The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow” on Thursday over revelations that Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused about 1,000 people over seven decades, vowing to hold abusers and those who protected them accountable.

In a long statement that broke the Vatican’s silence over a damning U.S. grand jury report that has shaken the American Church, spokesman Greg Burke said the Holy See was taking the report “with great seriousness”.

He stressed the “need to comply” with civil law, including mandatory reporting of abuse against minors and said Pope Francis understands how “these crimes can shake the faith and spirit of believers” and that the pontiff wanted to “root out this tragic horror”.

The grand jury on Tuesday released the findings of the largest-ever investigation of sex abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church, finding that 301 priests in the state had sexually abused minors over the past 70 years. It contained graphic examples of children being groomed and sexually abused by priests.

“The abuses described in the report are criminal and morally reprehensible. Those acts were betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith,” Burke said.

“The Church must learn hard lessons from its past, and there should be accountability for both abusers and those who permitted abuse to occur,” he said.

His statement came hours after U.S. bishops called for a Vatican-led probe backed by lay investigators into allegations of sexual abuse by former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month.. The Vatican did not directly address their request.

Pope Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation in July after American church officials said allegations that he sexually abused a 16-year-old boy almost 50 years ago were credible and substantiated.

McCarrick was possibly the first cardinal to resign since French theologian Louis Billot, who according to the National Catholic Reporter, a US newspaper, left over a disagreement with Pope Pius XI in 1927.

“The overarching goal in all of this is stronger protections against predators in the Church and anyone who would conceal them, protections that will hold bishops to the highest standards of transparency and accountability,” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement.

The bishops said they would create a new way to report accusations of sexual abuse by clergy members and for claims to be investigated without interference from bishops overseeing priests accused of sex abuse. They said it would involve more church members who were not clergy but had expertise in law enforcement or psychology.

Nick Ingala, a spokesman for Voice of the Faithful, a group formed to promote parishioners’ voices after the abuse scandal surfaced, said it was heartening that bishops wanted to set up an independent review process but he expressed scepticism that it would be successful.

“I don’t know how they are going to work that out,” Ingala said in a telephone interview. “I’m always hesitant to give 100 percent credence to any plan the bishops put forth based upon experiences in the past.”

The Pennsylvania grand jury report was the latest revelation in a scandal that erupted onto the global stage in 2002, when the Boston Globe newspaper reported that for decades, priests had sexually assaulted minors while church leaders covered up their crimes.

Similar reports have emerged in Europe, Australia and Chile, prompting lawsuits and investigations, sending dioceses into bankruptcy and undercutting the moral authority of the leadership of the Catholic Church, which has some 1.2 billion members around the world.

]]> 7782 https://www.faith-matters.org/us-pennsylvania-report-details-decades-of-sexual-abuse-by-priests/ Thu, 16 Aug 2018 11:17:19 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7754

Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania sexually abused thousands of children over a 70-year period and silenced victims through “the weaponization of faith” and a systematic cover-up campaign by their bishops, the state attorney general said on Tuesday.

An 884-page report made public by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro after a two-year investigation contained graphic examples of children being groomed and sexually abused by clergymen. It was largely based on documents from secret archives kept by the dioceses, including handwritten confessions by priests, he said.

“It was child sexual abuse, including rape, committed by grown men – priests – against children,” Shapiro told a press conference.

Representatives of the six Pennsylvania dioceses included in the report could not be reached for comment.

The attorney general said it was the most comprehensive report on Catholic clergy sex abuse in American history, nearly two decades after an expose of widespread abuse and cover-up in Boston that rocked the Roman Catholic Church.

Several of the dioceses issued statements apologising to victims and saying they were taking steps to ensure any criminal behaviour was stopped. “The grand jury has challenged us as a Catholic diocese to put victims first and to continue to improve ways to protect children and youth,” Bishop Lawrence Persico of the Erie Diocese said in a statement.

As accusers wept behind him, Shapiro described alleged abuse by priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses, including a group of Pittsburgh clergymen accused of ordering an altar boy to strip naked and pose as Christ on the cross while they photographed him.

“The pattern was abuse, deny and cover up,” Shapiro said, adding that church officials sought to keep abuse allegations quiet long enough so they could no longer be prosecuted under Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations.

“Priests were raping little boys and girls,” Shapiro said. “They hid it all for decades.”

The report cited 301 priests, some of whom have died. Only two of the priests are still subject to prosecution.

A few of the clergymen accused in the report succeeded in having their names redacted, and Shapiro said he would argue at a Sept. 26 court hearing for making all the names public.

He said the grand jury identified about a thousand victims, but believed there may be many more.

Shapiro said that one priest had molested five sisters in one family, he said. The diocese settled with the family after requiring a confidentiality agreement, he said.

The attorney general said that Catholic bishops covered up child sexual abuse by priests and reassigned them repeatedly to different parishes. “They allowed priests to remain active for as long as 40 years,” he said.

Describing the “weaponisation of faith” to silence victims, Shapiro cited several examples including one priest who allegedly told children “how Mary had to lick Jesus clean after he was born” to groom them for oral sex.

“Children were taught that this abuse was not only normal but that it was holy,” Shapiro said.

Since the Boston abuse scandal erupted in the 1990s, accusations involving American clerics have sporadically surfaced.

Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, resigned as a cardinal last month after accusations resurfaced that he abused a 16-year-old boy decades ago.

In recent months, Pope Francis accepted a number of resignations from Chilean bishops in a sex abuse scandal that has rocked that country.

A former Australian archbishop, the most senior Catholic cleric in the world convicted of concealing child sex abuse, was spared jail on Tuesday when he was ordered to serve his one-year sentence at home.

Newcastle Court Magistrate Robert Stone allowed Philip Wilson, 67, to serve his detention at home after an assessment by prison authorities due to a range of health issues, including heart disease, faced by the former archbishop.

Wilson was ordered to begin serving his detention on Tuesday in New South Wales state and would be eligible for parole in February 2019, the court said, without disclosing the address of where he would be held.

Australian Broadcasting Corp. Television showed Wilson being driven away from the court in Newcastle, about 170 km (105 miles) north of Sydney. It said he would be staying at his sister’s house.

Wilson has said he planned to appeal against his conviction for failing to disclose to police abuse by a priest, Father James Fletcher, after being told about it in 1976 by two victims.

An angry victim of Fletcher who was not involved in the case against Wilson confronted the former archbishop outside the court, pressing him to apologise and saying the appeal process would prolong the pain suffered by abuse victims.

“Where is the contrition from former Archbishop Wilson? His Grace, as somebody just said upstairs, has shown no grace,” abuse survivor Peter Gogarty said outside the court.

“This man said two weeks ago he was resigning as the Archbishop of Adelaide because of the hurt done to people like me, but I am still here and still hurting,” he said.

Wilson resigned as archbishop of Adelaide in July, two months after being convicted. He wanted to hold on to the position until he completed his appeal but came under pressure from Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, fellow clerics and abuse victims to quit.

Pope Francis named Bishop Greg O’Kelly to run the Archdiocese of Adelaide until a new archbishop has been appointed.

“Bishop O’Kelly said he was keeping Archbishop Wilson in his prayers as he formally commences this stage in his life, while also remembering the victims and survivors of abuse in the church,” the archdiocese said in a statement.

Wilson would be staying at a relative’s home, it said.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the country’s top Catholic body that Wilson once led, had no immediate comment.

A new high-tech forensic study of the blood flows on the Shroud of Turin, the mysterious linen some Christians believe is Jesus’ burial cloth, is the latest analysis to suggest that it is most likely a medieval fake.

The results of the investigation, in which scientists used a volunteer and a mannequin and employed sophisticated techniques such as Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (BPA), was published in the latest edition of the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

The Roman Catholic Church has not taken an official position on the authenticity of cloth, which bears an image, reversed like a photographic negative, of a man with the wounds of a crucifixion.

It shows the back and front of a bearded man, his arms crossed on his chest. It is marked by what appear to be rivulets of blood from wounds in the wrists, feet and side.

Sceptics say the cloth, which measures 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches (4.4 by 1.1 meters), is a masterful medieval forgery. Carbon dating tests in 1988 put it between 1260 and 1390, but some have challenged their accuracy.

The latest study was restricted to blood flows that would have resulted from some wounds – those of the left hand, the forearms, a wound in the side that the Bible says was caused by a lance, and blood stains near the waist.

A tiny tube was inserted into the wrist of the volunteer to simulate dripping from a wound where a crucifixion nail would have been inserted. A mannequin was used for the side “lance” wound.

Using instruments such a ballistic angle finder, the study showed that the direction and behaviour of the rivulets of blood did not match those evidenced in high-resolution photographs of the shroud. The cloth is housed in a special case in the Turin Cathedral and goes on display only on rare occasions.

“When the volunteer was in (various reclining positions) the blood movement never matched the Shroud,” said the study.

“Assuming that the red stains on the Turin linen are actually blood from the crucifixion wounds, the results of the experiments demonstrate that the alleged flowing patterns from different areas of the body are not consistent with each other,” it said.

The accuracy of the 1988 carbon dating tests, carried out on small samples of the cloth by universities in the United States, Britain and Switzerland, was challenged by some hard-core believers who said restorations in past centuries had contaminated the results.

The history of the Shroud is long and controversial.

After first surfacing in the Middle East and France, it was brought by Italy’s former royal family, the Savoys, to their seat in Turin in 1578. In 1983 ex-King Umberto II bequeathed it to the late Pope John Paul.

The Shroud narrowly escaped destruction in 1997 when a fire ravaged the Guarini Chapel of the Turin cathedral where it is held. A fireman risked his life to save it.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor, will be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church at a Vatican ceremony on September 4th.

Pope Francis cleared the way for sainthood for her last December. Teresa’s compassion reached out to slum-dwellers, famine sufferers and AIDS victims, and won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1910, Teresa traveled to India at age 18 and taught geography at a convent school. Twenty years later she opened her first school in the Calcutta slums.

She was honored by many world and religious leaders including the Pope, Indian Premiers Indira Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, and British Queen Elizabeth II.