ABUSE TRACKER

VATICAN CITY
The Tablet (UK)

15 March 2016 | by Christopher Lamb in Rome

A priest has admitted giving confidential financial documents of the Holy See to journalists, but claimed he was not “fully lucid” when doing so.

Monsignor Angelo Lucio Vallejo Balda, who had sat on a top level papal commission overhauling Vatican finances and administration, was giving evidence in the so-called Vatileaks trial of five people, including two journalists.

The defendants, who face up to eight years in jail, are accused of breaking a Vatican law created by Pope Francis in 2013 criminalising leaking.

“Yes, I passed documents,” Mgr Vallejo Balda said under questioning yesterday. “I did it spontaneously, probably not fully lucid.”

He admitted to passing material to both Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi who both wrote books based on the documents, which revealed widespread financial mismanagement in the Vatican.

The 54-year-old Spanish priest said he gave Nuzzi – who made waves with the first Vatileaks scandal in 2012 – a five-page list of some 87 passwords to access the reform commission’s password-protected emails.

The priest claimed, however, that he was convinced Nuzzi already had access to the material.

Mgr Vallejo Balda also said he was under pressure from fellow defendant and member of the commission, Francesca Chaouqui, a 34-year-old PR expert.

He explained that he felt under pressure from Chaouqui who at one time he had been close to. He said he had felt “compromised” after she had once entered his hotel room in Florence. The relationship, however, turned sour and Mgr Vallejo Balda said she and her husband had sent him threatening text messages especially after the reform commission ended in 2015 and Chaouqui was left without work.

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VATICAN CITY
news.va

2016-03-15 Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) The trial of three former Vatican employees and two journalists resumed this week at the Vatican. The five defendants are charged with acquiring and publishing confidential documents of the Holy See.

Listen to Christopher Wells’ report:

Monday’s session of the so-called “Vatileaks 2” trial saw testimony from Monsignor Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, former secretary of the Prefecture of Economic Affairs, who is accused of giving confidential information to journalists.

Under questioning from the prosecutor and the presiding judge, Monsignor Vallejo Balda admitted to leaking documents and providing email passwords to the journalists. He said he was sometimes asked for documents, and sometimes had offered them spontaneously, but claimed he never handed over hard copies or more important documents.

Referring to witness testimony, the prosecutor, known as the Promoter of Justice, accused Vallejo Balda, with his assistant Nicola Maio and laywoman Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, of forming a kind of “shadow commission” within the prefecture. He also showed, from conversations on the “Whatsapp” messaging platform, the relationship between Vallejo Balda and journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi.

In his testimony the cleric maintained that the relationship between Chaouqui and himself was initially one of trust and confidence, but later became one of suspicion. Vallejo Balda said he felt pressured and used by Chaouqui, who has not yet had a chance to testify.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WJAC

BY ABBEY WAY TUESDAY, MARCH 15TH 2016

Attorney General Kathleen Kane said Tuesday she will announce at her 10:30 news conference criminal charges stemming from the Office of Attorney General’s investigation of the Blair-County based Franciscan Friars, Third Order Regulars, Province of the Immaculate Conception.

Kane’s office seized documents from the order last summer.

Brother Stephen Baker, a former athletic trainer at Bishop McCort High School in Johnstown, committed suicide at the monastery in January 2013.

That happened days after Youngstown, Ohio, church officials settled lawsuits filed by 11 students who claimed Baker molested them in the late 1980s.

That prompted more than 90 former students at Bishop McCort High School in Johnstown to settle abuse claims against Baker for more than $8 million.

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PENNSYLVANIA
NBC 10

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane says she’ll announce criminal charges involving a Franciscan religious order based in central Pennsylvania.

WATCH LIVE: Kane’s news conference will be carried LIVE on this page at 10:30 a.m.

Kane has a news conference scheduled for Tuesday morning. She’s not saying who’s being charged or what they’re accused of doing. But she says the investigation centers on the Franciscan Friars, Third Order Regular, Province of the Immaculate Conception, based near Hollidaysburg.
A phone call to the monastery wasn’t immediately returned early Tuesday.

Read more: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/Johnstown-Bishops-Child-Abuse-Kathleen-Kane-Franciscan-Order-372094482.html#ixzz42yaXzx27
Follow us: @nbcphiladelphia on Twitter | nbcphiladelphia on Facebook

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FRANCE
RFI

By David Roe

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has urged Cardinal Philippe Barbarin accused of covering up the sexual abuse of Scouts by a priest, to “take responsibility”. This as it emerged Tuesday that another complaint, this time in respect of abuses committed during the 1990s by a priest still active in the Lyon area, had been made in February.

“The only message I have, without … taking the place of the Church, of the judges — because an investigation is under way — is that he must take responsibility, speak and act,” Valls told the national TV station BFM TV.

“I expect not only words, but acts,” the prime minister added.
Barbarin is one of several senior officials being sued for the alleged cover-up.

Church Cover-up

He is accused of being aware that priest Bernard Preynat had been sexually abusing young boys between 1986 and 1991.

According to a statement from the dioceses of Lyon, the complaint that was lodged in February was made by a highly placed government official, aged 42, who is said to have developed suicidal tendencies as a result of the abuse.

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Eagle

[live stream to begin at 10:30 a.m.]

Associated Press

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Attorney General Kathleen Kane says she’ll announce criminal charges stemming involving a Franciscan religious order based in central Pennsylvania later Tuesday morning.

Kane’s not saying who’s being charged or what they’re accused of doing. But Kane says the investigation centers on the Franciscan Friars, Third Order Regular, Province of the Immaculate Reception based near Hollidaysburg. A phone call to the monastery wasn’t immediately returned.

Kane’s office seized documents from the order last summer and Brother Stephen Baker stabbed himself in the heart at the monastery in January 2013.

That happened days after Youngstown, Ohio church officials settled lawsuits filed by 11 students who claimed Baker molested them in the late 1980s. That prompted more than 90 former students at Bishop McCort High School in Johnstown to settle abuse claims against Baker for more than $8 million.

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NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph

Lives have been shortened by abuse in residential homes, a survivor has said.

Many of the boys and girls are no longer alive today, Jon McCourt from Survivors North West added, claiming the defenceless children had a right to truth and justice.

Mr McCourt was a resident in St Joseph’s Catholic home (Termonbacca) in Derry and said he was beaten by a nun for being left -handed.

“For many survivors, the effects of the abuse have been long-lasting and harm has been passed down the generations.

“We not only expect a full apology for what was done to us, but also an acknowledgement that government has a responsibility to right those wrongs.”

Mr McCourt waived his right to anonymity to tell the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) Inquiry how he was punished for being left-handed.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Philly.com

March 15, 2016 — 7:35 AM EDT

by Staff Report

Attorney General Kathleen Kane will announce “criminal charges related to a major investigation” of a religious order this morning during a stop in Johnstown.

The announcement about the Franciscans, set for 10:30 a.m. at the University of Pittsburgh’s Johnstown Living Learning Center, comes two weeks after Kane released a grand jury report accusing dozens of priests in the Roman Catholic diocese of Altoona-Johnstown of either sexually abusing children or covering up the abuse.

After a two-year investigation, a statewide grand jury found that hundreds of children were abused over 40 years, while several diocesan leaders hid the horrors to protect the priests.

Two weeks ago, Kane said many of the crimes couldn’t be prosecuted because many alleged abusers had died, the statute of limitations for the crimes expired, and many victims remained too traumatized to testify in court.

To view a livestream of her news conference, go to: http://pacast.com/players/live_ag.asp

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UNITED KINGDOM
Wigan Today

A Catholic priest was today due to appear before magistrates to face historical sex abuse charges relating to his time at a former Wigan seminary.

Father Michael Higginbottom, who worked at St Joseph’s College in Up Holland throughout the 1970s, has been charged with six offences relating to two victims under the age of 16.

The 72-year-old, of West Farm Road, Newcastle, is due at Ormskirk Magistrates’ Court today having been charged last month following an investigation by Lancashire Police.

He is currently suspended from his post at a church in the North East, a spokesman for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle told the Evening Post.

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FRANCE
Le Figaro

[EXCLUSIVE – Pierre, now aged 42, says he was a victim of sexual touching at age 16 by Father Jerome Billioud. His lawsuit, filed in 2009, was closed due to prescription. He said Cardinal Philippe Barbarin knew about the priest’s abuse but did nothing to remove him from access to other children. The question is raised whether this scandal could be the “Spotlight” on the French church.]

EXCLUSIF – Pierre, aujourd’hui âgé de 42 ans, affirme avoir été victime d’attouchements sexuels à 16 ans par le père Jérôme Billioud. Sa plainte, déposée en 2009, a été classée pour cause de prescription.

Serait-ce le début d’un Spotlightà la française? Le film américain, tout juste primé aux Oscars, raconte la mise au jour des pratiques de prêtres pédophiles couverts par l’Église catholique dans la région de Boston. Aujourd’hui en France, le scandale touche Lyon. Et Pierre -qui souhaite pour l’heure conserver l’anonymat-, livre au Figaro un nouveau témoignage.

Il affirme qu’à 16 ans, il a été victime des attouchements d’un prêtre lyonnais. À 42 ans aujourd’hui, il occupe un poste de premier plan dans un ministère. Avec calme et émotion, il raconte comment il a été abusé par le père Jérôme Billioud, de l’ensemble paroissial La Croix Rousse. Le prêtre est notamment connu pour avoir célébré une messe le 21 janvier 2011 pour la mort de Louis XVI avec l’Action française. Pierre soutient que le cardinal Barbarin «n’a rien fait pour éloigner ce prêtre des autres enfants ». Sa plainte, déposée en 2009, a été classée pour cause de prescription. Mais dans les souvenirs de Pierre, les années n’ont pas prescrit la souffrance. Pis, les témoignages des anciens de Saint-Luc ont «réveillé un certain nombre de choses », explique-t-il. C’est pourquoi le 12 février, il a contacté le procureur de la République de Lyon. Deux jours plus tard, il lui a envoyé une lettre. Pierre doit être réentendu prochainement par la justice. À Lyon, une enquête préliminaire est ouverte pour «non-dénonciation de crime » et «mise en danger de la vie d’autrui ».

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FRANCE
Marianne

[Already in turmoil with the case of priest Bernard Preynat, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyon is accused on Tuesday, March 15 in “Le Figaro” of covering another pedophile priest.]

Déjà dans la tourmente avec l’affaire Bernard Preynat, l’archevêque de Lyon Philippe Barbarin est accusé ce mardi 15 mars dans “Le Figaro” d’avoir couvert un autre prêtre pédophile.

Le diocèse de Lyon est plus que jamais dans la tourmente. Le Figaro daté de ce mardi 15 mars publie un nouveau témoignage accablant pour le cardinal Philippe Barbarin. Pierre, 42 ans, affirme au quotidien avoir été victime d’attouchements d’un prêtre lyonnais de l’ensemble paroissial La Croix Rousse, le père Jérôme Billioud, lorsqu’il avait 16 ans. Il a déposé une plainte à l’encontre de l’archevêque de Lyon, déjà dans le collimateur après les révélations d’anciens scouts victimes d’attouchements d’un autre prêtre du diocèse.

Pierre raconte qu’au début des années 1990, il a rencontré ce prêtre lors d’un pèlerinage à Lourdes. “Il était comme un grand frère, un père de substitution”, explique-t-il. Or, dans une chambre d’hôtel à Biarritz, “le père Billioud a commencé à se frotter et à se masturber contre moi. J’étais très gêné, je ne savais pas quoi faire, j’ai fini par dormir par terre et j’ai fait comme si rien ne s’était passé”, se souvient-il.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Care Appointments

Press Association

Direct Government intervention with South Yorkshire Police is needed to improve the force’s performance when dealing with the sexual abuse of children, the Lords heard.

Lib Dem peer Lord Scriven expressed concern at the way exploitation cases had been treated in the police area during Lords question time.

“Will the Minister seriously consider direct intervention by the Government in South Yorkshire Police’s performance in dealing with child sexual exploitation?

“This has been highlighted by the recent report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which said that South Yorkshire Police still needs to make major improvements. …

Conservative peer Lord Lexden raised concerns about the Church of England.

“Is it not essential that all agencies involved in protecting children investigate allegations of sexual abuse fully, fairly and openly? Will my noble friend agree that the more stringent procedures now required of bodies such as our school inspectorates and the Church of England authorities represent real progress?

“However, are we yet in a position to place total confidence in the church authorities? They failed to give an adequate account of the process which led them to accept last October the veracity of a single uncorroborated complaint of child sexual abuse made against one of our greatest, most venerated bishops, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, who died in 1958. He was a man held in the highest regard in this House during his 20 years of service to it and the nation,” Lord Lexden said.

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Nicole Chettle

A man who was sexually abused as a child at an exclusive Sydney Catholic boarding school said he would have preferred for all of the matters against his assailant to have been heard at the same time, an inquiry has heard.

The survivor, known as CDR, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney he was abused in 1984 at St Joseph’s College, but wished his matter had gone to trial with five other abuse victims.

Counsel assisting the commission Jeremy Kirk SC told the hearing Brother John Denis Maguire was found not guilty on 17 counts of child sexual abuse, after six trials and two retrials in 2003 and 2004.

Maguire was later found guilty of child sex offences against another boy and in March 2015 he was sentenced to three years’ jail, with a non-parole period of one year and nine months.

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VATICAN CITY
BBC News

A Spanish priest has admitted to leaking classified Vatican documents to journalists, saying he had felt intimidated.

Monsignor Angel Lucio Vallejo Balda has said he was manipulated by a woman co-defendant with whom he was romantically entangled.

He was questioned as the so-called Vatileaks II trial resumed.

It centres on two books that depict a Vatican plagued by graft and where Pope Francis faces resistance to his agenda.

The books came out last year and were based on the leaked information. The five people on trial face jail terms of up to eight years.

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

March 15, 2016

Jane Lee
Legal affairs, health and science reporter

Child sexual abuse survivors have joined the Catholic Church to call on the Turnbull government to commit to a national redress scheme, fearing they will receive different levels of compensation, depending on where they were abused, through state-run schemes.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse last year recommended the federal government establish a single national redress scheme for 60,000 survivors, which it said was “the most effective structure for ensuring justice for survivors” and the most cost-efficient model. The “next-best option” was for state and territory governments to run their own schemes, it said.

Social Services Minister Christian Porter told Parliament earlier this month that the government was working on a nationally consistent approach for state and territory schemes. This was because a single national scheme would require all states and territories to agree to it and South Australia had already indicated it did not.

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HAWAII
Honolule Civil Beat

Editor’s Note: Civil Beat generally does not use anonymous sources, as noted in our long-standing policy. We’re making an exception here because of the importance of hearing a sexual abuse victim’s perspective, and the fact that court records, including a settlement with the Catholic Church, do not reveal his identity.

“I consider myself one of the lucky ones,” says a man who recently settled a sex abuse case against the Catholic Church.

MG, as he’s referred to in court records that keep his identify secret, says he feels “lucky” because after decades of battling alcoholism, drug addiction, mood disorders and depression, he’s at the point where he can begin to forgive three Catholic priests he says sexually assaulted him when he was too young to stop them.

“To me, it is like they killed the kid in me. There is a part of me that was a kid and he died,” says MG.

On Jan. 21, the Diocese of Honolulu, the Associated Sulpicians of the United States and the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers reached a mediated settlement with MG for an undisclosed amount.

He is one of 63 people who have sued Hawaii’s Catholic Church and the religious orders overseeing parishes and schools, where they allege they were sexually attacked when they were children.

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CONNECTICUT
Hartford Courant

Dave Altimari

A pastor at a Baptist Church in New Haven was allowed to continue leading his church for five years while on the state sex offender registry after a child-molestation conviction, letters from church officials and state court records show.

It was only after his second arrest — in 2014 on child pornography charges — that Eli Echevarria stepped down from leading El Calvario Baptist Church, according to the letters and court records.

Church leaders, who operate independently of the central Baptist governing authority in Connecticut, have not responded to multiple requests for comment. Echevarria is serving a two-year prison sentence.

But the case and the way it was handled have sparked criticism of the church’s governing authority.

The fact that American Baptist Churches of Connecticut, the church’s ruling body, never informed other pastors of Echevarria’s history came to the attention of William Keane, pastor at First Baptist Church of Branford, after Echevarria began attending his church.

Keane criticized the statewide church’s handling of Echevarria’s situation, including a policy put in place after Echevarria’s second conviction that requires state church officials to run the names of all pastors through the state’s sex offender registry list at least once every two years.

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PENNSYLVANIA
York Daily Record

Brandie Kessler, bkessler@ydr.com

State Rep. Mark Rozzi stood inside the capitol rotunda Monday and pressured lawmakers, specifically State Rep. Ronald Marsico, to reform the state’s statute of limitations on child sexual abuse.

For years, proposed legislation to change the statute of limitations in Pennsylvania, has not made it out of the house judiciary committee, which Marsico, R-Dauphin, chairs. Rozzi said that needs to change, and the proposed legislation needs to be voted on.

“We will jam up the (judiciary) committee, we will stop the committee from functioning if we have to,” Rozzi, D-Berks, told a crowd of dozens, including many who came specifically for the reform rally. “We’re just asking, basically, Chairman Ron Marsico to do his job, and that’s to pass that bill out (of) committee to protect the victims, the children of this commonwealth.”

Among the people standing behind Rozzi was Kristen Pfautz Woolley, founder of Turning Point Women’s Counseling and Advocacy Center in York. She is a survivor of child sexual abuse.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Centre Daily Times

BY CATE HANSBERRY
chansberry@centredaily.com

In the wake of a grand jury report on abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese released earlier this month, state representatives, adult victims of child sexual abuse and advocates gathered Monday at the Capitol to push for statute of limitations reform.

Led by Rep. Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, the rally in the Capitol Rotunda was held to demonstrate public support of efforts to revise child sex abuse statute of limitations laws to allow adult victims to prosecute their abusers.

According to the grand jury investigation, priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese sexually abused hundreds of children over about 40 years. The report alleges that religious leaders worked to cover up the abuse.

Due to statute of limitations laws, the case cannot be prosecuted.

“First it was Boston, then Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and the pattern repeats itself in Altoona-Johnstown,” Rozzi, who was a victim of child sexual abuse, said. “The only way this ends is if we make it loud and clear to child rapists and those who harbor them, that they can no longer hide.”

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MINNESOTA
Duluth News Tribune

By Tom Olsen on Mar 14, 2016

The Diocese of Duluth is expected to enter mediation this summer with representatives of dozens of alleged victims of child sexual abuse, as the parties seek to reach an amicable agreement in the diocese’s ongoing bankruptcy case.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel approved a motion to appoint Gregg Zive as a mediator to work with the diocese, its insurers and attorneys representing claimants.

Zive, a bankruptcy judge in Arizona who has experience handling diocesan bankruptcies, was mutually recommended by the diocese and St. Paul-based Jeff Anderson and Associates, the law firm representing most of its creditors.

Kressel said Zive is not expected to be available until June, which places the likely start date after the May 25 deadline for abuse victims to file claims in bankruptcy court.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

By Karen Langley / Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau

HARRISBURG — In the wake of a grand jury report alleging extensive child sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, Attorney General Kathleen Kane and other state leaders called Monday for legislators to change statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse.

After changes in 2002 and 2006 following abuse scandals, victims of child sexual abuse in Pennsylvania can now bring criminal cases until their 50th birthdays and civil lawsuits until their 30th birthdays.

Speaking in the Capitol, Ms. Kane called for an end of limitations for criminal and civil cases.

“We ask ourselves as a society, who are we?” she said. ”Do we protect our children? Do we make sure that child sexual abusers never stop looking over their shoulder? Or do we protect the rapists?”

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AUSTRALIA
Star Weekly

March 15, 2016

by Matt Crossman

More church abuse survivors from Sunbury have spoken up in the wake of Cardinal George Pell’s Royal Commission appearance.

Sunbury’s Paul Levey, who was in Rome when Cardinal Pell gave evidence via videolink, said he had been inundated with calls and emails since returning last week.

Some were from men who were talking for the first time after being abused while students at Salesian College.

‘‘More brothers, priests and teachers who were at Salesian have been named, and I know for sure they’ve not been previously named or charged,’’ Mr Levey said.

“There’s been a 25 per cent increase in calls to the Centre Against Sexual Assault in Ballarat … Sunbury, now, has just exploded.’’

A large number of Salesian College principals, boarding masters and brothers who were at the college between 1960 and 1990 have faced courts on scores of sexual abuse charges.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Tribune-Review

BY BRAD BUMSTED | Monday, March 14, 2016

HARRISBURG — Attorney General Kathleen Kane on Tuesday will announce criminal charges related to a “major investigation” in Johnstown about two weeks after a statewide grand jury report detailed child sex abuse by priests and cover-ups by bishops in the Altoona-Johnstown region.

Kane attended a news conference Monday in Harrisburg to advocate for legislation that would extend the amount of time prosecutors have to bring charges in sexual abuse cases. She would not say whether the upcoming charges are related to the grand jury report, but she told reporters her office has received 150 calls on a hotline established to collect tips about the grand jury’s allegations.

The report said hundreds of children had been abused by priests during four decades.

“I can’t comment on any further cases we might have,” Kane said when asked whether secret archives detailing abuse and seized by search warrant in the Altoona-Johnstown case would be available from other diocese offices.

Pennsylvania’s statutes of limitations are “mediocre” compared with other states, a legal expert said.

Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School and at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said legislators in Pennsylvania and New York haven’t made it a priority to eliminate criminal and civil statutes of limitation and allow a two-year “window” to file lawsuits from the date a bill is passed.

“It’s primarily the effect of the Catholic Conference (lobbying against changes),” said Hamilton, who has studied statutes in abuse cases.

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NEW MEXICO
Albuquerque Journal

By Albuquerque Journal Editorial Board
Tuesday, March 15th, 2016

Catholic Church leaders often take public positions, staking out what to them is the high moral ground and calling for action on a wide range of social issues ranging from immigrant rights to climate change to abortion to food stamp rules.

But their high road has developed a significant pothole from the refusal to make public the church records involved in the Gallup diocese’s bankruptcy case, including personnel files of alleged pedophile priests.

In 2013, Gallup was the ninth Roman Catholic diocese in the U.S. to file for Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy in response to civil lawsuits filed by alleged victims of clerical sex abuse.

A Phoenix attorney who has filed 13 such lawsuits against the Gallup diocese says the records are critical to reaching a settlement in the bankruptcy case in which 57 people have filed claims.

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FRANCE
Times LIVE (South Africa)

AFP | 15 March, 2016

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls urged a cardinal accused of covering up the sexual abuse of Scouts by a priest, to “take responsibility” in a case which has shocked France.

“The only message I have, without … taking the place of the Church, of the judges — because an investigation is underway — is that he must take responsibility, speak and act,” Valls told BFM TV.

Asked whether he meant Cardinal Philippe Barbarin should resign, Valls said: “It is his responsibility, but he must also understand the pain.”

“I expect not only words, but acts,” the prime minister added.

Barbarin is one of several senior officials being sued for the alleged cover-up.

He is accused of being aware that priest Bernard Preynat had been sexually abusing young boys between 1986 and 1991.

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FRANCE
The Local

A French cardinal at the centre of a paedophile scandal came under renewed pressure on Tuesday when another witness accused him of covering up sex abuse and the French PM told him to take responsibility for his actions.

Bishops from across France met in the sanctuary of Lourdes for their annual behind-closed-doors conference on Tuesday, just as a paedophile rocked the catholic church and beyond.

At the centre of the scandal is Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who is being sued as part of an alleged cover-up of sex abuse on boy scouts by a priest in the late 1980s.

On Tuesday Barbarin was hit by new allegations that he covered for a second priest that was accused of sexual abuse in 2009 relating to incidents years earlier.

In an interview with Le Figaro newspaper, the victim said Barbarin was aware of the abuse the priest had carried out, but did nothing.

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CONNECTICUT
Valley Independent Sentinel

BY Ethan Fry | MAR 14, 2016

Detectives probing embezzlement allegations at a Seymour Catholic church spent nearly a year following a paper trail in the case, tracking much of the money from local bank accounts to locations as far-flung as Canada and central Africa.

Their conclusion? The Rev. Honore Kombo, the parish priest of St. Augustine’s on Washington Avenue, had taken tens of thousands of dollars intended for the church and used it for other purposes.

In interviews with police, Kombo told cops that he had “no ill intentions.” He said the money he took went to support programs in his native Congo, and would be paid back.

“It is very unfortunate what I did and I’m deeply sorry but it was not for ill intention and I’m responsible for it,” Kombo is quoted in an arrest warrant as telling detectives. “I will accept whatever the law sees fit in cases like this.”

Seymour police charged Kombo with first-degree larceny Feb. 29.

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
Catholic News Agency

Vatican City, Mar 14, 2016 / 05:37 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- During a Vatican City trial on Monday over a case in which five individuals are accused of leaking and disseminating confidential financial documents, a former Vatican official said he relayed documents only under duress.

“Yes, I passed documents,” Msgr. Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, a former secretary of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs, told Vatican prosecutors March 14. “I was convinced I was in a situation without exit.”

Msgr. Vallejo claimed he felt trapped by “the powerful world behind” Francesca Chaouqui – another of the defendants in the trial.

Chaouqui, a public relations expert, was a member of a committee formed by Pope Francis in 2013 to help reform Vatican finances. The committee, COSEA, has since been dissolved.

The three other defendants are Nicola Maio, Msgr. Vallejo’s secretary, and the journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi.

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 Age

March 15, 2016

Cameron Houston

Another Melbourne Catholic Church historically linked with a prominent paedophile priest has been targeted in an attempted arson attack.

St Bede’s Church in Balwyn North was broken into about 4.30am on Sunday morning, but the intruder is understood to have fled the Severn Street property after an alarm was activated.

Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne spokesman, Shane Healy confirmed that a window had been broken and accelerant poured around the alter, but no fire had been lit.

Mass on Sunday morning was relocated to an adjoining building following the failed arson attempt.

On Sunday night police arrested a man, believed to be a victim of clerical abuse, who was questioned but released without charge.

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.

PENNSYLVANIA
The Morning Call

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane will announce “criminal charges related to a major investigation” during a Johnstown stop Tuesday, her office said Monday.

Kane’s second local news conference this month will begin at 10:30 a.m. at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown Living Learning Center.

The AG’s office did not confirm what subject will be discussed.

On March 1, Kane held a press conference at the Blair County Convention Center during which she discussed a grand jury report that accused the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown of perpetrating a decades-long cover-up to protect dozens of priests and other religious leaders who allegedly sexually abused children.

The document noted that the large investigation started when the attorney general’s office began looking into allegations made against Brother Stephen Baker – who, in his role as an athletic trainer, reportedly abused dozens of students at what was formally called Bishop McCort High School. But the document did not provide any additional information about the Baker case.

“The question is really whether more evidence has surfaced indicating Brother Baker sexually abused children in Pennsylvania or prior to Pennsylvania,” said Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston attorney who represented more than 30 of the victims from Bishop McCort.

Garabedian said because of the “enormity” of the information involved in cases, such as the one involving Baker, the diocese and local law enforcement, it is “not unusual that press conferences would take place in close proximity to each other.”

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VATICAN CITY
Religion News Service

Rosie Scammell | March 14, 2016

VATICAN CITY (RNS) A Spanish priest has confessed to leaking secret Vatican information to journalists, telling a Holy See court he felt trapped and in danger, especially from an Italian co-worker he had fallen for.

Monsignor Angelo Lucio Vallejo Balda told the court on Monday (March 14) that he passed information to two Italian journalists, Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, who in November published books featuring the confidential documents on Vatican financial misfeasance and Pope Francis’ efforts to overhaul the system.

“Yes, I passed documents,” said Vallejo, who was appointed to a commission tasked with advising the pope on reforming the Vatican administration. “I did it spontaneously, probably not fully lucid,” the Associated Press reported.

Included in the information he gave to Nuzzi was a five-page document containing 87 passwords which gave the reporter access to the committee’s work.

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome

A Spanish monsignor who is on trial for disclosing classified church documents admitted on Monday that he passed information on to journalists but suggested he was coerced into it by a woman he had a relationship with.

“Yes, I passed documents,” Lucio Vallejo Balda said in response to questions from a Vatican prosecutor. “I did it spontaneously, probably not fully lucid.”

He added that he had handed “87 passwords” over to a journalist at a time when he was being treated for depression and stress.

“I was convinced I was in a situation without exit,” he said.

It was a critical admission in a trial against the Spanish prelate and four others – including two journalists – who technically face up to eight years in jail following accusations that they disseminated classified information about mismanagement of Vatican funds.

It has also pitted Balda against a former colleague on a special papal commission in which both had been tasked with the job of investigating the church’s murky finances: a laywoman and PR executive named Francesca Chaouqui.

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WASHINGTON
KIRO

Updated: Mar 14, 2016

Protesters held signs and childhood photos in a demonstration to the Seattle archdiocese on Monday.

Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said they want abuse documents disclosed.

The Archdiocese of Seattle released a list of clergy child sex abusers in January. It listed dozens of people who served from 1923 to 2008: 30 archdiocesans, 16 religious priests, 14 religious brothers, one religious sister, two deacons and 14 priests from other dioceses.

See below for map of churches, schools and hospitals in Washington where child sex abusers, serving as priests, worked on assignment. Read the list here.

Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain apologized on behalf of those who abused minors in a news release after the list was released.

“I will continue to pray for all survivors of sexual abuse, and deeply regret that vulnerable individuals in the church’s care have been harmed,” Sartain wrote.

In a news release to KIRO 7 about Monday’s planned protest, SNAP said it wants Sartain to add four more priests to his list. The group also believes that abusive nuns, seminarians and lay staff should be added.

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VATICAN CITY
Straits Times

VATICAN CITY (AFP) – A Spanish priest at the centre of a controversial Vatican leaks trial admitted on Monday to passing classified documents to the press but insisted he had acted under emotional blackmail from a female colleague with whom he was romantically entangled.

“Yes, I sent documents to journalists, I handed over a list of five pages with 87 passwords,” Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda told a Holy See court.

The Spanish Vatican official said he had not been “fully lucid” when he leaked the documents and had since been treated by a psychiatrist for depression and stress.

Vallejo Balda described his former colleague, Italian PR consultant Francesca Chaouqui, as a dangerous and manipulative woman who had cooerced him into leaking the documents by threatening to reveal an intense relationship between them.

“I was certain that there were illegitimate interests behind Chaouqui,” he told the court, revealing that he believed his colleague and her husband to have been working for the Italian secret services.

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

VATICAN CITY | BY PHILIP PULLELLA

A Vatican prelate on Monday admitted in court he had leaked confidential documents to the media and said he had been manipulated into it by a woman co-defendant who claimed she was a spy.

After an adjournment of more than three months, Spanish Monsignor Angel Lucio Vallejo Balda was questioned at the resumption of the so-called “Vatileaks II” trial.

Vallejo and four other people are on trial in the case, which centers on the publication last year of two books based on leaked documents that depict a Vatican plagued by graft and where Pope Francis faces stiff resistance to his agenda.

Pressed by the prosecution and the court president on whether he had leaked documents, Vallejo said “yes”. He also said he had given the author of one of the books some 85 passwords to access electronic documents and email accounts in the Vatican.

Most of the three hours of the questioning of Vallejo, a 54-year-old Spaniard, revolved around his relationship with Francesca Chaouqui, 35, a married public relations consultant.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane

3/14/2016

Monday, March 14, 2016

Attorney General Kane Press Office / 717-787-5211
press@attorneygeneral.gov
Twitter: @PaAttorneyGen

***ADVISORY***

TOMORROW: ATTORNEY GENERAL KANE TO ANNOUNCE CRIMINAL CHARGES RELATED TO MAJOR INVESTIGATION

WHAT:
News conference announcing criminal charges related to a major investigation conducted by the Office of Attorney General

WHO:
Kathleen G. Kane, Pennsylvania Attorney General

WHEN:
Tuesday, March 15 at 10:30 a.m.

WHERE:
University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Heritage Hall within the Living-Learning Center, 450 Schoolhouse Road, Johnstown, Pa. 15904

LIVESTREAM:
http://pacast.com/players/live_ag.asp

SATELLITE COORDINATES:
EVENT: Attorney General

TIME: 10:15 to 11:00 (Eastern)

FORMAT: 16 x 9 HD 720p

SATELLITE: AMC – 9 (KU-Band – DIGITAL)

ORBITAL POSITION: 83 Degrees West

TRANSPONDER: K 23

CHANNEL: A/B (18Mhz)

SYM RATE: 13.235 msps

FEC: 3/4

BIT RATE: 18.295441

DOWNLINK POL: Horizontal

DOWNLINK FREQ: 12151.00 MHz

Modulation Type: DVB-S, QPSK

TROUBLE: 717-772-4282

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PENNSYLVANIA
WFMZ

HARRISBURG, Pa. – Victims of child sexual abuse and their advocates gathered beneath the Capitol dome in Harrisburg on Monday.

Led by Pennsylvania Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Berks County Democrat who, himself, was abused as a child, they called on the full House of Representatives to take up a pair of bills that would reform child sex abuse statute of limitations.

Rozzi cited a pattern of child sex abuse cases continuing to be revealed across the country, the most recent one being in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, where a grand jury found that hundreds of children were sexually abused for at least 40 years.

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PENNSYLVANIA
CBS Philly

By Tony Romeo

HARRISBURG, Pa. (CBS) — Advocates say they believe the grand jury report about abuse by priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese is a tipping point in their effort to eliminate the statute of limitations in child sex abuse cases.

Advocates have been trying for more than a decade to enact legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations for both criminal and civil cases of child sex abuse. At a state capitol event Monday, Attorney General Kathleen Kane was among those who argued for a change in the law.

“That those who prey on our children know that you’ll never get a free pass,” Kane said.

Brenda Dick, identified as a victim of the Altoona-Johnstown abuse, made a personal plea for action.

“It is a life sentence,” Dick said. “I’m not asking, I’m begging.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
PennLive

By Ivey DeJesus | idejesus@pennlive.com

HARRISBURG – Calling the latest grand jury investigation into clergy sex abuse a tipping point in their cause, a cadre of advocates for victims of child sexual abuse on Monday continued to seize the momentum created by that report to reiterate calls for reform in the statute of limitations.

Led by Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Berks County Democrat and clergy sex abuse survivor, the advocates, flanked by several dozen survivors, made impassioned appeals at the podium that thundered throughout the Main Rotunda of the state Capitol.

“To my colleagues in this building, I urge you to stand with me and pass our bills. Let’s get this done,” said Rozzi, who is pushing legislation sponsored by Rep. Tom Murt (R- Montgomery/Phila.) calling for a two-year window in the law to allow victims whose legal bounds have expired to seek legal redress for their abuse.

“They want their truth to come out and I’m here to fight for their justice,” Rozzi said.

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PENNSYLVANIA
WJAC

BY RON MUSSELMAN MONDAY, MARCH 14TH 2016

Attorney General Kathleen Kane will be in Johnstown Tuesday morning to announce criminal charges related to a major investigation.

Pennsylvania’s top prosecutor has not said what the announcement is about, but it’s widely speculated the charges are related to findings from a grand jury report released by Kane two weeks ago.

That 147-page report claimed two Roman Catholic bishops in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown helped cover up the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by over 50 priests or religious leaders over a 40-year period.

Kane has said none of the alleged criminal acts can be prosecuted because some abusers have died, statutes of limitations have run their course and victims are too traumatized to testify.

Tuesday’s news conference will be held at Pitt-Johnstown’s Heritage Hall at 10:30 a.m.

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PENNSYLVANIA
We Are Central PA

Attorney General Kathleen Kane will be in Johnstown Tuesday to announce criminal charges.

Kane’s office is not being specific, only that this is related to a major investigation.

There is speculation that it will be related to the sex abuse cover-up inside the Altoona Johnstown Catholic Diocese.

At least 50 priests are accused of abusing hundreds of children, but no charges can be filed because many of the priests have died or the statute of limitations has expired.

Kane’s news conference is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at Pitt Johnstown’s Heritage Hall.

Monday in Harrisburg, a group rallied to change the statute of limitations law.

Reiterating a pledge made in the wake of a grand jury report documenting rampant child sexual abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown diocese, state Rep. Frank Burns today joined a cadre of lawmakers who implored their peers to change the state’s outmoded statute of limitations laws for such crimes.

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ILLINOIS
Jeff Anderson & Associates

Sexual Abuse Survivor of Fr. Albert Wehby Files Lawsuit Against Melkite-Greek Catholic Church

Jane Doe 247 will be present to answer questions, discuss her experience and
why she feels it’s important to share her story

Doe 247 Complaint
Albert Wehby Assignment Timeline
Albert Wehby picture 1
Albert Wehby picture 2

What: At a news conference on Monday, attorneys Jeff Anderson and Marc Pearlman will:

* Announce a civil lawsuit on behalf of Jane Doe 247 who was sexually abused as a young girl by Fr. Albert Wehby. The lawsuit names the Melkite-Greek Catholic Church and St. John the Baptist in Northlake, IL as defendants. Jane Doe 247 was sexually abused by Wehby at St. John the Baptist in Northlake in the 1990s when she was 14 to 17 years old.

* Discuss the lawsuit against the Melkite-Greek Catholic Church which alleges that Wehby’s abuse of Jane Doe 247 resulted from the organization’s negligence and concealment of information about the danger of sexual abuse by Wehby and others in the Melkite-Greek organization. By refusing to publicly release information on abusers, the Melkites continue to put children at risk.

* Urge the Melkites to come clean and take responsibility for their actions and failures.

WHEN: Monday, March 14, 2016 at 1:00 P.M. CST

WHERE: Law Offices of Kerns, Frost & Pearlman and Jeff Anderson & Associates
30 West Monroe
Suite 1600
Chicago, IL 60603

Notes:
All documents will be available online Monday prior to the press event at ww.abusedinchicago.com and www.andersonadvocates.com.

Contact Jeff Anderson: Office: 651.318.2650 Mobile: 612.817.8665
Contact Marc Pearlman: Office: 312.261.4550 Mobile: 773.368.0142

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ILLINOIS
CBS Chicago

By Lisa Fielding

(CBS) — A 34-year-old woman, known only as Jane Doe 247, says she was sexually abused by a priest at St. John’s The Baptist Church in Northlake from the ages of 14 to 17.

“I was stunned the first time he touched me inappropriately. I didn’t know what to think. He was a man of the cloth,” Jane Doe tearfully recalled.

Now, she is suing the parish and the Melkite-Greek Catholic Church.

“It is the diocese and the parish that she was at St. John’s that could have and should have done something more than what they did,” said attorney Jeff Anderson.

Anderson says the abuse happened between 1995-1998 and that parish and other clerics knew was going on.

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MEXICO
La Prensa

[Oaxaca archdiocese is accused of covering up sexual abuse of 100 indigenous children: Mexico.]

La Arquidiócesis del Estado sureño de Oaxaca enfrenta acusaciones de encubrir a un sacerdote que abusó de más de 100 niños indígenas en una década y de ejercer represalias contra otros curas que presentaron denuncias en su contra.

La denuncia forma parte del legado del Departamento de Investigaciones sobre Abusos Religiosos (DIAR) y el Centro de Investigaciones del Instituto Cristiano Mexicano (ICM), que hace tres años reveló que el 30% (4 mil 200) de los 14 mil 000 sacerdotes católicos que existen en México han cometido algún tipo de abuso sexual.

Organizaciones civiles y familiares de las víctimas acusaron al arzobispo de Oaxaca, José Luis Chávez, de ocultarle al Vaticano las pruebas del abuso de niños indígenas y de negarse a escuchar a las víctimas.

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UNITED STATES
First Things

by William Doino Jr.
3 . 14 . 16

When Spotlight, the critically acclaimed film about the Boston Globe’s investigation into clergy sexual abuse, won best picture at this year’s Oscars, producer Michael Sugar accepted the award with a message:

This film gave a voice to survivors and this Oscar amplifies that voice which we hope will become a choir that will resonate all the way to the Vatican. Pope Francis, it is time to protect the children, and restore the faith.

That statement was welcomed by many victims of clergy abuse, who believe the movie’s success validates their long fight for justice; but it was also criticized for leaving the impression that the Church has done nothing to combat sexual abuse since the Globe’s 2001-2002 investigation. As Joan Desmond, who covered the abuse crisis extensively, commented:

Did the producer stop researching this topic after the Globe published its page-one stories about the cover-up in Boston more than a decade earlier? Is Michael Sugar unaware that since 2002 the Church has mounted a massive campaign to establish and implement ambitious guidelines for the protection of children and young people?

It’s a necessary question, but it’s also fair to ask whether Pope Francis, for all the excellent things he has said and done about fighting the evil of clergy sexual abuse, has lived up to all his promises. The answer, at least at this point, is no. And there are fears that he may be backsliding.

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TEXAS
Star Tribune

Associated Press MARCH 14, 2016

EDINBURG, Texas — An 83-year-old former priest has pleaded not guilty to murder for the slaying of a South Texas teacher and ex-beauty queen more than a half century ago.

John Feit used a walker as he arrived in court Monday in Hidalgo County. He’s accused of the April 1960 beating and suffocation of 25-year-old Irene Garza.

State District Judge Luis Singleterry set bond at $1 million.

Feit was returned to Texas last week from Phoenix, where he was jailed since his arrest last month after prosecutors said they had new evidence against him. The nature of that evidence hasn’t been disclosed. He long had been suspected in her death.

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DELAWARE
UDaily

12:38 p.m., March 14, 2016–The editor for the Boston Globe team of investigative journalists that uncovered the Catholic Church’s child sex-abuse scandal, won a Pulitzer Prize and was portrayed in the movie Spotlight will speak at the University of Delaware on Tuesday, March 22.

Walter V. Robinson’s talk, at 7 p.m. in Mitchell Hall on UD’s Newark campus, is sponsored by the Department of English and is free and open to the public.

Robinson, played by Michael Keaton in the Academy Award “Best Picture” winning film, will tell the story of the newspaper’s 2001 investigation and share his thoughts about the film. Earlier in the day, he will speak with UD journalism students and faculty.

A Globe veteran, Robinson was the editor of the paper’s investigative Spotlight Team for seven years, including the reporting project that exposed a pattern of sexual abuse of children by priests in the Boston area and a decades-long cover-up of those crimes. The work sparked similar investigations and disclosures across the country and around the world and won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler Mar 14, 2016

For anyone who has been following the sex-abuse scandal in the American Catholic Church, the Pennsylvania grand-jury report on the failures of the Altoona diocese follows a depressingly familiar pattern. There are the priests who molest adolescents (virtually always boys), the treatment centers that give the predators clean bills of health, enabling them to find more prey. But in the whole sad 145-page report (which is embedded in this Post-Gazette report there are also some remarkable new features:

Appeals to emotions. A grand jury’s proper function is to determine whether or not there is adequate evidence to justify criminal charges. In this case the grand jury decided that there was not, because the statute of limitations bars prosecution of crimes from the distant past. But this report is not a dispassionate, factual document; it is clearly written with a goal of rousing public outrage. The pages are laced with moral (as opposed to legal) judgments, and the prose occasionally turns purple. “A man not fit to be around a child was tasked to tend their souls,” the grand jury laments. And later: “These men wrote their legacy in the tears of children.” That sort of language might be appropriate for a newspaper editorial; it is not for a grand-jury report.

Self-congratulation. The grand jury proudly announces that it “learned” that priests were placed on “sick leave” to camouflage the fact that they were being investigated and/or treated for sexual misconduct. That’s not exactly ground-breaking detective work. Those of us who were following this story “learned” that ruse at least a dozen years ago, and now you can “learn” the same thing by spending a couple of hours at the local movie theater and watching Spotlight.

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VATICAN CITY
ANSA

(ANSA) – Rome, March 14 – PR expert Francesca Chaouqui, one of five defendants in the so-called Vatileaks 2 trial into the leaking of classified Holy See documents to two investigative reporters, arrived at the Vatican for a hearing on Monday afternoon accompanied by four bodyguards.

A visibly pregnant Chaouqui, wearing a black suit and pulling two wheeled suitcases, did not respond to questions from journalists as she passed through the Perugino entrance. She was preceded by Emiliano Fittipaldi, author of the bestselling ‘Avarice’ documenting lavish spending by clergymen and one of two journalists on trial on charges of spreading classified information. The other is Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of another controversial book, the Way of the Cross, documenting alleged Vatican waste and mismanagement. Fittipaldi was due to be the first defendant to take the stand in the trial, which also involves Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda and Balda’s former assistant Nicola Maio.

Chaouqui, Balda and Maio are accused of criminal association and conspiracy to leak classified documents.

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CITTA’ DEL VATICANO
Infovaticana

Gabriel Ariza 13 marzo, 2016

El prelado, que teme por su vida, logró hacerse con un móvil para hablar con personas de su máxima confianza y preparar su defensa, ante la indefension a la que le ha sometido la Gendarmería vaticana. Nunca intentó contaminar pruebas.

La sala de prensa de la Santa Sede ha comunicado que “Vallejo Balda vuelve a prisión acusado de violar la prohibición de comunicarse con el exterior”. Según la agencia ANSA, el prelado estaba en semilibertad pero ha vuelto a la celda.

La realidad es muy diferente, pues Vallejo Balda nunca recuperó su libertad y su situación en el palacio de los penitenciarios se parecía más a una prisión preventiva que a un arresto domiciliario.

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VATICAN CITY
Telegraph (UK)

By Nick Squires, Rome 14 Mar 2016

A mobile phone hidden inside a Catholic religious book was smuggled to a Vatican prelate who is in detention for allegedly leaking confidential Holy See documents to investigative journalists, according to local media.

Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda is one of five people accused of leaking and publishing classified Vatican documents, with their trial inside the walls of the tiny city state to resume on Monday.

Since December the Spanish prelate has been held in a building inside the Vatican under house arrest.

But at the weekend the Vatican announced that he had been effectively rearrested and returned to a cell inside the barracks of the Vatican Gendarmerie, the sovereign state’s tiny police force, because he had “violated a ban on communicating with the outside world.”

It had been one of the conditions by which he was kept under house arrest, said the Rev Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.

A website devoted to Vatican affairs claimed that the Spanish monsignor had been caught calling friends and supporters with a mobile phone that was smuggled to him in a hollowed-out copy of The Writings of St Francis. …

Until he was returned to the Vatican gendarmerie cell, he was being held in an apartment where a disgraced Vatican ambassador, Jozef Wesolowski, was kept pending his trial.

Archbishop Wesolowski was accused of sexually abusing teenage boys in the Dominican Republic, where he was posted. But he died suddenly last August, with the Vatican saying he had suffered a cardiac arrest.

“Balda is in fear of his life,” said Gabriel Ariza, the editor of Infovaticana. “He told me in a letter. He was being kept under house arrest in the same room where Wesolowski was found dead in mysterious circumstances.”

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AUSTRALIA
ABC News

By Leonie Mellor

A group of former Brisbane Grammar School (BGS) boys sexually abused by a paedophile school counsellor are calling on the royal commission into child sexual abuse to make recommendations urging private schools to refund tuition fees.

It is an attempt to force the hand of the prestigious BGS, which has refused to pay back school fees.

The men were among many who made submissions to the royal commission last year when it was investigating the handling of complaints about counsellor Kevin Lynch, who worked at BGS during the 1970s and 80s then at St Paul’s Anglican School during the 80s and 90s.

The Anglican Archdiocese of Brisbane agreed to refund school fees of victims from St Paul’s, prompting BGS students to pressure their former school to do the same.

“I had felt utterly betrayed by Brisbane Grammar School, on this particular aspect,” the father of one man said.

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WASHINGTON
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Victims want probe of archdiocese
SNAP: “Law enforcement must act”
Group wants abuse documents disclosed
And they release part of a predator priest’s record
“Archbishop should also expand perp list,” victims say
A church agency counselor abused 2 weeks ago, they note

WHAT
Holding signs and childhood photos at a sidewalk news conference, clergy sex abuse victims and their supporters will

–disclose 15 pages of church records about one of Seattle’s most notorious predator priests, and
–beg local law enforcement or the state attorney general to investigate the archdiocese with a focus on pursuing “enablers” – current or former church staff who may have destroyed evidence, obstructed justice intimidated victims, threatened whistleblowers, or refused to report known/suspected abuse to police.

They will also urge Seattle Catholic officials to

–end the “slow torture of gradual, grudging records releases” by fully “coming clean and voluntarily disclosing all documents about all child molesting clerics,” and
–add more names of child molesting priests, nuns, seminarians, brothers and lay people – including those who prey on vulnerable adults – to the recently-posted predators list on the church website.

WHEN
Monday, March 14, 1:15 p.m.

WHERE
On the sidewalk outside the Seattle Catholic archdiocesan headquarters (“chancery”) 710 9th Ave. (corner of Cherry St.) in downtown Seattle

WHO
Four-six clergy sex abuse victims who belong to a support group called SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, including a Chicago woman who is the organization’s founder

WHY
—1) More than 115,000 pages of long-secret records about clergy sex crimes and cover up involving more than 50 priests were obtained in a recent grand jury investigation in the Altoona Pennsylvania diocese, which has garnered national attention recently. Seattle Catholic officials are hiding even more documents about even more predators, SNAP charges.

Eight other district attorneys across the US done similar investigations.

“If, for decades, dozens of staff at a hospital were hurting patients, prosecutors or the attorney general would launch investigations,” said Barbara Blaine of Chicago, SNAP’s founder. “Authorities would use their bully pulpits to urge the wounded to come forward. That’s the least that should happen here.”

—2) Even without a law enforcement investigation, SNAP says, Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain should, “for kids’ safety, victims’ healing and the church’s health,” voluntarily release those records, because kids will be safer and cover ups will be deterred if those who protected predators are publicly exposed.”

“Fixating solely on predator priests just distracts from the crux of the crisis: church staff who hide child sex crimes,” said Tim Lennon, a SNAP board member. “We believe that many employees who enabled pedophiles to hurt kids are still on the job in churches and that citizens and Catholics need and deserve to know who they are.”

—3) SNAP is making public today 15 pages of records about Fr. James McGreal. They show deliberate deception by Catholic officials. In 1977, a church therapist wrote Seattle’s then-archbishop that McGreal should “not have any close activities with teens or young adult men.” But 11 years later, the archbishop wrote to a McGreal victim’s family claiming he did not know McGreal was a pedophile until 1987.

SNAP believes “much more proof of many more lies and half-truths by more current and former Catholic supervisors” remains hidden in the archdiocesan secret files.

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FRANCE
GMA News

Lyon, France – Victims of a French priest who has admitted sexually abusing boys wrote to the Vatican on Monday to ask for an audience with Pope Francis about an alleged cover-up by the archbishop of Lyon.

Priest Bernard Preynat was charged in January after victims came forward with claims he had sexually abused Scouts between 1986 and 1991.

Prosecutors say he has admitted the charges.

The victims have filed complaints against several senior officials in the Lyon diocese in eastern France, including Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, accusing them of being aware of the abuse but failing to report the priest.

“We no longer have any confidence in our diocese which is judge and jury in this case,” Bertrand Virieux, a member of the victims’ association, told AFP.

“We therefore appeal to the pope and we would like him to take firm action,” he said.

Virieux said the group did not feel it was their job to call for Barbarin’s resignation. “It is up to the pope to judge,” he said.

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PENNSYLVANIA
PennLive

By Ivey DeJesus | idejesus@pennlive.com

Throughout the 1990s priest across Philadelphia and Altoona were molesting hundreds of children.

Grand jury investigation reports have detailed the horrific crimes of sodomy, rape, and countless other acts of depravity carried out in confessionals, sacristies, rectory bedrooms, locker rooms and cars on altar boys, members of choirs and legions other children across parishes.

Across Catholic communities, few parents suspected such an unthinkable travesty, investigators concluded, but there were some who did.

Scores — if not hundreds — of parents and individuals in the state’s Catholic Church communities called Pennsylvania’s ChildLine hotline throughout those years to report that they suspected a priest of molesting a child, according to former Childline staffers.

Restricted by weak laws, the clerks and counselors who staffed the hotline could do little to help the callers or the possible victims. All they could do was to alert local law enforcement officials — the very people who, according to a recent state grand jury report, often ignored or colluded with church officials to hide the abuse.

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VATICAN CITY
Crux

By Inés San Martín
Vatican correspondent March 14, 2016

ROME — A trial against three former officials of a Vatican commission and two journalists, all accused of illegally obtaining and publishing documents revealing mismanagement of Church finances, resumed on Saturday with the first public hearings set for Monday and Tuesday.

Initially Vatican officials, including Pope Francis, had hoped the trial could be wrapped up quickly, before the pontiff’s Holy Year of Mercy began on Dec. 8. After a slew of requests for expert analysis and witnesses from defense attorneys, however, the trial before a three-judge panel was suspended in November and resumed only this week.

On Saturday, the trial judge met with technical experts in a closed-doors session to examine the admissibility of new computer evidence. Monday and Tuesday’s hearings will be dedicated to witness testimony.

Although it hasn’t been specified who will take part, some top Vatican officials have been called to testify. They include Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state; Spanish Cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló, president of a commission working on the reform of the Institute for the Works of Religion, often referred to as the “Vatican bank,” and Polish Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, head of papal charities.

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TEXAS
Brownsville Herald

A $1 million bond has been set against a former priest accused in the 1960 murder of McAllen beauty queen Irene Garza.

John Feit appeared this morning before 92nd state District Court Judge Luis Singleterry who placed a $1 million bond against Feit, who is a former priest.

Feit pleaded not guilty to the murder charge and was remanded back to the custody of Hidalgo County sheriff’s deputies.

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TEXAS
The Monitor

STAFF REPORT | Posted: Monday, March 14, 2016

With the help of a walker, 83-year-old former priest John Feit entered the courtroom Monday morning to face an Hidalgo County judge for the first time in connection with the 1960 rape and murder of Irene Garza.

After nearly 56 years of being suspected in 25-year-old Garza’s death, John Feit pleaded not guilty to murder before 92nd State District Court Judge Luis Singleterry who set his bond at $1 million.

Feit is accused in the April 1960 death of Garza, a schoolteacher and beauty queen who was last seen going to confession at McAllen’s Sacred Heart Church. Her body was found five days later after being dumped in a canal.

During the initial investigation officers linked Feit to Garza’s death after finding evidence and placing him at the church the night she disappeared. Feit was never charged in this case and was moved out of state by the church, documents show.

Feit was living in Arizona when he was arrested in February in connection to Garza’s death after a grand jury in Hidalgo County found there was enough evidence to prosecute him.

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UNITED STATES
Daily Times

By Sister Maureen Paul Turlish, Times Guest Columnist

POSTED: 03/13/16

“Spotlight” was awarded an Oscar for the best motion picture of 2016 and it more than deserves such recognition. It brings a whole new level of attention to this outstanding film and the problems it addresses especially the abuse of authority in the Roman Catholic Church.

It is a wake-up call for people in the United States and in countries around the world to recognize the egregious damage done to children and deal with the epidemic, the pandemic really, that childhood sexual abuse is.

“Spotlight” concerns itself with heinous crimes of sexual abuse perpetrated upon innocent children by rogue priests in a powerful religious denomination while it addresses one institution’s corruption played out in Massachusetts by Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston. Law covered up and protected such priests while supposedly “saving the church from scandal.”

Revelations following the Boston Archdiocese’s implosion were catastrophic.

The abuse of power by men in a rigidly structured patriarchal society, the narcissism and the sociopathic behavior of sexual offenders cry out for accountability, transparency, and ultimately, for justice. But lame apologies for criminal actions, euphemistically described as mistakes, and impotent prayer services will not get the job done.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Berliner Morgenpost

[A total of 1,600 victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have reported abuse and submitted applications for recognition and material benefits, according to Bishop Stephan Ackermann.]

1600 Betroffene wollen von der katholischen Kirche entschädigt werden. Ein erster Zwischenbericht wird noch in diesem Jahr erwartet.

Berlin. Bei der Aufarbeitung des sexuellen Missbrauchs in der katholischen Kirche haben sich rund 1600 Betroffene gemeldet und Anträge auf Anerkennung und materielle Leistungen gestellt. Das teilte Bischof Stephan Ackermann in einem Interview mit dem “Tagesspiegel am Sonntag” mit. “Wie viele Täter sich dahinter verbergen, können wir erst mit der Studie sagen”, sagte er.

Der Bischof bekräftigte zudem sein Ziel, dass das Forschungsprojekt der Bischofskonferenz “eine quantitative und qualitative Übersicht” aller Missbrauchsfälle ermittelt. Gegenstand der Studie sei auch die Frage, wie viele Täter aus ihren Ämtern entlassen wurden. Kommendes Jahr werde es Ergebnisse geben, sagte der Trierer Bischof. Vielleicht werde schon dieses Jahr ein Zwischenstand präsentiert, fügte er hinzu. Es ist bereits das zweite Aufarbeitungsvorhaben, nachdem ein erstes Projekt mit dem Hannoveraner Kriminologen Christian Pfeiffer gescheitert war.

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SCHWIEZ
kath.ch

[Theologian: “Sexual assaults were treated as an embarrassing problem”.]

Zürich, 13.3.16 (kath.ch) Inwiefern lassen sich die sexuellen Übergriffe und ihre Vertuschung im kirchlichen Umfeld, wie sie der Film «Spotlight» thematisiert, auf Schweizer Verhältnisse übertragen? Markus Ries, Professor für Kirchengeschichte an der Universität Luzern, hat das Thema der Gewaltanwendung in kirchlich geführten Erziehungseinrichtungen untersucht. Welche Parallelen er zum Film zieht, erzählt er im Interview mit kath.ch.

Sylvia Stam

Sie haben den Film «Spotlight» gesehen. Wie war Ihre spontane Reaktion darauf?

Markus Ries: Es ist eine sehr berührende Geschichte, vor allem, wenn man sie medial vermittelt und künstlerisch aufbereitet bekommt. Die Opferperspektive ist stärker im Hintergrund als beispielweise beim «Verdingbub», aber es packt einen dennoch. Der Hauptakzent liegt in «Spotlight» auf der Institution, die vertuschte. Das wird sehr beklemmend ins Bild gesetzt.

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DEUTSCHLAND
kath.ch

Der ehemalige Limburger Bischof Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst nimmt nach Protesten nun doch nicht am Kongress «Freude am Glauben» im April in Aschaffenburg teil. Das habe der Bischof selber beschlossen, teilte das Forum Deutscher Katholiken als Veranstalter mit.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Exaro News

More than a million pages of documents have been found at just three of the of the Church of England’s 42 dioceses.

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FRANCE
ANSA

(ANSA) – Paris, March 14 – A group of victims of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest in the 1980s have written a letter to Pope Francis requesting a private audience in the Vatican, said French daily Le Parisien on Monday.

The victims are former scouts from the outskirts of Lyon who accused Father Bernard Preynat of abuse through the early 1990s.

The letter asks for an explanation of why Preynat wasn’t suspended until 2015, despite the fact that Lyon archbishop Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was informed of the abuse in 2007.

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FRANCE
Le Point

DE NOTRE CORRESPONDANTE À LYON, CATHERINE LAGRANGE
Publié le 14/03/2016

Les anciennes victimes présumées du père Preynat du diocèse de Lyon s’en remettent au pape François. Dans un courrier daté du 14 mars, et posté le 15 mars, les trois fondateurs de La Parole libérée, association regroupant les anciennes victimes du père Bernard Preynat du diocèse de Lyon, viennent d’écrire au pape François pour lui demander une « audience privée ».
Désarroi

Dans leur long courrier, François Devaux, Bertrand Virieux, et Alexandre Hezez font tout d’abord référence aux déclarations du pape dénonçant à plusieurs reprises les actes pédophiles commis par des membres de l’Église. « Si nous faisons appel à vous, très Saint-Père, c’est car vous avez, dans toutes vos déclarations et communications officielles, montré un attachement indéfectible à la vérité et à la protection des enfants, ainsi qu’une volonté de mettre fin aux pratiques de dissimulations justifiées par le souci de virginité de l’image de l’Église de France », écrivent-ils.

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FRANCE
Le Parisien

[French victims of paedophile priest demand Pope talks]

Des victimes du curé Bernard Preynat envoient aujourd’hui une lettre au pape François et demandent une audience privée. Ils n’ont plus confiance en Mgr Barbarin.

La lettre recommandée part aujourd’hui pour Rome. Trois fers de lance de la Parole libérée, association qui fédère les victimes d’un prêtre soupçonné de pédophilie dans le diocèse de Lyon, ont décidé d’adresser une lettre au pape François.

Les signataires de la missive, qui ont eux-mêmes subi les agressions sexuelles du père Bernard Preynat quand ils étaient scouts dans la banlieue de Lyon, dans les années 1980, demandent au chef de l’Eglise catholique de leur accorder une audience privée au Vatican.

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FRANCE
euronews

[Bertrand Virieux, a cardiologist, is a victim of priest Bernard Preynat who has emerged as a leader of the victims group called La Parole Liberee.]

Bertrand Virieux est le Secrétaire de l’Association La Parole Libérée. Il fut victimes d’attouchements de la part du père Bernard Preynat, lors de ses années de scoutisme, il y a 35 ans. Selon la justice française, son cas est prescrit, mais il mise sur l’effet réparateur de la parole libérée par son association pour les victimes souvent affectés par le silence qui a pesé sur leur passé. Propos recueillis par Valérie Gauriat

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UNITED STATES
Commercial Appeal

By Deborah Fisher, Special to Viewpoint

There’s a great scene about public records in the movie “Spotlight,” which is based on the true story of The Boston Globe’s investigative reporting of child sex abuse by Catholic priests.

Reporter Michael Rezendes rushes to the court clerk’s office to get an exhibit that had been filed as part of a court motion. It contained letters and evidence that showed the Archdiocese of Boston had known about the molestation of children for years, but failed to stop it.

“Those records are sealed,” says the clerk.

“No, that’s a public motion. Those records are public. I work for the Globe,” Rezendes replies.

“Good for you,” the clerk says, unmoved.

Rezendes then goes to the judge’s office.

“These exhibits you are after, Mr. Rezendes, they are very sensitive records,” the judge says.

“With all due respect, your honor, that’s not the question. The records are public,” the reporter says.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

March 13, 2016

Simon Plant
Herald Sun

TIM Minchin feels “sorry” for Cardinal George Pell and has defended his contentious number about Australia’s highest ranking cleric as a “cheeky little pop song’’.

The comic musician, in Melbourne today for Thursday’s premiere of Matilda The Musical, wrote “Come Home (Cardinal Pell)” in the “language of anger’’, urging the religious leader to fly home to Australia and give evidence into a royal commission into child sexual abuse.

But after hearing Cardinal Pell give evidence in Rome, where the cleric also met with survivors of abuse, Minchin said: “I feel sorry for (Cardinal) Pell in many, many ways but it doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for a cheeky little pop song.

“I’m really, really sad that he couldn’t say, ‘This was terrible, we were wrong, it (child sexual abuse) was systemic and endemic and we’re trying to improve and I was wrong with the Melbourne Response’.

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AUSTRALIA
The Courier

By Melissa Cunningham
March 14, 2016

There was a “loud” message on the streets of Daylesford at the weekend: No more silence on child sexual abuse.

Supporters and suirvours of child sexual abuse victims marched down the streets as part of the ChillOut Festival’s annual street parade.

The crowd erupted in cheers as the group marched clutching a colorful handmade banner with the words “No More Silence” boldly sprawled across it.

Ballarat region resident and sexual abuse survivor Libby O’Brien told The Courier she felt compelled to make the banner with her partner to spread the Loud Fence message to the thousands of people who lined the streets.

“This movement is about all types of child sexual abuse,” Ms O’Brien said.

“We’ve seen victims come forward from Catholic institutions, private schools, state schools. Every single ribbon tied across the world has a face and there has been too much silence surrounding child sexual abuse. It’s connecting everybody. The only way forward is to provide a voice to victims and push to protect future generations of children by ending the cycle of sexual abuse.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
We Are Central PA

By Karina Cheung | kcheung@wtajtv.com
Published 03/13 2016

Altoona, Blair County, Pa.

The Attorney General’s grand jury report on abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese has Pennsylvania abuse advocates, survivors, and lawmakers calling for statute of limitations reform.

An area woman, who is a survivor of abuse, will share her story at a rally in Harrisburg on Monday. She’s speaking in support of two bills currently awaiting house approval.

28 years ago, Brenda Dick’s life changed, forever.

“I was raped from the time I was 5 and touched clear up until I was 12, almost 13,” remembered Brenda.

Now, Brenda is sharing her story with others, hoping for change. She started an online petition to end the statute of limitations for child abuse victims in Pennsylvania.

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VATICAN CITY
New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MARCH 14, 2016

VATICAN CITY — Sparks may fly this week with the first testimony in the Vatican’s controversial trial over leaks of confidential documents that revealed waste, mismanagement and greed in the Catholic Church’s hierarchy.

Two journalists face up to eight years in prison if convicted of putting pressure on a Vatican monsignor to obtain the documents and publish them. The monsignor and two other people affiliated with a papal reform commission are also on trial, accused of giving the journalists the information.

The trial resumes Monday after a three-month delay to give the defense time to prepare and experts time to go through text message and other evidence. Earlier, the Vatican had come under sharp criticism that it was rushing the trial and that the defendants weren’t getting a fair shake.

During hearings Monday and Tuesday, the first of the five defendants is expected to be questioned by Vatican prosecutors. The testimony may be uncomfortable for the Holy See, given that details are expected about the onetime close friendship between Monsignor Angelo Lucio Vallejo Balda and the lone woman on trial, Francesca Chaouqui, who is now pregnant.

Media rights groups from around the world, meanwhile, have denounced the prosecution of journalists Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianlugi Nuzzi, who wrote blockbuster books last year detailing the resistance Pope Francis is facing in trying to clean up waste and corruption in the Vatican.

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VATICAN CITY
The Local

Published: 14 Mar 2016

A controversial Vatican trial of journalists and alleged whistleblowers resumes on Monday, in the latest instalment of an image-bruising legal saga.

The spicy courtroom drama has already served up claims of sexually charged scheming, blackmail and computer hacking behind the fortified walls of the secretive city state.

From Monday, lawyers on both sides of a case increasingly seen as a public relations own goal will be able to put some of Pope Francis’s closest aides on the stand.

The trial has been adjourned for three months to enable computer experts to recover deleted email, text and WhatsApp messages between some of the accused, one of whom is basing her defence on a claim that she was working on the pope’s behalf.

Francesca Chaouqui, a pregnant former PR adviser to the Vatican, is one of five people accused of leaking classified documents that revealed out-of-control spending at the top of the Catholic Church and some top clerics’ love of luxury.

She has been granted the right to call as witnesses Vatican number two Cardinal Pietro Parolin and two Francis confidantes, charity supremo Archbishop Konrad Krajewski and Cardinal Santo Abril y Castello, who heads a panel overseeing the scandal-hit Vatican bank.

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ILLINOIS
Herald & Review

Mar 13, 2016

Newspaper people have a special fondness for movies about newspapers, especially when journalists are depicted as heroes.

So, it’s not a big surprise that several Herald & Review staffers enjoyed a special showing of the Academy Award winning move “Spotlight” at the Avon Theater a week ago.

The movie, which won for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, hasn’t been seen widely. It didn’t show in Decatur and has seen a limited run in other theaters in Central Illinois. Although it’s an extremely well-made movie, it doesn’t have the explosions and special effects that are popular in movies these days.

But it’s a movie worth seeing, now that it’s available on DVD and by other methods. It depicts the Boston Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese and the cover up and transfers of priests that sexually abused young children.

What’s impressive about the movie is that it honors the reporting process in a compelling way. Much of what journalists do during the day isn’t especially exciting. There is a lot of time spent in meetings, reading documents and talking to sources that either won’t share their stories or don’t have accurate information. “Spotlight” depicts that process accurately. It also deals with how journalists sometimes fail. In this case, the Globe had been warned about the number of priests involved in sexual abuse years earlier, but had ignored the story.

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MASSACHUSETTS
Breitbart

Just 18 months after founding a special website called Crux, dedicated to reporting on the Catholic Church, the Boston Globe has announced that it is withdrawing from the venture, citing financial reasons.

In 2014, Boston Globe owner John Henry tapped veteran Vatican reporter John L. Allen to head up the site in an effort to expand the company’s readership beyond the Boston area to a potential market of more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide.

In disentangling itself from Crux, the Globe has ceded ownership to Allen, who has announced that he plans to keep it going, together with the site’s Vatican correspondent Inés San Martín.

After the movie Spotlight won the Academy Award for best picture, the Globe has been basking in renewed admiration for its 2002 crusade against the Church’s handling of the American sex abuse crisis, which bagged the paper a Pulitzer Prize.

At the time, the paper was fiercely criticized for what was perceived by many as a vicious campaign against the Catholic Church, since the Globe’s investigations into the sexual abuse of minors exclusively targeted Catholic priests, while ignoring the rampant abuse occurring in every organization and institution having dealings with children, whether religious or secular.

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TEXAS
KEYE

BY SARAH NAVOY SUNDAY, MARCH 13TH 2016

AUSTIN, Texas — The Roman Catholic Diocese of Austin is facing a lawsuit alleging it knew of sexual abuse going on in the early seventies.

The man who filed the civil suit, referred to as John Doe 120, said he was an altar boy at the time of his abuse.

Doe claims he was sexually assaulted for about 5 years by the now deceased Reverend Milton Eggerling. According to court documents, Eggerling preached at St. Louis Church and School in the 1970’s.

According to Doe’s attorney Tahira Merritt, Eggerling acted as a mentor to him, took him on trips, and showed him special treatment to lure him in. The lawsuit also alleges the priest gave the boy alcohol.

According to Merritt, teachers, nuns, and priests knew or should have known that Eggerling had an inappropriate relationship with the boy.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Philly.com

Updated: MARCH 14, 2016

“I have greatly sinned … in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.”
– From the Confiteor, a prayer said during the Penitential Act during a Roman Catholic Mass

By Thomas P. Murt

In Western Pennsylvania, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown knowingly protected priests who were known child molesters, according to a grand jury report. The diocese, the report continued, through church connections and pathetic public officials, protected the child-molesting priests from law enforcement and prosecution.

Perhaps the worst crime that officials committed is never taking subsequent action to protect children from these child-molesting priests. In the diocese, when a priest was found to have sexually abused a child, the normal protocol was to simply move him to another parish, offer a cash payment to the family, and/or to send the child-molesting priest on retreat, only to have him returned to ministry in the future.

The grand jury report of child sexual abuse in the diocese is even more graphic, sickening, and disgusting than the grand jury report on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. If you have the stomach for it, you can find it on the Internet. The link will caution you about the graphic nature of the material.

Make no mistake, as ugly and painful as the latest sex abuse scandal is, this is not the last one we will hear about. While many victims are finding the strength to come forward, no doubt there are thousands of others who are still hiding in shame and humiliation. The true shame and humiliation, however, is not theirs at all. That belongs to Pennsylvania’s legislators, who still collectively refuse to take action to reform the statute of limitations as it relates to child sex abuse.

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FRANCE
The Local

French victims of the paedophile priest Bernard Preynat on Monday sent a letter to Pope Francis, requesting a private audience with the pontiff.

“We wish, Holy Father, that you can be a guiding light in our night and that you take the time to get to know us,” read the letter, sent by three members of the Parole Libérée, a group set up to help members of the Scout group who suffered sexual abuse in the 1980s.

The letter went on to explain that they were not “motivated by any spirit of vengeance” and simply want to “understand” why the priest was able to remain in office until August 2015.

“By retreating into silence, our cardinal has lost all credibility,” Bertrand Virieux, a cardiologist and one of the three signatories, told Le Parisien, referring to Lyon Archbishop Philippe Barbarin, who failed to report the priest despite saying earlier this year that he had been made aware of the priest’s behaviour “around 2007-8”.

Virieux explained: “That’s why today we call on Pope Francis, in whom we trust.”

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AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

March 14, 2016

Terry Laidler

Your Honour,

Please could I start by making a statement that I hope will help the royal commission and that I pray will give some solace to so many people I now know to have been traumatised by abuse suffered on an horrendous scale.

I have no wish to put people who say they told me about sexual abuse into a position where their recollections need to be tested in minute detail against mine. They have gone long enough with their voices not being heard by powerful figures in the Catholic Church and in society generally.

I can accept that, despite differences of recollection between me and some of them, there is already enough evidence before the commission that many tried to tell me from the time I was a junior priest in Ballarat and that I seemed to them to be dismissive or lacked compassion or took no action. For that, I apologise to them profusely: I did not do enough and more people were abused by the same priests and brothers complained about.

I must, also, accept my share of the responsibility for the systematic cover-up that occurred when I was a consultor in the diocese of Ballarat. Bishop Ronald Mulkearns acted shamefully, and we were complicit in it. I am not sure why exactly, perhaps it was a misguided wish to protect the church as an institution, or a desire for advancement and the clerical culture that made us loyal to the bishop and to our fellow priests in such a dysfunctional way.

My colleagues and I may have been deceived or kept in the dark, but nonetheless, we lacked the compassion or the courage to ask more questions about things that should have focused our attention acutely. When we knew of crimes committed against children, as loyal advisors we should have demanded that he act. When he did not listen to us, we should have resigned and gone to the police ourselves. I am so sorry for the hurt and damage that not doing so has caused.

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UNITED STATES
Jewish Press

By: Dr. Michael J. Salamon

March 3 marked a turning point. On that day, Newsweek magazine published an article titled Child Abuse Allegations Plague the Hasidic community. (True, there have been other articles in major media outlets about abuse in Orthodox communities but this is the first time the problem was broadly tackled in a major, full-length, comprehensive, well-researched piece in a publication not geared exclusively toward a Jewish readership.)

We can argue about whether the article is a damning indictment of blind obedience or whether or not the root problem is a determination to protect the reputations of institutions and their leaders while ignoring the needs of individuals.

We can debate whether or not those who spoke to Newsweek transgressed the alleged sin of mesirah, a sin that likely does not apply in our day, or worse, that they are all liars with their own sinister agendas.

And we can even worry that the article may cause irreparable harm to our community by casting us in a bad light and thereby providing fodder for anti-Semitism.

I would disagree with most of those presumptions.

I believe the Newsweek article actually improves our standing because it forces us to be more open and honest about the scourge of abuse. It shines a very bright light on a problem that some still want to sweep under the rug. And it destroys the delusions of those who continue to believe that Orthodox Jews do not abuse. Most important, it gives us an opportunity to show we can make a commitment to clean things up.

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NEW YORK
Forward

Sam Kestenbaum
March 13, 2016

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s premier yeshiva is seeking to assure parents that no sexual or physical abuse is taking place within its walls following a detailed report on allegations of such abuse in the past.

“I categorically assure you that there is absolutely no abuse taking place in Oholei Torah that we know of,” Rabbi Sholom Rosenfeld, the school’s administrator, wrote parents in a March 8 letter on school letterhead, “neither sexual abuse, nor physical abuse, nor verbal abuse.”

The abuse allegations, which appeared in a March 3 Newsweek article, detailed past instances of alleged misconduct at Oholei Torah, a religious school of about 2,000 male students, kindergarten through high school, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. In one such case, a student was said to have thrown through a door or window. In other cases, reports of sexual abuse were allegedly ignored.

The school’s letter to the parents, dated March 8 and posted on community websites, neither addressed or denied any specific allegations or complaints, but described “many actions and precautions” that the school has instituted in recent years to prevent abuse. Among other things, the letter stated, Oholei Torah has, in recent years installed “windows on every classroom door” and has invited “numerous speakers” to address “child abuse and bullying.” The school has also held regular training programs for students on how to react to “improper behavior toward them,” according to the letter.

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FRANCE
20 Minutes

[Case Barbarin: “We have confidence in our archbishop,” assure the Catholic faithful, Sunday morning, while an icy wind swept through the place Saint-Jean in Old Lyon, faithful linger a moment on the steps of the cathedral, at the end of the mass. We shake hands, we smile, we take news of each other. Bundled up in their coats, some gather a few moments to discuss the homily the priest gave on sin and mercy. These are two themes that appear for the faithful during the troubled times since the indictment of Father Preynant on suspicion of child abuse. One person said the case has been blown outof proportion by the media. One person was at fault and now the whole church is pointed at, said one woman.]

Elisa Frisullo

Ce dimanche matin, alors qu’un vent glacial s’abat sur la place Saint-Jean dans le Vieux-Lyon, des fidèles s’attardent quelques instants sur le parvis de la cathédrale, à la sortie de la messe. On se serre la main, on se sourit, on prend des nouvelles des uns et des autres.

Emmitouflés dans leurs manteaux, la mine rosie par le froid, certains se regroupent quelques instants pour évoquerl’homélie du prêtre, consacrée, en ce cinquième dimanche du carême, au péché et à la miséricorde. Deux thèmes qui paraissent essentiels, pour les fidèles que 20 Minutes a rencontrés, en ces temps troubles que traverse l’église lyonnaise depuis la mise en examen du père Preynat, soupçonné d’agressions sexuelles sur des scouts.

Une affaire « montée en épingle »

« Cette affaire a été montée en épingle par les journalistes. On s’acharne sur l’église. Un homme a commis une faute et c’est toute l’église qui se retrouve montrée du doigt », estime Véronique, une catholique pratiquante qui, comme beaucoup de fidèles, a suivi l’évolution de l’affaire de pédophilie.

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UNITED KINGDOM
BBC News

A woman, who the Church of England has accepted was abused by a bishop, has apologised to the family of a former Archbishop of Canterbury.

The victim, known as Carol, claimed she had written to Lord Carey, telling him that she had been abused as a child by Bishop George Bell.

In a statement issued by her solicitor, she accepted that was an error.

“Carol has issued a private apology to the Careys for the genuine mistake she made in good faith,” it said.

The statement continued: “She first made complaints in 1995 to Bishop Kemp of Chichester.

“She was prompted to complain again to Lambeth Palace at the time of the Jimmy Savile revelations, but it was only in 2013 when she wrote again – this time to Archbishop Justin Welby – that the matter was referred to the police.”

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ARGENTINA
TN

[Spotlight: The names of seven Argentine priests, accused of molesting minors. appears at the end of the film.]

Al final del film que ganó el Oscar, se citan abusos sexuales cometidos por sacerdotes o religiosos en el país. Detrás de cada mención hay una historia que te queremos contar.

Domingo 13 de Marzo de 2016

El sacerdote Héctor Pared murió de SIDA en el 2003 después de haber sido condenado a 24 años de prisión por abusos sexuales cometidos contra adolescentes internados en el Hogar Hermano Francisco de Quilmes.

Alojado en el penal de Olmos, el cura seguía oficiando misa, y su estado de salud era mantenido en secreto por sus superiores en la Iglesia y por el Servicio Penitenciario.

Los miembros del tribunal que lo condenó afirmaron que su enfermedad podría haber sido considerada un agravante en el momento del fallo. Sus víctimas revivieron el trauma al ser sometidas a análisis de HIV años después del delito.

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PERU
La Republica

[Since October last year, a journalistic investigation has documented systematic psychological, physical and sexual abuse within the Sodality of Christian Life (SVC), a Catholic movement of Peruvian origin.]

Desde octubre del año pasado, cuando publicamos Mitad monjes, mitad soldados, una investigación periodística que documentó los sistemáticos abusos psicológicos, físicos y sexuales al interior del Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana (SVC), un movimiento católico de origen peruano, poco es lo que se ha avanzado hasta la fecha en cuanto a sanciones y reparación a las víctimas.

La investigación supuso el “primer destape en nuestro país de una estructura cuyo origen fue la práctica religiosa y el compromiso de la fe, pero que además fue usada por sus más altos dirigentes, entre ellos su fundador Luis Fernando Figari, como un pretexto y coartada para el desenfreno, el abuso y la comisión de actos violentos”, como editorializó este diario (22/10/2016).

Ante la denuncia, el Sodalicio respondió con un comunicado de talante defensivo y poco transparente, firmado por su Vicario General, Fernando Vidal Castellanos, que luego tuvo que ser enmendado por uno segundo, debido fundamentalmente a las presiones internas del entonces sacerdote sodálite Jean Pierre Teullet y a la avalancha de reportajes que reproducían los verosímiles y crudos testimonios de las víctimas.

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ESPANA
El Pais

[Reports of child abuse in Barcelona Marist schools is reaching alarming proportions. There are now 30 victims and at least seven teachers from seven different schools.]

XAVIER VIDAL-FOLCH
11 MAR 2016

Las denuncias por pederastia en colegios barceloneses de los Maristas empiezan a apuntar proporciones muy alarmantes. Ya son una treintena y afectan al menos a siete profesores de siete colegios distintos. Sean todas ciertas o no, exageradas o suaves, y relativas a delitos prescritos o vivos, la respuesta oficial es homeopática.

El superior de los Maristas acaba de reprochar el silencio del primer centro afectado en 2011, en torno al primer caso conocido. El Departamento de Enseñanza no se enteró. Fiscalía y Mossos suspendieron las pesquisas cuando la familia retiró las acusaciones para evitar la presión al muchacho abusado. El pleno del Parlament lanzó el 3 de marzo una enfática y unánime resolución condenatoria y admonitoria —sugirió “consecuencias”, sin siquiera concretar “sanciones”—, instó a los centros a cumplir los protocolos y parloteó sobre la formación de los docentes.

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OSTERREICH
Profil

[The first “Spotlight”: The Groer affair in Australia as a historical taboo.]

Vor 20 Jahren outete profil den Wiener Kardinal Hans Hermann Groer als Kinderschänder. Der damalige profil-Chefredakteur Josef Votzi über einen historischen Tabubruch.

Boston, 1976. Erste Szene, eine Rückblende. Ein Geistlicher sitzt in einem Polizeigebäude zur Einvernahme. Dialog zwischen zwei an der Untersuchung beteiligten Männern. Der eine fragt besorgt: „Bei Anklage wird die Presse da sein.“ Der andere: „Welche Anklage?“

Schnitt. Der Priester wird durch den Seitenausgang zu einem wartenden Auto gebracht.

Boston 2001. Das Investigationsteam des „Boston Globe“ hat seinen Arbeitsplatz im Keller des Redaktionsgebäudes. Die vier Reporter frönen aber als Einzige dem Luxus, sich ihr Rechercheprojekt sorgfältig auswählen und ein Jahr lang daran arbeiten zu können.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Domradio

[Opposition to a planned appearance of the former Limburg bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst next month to the Joy of Faith congress is growing in Aschaffenburg and an online petition has been launched.]

Der Widerstand gegen einen geplanten Auftritt des ehemaligen Limburger Bischofs Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst Ende April zum Kongress “Freude am Glauben” in Aschaffenburg wächst. Jetzt soll eine Online-Petition gestartet werden.

Diese richtet sich gegen die Einladung des Bischofs zum Kongress “Freude am Glauben”, wie Thomas Röhrs gegenüber der Katholischen Nachrichten-Agentur (KNA) ankündigte. Zuvor habe der langjährige Vorsitzende der Kolpingfamilie in Alzenau das “Forum Deutscher Katholiken” als Veranstalter gebeten, die Einladung von Tebartz-van Elst zu überdenken. Dieser soll am 24. April in Aschaffenburg sprechen.

Würzburger Bischof Hofmann mit Bedenken

Bedenken gegen den Auftritt hatte zuvor auch der zuständige Würzburger Ortsbischof Friedhelm Hofmann angemeldet. Er halte die Einladung von Tebartz-van Elst “wegen der Reaktionen der Gläubigen für sehr unglücklich”, sagte sein Sprecher Bernhard Schweßinger. Hofmann selbst habe gegenüber dem zurückgetretenen Bischof von Limburg angeregt, die Teilnahme zu überdenken, so der Sprecher weiter. Auch den Organisatoren des Kongresses habe er seine Bedenken mitgeteilt. Von dem geplanten Auftritt habe der Würzburger Bischof “erst durch die Presse Kenntnis bekommen”.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia

Adults have a duty to love and protect children. Yet not a day goes by when we don’t hear a story about children abused by someone they know and trust. Perpetrators cover a very wide spectrum, from parents to coaches to teachers to clergy. But especially bitter for the statewide Catholic community is a March 1 grand jury report detailing abuses that took place in western Pennsylvania’s Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.

This news brings back ugly feelings for so many within our own Archdiocese, which learned its own lessons about child sexual abuse the hard way. The most important lesson is that the persons who suffer most in these tragedies are the survivors and their families. I’ve met personally with many survivors over the years. Their stories and experiences are intensely painful. I am deeply sorry for all they’ve endured, for the past failures of the Church, and for the role she has played in their suffering.

When I arrived here more than four years ago, we committed the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to do all it can to support survivors on their path toward healing and to create Church and school environments to protect our young people and keep them from harm. My predecessor, Cardinal Rigali, had already started by hiring respected professionals – experts from the victim services and law enforcement communities — to establish and implement best practices. Their charge was based on two simple requirements: Law enforcement authorities must be notified immediately and properly when any allegation of abuse is made; and survivors need to be cared for professionally and with compassion.

We’ve made progress. Today, the Archdiocese has a zero tolerance policy for clergy, lay employees and volunteers who engage in misconduct with children, and it takes immediate action when an accusation is made. Any allegation of abuse must be reported immediately to law enforcement, and any substantiated allegation against a member of the clergy results in immediate removal from ministry.

Every year, our Victim Assistance Program offers substantial support to individuals and families. During the 2014-2015 fiscal year alone, the Archdiocese dedicated more than $1.7 million to underwrite counseling, to provide medication, to eliminate barriers to receiving support such as travel and childcare, and provided other forms of support to survivors and their families.

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PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Domradio

[The Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia has in the past fiscal year spent 1.7 million US dollars – that is 1.5 million euros – in support for victims of sexual abuse.]

Das katholische Erzbistum Philadelphia hat im vergangenen Steuerjahr 1,7 Millionen US-Dollar – sprich 1,5 Millionen Euro – Hilfen für Opfer sexuellen Missbrauchs ausgegeben.

Diese Zahl nannte Erzbischof Charles Chaput in einem Gastbeitrag der Online-Zeitung “Philly Voice” am Freitag. Zugleich kündigte er ein Trainingsprogramm für “gesunde Beziehungen” an kirchlichen Schulen an. Die Kurse richteten sich an Jugendliche ab der neunten Klasse und begännen im Mai.

Missbrauchsbericht in Nachbarbistum

Als “besonders bitter” bezeichnete Chaput einen kürzlich veröffentlichten Missbrauchsbericht aus dem Nachbarbistum Altoona-Johnstown. Die Ergebnisse einer gerichtlichen Kommission dort weckten erneut “hässliche Empfindungen” bei vielen Menschen im eigenen Erzbistum, so Chaput.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 12 March 2016 – The director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., today informed journalists that this morning in the Vatican City State Tribunal, as part of the current trial for the dissemination of reserved news and documents, the hearing in camera took place, as ordered by the president of the Tribunal following the deposition of the technical report by the two expert witnesses, both ex officio and ex parte. The hearing was attended by the full College, the Promoter of Justice and all the defendants accompanied by their lawyers. The hearing lasted for around one hour. As expected, the next hearing will take place on Monday 14 March at 3.30 p.m.

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FRANCE
Le Progres

[Case Preynat: The bishop of Oran, Jean-Paul Vesco, defends Cardinal Barbarin.]

Il est Lyonnais. Il a été ordonné, par le cardinal Barbarin, évêque en janvier 2013 à Oran (Algérie). Aujourd’hui, il livre son sentiment. Et met en garde sur la facilité qui consisterait à désigner l’archevêque de Lyon comme bouc émissaire dans l’affaire du prêtre Preynat.

Les évêques sortent de leur réserve les uns après les autres pour venir en aide au cardinal Philippe Barbarin. Après Mgr Georges Pontier, président de la Conférence des évêques de France et archevêque de Marseille et Mgr Michel Dubost, évêque d’Évry, c’est au tour de Jean-Paul Vesco, l’évêque d’Oran, lyonnais d’origine de prendre la parole.

« L’ouverture de l’enquête préliminaire pour ‘‘non-dénonciation de crime ’’ visant notamment l’archevêque de Lyon fait grand bruit, comment pourrait-il en être autrement ? Des actes inacceptables et répétés ont été commis à l’encontre d’enfants qui ont été blessés pour toute leur vie d’adulte. Deux circonstances aggravent la réalité de ce scandale, que le temps ne peut décidément pas effacer. La première est que ces actes ont été commis par un prêtre à qui ces enfants avaient été confiés et qui s’étaient confiés à lui dans leur foi naissante.

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AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph

Angela Mollard

There’s a scene in the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight where all the pieces of the puzzle come together. For months the reporters on the Boston Globe have been investigating sexual abuse by priests but the “light bulb” moment occurs when they realise that offending priests are listed in the diocese’s annual directory as “unassigned” or “on leave”.

And so, using rulers and pens, the team goes painstakingly through years of directories, underlining the names of priests who have taken leave of their parishes. They enter the information on a spreadsheet and what was originally believed to be six priests suddenly appears to be 87.

If you’re a journalist watching that moment there’s both recognition and regret: recognition of the meticulous, mind-numbing work but, more potently, regret that investigative journalism is now as endangered as the many institutions it has exposed.

Journalists loathe writing about journalism. We focus on what we produce, not how we produce it. We’re notoriously secret squirrels scrabbling around scrutinising and elucidating on every industry but our own. Even our awards nights are an uncomfortable showcase of bad dressing and neuroticism.

But sometimes we need to turn the pen on ourselves, to advocate, campaign or simply be a journal of record for what’s happening in our world. Sometimes there needs to be a story about the storytellers.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Church Militant

by Joseph Pelletier • ChurchMilitant.com • March 11, 2016

“[T]he focus should be on the victims of abuse”

ALTOONA, Penn. (ChurchMilitant.com) – A Pennsylvania bishop is ordering banners honoring two disgraced bishops to be taken down “indefinitely.”

The decision from Bp. Mark Bartchak of Altoona-Johnstown came last Friday following the release of a grand jury report implicating the diocese’s two previous bishops in a four-decade cover-up of over 50 homosexual priests. The two banners, which hung in the nave of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Altoona, bore the names of Bp. James Hogan and Bp. Joseph Adamec, along with the title “The Most Reverend” and their respective positions as the sixth and seventh bishops of the Altoona-Johnstown diocese.

ChurchMilitant.com learned from the diocese that in addition to the two banners for Hogan and Adamec, the remaining six honoring Altoona-Johnstown’s other bishops were also removed. Moreover the diocese has taken down featured portraits of all eight prelates.

According to diocesan spokesman Tony DeGol, the bishop “feels this is a time of humility for the diocese and the focus should be on the victims of abuse.”

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PENNSYLVANIA
Times Leader

March 13th, 2016

A grand jury’s recent report about alleged sexual abuse of children years ago by clergy in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown provides a disturbing new reminder of a tired and despicable theme.

Too often we read about religious leaders, teachers and other authority figures in Pennsylvania who view children as objects to be preyed upon, not lives to be treated as precious.

In the diocese’s case, the supposed perpetrators won’t face earthly justice. The statute of limitations for criminal prosecution has expired or the accused have since died, according to news reports. That means the alleged victims, including some newly emboldened to speak up since state Attorney General Kathleen Kane this month made public the grand jury’s report, can hope only to achieve some measure of healing by talking freely and getting connected with professional counseling services.

The situation, sobering as it is, no longer shocks. We have heard the story – in Philadelphia – and even seen the movie – of events in Boston – before.

And our sensibilities continue to be assaulted almost monthly, if not more often, by horrid behavior on the part of certain adults in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Public school teachers who engage in consensual sex with students. Molesters who formerly held positions of “trust.” Pedophiles.

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PENNSYLVANIA
The Morning Call

Matt Assad and Peter Hall
Of The Morning Call

Huddled in a law office on Hamilton Street, the district attorneys of the five counties in the Allentown Catholic Diocese spent days poring over files that detailed nearly two dozen allegations that priests had sexually abused children over several decades.

That unprecedented step came in May 2002 after sex-abuse allegations exploded in the Boston Archdiocese, prompting Allentown Bishop Edward P. Cullen to grant the five prosecutors, including Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin and Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, a rare glimpse into the diocese’s secret archives.

In the wake of the Boston revelations, attorneys and prosecutors across the nation have used lawsuits and criminal investigations to open those secret files to the public. Now victim advocates in Pennsylvania, where the statutes of limitations are short, are calling for legislators to give them that power too, by removing the deadlines that have kept people from suing the Catholic Church.

But some legal experts and the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, which represents dioceses and bishops statewide, say it would open a Pandora’s box of decades-old allegations that age, fading memories and death would render nearly impossible for the accused to defend against.

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FRANCE
euronews

By Valérie Gauriat

A group of former scouts have broken the silence about the abuse they went through decades ago. They want the highest authorities of the French clergy to face up to their responsibilities.

Victims speak out

Bertrand and Pierre Emmanuel had nothing in common. That was until they discovered a few weeks ago that the same memories had marked their childhood behind the walls of the same church in the suburbs of Lyon in east-central France.

“The priest who officiated here abused a lot of children, dozens and dozens in fact,” says Bertrand Virieux, one of the alleged victims

Several of the alleged victims spoke to euronews journalist Valerie Gauriat about the abuse:

“What shocked me the most was when he tried to put his tongue in my mouth. He stroked my genitals, I couldn’t avoid it,” recalls Pierre-Emmanuel Germain-Thill. “I wanted to run away, and at the same time, I didn’t know what to do, I was afraid that if I left that room, nobody would believe me.”

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FRANCE
The Daily Beast

Barbie Latza Nadeau

One of France’s most prominent cardinals knew about a pedophile priest abusing young Catholic Scouts—and now the alleged cover-up will be tried in secular courts.

ROME—For all those (namely the Vatican press office) who say that the Catholic Church is doing all it can on clerical child sex abuse—namely the Vatican press office—there is yet another reason to doubt those lofty words.

Meet the Archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who has denied he did anything wrong by hiding the well-known fact that Father Bernard Preynat was sexually abusing as many as 40 Catholic Scouts in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Preynat was relieved of his duties in the parish of Roanne in 2015 after admitting to the sex abuse. He was indicted on January 27 on charges of “sexual abuse and rape of minors” and has admitted his crimes to the police.

The 45 Scout victims who lodged the complaint that led to Preynat’s arrest share horrifically similar stories of abuse. “He would say ‘tell me you love me’. And then he would say ‘you’re my little boy,’ ‘it’s our secret, you mustn’t tell anyone,” one of Preynat’s victims said, according to criminal trial reports.

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AUSTRALIA
The Age

March 13, 2016

Cameron Houston and Chris Vedelago

Survivors of clergy abuse have accused the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne of stalling and obfuscation by delaying the release of an independent review of its own controversial compensation scheme.

The review of the Melbourne Response was announced by Archbishop Denis Hart in August 2014 following repeated claims at the royal commission that the church was primarily concerned with avoiding litigation and minimising payouts.

Archbishop Hart had vowed the findings by retired Federal Court Judge Donnell Ryan, QC, would be released by November 2014 and were expected to recommend a significant increase, or removal, of the $75,000 cap on compensation.

Fairfax Media can reveal that Mr Ryan submitted the review to Archbishop Hart on September 30, 2015, but that the report and its recommendations are yet to be made public.

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