20 000 pennies donated in Rockville

Send The Bishops a Message has donated 20 000 pennies to the Diocese of Rockville, NY. The number of 20 000 was deliberately chosen to represent a (conservative) estimate of the number of US victims of sexual abuse by priests.

A message for the Rockville Centre diocese

Members of a national coalition led by Send the Bishops a Message delivered 20,000 pennies and a letter to Bishop William Murphy last Sunday morning during a sidewalk "press conference" outside St. Agnes Cathedral.

The group, which claims to represent over 25,000 people, called upon Murphy to use the money as a seed for a special fund to aid clergy sexual abuse victims.

The coalition, which also includes Victims' Voice, Road to Recovery and the National Survivor Advocates Coalition, is calling for a proposed Diocese of Rockville Centre Good Samaritan Clergy Sexual Abuse Victims’ Trust fund to be overseen by independent trustees who would distribute grants and other support to help victims and their families recover and heal from the trauma they say resulted from the abuse.

The number of pennies being donated, the group said, represents a conservative estimate of the number of people in the United States who experienced sexual abuse by Catholic priests and other church employees since 1950.

 LiHerald.com 

Boston Archdiocese: New Accusations Against Priest

BRAINTREE, Mass. (AP) ― A priest cleared by the Boston Archdiocese three years ago of child sex abuse is now facing more accusations.

The archdiocese said Wednesday the Rev. Thomas Curran has been restricted from public ministry following new allegations that he sexually abused children in the 1970s and 1980s.

Curran was on administrative leave from 2002 to 2007 during the archdiocese's investigation of two sexual abuse allegations, which it found were unsubstantiated. Curran was then placed on permanent disability, which restricted his ministry to family. He's now restricted from any ministry. His current location could not immediately be determined.

Cardinal Sean O'Malley said the new charges brought the church "great sadness" and underscored the importance of its efforts to protect children.

SNAP, an abuse victims advocacy group, said the case shows "how extraordinarily flawed" church sex abuse investigations are.

-Massachusetts AP News

Belgian Cardinal: "Damage Control" Before Concern For Victims

Cardinal Godfried Danneels also acknowledged that "all too often" the Roman Catholic Church had given damage control precedence over concern for victims in sexual abuse cases involving clergy.

Roger Vangheluwe, the Bishop of Bruges, resigned at the end of April after admitting to a paedophile relationship with his teenage nephew n the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was still a priest.

The victim, according leaked transcripts of a meeting on April 8, was then asked by Cardinal Danneels to keep silent about the abuse until Bishop Vangheluwe retired next year.

The cardinal insisted that he had tried to establish why the family had kept quiet about the abuse for almost 25 years and he denied mentioning the bishop's impending retirement to influence the relatives.

"I never wanted to suggest that it should not be made public," he said.

Cardinal Danneels, who retired in January, has been questioned by police as a witness in an investigation into sexual abuse by the Church in Belgium.

He said that he had only become aware of a sex abuse problem was big after cases emerged in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany.

"We knew of a few cases. But the stream of reactions that came in after Vangheluwe's resignation made the scale of the problem clear, also for me," he said.

Read more at Daily Telegraph

German Bishops' Abuse Guidelines Require Reporting to Police

Any suspicion of the mistreatment of children by church officials will in future be reported to prosecutors immediately, according to new guidelines presented by Germany's Catholic bishops on Tuesday.

The Roman Catholic Church in Germany on Tuesday unveiled a new set of guidelines for dealing with cases of sexual abuse within the church.

All future allegations of abuse at the hands of church officials are to be reported to state prosecutors, which was not the case under the previous policy. Rules have been extended to include not just clergy but all staff working for the church.

"The shocking revelations and experience of recent months has shown us that the guidelines of 2002 were not precise enough in every area", said Stephan Ackermann, the Bishop of Trier, at a press conference to  present the new rules.

The German Bishops' Conference gave Ackermann the responsibility for re-drawing the guidelines in February, after allegations of mistreatment at an elite Jesuit school in Berlin. Further cases of mistreatment in Germany and across Europe have caused severe damage to the Catholic Church.

The new 55-point regulations are to replace 16-point guidelines from 2002, and take effect on Wednesday, September 1. They were approved by the bishops' permanent council at a meeting in Wuerzburg last week.

"It was important for us bishops to make sure that the new guidelines prevent cases of sexual abuse being covered up," Ackermann said in the western city of Trier.

-Deutsche Welle

Priest gets 4 years for molesting St. Charles boy

A former Roman Catholic priest was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison for sexually assaulting a St. Charles boy.

Alejandro Flores, 37, of Shorewood, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal sexual abuse, a Class 1 felony, at a hearing in Kane County.

Prosecutors said Flores preyed on a boy whose family he met while working at St. Mary's Church in West Chicago. The abuse occurred on multiple occasions in Flores' car and in the victim's home, when the boy was 12 or 13 years old, prosecutors said. There also were allegations that Flores made attempts to have sexual contact with the victim's older brother.

As a result of his conviction, Flores must register as a sex offender for life and face deportation to his native Bolivia upon release from prison.

By law, he must serve at least 85 percent of the sentence, or about three years and five months, Judge T. Jordan Gallagher said.

- from Daily Herald

Alejandro Flores, 37, of the 600 block of Brook Forest Avenue in Shorewood, had been charged with 16 felonies, including predatory sexual assault, criminal sexual assault, criminal sexual abuse, indecent solicitation of a child and attempted aggravated sexual abuse in connection with the alleged sexual abuse of his now 13-year-old godson.

Without the plea bargain, Flores could have faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 to 16 years in prison, especially given the predatory sexual assault charge, according to Kane County Assistant State’s Attorney Debra Bree. She said the prison sentence could have been even longer than that if the judge decided to sentence each charge consecutively.

The Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office said between Jan. 1, 2005, and Jan. 1, 2010, Flores had sexual contact with a St. Charles minor between the ages of 8 and 13.

Prosecutors allege during the same period, Flores also tried to have sexual contact with the victim’s older brother, who also was a minor.

-from My Suburban Life

Belgian Cardinal Attempted to Secure Silence on Abuse

The church has been protesting vigorously that the scandal of sexual abuse is mostly about past history, that for the most part, past failings have been corrected and appropriate procedures are now in place. To some extent this is true -  but some degree of episcopal cover-up clearly continues.

In April this year, the Belgian Bishop Roger Vangheluwe admitted to sexual abuse, and resigned. Shortly before this, the then head of the Belgian Church, Cardinal Daneels, tried to persuade the victim from going public with his allegations until after Vangheluwe's resignation.

From BBC News, Aug 28:

The former head of the Catholic Church in Belgium tried to stop a victim of sex abuse from going public with their story, Church officials have confirmed.

During a meeting in April, Cardinal Godfried Danneels advised the victim to delay a public statement until the bishop who abused him had retired.

Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who was also at the meeting, admitted to the abuse in April and resigned.

The victim recorded the meeting, and released the tape to Belgian media.

Decades Long Abuse Alleged in California

LOS ANGELES — The Roman Catholic Church in the United States has become embroiled in a new pedophilia scandal with six women and one man alleging sexual abuse by a priest over three decades.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Oakland, California accused Father Stephen Kiesle of acts of sexual abuse between 1972 and 2001, and alleged that Catholic Church officials knew of the crimes but did not stop them.

Pedophile priest scandals and allegations of high-level cover-ups that swept Australia and the United States in 2004 have surged again since last year and rocked the Catholic Church in Europe and the United States.

"The Catholic bishops in the United States of America and the Holy See have long facilitated the sexual molestation of children by engaging in the harboring and protection of known child molesting priests," read a copy of the latest lawsuit obtained by AFP.

"The bishops and Catholic hierarchs have done so to prevent the priests from being prosecuted and to avoid scandal," the lawsuit read.

It said church figures "have subjected Catholic families and children in these communities to known pedophiles, counting on the devotion and reverence in the communities to keep any further abuse by the priests secret."

The plaintiffs, six women and one man, said they were abused by Kiesle throughout childhood and adolescence, although one alleged victim, Teresa Rosson, 48, said she suffered abuse at the hand of the cleric until about a decade ago.

-from AFP