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Due to clergy sex abuse scandals centered primarily in the Northern hemisphere, the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church has been subjected to an opportunistic siege by prominent individuals and organizations who see the chance to advance their goals, including the ordination of women and the suspension of the requirement for priestly celibacy. There is also a strongly defensive element to this strategy. Opponents of the Church know that there is a well-documented and strong correlation between male homosexuality and child sexual abuse, but claim that there is no evidence supporting this connection. And, of course, those who are...

A Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a teenage girl in Minnesota has been allowed to continue working at a Catholic diocese in southern India despite warnings from an American bishop that he could still “pose a risk to minors,” according to church documents released Monday. In a letter sent in December 2005, the bishop, Victor H. Balke, told Vatican authorities that preliminary investigations showed that the priest, Father Joseph Pavanivel Jeyapaul, had molested a 16-year-old girl after promising to discuss her interest in becoming a nun. Bishop Balke wrote that the priest had also “misappropriated a substantial amount of...

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost all credibility because of its mishandling of abuse by priests, the leader of the Anglican church said in remarks released Saturday. A leading Catholic archbishop said he was "stunned" by the comments. The remarks released Saturday marked the first time Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has spoken publicly on the crisis engulfing the Catholic Church. The comments come ahead of a planned visit to England and Scotland by Pope Benedict XVI later this year. "I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who was saying that it's quite difficult in some parts...

A seminary is not the place where you'd expect sex to be a regular topic of conversation. But at the North American College in Rome, where student priests from across the United States are sent, new efforts to prevent sexual abuse are changing that. Part of the psychological element of the examination, says the Rev. Gregory Grannazzisi, involves asking students directly about sex and celibacy. "Some will ask you about your friendships," Deacon Michael Novajosky says. "They will ask about what is your sexual past." The difficult questions aren't kept secret, but discussed openly at the seminary as an integral...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, accused by victims' lawyers of being ultimately responsible for a cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests, cannot be called to testify at any trial because he has immunity as a head of state, a top Vatican legal official said on Thursday. The interview with Giuseppe dalla Torre, head of the Vatican's tribunal, was published in Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper as Pope Benedict began Holy Thursday services in St Peter's Basilica and Catholics marked the most solemn week of the liturgical calendar, culminating on Sunday in Easter Day.

There is an interesting and very modern thing that often happens when individuals join and rise within mighty and venerable institutions. They come to think of the institution as invulnerable—to think that there is nothing they can do to really damage it, that the big, strong, proud establishment they're part of can take any amount of abuse, that it doesn't require from its members an attitude of protectiveness because it's so strong, and has lasted so long. And so people become blithely damaging...

Elizabeth Scalia is a contributing writer to First Things Magazine as the blogger known as The Anchoress. The question has come my way several times in the past week: "How do you maintain your faith in light of news stories that bring light to the dark places that exist within your church?" When have darkness and light been anything but co-existent? How do we recognize either without the other? I remain within, and love, the Catholic Church because it is a church that has lived and wrestled within the mystery of the shadow lands ever since an innocent man was...

LOS ANGELES – The head of a Roman Catholic order that specialized in the treatment of pedophile priests visited with the then-pope nearly 50 years ago and followed up with a letter recommending the removal of pedophile priests from ministry, according to a copy of the letter released Wednesday. In the Aug. 27, 1963 letter, the head of the New Mexico-based Servants of the Holy Paraclete tells the pope he recommends removing pedophile priests from active ministry and strongly urges defrocking repeat offenders. The letter, written by the Rev. Gerald M.C. Fitzgerald, appears to have been drafted at the request...

One by one, as I predicted, the pathetic excuses of Joseph Ratzinger's apologists evaporate before our eyes. It was said until recently that when the Rev. Peter Hullermann was found to be a vicious pederast in 1980, the man who is now pope had no personal involvement in his subsequent transfer to his own diocese or in his later unimpeded career as a rapist and a molester. But now we find that the psychiatrist to whom the church turned for "therapy" was adamant that Hullermann never be allowed to go near children ever again. We also find that Ratzinger was...

Here below in full, the text of Pope Benedict's Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland. * * * 1. Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Church in Ireland, it is with great concern that I write to you as Pastor of the universal Church. Like yourselves, I have been deeply disturbed by the information which has come to light regarding the abuse of children and vulnerable young people by members of the Church in Ireland, particularly by priests and religious. I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have...

Vatican Denies Cover-Up In U.S. Sex Abuse Case New York Times reports future pope failed to defrock troubled priest Breaking news VATICAN CITY - There was no cover-up in the church's handling of the case of an American priest accused of molesting 200 deaf boys, the Vatican said Thursday, denouncing what it called attempts to smear Pope Benedict XVI and involve him in the scandal. L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said there was a "clear and despicable intention" to strike at the pope "at any cost" with recent revelations of how the Vatican handled clerical abuse. According to church and...

The Boston Archdiocese has admitted for the first time that Irish sex abuse priests worked in its diocese. The priests, named as Brendan Smyth, Dennis Murphy and Joseph Maguire, were transferred from Ireland to the U.S. in what critics say was little more than an attempt to insulate the priests from scrutiny and possible prosecution

Voice of the Faithful, the Catholic lay group that formed in response to the priest sex abuse scandal, is facing its own crisis: lack of money. The national organization said it is "at the crossroads of financial survival" and needs $60,000 in donations by the end of July to keep going. The news struck a chord at a local affiliate. "I'm not terribly surprised," said Jolene Guerra of Topsfield, co-coordinator of the North Shore-Seacoast affiliate, which has members from Salem to Newburyport. "I'm certainly disappointed. I think financially the national organization has been struggling." "I've already been receiving e-mails from...

A Roman Catholic diocese in Connecticut sought Friday to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep under wraps sex abuse documents that could shed light on how a prominent retired cardinal handled the allegations. Bridgeport Diocese officials asked the state Supreme Court to continue a stay on releasing the documents while it asks the nation's highest court to review the case. The state court has ruled that more than 12,000 pages of documents from more than 20 lawsuits against priests should be released. Those documents have been sealed from public view since the diocese settled the cases in 2001.

(From 2002-but even more relevant today) The sex-abuse scandal currently plaguing the Catholic priesthood has already grown to the point where it poses a serious threat to the power, prestige, and credibility of the American Catholic Church. The sky, so to speak, is falling. An institution whose fundamental strength and continuity (whatever its many problems) could once be taken for granted is experiencing a genuine crisis. Yet, over and above its significance for the Catholic Church, the greatest lesson of this scandal has yet to be drawn. The uproar over priestly sex abuse — especially the calls to do away...

A federal appeals court says the Vatican can be sued for abuse committed by its priests. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that victims of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests can sue the Vatican even though it is considered a sovereign nation. The appeals court said there are exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and abuse can be one of them. The Oregon case has been working its way through the federal appeals court since a judge in Portland ruled in 2006 that the Holy See can be held responsible for the actions of individual...

The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles is pursuing the theory that the prelate deprived parishioners of 'the right of honest services' by failing to protect their children from predatory clerics. By Scott Glover and Jack Leonard 4:44 PM PST, January 28, 2009 The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles has launched a federal grand jury investigation into Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in connection with his response to the alleged molestation of children by priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, according to two law enforcement sources familiar with the case. The probe, in which U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien is personally involved,...

The sexual-abuse litigation that has raged for years against the Catholic church just got a lot more interesting. In a landmark ruling yesterday, the Sixth Circuit concluded that the Vatican could be held liable for negligence in sexual-abuse cases filed in the U.S. It is the first time a circuit court reached that conclusion, and the opinion is considered a breakthrough by those allegedly abused by priests. Here’s the WSJ story. Catholic dioceses in the U.S. have paid out more than $3 billion to alleged abuse victims, most of that coming since the scandal broke open nationwide in 2002. Click...

A number of books have been written about sexual abuse by Catholic clerics. Some are the gut-wrenching stories of victims themselves, told in their own words or through another. Some are polemical in that they confront the official Church for its hypocritical response while demanding both recognition and action to help solve the problem. Still others are scholarly ventures into the mysterious depths of this unique socio-cultural phenomenon by academics from a variety of disciplines. All are seeking answers as to “why.” The answers are much more complex and elusive than simply saying “celibate priests are sexually dysfunctional” or “bishops...

“Annoying and misleading” is what Sulpician ethicist Fr. Gerald Coleman has called a retired Australian bishop’s attempt to link celibacy with clergy sexual abuse of children. Writing in the July 11 San Francisco archdiocesan Catholic San Francisco, Coleman, the former rector of St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park and currently the vice president for ethics for the Daughters of Charity Health System, challenged Geoffrey Robinson, a former auxiliary bishop of Sydney, Australia. In May, Cardinal Roger Mahony forbade Robinson to speak in the Los Angeles archdiocese, as did Bishop Tod Brown in the Diocese of Orange and Robert Brom of...

A Catholic priest who previously worked in youth ministry and religious education at churches in Germantown and Bethesda turned himself in to police Tuesday evening in Montgomery County after being charged with abusing a former altar boy. The Rev. Aaron Joseph Cote, 56, worked part time in youth ministry at Mother Seton Parish in Germantown between 1999 and 2002 and part time in religious education at Bethesda’s St. Jane Frances de Chantal Parish between 1997 and 1999. Police allege Cote engaged in “inappropriate touching of” and “inappropriate personal sexual activity” in the presence of a then-14-year-old victim, who was seeing...

The Pope played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, according to a shocking documentary to be screened by the BBC tonight. In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety. The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the...

Shocking Past of Former Priest Who Was Killed In Palmer Fire YouNewsTV™Story Published: May 15, 2008 at 6:58 PM EDT Story Updated: May 16, 2008 at 3:13 PM EDT By Liz Tufts Watch The Story The shocking past of Andre Corbin is coming to light, just days after the former priest was killed in an apartment fire in Palmer. Andre Corbin was arrested in 1988 for molesting a boy at a church in North Carolina. According to a website that highlights the history of sexual abuse by priests, it says Corbin plead guilty to the accusations and was sentenced to...

I can understand why nearly three-quarters of U.S. Catholics say they approve of their new Pope, Benedict XVI. He is a deep thinking Pontiff who, like John Paul II before him, holds fast to refreshingly strong moral convictions. When he said he was ashamed of the existence of pedophile priests and their subsequent abuse of young boys, unlike the scoffers, I believe him. It’s true that many Catholic leaders, to their disgrace, ignored early reports and initiated a cover-up. If financial retribution can ever repay such betrayal, many archdioceses have been bankrupted by the scandal. The church, however slow, has...

Secular progressives, especially those in the Boston media, are having a field day dredging up the whole pedophile priest controversy here at its epicenter. While the mainstream media’s been giving us wall-to-wall all-Pope, all-the-time coverage, many here in the Boston area are well into their sixteenth minute of fame, and bashing the Pope for avoiding our city on his America tour. While he has publicly acknowledged the scandal, and now met with some of the victims, enough is not enough for these professional victims. "I acknowledge the pain of the Church in America is experiencing as a result of sexual...

For 25 remarkable minutes, the shepherd of the world's 1 billion Catholics met with a handful of victims in the worst scandal to ever tarnish the U.S. church. One man, abused as an altar boy, said he placed his hand over Pope Benedict XVI's heart as he pleaded with him to fix the problem of sexual abuse of minors. The pontiff apologized to his guests for not being perfectly fluent in English, and "for everything," according to another victim. Plans for the secret meeting were kept quiet. But two Boston-area victims of abuse shared details of the meeting in interviews...

WASHINGTON -- Pope Benedict XVI, in a dramatic move likely to alter forever the image of his pontificate, met this afternoon with five victims of clergy sexual abuse from Boston. The private meeting, which was first reported by the Globe this afternoon and has since been confirmed by the Vatican, was brokered by Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston.

Pope Benedict XVI chided Americans for a moral breakdown he said had fueled the church's child sex abuse scandal, ahead of an open-air mass before tens of thousands here Thursday. Gates opened at Washington's new sports stadium before dawn so that an expected 48,000 people could trickle through stringent security measures to attend the mass at 10:00 am (1400 GMT). Benedict received a rapturous White House welcome Wednesday and met privately with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office, before addressing the pedophile priest scandal that has rocked the US church in a speech to US Catholic bishops. Thousands...

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - Catholic diocese officials say a priest accused of sexually abusing minors is HIV positive. After the Reverend Philip Magaldi recently told another priest that he has the disease that causes AIDS, the diocese alerted people who have lodged allegations against him. The diocese in Fort Worth said it also notified parishes where Magaldi served. Church officials say they believe Magaldi has been HIV positive since 2003. He was removed as a priest in 1999 after sexual misconduct allegations arose in Rhode Island and Fort Worth.

NEW YORK — When the Associated Press set out to investigate an apparent problem with sexual assault of children in public schools, the organization spared no expense. A congressionally mandated study by Hofstra University had already found school-based sexual abuse to be a big problem. “It was one of our priorities for the year,” said John Affleck, editor of the AP’s national reporting team.The result was a three-part series, available to editors throughout the country beginning Oct. 20, that revealed widespread and routine sexual assault of public school students throughout the country. The first story summarized: “Students in America’s schools...

TIES THAT BIND Against the advice of some of his campaign advisers, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has kept a suspended Catholic priest and childhood friend on the payroll of Giuliani Partners as a consultant. The priest has been caught up in the continuing sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Msgr. Alan Placa, who was suspended from his priestly duties back in 2002 and who has also served as a practicing attorney, has worked on a consulting basis with Giuliani Partners. In 2003 a grand jury in Suffolk County, New York, accused Placa of sexually abusing multiple victims....

A study presented to the [U.S. Catholic] bishops on Monday by Karen Terry and Margaret Smith of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the "causes and context" of the [sex abuse] crisis....said the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, which peaked numerically in the mid-1970s, for the most part reflected "overall changes in behavior, attitudes, and media representations in American society during this time period." "This is in conflict with the idea that there is something distinctive about the Catholic church that led to the sexual abuse of minors," Terry said. [snip] ...During a press briefing on...

A group distributed fliers Sunday morning at a Pleasanton Catholic Church because the priest selected to lead the parish was arrested several years ago in a case involving a lewdness allegation. Church leaders defended him. "He wouldn't be here if I weren't satisfied and the bishop," said the Rev. Dan Danielson, who is stepping down. The Rev. Padraig Greene takes over Jan. 1 at the Catholic Communities of Pleasanton, which includes St. Augustine Catholic Church and St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church. Greene was associate pastor there for five years before moving to St. Joseph Catholic Church at Mission San Jose....

In 2004, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, proclaimed that after two years of relentless investigations into priests who sexually abused children and the bishops who protected them, "the scandal is history." For reporters weary of the scandal's emotionally draining subject matter, Gregory's sound bite invited a retreat. The bishops pointed to the "youth protection charter" they had developed, laying out guidelines for removing predator priests and for treating victims responsibly. They released data showing that they had identified about 4,400 abusive U.S. priests. They had a reform agenda, it seemed, and promised new vigilance...

Child abuse has gone unchecked in the Church of England for decades amid a cover up by bishops, secret papers have revealed. Information that could have prevented abuse has been "lost or damaged", concerns about individuals have been ignored and allegations have not been recorded. It means that the Church has no idea how many paedophiles are in its midst. Lawyers warned last night that the Church faces a crisis as catastrophic as the one that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church and cost it millions of pounds in damages. Richard Scorer, a solicitor who has specialised in child abuse cases,...

In order to raise the cash to make its pederasty payment, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is selling a convent that currently provides a residence for three nuns. The anticipated selling price is a drop in the bucket of the roughly $250 million needed to keep the archbishop out of the witness box meet the Archdiocese's liabilities in the sex-abuse settlements, and the convent is one of about 50 non-parish properties to be sold. The sisters have been asked to vacate the house by the end of December. From the point of view of the archdiocesan business office it's not...

SAN DIEGO – The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego reached a $198.1 million agreement with 144 childhood sexual abuse victims Friday morning. The settlement was reached after marathon discussions between attorneys and victims. As part of the settlement, the diocese will also ask a federal bankruptcy judge to dismiss its Chapter 11 case. Another important part of the agreement was the diocese's promise to release church documents about priest abuse, said Irwin M. Zalkin, an attorney for 33 victims in the case. He said that without that concession, the victims would not have agreed to settle their claims. The...

SAN DIEGO -- The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego said Friday it has agreed to pay $198.1 million to settle 144 claims of sexual abuse by clergy, the second-largest payment by a diocese. The agreement caps more than four years of negotiations in state and federal courts. Earlier this year, the diocese abruptly filed for bankruptcy protection just hours before trial was scheduled to begin on 42 lawsuits alleging sexual abuse. Bankruptcy could shield the diocese's assets, but a judge recently threatened to throw out the bankruptcy case if church officials didn't reach an agreement with the plaintiffs. The...

Massive PR machine? Some say Cardinal Mahony’s willingness to meet with sexual abuse victims nothing more than a public relations stunt Over the past year, Cardinal Roger Mahony has met individually with 70 victims of clergy sexual abuse. Archdiocesan spokesman Tod Tamberg told the July 30 Los Angeles Times that Mahony has scheduled more meetings with sexual abuse victims and that “he has said he will meet with any victim who wants to meet with him.” But Lee Bashworth, 37, who claims abuse by former priest Michael Wempe, told the Times, that, though he would “relish an opportunity to tell...

Amy Berg's documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" has powerful and horrifying material to work with: a Catholic priest, the Irish-born Fr. Oliver O'Grady, who admits--right on film--that he molested at least 25 children during his 20-odd years in parishes during the 1970s and 1980s in the Stockton diocese in rural California. The bishops of Stockton, who included Roger Mahony, now archbishop of Los Angeles, instead of yanking "Father Ollie" from his pulpit and calling the police, either ignored complaints about him or ordered "counseling" and transferred him from parish to parish, always one step ahead of the outrage of his...

As the Roman Catholic Church struggles to repair itself and its image in the wake of the sex abuse scandals, one of the more confounding questions church leaders face is what to do with priests accused of abuse. Some priests whose crimes fell within statutes of limitation are in jail. Some have been defrocked. But others — because they are elderly, because of the nature of their offenses, or because they have had some success fighting the charges — cannot be defrocked under canon law. These priests occupy a sort of shadow world, stripped of most duties but still financially...

Few would dispute that the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin exercised great influence in the Catholic Church in the U.S. Sadly, however, that influence was not for the good of the Church. The following are pertinent excerpts from Randy Engel's new book The Rite of Sodomy. Chapter 15 The Special Case of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Introduction This segment on Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was originally incorporated into the previous chapter on homosexual members of the American hierarchy. However, because of his extraordinary influence on AmChurch, I decided Cardinal Bernardin deserved a chapter all his own. To do real justice to Cardinal Bernardin...

SANTA ROSA A Roman Catholic church official apologized Saturday for waiting several days to notify authorities about sexual abuse allegations against a priest, a delay that may have allowed the priest to flee to Mexico. Bishop Daniel Walsh of the Santa Rosa diocese said in a one-page statement to parishioners he put "caution" before "doing the right thing" in handling the allegations against priest Xavier Ochoa. Church officials say Ochoa admitted April 28 to sexually abusing a 12-year-old altar boy, but the allegations were not reported to Child Protective Services until May 1, and Ochoa disappeared the next day. "I...

Pope Benedict took disciplinary action against the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ yesterday, ordering him to renounce every public duty after a nine-year investigation into claims of sexual abuse.The 86-year-old Fr Marcial Maciel, a close friend of the late Pope John Paul II, is the most prominent figure in the Catholic Church ever to be disciplined by the Vatican on grounds of sexual abuse. He will not face a full Church trial on account of his age, but he is now forbidden to celebrate Mass, speak in public or to the press. In a statement, the Vatican invited...

(Gates, N.Y.) An 80-year-old priest has been charged with sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl. The Rev. John Steger is a priest at St. Jude the Apostle Church on Lyell Road. He's charged with two counts of sexual abuse and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Police said the alleged inappropriate touching happened at the church rectory, where the girl was doing chores. Police said the girl told her parents, who contacted police. The alleged abuse happened once at the end of April and once at the beginning of May. In a statement, the Roman Catholic Diocese of...

A new study has found that the scandal over sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has not caused American Catholics to leave the church, or to stop attending Mass and donating to their parishes. The study shows that Catholic participation in church life and satisfaction with church leadership dropped noticeably at the height of the scandal in 2002, but has now largely rebounded to prescandal levels. The only significant decline is in the percentage of Catholics who contributed to diocesan financial appeals, annual campaigns that are usually run by bishops. While the percentage of Catholics who contributed to their...

Last summer, attorneys in Colorado filed the first sex-abuse lawsuits against the archdiocese of Denver since the national clergy abuse scandal began four years ago. All of the suits involved two men: one, a laicized former priest who left active ministry more than a decade ago, and the other, a priest dead for more than a decade. Several of the suits have since named individual parishes as targets along with the diocese. Every claimed incident of abuse occurred more than twenty-five years ago. Nearly all occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Under Colorado law, plaintiffs’ attorneys have a problem. So...

Michael Edwin Wempe, the pedophile priest whom Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said he regretted returning to the ministry, was sentenced today to three years in prison for molesting a boy more than a decade ago. The 66-year-old retired priest was found guilty in February in the first significant criminal conviction of a Los Angeles cleric since the church's sexual abuse scandal erupted four years ago. Wempe received the maximum sentence, but has already served 600 days, so he will spend about another year in prison. He made no statement to the court. The case garnered close attention because it came...

Rev. Michael Knotek stands by his brother George, who says he was abused by a priest as a teen and has sued the Joliet Diocese On a recent Sunday, Rev. Michael Knotek asked parishioners in his Far South Side sanctuary to bow their heads and call to mind the greatest cross they had to bear. As they obeyed, Knotek also hung his head and meditated on the burden he has carried for 31 years: the knowledge that his older brother was molested by a priest and his belief that his church tried to cover it up. "If we're careful, by...

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony must turn over to L.A. prosecutors the personnel files of two priests accused of molestation after the U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear his request to keep them private. Though the ruling only affects the files of two priests, it likely opens the door to the release of hundreds of confidential Catholic church files sought by more than 500 people who say they were molested by priests with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Mahony has fought more vigorously than any other prelate in the United States to block attempts by prosecutors and plaintiff attorneys to...