” Instead, he said the ad-hoc jury system “works better” and that “several” bishops had already been judged.

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IRELAND
The Wall Street Journal

August 26, 2018

Pope Francis issued a sweeping apology for the sexual abuse charges surrounding the Catholic church at the end of his two-day visit in Ireland.

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