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Church: Springs priest faces sex-abuse probe

After learning their pastor has been accused of sexually abusing a child, the shocked congregation of St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church was left in silence Saturday night.

The Rev. Rafael Torres-Rico told the packed, 1,100-member church during the 5 p.m. Mass that The Rev. Charles Robert Manning is being investigated by Colorado Springs police for “sexual abuse of a minor.”

No other details of the allegations against Manning were shared with the congregation, some of whom were in tears by the end of Torres-Rico’s announcement.

“It is important to remember that in both civil and canon law Father Manning is presumed innocent until proven guilty,” Torres-Rico told the church.

The allegations were brought to the police on Jan. 4, and Manning has since been asked to step down, Torres-Rico said.

Colorado Springs police spokeswoman Barbara Miller said she was not aware of the investigation and had no comment.

St. Gabriel’s, on Scarborough Drive in one of the fastest-growing neighborhoods in eastern Colorado Springs, opened its doors in 1998. The church, near the intersection of Powers Boulevard and Research Parkway, hosts five services per weekend for its growing congregation, according to the church’s website.

The church does not allow children under 12 years old to attend mass alone. At Saturday’s mass the congregation was reminded to accompany children under 12 anywhere in the building, including to the restroom.

Church-goers refused to comment as they left the service. Church officials had no immediate comment.

No criminal record for Manning can be found in Colorado. An online search shows that Manning has served in three parishes over the past decade.

In a 2002 posting on a Catholic website, a C. Robert Manning identified himself as pastor of St. Lawrence the Martyr Church in Bridgeton, Mo.

From 2004 to 2007, Manning headed a Catholic church in Imperial, Mo. There, he oversaw efforts to revive the church’s school, which faced falling attendance, according to the church website. The school closed in 2007, the year Manning came to Colorado Springs.

In 2010, Manning was named chaplain of the year by the Colorado branch of Knights of Columbus.

The Catholic Church has battled allegations of sex abuse by priests for years, including a revelation in 2010 that the former priest Divine Redeemer, in Monument, was accused of a sex abuse against a child in Denver.

When the priest, the Rev. Mel Thompson, was accused in 2010 of molesting a Denver boy, there had been 50 similar cases within the Denver Archdiocese over a five-year span.

Complete Article HERE!

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How long will church be allowed to keep its dangerous secrets?

An American priest, who has been financially supported for the past five years by the priest and parishioners of a Vancouver Catholic church, has been convicted of sexually molesting a minor by an ecclesiastical tribunal in Pennsylvania.

In its decision, reached last October, the tribunal recommended to the Vatican that Eric Ensey be dismissed as a priest.

“The tribunal reached moral certitude that Ensey had indeed committed the offences of which he was accused,” Fr. Tom Doyle wrote in letters sent last week to Vancouver Archbishop Michael Miller and John Horgan, the priest at Saints Peter and Paul Church.

Doyle, a Dominican priest and canonical lawyer, represented the victims.

“I realize that Ensey and his cohorts continue to insist on their innocence,” he wrote. “They have masked themselves with a deceitful veil of traditional orthodoxy, which has proven successful in duping a number of people. Unfortunately there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

The tribunal spent nearly three years investigating Ensey, who since 2002 has been restricted from doing any ministerial work, presenting him-self as a priest, wearing clerical garb or performing any sacred functions.

Horgan passed none of that information on to parishioners.

“I told them he [Ensey] was a student priest,” Horgan told me in December. “I did not go into all the details because, in this case, I though the charity we were doing for him was sufficient. That may well have been a mistake of prudence on my part.”

At that time, Horgan also told me he was “fully aware” of the tribunal proceedings.

Horgan’s fundraising stopped in December after Miller ordered an end to soliciting and accepting tax-deductible donations for Ensey, other members of the Society of St. John, the seminary it runs in Paraguay, and an associated orphanage.

Ensey is appealing the tribunal’s decision, Doyle said in a telephone interview from Virginia. The appeal will be heard by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body once known as the Inquisition.

“Ensey’s chances of winning an appeal are about as good as that of a rabbi being elected pope,” said Doyle, who has been involved in many similar cases since the first one in 1985 when he worked in the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, D.C.

The congregation will likely decide fairly quickly. But it doesn’t make its decisions public. The Vatican also provides no public access to its list of so-called defrocked priests.

It’s not clear how much money the Vancouver parish raised to support Ensey or whether they were given tax receipts for those donations. Horgan, however, told parishioners that he had been giving a third of his salary to the disgraced priest.

The archbishop’s direction to stop collecting donations resulted from parishioners’ complaints.

Nearly 10 years ago, Ensey was stripped of ministerial duties after a former seminarian filed a civil lawsuit alleging that he’d been sexually abused by Ensey and Carlos Urruti-goity, who is now a monsignor in Paraguay.

Ensey and Urrutigoity founded the Society of St. John in Pennsylvania. But the bishop there “suppressed” or disbanded it in 2004 because of allegations of rampant sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement.

Soon after the diocese had negotiated a $425,000, out-of-court settlement in the sexual abuse lawsuit in 2005, Ensey fled to Rome without the bishop’s permission.

Had Ensey followed orders and remained in Pennsylvania, he would not have needed the Vancouver parish’s charity. He could have collected a salary until the case was finalized.

Even so, it’s unlikely Vancouver parishioners would have financed his studies if they’d known Ensey was under investigation for sexual abuse, or helped a Paraguayan society whose leaders are also alleged sexual abusers and financial mis-managers.

But they didn’t know. Horgan’s lapses of judgment. The archbishop’s seeming lack of oversight. The Vatican’s hands-off approach that allowed the Society of St. John to be reconstituted in Paraguay and its leaders to oversee a seminary that graduated 36 priests last year.

And the Vatican’s continued secrecy regarding those who are being investigated or have been defrocked.

How long will Catholic faithful allow this to go on? They’ve already spent hundreds of millions of dollars defending priests and compensating their victims.

Vancouver Catholics dug deep to raise $19 million in 2002 for victims of the Christian Brothers’ Mount Cashel orphanage to avoid selling St. Thomas More College and Vancouver College.

If protecting children and youth isn’t a priority for church leaders, parishioners should, at very least, demand they do a better job of risk management.

Complete Article HERE!

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Ex-priest keeps the faith

Unable to deny his feelings, Father Jim resigns to be with the woman he loves

Like many Roman Catholic men who feel called to the priesthood, the Rev. Jim Hearne wrestled with whether ordination was right for him.

The youngest of seven in an Irish Catholic family, he saw the joy of family life firsthand and never could quite extinguish the desire to one day have children of his own. But spurred to help stem the priest shortage and strengthen the integrity of the cloth, Hearne donned a priest’s collar in 2005 at age 25.

Now he wonders if his six years in the pulpit as “Father Jim” might have been preparation to become Jim, the father. After a six-month leave of absence from St. Giles Roman Catholic Church in Oak Park, Illinois, Hearne decided not to return to the pulpit, but to stay in the pews and pray to one day start a family of his own.

He has no intention of turning his back on Catholicism. Rather, he wants to be more faithful to the church he calls home, and faithful to his feelings.

Hearne has fallen in love.

“To stay and bear and grunt it out I think would be unfair to God,” Hearne, 32, said during a recent interview at his childhood home in Dolton, Illinois. “It would be unfair to the people of God and would be unfair to me. … Perhaps God just wanted me to be a priest for six years. It’s odd. It’s weird. It’s mysterious. That’s our God.”

Hearne’s decision has sent a ripple through the Oak Park congregation, where many parishioners bemoan the Catholic Church’s celibacy requirement and the scarcity of men who want to become priests. Allowing priests to marry would bolster the dwindling ranks, many believe, and enable committed Catholics like Hearne to serve both God and family.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Francis George said he wishes Hearne would reconsider.

But Hearne’s tale is not about a loss of faith or a clash with church hierarchy. It’s about a man who believes he is following God in an unexpected direction. While he already misses his ministry, he does not resent his church for prohibiting priests from marrying. Celibacy is not necessarily a bad idea, he says.

“I think the spiritual quest or journey is our attempt to understand, freely receive, embrace God’s entering into our life out of pure love,” he said. “Am I to have a family? What kind of work will I do? Will I be seen as an outcast by other members of the clergy and even the cardinal for having left the ministry?”

Hearne doesn’t speak in simple sentences. He delivers sermons. After all, he spent most of his life training to become a priest.

That journey began at the bedside of his dying mother 21 years ago. As he waited for his six older brothers and sisters to arrive at the hospital, priests rotated in and out of the room, offering prayers and comfort to the 11-year-old son and his father.

Hearne believes he saw the best of the priesthood that day.

“I really saw God shining through all those people in a way I hadn’t before and thought: ‘Maybe I could do that. Maybe God is calling me in that direction,’ ” Hearne said.

His older brother John saw Hearne’s vocation then, too. While most of the siblings were angry with God for taking their mother at age 50, their youngest brother remained upbeat, he said.

“When I look back, my brother was probably the strongest of all. We all knew there was something there,” said John Hearne, 45, of Dyer, Indiana. “I believe he saw something that we didn’t: faith.”

Jim Hearne enrolled at Mount Carmel High School, an all-boys school run by the Carmelite religious order.

He later enrolled at St. Joseph College Seminary at Loyola University, where for the first time in years he attended classes with the opposite sex.

Several fellow seminarians disregarded the prohibition on dating and eventually dropped out of the program. Hearne adhered to the rule, but it was a challenge. When he reached Mundelein Seminary for his graduate work, a veteran clergyman offered some words of wisdom that helped. Every priest falls in love during the course of his priesthood, the clergyman warned.

“You praise God in those moments,” Hearne said. “Just because you have the blackandwhite collar on doesn’t mean you stop having feelings. That’s what he really got across. Now it’s what you do with that love that will determine your course of action.”

Just as seeing the best of the priesthood propelled Hearne toward the vocation, witnessing the worst of the clerical culture by the time he was ordained further fuelled his commitment. While he was still enrolled in Mundelein Seminary, the sexabuse scandal erupted in Boston and spread nationwide.

“It was going to be on my generation of priests to try and somehow, some way restore trust and integrity to the priesthood, remembering that [the] majority of priests are doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” Hearne said.

As an associate pastor at St. James Catholic Church, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and also at St. Giles, Hearne was popular with young people and heavily involved in the youth ministries.

But as the young priest immersed himself in the daytoday demands of priesthood, he realized he was lonely.

“They can teach you all they want” about celibacy, he said. “You can read all the books about it that have been printed – volumes and volumes. Until you live it and experience it, it’s a far different thing.”

To protect her privacy, Hearne won’t say much about the woman he fell for. But he does acknowledge that it’s serious.

“A man doesn’t leave the priesthood just to date,” he said.

His brother John made sure of it, interrogating the woman the first time they met, to make sure she was equally committed and understood what his brother was willing to give up for her.

Jim Hearne emphasizes that he has “crossed no moral boundaries,” and he still upholds the church’s teaching on chastity.

Unable to deny his feelings any longer, he met with the cardinal last July and requested a leave of absence. Falling in love was not a legitimate reason to leave the priesthood, the cardinal told him, before granting him six months to give his decision more thought.

“Jim is a very fine man. He’s a really good man,” George said. “I hope with God’s grace that it will work out.”

The cardinal also warned him that if he left the priesthood and became a layperson once again, he could not immediately marry in the church – a source of heartbreak for Hearne, who wouldn’t want to marry anywhere else.

In a letter to parishioners at St. Giles, Hearne assured them that misconduct had not spurred his sudden departure. He also assured them that they had not forced him to leave.

“Please know that you have done nothing wrong,” he wrote.

“I love God. I love my faith. I love you. And it is because of this love that I need to do this for myself.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Batley schoolboy with Down’s Syndrome barred from first Holy Communion

THE Roman Catholic Church is preventing a seven-year-old boy with Down’s Syndrome from taking his first Holy Communion.

Little Denum Ellarby goes to church, knows who Jesus is and is old enough to take part in the special ceremony.

But he will not be joining children of his age at Holy Communion preparation classes or on the big day itself at St Mary’s Church in Batley.

The diocese has written to Denum’s parents saying their son is not yet ready as he has ‘limited concentration’ and does not enjoy Mass.

His parents have now accused the Catholic Church of discriminating against him because of his disability.

Mum Clare, of Crown Flatt Way, Dewsbury, said: “I feel really let down by the Catholic faith. If I don’t stick up for him, no-one will.”

Seven-year-old Denum is a pupil at St Mary’s Catholic Primary School in Batley.

The Reporter Series understands that at the age of about seven, pupils from St Mary’s School are invited to take First Communion classes at St Mary’s Church.

But Mrs Ellarby said she never received an invite and by the time her family heard about the classes they had missed the first meeting.

Parish priest Fr Mungovin declined to comment about Denum, as did St Mary’s School and the Vicar General.

In a statement, a Diocese spokesman said: “Often Baptism is celebrated for babies in order to bring them into the life of the Church but they only proceed to the Sacrament of First Communion when they take part in the Church’s life and understand the Church’s faith in regard to these Sacraments. Denum’s family has not participated in the regular life of the Church or in the preparation preceding First Communion.

“We hope that this will change as Denum grows and we are working with him and his family to help him achieve this.”

Xanthe Breen, of the Down’s Syndrome Association, has been speaking to the family about their concerns.

She said: “It’s not something we have ever heard of before. It’s a shame all parties can’t come to a compromise.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Priest who fathered child removed from New York church

A newly installed Roman Catholic priest has been removed from his suburban New York parish after church officials on Thursday said he secretly fathered a child while attending seminary.

The removal of Reverend Casmir Mung’aho, 34, from his post at St. Stephen the First Martyr Church in the Orange County town of Warwick, New York, comes two weeks after the resignation of a Los Angeles assistant bishop who admitted he had two children.

Mung’aho was asked to step down after officials learned he fathered a child in a consensual relationship with an adult woman during his first year of seminary school, Bishop Dominick Lagonegro said in a statement.

While Mung’aho was removed from the congregation in Warwick, it was not yet clear whether he will remain a priest or be defrocked by the New York Archdiocese, said archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling. He said officials had yet to discuss with Mung’aho what action will be taken.

“Father never revealed this to our bishops or seminary authorities, which he certainly should have done,” Lagonegro said in a statement.

“Given the need for Father Casmir to address this matter and reflect on his responsibilities in a very serious way, his assignment to St. Stephen’s is now ended. Please pray for him, as well as for the mother and the child whose lives are so precious.”

The Catholic Church requires celibacy from its priests.

When asked how the church found out about the young child, the Rev. Michael McLoughlin, St. Stephen’s pastor, declined to elaborate to Reuters.

“We’re all sad and we’re all praying for him,” McLoughlin said. “Everything is out there now and other than that I have nothing to say.”

Attempts to reach Mung’aho were not immediately successful. According to his biography published in the New York archdiocese’s official newspaper last year, he grew up in Tanzania and came to the United States about six years ago. As a child, he had always dreamed of becoming a priest.

“The support and respect for the church in general is very high,” he said in his biography. “I see myself here being a model. It’s being an example every day.”

Mung’aho graduated from St. Joseph’s Seminary school in Yonkers, just north of New York City, last year before taking a position at the church in Warwick, a town about 60 miles north of New York City.

Earlier this month, Gabino Zavala, an assistant bishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, resigned after admitting he had a secret family and the two teenage children he fathered were living with their mother in another state.

Complete Article HERE!