Archive for Church
Priest Removed After Sex Abuse Complaint
Posted by: | CommentsA Centennial priest has been removed from active ministry after the archbishop of Denver received complaints the priest abused a minor in the 1970s.
In a statement Sunday, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said Father Mel Thompson has been removed from his priestly duties and has withdrawn from active ministry.
Thompson has served at St. Thomas More church in Centennial for about nine years
The removal comes after an April 7 complaint against Thompson for “past sexual misconduct with a minor that reportedly occurred in the early 1970s,” Chaput said.
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese, Jeanette DeMelo, said Sunday the abuse complaint came from a grown male.
The church would not be more specific about when the alleged misconduct occurred, and a timeline provided by the church does not say where Thompson served from 1970 to 1973. After that, Thompson was assigned to Good Shepherd Parish in Denver, formerly named St. John the Evangelist.
The church has reported the alleged abuse to local law enforcement, Chaput said. Denver police spokesman Matt Murray said the officer in charge of leading such investigations has not been notified about this particular case. However, Murray said that doesn’t mean the case could be in the department’s system waiting to be investigated on Monday.
The announcement comes as sex abuse allegations have swept across Europe and the U.S. in recent weeks. The pope himself has come under fire for the handling of cases that date to his tenure as archbishop of Munich and as a Vatican cardinal in charge of the office dealing with abuse cases.
Last week Pope Benedict XVI said he is willing to meet with more victims of clerical sexual abuse.
Benedict has already met with abuse victims during trips to the United States and Australia and with Canadians at the Vatican.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said many victims are looking not for financial compensation but for moral help.
He said proper selection and training of prospective priests will be crucial in preventing further abuse, and he insisted that the church keep carrying out canon trials “with decisiveness and truthfulness” and cooperate with civil authorities.
Can the Pope be charged as a criminal?
Posted by: | CommentsProtests are growing against Pope Benedict XVI’s planned trip this fall to Britain, where the legal world is debating whether the Vatican’s implicit statehood could shield the Pope from potential prosecution related to sex crimes by pedophile priests.
More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition to Prime Minister Gordon Brown opposing the Pope’s four-day visit to England and Scotland in September.
The campaign has gained momentum as more Catholic sex- abuse scandals shake Europe.
Although Benedict has not been accused of any crime, senior British lawyers are now examining whether the Pope should have immunity as a head of state and whether he could be prosecuted under the principle of universal jurisdiction for an alleged systematic cover-up of sexual abuses by priests.
The middle of last year, the Irish government’s commission investigating charges of abuse in Catholic institutions – keeping in mind that, for most of the last century, “Catholic institutions” meant not just the church on the corner, but most of the school system – concluded that there was “a substantial level of sexual abuse of boys in care that extended over a range from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence. Perpetrators of abuse were able to operate undetected for long periods at the core of institutions. Cases of sexual abuse were managed with a view to minimising the risk of public disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation. This policy resulted in the protection of the perpetrator. When lay people were discovered to have sexually abused, they were generally reported to the Gardai [the police]. When a member of a Congregation was found to be abusing, it was dealt with internally and was not reported to the Gardaí.
“The desire to protect the reputation of the Congregation and institution was paramount. The documents revealed that sexual abusers were often long-term offenders who repeatedly abused children wherever they were working. Contrary to the Congregations’ claims that the recidivist nature of sexual offending was not understood, it is clear from the documented cases that they were aware of the propensity for abusers to re-abuse. The risk, however, was seen by the Congregations in terms of the potential for scandal and bad publicity should the abuse be disclosed. The danger to children was not taken into account. When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again.”
What he’s referring to is the pope’s previous job: For more than 20 years before he became the pope, Cardinal Ratzinger led the Vatican office that had responsibility, among other issues, for response to child abuse cases. An archbishop wrote letters to that office in 1996, calling for disciplinary proceedings against priest Lawrence Murphy. This has been confirmed by Church and Vatican documents. Murphy is believed to have molested some 200 boys at St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, between 1950 and 1974. While a canonical trial was initiated by Cardinal Ratzinger’s secretary, it was ended by the future pope himself after his receipt of a letter from Murphy in which Murphy said he was ill and wanted to live out the remainder of his time in the “dignity of my priesthood”.
Vatican failed to heed sex abuse
Posted by: | CommentsThe tsunami of sex abuse scandals hitting the Roman Catholic church indicates it learned little from the trailblazing work done in Canada on the issue two decades ago, say experts in the church here.
“Anyone who was paying attention had to know, at least 20 years ago, that there’s a right way to manage this and a wrong way,” said Sister Nuala Kenny, professor emeritus of bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
In 1990, Kenny was a member of the Winter Commission set up by the Catholic church to investigate the sexual abuse of boys by members of the Christian Brothers religious order at the notorious Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John’s, Nfld., in the 1970s and 1980s.
Two years later, she became a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Child Sexual Abuse, set up by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Its report, From Pain to Hope, was issued after the church and the Ontario government agreed to a $40 million compensation package for 1,600 men abused as children at two Catholic training schools near Ottawa and Toronto. Provincial police laid more than 200 assault and sex-related charges, which ended in 15 convictions.
Allegations of child abuse, the reports insisted, must be treated as potential crimes, rather than internal church matters, and reported to civil authorities. The primary obligation, they stressed, is protection of the child.
Yet in subsequent scandals that erupted in Boston and Ireland, priests accused of sex abuse were simply moved to other parishes, while church authorities turned a blind eye to allegations, if not flatly tried to cover them up.
Last month, it was revealed that the head of the Irish Catholic church, Cardinal Sean Brady, was present during meetings in 1975 when children signed vows of silence about complaints against a pedophile priest. Brady has so far resisted calls to resign.
The latest scandal is swirling around the pontiff himself. A psychiatrist who treated a priest accused of sexually abusing boys in the early 1980s says a German archdiocese, headed at the time by the future pope, neglected repeated warnings that the priest should not be allowed to work with children.
The priest was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria in 1986.
Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, as the Pope was then known, approved a decision to send the priest for therapy in 1980. But the psychiatrist told The New York Times he doesn’t know if Ratzinger knew of repeated warnings about the man.
Kenny says Canada’s Catholic churches have extensively improved the reporting and handling of sex abuse cases, and the screening and education of student priests.
But she says Canada’s bishops have failed to deal with the underlying issues in abuse scandals – the power of priests over parishioners, their lack of accountability to bishops or parishioners, and the church’s attitude toward sexuality in general, and the celibacy of priests in particular.
“In general, the approach that I see is not in the tradition of brave action for justice that I’ve come to respect the Canadian bishops for. I think it’s: `Head down, if it didn’t happen here, if it’s not happening now, if we took care of that, let’s move on.’ We’re not taking the opportunity for this larger conversation,” Kenny said.
Too many priests are isolated from their parishioners, she says, lacking in the kind of a support that can keep them out of trouble
Documents on Church Sex Abuse to Be Released Today
Posted by: | CommentsBy the end of the day, more than 12,000 pages of documents containing information about sexual abuse complaints against several priests Diocese of Bridgeport and how the church handled those complaints could be released.
The legal fight started eight years ago and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today, it could end with a judge-ordered deadline to release the documents, the Hartford Courant reports. The judge set the deadline for today to give the diocese time to review the documents and flag ones those it considers privileged.
Bridgeport diocese spokesman Joseph McAleer told the Courant on Monday that the church would comply with the judge’s order.
“Contrary to the naysayers, this is very old news. Between 1993 and 2002, more than 200 media reports were published about these and other cases, including extensive Hartford Courant coverage in 2002 in an article that published, without permission, many of the sealed documents,” McAleer said.
The diocese settled the lawsuits in March 2001, paying an undisclosed amount to 23 plaintiffs who alleged that they had been sexually abused by seven different priests
Experts: Bishops covered up priests’ child abuse
Posted by: | CommentsRoman Catholic Church leaders in Dublin spent decades sheltering child-abusing priests from the law and most fellow clerics turned a blind eye, an investigation ordered by Ireland’s government concluded Thursday.
Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who handed over more than 60,000 previously secret church files to the three-year investigation, said he felt deep shame and sorrow for how previous archbishops presided over endemic child abuse — yet claimed afterward not to understand the gravity of their sins.
Martin said his four predecessors in Ireland’s capital, including retired Cardinal Desmond Connell, must have understood that priests’ molestation and rape of boys and girls “was a crime in both civil and canon law. For some reason or another they felt they could deal with all this in little worlds of their own.
“They were wrong, and children were left to suffer.”
That report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn’t stop it, whereas Thursday’s 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese — home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics — did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.
By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies — among them qualified lawyers — already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop’s private vault.
The investigators also dug up a paper trail documenting the church’s long-secret insurance policy, taken out in 1987, to cover potential lawsuits and compensation demands. Dublin church leaders publicly denied the existence of the problem for a decade afterward — but since the mid-1990s have paid out more than euro10 million ($15 million) in settlements and legal bills.
It was not until 1995 that then-Archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases. At that time, Connell actually held records of complaints against at least 29 priests, the report found. Connell later pursued a lawsuit against the investigators in an abandoned bid to keep them from seeing more than 5,500 files documenting the church’s knowledge of abusive priests.
The report said all four archbishops sought “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”
The investigators lauded a handful of priests and mostly low-ranking police who pursued complaints and prosecutions, almost always unsuccessfully, from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The government also apologized for the state’s failure to pursue Dublin priests accused of child abuse until recent years.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, who received the Dublin Archdiocese report in July but delayed its publication for legal vetting, vowed that the state would never again treat the Catholic Church with deference.
“A priest’s collar will protect no criminal,” he said.
But pressure groups representing more than 15,000 documented victims of abuse by Irish Catholic officials said the government was not doing enough to end the danger of Catholic child abuse — in part because the law still stops short of requiring bishops to report abuse complaints to police.
And she forecast that, because abused children often do not seek justice until they reach adulthood, children today were still being abused by priests. “It’s very likely in 10 or 15 years’ time that the children who are being abused today will bring forward allegations,” she said.
“As Irish people we like to think we live in a civilized society,” she said, “but we need to hang our heads in shame.”
Abuse Complaints Confirmed Against Maine Priest
Posted by: | CommentsThe Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland says it has confirmed sexual abuse complaints against a priest that took place more than 60 years ago.
Bishop Richard Malone read a letter Saturday to parishioners at St. Francis Xavier Church in Winthrop that said the incidents involving the Rev. Joseph R. McGowan took place between 1936 and 1949 while McGowan served as pastor at the church.
Malone said he is directing the removal of any memorials or tributes to McGowan on church property. Church officials say the Winthrop council of the Knights of Columbus is removing McGowan’s name from its charter at the bishop’s request.
McGowan died in 1962 at the age of 72. He served at churches in Augusta, Portland and Winthrop before retiring in 1957.
Roman Catholic church releases sex abuse complaints Itally
Posted by: | CommentsThere were 50 allegations of sexual abuse made against the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales last year with more than half dating back 30 years or more, according to the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission. In its first annual report, the body set up to protect children, young people and vulnerable adults reported a “significant number” of the allegations related to incidents said to have taken place in the 1970s. The statistics showed that of 51 alleged abusers, 30 were clergy or from religious orders, seven were volunteers, six were parishioners and five were employees.
Pope Benedict met victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy in the last hours of his nine-day visit to Australia, underlining his earlier public apology for the pain they have suffered.
But his efforts have been criticised by victim support groups, who accused the church of stage managing the meeting, choosing people who would not speak out.
The Pope held a private mass in a chapel at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney and then spoke privately with four representatives of abuse victims – two men and two women – for around an hour “as an expression of his ongoing pastoral concern for those who have been abused by members of the church”, the Vatican said in a statement.
“He listened to their stories and offered them consolation,” the statement said. “Assuring them of his spiritual closeness, he promised to continue to pray for them, their families and all victims.
“Through this paternal gesture, the holy father wished to demonstrate again his deep concern for all victims of sexual abuse.”
It is believed to be the first time the Pope has specifically apologised for sexual abuse by clergy and stated clearly that abusers should be brought to justice.
Pastor leaves trail of complaints
Posted by: | CommentsAn Omaha girl told her pastor that her body belonged to God, not to him.
The pastor disagreed. He said having sex with him was OK, and “This is what love is.”
Those allegations are contained in new documents reviewed by The World-Herald in the case of a Lincoln pastor accused of sexually assaulting the girl in Omaha and Council Bluffs.
Attorneys for the girl, now 17, say she will need psychological treatment and will suffer from the abuse for the rest of her life. She and her father are suing Efrain Umaña Sr. for damages for emotional pain and distress, according to a lawsuit filed in Pottawattamie County District Court.
He also faces criminal charges in Douglas and Pottawattamie Counties.
She alleges in the civil suit that Umaña, who is now 54, raped her at least three times: once at her home in Omaha, once at the church in Council Bluffs and once in Umaña’s car. She said she was in fourth or fifth grade at the time of the assaults.
Umaña’s attorney, Andrew Wilson, said Umaña denies the girl’s allegations.
The girl and her family regularly attended the church in Council Bluffs where Umaña formerly preached, Templo Monte Horeb. It is near 30th Street and 5th Avenue.
Umaña had influence and authority over her and used that power to sexually abuse her, attorneys John McHale and Robert Knowles said in the lawsuit.
The girl and her father also named the church as a defendant in the same lawsuit, alleging that the church was negligent in failing to check Umaña’s background. They also say the church failed to supervise Umaña
Umaña worked as a Lincoln Public Schools bus driver from 1992 to 1997. In 1993, three students reported that they felt uncomfortable around Umaña, according to memos obtained by The World-Herald.
The students reported that he hugged them, said things like, “Hi, Babe” and told them how pretty they were. He also kissed one and grabbed at their coats, according to the documents. One girl reported that she told him the bus was cold and he said, “Yes, but you and me are hot.”
In 1994, three elementary school students reported that Umaña grabbed them in inappropriate places. Umaña denied the allegations to school officials. In 1997, Umaña was terminated
According to a letter the church sent to Umaña, his dismissal resulted in part from a report by a 17-year-old parishioner that she’d had a physical relationship with him. She later sued and said the case was settled out of court for $18,000.
A 14-year-old girl also reported that he made advances.
He was dismissed from another Lincoln church, at 1305 N. 52nd Ave.
The church was an affiliate of the International General Assembly of the Church of God, of Cleveland, Tenn. A Church of God trial found him guilty of ecclesiastical charges of unbecoming ministerial conduct.
Gay Cobourg area man says human rights violated by Catholic diocese, parishoners
Posted by: | CommentsSexual orientation has been named as grounds for discrimination in an application for a Human Rights Tribunal hearing.
Jim Corcoran, owner of Ste. Anne’s Inn and Spa, in Grafton, has made the application against 12 members of St. Michael’s Church, Cobourg, and the Catholic Diocese of Peterborough.
Mr. Corcoran’s application to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario states he was removed from serving at the altar during mass at the church because a group of parishioners wrote a letter to Bishop Nicola DeAngelis claiming he is an openly homosexual man married to another man, and they threatened to cause a scandal if the bishop did not remove him from serving.
Mr. Corcoran served as an acolyte (altar server) from Dec. 7, 2008, to April 19, 2009, at St. Michael’s Church, under Father Allan Hood. In April, the bishop instructed Father Hood to tell Mr. Corcoran and his partner they were no longer welcome on the altar.
“I don’t think sexual orientation should have any bearing on this… most Canadians are well past that,” Mr. Corcoran said in an interview on Wednesday.
“All he (the bishop) did was follow the church’s rules. Now we’re being sued under the Human Rights Tribunal and they should have no jurisdiction here.”
Mr. Ward said any other issues with Father Hood “muddy the waters.”
In the application under remedy, Mr. Corcoran is asking the 12 parishioners to donate $20,000 each to a charity of Mr. Corcoran’s choice, and that the diocese pay his legal costs associated with the application, up to a maximum of $25,000, for a total of $265,000. He also hopes the 12 will be “held accountable for their un-Christian actions, in front of their peers in a public forum, by the bishop or the bishop’s superior,” the application states.
Mr. Corcoran would also like the bishop to preach a sermon at St. Michael’s “on the consequences of practicing discrimination and the slanderous spreading of rumours, hate and innuendo.” And he would like to be reinstated as a server at the church, with apologies to himself, friends and family.
Mr. Corcoran, who said he lives a chaste lifestyle with his same-sex partner, who is not named in the document and wishes to remain anonymous, said his situation has been the subject of many right-wing blogs, many of which attack his lifestyle.