ABUSE TRACKER

GAINESVILLE (FL)
The Gainesville Sun

December 25, 2017

By Cindy Swirko

‘This didn’t have to go on. It could have been stopped much earlier.’

John Neal was about 6 when he and his little sister, Katonya, went to live with Anna Young at the House of Prayer, and he was 12 when he was spirited away.

During those years, Neal saw Katonya tortured until she eventually died. He was beaten and saw others beaten. He said Young forced a mother to take her son to Puerto Rico and abandon him at a church, or else the boy might have died from abuse.

Neal, now 40, saw a lot more and kept quiet, until recently. Now, thanks to him and others who went to law enforcement, Young is a 76-year-old in the Alachua County jail facing murder charges in connection with the death of a toddler about 30 years ago.

“People were brainwashed. Like the Jim Jones thing — if Anna had said ‘Drink the Kool-Aid,’ we would have drunk the Kool-Aid,” Neal said. “She used fear and she used God. Number one, she used God. Everybody was going to burn in hell. The kids had demons in them — that’s why they got treated so bad.”

Young’s arrest and the details now emerging about the House of Prayer raise questions about missed opportunities to end the abuse earlier.

The indictment is for the death of Emon Harper sometime between 1988 and 1989. Also called Moses, he was 2 or 3 years old at the time and was allegedly killed by Young through starvation and torture.

The boy’s remains have not been found. Multiple people who lived at the church compound said his body was burned in a pit. They said he was from Chicago and that his parents did not live at the compound.

Neal lived at the House of Prayer property, first in Waldo and later on Southeast 138th Avenue off Wacahoota Road, while Emon was there. Neal said he cannot talk about Emon because of the legal case against Young.

But Neal talked about how he ended up at House of Prayer, his life there and his recovery.

And he talked about his little sister.

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.

ALBUQUERQUE (NM)
Albuquerque Journal

December 26, 2017

By Olivier Uyttebrouck

Former priest Sabine Griego’s relationship with the Archdiocese of Santa Fe took an abrupt turn for the worse after the late Archbishop Robert Sanchez stepped down in March 1993.

Just three days after Sanchez resigned, an archdiocese official sent Griego a letter telling him to “not exercise your ministry in parishes or in any other ministerial situations.”

The archdiocese’s concerns about Griego were well-founded, according to court records released recently by a judge’s order. In 2004, former Archbishop Michael Sheehan, who succeeded Sanchez in 1993, sent a letter to Vatican officials urging them to remove Griego from the priesthood. The Vatican did so in 2005.

“First, there is the sheer volume and heinous nature of the accusations,” Sheehan wrote.

He included a list of 16 men and a woman who alleged that the La Madera native ordained in 1964 had sexually abused them as children, from 1965 to 1990. The archdiocese had paid nearly $3 million to victims, Sheehan wrote.

Victims “will have to live with the trauma of their experiences for a lifetime, let alone the suffering incurred by their families and loved ones,” he wrote.

Griego did not respond to voice messages left at his home in the Las Vegas, N.M., area.

Copyright © 2017 Albuquerque Journal

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.

NEW ALBANY (OH)
Christian Post

December 22, 2017

By Leonardo Blair

James Csaszar, a suspended Ohio priest who was under investigation for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with an underage boy, jumped from an 82-story hotel in Chicago Wednesday, leaving his colleagues in shock.

The 44-year-old priest who was reportedly well-liked led the Church of the Resurrection in New Albany, Ohio. Officials say he was under investigation for leading a double life prior to his death at the sleek Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel.

“It is with deep shock and sadness that we have learned of the death of Father James Csaszar, pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in New Albany, who took his own life yesterday in Chicago,” Bishop of Columbus, the Most Rev. Frederick F. Campbell, confirmed in a statement Wednesday.

“On Nov. 7, Father Csaszar was placed on an administrative leave by the Diocese of Columbus after diocesan officials were made aware of excessive and questionable text and telephone communications with a minor and potential misuse of church funds while serving as pastor of St. Rose Parish, New Lexington,” he explained.

“Following a diocesan review of the matter, the New Lexington Police were contacted and all information was turned over to them and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation for their review; an investigation was being conducted at the time of Father Csaszar’s death,” he added.

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.

AUSTRALIA
The Weekly Times

December 26, 2017

By Genevieve Barlow

THE act by parishioners of removing ribbons placed by survivors and their supporters to mark the institutionalised sexual and other abuse at churches, orphanages, schools and
elsewhere was misguided and insensitive.

Ribbons had been tied to church gates, fences and signs from Ballarat to Shepparton, Sale, Mortlake, Ararat, Sunbury, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Lancefield in a movement called the Loud Fence campaign, which began in 2015.

Then, at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Ballarat, the week before Christmas and just days after the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuses handed down its report, parishioners took the ribbons down from the cathedral fence.

“It signalled what the Catholic Church has done historically. They just want us to go away. All they wanted was to get them down before Christmas,” said Phil Nagle, who was abused as a boy at St Alipius Primary School in Ballarat.

He reckoned the Ballarat Catholic Diocese should be concentrating on the catastrophic failure of leadership and the Royal Commission’s recommendations instead of removing the ribbons.

Abuse survivors and their supporters reacted predictably and put more ribbons up.

These were taken down. More were put up.

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.

AUSTRALIA
The Australian

December 26, 2017

By Chrissie Foster

A total of 37 per cent of the 15,000 survivors who came forward to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse were sexually assaulted within the Catholic Church. These atrocious crimes against children were not committed by suburban delinquents or bikie gangs — but by your local clergy.

Back in March 1996 when my husband, Anthony Foster, and I began our battle against the Catholic Church hierarchy over the sexual assaults of our own child by a priest, it was at a time when a rumour flourished — that supposed victims were liars after money. This lie was taken as the biblical truth by the faithful.

That, together with a priest’s status — claiming they became another Christ when ordained — meant we were easily dismissed by priest and parishioner alike. But there was no hint of the black-hearted Father Kevin O’Donnell being another Christ with his child rapist career, which spanned 50 years as a priest.

A secret report dated August 2, 1995, by Melbourne Response’s Carelink head Richard Ball on O’Donnell stated “he had some early involvement with young folks but nothing much until shortly after ordination (1942), and from then on until three or four years ago (1991/92)”.

Complaints were acted on by the hierarchy — various archbishops took actions to protect O’Donnell. He was left in place or moved to a new parish to continue sexually assaulting children which he did at every primary school he oversaw.

This criminality is what we were fighting, and the arrogance and heartlessness of these ontologically changed holy men — I could neither believe in them nor stomach them. Who could once the truth was known? Who could support such men who sexually assaulted little children, or those who protected the criminal, even abetting further sexual assaults?

Almost 22 years later we have our royal commission findings and recommendations, which are damning of the Catholic hierarchy and its failure to protect children from rapist priests and brothers.

This month saw victims’ accounts validated by a royal commission that forensically exam­ined witnesses and more than 1.2 million documents. It was a great moment; it was a relief and a stamp of truth on what victims had been saying for decades.

The royal commissioners, because of their five years of listening, researching and analysing, are experts on the issue of child sexual assault. There is no higher authority than them on this crime anywhere in the world.

They know what will make Australian children safe, they know what civil laws need to be enacted to counter this insidious felony against our youngest, most vulnerable, powerless citizens. The commission’s recommendations must be implement­ed by the governments of this country.

Australian taxpayers have stumped up $450 million for these recommendations, which were handed to the Governor-General on December 15 and must not go to waste by sitting on a shelf collecting dust in Parliament House.

Reacting to some of the commission’s recommendations for child protection, members of the church hierarchy promise they will go to the Vatican bleating because their power and authority have been challenged.

There was no going to the Vatican on behalf of the thousands of children raped by their colleagues; only legal arguments, petty church-restricted payouts and the silencing of children.

Now church leaders go to a Vatican knowing that the men there never lifted a finger to help or protect children, or spoke words to eradicate the child rapists among them; a Vatican that, when asked, refused to hand over church files on Australian pedophile clergy to the royal commission. All roads lead to Rome, including the pedophile road.

But in 2013 a high-ranking Catholic clergyman stated under oath to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Non-Government Organisations: “Well, we are good citizens, so if the government sets regulations for the whole of society, we certainly follow them.”

So politicians should feel free to implement the royal commission’s recommendations and enact civil laws that will ensure child safety.

By comparison, the Vatican’s canon law is nothing more than the rules of the local footy club and, as such, must be ignored by civil law. If the hierarchy wishes to reject civil law and obey canon law then we will watch them go to prison.

The damage done by the Catholic hierarchy for decades by not removing pedophile priests from contact with children, and therefore creating more victims — as confirmed by the royal commission’s findings — is a wilful, criminal abuse of power.

Apart from irreparable damage, misery and death to children and adults, the church is responsible for the enormous repair bill from attempts to restore victims’ lives. It is a huge bill that the Australian taxpayer has had to pay. Perhaps governments should look to retrieve costs by placing a levy on the Catholics and others in line with their percentage of wilful and neglectful prolonging of child sexual assault.

All that said, my family has had its first Christmas without Anthony. He passed away suddenly in May. He did not live to see the end of the royal commission during which he attended so many sessions and round tables. It is a tragedy that he did not see the victory that awaited all victims and survivors and their families.

Anthony fought a long, hard battle. His insightful analysis and gentle voice on this issue will be forever missed. He tried so hard to make the future safer for children so that what happened to our two daughters at the hands of a trusted priest, in a system of education and at the mercy of a hierarchy that has been shown not to care on any level about any child, would not happen to others.

Anthony was a great counter to the men who claimed to be holy. They had no moral compass — they are hollow men with hollow words. When they die and go to their God they may then realise they got it all wrong in protecting their body of assets and power instead of protecting the bodies of children.

Chrissie Foster, with Paul Kennedy, is author of Hell on the Way to Heaven.

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.

JAPAN
The Asahi Shimbun

December 26, 2017

Every year-end, TIME magazine selects an influential individual as Person of the Year.

In 2015, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her commitment to accepting refugees. Last year, the magazine picked U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for his “accomplishment” of dividing the nation by winning the presidential election.

But this year, five women made the TIME cover by edging out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and other candidates.

Dubbed “The Silence Breakers,” the group includes an actress who testified against an influential film executive over allegations of sexual misconduct.

But these are not the only people who started going public as victims of sexual abuse. The hashtag “MeToo” went viral on social media, empowering countless other individuals to come forward and start a movement.

I imagine that the originator of this hashtag must have hoped that if every victim declared themselves as one of countless victims, the gravity of the problem would not be lost on the public at large.

The movement has indeed gone global, exposing powerful men–including high-profile politicians and world-class orchestra conductors. And women in Japan, too, have begun to speak out (http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201712220046.html).

One individual takes the first courageous step, inspiring another to follow suit. This is the chain reaction that has been triggered around the world. It reminds me of a baton relay race, or a road being laid with one paving stone after another.

One by-product of this is the “ChurchToo” hashtag. Many cases of clergy sexual abuse of children have been exposed in Europe and the United States.

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.

AUSTRALIA
Central Western Daily

December 26, 2017

By Rachel Chamberlain

BISHOP of Bathurst Michael McKenna plans to study the recommendations put forward from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse before having his say on them.

The 409 recommendations, aimed at keeping children safe, were handed down in a 17-volume final report on December 15.

Bishop McKenna, whose diocese includes Catholic parishes in Orange, Dubbo, Mudgee and Cowra, said it was not the right time to respond to the report’s recommendations.

“The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has now concluded its work and delivered its report to the Australian Government,” he said.

“Very soon, we must begin to study the multi-volume report and consider the recommendations that the commissioners have made. Then will be the time for a full response.

“For now, we should acknowledge gratefully the work of everyone who has participated in the Royal Commission, especially those who have told their stories and those who have listened to them.”

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.

TOLEDO (OH)
The Toledo Blade

December 26, 2017

By Keith C. Burris

Bernard Law, who came to symbolize the inability of the Catholic church to deal honestly with sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, died last week at 86.

No human being should be only a symbol in the eyes of fellow human beings. But there is a reason Cardinal Law became a symbol. He, as the archbishop of Boston, enabled the abusers — serially transferring them instead of urging them into treatment and defrocking them. He also directed a systematic stonewalling by the archdiocese when the Boston Globe began to uncover the extent of clergy abuse in Massachusetts. And though he “apologized,” in a very broad and general way, several times, he never set out to make it right.

By that I mean two things: The cardinal never took personal responsibility. And he never ministered to the victims of abuse.

The cardinal eventually recognized the gravity of the scandal — he resigned, after all. But he did not seem to recognize, or accept, the gravity of the sin. He did not see the size, or the blackness, of the stain upon the church. He did not really comprehend the pain the abuses caused — the wrecked lives. Lives forever marred by guilt, pain, addiction, and in many cases suicide. Souls that never healed.

He never saw the human carnage. Never wanted to. And thus, he never did penance.

I watched a video, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, of Cardinal Law speaking publicly for the first time about the abuse, in 2002, under intense pressure from the Globe’s stories. Was he pained by the abuse? Yes. Was he equally irritated at having to meet the press? Definitely.

When the Globe’s Walter Robinson asked the cardinal if he would now see to it that all documents on known priest-pedophiles be made public, the cardinal dodged but essentially declined. He said he didn’t really understand the problem in 1986 and now he understood it better. Poor policy decisions had been made. He felt no great guilt. He gave the impression of a sovereign who wanted his cold porridge to be taken away.

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.

LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Times

[Note: This important article was not blogged in Tracker when it appeared earlier this month. See also Report by Lord Carlile of Berriew Q.C. into Matters Relating to Ealing Abbey and St Benedict’s School, Ealing, released on November 9, 2011.]

December 7, 2017

By Fiona Hamilton

A “sadistic” monk who was head of a top Catholic school was convicted yesterday of molesting ten pupils in a campaign of abuse during the 1970s and 1980s that was exposed by The Times.

Andrew Soper, known as Father Laurence, is thought to be the most senior Catholic priest to be convicted of sex crimes in the UK. He withdrew £182,000 from his Vatican bank account and fled to Kosovo to avoid prosecution for attacking boys at St Benedict’s School in Ealing, west London.

Soper, the former abbot of Ealing Abbey, which adjoins the school, spent five years abroad before he was extradited. A jury at the Old Bailey deliberated for 14 hours before finding him guilty of 19 charges of indecent assault and buggery between 1975 and 1982.

Soper, 74, who is likely to die in jail, is the fourth staff member of St Benedict’s to be convicted of indecent assault and the school apologised unreservedly last night for the “serious wrongs of the past”.

The 60-year history of abuse at the school was exposed by The Times and a report by an independent barrister concluded in 2011 that there had been a “lengthy and cumulative failure” by monks to protect children in their care.

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.

LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Guardian

December 21, 2017

By Harriet Sherwood

Andrew Soper had been convicted of 19 charges of rape and other sexual offences against 10 boys at St Benedict’s school

A Roman Catholic priest who sexually abused boys at an abbey school in the 1970s and 80s has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Andrew Soper, 74, formerly known as Father Laurence Soper, was a fugitive for five years after jumping bail. An international warrant was issued for his arrest.

He was convicted earlier this month of 19 charges of rape and other sexual offences against 10 boys at St Benedict’s school in Ealing, west London. He is the fourth man at the school to have been convicted of abuse.

Following the guilty verdicts, the school apologised unreservedly for the “serious wrongs of the past”.

Sentencing Soper at the Old Bailey on Thursday, Judge Anthony Bate said: “You are an intelligent man with gifts of scholarship and erudition. However, as you acknowledged during cross examination, showing a degree of insight, that is not how you will be remembered.

“Your good qualities are utterly overshadowed by the proven catalogue of vile abuse for which you are now at last held to account. Your disgrace is complete.”

Soper’s disappearance to Kosovo had been “meticulously planned”, the judge said, adding: “You intended to live out your days there in obscurity.”

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.

LONDON (ENGLAND)
Metropolitan Police

December 21, 2017

A Roman Catholic priest has been jailed for 18 years after he was found guilty of 19 counts of non-recent abuse against boys at a school in Ealing.

Andrew Soper, known as Father Laurence, 74 (17.09.43) of no fixed abode, was sentenced on Thursday, 21 December, after a ten-week-long trial at the Old Bailey.

He was also handed down a Sexual Harm Prevention Order with no time limit.

Soper was found guilty on Wednesday, 6 December of 19 counts of indecent assault against ten boys who attended St Benedict’s Middle School in Ealing between 1975 and 1982.

In his summing up, the judge told Soper “Your disgrace is complete.”

The court heard Soper was a former abbot at Ealing Abbey and a headmaster of the middle school between 1972 and 1991. He taught boys aged between 11 and 14 and, as headmaster, he was in charge of discipline.

The first allegation was made in 2004 by a former pupil who said he was sexually assaulted by Soper in his office whilst he was being punished.

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.

HONOLULU (HI)
KHNL / KGMB / Hawaii News Now

December 20, 2017

By Lynn Kawano

[See also the recent KHNL-KGMB series Hidden Betrayal:

• Part I: Kamehameha Schools sex abuse victims: ‘Monster’ stole our childhoods (11/27/17)

• Part II: ‘Cover-up’ added to pain, Kamehameha School sex abuse victims say (11/28/17)

• Part III: Victims: Kamehameha Schools sex abuse suit is about accountability (11/29/17)

• Former trustees: ‘Wall of secrecy’ at Kamehameha Schools helped sex abuse stay hidden (11/28/17]

Long-hidden documents show how the same man, prominent Honolulu psychiatrist Dr. Robert Browne, played a central role in two of Hawaii’s biggest sex abuse scandals.

Browne is accused of sexually assaulting more than 30 former students at Kamehameha Schools over nearly three decades, from 1958 to 1985.

And, the documents show, he was also treating Catholic priests in Hawaii who had been caught abusing children.

Those priests weren’t turned into the police, but were often instead sent for psychiatric treatment — to be “cured” of their pedophilia problem. Not surprisingly, one priest in particular who was getting therapy from Browne went on to molest kids for decades.

‘I could not believe God allowed this to happen’

For the dozens of Hawaii children who were sexually assaulted by men of the cloth, houses of worship became places of hell.

Chesjoy “Anthony” Long knows that only too well.

He was abused by Father George DeCosta, a priest from a church in Keaukaha. It was 1970 and Long was 14 years old.

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.

CHARLOTTE (NC)
Charlotte Observer

December 24, 2017

By Tim Funk

Bishop William Curlin, who presided over the rapidly growing Catholic Diocese of Charlotte from 1994 to 2002, died Saturday at Carolinas Medical Center. He was 90.

The cause of death was cancer, which he had battled for years.

Curlin was known as a pastoral bishop and as a longtime friend and spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa. In 1995, he brought the diminutive nun with a towering reputation to Charlotte for an ecumenical service that drew 19,000 people to the old Charlotte Coliseum. She also installed in Charlotte some of her sisters from the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order she founded in India to serve the poorest of the poor.

* * *

Curlin’s tenure was not without controversy. He was bishop at a time when the Catholic Church in the United States and around the world was rocked by scandal at widespread reports of priests sexually abusing children. The Charlotte diocese never approached the volume of cases of sexual misconduct uncovered in Boston and many other dioceses. But N.C. members of SNAP – Surviviors’ Network of those Abused by Priests – and others criticized Curlin for not being transparent about priests and other men accused of sexual misconduct who were allowed to work in the diocese without the public knowing about their past.

In one of the most publicized cases, Mark Doherty was hired to teach at Charlotte Catholic High School despite a warning to Curlin from the Boston archdiocese about allegations against him. Doherty lost his job after the case came to light.

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.

ENGELWOOD (CO)
Patheos

December 24, 2017

By David McAfee

A Catholic priest who was being investigated for “questionable texts” and phone calls with a 16-year-old boy killed himself by jumping from a building on Wednesday, signaling there may be much more to this case.

Rev. James Csaszar, who was also being investigated for misusing money from the Church of the Resurrection in the Columbus (Ohio) suburb of New Albany, jumped to his death from a room at the Aqua Hotel in Chicago. Previously, the Diocese had suspended him for “excessive and questionable” texts and phone calls with the young boy. Church officials also contacted the local police.

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.

WASHINGTON (DC)
Christian Times

December 25, 2017

By Jardine Malado

Attorneys for victims of sex abuse have filed a lawsuit against a bankrupt Catholic diocese in Montana last week to ensure that more than $70 million in assets will be available to their clients.

A committee representing eight sex abuse victims filed a complaint against the diocese of Great Falls-Billings in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Dec. 18 in an attempt to reach a negotiated settlement in the dispute over the matter of $70 million worth of diocesan assets.

According to Fox News, the diocese filed for bankruptcy protection in March as part of sex abuse settlements in a lawsuit involving over 400 victims.

The officials said at the time that the diocese and its insurers would set up a fund for the victims and additional money will be provided for those who have yet to come forward.

Church officials have contended that the disputed assets should not be made available because they are held in trust for diocese’s parishes and thus not part of the bankruptcy estate.

Attorneys for the victims argued that the parishes are not separate legal entities from the diocese and therefore have no exclusive claims to the trust.

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.

LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Guardian

December 24, 2017

By Brad Chilcott

For both people of faith and no faith the Christmas story is an opportunity to reflect: Will we keep power and privilege to ourselves or offer the gift of solidarity?

The newborn lying in a feeding trough and soon to be threatened with death by an occupying power, commemorated in sanitised nativity scenes in shopping malls and front yard light displays is the child born in Palestine for whom fear of violence is the daily norm.

He is the Rohingya Muslim watching his village burn.

The child of Mary is the survivor exposing their abuse before a royal commission.

The son of God is the woman unable to escape domestic violence, the bullied transgender student contemplating suicide and the Aboriginal child in a spit hood.

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.

VATICAN CITY
Vatican News

December 25, 2017

By Pope Francis

[See also Pope Francis’ Christmas Eve homily.]

On Christmas Day Pope Francis prays for world peace and gives his “Urbi et Orbi” blessing
Pope Francis has appealed for peace and for a world in which children across the globe may be able to hope for a future of justice, security and joy.

The Pope’s words came on Christmas Day as he addressed the city and the world during his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” message from the Central Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Please find below the full text of the Pope’s message:

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Happy Christmas!

In Bethlehem, Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. He was born, not by the will of man, but by the gift of the love of God our Father, who “so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).

This event is renewed today in the Church, a pilgrim in time. For the faith of the Christian people relives in the Christmas liturgy the mystery of the God who comes, who assumes our mortal human flesh, and who becomes lowly and poor in order to save us. And this moves us deeply, for great is the tenderness of our Father.

* * *

Today, as the winds of war are blowing in our world and an outdated model of development continues to produce human, societal and environmental decline, Christmas invites us to focus on the sign of the Child and to recognize him in the faces of little children, especially those for whom, like Jesus, “there is no place in the inn” (Lk 2:7).

We see Jesus in the children of the Middle East who continue to suffer because of growing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. On this festive day, let us ask the Lord for peace for Jerusalem and for all the Holy Land. Let us pray that the will to resume dialogue may prevail between the parties and that a negotiated solution can finally be reached, one that would allow the peaceful coexistence of two States within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders. May the Lord also sustain the efforts of all those in the international community inspired by good will to help that afflicted land to find, despite grave obstacles the harmony, justice and security that it has long awaited.

We see Jesus in the faces of Syrian children still marked by the war that, in these years, has caused such bloodshed in that country. May beloved Syria at last recover respect for the dignity of every person through a shared commitment to rebuild the fabric of society, without regard for ethnic and religious membership. We see Jesus in the children of Iraq, wounded and torn by the conflicts that country has experienced in the last fifteen years, and in the children of Yemen, where there is an ongoing conflict that has been largely forgotten, with serious humanitarian implications for its people, who suffer from hunger and the spread of diseases.

We see Jesus in the children of Africa, especially those who are suffering in South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Nigeria.

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.

ROME (ITALY)
L’Espresso

December 21, 2017

By Emiliano Fittipaldi

Francesco’s friend and adviser, Oscar Maradiaga, preached pauperism but received half a million a year from a University of Honduras. Bergoglio also wanted an investigation on millionaire investments and on the inappropriate behavior of Bishop Pineda, a loyalist of the cardinal

When he finished reading the inquiry drafted by the apostolic envoy he himself had sent to Honduras last May, Pope Francis’ hands went up to his skullcap. He had just found out that his friend and main councilor — powerful cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, a staunch supporter of a poor and pauperist Church and coordinator of the Council of Cardinals after he appointed him in 2013 — had received over the years from the Catholic University of Tegucigalpa around 41,600 US dollars a month, with an additional 64,200 dollars bonus in December. Bergoglio had yet to learn that several witnesses, both ecclesiastical and secular, were accusing Maradiaga of investments in some companies in London topping a 1,2 million dollars that later vanished into thin air, or that the Court of Auditors of the small Central American nation was investigating a flow of large sums of money from the Honduran government to the Foundation for Education and Social Communication and to the Suyapa Foundation, both foundations of the local Church and therefore depending on Maradiaga himself.

“The Pope is sad and saddened, but also very determined at discovering the truth,” people of his entourage at Santa Marta, his residency, explain. He wants to know every item of the investigation Argentine bishop Jorge Pedro Casaretto conducted in Honduras, on top, of course, of the final destination of the jaw-dropping sums of money obtained by the cardinal. Just in one year, 2015, as shown in an internal university report L’Espresso obtained, the cardinal received almost 600,000 dollars, a sum that according to some sources he collected for a decade in his capacity as “Grand Chancellor” of the university. However, some other rather unpleasant items account for the rest of the sums he received according to Bishop Casaretto’s report. The pope’s trustworthy person put down on paper the serious accusations many witnesses brought forward (the audits totaled around fifty witnesses and included administrative staff of the diocese and of the university, priests, seminarians and the cardinal’s driver and secretary) also against the Auxiliary Bishop of Tegucigalpa, Juan José Pineda, among the most loyal in Maradiaga’s inner circle and de facto his deputy in Central America.

After studying the dossier he received directly six months ago, Pope Francis assigned to himself all final decisions to be made.

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.

FRONT ROYAL (VA)
LifeSiteNews

December 22, 2017

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

The cardinal who has led Pope Francis’ efforts to “reform” the Church is now accused of having received over 40,000 USD monthly for years from a Catholic university under his control, and of funneling millions of dollars to foreign corporations that have mysteriously lost part of the deposits.

The allegations appeared in a report that was delivered to Pope Francis in May of this year which was revealed Thursday by the Italian newspaper L’Espresso.

Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has wielded immense influence under Francis’ papacy because the pope chose him to lead the “C9” Council of Cardinal Advisers charged with reforming the Roman Curia. He was one of the key members of the liberal faction at the Synod on the Family that has resulted in a crisis over the Church’s teaching on marriage.

According to L’Espresso, Maradiaga received, over the space of years, personal payments averaging $41,600 per month from the Catholic University of Tegucigalpa, of which he is Chancellor. In addition to the monthly pay, he is reportedly given a Christmas bonus of $64,200. In one year alone, 2015, he is accused of having taken almost $600,000 from the university, which would be equivalent of ten years pay at a normal rate of salary as a university chancellor.

Moreover, the report delivered to the pope includes an accusation that Rodriguez Maradiaga has made troubling payments to an intimate male friend of the auxiliary bishop of his archdiocese, Juan José Pineda, who lives in an apartment close to Maradiaga and who has shared his domicile with Pineda.

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NEW YORK (NY)
Huffington Post

December 22, 2017

By Celia Wexler

I didn’t expect this punch in the gut from Pope Francis. But I guess I was naïve. Of course, the pope would say a formal and apparently heartfelt goodbye to Cardinal Bernard Law, the prelate whose reckless disregard for the welfare of children in the Boston archdiocese led to a tragedy that still harms and hurts.

Law died this week at 86. He had resigned in disgrace from his powerful position in Boston, and found a cushy berth in Rome. Still able to savor the pomp and perks of that rarest of rare male clubs, the college of cardinals.

Law never really apologized enough for the damage he wrought. But for posterity’s sake, let’s review : After the Boston abuse scandal became front-page news in Boston in 2002, the Globe tallied its initial toll: 500-plus claims of abuse by victims, the prospect of lawsuits seeking an estimated $100 million in damages, and an archdiocese – that had already paid out $40 million – teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

But those numbers only scratch the surface. We’ll never know how the acid of Law’s betrayal of his flock corroded faith and ruined lives.

And yet, in the face of this untold harm, Pope Francis permitted Law to be buried with all the pomp and circumstance the church affords its powerful prelates, and with a papal blessing:

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WASHINGTON (DC)
NPR

December 23, 2017

By Tovia Smith

When the cardinal’s residence was built in the 1920s atop a hill in the leafy, most western outpost of Boston, it was modeled after an Italian palazzo. The grand mansion, replete with ornate mahogany and marble appointments, stood as a testament to the Boston Archdiocese’s stature in the very Catholic city of Boston. Political candidates — local and national — would come calling, and even the pope came to visit.

When Cardinal Bernard Law took up residence in the Renaissance Revival mansion, Boston’s Roman Catholic movers and shakers would flock to the backyard for his garden party fundraisers.

Today, a steady stream of students hauling backpacks and members of the public traipse across that same property. The mansion, now owned by Boston College, has been gutted and converted to an art museum and meeting rooms — a remarkable fall from grace that parallels that of the Boston Archdiocese itself.

A total of 65 acres of prime church property — possibly its most valuable in Massachusetts — was sold in a fire sale after the clergy sexual abuse crisis, when the church was struggling to pay some $85 million in settlements to victims. In the years since, the cost of settling claims surpassed $200 million, and the church’s declining fortunes have been more than just financial.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service via National Catholic Reporter

December 21, 2017

Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned as archbishop of Boston when it became clear he had knowingly transferred priests accused of sexually abusing children, made mistakes as all people do, Cardinal Angelo Sodano said at his funeral.

Sodano, as dean of the College of Cardinals, celebrated the funeral Mass for Cardinal Law Dec. 21 at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter’s Basilica.

In his homily, Sodano said, “unfortunately, each one of us can sometimes lack in fidelity to our mission. That is why, at the beginning of every Mass, we say the ‘Confiteor,'” the prayer that begins, “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned.”

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters via Union-Leader

December 21. 2017

By Philip Pullella

The funeral of Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned as Archbishop of Boston 15 years ago after covering up years of sexual abuse of children by priests, was held in the Vatican on Thursday without a mention of what led to his downfall.

About 200 people attended the funeral Mass in a chapel in the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica and presided over by a senior cardinal, Angelo Sodano. The wooden coffin lay on the floor with an open book of the gospels resting on it.

Pope Francis entered the chapel for a few minutes after the Mass to bless the coffin and conduct a brief service known as the Final Commendation and Farewell – which he does for all cardinals who die in Rome.

“He dedicated his whole life to the Church,” Sodano said in his homily in praise of Law, who died on Wednesday.

Sodano listed the stages of Law’s clerical life and said the late Pope John Paul had “called him to Rome” to be archpriest of a Rome basilica. But Sodano made no mention of the reason why he left Boston.

“Unfortunately, each of us can sometimes be lacking in our mission,” Sodano said.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
Kansas City Star

December 21, 2017

By Melinda Henneberger

Twelve years ago, after the death of Pope John Paul II, I watched a man who will go down in history as a fierce protector of child rapists process into St. Peter’s to celebrate one of the nine masses that traditionally follow the death of a pontiff.

On that day, Cardinal Bernard Law, who died this week at 86, had already resigned in disgrace from his post as archbishop of Boston. He’d lost his stroke with the White House, too, after the Boston Globe revealed the full extent of the clerical sex abuse scandal that Law’s cover-up had both delayed and compounded.

In exile in Rome, Law was a pariah but also a man who retained some vestiges of power, especially on the key committee that helps choose bishops; if Catholics didn’t invent having it both ways, we certainly have long experience in it.

On the day in 2005 that Law eulogized his own protector, John Paul, I wrote that he should have stayed home instead of showing up as he did, surrounded by a security detail that treated the two American survivors of clerical abuse who’d come to peacefully protest outside the basilica as if they were the criminals.

Initially, I felt that Law’s Thursday funeral mass should not have been celebrated in St. Peter’s, either, by yet another predator coddler, Cardinal Angelo Sodano. And what did Pope Francis think he was doing, offering the closing prayer?

But perhaps I was wrong to write of Law’s memorial mass for John Paul that “the whole spectacle of the disgraced cardinal slinging incense was almost too baroque to bear.”

Because painful as it was to watch, the sight of the bloated, visibly broken Law made remembering the worst of John Paul’s legacy inescapable.

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BRISBANE (QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA)
Courier-Mail

December 23, 2017

By Greg Stolz

A class action against the Catholic Church over alleged shocking private school abuse could be looming, with dozens of former students from Nudgee Junior College coming forward.

The ex-students have contacted lawyers after The Sunday Mail revealed that two Queensland brothers have launched a multimillion-dollar claim for damages, for physical and sexual abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of teachers at the Brisbane school in the 1970s.

Former Nudgee Junior College captain John O’Leary and his brother Bill are seeking about $7 million in damages from the Christian Brothers for their alleged mistreatment while they were boarders.

The Supreme Court claim, lodged last week, alleges then-Nudgee Junior headmaster Brother John Regan subjected the O’Learys to ‘‘terrifying’’ physical and verbal attacks.

The siblings allege Regan beat them daily – sometimes knocking them unconscious – kicked them, struck them hundreds of times and lifted them off the ground by their ears.

John O’Leary, who was junior college captain and is now an unemployed labourer living on a derelict boat in north Queensland, alleges he lived “in a constant state of terror and anxiety” as an 11-year-old and 12-year-old at the school.

The brothers allege the abuse left them with profound and long-lasting psychological damage.

Lawyers said the case could be a landmark action, challenging the State Government’s failure to remove time limits for physical abuse claims, as other states have done.

Nudgee Junior College students Bill (left) and John O’Leary.
The O’Learys have hired high-profile Gold Coast law firm Nyst Legal.

Their lawyer, Brendan Nyst, said dozens of ex-Nudgee Junior students and some from other schools had come forward since The Sunday Mail broke the story last week.

“Our office has been inundated with calls from former students,” he said.

“We’re currently assessing the information.”

The State Government had last year removed the three-year time limit on sexual abuse claims, in line with the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Sexual Abuse.

Mr Nyst said because Queensland did not to remove the time limits for physical abuse, as other states did, the O’Learys would have to convince the Supreme Court to allow their claim to proceed.

The O’Learys said they hoped the Catholic Church would not exploit abuse-claim time-limit laws.

“After all these years I think they’ll finally do the right thing,” John O’Leary said.

“Back then we were just kids. We had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no one to turn to.”

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Irish Times

December 23, 2017

By Eamon Maher

[Note: See also The Catholic priesthood blighted my youth and the youth of people like me, by John Boyne, Irish Times, November 7, 2014.]

In a country renowned for its Catholicism, it is unusual the ‘Catholic novel’ never took root

In Underground Cathedrals (2010), the Glenstal monk and author Mark Patrick Hederman described artists as the “secret agents” of the Holy Spirit: “Art has the imagination to sketch out the possible. When this happens something entirely new comes into the world. Often it is not recognised for what it is and is rejected or vilified by those who are comfortable with what is already there and afraid of whatever might unsettle the status quo”. Reflecting on this position, one wonders to what extent Irish novelists have fulfilled the important role outlined by Hederman. In the past, they definitely did offer an alternative view of existence by challenging aspects of church and state dominance, and suffering severe consequences as a result. In 1965, for example, John McGahern’s second novel The Dark unveiled a hidden Ireland where guilt, domestic violence, hypocrisy and sexual abuse seemed to thrive in a supposedly “Catholic” country. The novel attracted the attention of the Censorship Board, was banned and its writer lost his job as a primary school teacher in Clontarf. McGahern displayed no real bitterness as a result of this unfortunate interlude, realising that he lived in a “theocracy in all but name” and describing the Ireland of his youth and early adulthood in the following terms:

“Hell and heaven and purgatory were places real and certain we would go to after death, dependent on the Judgment. Churches in my part of Ireland were so crowded that children and old people who were fasting to receive Communion would regularly pass out in the bad air and have to be carried outside. Not to attend Sunday Mass was to court social ostracism, to be seen as mad or consorting with the devil, or, at best, to be seriously eccentric.”

In more recent times, the wheel has come full circle and it is now far more commonplace to criticise the actions of the Catholic Church than it is to defer to the institution. This results in many novelists taking a (possibly well-earned) swipe at what they consider the inadequacies of the system. Hence John Boyne, in A History of Loneliness (2014), follows the career of a Dublin priest, Fr Odran Yates, who fails to see, or chooses not to see, the paedophile tendencies of his contemporary in the seminary, Fr Tom Cardle, with calamitous consequences for his young nephew Aidan, who ends up being abused by Cardle. While this novel deals mainly with the negative impact Catholicism can have on clerical attitudes to sexuality in particular, it occasionally gives free rein to some of its author’s personal opinions. Take for example Cardle’s comments to Yates on his release from prison after serving a sentence for child abuse:

“You knew it, you kept it secret and this whole conspiracy that everyone talks about, the one that goes to the top of the Church, well it goes to the bottom of it too, to the nobodies like you, to the fella that never even had a parish of his own and hides away from the world, afraid to be spotted. You can blame me all you like, Odhran, and you’d be right to, because I’ve done some terrible things in my life, but do you ever think of taking a look at yourself? At your own actions? At the Grand Silence that you’ve maintained from the very first day?”

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TOWNSVILLE CITY (QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA)
Townsville Bulletin

December 23, 2017

By Shari Tagliabue

It must be difficult to be Catholic at this holy time of year; anyone who follows a faith from baptism to the grave should have been shaken to the core after the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released its findings this week.

After four years of investigation, the pomp and ceremony, immense power, vast wealth, traditions and rituals of the once-revered Catholic Church counted for little as thousands of testimonials documenting sexual and physical abuse weren’t able to be silenced by denials, shifting of blame, secretive payouts, gag orders or clandestine transfers.

The past month marked 2017 as the year victims found the courage to speak out, safety in numbers has allowed working-age women affected by sexual predators in the entertainment industry to break their shame-based silence, yet the victims of the most gross abuse of power imaginable weren’t in an industry of their own choosing and weren’t young adults, but children attending school, care facilities or church, with young boys just over 63 per cent of the victims.

It has been well documented that those affected have carried the trauma with them throughout their lives, with many, including a once vibrant, intelligent and carefree kid I knew well, unable to give evidence.

He, like many others, was abused at boarding school.

Unable to form relationships as an adult he masked his pain with drugs and alcohol before taking his own life.

What an irony that while suicide is considered a mortal sin by the Vatican, the same institution decreed in 2010 that ordaining women as priests was a sin on par with paedophilia.

There is no punishment harsh enough for the depraved predators who targeted children under the guise of caring for them. One of the 409 recommendations from the royal commission was that priests who heard confession from a paedophile should report the information to the police.

The church’s unwillingness to allow this shows a complete lack of understanding of their role – protector of innocents, not criminals, while another recommendation that priests should not be celibate is curious – depravity causes paedophilia, not celibacy.

For those of us that live without religious influence, it is unfathomable that an organisation can enjoy privacy, privilege, power and tax-free status under a belief system that absolves devotees of unlawful acts merely by secret confession and a few Hail Marys.

Police spend countless hours tracking paedophile networks online, surely protected confessionals have allowed like-minded men to collaborate and these vile networks to flourish?

The figures speak for themselves. Of the abuse documented, 68.3 per cent came from Catholic Church organisations, 14.7 per cent Anglican, 7.3 per cent from the Salvation Army and 4.2 per cent Protestant.

If the Catholic Church is now forced to depart from long-held traditions, so be it.

Abuse of minors has flourished for decades, but we cannot tolerate this protectionism any longer, or the long-held belief that churches are pillars of society.

What kind of society supports child abuse and paedophilia?

Equality, and protection of the vulnerable should be the core of any organisation, religious or otherwise.

Anything less is criminal.

A(wo)men.

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LONDON (ENGLAND)
Catholic Herald

December 23, 2017

By Michael Davis

[Note: See also Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s 2011 letter about the Boston abuse statistics, his 2004 summary of the data, and the Boston Globe article on the priests left off O’Malley’s 2011 list.

After the abuse crisis, priests are considered guilty until proven innocent

In the early 2000s, when claims clerical sex abuse in Boston first surfaced, there were roughly 1,350 priests ministering to the archdiocese. At least 270 were accused of abusing children. That’s upwards of 20 per cent of all clergy, both secular and religious.

Now, that does not mean one in five priests is a predator. But, then again, who knows? Cardinal Seán O’Malley, his successor as Archbishop of Boston, has called this “the greatest tragedy to befall children” in the history of Massachusetts. And he’s right. But it was the worst tragedy to befall the state’s priests, too. Every single one of them automatically comes under suspicion of being a paedophile.

Ireland has a better sense of how difficult this saga has been for those upstanding clergymen who find themselves lumped together with the heinous minority of predators. The 2014 film Calvary stars Brendan Gleeson as a priest who is threatened by a victim of clerical sex abuse – and only because he’s innocent. “There’s no point in killing a bad priest,” the man tells him. “But killing a good one! That’d be a shock.”

In another scene, Gleeson’s character passes a little girl on the side of the road. They walk together, talking about surfing and holidays, until her father pulls up alongside them and orders her into the car. “What the hell were you saying to her?” he asks Gleeson’s character. “I wasn’t saying anything,” the priest replies, stunned. “You looked deep in ——ing conversation to me,” the father snaps, and they peel out down the road. Gleeson is left standing there dumbly, humiliated.

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EUGENE (OR)
Associated Press via Register-Guard

December 24, 2017

By Gillian Flaccus

When stories of sexual misconduct by powerful men ­began to fill the news this fall, Manny Vega immediately flashed back to his childhood. He saw strong similarities between the recent allegations against producers and politicians and his own abuse as a child by his parish priest.

“The parallels are in the power dynamics,” said Vega, a former police officer and decorated Marine who lives in Oxnard, Calif. “Whether you’re the leader of a church or the leader of a film studio, you’re ­going to be someone people look up to and someone people go to for guidance. It puts the victim at a horrible ­disadvantage.”

While there are key differences, the sexual harassment detailed in today’s headlines shares the same well-worn themes that made it so hard for Vega and hundreds of other clergy abuse victims to come forward more than a decade ago: fear of retribution and disbelief, impossible power dynamics and confidential settlements that bury complaints.

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GLOUCESTER (MA)
Gloucester Times

December 21, 2017

By Paul Leighton

Salem — In the summer of 2002, Bernie McDaid and his mother met with Cardinal Bernard Law in the Archdiocese of Boston’s mansion in Brighton.

It was in the early stages of revelations that hundreds of children, including McDaid, a former altar boy at St. James Church in Salem, had been sexually abused by priests in the Boston area.

Law agreed to meet with McDaid and his mother to personally apologize. At the time, the stories of abuse had mostly come out of Boston, and McDaid asked Law why the problem was so prevalent in this area.

“He bowed his head like a puppy dog, looked at the floor and looked back up to me and said, ‘I wish it was just Boston,'” McDaid recalled. “That was a very telling moment in my life. One of the heads of the Catholic church is basically telling you they’re raping and molesting children all over the world.”

McDaid recalled that story on Thursday morning as Law’s funeral was being held at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Law’s death, at age 86 on Wednesday, has sparked emotional reactions among victims of clergy abuse, including anger at Law for his role in covering up the problem and moving abusive priests from parish to parish.

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COLUMBUS (OH) and NEW ALBANY (OH)
Diocese of Columbus and Church of the Resurrection

December 21, 2017

By Bishop Frederick F. Campbell

It is with deep shock and sadness !hat we have learned of the death of Fattier James Csaszar, pastor of the Church of !he Resurrection in New Albany, who took his own life yesterday in Chicago.

On November 7, Father Csaszar was placed on an administrative leave by the Diocese of Columbus after diocesan officials were made aware of excessive and questionable text and telephone communications with a minor and potential misuse of church funds while serving as pastor of St Rose Parish, New Lexington. Following a diocesan review of the matter, the New Lexington Police were contacted and all information was turned over to !hem and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation for !heir review; an investigation was being conducted at the time of Father Csaszar’s death.

We are reminded throughout sacred scripture that God our Father is loving, merciful, compassionate and forgiving. We also know that in his years of priestly ministo; Fr. Csaszar did many good things for the people that he served in his parish assignments. And so we ask !hat eveo;one pray for Father Csaszar, his family, friends, and parishioners during this most difficult time.

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BOSTON (MA) and WASHINGTON (DC)
Catholic News Service via The Pilot

December 22, 2017

By Julie Asher

The death of Cardinal Bernard F. Law opened “a lot of old wounds,” causing “much pain and anger in those who have suffered so much already,” Boston Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley said Dec. 20, the day the Vatican announced Cardinal Law’s death.

The passing of the cardinal in Rome has put the spotlight once again on Boston as the epicenter of a clergy sex abuse scandal that has affected the whole U.S. church. The scandal erupted in 2002 and Cardinal Law resigned a year later amid allegations of mishandling clergy sex abuse cases.

Since 2002, however, the U.S. Catholic Church has taken many steps to bring abusers to justice, to prevent abuse and to heighten awareness of signs and symptoms of abuse.

“Looking at the culture of safety and well-being, the modus operandi has changed,” said Deacon Bernie Nojadera, executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Child and Youth Protection. “No one can just go in to a parish and say they want to work with children, young people. They have to be cleared, background-checked, and it has to be done repeatedly. This ongoing awareness and mindfulness is in place.”

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MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA)
The New Daily

December 23, 2017

[Note: Includes a video of Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher’s Christmas message.]

Advocates for marriage equality have criticised Australia’s leading Catholic for saying 2017 was a ‘horrible year’ because of the same-sex marriage debate and the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.

In a Christmas message released on Friday, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher said Christian concepts of life and love were challenged during the “annus horribilis” of 2017.

Reverend Fisher also acknowledged the “shameful crimes and cover-ups” in the church uncovered by the child abuse royal commission.

“For people of faith you might say it’s been an annus horribilis,” he said.

“Our Christian conceptions of life and love have been challenged in the marriage and euthanasia debates, freedom of religion in Australia put in doubt and shameful crimes and cover ups in our church uncovered by the royal commission.”

Equality Campaign spokesman Clint McGilvray said Reverend Fisher’s decision to refer to both marriage equality and the sexual abuse inquiry in the same context was “completely wrong”.

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DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Irish Times

December 22, 2017

Cardinal Bernard F Law, whose stature as archbishop of Boston and America’s senior Roman Catholic prelate was shattered in a maelstrom of scandal, acrimony and resignation in 2002 after revelations that he had protected abusive priests for years, died Wednesday. He was 86 and lived in Rome.

The Vatican confirmed the death in a news release.

He was a staunch defender of church orthodoxy, a Harvard-educated advocate of social justice for immigrants and the poor, who had campaigned for civil rights in the segregated South. And when he arrived in Boston in 1984 as Pope John Paul II’s new archbishop, he was welcomed like a favourite son.

Over the next 17 years, he became one of the nation’s most influential churchmen, a protégé and confidant of the Pope, a friend of presidents, a force in politics who travelled widely, conferred with foreign leaders and nurtured Catholic relations with Protestants, Jews and others. Admirers thought he might become the first American pope.

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NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times

By Randy Boyagodadec, reviewing Crimes of the Father, by Thomas Keneally

December 22, 2017

“He was a bad priest, he knew it.” Graham Greene’s whiskey priest risks his life to celebrate Mass in anticlerical Mexico. He’s an enemy of the state, a man of God and the great hero of “The Power and the Glory.” Father Frank Docherty, the protagonist of Thomas Keneally’s new novel, “Crimes of the Father,” is a bad priest to some and a good one to others, and he certainly knows it. Sent away from his native Sydney in 1972 by an archbishop who found Docherty’s political activism and theological liberalism unacceptable, he is by the 1990s a psychologist and a professor in Canada. Under those auspices, he researches the sexual abuse of children and minors by the clergy. “He knew the suspicion he attracted from his brethren in the wider priesthood. He was a priest who ponced around academia all week, dealing with unhealthy and distasteful subjects, and helped out at a local parish on the weekend — how graceful of him!”

For his 36th novel, Keneally has chosen a subject that is by now painfully familiar to both Roman Catholics and the wider public. The main action takes place in Sydney in 1996 and concerns the city’s longstanding Irish population. This is a time and place and community in which those abused are just beginning to come forward more boldly, while church leaders and the faithful more broadly are themselves only just starting to reckon more openly with longstanding patterns of institutional failure, corruption and concealment. As he returns to Sydney to lecture on his research, resume complicated friendships and seek permission from the current archbishop to celebrate Mass again in his native archdiocese, Docherty becomes involved in an intertwined series of private and public revelations.

* * *

The novel’s far more distinctive and well-wrought character is Sarah Fagan, the Sydney cabdriver who picks up Docherty at the airport upon his return. Through intensely told flashback sequences, Keneally brings out the confusion and pain teenage Sarah experiences when she comes under the influence of Father Leo Shannon, a rising young star in the archdiocese. Under the guise of hiring her as his office assistant, Shannon makes Fagan feel privileged, even blessed, to spend secret time doing secret things with him. When he coolly rejects her for other girls, “she felt the jolt of this news, and a sickening bewilderment in the pit of her stomach; the extreme sentiments of the rejected.”

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ROME
Catholic Culture

December 19, 2017

By Phil Lawler

As of yesterday, the Pope’s special commission on sexual abuse formally ceased to exist.

The Commission for the Protection of Minors was established by Pope Francis in 2013, for a four-year term that began on December 17 of that year. That term has now officially expired.

Vatican-watchers fully expect that Pope Francis will extend the group’s mandate (or, at this point, renew it)—although nobody knows whether or not he will renew the terms of the current members. And the group wasn’t likely to hold meetings during the Christmas season anyway, so no real harm has been done by allowing the group’s formal authority to lapse.

Nevertheless, at a time when an Australian royal commission is lambasting the Catholic Church for its handling of abuse complaints, it’s noteworthy that the Vatican has not announced the timely renewal of the papal commission.

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LONDON (ENGLAND)
Get West London

December 22, 2017

Andrew Soper was handed the lengthy sentence on Thursday (December 21), after a jury had found him guilty of a string of offences at St Benedict’s School

A Roman Catholic priest has been jailed for 18 years for molesting children at a church school in Ealing .

The former abbot and headmaster Andrew Soper, 74, was handed the sentence on Thursday (December 21) at the Old Bailey after being found guilty following a 10-week trial earlier in the month .

He had been extradited to face 19 charges of indecent assault and buggery against 10 former pupils after fleeing the country with £182,000 from the Vatican bank in a bid to avoid responsibility for the abuse at fee-paying St Benedict’s School, in Eaton Rise .

Some of his victims were at court to hear his sentencing, with their statements read out detailing the effects the abuse had on their lives.

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LONDON (ENGLAND)
BBC

December 21, 2017

A Catholic priest who abused boys at a London school in the 1970s and 1980s has been jailed for 18 years.

Laurence Soper, 74, fled to Kosovo with £182,000 from the Vatican bank in a bid to avoid prosecution for abusing boys at the independent St Benedict’s School, in Ealing, where he taught.

He was extradited to face 19 charges of indecent and serious sexual assault against 10 former pupils.

He is the fourth man to be convicted of molesting children at the school.

Sentencing, Judge Anthony Bate said Soper’s conduct was “the most appalling breach of trust” and he had “subverted the rules of the Benedictine order and teachings of the Catholic Church”.

He said the former abbot and headmaster’s life would now be “overshadowed by the proven catalogue of vile abuse”.

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BOSTON (MA)
WGBH Frontline

December 21, 2017

By Patrice Taddonio

[Note: Includes streaming link to the Hand of God documentary about Paul Cultrera and Fr. Joseph Birmingham. See also an a resource page for the movie and assignment history of Birmingham with links to documents.]

Cardinal Bernard Law, a key figure in the clergy sex abuse scandal that continues to haunt the Roman Catholic Church, died this week at the age of 86.

Law was the archbishop of Boston when starting in 2002, a Boston Globe investigation found that for years, he had transferred priests who sexually abused children within his archdiocese. After the stories broke, Law’s name became synonymous with the abuse scandal. He apologized and resigned from his post after the Globe’s revelations, but he continued to hold his title as cardinal up until his death on Tuesday.

All told, approximately 1,000 people would come forward alleging clergy sex abuse within the Archdiocese of Boston, exposing the depth of a scandal that had been largely hidden from public view under Law’s tenure.

Among the many people impacted by abusive priests within the archdiocese was Paul Cultrera, whose story was the focus of the 2007 Frontline documentary Hand of God (watch below).

Cultrera grew up in a Catholic home in Salem, Massachusetts, where pictures of popes and cardinals hung in the hallway. He was molested in the 1960s by Father Joseph Birmingham, who allegedly abused nearly 100 other children, and who would eventually be one of the priests named in the Boston Globe’s reporting.

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BILLINGS (MT)
KTVQ

December 19, 2017

By Erik Olson

More than $70 million in assets at Catholic parishes in Eastern Montana, including in Billings, could be at stake as part of the regional diocese’s bankruptcy amid claims of sexual assault stemming back to the 1950s.

Survivors of sexual assault at the hands of priests and nuns dating back to the 1950s say the Great Falls-based diocese has understated its total assets by not including properties held in local parishes, according to documents filed Monday in federal bankruptcy court in Butte.

The Diocese of Great Falls-Billings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March, a move that church officials said would help develop a compensation fund for victims and set aside money for more who come forward.

“The resolution of this litigation is critical to (the diocese) … because it will determine the magnitude of distributions to its creditors, including the survivors of the childhood sex abuse enabled by (the diocese) or whether (the diocese) can continue to avoid being held accountable to the survivors,” attorneys for the survivors wrote.

A total of 86 victims are involved, according to an October story by the Great Falls Tribune. The abuse cases took place over decades, mostly in rural and reservation parishes.

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BILLINGS (MT)
KTVQ

December 20, 2017

Great Falls – The bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Great Falls-Billings is now responding to a new filing in the diocese’s bankruptcy case.

In that lawsuit, attorneys for 86 victims who were sexually abused by eastern Montana priests dating back to the 1950s contend that as much as $70 million of church assets should be included as part of the bankruptcy estate.

Those assets include 14 parishes within the Great Falls-based diocese, four in Billings.

While the plaintiffs contend those assets should be available for the settlement, the diocese maintains the parishes are held in trust by the diocese and are therefore exempt..

“The distinction is we are under the corporation of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Great Falls. All the parishes come under that cooperation, but we hold assets only in trust, we don’t own any of the parish assets. And that’s the contention,” Bishop Michael Warfel told MTN News Wednesday.

Attorney Jim Stang, who represents the 86 victims, said Wednesday his goal is to reach a settlement with the diocese.

He told MTN news that under Montana law, the parishes do not exist on their own, and those assets should be available to creditors.

But in the end, that issue will be decided by a federal bankruptcy judge.

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ROME
The Guardian

December 22, 2017

By Stephanie Kirchgaessner

The Vatican has at last broken its silence on priests who become fathers, as their children reveal the pain of secrecy

When he was a boy, Vincent Doyle spent most weekends with a priest he believed was his godfather.

Every Friday night they would watch MacGyver and Vincent would stay in a room that the priest, who was called JJ, kept for him. And every morning before school, he would call Vincent to wish him well.

It was not until years later when Doyle, a psychotherapist based in Galway, was sitting in the kitchen with his mother, leafing through old poems the late priest had written, that he asked the question he innately knew the answer to. “I said: ‘He was my father, wasn’t he?’ And I saw a tear come out of her,” Doyle says.

Catholic priests have been breaking their vows of celibacy and fathering children for decades, if not centuries. For just as long, the Vatican has not publicly addressed the question of what, if any, responsibility the church has to provide emotional and financial support to those children and their mothers. Until now.

A commission created by Pope Francis to tackle clerical sexual abuse will develop guidelines on how dioceses should respond to the issue of the children of priests.

The pontifical commission for the protection of minors has been criticised for doing too little on child sexual abuse. Its decision to take up the issue of priest fathers comes after Irish bishops published guidelines this year that have been hailed as a global model.

They say a child’s wellbeing must be the first consideration of a priest father, and that he must “face up” to his personal, legal, moral, and financial responsibilities.

Acknowledgement of the issue has come about in part because people such as Doyle, who has launched an organisation designed to help priests’ children cope with their difficult childhood circumstances, are speaking out like never before.

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AUSTRALIA
Warwick Daily News

December 22, 2017

By Marian Faa

TWO LOCAL priests reflected with sadness on the history of child sexual abuse within Catholic institutions after the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse presented its final report to the Governor General on Friday, December 15.

After 54 years working as a Catholic priest in the Darling Downs and beyond, Fr Terry Hickling said the thought of abuse within the Church shocked and disappointed him.

“I am very, very sad that these things have occurred and that priests religious and people involved in our Church have been involved in pedophilia,” Fr Hickling said.

“It saddens me and turns my stomach upside down.”

Catholic institutions were vastly over-represented in reports of abuse taken from more than 8,000 survivors over the five years the Commission was conducted.

Nearly 65 per cent of victims identified as male, and most perpetrators of institutional child sexual abuse were teachers and persons in religious ministry.

The final report included 189 new recommendations, two of which have caused controversy within the Catholic Church.

They included introducing voluntary celibacy for priests and requiring priests to report matters relating child abuse disclosed in confession.

Parish priest Franco Filipetto the Church had committed itself to working with other authorities to implement the recommendations of the royal commission but it was only those two recommendations that had become particularly problematic.

“In my opinion these two recommendations cannot be resolved by the church at a national level,” Fr Filipetto said.

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BILLINGS (MT)
Associated Press

December 21, 2017

BILLINGS, Mont. – Representatives of sex abuse victims and their survivors are suing a bankrupt Roman Catholic diocese in Montana in an effort to ensure more than $70 million in assets are available for those abused by church officials.

The Diocese of Great Falls-Billings entered bankruptcy protection in March as part of settlements involving more than 400 people in sex abuse lawsuits. Church officials said at the time the diocese and its insurers would contribute to a fund to compensate victims and set aside additional money for those who had yet to come forward.

Mediation has not produced a settlement so far.

A committee of unsecured creditors representing eight sex abuse survivors sued the diocese in U.S. Bankruptcy Court this week, aiming to reach a negotiated settlement. California attorney James Stang, who represents the committee, said the complaint was “part of the process,” the Billings Gazette reported.

U.S. Catholic leaders have been grappling with a clergy sexual abuse crisis that exploded in 2002 following reporting by The Boston Globe. Nationwide, the church has paid several billion dollars in settlements since 1950. More than 6,500 clergy members have been accused of abuse and hundreds have been removed from church work.

In the Montana bankruptcy case, the church says the disputed assets are held in trust for its parishes and therefore unavailable for creditors. The creditors argue the property is part of the church’s estate and should be available for victims.

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ENGLAND
Agence France-Presse

December 21, 2017

A priest was jailed for 18 years on Thursday for sexual abusing boys at a top British Catholic school in crimes dating back to the 1970s.

Andrew Soper, 74, fled to Kosovo in 2011 to avoid prosecution over charges that he molested boys while headmaster at St Benedict’s School in London.

He was extradited in 2016 to face 19 counts of indecent assault and buggery against 10 former pupils in the 1970s and 1980s.

A jury at the Old Bailey central criminal court in London found him guilty of all charges on December 6.

Sentencing him Thursday, judge Anthony Bate said that Soper’s conduct was “the most appalling breach of trust” and that he had “subverted the rules of the Benedictine order and teachings of the Catholic Church”.

Bate said Soper’s life would now be “overshadowed by the proven catalogue of vile abuse”.

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PORTLAND (OR)
Associated Press

December 22, 2017

By Gillian Flaccus

Clergy abuse victims who went public to force change in the Roman Catholic Church see haunting similarities between their experience and the experiences of women now describing abuse at the hands of powerful men.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Thousands of clergy abuse victims went public over the past two decades to shed light on sexually abusive priests within the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, many of these victims are being reminded of their abuse by the sexual misconduct scandals gripping Hollywood and Washington, D.C.

They see haunting similarities between their experience and the experiences of women coming forward about abuse at the hands of powerful men. They include fear of retribution, impossible power disparities, and confidential settlements that bury complaints.

Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has denied allegations that he raped three women and sexually assaulted or harassed dozens of others. In the fallout, dozens of other high-profile men have been publicly accused of misconduct.

The Catholic church has paid more than $3 billion to settle clergy abuse cases since 1950, including a record-breaking $660 million settlement in Los Angeles a decade ago.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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UNITED STATES
USA TODAY

December 21, 2017

By Alfred P. Doblin

Law became the face of this institutional evil, and his legacy will remain solely that, for generations to come.

There was a time when “men of the cloth” were revered. To have a priest in the family was a sign of pride for many a Catholic parent. Priests were good men, focused on helping others.

Then there was the time of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law. And nothing would be the same again.

In fairness to Law, who died Wednesday in Rome at age 86, he was not the only prelate who enabled predator priests to destroy the lives of hundreds upon hundreds of children. But through the great reporting of The Boston Globe that pulled back the drapes on this sordid system, Law became the face of this institutional evil, and his legacy will remain solely that, for generations to come.

I spent 1988 to 1998 working in the Catholic press, including stints as editor of the archdiocesan newspapers for Detroit and Los Angeles. During those years, I can’t recall a pedophilia case coming to my attention. In retrospect, that is not surprising, since during that time bishops were still able to keep a firm lid on accusations. Priests could be reassigned for many reasons, and unless you were connected into a particular parish you would have no idea if there was a nefarious reason for the shift. And even then, facts would have been hard to come by.

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BRAINTREE (MA)
Catholic News Service

December 21, 2017

By Mark Labbe

BRAINTREE, Mass. (CNS) — Journalists crowded into a room in the Archdiocese of Boston’s Braintree headquarters Dec. 20 as Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley answered questions following the death of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, whose death was officially announced by the Vatican earlier that day.

The former archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law resigned in 2002 amid allegations of mishandling cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests in the archdiocese. In 2004, the cardinal was named archpriest of a basilica in Rome, where he died at age 86.

“This is a very difficult day for survivors and all of us in the Archdiocese of Boston and for me,” said Cardinal O’Malley at the news conference.

“We have anticipated this day, recognizing that it would open a lot of old wounds and cause much pain and anger in those who have suffered so much already, and we share in their suffering,” he continued.

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NEW YORK (NY)
CRUX

December 22, 2017

By Christopher White

NEW YORK – At a press conference in Boston on Wednesday, Cardinal Sean O’Malley was asked whether he believed Cardinal Bernard Law, his predecessor who became the public face of the Church’s child sexual abuse scandals, would be welcomed into heaven.

Law died in Rome on Wednesday, and is largely remembered for his damning cover-up of clergy sexual abuse.

O’Malley told reporters that he hoped everyone would be welcomed into heaven – while also adding that he was not the one to judge. He also said that there was more to Law than his mistakes – a means of acknowledging the obvious, while also pulling a page from Shakespeare in an effort to perhaps signal that discretion is the better part of valor.

While Law’s death did not exactly elicit the sounds of silence that some had predicted, and indeed, some had even hoped for, it was by no means the usual fanfare that typically surrounds the death of a United States cardinal.

When Cardinal William Keeler, who led the archdiocese of Baltimore from 1989 to 2007, died in March of this year, his death was met with an outpouring of tributes from fellow U.S. bishops. In the days following his death, Keeler received a grand send-off with his reposed body given viewings at two locations, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York served as homilist for the funeral mass.

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ROME
The Washington Post

December 21, 2017

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

Survivors of clergy sexual abuse reacted Thursday with outrage after the Catholic Church honored disgraced former Boston Archbishop Bernard Law with a full cardinal’s funeral, despite his role in a major coverup from which the church is still reeling. Law died Wednesday at age 86.

Law was honored with the standard funeral Mass of cardinals who live at the Vatican, as he did. The ceremony did not include mention of his role in the Boston archdiocese scandals that spanned decades. Pope Francis led a short benediction at the service.

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ROCKVILLE CENTRE (NY)
Newsday

December 20, 2017

By Bart Jones

New Jan. 31 date is set mainly because victims, with painful memories, are finding it difficult to complete paperwork, administrator says.

People who previously filed complaints with the Diocese of Rockville Centre that they had been sexually abused by clergy will have an extra month to apply for a new compensation and reconciliation program, officials said Wednesday.

The diocese is shifting the deadline of the program’s first phase from Dec. 31 to Jan. 31 largely because many victims are struggling to complete the paperwork, which involves reliving painful memories, said Camille Biros, one of the program’s administrators.

“Some of them are so traumatized that it is difficult for them to now start to reopen the process and put it down on paper,” Biros said.

The Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, announced in mid-October, will provide victims with financial compensation if they agree not to take legal action against the diocese in the future. It was modeled after programs launched over the past year in the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn.

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FARGO (ND)
MENAFN – Asia Times

December 22, 2017

A US court has set the bail for a Catholic priest charged 15 years ago with child sex abuse at US$5 million after finally getting him back from the Philippines, where he fled after the charges were filed.

Fernando Laude Sayasaya was extradited to the US on December 15 after he was arrested in the Philippines on November 19. He now faces charges that were filed in Cass County District Court in North Dakota in late 2002.

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GUAM
The Guam Daily Post

December 22, 2017

By Kevin Kerrigan

The number of sex abuse cases accusing former Guam priests of sexual abuse decades ago now total 147.

And there are more cases to come, said attorney Michael Patterson, who is representing the Archdiocese of Agana, in a hearing yesterday in the District Court. “There are a couple more to be added on here soon,” he said.

In reviewing the cases, Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood observed that there are now more abuse cases on Guam than there were in Hawaii, which has been dealing with a similar series of clergy abuse cases.

Currently, 103 of the Guam cases are in federal court before Tydingco-Gatewood. Superior Court Judge Michael Bordallo presides over 44 others. Tydingco-Gatewood said she’ll meet with Bordallo in January to work out procedures for handling the local and federal cases going forward.

In April 2016, nearly 150 victims of child sex abuse filed lawsuits against Hawaii’s Catholic Church and other local institutions in the past four years, hawaiinewsnow.com reported. This includes more than two dozen lawsuits that were filed within the last two weeks in April 2016, which was the deadline to sue, the news website reported.

The Guam sex abuse plaintiffs’ lawsuits collectively seek close to $500 million, Post files show.

In yesterday’s hearing, Tydingco-Gatewood expressed disappointment that the mediation protocols in the clergy sex abuse cases have not yet been completed.

As a result, the start of the mediation process has been pushed back to June, from March next year.

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GUAM
The Guam Daily Post

December 22, 2017

By Mindy Aguon

A former priest allegedly paid a young boy to lie face down on a mat during an outing at the Lonfit River and then raped him in the early 1970s, according to a new lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of Guam on Wednesday.

J.M., who used initials to protect his identity, filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Agana, the Boy Scouts of America and retired priest Louis Brouillard.

The former Barrigada altar boy and Boy Scout alleges he was subjected to Brouillard exposing himself before Mass and providing the altar boys with pornographic magazines to make them more pliable to his sexually deviant wishes, court documents state.

J.M. also said he would swim naked during Boy Scout outings and let Brouillard grope and touch him because he would be rewarded after swimming with restaurant food that he and his family could not afford.

During one outing when J.M. was 14, Brouillard allegedly took him aside and paid him money to lie down on a mat and then raped the boy. J.M. jumped up and screamed in pain and was later forced to defecate in his pants due to the “evil imposed upon him,” the lawsuit states.

Upon returning home, J.M told his grandmother what Brouillard had done to him.

The next day, J.M.’s grandmother went to her nearby Catholic church with her grandson and behind closed doors yelled at the priest in protest as to what Brouillard had done to J.M.

The lawsuit seeks $10 million in damages.

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LOUISVILLE (KY)
Louisville Courier Journal

December 21, 2017

By Darcy Costello

A Roman Catholic priest found guilty of molesting a boy at summer camp in the 1970s will not be immediately released on parole.

The Kentucky Parole Board instead voted to give Father Joseph Hemmerle a 24-month deferment, meaning his case will be considered by the board again in two years, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Lisa Lamb said Thursday.

Hemmerle was sentenced in February to seven years in prison after being found guilty at trial in November 2016 of a single count of immoral or indecent practice with a child. He is being held at Green River Correctional Complex, Lamb said.

The 24-month deferment was a unanimous decision from the two-member panel, Lamb said. It came after a victim impact hearing held Monday.

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AUSTRALIA
The Newcastle Herald

December 21, 2017

By Joanne McCarthy

AUSTRALIA’S largest Pentecostal Christian church has denied any knowledge of child sex allegations against a predatory church youth leader who was jailed only days before the church was criticised in the child abuse royal commission final report.

Christopher Laban Bridge, 69, of Yarramalong – a prominent member of the Generation City Church at Hamilton – was jailed on December 13 for sexually assaulting four boys at Assemblies of God churches in Dubbo and the Hunter in the 1970s and 1980s.

He moved to the Hamilton church in the mid 1970s after a Dubbo victim’s parents reported Bridge’s sexual assaults to Dubbo Assemblies of God pastor, the late Jack Allsopp. No action was taken after the report, a court was told.

Australian Christian Churches (the former Assemblies of God) said it had no record of any child sexual abuse allegations against Bridge until 2014, despite a Hunter victim’s mother saying she told a senior church pastor in the early 1980s about her son’s description of explicit sex acts committed by Bridge.

“The first time the ACC movement was made aware of Christopher Bridge’s paedophile activities in the 1970s and 1980s was when a victim spoke of his experiences to an ACC pastor in October 2014,” a church spokesperson said on Wednesday.

But a Hunter victim backed his mother’s account, saying the failure of the senior church pastor to act had devastating consequences for him and his family.

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United States
TIME Magazine

December 21, 2017

By Abigail Abrams

The conversation this fall around sexual harassment and abuse has led millions of women to speak out about their experiences and begin demanding change in their industries. Now the movement has reached a new community: evangelical Christians.

More than 140 evangelical Christian women published a statement this week calling on churches to support women who come forward with stories of abuse, and to address what they see as silence by many church leaders and congregations.

Within about 24 hours of the statement’s release on Wednesday, it garnered more than 3,000 signatures, including prominent Christian women like authors Jen Hatmaker and Ann Voskamp, poet Amena Brown and Lynne Hybels, co-founder of one of the country’s largest churches. The statement features the hashtag #SilenceIsNotSpiritual and kicks off a campaign that will run through Easter.

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GUAM
Kuam News

December 21, 2017

By Krystal Paco

Plaintiffs’ counsel had plenty to say about Father Louis Brouillard, who is named in majority of the 150 clergy sexual abuse lawsuits filed to date.

According to plaintiffs’ attorney David Lujan during a status conference this week in the federal court, Brouillard is “as sharp as they come” and “no question he’ll testify in favor of us.”

Parties met with Brouillard in Minnesota earlier this year to interview the priest.

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NEW ALBANY (OH)
WOSU Radio Public Media

December 21, 2017

By Steve Brown

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus says a New Albany priest who was suspended over questionable contact with a minor has committed suicide.

An emailed statement from the diocese says Father James Csaszar took his own life in Chicago on Wednesday. No other details about his death were given.

Csaszar had been on leave from position at the Church of the Resurrection in New Albany since November 7, when diocese officials say they learned about what they called “excessive and questionable” text and telephone contact with a minor.

The statement says the diocese was also looking into the potential misuse of church funds when Csaszar served at the St. Rose Parish in New Lexington.

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ITALY
Link Iesta

December 21, 2017

By Carmine Gazzanni

[Google Translate: Since 2000, 136 pedophile priests have been condemned or confessed. After the UN accusations and several attempts, the first question arrives in Parliament that systematically addresses the age-old question of pedophile priests]

Dal 2000 ad oggi sono stati 136 i preti pedofili condannati o reo confessi. Dopo le accuse dell’Onu e diversi tentativi, arriva in Parlamento la prima interrogazione che affronta in maniera sistematica l’annosa questione dei sacerdoti pedofili

Centotrentasei. Tanti sono i sacerdoti condannati o reo confessi per violenze e molestie a danno dei minori. E parliamo soltanto dei casi dal 2000 ad oggi, cui si aggiungono un altro centinaio di prelati indagati o imputati per le stesse ragioni. Sono numeri, questi, forniti da Rete l’Abuso, l’associazione che raduna i sopravvissuti agli abusi dei sacerdoti. «E il dato è evidentemente parziale», ci dice il presidente Francesco Zanardi, anche lui vittima, quando era ragazzo, di violenza sessuale. Un buco nero entro cui sono finiti in tanti. E il caso raccontato in questi giorni da Le Iene di abusi addirittura all’interno delle mura vaticane, non è che l’ultimo esempio di una lunga serie, resa possibile anche dai pesanti silenzi dello Stato italiano. Un silenzio, però, rotto ora da un atto che lo stesso Zanardi definisce «epocale». È stata, infatti, presentata la prima interrogazione parlamentare che affronta in maniera sistematica l’annosa questione dei sacerdoti pedofili, chiedendo un intervento fattivo al governo italiano.

Già, perché lo Stato avrebbe potuto e potrebbe fare molto di più. Basti questo: a differenza della gran parte degli altri Paesi dell’Unione europea, non c’è in Italia una commissione parlamentare ad hoc. Certo, ci sarebbe l’Osservatorio «per il contrasto della pedofilia e della pornografia minorile», che fa capo direttamente al dipartimento per le Pari opportunità; peccato che non intervenga quando di mezzo c’è l’abito talare. E, ancora, c’è il certificato anti-pedofilia introdotto in Italia già nel 2014, ma alcune categorie sono esentate dal presentarlo. Tra queste, proprio i sacerdoti.

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PERTH (AUSTRALIA)
The West Australian

December 19, 2017

By Nick Butterly

A Catholic priest has stood down from a Perth parish amid claims he engaged in “inappropriate behaviour with adults”.

Perth’s Catholic Archbishop Timothy Costelloe wrote to worshippers at the Midland parish at the weekend to confirm Father Kenneth Asaba had offered his resignation after an internal investigation.

In a statement, Archbishop Costelloe said about two years ago allegations were made against Father Asaba and the complainants were encouraged to take the issue to the WA professional standards office of the Catholic Church.

The details of the complaints have not been made public.

That investigation found against Father Asaba.

The priest requested an independent review of the finding. This was conducted by a barrister.

The review again found against Father Asaba.

Archbishop Costelloe said Father Asaba, who is originally from Kenya, was now taking time to consider his future.

In the statement, the Church said he had been barred from acting as a priest in the diocese.

“This has been a distressing experience for every-one concerned,” Arch-bishop Costelloe said.

“This distress has been added to by the time it has taken to reach that point.

“I apologise for this but can only say that the process must be undertaken with care, thoroughness and impartiality — and this takes time.”

Archbishop Costelloe admitted many parishioners would be confused by the situation and possibly angry about the process.

He said those who made the complaints would receive continuing support from the church pro-fessional standards office.

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AUSTRALIA
The West Australian

December 19, 2017

By Gemma Tognini

I was on the phone to a friend talking about a tricky dynamic she’d been trying to navigate between her and a colleague. My friend is strong, successful and capable.

She is generous and kind, bloody hilarious and great with people in general. Still, she’d been having problems with a particular chap and couldn’t nail down why.

She said part of it was his demeanour, the way he spoke to her, the way she felt belittled by him, but even that wasn’t enough to explain her overwhelming sense of paralysis and nausea.

Her need to run to the bathroom after each difficult interaction they had. In short, she felt incapable of navigating a situation she would normally have sailed through.

As I listened to her talk, it got quiet on the other end of the phone. Then I heard crying. A soft, heavy sobbing. In an instant, almost like the gentle cracking of an eggshell, it had dawned on her why she had reacted this way.

“He reminds me of the man who sexually abused me when I was a little girl,” she said.

I’m sharing this story with my friend’s permission, even though you’ll never know her name.

And I’m sharing this story because last week when the report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse was handed down, there was one response that sparked a flame of rage within me that I have been unable to extinguish.

The swiftness with which the Catholic Church defended what it calls the “seal of the confessional” stunned me, to be honest, though it shouldn’t have. It’s a response that was entirely on form.

Now, before I go on let me make a couple of things clear. I’m writing this as a Christian, a singularly dull fact in my view, but relevant in the context of this column. I’m not a church hater, an atheist, hater of any faith, let alone the Catholic faith.

I went to a Catholic school and had a terrific experience there. My own evolution of faith over the past 40-odd years took me from being a kid who had Catholicism chosen for her, to a person who, as a teenager found a home, if you like, in a contemporary Christian congregation.

What I’m saying is that I’m not taking aim from the sidelines as a spectator in this game. I am well and truly in the arena.

So, back to this confessional thing and let me recap and get straight to the point.

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NEW YORK (NY)
The Times of Israel

December 19, 2017

By Cathryn J. Prince

After an internal investigation, the movement cuts ties with its longtime youth head. But a leading child advocate says it shouldn’t take one person’s courage to change a system

NEW YORK — An anonymous November 9 Facebook post cracked a dam of silence surrounding a decades-long child sex scandal as allegations of abuse began trickling forth from the dozens of alleged victims of Jules Gutin, the longtime and much lauded director of the Conservative movement’s youth movement.

Earlier this week the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) severed ties with Gutin, 67, after an internal investigation substantiated an allegation of child sexual abuse dating back 33 years.

For many former USY members, the airing of the abuse allegations is a moment of reckoning that is late in coming — and not entirely embraced by all.

Speaking from his Jerusalem office, former United Synagogue Youth (USY) leader Arnie Draiman said he wasn’t shocked late last week to hear USCJ had severed ties with Gutin, but is dismayed by the shattering silence from his cohort in the announcement’s wake.

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.

UNITED STATES
Entertainment Weekly

December 21, 2017

By Olivia Munn

Since sharing her own experience with sexual harassment in Hollywood, actress Olivia Munn has become a vocal advocate for change. She opens up to EW about an industry she says has a history of forgiving abusers — and punishing victims.

In an interview with the BBC [in the wake of allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which Weinstein denies], Woody Allen said he felt sad for Weinstein and warned of a “witch-hunt atmosphere…where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.” However, the possibility of an overcorrection is much less worrisome than all of the injustices that led us to this moment. Woody’s gut instinct to fear what this might become would be better suited to a gut instinct to hold back an urge that could be wrong.

My experience with [director] Brett Ratner enforced in me the belief that I deserve to be here and that I should be able to reach for my dreams without being harassed and abused, no matter what economic or social position I find myself in. [Munn is one of six women who in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 1 accused Ratner of sexual misconduct. Ratner disputes their claims.] How will anyone know you’re worth it if you don’t?

In our world today — and it’s not just Hollywood, it’s the same for girls and women all over the world who have survived sexual abuse and/or harassment — abusers don’t usually get in trouble unless the victim is broken first, because the violating act alone is not damaging enough to spark society’s outrage. It’s a marathon towards self-destruction in order to gain credibility and a vicious circle of victim-blaming.

When people ask how these men in powerful positions were able to hurt so many people for so many years, I look to the people at the top and ask those questions.

The system that lets men like Ratner and Allen back in, is the same system that creates disparity. It’s tilted to roll back into their favor while the rest of us are saddled with a Sisyphean task.

Imagine Hollywood as a mountain with all of the powerful people positioned at the top. The rest of us have to push a boulder up this hill while running through numerous gauntlets and any abuse we encounter is just par for the course and accepted. I know it’s acceptable abuse because no matter how badly certain people f— up, they fall right back to their position of power while most people have to go to the back of the line and earn their way back up.

This is not a “women’s” issue, this is an abuse-of-power issue…and until we eradicate the diseased roots of our infrastructure and make foundational, systemic changes, nothing will change.

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UNITED STATES
Yahoo Sports

December 20, 2017

By Dan Wetzel

The need for a single, powerful law enforcement agency to fully investigate all aspects of Larry Nassar’s reign of terror is reaffirmed with each new detail in this sick, sordid scandal.

The Department of Justice. The FBI. A state attorney general’s office that’s truly committed, the way Pennsylvania was in not just convicting former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky on 45 counts of molestation, but jailing his administrative enablers also.

So far everything has been patch-work, slow and inefficient. Nassar, 54, is serving 60 years after being sentenced this month on federal child pornography charges. He still faces additional state prison time after pleading guilty to sexual assault. And in all likelihood, he will never see the outside of a prison again for a sexual abuse scandal that on scale is exponentially greater than Sandusky.

The fog of confusion, however, will only increase until there are true investigations into Michigan State, where he worked, the United States Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics, where he volunteered and, Twistars Gymnastics Club, the Lansing-area operation with which he associated.

Wednesday brought word that in 2016, USA Gymnastics paid gold medal winner McKayla Maroney a reported $1.25 million to not publicly mention that she was abused by Nassar. It is a vomit-inducing revelation about the USAG, an organization that grew rich off the talents of young female athletes. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of it should resign immediately.

The news came not via law enforcement, though, but a civil suit filed in Los Angeles. Maroney previously chose to break the non-disclosure and detail Nassar’s attacks on social media and in a court-filed victim impact statement. The suit argues such agreements are illegal in California, where Maroney lived. Her attorney explained she made the deal only because she was, at the time, suicidal due to the trauma.

“She couldn’t function,” attorney John Manly told ESPN. “She couldn’t work. [The USGA was] willing to sacrifice the health and well-being of one of the most famous gymnasts in the world because they didn’t want the world to know they were protecting a pedophile doctor.”

The civil suit continues a trend in this vast and terrible story. The truth has come not from official investigative channels, none of which stopped Nassar. Every report, review and administrator failed the victims, either via incompetence, disorganization or, perhaps, worse.

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UNITED STATES
Yahoo Sports

December 20, 2017

By Jay Busbee

Note: This story contains graphic details of abuse which some readers may find disturbing.

A lawyer for Olympic icon McKayla Maroney is charging that USA Gymnastics paid her to keep silent about abuse she suffered at the hands of former team doctor Larry Nassar.

John Manly, an attorney for the gold medal-winning gymnast, has filed suit on her behalf against USA Gymnastics in Los Angeles Superior Court. He contends the organization sought to buy her silence, paying her a reported $1.25 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, while she was emotionally traumatized from the effects of Nassar’s abuse.

“I want people to understand that this kid had no choice. She couldn’t function. She couldn’t work,” Manly told ESPN. “They [USAG] were willing to sacrifice the health and well-being of one of the most famous gymnasts in the world because they didn’t want the world to know they were protecting a pedophile doctor.”

Nassar has pleaded guilty to 10 counts of criminal sexual conduct, and is scheduled to be sentenced in Michigan in January. He is already serving 60 years in prison on child pornography charges. Nassar, who served as USA Gymnastics’ doctor during four Olympic Games, also faces civil lawsuits charging he abused more than 140 women during medical exams.

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EDINBURG (TX)
The Monitor

December 21, 2017

[Note: This article includes a link to Bishop Flores’ full letter. See also a PDF of the original Pawlicki letter.]

Bishop Daniel E. Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville issued a statement Wednesday expressing the sorrow of the Catholic Church regarding the 1960 murder of Irene Garza by a member of the clergy.

“As a Catholic, as bishop of this local church, and as a human being I am horrified by this,” the bishop wrote in a message posted on the diocese website. “The suffering caused to so many by this crime in incalculable.”

“On behalf of the church, for the sinful actions of members of the church, I express this sorrow to the family, and to those whose faith has been injured by these events,” the message continued.

Read Bishop Flores’ full letter.

John Feit, 85, who served as a priest in the McAllen area in 1960, was sentenced to life in prison on Dec. 8 after a jury found him guilty of Garza’s murder. An autopsy report confirmed that the schoolteacher died by asphyxiation, likely by suffocation.

Addressing evidence introduced during the trial that suggested a conspiracy between the church and law enforcement at the time shielded Feit from prosecution, the bishop said he has no answers.

“The Diocese of Brownsville did not exist back then and I have no special insight into what was done or not done by civil and church authorities in the aftermath of the crime,” Flores said in the statement. “And answers to many questions about what people around the investigation were thinking and doing in 1960 were not given in the verdict.”

Jurors were shown an October 1960 letter between clergy officials regarding the case that suggested that officials feared bad publicity from the conviction of a priest would trigger political ramifications extending from the Rio Grande Valley to the White House.

Rev. Joseph Pawlicki, a pastor at a church outside Austin, wrote to Rev. Lawrence Seidel, the head of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate order to which Feit belonged, urging him to hire a private investigator to find “loopholes” in the state’s case against Feit.

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NEW YORK (NY)
The New Yorker

December 20, 2017

By James Carroll

In the spring of 1989, a group of black-clad clergy gathered to bury one of their own—a Boston priest named Father Joseph Birmingham. Presiding at the funeral was their leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, who died himself on Wednesday, in Rome. As the obsequies for Birmingham drew to a close and the crowd began to disperse, Law was confronted by a man named Thomas Blanchette. He identified himself as having been sexually abused as a child by Birmingham, who would ultimately be accused of having molested more than forty boys. In 2002, Blanchette told the Boston Globe what happened next; Law “laid his hands on my head for two or three minutes. And then he said this: ‘I bind you under the power of the confessional never to speak a word of this to another.’ ”

Law never admitted saying such a thing, but why would Blanchette make it up? Of all the gruesome details that surfaced during the Globe’s investigation into Law’s years-long protection of rapist priests, this incident, for a Catholic, epitomizes the perversion. What Law did in response to a traumatized victim was to reverse the meaning of the Seal of the Confessional, the solemn Catholic mandate that forbids priests from revealing anything said by a penitent in the sacred forum of the Sacrament of Penance. In doing so, he was seeking to protect not only the one priest but also the clerical structure of power to which, even dead, that priest still belonged. Law was prepared to twist the Sacrament itself to his own foul purpose, even exploiting the ritual gesture of hands imposed on a vulnerable penitent’s head. This was a savage abuse of Catholic piety, obviously intended to intimidate and silence. It amounted to a sacrilege.

But then, of course, the entire saga of Catholic sex abuse—thousands of priests harming tens of thousands of young people; the worldwide Catholic episcopate protecting the abusers instead of the children—is a sacrilege. And, no, it has not yet been finished with. Law’s death is a reminder not only of the hierarchy’s grievous failure during the sex-abuse crisis but of the way in which the Church has yet to reckon with what the crisis laid bare.

Law’s own fate offers an object lesson in Vatican denial. After he was forced to resign as Archbishop of Boston, in 2002, he was rescued from disgrace by Pope John Paul II, who appointed him to one of the most prestigious positions in Catholicism—Archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major. It was a clear signal of support. After all, Law had merely implemented the Vatican’s own policy of reserving to Church jurisdiction, instead of civil authority, the abuse of children by priests. As a 2001 directive from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, put it, crimes “perpetrated with a minor by a cleric . . . are subject to the pontifical secret.” That Law, banished from Boston, was then protected in Rome meant that the entire structure of misogynist clericalism—all male, sexually repressed, blatantly dishonest—was protected, too. That structure is intact, protected still, even by the otherwise liberalizing Pope Francis. On Thursday, Law will be laid to rest in Rome with the full panoply of observances due an honored prince of the Church, with Francis himself pronouncing the final blessing. The ongoing grief, rage, and heartbreak of abuse survivors will not, one presumes, be acknowledged.

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BOSTON (MA)
Boston Herald

December 21, 2017

By Peter Gelzinis

No hiding sins of the cloth from God

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”

To grow up Catholic is to have those words burned into your consciousness by the age of seven. When I recited them for the first time, I was kneeling in the dark, confessing what few sins I could imagine to a voice on the other side of an opaque window.

But I still recall feeling “cleansed” when the priest forgave my childish sins and told me to say three “Hail Marys” and a good Act of Contrition.

In time, Catholics come to understand that the sacrament of penance, or confession, is actually a dress rehearsal for Judgment Day, when we will all have to come clean for real before the Lord.

For Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, Judgment Day arrived Tuesday, when at age 86, he departed the splendid banishment of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

Exactly where he now dwells in the afterlife — heaven, hell or purgatory — none of us can say. But among a sprawling community of victims, sexually abused in silence by priests who were quietly shuttled around various parishes in Boston for decades, Bernard Law most likely rests in a place of eternal torment, where he cannot take refuge behind lawyers or non-disclosure agreements.

As a prince of the church, you can’t say you didn’t know. Or I thought I was doing the right thing. Or we couldn’t have the whole archdiocese knowing about this stuff.

Bernard Law had a Harvard degree. God is certainly aware of that. It’s one thing to try to play Mickey The Dunce down here, as he managed to do for years. It’s quite another to try to play that card with the Almighty.

God is simply not going to buy that.

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ROME
National Catholic Reporter

December 21, 2017

By Thomas Reese

Cardinal Bernard Law, who died Dec. 20 in Rome at age 86, began his priestly life as a journalist, but rose quickly up the ecclesiastical ladder only to come crashing down in scandal and disgrace. May God have mercy on his soul.

As editor of the Natchez-Jackson, Miss., diocesan newspaper in the 1960s, Fr. Law bravely supported the civil rights movement. He even had to hide in the trunk of a car when his life was threatened. He also spent time at the U.S. bishops’ conference in Washington, where as head of the office of ecumenism he worked on improving relations with Protestants and Jews.

As a result, by the time he became bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in 1973, he had solid progressive credentials in both ecumenism and social justice. While in Missouri, he became friendly with the Bush family through George H.W. Bush’s brother, who had financial interests in the state.

In 1984, Law was promoted to archbishop of Boston, where he was the first archbishop to have attended Harvard University. His arrival was greeted with great hope.

He soon saw his role as a national and international leader. His connection to the Bush family proved invaluable and probably moderated his political views. He strongly supported the pro-life agenda of the pope and the American bishops, but not the consistent ethic of life espoused by Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.

Even so, Law was not afraid to use his influence to support the policies of the bishops’ conference. One staff person reports he was well-briefed and effective when meeting with Cabinet secretaries. His phone call was also put through to Air Force One to complain when the Reagan administration attempted to classify ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches.

As a loyal supporter of John Paul II, Law also played an active role in the church as a cardinal. The Vatican used him in communicating with the Bush White House, especially prior to the pope’s historic visit to Cuba. In return, the Vatican often followed his recommendations for episcopal appointments in the U.S.

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ROME
Crux

December 21, 2017

By John L. Allen Jr.

ROME – Before an unusually small congregation of mourners, albeit one that featured U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Callista Gingrich and her husband, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a funeral Mass for Cardinal Bernard Law was celebrated behind the main altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday afternoon.

Pope Francis took part in the ritual, not celebrating the Mass but offering final prayers at the end, reading the prescribed prayers for the final commendation of the deceased to God and the final valediction.

The Vatican’s foreign minister, British Archbishop Richard Paul Gallagher, was also on hand for the funeral Mass.

The main celebrant for the liturgy was Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, acting in his capacity as the Dean of the College of Cardinals. His role was controversial, given that like Law himself, Sodano has a checkered history when it comes to the child sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.

For much of the late 20th century, Sodano was a patron of the late Mexican Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, whose pattern of sexual abuse and misconduct was eventually recognized by his own order following a Vatican investigation that Sodano had opposed.

In 2010, Sodano again stirred controversy when he suggested during an Easter homily that critics of Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of sexual abuse controversies were engaging in “petty gossip.”

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ROME
CNN

December 21, 2017

By Laura Smith-Spark and Delia Gallagher

Pope Francis is expected to give the final blessing at the funeral Thursday of Cardinal Bernard Law, the former Boston archbishop who resigned in disgrace during the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, prompting outrage from abuse survivors.

Francis’ role in the ceremony, which got underway Thursday afternoon, has fueled the controversy over the decision to grant Law a full cardinal’s funeral at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

Law, who died early Wednesday in Rome following a long illness, became a symbol of the sex-abuse scandal after a Boston Globe investigation revealed that he and other bishops had covered up child abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese.

The story was made into a celebrated movie, “Spotlight,” and the scandal forced the Catholic Church to rethink the way it dealt with child abuse in the church.

It is protocol for the Pope to give the “final commendation,” or blessing, at a cardinal’s funeral when he dies in Rome, Vatican officials told CNN. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, is presiding over the Mass.

The occasion is a funeral, not a tribunal nor a judgment of Law’s life, the Vatican added. The Pope will give a commendation for the cardinal to be judged by God, officials said.

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BOSTON (MA)
WBUR 90.9

December 21, 2017

By Eileen McNamara

He is being buried today from St. Peter’s, from the heart of the Vatican, on the darkest day of the year. His funeral is being broadcast live on the Vatican’s television network. Pope Francis himself will bless the remains of Cardinal Bernard Law, the prelate who facilitated and covered up the crimes of predatory priests across decades in the Archdiocese of Boston.

It was not enough that the misguided men of Rome provided Law safe haven at a Roman basilica for 15 years after the depth and breadth of his obstruction of justice was exposed. They have to honor the un-indicted co-conspirator in the sexual abuse of children with a saint’s send-off in the sacred seat of the Roman Catholic Church.

It astounds the imagination, even among those of us who thought all the pope’s men had long ago exhausted our capacity for outrage.

Let’s leave it to The New York Times and The Washington Post to refuse to speak too ill of the dead, to balance the ledger with an even-handed accounting of his good deeds and bad. In Boston, Law deserves an obituary as unvarnished as his rank ambition and craven evasion of responsibility.

First the disclaimers: He championed the cause of civil rights in Mississippi in the 1960s; his initiatives improved relations between Catholics and Jews from Missouri to Massachusetts; he embraced the Haitian, Hispanic and Southeast Asian immigrants who were fast replacing the Irish and Italians in the pews of Dorchester and Lowell and Lynn when he arrived in the Archdiocese of Boston in 1984. But it was less than a year later that Auxiliary Bishop John M. D’Arcy warned Law of the danger of his decision to transfer the Rev. John J. Geoghan, a serial child molester, from St. Brendan’s in Dorchester to St. Julia’s in Weston. Parishioners, D’Arcy wrote, would rightly “be convinced the Archdiocese has no concerns for their welfare and simply sends them priests with problems.” Law ignored D’Arcy and Geoghan resumed his sexual assaults on children.

“I only wish that the knowledge that we have today had been available to us earlier,” Law wrote in 2001 in the Pilot when the extent of his complicity was beginning to emerge. That was a transparent lie, part of a pattern of deceit that would be Law’s undoing. In 1985, medical and legal experts had delivered a 92-page report to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on sexually abusive priests; Law had urged that the independent study be undertaken.

How had he escaped accountability for so long? It is hard to remember now that Law was the darling of the ascendant conservative wing of the Catholic Church when he moved into the mansion on Lake Street in Brighton. When Pope John Paul II elevated the Harvard-educated archbishop to cardinal within a year, his long-shot ambition to become the first American pope seemed a credible dream to the moneyed swells with whom he mingled so effortlessly at his annual garden party.

Credit his arrogance for the overreach.

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WASHINGTON (DC)
The Washington Post

December 20, 2017

By Amy B Wang

On March 13, 1964, a tiny diocesan newspaper edited by a young Catholic priest with no prior journalism experience laid out the case for racial desegregation in Mississippi.

The editorial in the Mississippi Register, headlined “Legal Segregation is Dying,” was stunning for its controversial position at the time, particularly in a racially charged state at the center of the American civil rights movement. Only months before, a prominent civil rights leader had been shot in the back and killed.

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BOSTON (MA)
Boston Herald

December 21, 2017

By Chris Cassidy, Marie Szanislo, Matt Stout

Pope to preside over final prayers for Law

Cardinal Bernard Law’s funeral today inside St. Peter’s Basilica — one of the holiest shrines in Catholicism — where Pope Francis will attend has enraged survivors of clergy sex abuse who say the disgraced cleric doesn’t deserve the high honor.

“One of the big things that bothers me is he’s going to have this huge funeral in the Vatican at St. Peter’s Basilica with all the pomp and circumstance. He doesn’t deserve it,” said Ann Hagan Webb, a priest abuse survivor and Wellesley psychologist who treats other victims. “Pope Francis should have the presence of mind to just give him a quiet funeral and not incite the retraumatizing of victims.”

Law’s death at the age of 86 reopened nightmarish memories of rampant, unchecked child molestation throughout the archdiocese by Catholic priests taking advantage of their pristine image and moral authority in the community to avoid accountability.

Law transferred pedophile priests from parish to parish, keeping them in contact with young children and their predatory crimes a secret.

“His death just brings back all of the pain and suffering he allowed to happen, and he was the cause of it,” said Robert Costello, 56, of Plainville, a priest abuse victim from the first through eighth grades. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t remember what happened to me. … Bernie Law was a cruel, selfish bastard.”

Nonetheless, the Vatican plans the same customary funeral arrangements as any other cardinal living in Rome at his time of death.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals, will preside over the funeral Mass this morning, alongside other cardinals and bishops, according to the Catholic News Agency.

The pope will preside over the final prayers. Law will then be buried at Rome’s Basilica of St. Mary Major.

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BOSTON (MA)
Reuters

December 21, 2017

“What the #MeToo movement shows is the public is now willing to assign blame. They are naming names and part of that is naming the legislators who are not willing to pass these laws.”

The death on Wednesday of Roman Catholic Cardinal Bernard Law, who covered up the church’s child sex abuse scandal for decades, prompted US activists to reflect on how far their efforts have come to make sure abusers can be prosecuted and how many hurdles remain.

Thousands of people worldwide came forward to say they were child victims of priest abuse after the scandal broke in 2002. But many in the United States found that state laws protected their attackers from criminal prosecution or even civil lawsuits for crimes that were years or decades old.

That sparked a drive by advocates to reform statutes of limitations, reflecting research showing that many people sexually abused as children do not report the fact until well into adulthood. That effort has gained support from the #MeToo movement this year as millions of women have shared their stories of being sexually harassed or assaulted.

“Powerful institutions have protected abusers and kept them in place just as Cardinal Law did,” New York state Senator Brad Hoylman, author of a bill that would eliminate the statue of limitations on reporting new child sex abuse and allow a one-year period to file civil suits over older allegations.

“It’s taken us a long time to move on these issues but I think we’re at a point of culmination where change could occur next year.” US statutes of limitations for criminal and civil cases vary widely by state, making for a patchwork system determining victims’ rights to seek redress in the courts.

This year eight states passed laws giving child sex abuse victims more time to legally confront their abusers, according to Child USA. Bills were introduced but not passed in four: New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Washington state.

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BOSTON (MA)
The Associated Press

December 21, 2017

Pope Francis prayed Thursday for a merciful final judgment for Cardinal Bernard Law, symbol of the Catholic Church’s failure to protect children from pedophile priests and its arrogance in safeguarding its own reputation at all costs.

In a final blessing at Law’s funeral Mass, Francis blessed his coffin with incense and holy water at the foot of the back altar of St. Peter’s Basilica and recited the ritual prayer commending him to God.

“May he be given a merciful judgment so that redeemed from death, freed from punishment, reconciled to the Father, carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, he may deserve to enter fully into everlasting happiness in the company of the eternal King together with all the saints.”

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BOSTON (MA)
The Conversation

December 21, 2017

By Mathew Schmalz
Associate Professor of Religion, College of the Holy Cross

Cardinal Bernard Law died on Wednesday, Dec. 20, in Rome. Law was Archbishop of Boston, a position of prestige in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. He had wide political connections, including with the Bush family. He publicly denounced Catholic politicians who supported abortion rights.

But this power and influence came to an end when The Boston Globe revealed how Cardinal Law had concealed sexual abuse committed by priests.

When Law was forced to resign in 2002, it did not mark the end of Catholicism’s struggle with sexual abuse in its ranks. Although reforms in the United States have made it mandatory for priests to report instances of sexual abuse, much work remains to be done in the Catholic Church worldwide.

From my perspective as a Catholic scholar of religion, one of the challenges in tackling this issue is the hierarchy of the church itself.

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VATICAN CITY
The Associated Press

December 21, 2017

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis is set to preside over the final rites in the funeral Mass for Cardinal Bernard Law, symbol of the Catholic Church’s failure to protect children from pedophile priests and its arrogance in safeguarding its own reputation at all costs.

The dean of the college of cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, will celebrate Law’s funeral Mass on Thursday behind the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica. Following the typical protocol, Francis is expected to preside over a final prayer, a blessing with incense and the sprinkling of holy water around Law’s coffin.

U.S. Ambassador-designate Callista Gingrich and her husband, Newt, as well as some other members of the diplomatic corps were on hand in the pews, along with the Vatican foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher.

Turnout was otherwise limited, with the basilica ushers stacking extra rows of empty seats before the Mass began.

One of the opening prayers reads: “O God, who chose your servant Cardinal Bernard Law from among your priests and endowed him with pontifical dignity in the apostolic priesthood, grant, we pray, that he may also be admitted to their company forever.”

Law, who died Wednesday at age 86, resigned in disgrace as archbishop of Boston in 2002 after revelations that he covered up for dozens of priests who raped and sexually molested children, moving them to different parishes without telling parents or police.

The scandal, exposed by The Boston Globe and memorialized in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” then spread throughout the U.S. and world, with thousands of people from all continents coming forward in ensuing years with claims their priests sexually abused them when they were children.

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UNITED STATES
NBC News

December 21, 2017

By Corky Siemaszko

Before Harvey Weinstein, there was Cardinal Bernard Law.

While Law’s sin was covering up for pedophile priests in Boston, not allegedly assaulting actresses, his ouster some 15 years ago paved the way for today’s torrent of takedowns of powerful men like Weinstein who have been accused of sexual harassment and worse, experts said Wednesday.

“What happened with Law emboldened people to come forward. It made them realize they can challenge a powerful institution like the Catholic Church and that change can happen,” said Jennifer Drobac, an Indiana University law professor and an expert on sexual harassment in the workplace.

The downfall of Law, who died Wednesday at the Vatican, was “a cultural change and not just in the Catholic Church,” Drobac added.

“What happened has had a ripple effect on all kinds of other institutions in our country, and it has a ripple effect all over the world,” she said. “We don’t even know how wide the ripple effect will go.”

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AUSTRALIA
ABC Ballarat

December 18, 2017

By Charlotte King

Catholics in the Victorian town of Ballarat — referred to as an epicentre of child sexual abuse — say the church must accept grassroots involvement from parishioners to enact changes recommended by the royal commission.

The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse issued a damning report about the Ballarat Catholic Diocese earlier this month, describing its handling of clergy child sex abuse as a “catastrophic failure of leadership”.

The Commission’s final report, released on Friday, also called for sweeping reforms for the Catholic church including that bishops draw upon advice from lay people in relation to the admission of individuals to the priesthood.

In a statement, Pope Francis said the findings “deserve to be studied in depth” while the Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, said the church would seriously consider all of the royal commission’s 189 new recommendations, but rejected calls for priests to be forced to break the seal of confessional.

The Ballarat Catholic Diocese said it was open to a recommendation that would see parish priests stripped of their power over schools.

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GUAM
Pacific Daily News

December 21, 2017

By Haidee V. Eugenio

Formal mediation to try to settle nearly 150 Guam clergy sex abuse cases won’t start until June 2018 to allow for the deposition of each of the plaintiffs.

This will allow the local Catholic Church’s insurance carrier, a subsidiary of AIG, to help evaluate claims for damages and liability, attorneys told the federal court Thursday.

Each of the plaintiffs will be deposed for up to four hours each. They will provide sworn statements to the parties’ attorneys, said Seattle-based attorney Michael Patterson, co-counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana.

The archdiocese is a named defendant in all the clergy sex abuse cases filed in the U.S. District Court of Guam and the Superior Court of Guam.

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SCOTLAND
BBC

December 21, 2017

By Mark Daly

Fears are growing that an Australian former monk accused of sexually abusing children at a Catholic boarding school in Scotland may never face trial.

Father Denis “Chrysostom” Alexander is in custody in Sydney and is contesting moves to extradite him back to Scotland, on the grounds of ill health.

The 81-year-old was among several monks accused in a BBC Scotland documentary in 2013 of sexual and physical abuse at the Fort Augustus Abbey school.

Fr Alexander denies the allegations.

Strong criticism

Meanwhile, the Crown Office, Scotland’s criminal prosecution service, confirmed it was dropping five further Fort Augustus abuse cases which had lain “under consideration” for two and a half years.

It said the “passage of time presented particular challenges” in the investigations, especially around important witnesses who were either dead or not able to take part.

It said extradition proceedings with Australian authorities were under way in the case of Fr Alexander.

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ROME
THE PULSE (via Catholic Culture)

December 20, 2017

By Phil Lawler

December 20, 2017 (Catholic Culture) – As of yesterday, the Pope’s special commission on sexual abuse formally ceased to exist.

The Commission for the Protection of Minors was established by Pope Francis in 2013, for a four-year term that began on December 17 of that year. That term has now officially expired.

Vatican-watchers fully expect that Pope Francis will extend the group’s mandate (or, at this point, renew it)—although nobody knows whether or not he will renew the terms of the current members. And the group wasn’t likely to hold meetings during the Christmas season anyway, so no real harm has been done by allowing the group’s formal authority to lapse.

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GREAT FALLS-BILLINGS (MT)
The Billings Gazette

December 21, 2017

By Clair Johnson

A Committee of Unsecured Creditors in the bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Great Falls-Billings is suing the church, alleging that more than $70 million in real property and other assets are part of the church’s estate and should be available for creditors and survivors of sex abuse by church officials.

The adversarial complaint, filed late Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, said getting the disputed assets issue resolved “is critical” to the church’s estate because it will “determine the magnitude of distributions to its creditors, including survivors of the childhood sex abuse enabled by (the diocese) or whether (the diocese) can continue to avoid being held accountable to the survivors.”

Attorney James Stang, of Los Angeles, California, who represents the unsecured creditors committee, said on Wednesday the committee’s goal is to reach a negotiated settlement and that the complaint is “part of the process.”

The committee represents eight sex abuse survivors, Stang said.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
NCR

December 20, 2017

After resigning as archbishop of Boston in December 2002, Cardinal Bernard Law, who died in Rome early this morning, took refuge in a convent in Clinton, Maryland, owned by the Sisters of Mercy of Alma.

A year and a half later, in May 2004, he was appointed archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica, one of the oldest and most important shrines in Rome, and settled into an influential, albeit quiet, role in the Vatican Curia.

Five years after Law’s resignation, NCR ran a profile of the cardinal detailing his life in the heart of the Vatican. The article ran under the headline: “After the fall: Law finds normality in an unremarkable role in Rome.”

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MANCHESTER (NH)
WMUR

December 20, 2017

By Jennifer Crompton

Clergy sex abuse victims and advocacy groups are speaking out Wednesday after the death of Cardinal Bernard Law, who, as archbishop of Boston, shuffled pedophile priests from one parish to another without alerting parents or police.

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ROME
CRUX

December 20, 2017

By Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley

SPECIAL TO CRUX: Cardinal O’Malley statement on the death of Cardinal Bernard Law

[Editor’s note: Cardinal Bernard Law died Thursday morning in Rome at the age of 86. The following is a statement released by Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, Law’s successor in Boston.]

Cardinal Bernard F. Law, my predecessor as Archbishop of Boston, has passed away at the age of 86 following a prolonged illness.

I recognize that Cardinal Law’s passing brings forth a wide range of emotions on the part of many people. I am particularly cognizant of all who experienced the trauma of sexual abuse by clergy, whose lives were so seriously impacted by those crimes, and their families and loved ones. To those men and women, I offer my sincere apologies for the harm they suffered, my continued prayers and my promise that the Archdiocese will support them in their effort to achieve healing.

As Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law served at a time when the Church failed seriously in its responsibilities to provide pastoral care for her people, and with tragic outcomes failed to care for the children of our parish communities. I deeply regret that reality and its consequences. Since the day I arrived in the Archdiocese of Boston, my primary objective has been to work for healing and reconciliation among survivors, their families and the wider community of Catholics for whom the abuse crisis was a devastating experience and a great test of faith. In the midst of these groups that were most affected have stood priests and religious sisters of the Archdiocese who have tried to minister to any and all seeking assistance, even when they have been deeply challenged by the crisis that unfolded in the Church.

It is a sad reality that for many Cardinal Law’s life and ministry is identified with one overwhelming reality, the crisis of sexual abuse by priests. This fact carries a note of sadness because his pastoral legacy has many other dimensions. Early in his priesthood in Mississippi Cardinal Law was deeply engaged in the civil rights struggle in our country. Later, he served in the Archdiocese and nationally as a leader in the ecumenical and interfaith movement following the Second Vatican Council, developing strong collaborative relationships with the Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities in Boston. He was well known for visiting the sick, the dying and the bereaved at all hours of the night and day, a ministry that extended to the rich and poor, the young and elderly, and people of all faiths. He also held the care for immigrants and their families in a special place in his ministry.

In the Catholic tradition, the Mass of Christian Burial is the moment in which we all recognize our mortality, when we acknowledge that we all strive for holiness in a journey which can be marked by failures large and small. Cardinal Law will be buried in Rome where he completed his last assignment. I offer prayers for him and his loved ones as well as for all the people of the Archdiocese.

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ROME
National Catholic Register

December 20, 2017

By Matthew E. Bunson

The cardinal, who played a major role in the promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, will be remembered more for his role in the clergy sex-abuse scandal.

ROME — Cardinal Bernard Law, whose time as archbishop of Boston from 1984 to 2002 ended in the scandal and cataclysm of the clergy sex-abuse crisis, died in Rome in the early morning of Dec. 20, after a long period of declining health and a brief hospitalization for heart problems. He was 86.

During much of his time as shepherd of the Archdiocese of Boston, Cardinal Law was one of the most prominent Catholic leaders in the United States and an influential member of the College of Cardinals. That ended in 2002, however, as a result of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal, and controversy followed him even as he departed Boston to become archpriest of the Patriarchal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome in May 2004.

Faced with multiple allegations that he had moved priests accused of child sexual abuse from one assignment to another, he resigned Dec. 13, 2002. It was one of the darkest moments in recent American Catholic life. In his resignation letter, Cardinal Law begged forgiveness from the victims of sexual abuse.

“It is my fervent prayer that this action may help the Archdiocese of Boston to experience the healing, reconciliation and unity, which are so desperately needed,” wrote Cardinal Law. “To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologize and from them beg forgiveness.”

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VATICAN CITY
The Associated Press, Religion News Service

December 20, 2017

By Rachel Zoll

VATICAN CITY — Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former archbishop of Boston whose failures to stop child molesters in the priesthood sparked what would become the worst crisis in American Catholicism, died early Wednesday, the Vatican said. He was 86.

Law had been sick and was recently hospitalized in Rome.

Law was once one of the most important leaders in the U.S. church. He broadly influenced Vatican appointments to American dioceses, helped set priorities for the nation’s bishops and was favored by Pope John Paul II.

But in January 2002, The Boston Globe began a series of reports that used church records to reveal that Law had transferred abusive clergy among parish assignments for years without alerting parents or police. Within months, Catholics around the country demanded to know whether their bishops had done the same.

Law tried to manage the mushrooming scandal in his own archdiocese by first refusing to comment, then apologizing and promising reform. But thousands more church records were released describing new cases of how Law and others expressed more care for accused priests than for victims. Amid a groundswell against the cardinal, including rare public rebukes from some of his own priests, Law asked to resign and the pope said yes.

“It is my fervent prayer that this action may help the archdiocese of Boston to experience the healing, reconciliation and unity which are so desperately needed,” Law said when he stepped down as head of the Boston archdiocese in December of that year. “To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologize and from them beg forgiveness.”

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ROME
CNN

December 20, 2017

By Emanuella Grinberg

(CNN) Cardinal Bernard Law, the former Boston archbishop who resigned in disgrace during the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, has died, the Vatican confirmed. He was 86.

Law died in Rome, where he had served as archpriest of the Papal Liberian Basilica of St. Mary Major after he was forced to resign in 2002 as archbishop of Boston.

Law’s name became emblematic of the scandal that continues to trouble the church and its followers around the globe after it was revealed that he and other bishops before him had covered for pedophile priests in the Boston Archdiocese.

Law at the time apologized during a news conference to victims of abuse by a priest, John Geoghan, who had been moved from parish to parish, despite Law’s knowledge of his abuse of young boys. Law insisted Geoghan’s abuse was in the past.

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Fargo (ND)
The Associated Press

December 20, 2017

FARGO, N.D. – A judge has set bail at $5 million cash for a Catholic priest accused of molesting two boys in North Dakota in the 1990s.

KFGO radio reports that Fernando Laude Sayasaya appeared in court on Tuesday via video from the Cass County Jail. He’s facing two counts of gross sexual imposition.

Sayasaya was recently returned to the United States from the Philippines, where he had been since 1998. A Philippines court ordered his extradition in 2010. He appealed, lost and was ultimately arrested last month.

Prosecutors allege that Sayasaya abused two underage siblings from 1995 to 1998, while he was assigned to the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and St. Mary’s Cathedral in the Fargo area.

They argued that Sayasaya was a flight risk. He didn’t oppose the bail amount.

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SAN JOSE (CA)
The Mercury News

December 19, 2017

By Sharon Nogushi

Catholic school allegedly violated law by conducting own investigation into complaints

SAN JOSE — Over thee decades, Presentation High School administrators repeatedly violated state law and failed to report sexual abuse claims to police and the county’s child protection agency, according to allegations in two cases made public Tuesday.

In one case, an alleged victim’s mother said her daughter was sexually assaulted by an instructor in 2013-’14. Classmates reported to administrators the teacher’s troubling behavior — touching, sending multiple daily texts and sexual SnapChat photos — Dina Leonis said. The school, however, did not report the matter to police, she said.

“My daughter suffered extreme emotional distress,” said Leonis, who notified police.

The latest sexual abuse claims follow previous allegations by other alumnae, who contended they and classmates were groped and sexually victimized by a teacher in 1990 at the prestigious Catholic girls school. After those students came forward, the school placed two teachers on leave as it looked into two separate incidents, one of which they reported to police.

“All reports of sexual harassment that have come to Presentation High School have been handled properly by the school administration,” said Principal Mary Miller in a prepared statement. “Some of the other claims made today we are hearing for the first time.”

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

December 19, 2017

By NCR Editorial Staff

In December 2013, Pope Francis sparked hope that the Catholic Church was (finally!) taking the scandal of clergy sexual abuse seriously. He created a group to advise him and future popes on how the church worldwide could protect children, appointing experts on the issue and even survivors of abuse to a new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

Now, as of this writing four years later, that commission has lapsed into an inactive state. Its members’ terms of office, as set by the group’s Vatican-approved statutes, expired Dec. 17. Neither the pope nor the Vatican have made known when or if the current members will be reappointed or new members found.

That Francis has allowed this lapse to occur is worrisome. A commission without validly appointed members ceases to be a commission; its members may carry on their work but if they do, they do so as individuals without legal standing or vested authority to back them. What work could they carry on? This never should have been allowed to happen.

That the Vatican felt no need to offer an official explanation is just as worrisome, because it suggests that the protection of children is not as high a priority as statements from the Vatican say it is. That decision makers in the Vatican apparently didn’t realize — or didn’t care — that this lapse would be perceived negatively is also troubling. A lack of an official response sends a tone-deaf and disappointing message to Catholics and the world. It points to the causal negligence at the heart of the scandal that has plagued the church for decades and demonstrates why the church can’t shake allegations that its leaders “just don’t get it.”

We cannot forget that less than 10 months ago, Marie Collins, an original appointee and a survivor of clergy abuse, resigned from the commission out of frustration with an intransigent Vatican bureaucracy.

We’ve been told not to read too much into the vacant commission. It’s just a bureaucratic snafu, we’re told, and it will be corrected by April, when the commission’s next plenary assembly is set. The office in the Curia meant to support the work of the commission will continue its work, we’ve been told. These statements, meant to be assurances, sound too much like hollow promises of the kind we’re been programmed to hear from church officials when it comes to the abuse of minors by clergy.

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VATICAN CITY
Daily Mail/Associated Press

December 20, 2017

By Michelle Ganney

– Cardinal Bernard Law, former archbishop of Boston, dies at age 86 in Rome
– He was highest-ranking official in history of US church to leave office in disgrace
– It was revealed Law failed to remove sexually abusive priests from the ministry
– His actions and silence led to a sense of betrayal among many Boston Catholics
– The abuse extended over six decades harming 789 children involving 237 priests
– After the scandal Pope John Paul II appointed him archpriest of the Patriarchal Basilica of St. Mary Major, which is when he moved to Rome

Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former archbishop of Boston, died at the age of 86 in Rome on Tuesday.

Law, whose failures to stop child molesters in the priesthood sparked what would become the worst crisis in American Catholicism, had been sick and was recently hospitalized in Rome.

The official who confirmed the death was not authorized to make the announcement and asked to remain anonymous. The Vatican is expected to make a statement on Wednesday.

Law, who moved to Rome two years after resigning from his position in Boston due to the scandal, was once widely recognized as one of the most important leaders in the U.S. church.

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VATICAN CITY
Redazione ANSA

December 20, 2017

Pope condolences, will attend funeral

(ANSA) – Vatican City, December 20 – Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston at the centre of a child-sex-abuse scandal in the American city, has died at the age of 86, sources said Wednesday. Law, who had recently been taken into hospital in Rome, was forced to quit as the archbishop of Boston in 2002 after it emerged he had failed to stop priests who sexually abused children, moving them from parish to parish without informing the authorities.

He was controversially brought to Rome by the Catholic Church to run the Basilica of Saint Mary Major from 2004 to 2011.

The scandal was brought to light by the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Spotlight investigation, made into an Oscar-winning film in 2015.

Pope Francis voiced his condolences for Law, saying “may God welcome him in peace”.

The pope will attend Law’s funeral in St Peter’s Basilica on Thursday.

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ROME
The Associated Press

December 20, 2017

Key dates in the life of Cardinal Bernard Law, who died early Wednesday at age 86.

— Nov. 4, 1931: Bernard Law is born in Torreon, Mexico; the only child of a U.S. Air Force colonel and a mother who converted to Roman Catholicism from Presbyterianism.

— 1953: Law graduates from Harvard University with a degree in medieval history.

— 1961: Law is ordained as a priest.

— 1968: Law takes a job at the ecumenical office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

— 1973: Law is named bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri.

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ROME
SKY News

December 20, 2017

US Cardinal Bernard Law was widely blamed for failing to stop child molesters in the priesthood during his tenure in Boston.

Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston who became a symbol of the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, has died at 86.

Cardinal Law died in a hospital in Rome, where he had been living.

The Vatican did not give a cause as it announced his death, but the Cardinal was believed to have been suffering from complications of diabetes and liver failure, among other ailments.

Cardinal Law was archbishop of Boston, one of the most prestigious and wealthy American archdioceses, for 18 years.

The late Pope John Paul reluctantly accepted his resignation in 2002 after the Catholic Church was rocked by worldwide sex abuse revelations.

The scandal was uncovered by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, which showed how priests who sexually abused children had been moved from parish to parish for years rather than being sacked or reported to the authorities.

Cardinal Law was widely blamed for allowing that to happen.

The report soon began a trickle-down effect around the world, as the cover-up techniques used in Boston were discovered to have been used in country after country.

“It is my fervent prayer that this action may help the archdiocese of Boston to experience the healing, reconciliation and unity which are so desperately needed,” Cardinal Law said upon resigning.

“To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologise and from them beg forgiveness.”

Still, he retained support in the Vatican. In 2004, a year before John Paul’s death, he was appointed archpriest of the Basilica of St Mary Major, one of four principal basilicas in the Italian capital.

Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston lawyer who has represented victims of the sex abuse scandal, said the Cardinal’s death had reopened old wounds.

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ROME
Agence France-Presse

December 20, 2017

Pope Francis paid his respects to the late US Cardinal Bernard Law on Wednesday, without mentioning the sex abuse scandal that forced the once-influential church figure to resign, an omission bound to rile victim associations.

“I raise prayers for the repose of his soul,” Francis said in a telegram after Law, 86, died in Rome.

The former Boston cardinal had fallen from grace after he allegedly shielded priests involved in a wide-reaching sex abuse scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church and eclipsed his long and at one-time venerated career.

It is traditional for the pope to issue a message of condolence and prayer after the death of the red-hatted church seniors.

But the telegram made no reference to the paedophilia scandal, and neither did the official biography issued by the Vatican.

The biography merely said that Law, who was appointed Archbishop of Boston by John Paul II in 1984 became “Archbishop emeritus of Boston, 13 December 2002”.

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ROME
Associated Press

December 20, 2017

Pope Francis sent a telegram of condolences Wednesday to the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, for the death of Cardinal Bernard Law and said he is praying for his soul.

The letter made no mention of Law’s role as the former archbishop of Boston, where he was responsible for covering up for sexually abusive priests in a scandal that erupted across the nation and eventually cost the American church some $3 billion in legal fees.

Rather, Francis’ telegram referred to Law’s final position as archpriest of the St Mary Major basilica in Rome.

In it Francis said: “I raise prayers for the repose of his soul, that the Lord, God who is rich in mercy, may welcome him in His eternal peace, and I send my apostolic blessing to those who share in mourning the passing of the cardinal.”

An advocacy group for survivors of sex abuse called for Pope Francis to keep survivors in mind when he celebrates Cardinal Bernard Law’s funeral Mass.

SNAP, which gained prominence as the US abuse scandal erupted in Law’s Boston in 2002, said no victim of sexual abuse will ever receive the same attention and pomp that Law received in life and is due to receive in death.

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