ABUSE TRACKER

As a student at a Catholic college in the 1ate 1980’s I wrote a paper for an English Comp class on the downfall of the televangelists. Many will remember that era as a time when one sexual scandal after another seemed to rock the televangelist world. Sexual assaults, “consensual” sex with congregants, hiring prostitutes, the preachers did it all. It wasn’t so shocking that these dramatic men preaching the Gospel, while having their hand out for donations, turned out to be frauds. What shocked me was the loyalty of their congregation. They looked at the media as “attacking Jesus, attacking people of faith.” In reality they were just exposing con men who used religion as their draw.

I’m sure the paper that I wrote was tinged with sarcasm at the naiveness of the congregants. Even when the cold hard facts were presented, they just couldn’t see it. I was so…

View Cache

A Sunset man is suing the Boy Scouts of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, alleging sexual abuse by staff members.

“I told myself, just hold these cards to your chest one day,” said Van Medeiros. “One day, maybe you’ll be able to put them on the table.”

Since he was 7 years old, Medeiros said he has held on to secrets from the past he said ruined his childhood in 2009.

“From ages 7-to-13, I was routinely sexually abused by several members of the church,” he claims. “I never was able to tell my story because I was threatened essentially, that would ruin not just my life, but my mother’s life.”

The lawsuit states that “counselors, teachers, trustees, directors, officers, employees, agents, servants and/or volunteers,” of the local Crossroads of the West Council of Boy Scouts of America, “sexually assaulted, sexually abused, and/or had sexual…

View Cache

A reverend mother who oversees cloistered nuns at an Arlington monastery is in a legal battle with Bishop Michael Olson and the Fort Worth Catholic Diocese after he launched an investigation into allegations she violated her chastity vows with a priest.

Reverend Mother Superior Teresa Agnes Gerlach has sued Olson and the diocese, seeking more than $1 million in damages. She accuses the bishop of abuse of power and overstepping his authority.

Gerlach, along with Sister Francis Therese, filed the lawsuit May 3 in Tarrant County district court. The dispute is playing out in court and with canonical lawyers who handle ecclesiastical matters.

Matthew Bobo, an attorney representing the nuns, said the accusations are “absolutely false and have no basis.”

“Per canon law, he doesn’t have the authority to start an investigation or take any action. This is an independent religious organization which answers directly to the…

View Cache

Nuns from an Arlington, Texas, Carmelite monastery are suing the Diocese of Fort Worth and the bishop for $1 million for alleged violations of privacy and harming the physical and emotional well-being of the sisters.

The lawsuit stems from interactions related to a diocesan investigation of the Reverend Mother Superior Teresa Agnes Gerlach. The diocese has said it was investigating “grave misconduct” based on a report that she “committed sins against the Sixth Commandment and violated her vow of chastity with a priest.”

Although the diocese alleges that Gerlach admitted to violations of the Sixth Commandment, her attorney Matthew Bobo said in a statement provided to CNA that she was “under heavy medication from a procedure” and does not recall what she admitted.

“They are making it sound like she had some sexual liaison affair with another priest and that did not happen,” Bobo said.

The lawsuit claims that Bishop…

View Cache

One of Poland’s most senior bishops has apologised for neglect in how the country’s Catholic church dealt with child sex abuse by priests in the past, after a new report indicated over 1,000 victims during the communist period

Wojciech Polak – who is archbishop of Gniezno and primate of Poland – claimed that the church had “often been naive in dealing with these crimes”. However, he also noted that the communist authorities exploited the issue to blackmail priests into collaborating.

Yesterday, Rzeczpospolita, a leading newspaper, published what it claimed to be the first research of its type looking at reports of abuse linked to the church in communist-era archives.

Its findings pointed to over 1,000 children being abused by members of the clergy or lay employees of the church in the period 1944-1989. The newspaper notes that this number is just the “tip of the iceberg” because only a small proportion…

View Cache

“Decades too late.” That’s how one person describes the recent efforts from the six Illinois Catholic Dioceses to streamline their process for handling allegations of sexual abuse by a member of the clergy.

These new procedures are meant to give people a better understanding of how the diocese will handle allegations of sexual abuse, but survivors and advocates say church leaders need to do more.

Marc Pearlman is an attorney who represents survivors of sexual abuse in Illinois. He’s covered hundreds of cases; he says nearly 90% of those involve one of the six Illinois dioceses.

“The catholic church is arguably more responsible for more child sex abuse than any institution in the world,” says Pearlman. “Rockford has a notable history of child sex abuse and equally bad, if not worse, is the cover-up of that sex abuse.”

The Illinois Attorney General’s Office was first made aware of priests allegedly…

View Cache

All six of the dioceses of the Catholic Church in Illinois have released a public statement detailing what the church does when allegations are made involving sexual abuse against minors.

The seven-page news release from dioceses in Peoria, Springfield, Rockford, Chicago, Joliet and Belleville breaks down the procedures to protect children.

“By issuing this joint public statement, the Illinois dioceses hope to enhance the public’s understanding of how they handle allegations of sexual abuse involving minors,” the dioceses said.

The entire statement can be found on the Catholic Diocese of Peoria’s website.

The church developed these policies after decades of allegations in criminal and civil court that priests were molesting minors.

The state’s dioceses say they’ve been working with the Illinois Attorney General’s Office to “improve the transparency and effectiveness” of the policies.

“Prompted by the Attorney General’s investigation, the dioceses have critically reviewed current policies and…

View Cache

A female student has sued the Christian school she attended in western Michigan over its leaders’ alleged failure to prevent her sexual abuse by an art teacher and an older student.

The lawsuit was filed March 31 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan and seeks $25,000 in damages. It alleges that The Potter’s House, a preschool through 12th grade private school in Grand Rapids, Mich., and its leaders failed to comply with Title IX policies and “inflicted emotional distress” on the alleged victim, “Jane Doe.”

In January 2016, when Doe was in fifth grade, James “Jamie” Treadwell, 64, was an “artist in residence” at the school and rented a basement studio at a school-owned building adjacent to the school. The itinerant artist was then affiliated with a celibate religious brotherhood called The Servants of the Word, which subsequently broke…

View Cache

For the Hillsong lovers, Hillsong haters and those who love to hate Hillsong, the latest documentary treatment of the global megachurch’s descent into scandal is here and available to stream beginning Friday (May 19).

“The Secrets of Hillsong,” a four-part series that will air on FX and Hulu, purports to be the first time Carl Lentz, the fallen celebrity pastor, one-time “hype priest” and former spiritual mentor of Justin Bieber, has spoken publicly about allegations that he had sexual affairs, including allegations of sexual abuse toward his family’s nanny, Leona Kimes, though pieces of his personal defense have been leaking out in news stories and Instagram posts since Lentz was fired in November of 2020.

In the new docuseries, produced in partnership with Vanity Fair and based on their early reporting of scandals at Hillsong’s Manhattan branch, Lentz reportedly acknowledges a power dynamic at play in his relationship with Kimes…

View Cache

Editor’s Note: In support of the sixth strategic action of Vision 2025 adopted by messengers to the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting, Baptist Press will continue to report every instance of sexual abuse related to Southern Baptist churches, entities, institutions or leaders of which we are made aware.

A former Texas youth minister remained in jail May 18 after telling the Magnolia Police Department he sexually touched teenage boys while working in youth ministry at First Baptist Church of Magnolia.

Michael Anthony Romero, 51, was arrested May 12 on one count of sexual indecency with a child, a second-degree felony, Montgomery County Court records show.

The arrest occurred, according to court records accessed by KHOU.com, five months after Romero voluntarily approached the police department and told officers he touched teenage boys during youth group retreats, a Christian church camp and sleepovers at his lake house between 2002 and 2012. He named five…

View Cache

A Bolivian priest has been detained on suspicion of abusing seminary students a decade ago in a case that emerged after news broke earlier this month of a pedophilia scandal involving a late Jesuit priest in the Andean country.

Milton Murillo, a Catholic parish priest at the Church of San Roque in the southern region of Tarija, was sent to pre-trial detention for three months during a hearing late Thursday, regional prosecutor Sandra Gutiérrez Salazar said.

“With this, we want to express that the Public Prosecutor’s Office is taking stern action to ensure these crimes are punished,” she told reporters Friday.

The Murillo case came to a head in part because of the scandal that erupted earlier this month over Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas. Pedrajas died of cancer in 2009 and left behind a personal diary in which he confessed to having abused around 85 minors in Bolivia during the…

View Cache

Two journalists with Poland’s Rzeczpospolita journal published an investigation on the scale of abuse between 1944 and 1989

The number of victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Poland between 1944 and 1990 may be close to 1,100, with the number of abusers close to 300.

Those are, however, not the official findings of the church in Poland. On March 15, the bishops announced they will create a commission of experts to investigate past cases of abuse of minors by clergy in the country.

The numbers come from two journalists with Poland’s Rzeczpospolita journal, Tomasz Krzyzak and Piotr Litka, that published an investigation May 18 on the scale of sexual abuse in the church in Poland between 1944 and 1989.

“We did a very simple thing that is easily accessible to any public institution in the country — we looked at the state archives of communist-ruled Poland that…

View Cache

The Sun recently ran an article about child sexual abuse in the Baltimore archdiocese that quoted Charles LoPresto (”Report on sexual abuse by priests details horrors of life in hardest-hit Catholic parishes, schools,” April 7). While teaching at Calvert Hall College High School in the 1970s, he learned that a student had been abused by a priest at the school. He could have lied, covered up or looked the other way as so many of his contemporaries and superiors did. Instead, he went to the administration and threatened to quit if the priest wasn’t removed. The priest was gone the next day.

That was an oasis of heroism in the midst of a moral desert, made all the more remarkable by the fact that we were in a recession (aren’t we always?) and I happen to know he couldn’t afford to lose his job.

So I’d like…

View Cache

[Via Canberra Times]

A former Catholic student’s allegations he was sexually abused four decades ago may have been made against the wrong person.

Brother Daniel Slattery taught at Kendall Grange School and faced 13 counts of historical sexual abuse against three young boys aged between nine and 13 years who were students in 1980.

Kendall Grange on the shores of Lake Macquarie was run by the Order of the Hospitaller Brothers of St John of God, a religious order of the Catholic Church.

Boys with intellectual and behavioural difficulties were enrolled at the school and were frequently exposed to sexual or violent acts by the Brothers there.

In July 2018, Slattery was accused of committing a number of sexual acts on the three boys at various locations around the school including in his bedroom and their dormitory.

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and deemed unfit to stand trial, he was found…

View Cache

All Illinois Catholic dioceses issued a summary of their common processes for handling allegations of sexual abuse of minors against any Catholic cleric who has ministered within their respective boundaries.

The Catholic Church in the United States set in motion similar processes in response to a growing understanding that, over its history, church clerics and other personnel had sexually abused children in their care and that the response to these crimes had been insufficient.

While most processes have been in place for a while, Illinois dioceses have either described or applied them in different ways.

Each Illinois diocese has continually improved its policies to conform to national standards and as a result of its experiences.

In 2019, Pope Francis issued the decree entitled, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, mandating a world-wide system for the reporting, investigating, and resolving allegations against bishops, both of participating in an act of abuse, and of failing…

View Cache

Cardinal Blase Cupich spoke with ABC7 Chicago exclusively Thursday about how all six Illinois Catholic dioceses are now streamlining their process for handling allegations of sexual abuse by a member of the Catholic clergy.

The hope is to give people a better understanding of how the Illinois Catholic dioceses handle allegations of sexual abuse of minors, but survivors have said church leaders need to do more.

“We wanted to make sure that we followed the same kind of format and the ways that we communicate information,” Cupich said.

On Thursday, the six dioceses in the state released a joint statement detailing the process of reporting and investigating each case, including the publication of names of clerics “credibly accused” of sexual abuse.

“The way that we communicated information to people, especially through our websites, had some variations, and so we tried to tighten that up as a means of making sure…

View Cache

All Catholic dioceses in Illinois today issued a statement and summary of their common processes for handling allegations of sexual abuse of minors against any Catholic cleric who is ministering or has ministered within their respective boundaries.

The six Catholic dioceses of Illinois include the Archdiocese of Chicago, and the Dioceses of Belleville, Joliet, Peoria, Rockford, and Springfield.

The complete statement and summary can be found here. 

Archdiocese of Chicago Key Points are as Follows:

For more than 30 years, the Archdiocese of Chicago has been at the forefront of developing and continually improving policies and programs to address the scourge of child sexual abuse and to support survivors.

• Assistance Ministry: Since 1991, we have maintained one of the first and largest survivor assistance programs in the nation, providing pastoral assistance to anyone making an allegation, regardless of when the abuse is alleged to have occurred and whether or not the allegation is eventually substantiated.
  • The Office of Assistance…

View Cache

The legislation would have extended the civil statute of limitations for survivors of childhood sexual abuse

A legislative push to extend the statute of limitations for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file civil action failed this year — despite mounting evidence in Missouri and nationally that abuse can take years to come to light. 

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Brian Seitz, R-Branson, would have extended the amount of time survivors have to file civil action against a perpetrator from age 31 to age 41.

But it stalled in the legislative process. 

The bill was heard in committee in February and passed out of committee unanimously in April. It didn’t get a vote in the House until session was nearly over. It won unanimous approval from the House earlier this month but never got a committee hearing in the Senate.

Seitz attributes the bill’s limited traction this session…

View Cache

A former New Bedford priest who served at churches in Attleboro, North Attleboro and Easton has settled a sexual abuse lawsuit with a former altar boy at his parish in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Richard Degagne, who was a priest at St. Anthony of Padua Church in New Bedford when the alleged abuse occurred, settled the lawsuit with a payment “in the low to mid six figures,” the plaintiff’s lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian of Boston, told the New Bedford Standard Times.

The plaintiff, Jason Medeiros of Acushnet, was an altar boy at St. Anthony of Padua Church in New Bedford, and participated in a Catholic youth group.

In the lawsuit filed in Bristol County Superior Court, Medeiros alleged he was sexually abused by Degagne at various times between 1988 and 1991 when he was 13 to 15 years old.

The alleged abuse occurred in Degagne’s bedroom in the rectory…

View Cache

Pope Francis on Wednesday met briefly with a group of abuse victims who undertook a bicycle pilgrimage from Germany to Rome this month to ask the pope to do everything in his power to heal and prevent abuses in the Catholic Church.

The group, from the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, also delivered a letter to the Holy Father following his weekly general audience and presented him a gift: a sculpture of a heart by artist Michael Pendry.

“The work does not show a usual, romantic heart,” the group explained in its letter to the pope. “The heart has many open parts, allows introspection, it is angular and wounded. We as people who have been abused can easily find ourselves in this depiction. It is also so in our inner selves, in the center of our being, in the center of our heart!”

In all, 15 abuse victims arrived in…

View Cache

John Merzbacher, a former Baltimore Catholic school teacher, was convicted of rape in 1995. He was serving four life sentences.

John Merzbacher, a former Catholic school teacher and convicted child rapist who was named in a grand jury report detailing allegations of sexual abuse within the Baltimore Archdiocese, died in prison last week, according to reports citing the state’s corrections department.

Merzbacher, 81, was serving four life sentences at the Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover after being convicted of rape in 1995, the Baltimore Sun reported. He died of natural causes, according to the Associated Press.

Merzbacher was among nearly 160 priests and other church members named in a 463-page report released in April by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, which identified Merzbacher as “the most obvious example of systemic abuse” among non-clergy members.

The report, which a judge ordered released to the public in…

View Cache

Catholic priests in France will be forced to wear scannable QR codes to signal whether they are sex offenders as part of a national crackdown on abuse, according to church officials.

Under the new system, people can scan the wallet-size cards with their smartphones to receive one of three color codes revealing the clergy member’s “status,” according to the Bishops’ Conference of France.

Red shows that the priest has been stripped of his clerical position potentially due to child sex abuse, though the nature of the sanction is not specified.

Green is a sign that the priest is in good standing, while orange indicates he’s not yet fully qualified to lead Mass.

The system  — announced May 10 in an effort by the church to appear more “transparent” — also applies to bishops and deacons, France 24 reported.

The Catholic Church hailed the program as an efficient way to…

View Cache

Following the publication of a report by the Spanish newspaper El País that documented the serial sexual abuse of 89 victims committed in Bolivia by a Jesuit priest, new accusations have been made against other priests.

The scandal came to light when the nephew of the deceased Spanish Jesuit priest, Alfonso Pedrajas Moreno, found a diary among his personal effects that reveals the acts of abuse. The diary also showed that the Jesuit authorities were aware of the abuse and covered it up.

Both the Society of Jesus and the Bolivian government are pursuing the new cases.

In the last week, a complaint of abuse and rape was filed with the Bolivian public prosecutor’s office against Jesuit Father Luis María Roma Padrosa while Archbishop Alejandro Mestre, also a Jesuit, was accused of sexual abuse in a second complaint.

Both complaints were filed by former Jesuit provincial Osvaldo Chirveches.

“There are…

View Cache

The French Bishops’ Conference has just introduced its “in-house” scannable ID card which will replace the “celebret”, a paper document proving the holder’s credentials.  The card provides color-coded background information on priests’, bishops’ and deacons’ suitability to perform their duties or hear confession.  While green and orange indicates the holder is fully or partially qualified, the main goal is to wave a red flag at those who are no longer allowed to officiate.  

The Conference has finessed the context for this move by not spelling out the possible reasons for a red flag. However one can assume that the goal of this attempt at greater transparency is to weed out impostors and better keep track of those found guilty of sexual abuse – folks who often manage to evade detection and continue their criminal activities unabated. 

Culturally speaking this initiative reflects an acceptance in France of an Identification…

View Cache

Over the past six months, I have had the pleasure of working with this student. She has spent years giving her passion, creativity, and time to Hesston College. And recently, she has been a part of the student organizing that has led to administration promising change. But like many survivors before her, she has had to end her time at Hesston unceremoniously. Before packing and leaving, she wrote this to President Manickam. Even from her place of being abused, ignored, and silenced by administration, she has hopes that they can transform into the leadership they aspire to be, or even think they already are. As Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline,” and this, dear readers, is a survivor with deep discipline.

— Erin Bergen, Director of Student Advocacy

Click here to read law firm Cozen O’ Connor’s 2023 report on Hesston College’s numerous Title IX…

View Cache

Victims who were sexually abused within the Catholic Church have cycled hundreds of kilometers from the Bavarian capital to Rome together. They had a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican to hand over their message.

A group of victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church had an audience with Pope Francis on Wednesday, after reaching the goal of their bicycle challenge.

The initiative — the stated aim of which is to be seen and heard — was organized by victims groups in the Munich and Freising archdiocese under the motto “We’re leaving! Church, are you with us?”

What did the journey entail?

The group of nine abuse victims, along with their riding companions, traveled 715 kilometers (about 450 miles) in ten stages over as many successive days. 

To symbolize their emotional state, they also took along stones bearing words to reflect their thoughts and feelings.

Among them were anger, shame, worthlessness,…

View Cache

A new resource for tracking Native residential schools affiliated with the Catholic Church marks a major advance toward healing the wounds of systemic abuse, said one project organizer.

“While there are more steps for the Catholic Church to take to move toward truth, healing and reconciliation, this list is a powerful step forward,” said Maka Black Elk, executive director for Truth and Healing at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

On May 9, Black Elk and a group of archivists, historians, tribal members and other supporters unveiled a list of some 87 Catholic-run Native boarding schools that had operated in 22 U.S. states prior to 1978. The schools were among more than 400 overseen by the U.S. federal government in the 19th and 20th centuries, with many sites operated by Christian churches and organizations.

The list, accessible online at http://ctah.archivistsacwr.org,…

View Cache

The Vatican has been accused of obstructing investigation efforts into the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi in 1983

Rome prosecutors have opened a fresh investigation into the disappearance of a teenager 40 years ago, and are calling for full collaboration from the Vatican, Italian media reported Monday.

Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, was last seen leaving a music class in Rome on June 22, 1983.

Decades of speculation followed over what happened to her, with suggestions that mobsters, the secret services or a Vatican conspiracy were to blame, theories which sparked a hit Netflix series.

The Orlandi family’s lawyer Laura Sgro told AFP Monday she had learned of the fresh probe through Italian media reports, and “it would certainly be welcome news”.

The family has campaigned tirelessly for the truth, and it was their demands which led in part to the Vatican launching an inquiry into its…

View Cache

Despite prior admissions that he engaged in “manipulated intimacy” with a church member and employee, disgraced former Hillsong NYC pastor Carl Lentz strongly denies his misconduct was abuse in a new docuseries releasing this week.

In the docuseries, The Secrets of Hillsong, Lentz describes his years-long sexual misconduct with Leona Kimes, his nanny and a member of Hillsong NYC, as “an inappropriate relationship,” according to a preview in People. But Lentz argues “any notion of abuse is categorically false.”

Lentz also disclosed in the docuseries he was “sexually abused as a child by a family friend,” which has not been previously disclosed, People reported.

The four-part docuseries releases Friday on FX and is the only Hillsong exposé to feature interviews with Lentz and his wife, Laura, since their firing from Hillsong in 2020 after Carl’s admission of infidelity.

Hillsong later determined that Carl Lentz had inappropriate relationships with three women, including Kimes. In…

View Cache

A jury Wednesday awarded $95 million to a local man who alleged he was sexually abused in 1979 by a former Rochester-area priest who also has been accused by others of sexual assaults.

The local man alleged that the former priest, Rev. Foster P. Rogers, sexually abused him in Rogers’ car in July 1979.

The victim was then 15. Rogers now has limited income, according to letters he wrote the court, and the local man awarded the $95 million is unlikely to see even a tiny sliver of the award.

The award is one of the largest in New York since the Child Victims Act, which opened a window for lawsuits from past child victims of sexual abuse. Earlier this month an Erie County woman was awarded $100 million under the Child Victims Act, or CVA. That was thought to be the largest CVA award in New York.

In 1979 Rogers…

View Cache

There are relatively few positions in the country that have the job security of a Catholic bishop. In his diocese, as the church’s Code of Canon Law puts it, the bishop has “all ordinary, proper, and immediate power.” No one there can contravene his orders or force his removal from office. Neither can the national conference of bishops, nor can any regional ecclesial entities. 

Even Elon Musk, the new lord of Twitter and aspiring president of Mars, ultimately reports to various boards of directors. Catholic bishops report to the pope directly, and only he can choose to remove them.

Given that organizational reality, one can understand the dilemma of a Catholic in the Diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee. As NCR staff reporter Brian Fraga highlights in a thorough and wide-ranging investigation, many parishioners there are feeling demoralized and unsure what power they have to effect…

View Cache

The Church of England’s increasingly dire record on safeguarding should have consequences for its established status, says Megan Manson.

It didn’t take long for the glitz and glamour of the coronation to fade, and for the Church of England to find itself back in the quagmire of abuse scandals.

Within days of their Westminster Abbey extravaganza, the UK’s established Church found itself having to answer to damning findings of an independent review into the case of Trevor Devamanikkam, a CofE priest who raped Matthew Ineson in the 1980s. Ineson was just 16 years old.

Days later, victims of alleged abuse at the hands of CofE preacher Mike Pilavachi called for an independent investigation into his actions, as they don’t trust the Church’s own internal inquiry.

Pilavachi’s victims and survivors have every right to be sceptical of the Church’s ability, in their words, to “mark its own…

View Cache

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore has spoken out against headlines related to a recent Maryland Attorney General report on clergy sex abuse, saying many of the news stories don’t “provide a full or completely accurate picture” of the “30-year history of the Archdiocese’s accountability and enforcement efforts.”

The 454-page report, published April 5, details more than 600 instances of child sex abuse by 156 abusers from the archdiocese. According to the report, the majority of the abuse took place between the 1940s and 2002 – the year the U.S. Bishops implemented the Dallas Charter, establishing a set of procedures dioceses must follow to address allegations of sexual abuse.

Secular and Catholic media outlets alike, including Crux, reported the details of the report when it was published by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office. However, in recent weeks, several Baltimore media outlets revealed the supposed identities of several priests and church officials whose…

View Cache

A SEX abuse survivor has spoken out against Baltimore’s Catholic church, saying that a fellow victim reached out to a nun for help who then turned up dead.

Teresa Lancaster, 69, is now an advocate for victims like her, after being forced into the Archdiocese of Baltimore‘s “sex ring” while attending Archbishop Keough High School in Maryland during the late 1960s to early 1970s.

“I went to the counselor at Archbishop Keogh to get some advice about some problems at home,” Lancaster exclusively told The U.S. Sun.

Her counselor, Father Joseph Maskell, was a Catholic priest who allegedly sexually abused multiple girls at the high school during this time – but denied any accusations until his death in 2001 and was never criminally charged.

“When I went in there, he closed the door and took all my clothes off, and sat me in his lap within five or 10 minutes,” Lancaster said.

Another girl…

View Cache

A SURVIVOR of a Baltimore Catholic Church priest’s sexual abuse has spoken out about the horrific way he would silence his victims.

Father Joseph Maskell was a counselor and Catholic priest at Archbishop Keough High School in Maryland who abused girls like Teresa Lancaster, who attended in the late 1960s to early 1970s

Lancaster, now 69, is an advocate for sex abuse survivors after building up the courage to break her silence about the abuse she faced at the hands of Maskell.

“I went to the counselor at Archbishop Keogh to get some advice about some problems at home,” Lancaster exclusively told The U.S. Sun.

“When I went in there, he closed the door and took all my clothes off, and sat me in his lap within five or 10 minutes,” Lancaster said.

Lancaster called Maskell a “serial rapist” who abused multiple children, not just girls, but boys too, calling the cycle…

View Cache

Parish priest Michael Zacharias, 56, was convicted on five counts of sex trafficking by a federal jury in the Northern District of Ohio last Friday.

Zacharias has been on administrative leave from the Diocese of Toledo since he was arrested on August 18, 2020. His crimes, committed between 1999 to 2020, involved three victims, two of whom were still minors when Zacharias began abusing them.

The former pastor now faces a minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum of life in prison.

His sentencing hearing has not yet been scheduled.

According to court documents, Zacharias used psychological coercion, threats, and money to force his underage and adult victims to perform sexual acts with him. The two underage victims told investigators that they were addicted to drugs and needed the money.

Zacharias was ordained a priest in 2002 and was the pastor of St. Michael the Archangel…

View Cache

With under six months to go before a parliamentary election that is expected to be closely fought, a surprise figure has entered the Polish political field, despite the fact he died in 2005: Pope John Paul II.

The legacy of John Paul II, who was born Karol Wojtyła and was archbishop of Kraków before becoming pope in 1978, is under scrutiny after a recent book and television documentary accused him of covering up for paedophile priests before he became pontiff.

Poland, historically staunchly Catholic, has slowly been coming to terms with the scale of historical sexual abuse in the church, but until recently the figure of John Paul II, whom many Poles revere for his role in the ending of communist rule in the country, has remained untouchable.

That convention has been upturned by allegations in a documentary aired on Polish television station TVN earlier this year, and a concurrent…

View Cache

The Diocese of Oakland, in California, has filed for bankruptcy protection, Bishop Michael Barber announced May 8. 

The filing comes less than a month following Barber’s announcement that the diocese was strongly considering the legal maneuver due to hundreds of expected child sexual abuse lawsuits brought after the statute of limitations expired at the end of a three-year legal window.

In 2019, the state of California passed legislation that granted a three-year exemption to the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse lawsuits. The legal window began Jan. 1, 2020, and ended Jan. 2, 2023.

In a letter to the people of his diocese, Barber said there are more than 330 child sexual abuse claims, with the majority alleging assaults occurring between 1960 and 1989.

The diocese’s website said that three of the accusations claim the abuse occurred within the last two decades….

View Cache

Pope Francis plans to ask Bishop Richard F. Stika of Knoxville, Tenn., to resign in response to a Vatican-ordered investigation of sexual abuse cover-up and financial mismanagement, according to a report by The Pillar.

In a May 13 article, The Pillar cited unnamed sources “close to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops,” who indicated that Pope Francis came to a decision on the embattled Tennessee bishop in April.

Appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, Bishop Stika has been the diocese’s longest-serving ordinary, but his tenure has been a troubled one.

The bishop has been accused of sheltering and financing former seminarian Wojciech Sobczuk, who allegedly raped a parish organist. In May 2021, Bishop Stika confirmed to The Pillar he had removed an investigator appointed to the case by the diocesan review board, saying the former law enforcement professional was “past his prime” and declaring Sobczuk’s innocence. The organist has since…

View Cache

Mike Pride, who transformed the New Hampshire newspaper The Concord Monitor into a prizewinning paragon of regional journalism, mentoring generations of reporters and editors, defying the trope about the dying small-town newspaper and exerting an outsize impact on his profession, died on April 24 in a hospice in Palm Harbor, Fla. He was 76.

The cause was myelofibrosis, a rare type of blood cancer, his son Dr. Yuri Pride said.

As The Monitor’s managing editor from 1978 to 1983 and its editor until he retired in 2008, Mr. Pride won the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1987 for overseeing The Monitor’s eloquent coverage of the death of a hometown heroine, the astronaut and teacher Christa McAuliffe, in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

And he presided over a newspaper that was regarded as a model of objective reporting — in contrast to the strident front-page editorials…

View Cache

A Catholic priest in Ohio is the latest to be convicted as the church continues to encounter allegations of sex abuse against its priests.

A jury has convicted an Ohio Catholic priest on five counts of sex trafficking, the Department of Justice announced. 

The Department of Justice said Michael J. Zacharias trafficked three victims, two of whom were children who he continued to traffic as adults. The DOJ said it had evidence that Zacharias paid the victims to engage in sex acts with him. 

The DOJ said he began grooming the victims when they were young boys while serving at St. Catherine’s Catholic Parish school in Toledo, Ohio. Prosecutors said he integrated himself into the boys’ families “as a trusted friend, mentor and spiritual counselor.”

“The defendant overcame the victims’ resistance to his eventual commercial sex overtures by gradually sexualizing conversations and conduct with them. At the same time, the…

View Cache

He was allegedly sexually abused about 53 years ago as he attended Central Catholic High School in Steubenville.

This man, whose name is not being disclosed, has joined two other former students in revealing what he says was sexual abuse by a priest at the school, Father Kenneth Bonadies.

A news conference Monday in Steubenville, held by Road To Recovery Inc., detailed that man’s story.

While that man did not comment during the news conference, another one did speak via Zoom, saying Father Bonadies allegedly sexually abused him in stairwells and classrooms, causing him lifelong trauma.

An attorney representing all three men, Mitchell Garabedian, claims Bishop Jeffrey Monforton has been covering up what happened, and has refused to release the contents of files.

He said the victims have waited a long time and have gotten no response in civil court.

Dino Orsatti, Director of Communications for the Diocese of Steubenville,…

View Cache

John Merzbacher, a former teacher at Catholic Community School of Baltimore, who victimized dozens of Baltimore children in the 1960s and ’70s, has died in prison, where he was serving four consecutive life sentences. He was 81.

Early Sunday morning, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services notified one of the survivors of Merzbacher’s abuse of a “change in status” as of Saturday. “This is not an emergency; the offender is deceased,” the email stated.

Merzbacher died Friday in the infirmary at Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover. There was no sign of foul play. His death certificate states that he died from natural causes, according to Latoya Gray, spokeswoman for Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

When prosecutors brought charges against Merzbacher in the 1990s, they said at least 40 former students alleged they had been raped or otherwise abused by him. The former teacher allegedly…

View Cache

A sex abuse survivor has spoken out against Baltimore’s Catholic church, saying that a fellow victim reached out to a nun for help who then turned up dead.

Teresa Lancaster, 69, is now an advocate for victims like her, after being forced into the Archdiocese of Baltimore‘s “sex ring” while attending Archbishop Keough High School in Maryland during the late 1960s to early 1970s.

“I went to the counselor at Archbishop Keogh to get some advice about some problems at home,” Lancaster exclusively told The U.S. Sun.

Her counselor, Father Joseph Maskell, was a Catholic priest who allegedly sexually abused multiple girls at the high school during this time – but denied any accusations until his death in 2001 and was never criminally charged.

“When I went in there, he closed the door and took all my clothes off, and sat me in his lap within five or 10 minutes,” Lancaster said.

Another girl…

View Cache

One of Maryland’s most infamous sex offenders has died in prison. 

John Merzbacher was serving four life sentences after being convicted in 1995 of raping a student in the 1970s at the catholic school in south Baltimore where he was a teacher. 

He was also accused of abusing at least 13 other young victims, sometimes using a gun in the abuse, but those charges were dropped when Merzbacher was sentenced to life.  

State corrections officials said Merzbacher was 81 when he died of what prison officials said were natural causes at a prison on the Eastern Shore. 

View Cache

Diocese of Providence Priest Eric Silva — who has been removed from diocesan assignments at Catholic schools and parishes in Cranston, Barrington and Narragansett — now has a new home.

Silva had been removed for asking children “inappropriate questions” about sex.

Demers, Haiti, and St. Joseph’s Church

Now, Silva is assigned to St. Joseph Church on Hope Street — the parish associated with one of the most infamous Catholic priests — Priest Norman Demers. 

Silva’s name does not appear on the St. Joseph website, or weekly handout, nor does he introduce himself when giving mass.

Demers was assigned to St. Joseph from 1974 to 1990 — it was his longest assignment during his 42-year career in the priesthood. And it was at St. Joseph that he was involved with the parish’s Haiti project and allegations of sexual abuse came to light.

“The complaints about Father Demers were raised…

View Cache

Last night I read a longform article in the English edition of the Madrid-based newspaper El País about a Spanish-born Jesuit priest named Alfonso Pedrajas. After Pedrajas died in 2009, he left behind a diary that filled 383 printed pages, comprised of 350 entries chronicling his life and career as a priest. El País compared his diary to “a map charting a long and sinuous road,” explaining that “the priest’s diary follows his life from 1960, the year when he entered the Jesuit order as a novice, to 2008, the year he stopped writing after succumbing to exhaustion and illness.”

In his diary, Pedrajas acknowledged that he was a serial sexual predator. El País reported that it was filled with statements such as, “My biggest personal failure: without a doubt, the pederasty.” In one entry, he even estimated how many he had abused, writing, “I hurt so many people (85?)….

View Cache

Complainants call for apology from RCMP, compensation for former Immaculata students who experienced abuse

ichard Perry, 65, still has scars from abuse he said he suffered at the Immaculata Elementary day school more than 50 years ago — abuse he alleges the RCMP failed to fully investigate because he is Indigenous.

“We got hit all the time for not talking ‘right’, not doing things right,” he told the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal this week at a hearing in Burns Lake, B.C., more than 900 kilometres north of Vancouver and 220 kilometres northwest of Prince George.

The panel was in the community from May 1-12 to hear testimony from Perry and other former students, who recounted stories of physical and sexual violence and who said, decades later, that the RCMP failed to properly investigate their stories.

Six of the survivors launched a human rights complaint against the RCMP in 2017. They want…

View Cache

A federal jury has convicted an Ohio Catholic priest accused of grooming young boys of five counts of sex trafficking, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.

According to the department, evidence presented to jury demonstrated how that Michael J. Zacharias first met the victims when they were young boys, and he was a Seminarian at St. Catherine’s Catholic Parish school in Toledo, Ohio, and began grooming them for commercial sex acts.

“The charges related to three victims, two of whom Zacharias trafficked when they were minors and as adults,” said the DOJ. “The evidence presented to the jury detailed how Zacharias paid the victims to engage in sex acts with him using the victims’ fear of serious harm to compel their compliance.”

In 2002, a report in the Boston Globe opened a floodgate of revelations about sex abuse cases in the Catholic church. By…

View Cache

A Roman Catholic priest was convicted of five sex-trafficking charges in the molestation of three boys who prosecutors say he met at a Toledo preschool and coerced to continue sexual activity as adults.

Rev. Michael Zacharias was convicted by a federal jury on Friday of sexual trafficking of a minor, two counts of sexual trafficking of a minor by force, fraud, or coercion, and two counts of sexual trafficking of an adult by force, fraud, or coercion.

Prosecutors said Zacharias “paid the victims to engage in sex acts with him using the victims’ fear of serious harm to compel their compliance.” They also said the three victims were developing serious drug addictions and the priest “waited to propose commercial sex” until they were heavily involved in drug abuse.

The Toledo Blade reports that Zacharias, 56, was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and taken to the Lucas…

View Cache

Rattled by repeated cases of sexual abuse over the years, the French Catholic Church will soon provide digital ID cards with scannable QR codes that will offer colour-coded background information – ranging from green to orange to red – on bishops, priests and deacons. But the new measure is raising eyebrows.      

Old sins cast long shadows. After centuries of secrecy, the French Bishop’s Conference (CEF) has decided it will be more transparent by equipping priests, bishops and deacons with digital, scannable identification cards. No bigger than a bankcard, the IDs will certify whether or not its holder is fit to perform a sermon or has the right to hear confession. 

Essentially, the cards identify whether or not the Church member is facing a sexual abuse charge. 

When the announcement dropped on Wednesday 10 May, it sparked a mini revolution within the French Catholic…

View Cache

A Catholic priest in Ohio was convicted Friday on five counts of sex trafficking charges related to three victims, two of whom were minors when first sexually abused.

Michael Zacharias, 53, of Findlay, was charged with coercion and enticement, sex trafficking of a minor, and sex trafficking of an adult by force, fraud, or coercion, News Center 7 previously reported.

Zacharias was arrested without incident at his home in Findlay by members of the Northwest Ohio Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force. Zacharias, the pastor at St. Michael the Archangel parish in Findlay, was then placed on administrative leave due to his arrest.

A trial went underway that presented evidence of Zacharias paying victims to engage in sex acts with him, using the victims’ fear of serious harm to compel their compliance. The evidence showed Zacharias first meeting his victims when they were young boys, and he was a…

View Cache

The embattled Bishop Rick Stika will be asked by Vatican officials to resign as Bishop of Knoxville, after more than two years of scandal over the bishop’s leadership of his eastern Tennessee diocese.

According to sources close to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, Pope Francis decided last month to request Stika’s resignation, after reviewing the results of a Vatican-ordered investigation into the bishop’s management.

Stika is accused of protecting Wojciech Sobczuk, a seminarian accused multiple times of sexual assault. Stika last year admitted to The Pillar that he interfered with a diocesan review board investigation into the allegation that Sobczuk raped a parish organist, telling The Pillar that the seminarian was the victim of the alleged sexual assault, not the aggressor.

The bishop is also accused of mishandling other sexual misconduct allegations in the diocese, and has been accused by his presbyterate of bullying and harassment. 

It is not clear whether Stika will agree…

View Cache

The papal commission to protect minors began in 2014 as an independent body that reported directly to the pope

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors has been trying to define more clearly its relationship with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, but those efforts have been “slow,” said its president, Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley of Boston.

“Draft statutes for the commission were submitted to the Secretariat of State late last year reflecting the new mandate” of the commission, he told commission members May 4, opening their plenary assembly in Rome. The commission published his address on its website at tutelaminorum.org May 12.

While the Secretariat of State sent comments on the draft statutes earlier this year, they “offered little by way of substantive clarity on the nature of the working relationship between the DDF and the commission,” the cardinal said.

Pope Francis’ 2022 apostolic constitution, “Praedicate…

View Cache

A former elite junior football coach has been accused by former AFL player Daniel Hayes of rape back in 2005 and a writ has been lodged in the Victorian Supreme Court seeking damages.

Key points:

• Mark Patrick Heaney has denied allegations he raped former AFL player Daniel Hayes
• Heaney worked at schools and helped set up a Swans academy while serving as the AFL’s regional manager for northern NSW
• In 2014, Heaney was jailed after pleading guilty of one count of using a carriage service to groom a person under 16 years

Mark Patrick Heaney was a senior AFL employee who played a crucial role in the code’s expansion into New South Wales and coached Sydney Swans academy teams for three years.

Heaney, who was the AFL’s Northern New South Wales regional manager between 2009 and 2013, lost his job with the league in 2014 when he was convicted and…

View Cache

One community leader on how observers can look at the situation

A viral video of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy sparked accusations of sexual abuse and pedophilia, but some members of the Tibetan and Buddhist communities say the spiritual leader did not cause harm. The video, taken in Dharamsala, India in February, shows the Dalai Lama, 87, kissing the boy and asking him to suck his tongue. Outrage on social media last month led the Dalai Lama to issue an apology on Twitter. Some consider the concern over the interaction as a cultural norm that was lost in translation. 

“In Tibetan culture, the grandparents and elders are very close to children. It is a very common custom to kiss anybody on the mouth, especially children, for which there is a kind of understood innocence both ways,” says Angela Sumegi, an associate professor of humanities and religion at Carleton…

View Cache

The Archdiocese of Baltimore is pushing back on reports that named child sexual abusers continue to work in the archdiocese.

Video above: Attorneys to sue archdiocese over child sex abuse

In a new letter sent Friday to members of the archdiocese, Archbishop William Lori pushed back against recent reports that priests named in the report on clergy child sexual abuse are still working in the archdiocese.

Lori wrote, in part: “Some members of the clergy whose names have been tied more recently to media coverage focusing on the coverup are, in fact, some of the very people who helped force a culture change that rooted out evil and shut out attempts to conceal the failures or hide abusers.

“How is it a coverup if you report everything to law enforcement?”

Survivors of clergy abuse have called on Lori to step down. Earlier this week, they asked the archdiocese to release…

View Cache

Lay Catholics say the Knoxville Diocese is a ‘hot mess.’ Bishop Richard Stika tells NCR he plans to ‘move forward.’

Some priests in the Diocese of Knoxville have retired early or left active ministry. Others are considering leaving the priesthood. Groups of lay Catholics in the East Tennessee area say they are demoralized and frustrated.

“We are just really a hot mess,” said Susan Vance, a leader of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests in Tennessee.

Vance and other local Catholics blame Bishop Richard Stika, who became the diocese’s third bishop in 2009, for the turmoil in their local church. In two lawsuits, the diocese is accused of allegedly obstructing investigations into clergy sex abuse and intimidating people who reported they were abused. An apostolic visitation is investigating concerns about Stika’s leadership raised by laity and clergy.

“This man is not a leader. A leader looks after his…

View Cache

A 29-year-old teacher — who was working at a Jewish private school when police officers arrested him for child sex crimes at a private Catholic school and a charter school — is facing more charges on Wednesday in Miami-Dade County. Eric Bernard Givens, also known as “Mr G.”, has been at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center since Friday without bond. County jail and court records show that on Wednesday he was facing charges in cases involving three girls.

According to court records, the additional criminal cases involve two other girls who said Givens abused them while he was their teacher at St. Mary Cathedral School and a girl who met Givens while he was her teacher at the Theodore R. and Thelma A. Gibson Charter School in Miami’s Overtown district.

For many, hearing and sharing stories can play a vital role in their recovery from…

View Cache

Seven Buddhist monks are among nine suspects who are being held in pretrial detention after being arrested for allegedly embezzling assets worth about 300 million baht ($8.9 million) from donations received by a temple in Thailand’s northeast, authorities said Thursday.

The Criminal Court for Corruption and Misconduct Cases said the actions of the ringleaders in the case “gravely undermined Buddhism.”

Five monks and a driver were sent to pretrial detention on Thursday, according to a statement from the court in Bangkok. They were arrested at Wat Pa Thammakhiri in Nakhon Ratchasima province when police conducted a raid Tuesday and uncovered property worth about 100 million baht ($2.9 million) allegedly hidden by the suspects.

Cash, jewelry and amulets were found in many spots, including the monks’ private quarters, police said. Some items were buried underground.

The first arrests in the case occurred last Friday, when police took into custody the temple…

View Cache

A local priest was convicted Friday on a series of federal sex crime, according to our media partner the Blade.

A jury found Rev. Michael J. Zacharias guilty on all charges against him including on sex trafficking of a minor and sex trafficking of an adult and minor by force, fraud, or coercion.

Zacharias was a priest at St. Michael’s in Findlay. He was arrested in August of 2020. Bishop Daniel Thomas placed him on administrative leave immediately after his arrest.

Prosecutors said Zacharias engaged in sexual misconduct with minors since the late 1990s. According to court documents, Zacharias allegedly targeted two boys at Catholic schools in Toledo who had developed drug addictions, offering to pay them for sexual acts to help them purchase drugs.

The first victim was allegedly abused as a Catholic school student in Toledo while Zacharias was in seminary school, with…

View Cache

A federal jury in Northern District of Ohio convicted Michael J. Zacharias, a priest, of five counts of sex trafficking. The charges related to three victims, two of whom Zacharias trafficked when they were minors and as adults. The evidence presented to the jury detailed how Zacharias paid the victims to engage in sex acts with him using the victims’ fear of serious harm to compel their compliance.

Specifically, the jury heard evidence of how Zacharias first met the victims when they were young boys, and he was a Seminarian at St. Catherine’s Catholic Parish school in Toledo, Ohio, and how Zacharias began grooming the boys for commercial sex acts, using his position as a priest and teacher to ingratiate himself with the boys and their families as a trusted friend, mentor and spiritual counselor. The defendant overcame the victims’ resistance to his eventual commercial sex overtures by gradually sexualizing…

View Cache

For over two decades, Chi Alpha Campus Ministries, a college ministry in Texas affiliated with the Assemblies of God, has allowed a registered sex offender to attend meetings and prey on students, raping or sexually assaulting at least 13 men, whistleblowers say. They add that the man’s pattern of grooming and inappropriate behavior was reported to the group’s state and national leadership, but the ministry leaders did nothing, despite repeated calls to do so.

Daniel Savala, 67, has billed himself as an itinerant minister and spiritual mentor for decades. Since 1989, he has been affiliated with Chi Alpha Campus Ministries. Yet allegations are now surfacing that Savala used his access to college ministries and churches as a means to groom and sexually abuse college students and minors. This reportedly included Savala encouraging students to masturbate in front of him, get naked, and engage in other sexual activity.

In…

View Cache

Archbishop William E. Lori confirmed that no one who has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor is currently in ministry in the archdiocese, and that he has confidence that all clergy and employees are committed to protecting children and enforcing the archdiocese’s child protection policies.

In a May 11 exclusive interview with the Catholic Review, he expressed his support for some clergy in the Archdiocese of Baltimore who have been identified by a local media report as the officials whose names are redacted in the report of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office regarding clergy sexual abuse in the archdiocese. Archbishop Lori said that the court confidentiality orders remain in place and he respects the court process, so he would not confirm the identifications made by the media.

The archbishop said he has full confidence in the ministry of those identified by the local media outlet because the…

View Cache

The Baltimore Archdiocese insists it’s a changed institution. The rampant sexual abuse of children and accompanying cover-up within the Catholic Church dating back to the 1940s — revealed this spring in a lengthy attorney general’s report that redacted some of the names of the guilty — could not happen today, officials claim. “For decades, the Archdiocese has been firmly committed to holding suspected abusers accountable,” an online response to the A.G. report promises.

Yet three of five clergy members accused of previously helping to conceal the abuse of others, and whose names were unmasked this month by The Sun, remain active in parish ministries or Catholic governing boards today. What kind of accountability is that? If they helped cover up abuse, as the report claims, then their consequence is being made head pastor? That’s the position held by Monsignor J. Bruce Jarboe…

View Cache

Monsignor J. Bruce Jarboe, recently identified as one of the high-ranking Catholic clerics cited in an attorney general’s investigation into how the church handled child sex abuse cases, will not transfer to a prominent Towson parish as planned.

Archbishop William Lori told parishioners Friday that instead of moving in July to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Jarboe will remain pastor of St. Ann in Hagerstown. Lori sent letters to members of both parishes and discussed the change in the Catholic Review, an archdiocesan publication.

Jarboe also serves on the board of trustees for St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore (Lori is the board chair) and is an ex officio member of the St. Maria Goretti Catholic High School board of trustees in Hagerstown.

Jarboe is one of five clerics whose identities were redacted in a public version of the report by the Maryland Attorney…

View Cache

Regarding “A Bay Area Catholic diocese filed for bankruptcy in wake of hundreds of sex abuse lawsuits” (Bay Area, SFChronicle.com, May 8): The Catholic Diocese of Oakland is declaring bankruptcy because of the costs of litigation in 330 sexual abuse lawsuits. It’s amazing to me how quickly they move to shield their assets, but how slowly they moved to protect the hundreds of children abused by pedophile priests.

The diocese was equally quick to prevaricate about the reasons for declaring bankruptcy: “We believe this process is the best way to ensure a fair and equitable outcome for survivors.”

No. Bankruptcy is simply a way to protect assets. A number of dioceses have done the same thing to avoid legal and financial responsibility.

Someone, apparently no longer important to modern Christianity, once said something about rich men, desert quadrupeds and needles. The same person also said something about children, stumbling and…

View Cache

Archdiocese of Baltimore still colluding with abuse perpetrators

Lee Sanderlin’s and Cassidy Jensen’s excellent article uncovered the identities of five Archdiocesan officials whose names were redacted in the most recent version of the Attorney General’s report on child sex abuse by church clergy. (“Bishop, other high-ranking Baltimore Catholic officials identified as those who helped cover up sexual abuse,” May 6).

The information in the article provided me with some important pieces to the puzzle of my past. Getting this larger perspective strengthens my suspicions that all these officials knew what was happening, and some played key parts in this cover-up. Three such officials are Most Revs. Richard “Rick” Woy, G. Michael Schleupner and Auxiliary Bishop W. Francis Malooly.

I was introduced to Woy in August of 1992, when, as a representative of the Archdiocese, he was assigned to investigate my allegations of sexual abuse by…

View Cache

Even after more than four decades, the man says he clearly remembers “Brother Mike” inviting him into his tent at the Broad Creek Memorial Scout Reservation in Harford County and sexually assaulting him, then sending him out.

“Brother Mike,” he said, was a stocky man in his 20s who ran youth programs and Scouts at St. Ann’s Catholic Church on Greenmount Avenue and 22nd Street in Baltimore. The man was 15 years old then and lived around the corner from the church. He remembers “Brother Mike” had taken teenagers from St. Ann’s on the overnight Scouting trip in the 1970s.

“To this day, it still haunts me. I felt like I was not a man. I felt betrayed because he acted like I was his friend. I didn’t know it was wrong,” the man told The Baltimore Banner.

He shared those same troubling memories last year with investigators for the…

View Cache

The Freedom From Religion Foundation condemns the pope’s recent statement calling pedophile priests “God’s children” in need of “Christian love.”

“A god that would produce such ‘children’ is hardly a deity to be honored, much less worshiped,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “What about the victims — and their need for love, protection and justice?”

At a private meeting on April 29, Pope Francis told a group of Jesuits that any priest who has sexually abused children “must be condemned, indeed, but as a brother. Condemning him is to be understood as an act of charity.” He described such pedophile priests as “God’s children” who needed “a punishment but also pastoral care.”

Such half-hearted condemnation of clergy abuse from the head of a church that has institutionalized sexual abuse shows why the church continues to produce abusers, conceals their crimes and denies justice to survivors of priest abuse. Bombshell reports…

View Cache

Pope Francis raised some eyebrows while discussing sex abusers, whom he labeled “children of God” who deserve love and “pastoral care” — as well revolting “enemies” who must be punished.

The pontiff made his remarks last month during a private meeting with a group of Jesuit priests in Hungary, but they were only published Tuesday by La Civilta Cattolica, an Italian Jesuit journal.

“How do we approach, how do we talk to the abusers for whom we feel revulsion? Yes, they too are children of God. But how can you love them?” Francis was quoted as saying.

The 86-year-old leader of the Roman Catholic Church was responding to a question from a Hungarian Jesuit who asked: “The Gospel asks us to love, but how do we love at the same time people who have experienced abuse and their abusers?”

The pope acknowledged that the answer to this…

View Cache

FICTION
Old God’s Time
Sebastian Barry
Faber & Faber, $32.99

Every one of Sebastian Barry’s books has captivated me and held me in a kind of anxious thrall, waiting for characters to discover who they are. Barry is a genius for withholding truths even from the people who carry their burdens. Old God’s Time reaches another level. It has an unnerving and remorseless power. Even by Barry’s standards, it is a devastating achievement.

Very little happens for the first quarter of the book. That little is enough to create a tender space that will amplify the aching and tragic voice of all that is to follow. We meet Tom Kettle, a retired detective sergeant. For nine months, he has been living alone in a few rented rooms by the sea at Dalkey, listening to the wind and the birds while he smokes cigarillos. “To him this was the whole point of retirement, of existence –…

View Cache

From E. Jean Carroll’s suit against former President Trump to dozens of people coming out against the Portland diocese, laws have changed to allow more reporting.

Dozens of people in recent months have come forward against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland over sexual abuse claims that date back to when they were children.

While the accusers are adults now, only recently have they said they’ve been able to seek justice for what they say was years of sexual abuse between the ’50s and ’60s.

In 2021, the Maine Legislature passed a new law that removed the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse, which has allowed victims of alleged abuse to file lawsuits against the diocese. 

Attorneys representing the diocese have since challenged that ruling, however, Judge Thomas McKeon denied a motion for judgment regarding the constitutionality of lifting the statute of limitations. 

There are similar laws sprouting up across…

View Cache

The Bishop of Oxford said he “could have done more” to support a child who disclosed he was being sexually abused by a Church of England priest.

The church has apologised to Rev Matthew Ineson, who was aged 16 when he was abused and later went on to become a vicar.

A review into the actions of John Sentamu – then the Archbishop of York – concluded that he failed to act on the victim’s allegation of the abuse.

Lord Sentamu has rejected the review findings of the review which was published on Thursday.

Dr Steven Croft, now the Bishop of Oxford, was the Bishop of Sheffield at the time of the disclosures.

In a letter to clergy following the review’s publication, he said: “I have always sought to ensure that allegations are followed up, and that complainants and respondents are properly supported, but I know that on this occasion I didn’t get…

View Cache

It removes the statute of limitations for filing civil suits against perpetrators.

Frederick, Md (KM) – A bill signed into law last month by the Governor will make it much easier for victims of sexual abuse as children to file civil suits in Maryland  against the responsible parties.

Jonathan Schochor, an attorney with the law firm Schochor and Statin in Baltimore, has handled a lot of child abuse cases. He says this new law removes the statute of limitations which prevents some adults who were sex abuse victims as children from filing civil suits. “It lifts the statute of limitations and permits anyone who has been a victim of sexual abuse to come forward and enforce their rights,”: he says.

The new law takes affect on October 1sr, 2023.

Many of those persons who were victims of sex abuse when they were children often wait until they’re adults to file…

View Cache

Re: the April 13 article “Arizona court upholds clergy privilege in child abuse case.”

I was horrified to learn that Arizona state law does not require religious officials to report child sex abuse if they learn of it in a confessional setting (ARS 13-3620, section A). How many more children must have their lives ruined before this law is changed?

Child sex abuse occurs much more frequently than most of us realize. I was once told by a prosecutor that a small LDS-founded Arizona town has a higher per capita child sex abuse rate than Phoenix. In many cases, church officials know of this and do not report it. This must end.

Unfortunately, it is probably too late in this legislative session to introduce a bill to remedy this situation. Nevertheless, I urge everyone to contact their legislators and bring this to their attention so it may be remedied as…

View Cache

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

After contacting Butte Silver Bow Law Enforcement and following the completion of a third-party
investigation and consultation with the Diocesan Review Board, I am reinstating Father Kevin
Christofferson, a priest of the Diocese of Helena and pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Polson
and Sacred Heart Parish in Ronan, to active ministry effective May 8, 2023. A report of sexual abuse
against Fr. Christofferson, which was alleged to have occurred over twenty years ago, was not
substantiated.

In accordance with diocesan safe environment policy, Fr. Christofferson was placed on administrative leave
in October of 2022 after the report surfaced. This decision was sent to diocesan parishes and
communicated to media. While fully denying this and any other report of abuse, Fr. Christofferson willingly
stepped aside from active ministry. No other reports against him were received.

At that time, I notified law enforcement, and, per diocesan policy, initiated a third-party investigation. A
third-party…

View Cache

Several of the five high-ranking priests who worked to cover up and minimize child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore have celebrated Mass in parishes over the past week and remain on the governing boards of Catholic institutions, despite having their identities revealed and a subsequent call by victims’ advocates for them to step away from serving in the community.

Monsignor Richard “Rick” Woy is head pastor at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Crofton, Monsignor J. Bruce Jarboe is head pastor at St. Ann in Hagerstown and Monsignor G. Michael Schleupner regularly leads services at Our Lady of Grace in Parkton. All have celebrated Mass since The Baltimore Sun reported Thursday they were part of the hierarchy blamed in a Maryland Attorney General’s Office investigation about how the archdiocese handled abuse cases over decades.

In addition to his role as a pastor, Woy — whose…

View Cache

Virgil Wheeler, who died in April, verbally agreed deal but made U-turn after learning he would have to register as sex offender in New Orleans

A US Roman Catholic cleric who admitted in criminal court to sexually abusing a child before his ordination backed out of a seven-figure settlement agreement with his victim after learning he would have to register as a sex offender, the Guardian has confirmed.

The deacon in question – attorney Virgil Maxey “VM” Wheeler III – died earlier this year after writing a will expressing his desire to donate much of his money to prominent institutions, mostly in the Louisiana community in which he worked. His victim is now calling on the beneficiaries to reject those gifts from his abuser.

“Each of these gifts requires these institutions to ascribe to these funds the name of a dead pedophile,” the victim and his attorney, Richard Trahant,…

View Cache

The Society of Jesus in Bolivia has begun an investigation to determine if several of its members who served as superiors at the time of the abuse had covered it up.

An investigation by the Spanish newspaper El Pais has revealed that the Spanish Jesuit priest Alfonso Pedrajas Moreno, who died in 2009, sexually abused as many as 85 boys and adolescents in the 1970s and 1980s and recorded the incidents in a secret diary as “blunders,” and that the Jesuits covered it up.

A nephew of Pedrajas found the diary and contacted the Society of Jesus in Bolivia to file a complaint, and then went to the Spanish prosecutor’s office, which dismissed the case for having passed the statute of limitations, El Pais reported.

The journalistic investigation also compiled testimonies from alleged victims and relatives.

According to a May 9 report by El País, the priest disclosed the alleged abuses to at least seven…

View Cache

Lay Catholics say the Knoxville Diocese is a ‘hot mess.’ Bishop Richard Stika tells NCR he plans to ‘move forward.’

Some priests in the Diocese of Knoxville have retired early or left active ministry. Others are considering leaving the priesthood. Groups of lay Catholics in the East Tennessee area say they are demoralized and frustrated.

“We are just really a hot mess,” said Susan Vance, a leader of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests in Tennessee.

Vance and other local Catholics blame Bishop Richard Stika, who became the diocese’s third bishop in 2009, for the turmoil in their local church. In two lawsuits, the diocese is accused of allegedly obstructing investigations into clergy sex abuse and intimidating people who reported they were abused. An apostolic visitation is investigating concerns about Stika’s leadership raised by laity and clergy.

“This man is not a leader. A leader looks after his…

View Cache

Bishop Richard Stika was told a Diocese of Knoxville seminarian had been kicked out of an Indiana seminary over sexual harassment complaints weeks before the diocese began investigating whether the seminarian had raped a church employee here, Knox News has learned. The dismissal was explained in a letter from the president-rector of Saint Meinrad Seminary to Stika dated March 1, 2021. Nine days later, a Knoxville diocese sexual assault review board member wrote to the victims assistance coordinator about the rape allegation, and the review board began investigating at the end of the month.

Two weeks later, Stika ordered the firing of an independent investigator hired by the review board to dig into the allegation.

And in April 2021, Stika committed the diocese to pay nearly $50,000 for tuition and living expenses for the dismissed seminarian to attend Saint Louis University beginning that fall.

‘Uncomfortable’ behavior detailed

The Very Rev….

View Cache

Police: Girls say man victimized them while he was their teacher at Catholic private school in Little River, charter school in Overtown

MIAMI – A 29-year-old teacher — who was working at a Jewish private school when police officers arrested him for child sex crimes at a private Catholic school and a charter school — is facing more charges on Wednesday in Miami-Dade County.

Eric Bernard Givens, also known as “Mr G.”, has been at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center since Friday without bond. County jail and court records show that on Wednesday he was facing charges in cases involving three girls.

After his arrest, Scheck Hillel Community School administrators terminated Givens, according to Rabbi Ari Leubitz, who also reported that the first-year teacher had cleared a Florida Department of Law Enforcement background check when they hired him.

Givens is facing criminal charges in cases involving three girls, but…

View Cache

A jury Wednesday awarded $95 million to a local man who alleged he was sexually abused in 1979 by a former Rochester-area priest who also has been accused by others of sexual assaults.

The local man alleged that the former priest, Rev. Foster P. Rogers, sexually abused him in Rogers’ car in July 1979.

The victim was then 15. Rogers now has limited income, according to letters he wrote the court, and the local man awarded the $95 million is unlikely to see even a tiny sliver of the award.

The victim is not one of those seeking damages through the current bankruptcy proceeding with the Diocese of Rochester, which sought bankruptcy protection after hundreds of claims of abuse against former priests and others with diocese connections.

The award is one of the largest in New York since the Child Victims Act, which opened a window for lawsuits from past child victims…

View Cache

A licensed social worker who works for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland has been punished by the state for ethics violations.

Attorneys say Carolyn Bloom reached out via text to a woman who says she was forced into a sexual relationship with a priest.

However, because the woman was not a child, she was not eligible for services.

According to court paperwork, the two women exchanged texts for months, leading the woman to think Bloom was her therapist, which she apparently was not.

Bloom was censured by the state and agreed to pay for and participate in a year-long supervision program as part of her punishment.

View Cache

Poland’s Catholic church is providing every parish in the country with posters explaining how people can report cases of sex abuse as well as presenting the rights of victims and the types of support that are offered to them.

The materials, part of a campaign launched by the Polish episcopate, are intended to present “in an accessible way” the church’s system for “extending support and necessary help to victims”.

“We want to make people aware that anyone in need of support can use it,” wrote Piotr Studnicki, the head of the episcopate’s office for the protection of children and youth.

Among the information provided are contact details of those responsible for receiving notifications of alleged abuse in all of Poland’s dioceses, as well as the types of support (psychological, spiritual and legal) provided by the Saint Joseph Foundation – a body established by the church – and other initiatives such…

View Cache

2 alleged victims of late Rev. Dale Crampton also alleged sex abuse by late Auxiliary Bishop John Beahen

[PHOTO: Rev. Dale Crampton, seen here in this archival CBC News footage from the 1980s, sexually assaulted seven altar boys in the Ottawa area in the 1970s and 1980s, crimes he pleaded guilty to in 1986. At least 16 alleged victims have filed lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall since then, starting in 2009. (CBC)]

WARNING: This story contains details of child sexual abuse.

The Catholic church in Ottawa has quietly settled three child sexual abuse lawsuits involving notorious priest Dale Crampton, cancelling three separate jury trials that were scheduled to be heard in Ottawa this spring.

Two of the three plaintiffs alleged they were not only assaulted by Crampton, who killed himself in 2010, but also by his superior, auxiliary bishop John Beahen, at Crampton’s cottage in West Carleton. Beahen died from…

View Cache

Sexual abusers are disgusting “enemies” who deserve to be condemned and punished – but also deserve Christian love and pastoral care because they too are children of God, Pope Francis said.

Francis made his comments on April 29 in a private conversation with Jesuits while he was visiting Hungary.

Francis is also a Jesuit and the comments were published on Tuesday in the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, as is customary after such meetings.

Abuse scandals have shredded the Church’s reputation and have been a major challenge for the pope, who has passed a series of measures over the last 10 years aimed at holding the Church hierarchy more accountable, with mixed results.

During Francis’ visit, a Hungarian member of the Jesuits religious order asked Francis how it was possible to follow Jesus’ commandment to love enemies when the enemy was a sexual abuser.

“How do we approach, how do…

View Cache

Punishing and condemning those guilty of clergy sexual abuse is an act of charity, Pope Francis said.

“The abuser is an enemy. Each of us feels this because we empathize with the suffering of the abused,” he said during a private meeting with 32 Jesuits April 29 during his three-day trip to Budapest, Hungary. Those guilty of abuse “deserve punishment, but they also deserve pastoral care.”

As is customary during his trips, the pope spent time with local Jesuits, answering their questions; the transcript of the encounter was published May 9 by La Civiltà Cattolica, an Italian Jesuit journal.

One of the Jesuits at the meeting asked the pope about the Gospel commandment to love, “but how do we love at the same time people who have experienced abuse and their abusers? God loves everyone,” including the abuser.

“I would like to offer the compassion and love that the Gospel…

View Cache

A CATHOLIC Church Commission has concluded after only six months investigating child sexual abuse by priests in Portugal that only 4,815 victims were identified but said that it was the tip of a great iceberg of abuse that has yet to be revealed.

The report of the Commission was published on Feb. 13, 2023. Critics and supporters of clerical child abuse victims said that there were many thousands more victims not given the opportunity to come forward. The victims were mostly boys 10 to 14 years old. 

Several bishops and priests who have been accused of child abuse are still in their church duties and positions and allegedly flout the Vatican law supported by Pope Francis whereby the civil authorities should investigate and prosecute such allegations. A shocking report in France in January 2022 found approximately 3,000 Catholic priests and religious authorities had sexually abused over 200,000 children since the…

View Cache

Closing arguments are expected to begin 9 a.m. Thursday

A man accused of committing sex crimes while serving as a Roman Catholic priest in Mansfield and Fremont denied guilt from the witness stand Wednesday during his federal sex-trafficking trial.

The Rev. Michael Jude Zacharias, 56, faces five counts of sex trafficking, two of which involve victims who were minors. The allegations span 15 years from July 2005 to August 2020.

Closing arguments in the case are expected to begin 9 a.m. Thursday, according to Claudia Vercellotti, leader of the Toledo chapter of Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.

The victim advocate was in the U.S. District Court/Northern District of Ohio in Toledo on Wednesday to watch as Zacharias was sworn in to answer questions about his conduct.

Zacharias was placed on administrative leave in 2020 by Toledo Bishop Daniel Thomas, the Fremont News-Messenger reported last year. He is banned…

View Cache

Carolyn Bloom, a therapist appointed by Bishop Robert Deeley as a point person to handle allegations of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church for the entire state of Maine, has been disciplined by a Maine licensing board after she admitted to violating multiple ethics rules governing social workers.  The violations relate to Bloom’s interactions with a woman who reported being abused by a Diocese of Portland priest.

In 2020, Melissa Kearns reported her sexual abuse and exploitation by Rev. Anthony Cipolle to the Diocese of Portland.  One of the people she dealt with during the course of reporting her abuse was Bloom, who is identified on the Diocese’s website as an “independent clinician” and licensed clinical social worker.

According to Ms. Kearns’ allegation, Bloom began providing counseling to Ms. Kearns over the course of several months.  After Ms. Kearns retained Horowitz Law to represent her…

View Cache

A new resource for tracking Native residential schools affiliated with the Catholic Church marks a major advance toward healing the wounds of systemic abuse, said one project organizer.

“While there are more steps for the Catholic Church to take to move toward truth, healing and reconciliation, this list is a powerful step forward,” said Maka Black Elk, executive director for Truth and Healing at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

On May 9, Black Elk and a group of archivists, historians, tribal members and other supporters unveiled a list of some 87 Catholic-run Native boarding schools that had operated in 22 U.S. states prior to 1978. The schools were among more than 400 overseen by the U.S. federal government in the 19th and 20th centuries, with many sites operated by Christian churches and organizations.

The list, accessible online at http://ctah.archivistsacwr.org, provides school names,…

View Cache

E. Jean Carroll was only able to bring her lawsuit against the former president because of a change in New York law.

The jury verdict finding former president Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll as well as for defaming her by claiming that she lied about it was a shot at justice that Carroll would not have received had the New York Legislature not acted.

That is because the civil trial came decades after the expiration of the statute of limitations for the alleged sexual attack, which happened in the 1990s according to Carroll. But last year, state lawmakers passed and Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law the Adult Survivors Act. That law gave survivors of sexual assault that occurred when they were adults a one-year period to bring civil claims for damages for such attacks regardless of when the attack took place.

The revelations from the…

View Cache

2 alleged victims of late Rev. Dale Crampton also alleged sex abuse by late Auxiliary Bishop John Beahen

WARNING: This story contains details of child sexual abuse.

The Catholic church in Ottawa has quietly settled three child sexual abuse lawsuits involving notorious priest Dale Crampton, cancelling three separate jury trials that were scheduled to be heard in Ottawa this spring.

Two of the three plaintiffs alleged they were not only assaulted by Crampton, who killed himself in 2010, but also by his superior, auxiliary bishop John Beahen, at Crampton’s cottage in West Carleton. Beahen died from a stroke in 1988. 

Unlike in criminal courts, civil jury trials are rare in Canada — Ontario is one of a few provinces that still hold them. Most cases end up being settled out of court, sparing both sides the risk and scrutiny of public trials, and keeping any evidence gathered in the dark.

…

View Cache

Recovery Speaking Initiative supports survivors in Guelph and beyond

WARNING: This story contains details of sexual abuse of a child and may be disturbing to some readers.

Though he says he feels like a “warrior” now, at 71, 60 years ago Robert McCabe was just a sweet and quiet boy. A child, who, after being sexually assaulted by his Catholic priest in a motel room while travelling to Montreal, spent the night curled up in a chair crying “no, no, no.”

The Guelph man said sharing his memories has helped him to reconcile with them. He has finally forgiven himself and his abuser who is now deceased, after a life of coping using alcohol, and a quest for recovery and justice. He founded Recovery Speaking initiative in 2020 and runs a men’s support group held Thursdays online, because he said, “there is hope after dealing with sexual abuse…

View Cache

A group of archivists, historians, concerned Catholics, and tribal members has published the first comprehensive list of Native American boarding schools in the United States run by Catholic entities.

The Catholic Truth & Healing website lists 87 Catholic-run Native boarding schools before 1978 across 22 states. Seventy-three of those schools were run or staffed by Catholic women religious.

“While there are more steps for the Catholic Church to take to move toward truth, healing, and reconciliation, this list is a powerful step forward,” Maka Black Elk, executive director for truth and healing at Red Cloud Indian School, said in a May 9 statement announcing the publication. Black Elk contributed to efforts to compile the list.

Hundreds of government-funded boarding schools operated across the country from 1819 to the 1970s; many of those were run by religious groups, including Catholic dioceses and religious orders. In May…

View Cache