Catholic Priests – Page 185

July 11, 2015July 11, 2015

Vatican sex abuse trial halted as ex-archbishop falls ill

Jozef Wesolowski in a 15 March, 2013 file photo — It is not clear why the 66-year-old was hospitalised

he trial of a former archbishop charged with child sex offences has been adjourned after the defendant fell ill hours before he was due to appear in court at the Vatican.

Jozef Wesolowski, 66, is accused of paying for sex with children in the Dominican Republic from 2008-2013.

He is being treated in intensive care for an unspecified illness.

Wesolowski is the first high-ranking Catholic to stand trial in the Vatican on sex abuse charges.

He has already been found guilty by a special church tribunal and defrocked.

His case is seen as a test of Pope Francis’ push to tackle sex offenders.

Wesolowski, who is originally from Poland, had been recalled from his role as the Vatican’s envoy to the Dominican Republic in 2013 after allegations surfaced accusing him of abusing boys there.

The trial opened but the accused was not there

He is also charged with possession of child pornography.

If convicted, he could face between six and 10 years in a Vatican jail.

Pope Francis has overhauled the Vatican’s justice system to allow bishops to be tried in the Papal state, after the church was accused of not doing enough to tackle sex crimes against children.
Complete Article HERE!

July 3, 2015

Oregon Catholic priest put on leave amid hidden camera probe

By Shelby Sebens

An Oregon Catholic priest has been placed on leave by the Archdiocese of Portland as police investigate who placed a hidden camera, carefully disguised as an electrical outlet, in a church bathroom, the archdiocese said on Thursday.

The camera was discovered in late April near a toilet in the men’s bathroom of the St. Francis Catholic Church in Sherwood by a church member who took it immediately to Father Ysrael Bien, a police statement said.

But Bien didn’t report the camera to police until May 20 when he reported it stolen, Sherwood police spokesman Ty Hanlon said. Police are investigating how the camera wound up in the bathroom.

Bien has not been charged with a crime or named as a suspect. But the Archdiocese of Portland placed him on administrative leave last week in response to his failure to immediately report the hidden camera to police.

“It is deeply troubling that well-established Church protocols for the protection of parishioners were not followed,” Archbishop Alexander Sample said in a statement. “Finding a hidden camera in a church restroom should have been the cause for prompt and decisive action.”

Pat McCormick, spokesman for the Archdiocese, referred questions to the Sherwood Police Department. Bien could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Archdiocese assisted the parish in hiring investigators that conducted a sweep of the St. Francis school and parish and found no additional hidden cameras, according to the statement. Though the camera is missing, police said when it was found it did not contain a memory card.

“At the time of discovery it was not recording people,” Hanlon said.

Though police have conducted several interviews and searches related to the disappearance of the camera, they have not been able to identify a suspect, he added.

Complete Article HERE!

June 26, 2015

Gay Catholics Will Be Silenced During Pope Francis’ Philadelphia Visit: Archbishop

By Philip Pullella

Homosexuals can attend a Catholic family congress in Philadelphia during Pope Francis’ U.S. visit this year but won’t be allowed to use it to attack Church teachings, the city’s archbishop said on Thursday.

“We don’t want to provide a platform at the meeting for people to lobby for positions contrary to the life of our Church,” said Archbishop Charles Chaput. The Catholic Church teaches homosexuality is not sinful but homosexual acts are.

“We are not providing that kind of lobbying opportunity,” he told a news conference presenting the September 22-27 congress known as the World Meeting of Families.

Gay Catholic groups and families headed by gay Catholics had asked for an official presence at the gathering to present their view that homosexuals should be fully welcomed in the Church.

The pope will attend the last two days of the Philadelphia meeting at the end of a trip that will take him to Cuba as well as New York and Washington.

About 15,000 people from around the world are expected to attend the family congress to hear lectures and take part in workshops on family issues before the pope arrives to close the gathering.

“We hope that everyone feels welcome and certainly people who have experienced same-sex attraction are welcome like everyone else,” Chaput said.

Bishop John McIntyre, also of Philadelphia, said the only event dedicated to gay issues at the congress will be one by Ron Belgau, a celibate gay Catholic and founder of the Spiritual Friendship Initiative.

Belgau blogs and lectures about how Catholic gays can live by the Church’s teaching.

McIntyre said Belgau “will talk about his own coming to terms with his sexual orientation and the manner in which he embraced the teachings of the Church” and his mother will also speak.

The program for an event Belgau addressed last year at the University of Notre Dame said he spoke of “a faithful and orthodox response to the challenge of homosexuality”.

Catholic gay couples have contested the Church’s ban on homosexual activity, saying it deprives them of the intimacy that is part of a loving relationship.

It will be the eighth World Meeting of Families since the event was started by the late Pope John Paul in 1994 to promote traditional family values. It is held every three years in a different city.

Organizers said they expect up to two million people to attend the final event, a Mass by the pope on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a boulevard that runs through they city.

June 20, 2015

Report: Former Twin Cities archbishop John Nienstedt tried to limit investigation

The former archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John Nienstedt, interfered with an investigation by an outside law firm into allegations of his misconduct, Minnesota Public Radio reported Friday.

While Nienstedt authorized the investigation in the hope of clearing his name, the results threatened to ruin it. Several of his top advisers gathered privately in April 2014, and read sworn statements gathered by the lawyers that accused Nienstedt of inappropriate behavior, including sexual advances toward priests. Each adviser agreed he should resign.

A few days later, Auxiliary Bishops Lee Piche and Andrew Cozzens traveled to Washington to tell the papal ambassador; MPR was unable to learn what transpired there. But soon after the bishops returned home, the investigation as originally conceived ended, with Piche limiting the probe to allegations of crimes and grave sins. A new law firm eventually took over.

The Vatican announced Nienstedt’s and Piche’s resignationsMonday. They stepped down amid an intensifying scandal over how the archdiocese handled cases of clerical sexual misconduct. The archdiocese sought bankruptcy protection in January as abuse claims rose, and prosecutors filed criminal child-endangerment charges against the archdiocese earlier this month for allegedly turning a blind eye to Curtis Wehmeyer, a now-imprisoned former priest convicted of molesting two boys.

MPR said its details of how Nienstedt tried to limit the investigation came from interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the inquiry, including four people who provided affidavits to investigators, current and former archdiocese officials, and others who spoke with the investigators.

MPR could not reach Nienstedt for comment on the new allegations. In a 2014 interview, Nienstedt said, “I’ve done nothing criminally wrong ever, and nothing immoral” and that he hadn’t interfered with the investigation.

But attorneys at the Greene Espel law firm — the initial firm on the Nienstedt investigation — disputed the archbishop’s claim of noninterference as well as a recent similar statement from Piche.

“We strongly disagree with those statements. Greene Espel’s investigation and work will not be mischaracterized without a response by us,” attorneys Matt Forsgren and David Wallace-Jackson told MPR.

The attorneys had wanted to know whether Nienstedt had a personal relationship with Wehmeyer, and whether that influenced his decision to keep Wehmeyer in ministry despite knowing about his past misconduct. Nienstedt told MPR in 2014 he did not have a sexually inappropriate relationship with Wehmeyer.

Wehmeyer told the investigators he couldn’t understand why Nienstedt wanted to spend time with him or why he kept him in ministry. He said Nienstedt made him uncomfortable and that he wasn’t interested in Nienstedt.

Ex-seminarian James Heathcott, who lives in Oregon, told MPR he enrolled at a Detroit seminary in 1987 when he was 18. Nienstedt became rector a year later, and the seminary’s tone immediately changed, he said.

According to the affidavit, Nienstedt asked Heathcott: “Have you explored your sexuality?” and “Do you think you have homosexual tendencies?”

Heathcott also said Nienstedt later invited him on a ski trip at a “private chalet.” Heathcott said he declined and told Nienstedt that the invitation appeared to contradict his own statements to seminarians about the importance of boundaries. He said Nienstedt told him a few days later to pack his belongings and leave.

“I consider Nienstedt’s interactions with me to be a kind of grooming … I believe he denied me the chance to continue exploring my calling to the priesthood to its fruition,” he said in the affidavit.

The archdiocese, which filed for bankruptcy in January, hasn’t said what it paid Greene Espel. MPR, citing people with direct knowledge, put the cost at several hundred thousand dollars. The firm wouldn’t comment either. The archdiocese paid the second firm, Wold Morrison, nearly $139,000 between October and January, but the filing didn’t say if it made any payments to either firm earlier.

Complete Article HERE!

June 16, 2015June 16, 2015

More smoke and mirrors from the Vatican on child sexual abuse

By Kieran Tapsell

Cardinal Desmond Connell, the former archbishop of Dublin, told the Murphy commission in Ireland that mental reservation was deceiving someone without telling a lie. He said it is permissible to use “an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be.”There is an exquisite piece of mental reservation in a recent announcement from the Vatican. According to Vatican Radio, “The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors presented a five point plan to the Pope and his closest advisors at this week’s meeting, including the establishment of a ‘new judicial section’ to examine all cases of bishops accused of abusing their office and failing to report crimes committed by priests in their care.”

The ambiguous expression in this case is “failing to report crimes” because it does not say to whom the bishops should have reported. Nearly everyone would understand the expression to mean reporting to the police. That is not what the Vatican means. It means reporting to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in every case and only sometimes to the police.

As the Holy See told the Irish foreign minister in 2011, bishops are the governors of their own diocese, and so far as the church is concerned, the only restraint on them is canon law. Bishops can only be put on trial before this new tribunal for breaching canon law. A bishop who fails to report credible allegations of child sexual abuse by clergy to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is in breach of canon law because that obligation is set out in the decree Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela.

Likewise, canon law in the United States since 2002, and for the rest of the world since 2010, requires bishops to comply with domestic civil reporting laws. A failure to do so constitutes a breach of canon law. The recently resigned bishops — Archbishop John Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché of St. Paul-Minneapolis and Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., who was convicted by a Missouri court of failing to report a priest’s possession of child pornography — could be brought before the new tribunal for failing to comply with civil laws on reporting as required by the norms approved in December 2002 by the Holy See for the United States.

Very few jurisdictions in the world have comprehensive reporting laws. Most have reporting laws for children at risk, that is, where they are under the age of 18, but very few have reporting laws that apply to historical abuse, that is, where the abused person is now an adult. In the United States, half the states have such laws and half do not. The United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Canada do not have them. In 2014 and 2015, the Italian and Polish Catholic bishops’ conferences announced that they would not be reporting child sex abuse offenses by clergy to the police because their civil laws did not require it. Their stance is consistent with canon law.

In Australia, only two out of the eight states and territories require the reporting of historical abuse. Figures produced at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry in Australia suggest that historical abuse amounts to more than 99 percent of all complaints. The same inquiry found that of the 611 complaints of child sexual abuse in the four Victorian dioceses between 1996 and 2012, not one of them had been reported by the church to the civil authorities.

This was understandable because prior to 2014, there was no requirement under Victorian law to report any abuse, whether of children at risk or historical abuse. And the bishops on ordination had sworn an oath to obey all ecclesiastical laws, which in this case meant not reporting these crimes to the police in accordance with the pontifical secret imposed by Pope Paul VI’s Secreta Continere and Pope John Paul II’s Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela.

In those jurisdictions without such reporting laws, unless a bishop walks into a priest’s bedroom and finds him in flagrante delicto with a minor, the pontifical secret prevents him from reporting any knowledge of or allegations about such crimes to the police. If he reports the matter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he has complied with canon law and cannot be charged with “abuse of office,” despite the fact that he has covered up these crimes by not reporting them to the police.

On two occasions now, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee against Torture demanded that the Holy See abolish the pontifical secret for child sexual abuse and order mandatory reporting under canon law, irrespective of whether there are civil reporting laws or not. On Sept. 26, 2014, the Holy See rejected the request.

Many media reports describe the setting up of this tribunal as a breakthrough. There is no breakthrough. The announcement does not do away with the pontifical secret and does not extend reporting requirements to the civil authorities. In many cases of cover-up by bishops, there will be no abuse of office because the cover-up has been required by canon law, as the announcements by the Italian and Polish bishops attest.

The pope has always had jurisdiction to dismiss or punish bishops like Nienstedt, Piché and Finn, who have breached canon law. He even has jurisdiction to dismiss them even where they have not breached canon law, as the case of the Australian Bishop William Morris shows.

This announcement is being dressed up as a measure to protect children when all it is doing is setting up a tribunal that would ensure that bishops accused of breaching canon law have the right to be heard. It is another example of clericalism creating smoke and mirrors to give the impression that better protections are being provided for children when the people being looked after are the bishops. The real breakthrough will happen when the Holy See complies with the demands of the United Nations.
Complete Article HERE!