Church sex abuse inquiry 'not needed'

"An independent inquiry into dozens of suicides among victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and brothers in Victoria would achieve little, a Catholic bishop says.

Police investigating the case of convicted pedophile Brother Robert Best believe at least 26 victims of sexual abuse at schools in which he taught have committed suicide.

One of the investigating officers wants a parliamentary inquiry to investigate the deaths.

"If it helps the victims I'd be more than happy for it to go ahead," Bishop of Ballarat Peter Connors told AAP.

"I don't think they'll learn very much more ... I'm convinced we've done the best we can in more recent years."

"

-Sydney Morning Herald

'

Monterey diocese sued over sex abuse allegations

"Two men have filed separate lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Monterey, claiming negligence by church officials allowed them to be molested by priests.

In one suit, the plaintiff says he was 9 when he was first molested by Father William Allison in the rectory of San Carlos Church in 1966.

The abuse continued for 18 months, although the man only recently discovered the psychological damage it inflicted, according to the suit filed on July 21 in Sacramento County.

It further claims diocese officials were aware of previous allegations of abuse against Allison and had reason to suspect he was abusing the boy, but did not inform his family. Allison is no longer alive, according to diocese spokesman Warren Hoy.

"At no time did defendant diocese ever send an official ... to advise parishioners either verbally or through a church bulletin that there were credible allegations against Father Allison," the suit contends."

- San Jose Mercury News

Payment offered to German Abuse Victims - but Rejected By Victims

The German Jesuits have offered a financial payment to the victims of sexual abuse at their schools, but victims have rejected the offer as too low.

German Jesuits offer payment to sex-abuse victims

Berlin - Germany's Jesuit order of Catholic priests is offering to pay 1 million euros (1.36 million dollars) in compensation to some 200 victims of sex abuse.

The offer, equivalent to 5,000 euros per person, was made public on Wednesday. It concerns mostly men who turned to investigators to report suffering a variety of abuses, including semi-naked caning by teachers, at the country's four Jesuit schools.

The scandal erupted last year, when a Jesuit secondary school in Berlin, Canisius College, wrote to former pupils seeking evidence of sex abuse.

Germany's Catholic bishops have yet to settle a separate compensation package for people who were abused in parish churches, diocesan schools and other institutions. The Jesuits are a semi- independent institution within the Catholic Church.

Thomas Busch, a Jesuit spokesman in Munich, refused to call the planned payments 'compensation,' saying the suffering of the abused could never be put right with money.

-Monsters and Critics

Sex abuse victims reject Church payout offer

Victims of sexual abuse at Jesuit schools in Germany said Thursday that the Catholic Church’s offer of €5,000 in compensation is too low.

“This sum is not at all sufficient to compensate for the damages suffered or to signal a recognition of guilt,” leader of the Eckiger Tisch victim’s group Thomas Weiner told daily Frankfurter Rundshau. 

Weiner also said he found it incomprehensible that victims already known to the Church would have to file an application to receive the payment.  

-The Local.de

• Catholic abuse victims offered firm payout (24 Jan 11)
• European court rules preventive detention of sex offenders unjust (13 Jan 11)
• Pastor sacked for sex in Hamburg church (7 Jan 11)

Monastery sex abuse cases in Switzerland claim 40 victims from 15 monks

Fifteen monks were found guilty of sexual abuse at a monastery in Einsiedeln, in central Switzerland, in cases stretching back over six decades, an investigative panel said on Thursday.

The panel said there were at least 40 victims, with the majority of the cases occurring in the 1960s and 1970s.

The cases only began to come to light when preventive measures were introduced in 1998.

Nine of the monks found guilty committed indecent acts on children, the panel said.

Three monks were found to be ring leaders and the notion of sexual abuse at the monastery had become accepted, the investigators said.

For the first time last year, the Catholic Church in Switzerland compiled detailed statistics of cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and other pastoral workers.

Dutch Church Reports on Abuse - Repeats earlier patterns of US, Ireland, Germany.

The Dutch church has released the findings of its own investigation into sexual abuse in the Netherlands Catholic Church - and its not pretty. Repeating the pattern already established in the US and Ireland, and more recently reported for Germany, this investigation has established the existence not only of extensive sexual abuse, but also strong indications of widespread coverups or failures by the Church to act against perpetrators.

Dutch Panel Found 2,000 Church Abuse Claims

BRUSSELS — The Roman Catholic Church, battered by sexual abuse scandals from the United States to Belgium, is facing a new set of damaging allegations in the Netherlands. Figures released Thursday by an investigative commission showed that almost 2,000 people had made complaints of sexual or physical abuse against the church, in a country with only four million Catholics.

“The Roman Catholic Church has not faced a crisis like this since the French Revolution,” Peter Nissen, a professor of the history of religion at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said of the growing abuse scandal.

With one legal case starting this week, and accusations against two former bishops, the reaction of the church appears to have fueled the crisis. Nearly all of the cases are decades old, with probably no more than 10 from the past 20 years.

Asked in March on television about the hundreds of complaints already surfacing, one of the church’s most senior figures, Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, shocked the nation by replying not in Dutch but in German. “Wir haben es nicht gewusst” — We knew nothing — he said, using a phrase associated with Nazi excuses after World War II.

“A lot of people perceived it as an affirmation of the culture of covering up cases,” said Professor Nissen, adding that it meant to many, “ ‘We should have known’ or ‘We knew but we didn’t want to know.’ ”

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said that he had no comment and that the matter was in the hands of Dutch bishops.

Next month Cardinal Simonis, the retired bishop of Utrecht, will testify in Middelburg as a witness in a court hearing already under way involving sexual abuse.

In an interim report, issued Thursday, a commission headed by Wim Deetman, a Protestant and former education minister, said it had received roughly 1,975 reports of sexual or physical abuse, some directly but others through a body set up for victims, called Hulp en Recht, or Help and Justice.

One central accusation in the Netherlands is that, as in other countries, known abusers were simply transferred to new parishes.

In recent weeks it has emerged that a Roman Catholic order, the Salesians of Don Bosco, paid about $22,000 to settle an abuse claim against one bishop, Jan ter Schure, who died in 2003. The abuse is said to have taken place in Ugchelen between 1948 and 1953. The order declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Hulp en Recht is examining claims against a former bishop, Jo Gijsen, now 78, who has been accused of having an abusive relationship with a student at the Rolduc seminary between 1959 and 1961. He has denied accusations against him.

Central to the growing public debate over the church’s culpability is the extent to which sexual abuse was tolerated and covered up.

The hearing at which Cardinal Simonis will testify next month involves a priest convicted of abusing three youngsters in Terneuzen. The priest had been arrested, though not prosecuted, on similar grounds in the late 1970s as director of a Catholic youth center near The Hague, part of the diocese where Cardinal Simonis was then bishop.

The accuser’s lawyer, Martin De Witte, who represents about 120 other people claiming abuse, said his client wanted an apology and damages. “We say the Catholic Church didn’t take the measures to protect children from this man,” he said. “They gave him another chance, and another, and another.” 

-full report, NY Times 

A Priest's Open Letter on Abuse, Call for Full Disclosure

Last week, Fr. James Connell, vice chancellor of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, stood on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and called on his bishop to release documents related to the local sexual-abuse crisis: “I am absolutely convinced that we need the truth. Justice requires that the truth be known.” His appearance was a surprise to SNAP, which organized the press conference. According to Milwaukee News Buzz:

SNAP called the press conference Tuesday after learning that lawyers for the archdiocese and Auxiliary Bishop Richard Sklba have asked a judge to seal a sworn statement given by Sklba in a local court case regarding priest sex abuse cases.

(…)

There is some irony in Connell linking arms with Isely. About a year ago, Connell was the subject of another press conference in which Isely called on the priest to step down from the internal church board that hears sex abuse allegations. Isely pointed out that Connell had investigated allegations against Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest who abused scores of deaf children, according to church records.

(…)

Connell added that he had undergone a conversion of sorts after he began wondering what his life would have been like if he had been abused. Connell has since organized a group of other priests who hold monthly candlelight vigils for those who have been abused. He also began to challenge the hierarchy of the church as to whether officials were living up the Dallas Charter, the 2002 document adopted by the bishops to deal with sex abuse allegations.

Today, Connell released an open letter to priests [PDF] “regarding the need for the revelation of truth concerning the priest sexual abuse scandal.” It’s a remarkable document, one that deserves to be read by Catholics lay and ordained alike. Read it at Commonweal

Newark Abusers protected by Archbishop John Myers

Newark archbishop shielded at least 4 priests accused of sexual abuse

w.nj.com

Eight years ago, Newark Archbishop John J. Myers stood among the nation’s bishops at a landmark gathering in Dallas and helped craft a policy intended to cleanse the priesthood of pedophiles and restore trust among shaken American Catholics.

In ratifying the Dallas Charter, Myers and his colleagues promised a new era of reform and transparency. Allegations of sexual abuse against priests would no longer be hidden from parishioners or police, and any priest believed to have molested a child would be permanently banned from ministry.

In the years since, Myers and his aides say the archdiocese has taken aggressive measures to identify abusive priests.

But a Star-Ledger review of the archbishop’s record since 2002 shows Myers on at least four occasions has shielded priests accused of sexual abuse against minors and one adult. In the four instances, the priests have either admitted improper sexual contact, pleaded guilty to crimes stemming from accusations of sexual misconduct or been permanently barred from ministry by the archdiocese after allegations of sexual misconduct.

The archdiocese also wrote a letter of recommendation for one of the priests, a week after it learned he was accused of breaking into a woman’s home in Florida and possibly assaulting her.

From one perspective, the newspaper’s findings suggest Myers continues to take a cautious hand in publicly naming priests. The findings, coupled with testimony from a 2009 deposition, show the issue weighs heavily on Myers.

From another view, the archbishop has failed to live up to the guidelines and spirit of what was set forth in Dallas. The most controversial example is the Rev. Michael Fugee, who confessed to police eight years ago that he molested a 13-year-old boy. Fugee was never ousted from the priesthood, and the archdiocese assigned him last year as chaplain to St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark without telling hospital officials of his past.

In other cases:

- In 2004, the Newark Archdiocese wrote letters to six dioceses in Florida on behalf of the Rev. Wladyslaw Gorak, one week after learning Gorak’s ministry had been terminated in the Orlando Diocese — after he was accused of breaking into a woman’s home.

- Also in 2004, the archdiocese banned the Rev. Gerald Ruane from public ministry after investigating an allegation he molested a boy, but did not publicly notify lay people or other priests. Ruane continued to say Mass and wear his collar in public.

- In 2007, the archdiocese failed to inform lay people that it found a molestation claim credible against the Rev. Daniel Medina, who had worked in parishes in Elizabeth and Jersey City. The case wasn’t made public until a victims group uncovered an alert sent by the archdiocese in September 2008 to other bishops saying Medina was on administrative leave and could not be located.

Read the full report: