DreamWorks, Participant Pick Up Church Sex Abuse Scandal Film

Tom McCarthy has signed on to direct and co-write the script with Josh Singer.

by Tatiana Siegel
In a move certain to spark controversy, DreamWorks Studios and Participant Media have acquired film rights to the story of the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover-up of its pedophile priests in Massachusetts as uncovered during a yearlong investigation by the Boston Globe.

2009 Film Independent Spirit Awards - Press RoomTom McCarthy (The Visitor) has signed on to direct and co-write the script with Josh Singer (the upcoming WikiLeaks movie The Fifth Estate).

Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar and Steve Golin and Rocklin/Faust’s Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust will produce. David Mizner, who brought the project to the producers, will serve as a consultant and associate producer. Participant’s Jonathan King and Jeff Skoll will serve as executive producers.

Life rights have been acquired to the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight Team” of reporters and editors, including then-Globe editor Marty Baron, special projects editor Ben Bradlee Jr., Spotlight Team editor Walter “Robby” Robinson and reporters Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll.

The team spent a year interviewing victims and reviewing thousands of pages of documents and discovered years of cover-up by Church leadership. Their reporting eventually led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, who had hidden years of serial abuse by other priests and opened the floodgates to other revelations of molestation and cover-ups around the world that still reverberate today.

The Globe team won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service “for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy; stirred local, national and international reaction; and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.”

The Church has been very vocal in the past about films they see as depicting the faith in a negative light and organized boycotts of movies including The Da Vinci Code.

“The Boston Globe’s coverage of the Catholic priest scandal opened the door to a bigger story that had worldwide ramifications,” DreamWorks president Holly Bario. “The story of how this team of editors and reporters came to uncover the truth will make a dramatic and compelling film, especially with the talents of our director Tom McCarthy and his co-screenwriter Josh Singer on board.”

Added King: “It’s great to be back in business once again with our friends at DreamWorks and Anonymous, especially on such a powerful and still-evolving story. We have been eager to do another movie with Tom McCarthy ever since The Visitor'”

The project marks the sixth collaboration between DreamWorks and Participant, having previously partnered on The Fifth Estate — which is due in theaters Nov. 15 — Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the 2011 hit The Help, The Kite Runner and The Soloist.

Participant is no stranger to hot-button topics like the Catholic Church scandal. The company also backed such films as the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and Food, Inc. Other Participant films include Good Night, and Good Luck; Charlie Wilson’s War; Waiting for Superman; The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; and last year’s No, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign-language film.

In addition to The Visitor, McCarthy wrote and directed The Station Agent and Win Win. He was nominated for an Oscar for co-creating the story of Pixar’s Up. McCarthy also wrote the screenplay for the Disney film The Million Dollar Arm, starring Jon Hamm, which begins shooting in May. He is repped by the Gersh Agency and attorney Andrew Hurwitz.

Singer, a veteran TV writer, has worked on such shows as The West Wing, Law & Order: SVU, Lie to Me and Fringe. He is repped by WME and Anonymous Content.

Complete Article HERE!

Cross-dressing, drug dealing ‘Monsignor Meth’ pleads guilty to drug charge, faces 11 to 14 years in prison

Kevin Wallin, 61, admitted to selling more than four pounds of methamphetamine and making more than $300,000 while dealing the drug out of his Waterbury, Conn. apartment. Wallin, a Roman Catholic priest, is currently suspended but faces the prospect of removal from the priesthood by the Vatican.

A suspended Roman Catholic priest accused of making more than $300,000 in methamphetamine sales out of his Connecticut apartment while running an adult video and sex toy shop pleaded guilty Tuesday to a federal drug charge.

Kevin WallinKevin Wallin, 61, of Waterbury, admitted to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine and was scheduled to be sentenced June 25. The prosecution and defense agreed on a sentence of 11 to 14 years in prison.

Prosecutors said the 61-year-old Wallin had meth mailed to him from co-conspirators in California and sold the drugs out of his Waterbury apartment last year. He also bought an adult video and sex toy shop in North Haven named Land of Oz & Dorothy’s Place, apparently to launder the drug money, authorities said.

RELATED: PRIEST IN METH RING
Wearing a beige prison jumpsuit and sporting a goatee and close-cropped hair, Wallin acknowledged in court that the drug operation involved nearly four pounds of methamphetamine. He said “yes” several times as the judge asked whether he understood the consequences of his plea.

Wallin, former pastor at St. Augustine Parish in Bridgeport, appeared to have no supporters in the courtroom. He was led out of the room in handcuffs and remains detained.

Charges against four other people arrested in the case are pending.

RELATED: ‘MONSIGNOR METH’ OWNED PORN STORE, LIKED RECTORY SEX: REPORT
“We’re glad to have resolved this part of the case,” Connecticut U.S. Attorney David B. Fein said outside the courtroom. “It’s a serious conspiracy charge involving a very dangerous drug.”

Wallin’s public defender, Kelly Barrett, declined to comment.

Dubbed in some media as “Monsignor Meth,” Wallin was pastor of St. Augustine Parish for nine years until he resigned in June 2011, citing health and personal reasons. He previously served six years as pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Danbury until 2002.

Complete Article HERE!

Hushed up: cash probe into priest who made sex complaint against Keith O’Brien

A priest at the centre of the scandal that forced the leader of Scotland’s Catholics to stand down was forced to leave his parish following an investigation into church finances.

By Gerry Braiden

The man is the cleric who has complained to the Vatican he was sexually assaulted by Cardinal Keith O’Brien in Rome on the night he was made cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003.

O'BrianThat complaint was made in September 2012. Now it has emerged that, in 2011 the priest, currently on leave of absence from the church, was found to have overspent parish funds by a six-figure sum.

He resigned within hours of the appointment of Hugh Gilbert as Bishop of Aberdeen in August 2011 and several days later was told to leave his presbytery.

As parish priest, sources insist he had a legal right to many church items he is alleged to have taken on his departure.

One source said: “I wouldn’t say the money was trousered. There was clearly money not there. A lot of money. Six figures. But it was found to have been overspent.

“When he left the place was stripped. It was church items. But in the eyes of the law, as the priest, these were his possessions so it was never reported to the police.

“Bishop Moran [the previous Bishop of Aberdeen] didn’t want to deal with this. Bishop Hugh Gilbert did. He loves this man like a son but he told him to leave the parish.

“There was no willingness to make any of this public because of the damage to the church.”

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland said: “The priest concerned is a priest of the diocese of Aberdeen currently on a leave of absence.”

Among the items left behind were printouts of online conversations he had with a youth who claimed to have been abused by a priest in Northern Ireland.

The printouts were given to police in Northern Ireland but they decided not to act against the Belfast-based priest.

It has also emerged the priest who complained about Cardinal O’Brien is a long-standing and close friend of a senior figure in the Catholic Church in Scotland and was on holiday with him on the continent months before being told to leave.

The senior church official has been insisting he has had no part in any campaign to bring down Cardinal O’Brien.

Earlier this week, The Herald reported that one of those who has accused Cardinal O’Brien had been in a long-standing physical relationship with him.

The man is still a priest and is currently a chaplain on the continent. Two of the others are still serving priests in the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh. All their identities are known to The Herald.

It has also emerged two of the complainants were very close friends of a priest in the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh who committed suicide a decade ago, having attended Blairs College and Drygrange seminary with him.

He was found hanged in his presbytery by Cardinal O’Brien, a week before he was due to go on holiday with one of the complainers.

Cardinal O’Brien, 75, was due to help choose the new pope before he admitted his sexual conduct had “fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal”. He apologised and said he was retiring from public life.

Complete Article HERE!

The sorry tale of the Catholic Church in Scotland continues to unfold

By Alistair McBay

It seems there is no end to the woes of the Catholic Church in Scotland in the wake of Cardinal O’Brien’s abrupt departure.

o'brianThe latest reports in the media examine the Scottish Catholic Church’s record on dealing with historic allegations of child sex abuse by clergy, with one former investigator hired by the Church in the mid-1990s now considering a formal request to the police to investigate the Church’s handling of abuse cases.

The revelations confirm the now all too familiar pattern of protecting the Church’s reputation first and foremost – allegations not taken seriously enough or simply dismissed, offending priests quietly moved to another parish where they could offend again, and the Church continuing to refer to the cover-up with euphemisms like “errors” in handling cases.

The Church’s first line of defence is to claim that it had tackled the problem when it introduced formal guidelines in 1999 for the protection of children. But it was only five years earlier that O’Brien’s predecessor Cardinal Winning had enraged lay Catholics by stating that it was up to the victims of abuse to go to the police, not the Church authorities. A spokesman for the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children observed at the time that the Church in Scotland had “dealt with this issue in a shabby, damaging and incompetent way.” There is now emergent evidence that Cardinal Winning’s view was the one that still retained currency after 1999.

It gets no better for the Church when the names of those dismissive of investigators’ concerns are recalled. The investigator appointed by the Church in the mid-1990s suggested that the investigation remit be widened to include “inappropriate relations” among the clergy. Given the recent revelations surrounding the ‘inappropriate behaviour’ of Cardinal O’Brien with young priests and seminarians, this suggestion seems to have been made with some merit. But Bishop Roddy Wright of Argyll and the Isles had, according to media reports, expressed his disquiet at this. Bishop Wright, we now know, resigned shortly after this in the mid-1990s when it became known he had father­ed a child with a parishioner. He then abandoned his diocese and his vocation to marry a divorcee. No wonder the Bishop had been uncomfortable at the prospect of an investigation of ‘inappropriate relations’ among the clergy. It is not hard to see now that it may also have unsettled the then Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, one Keith Patrick O’Brien.

Bishop Wright was not alone in his disavowal of priestly celibacy. More recently we have had ‘Father Flash’ Roddy MacNeill from the island of Barra (who had an affair with his first cousin and is believed to be the father of her child) and Father Gerry Nugent who admitted to having sex with Angelika Kluk, (subsequently murdered by Peter Tobin who buried her body under the floor in Nugent’s church, St Patrick’s, where he had been working). There was also the case of Monsignor Creegan in the Diocese of Dunkeld, whose long-term mistress confessed to her affair with him after details of his illicit relationship with a second woman came to light.

So it would seem that the headline in the Daily Telegraph of 8 March that some Scottish priests under O’Brien’s watch were’out of control sexually’ would appear to be beyond challenge.

Another inconvenient truth for the Scottish Church is that you can have as many guidelines and policies as you want, but if bishops refuse to implement them, they are worthless. With the publication of the Nolan report in 2001, the Church boasted that its 1999 actions had preceded Nolan by two years, and claimed that “there is much sharing of information, expertise and resources among the eight Scottish Dioceses. There is also liaison between the Catholic and Reformed Churches in Scotland and a developing relationship with other Churches in Britain and Ireland.”

Was the Diocese of Cloyne in Ireland one of those with which this liaison occurred? For nowhere was the gulf between having procedures and actually putting them into practice more evident than in the case of Bishop John Magee in the Irish Diocese of Cloyne. Magee’s failures led to the Irish Government’s report revealing that the Vatican considered the Irish bishops’ child protection policies and guidelines to be a ‘study document’, not a definitive set of instructions and rules. This in turn led to the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s devastating speech in the Irish Parliament in 2011, when among other stinging criticisms of the Irish Catholic Church he noted the Cloyne report told “a tale of a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children,” and this even after formal procedures had been put in place and reassuring noises as to future full compliance had been made.

Now it seems that a similar tale of guidelines and procedures being ignored has been the case in Scotland under His Eminence Cardinal O’Brien’s tenure. In 2004, five years after the introduction of child protection guidelines and seven years after the initial investigative report, the director of child protection for the Catholic Church in Scotland found the system in disarray.

In a detailed report on Scotland’s eight dioceses, carried out between December 2003 and March 2004, she found out that problem priests were inadequately supervised and potentially dangerous to children and young adults. The report, entitled A Review of Child Protection Practices, referred to the Church’s ‘secret archives’ and stated: “There is no consistent system of monitoring clergy who present, or may present, a risk to children. Active cases requiring some further
action indicate that unacceptable levels of risk to children may have been and could remain present.”

She resigned after just four months, shortly after delivering her report to the Bishops. Further allegations of abuse are now appearing as more victims realise that they were not alone in being abused by Catholic clergy, nor alone in having their initial complaints summarily dismissed. As Cardinal O’Brien is alleged to have told one complainant at the time of his abuse by the notorious Father Lynagh, “you are just another abused child, no-one will believe you.” But times change.

Earlier this month, Lord McConnell, Scotland’s former First Minister, told of his regret that almost ten years on since he made a landmark apology to historic child abuse victims of the Catholic order the Sisters of Nazareth, the victims had yet to see redress. In an interview with BBC Scotland, Lord McConnell said there had been “absolutely no progress” on compensation for victims, and called on the Scottish Government to “do the right thing”.

As we await the inevitable media-inspired ‘Popefest’ this week from the Vatican, we wonder if the new Bishop of Rome will adopt a fresh approach to these issues and take on the Herculean task of cleansing the Catholic equivalent of the Augean stables. We wonder if the Church, whether globally or locally in Scotland, will at last grasp the full meaning of the words transparency and accountability. We wonder too if the Scottish Government will front up to the challenge of announcing a full inquiry of the sort announced last year by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Don’t anyone hold their breath.

Complete Article HERE!

Cardinal Keith O’Brien faces new abuse claims

By MARTYN McLAUGHLIN

A FORMER trainee priest is to take legal action against Cardinal Keith O’Brien after claiming the cleric abused, groped and kissed him during a visit to a seminary.

cardinal-keith-o-brien-QUITSThe ex-seminarian, who was a teenager at the time of the incident, alleges that the disgraced former Archbishop of St
Andrews and Edinburgh abused him after inviting him into his room following dinner for an alcoholic drink.

The victim’s solicitor said his client had been left “disturbed” by allegations surrounding the cardinal in recent weeks, which had “brought the past back.” He decided to come forward in the hope of encouraging any other victims to speak out.

The claims by the former trainee priest, now married with children, are separate from the allegations that the cardinal “behaved inappropriately” towards three priests and a former priest in the 1980s.

With the Catholic Church in Scotland left in turmoil following the events of the past three weeks, the latest revelations have cast further shadows over the Vatican and will put added pressure on Pope Francis to mount a detailed investigation into the beleaguered cardinal.

Since the initial raft of allegations were made against him, the 74-year-old has stood down as an archbishop, and apologised to the church and the country for his sexual conduct, which had, he said, “fallen below the standards expected” of a priest, archbishop and cardinal.

The cardinal, who turns 75 on Sunday, vowed to spend the rest of his life in retirement, with no further part in the public life of the church in Scotland. While he chose not to participate in the recent papal conclave he is still a cardinal, and the possibility remains that Pope Francis could strip him of his red mitre.

The man at the centre of the latest allegations left the priesthood months after the alleged incident of abuse in the 1980s. He had been attending a senior seminary college after spending four years at Aberdeen’s Blairs College, where the cardinal was rector between 1980 and 1985.

In an interview recalling the alleged abuse when he was 19, he said: “We’d have some sort of drink in his room, beer or wine. He was just chatting away about the past, the future, and so on. He had been talking about himself, how he was going places, his career had been mapped out and that it was for God to decide.

“I can’t remember the exact phrase he used but he told me he would always look after me and how good a priest I’d be. Until this stage I’d thought how excellent it would be to be a priest in his diocese.

“But that’s when it happened. After a few minutes he released me and I was able to make my excuses and go. As an adult looking back, I ask myself how it could have happened. Neither of us was drunk.”

The former priest, now in his 50s, has asked to remain anonymous because he has children. His solicitor, Cameron Fyfe, said he thought the incident had been isolated until the recent

allegations came to light.

Mr Fyfe told The Scotsman: “My client told me he found the recent allegations very disturbing and they brought the past back, and made him decide to do something about it. I think he also thought there are other victims out there, and if he was to speak then others might come forward.

Complete Article HERE!