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In the October 19 episode of Fox’s “Family Guy,” characters Brian (the family dog) and Stewie (the family child) travel in a time machine to rescue Mort Goldman (a Jewish family-friend) from the Nazi invasion of Poland. After Brian and Stewie disguise Mort as a priest to get him out of the country, a Nazi officer asks Mort, “Are you sure you’re a real priest?” Stewie replies, “Yeah, yeah, I can vouch for him, he’s real. He’s molested me many, many times.” Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows: “To its credit, the Fox News Channel has criticized its...

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...

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.

Gone are the days when Jesuit priests were virile men who fully embraced the Catholic Faith and prayed to be worthy of a martyr's crown. Let's play "compare and contrast", shall we? First, here's a tale from the 1640s in the upstate New York wilderness:He [Fr. Isaac Jogues] did not yet know the cause of his companion's [Rene Goupil] death; but the old man who had caused him to be slain having invited him, some days later, to his cabin, and giving him food, when the Father came to offer the blessing and express the sign of the Cross, that...

On Sunday, November 4th, Rev. Thomas Brennan, S.J., revealed publicly to a parish at St. Joseph University in Philadelphia that he was a homosexual. The priest chose to “come out” during a so-called “Diversity Week” allegedly dedicated to honoring Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius Loyola. The following is Fr. Euteneuer’s open letter to Fr. Brennan.Dear Father Brennan, Faithful Catholics are so accustomed to being scandalized by Jesuit priests and universities these days that your public announcement of your same sex attraction during the Mass last Sunday does not really surprise any of us. It does, however, increase the indignation that people...

VATICAN CITY - A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work. In an interview published Sunday, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico told La Repubblica daily he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity." Vatican teaching holds that gays and lesbians should...

VATICAN CITY -- An Italian monsignor was suspended from his position at the Holy See after the cleric said in a television interview he "didn't feel he was sinning" by having sex with gay men, the Vatican and news reports said Saturday. Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told journalists that while the case was under investigation the monsignor was suspended from his job as a top official in the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy, an office which aims to ensure proper conduct by priests. "The case is being handled with utmost reserve," Lombardi said. A private Italian TV network earlier...

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...

BOCA RATON - A new priest at St. Gregory's Episcopal Church was issued a citation for allegedly soliciting sex in a North Carolina public park's men's room recently. Though the announcement came out this week, police issued a citation for solicitation to the Rev. Michael Penland in June during a Waynesville police sting operation dubbed Operation Summer Heat. Waynesville is located near Asheville, N.C. Penland, who has been a youth minister at the Boca Raton church since November, allegedly followed an undercover officer and solicited sex from him, police said. Penland allegedly followed the officer as he left the park...

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...

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay over $600 million to settle claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in that diocese. This is the latest in a string of multi-million dollar payouts by Catholic diocese throughout the country. Perhaps it is time to take another look at the most comprehensive study of Catholic priest sexual abuse ever conducted. In 2002, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a national study of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The study, conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, found that nationwide, approximately 4400 Catholic priests were credibly...

WASHINGTON, August 30, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Officially promulgated on August 4, a new 98-page Program of Priestly Formation has been issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) after being approved by the Vatican.  Replacing the fourth edition of the norms guiding priestly formation in all seminaries published in 1992, the fifth edition has taken seriously the scandal of priestly sexual abuse.  Speaking of a proper formation in sexuality, the document states, "As we have recently seen so dramatically in the Church, when such foundations are lacking in priests, the consequent suffering and scandals are devastating."In the...

Queens parochial school principal who angered Catholic Church leaders by accusing a priest of looting school coffers to pay for a gay lover has won the backing of a prominent local Catholic educator. "Your courage in stopping this outrage, even at the risk to your own employment, has taught all of your pupils a lesson they will long remember," the Rev. Richard Van Houten, president of Archbishop Molloy High School in Jamaica, wrote to Barbara Samide. Van Houten went so far as to hint in the letter that he would come to Samide's rescue if she is ousted as principal...

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...

The following is an edited update from Catholic attorney Sharon Bourassa regarding the situation in the Miami archdiocese. (Note: This statement contains a graphic description.) “On March 21, 2006, Stephen Brady of Roman Catholic Faithful drove from Illinois to Fort Lauderdale to meet with Christifidelis members from All Saints Parish and parishioners from several other parishes -- St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Vincent and St. Augustine's.  The subject of Brady's visit was to discuss strategies for dealing with the ‘gay subculture’ that has infiltrated the Miami archdiocese (as well as many other dioceses across the U.S.), abuse of parish monies,...

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...

"This is an ancient, rigid, secretive, top-down, all-male monarchy. It always has been. It always will be. The answer is not to reform them, but to go around them and to contain them." Whatever constructive role these groups once played in the national “dialogue” about the abuses perpetrated by predatory, largely homosexual priests, it has long since past. In fact, they don’t seek dialogue at all. Clohessy now counsels against dialogue with bishops and instead urges Catholics to lobby state legislatures to exempt dioceses from statutes of limitation that prevent an endless stream of aging, often dubious, claims. High profile...

The Rev. Gerard L. Branconnier, who was removed from ministry after allegations were made that he sexually abused minors, had a gay marriage ministry in operation 15 years before it was legal in this state. However, gay marriage is not “legal” in the Roman Catholic church, which has opposed gay marriage and opposes adoption of children to same-sex couples. Paul A. Guries of Auburn, who settled a suit with the Catholic Worcester diocese, has released a copy of a video that shows Father Branconnier in 1989 marrying two men in a traditional Catholic marriage rite. The video is available here...