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New York clergy sex abuse victims are suing the pope — claiming in a landmark lawsuit filed Tuesday that he and the Vatican were aware that a significant number of priests were molesting children and kept it secret. The class-action lawsuit, brought in Manhattan federal court by seven survivors who previously settled with the Catholic Dioceses in New York for “pennies on the dollar,” alleges sole defendant “the Holy See” acted negligently by instructing its bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse.

Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years' jail for the sexual abuse of two Melbourne choirboys in the 1990s. This is the transcript provided by the County Court of Chief Judge Peter Kidd's full sentencing remarks: Warning: Contains details that may distress some readers. Cardinal George Pell, on 11 December 2018 you were convicted by a jury of five charges of sexual offending by you against two young boys in 1996 and 1997 in St Patrick's Cathedral, East Melbourne. You were convicted of one offence of Sexual Penetration of a Child under 16 years and four offences of...

Editor’s note: Some readers may find the details in this news story disturbing.The Rev. W. Thomas Faucher, a longtime priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise who pleaded guilty to five felony crimes, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison without parole and will be required to register as a sex offender. Faucher, 73, was accused of amassing thousands of child porn images and videos on his home computer — and pleaded guilty in September to sharing some of those images online. He apologized in the courtroom ahead of his sentencing at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise...

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced Wednesday his office is running an “ongoing investigation” into the state’s two Catholic dioceses and whether there has been any sexual abuse and coverup. Herring’s remarks come a day after D.C.'s top prosecutor made a similar announcement. In a late morning news conference, Herring said the probe was launched in response to a massive Pennsylvania grand jury report released this summer and not with specific knowledge of unreported abuse or a coverup in Virginia. However, he told reporters, after reading the report: “Like so many Americans … I felt sick.” The Pennsylvania report described...

A longtime Catholic school priest at a renowned New York City school has admitted to sexually abusing minors in the 1970s and 1980s, and local prosecutors are now investigating, authorities say. Father Robert Harrison, a priest who taught for 26 years and coached basketball for more than 20 years at the all-boys Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, has been removed from the school and is barred from any sort of ministry as church and law enforcement officials investigate.

Scandal has rocked the Vatican for the second time in a week. On Thursday (September 25), officials confirmed Pope Francis had sacked Bishop Livieres, head of the Paraguayan diocese of Ciudad del Este. Livieres is suspected of protecting a priest believed to have sexually abused young people. His dismissal followed the arrest two days earlier of former archbishop Josef Wesolowski, who is accused of paying for sex with children during his time as papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic. Pope Francis, has vowed to take a zero-tolerance policy on clerics who abuse minors. The pontiff approved Wesolowski’s arrest and earlier...

Former Archbishop of Cincinnati cited in filesCHICAGO -- As head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin got credit for instituting reforms and throwing out guilty priests in the midst of a child abuse scandal that covered four decades. But the former Archbishop of Cincinnati also helped cover up for sexual abusers, according to internal archdiocese documents released Tuesday that show how the archdiocese tried to contain the scandal. The documents claim that: > Bernardin not only refused to pursue a canonical trial to remove Rev. Norbert Maday, a convicted child molester, from the priesthood, he increased the priestÂ’s...

The release of 6,000 pages of documents by the Archdiocese of Chicago raised hopes Wednesday among sex abuse victims and their lawyers that new light will be shed on what the Catholic Church knew and did — or didn't do — about decades of allegations against priests. The nation's third-largest archdiocese handed over to victims' attorneys a trove of complaints, personnel documents and other files for about 30 priests with substantiated abuse allegations, as part of settlements with the victims. The lawyers, who have fought for years to hold the church accountable for concealing crimes and sometimes reassigning priests to...

Can you imagine a priest taking a group of altar boys to see the movie “Deliverance?” According to Tim Robbins, when he was an altar boy in New York City, at the age of ten or eleven, a priest at his church took him and some other altar boys into Times Square to see the R-rated film which contained a brutal homosexual rape scene.

A former Milwaukee priest who was removed from ministry after being charged with sexual abuse but cleared by a jury in a civil trial, is seeking $450,000 in damages from the archdiocese. Marvin Knighton says he was removed from the priesthood wrongfully, after a jury found him not guilty on sex-abuse charges. Church officials, conducting an independent inquiry, concluded that the charges against him were credible even if they did not meet the “reasonable doubt” standard required in civil law. Knighton’s claim came to light in bankruptcy proceedings for the Milwaukee archdiocese. His name appears, alongside the names of sex-abuse...

The second-highest official in the Archdiocese of Newark is stepping down in the wake of a sex scandal involving a former priest accused of violating an agreement with law enforcement barring him from working with children. Church officials say Monsignor John Doran resigned Friday as vicar general and will no longer hold a leadership position with the archdiocese. Doran signed the agreement the former priest had reached with prosecutors in 2007. …

The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, has admitted to a Victorian parliamentary inquiry that some members of the Church tried to cover up child sexual abuse by other members of the clergy, and has apologised for decades of child sex abuse within the Church, the ABC reports. Cardinal George Pell told the inquiry he was "fully apologetic and absolutely sorry" about decades of child sex abuse within the Church. Some members of the packed public gallery wept as Cardinal Pell was forced to answer questions about the Church's systemic cover-up of cases of rape of children as young as five-years...

Kampala - A popular Ugandan priest has been ostracized from the Catholic Church after exposing what he calls an 'open secret'-- the rampant sexual abuse of children by clergy members. Earlier this year, Ghanian cardinal and papal candidate Peter Turkson raised eyebrows when he told CNN that the international clergy sex abuse scandal couldn't happen in Africa because "African traditional systems kind of protect... its population against this tendency" and "in Africa homosexuality... [is] not countenanced in our society." But one African priest strongly disagrees. Anthony Musaala, a gospel music star known as the "Dancing Priest," has been publicizing sex...

He tells the Sydney Morning Herald, "I'm just glad that it's all coming to light so we can clean up the church so these things aren't happening any more. These are horrible things. Paedophiles or what have you hiding behind the cloth needs to be dealt with and addressed. But my faith will never waver because of people who are weak in the flesh." Wahlberg adds of his religious lifestyle, "Being a Catholic and also being a husband and a parent definitely makes me think a little bit longer and harder about the (movie) choices I make, but being an...

HURLINGHAM, Argentina — Father Julio Cesar Grassi was a celebrity in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires. The young, dynamic, media-savvy priest networked with wealthy Argentines to fund an array of schools, orphanages and job training programs for poor and abandoned youths, winning praise from Argentine politicians and his superior, Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Grassi called his foundation Felices los Niños, "Happy Children." Today, Grassi is a convicted sex offender who remains free on a conditional release after being sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2009 for molesting a prepubescent boy in his care. Yet in the years after Grassi's...

Cardinal Peter Turkson made the comments to an American journalist He said similar sex scandals would not happen in African churches Cardinal Turkson is second favourite to take over as PopeThe African cardinal widely tipped to be the first black pope in modern history faced a firestorm of criticism last night after he laid the blame for clerical sex abuse crises at the feet of gay priests. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who comes from Ghana, told an American journalist that similar sex scandals would never convulse churches in Africa because the culture was inimical to homosexuality. ‘African traditional systems kind of...

A retired Los Angeles cardinal accused of mismanaging a child sex abuse crisis has been stripped of all administrative and public duties by his successor. Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony, 76, has apologised for his "failure", Archbishop Jose Gomez said on Thursday. The Los Angeles archdiocese, the largest in the US, has released thousands of pages of files on priests accused of child molestation. Cardinal Mahony retired in 2011, having run the archdiocese for 25 years. In 2007 Los Angeles paid $660m (£415m) to alleged victims of abuse, the largest sex abuse payout on record. Cardinal Mahony has publicly apologised for...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Cardinal Roger Mahony, who retired with a tainted career after dodging criminal charges over how he handled pedophile priests, was stripped of duties by his successor as a judge ordered confidential church personnel files released. The unprecedented move by Archbishop Jose Gomez came less than two weeks after other long-secret priest personnel records showed how Mahony worked with top aides to protect the Roman Catholic church from the engulfing scandal. One of those aides, Monsignor Thomas Curry stepped down Thursday as auxiliary bishop in the Los Angeles archdiocese's Santa Barbara region. Gomez said Mahony, 76, would...

LOS ANGELES — Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony and other top Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles officials maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests, provide damage control for the church and keep parishioners in the dark, according to church personnel files.

The Roman Catholic Church has moved sexually abusive priests across international borders and kept them in ministry, criminal authorities in Australia have concluded. Their finding mirrors that of our landmark 2004-2005 investigative series, Runaway Priests: Hiding in Plain Sight. We identified over 200 cases in which accused clerics escaped justice by going abroad. Police in the Australian state of Victoria, in a report to parliament there, cite a case I first brought to light: The Salesians of Don Bosco religious order moved a priest to Samoa in 1998, when he had one child molestation conviction on his record and was...