Former Pitcairn mayor found guilty over child abuse images, Kenya Child Abuse
– Kenya child abuse: US ex-missionary gets 40yrs’
Former Pitcairn mayor found guilty over child abuse images
Michael Warren, who downloaded more than 1000 images of child abuse while working in child protection, will serve his sentence on the tiny Pacific island
Eleanor Ainge Roy in Dunedin Monday 7 March 2016
The former mayor of Pitcairn Island has been sentenced to 20-months in prison after he was convicted of possessing more than 1000 images and videos depicting child pornography.
The tiny British territory in the South Pacific, which has a population of around 50 people, gained international notoriety in 2004 when seven of the island’s 12 men were accused of a total of 55 sex crimes, some dating back 40 years.
Pitcairn mayor charged with possessing child abuse material wants to face ‘local law’
According to crown prosecutor Kieran Raferty, former mayor Michael Warren – who served as the island’s mayor from 2008 to 2013 – began downloading images of child abuse in 2004.
During the years Warren downloaded the images he was working in child protection on the island – and travelling to New Zealand and the United Kingdom in an official capacity for further training in child protection.
Raferty said Warren’s initial defence was that he had downloaded the images because he wanted to understand child pornography after the 2004 sex abuse cases.
Warren has also been found guilty of engaging in an internet “sex chat” with a person purporting to be a 15-year-schoolgirl, and of possessing a video that showed a bound and gagged naked woman….
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/former-pitcairn-mayor-found-guilty-over-child-pornography
Kenya child abuse: US ex-missionary gets 40yrs’
2016-03-07
Oklahoma City – A former missionary convicted of sexually abusing children at an orphanage in Kenya was sentenced on Monday to 40 years in a US prison.
Matthew Lane Durham, 21, had faced up to 30 years on each of four counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. He was ordered to pay restitution of $15 863.
Durham asked the court for mercy. “All I wanted was to follow God’s plan for me,” he told the judge.
Defence attorney Stephen Jones has said Durham plans to appeal. He has described Durham, who was 19 when he was charged, as “an emotionally vulnerable teenager” who was struggling with sexual identity while being a devout Christian.
Prosecutors alleged Durham targeted orphans while volunteering at the Upendo Children’s Home in Nairobi between April and June 2014. Durham had served as a volunteer since 2012 at the orphanage, which specialises in caring for neglected children.
Orphanage officials and five of the children travelled from Kenya to testify at the trial.
Prosecutors asked that Durham be placed under supervision for the rest of his life in the event he is ever released from prison.
“He raped or sexually molested by force or threat four children ranging in ages from 5 years to 14 years – some multiple times – in a span of just 33 days,” prosecutors wrote….
http://www.news24.com/World/News/kenya-child-abuse-us-ex-missionary-gets-40yrs-20160307
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Bishop should fire a nun and his abuse advisors
Grand jury showed “victims advocate” is a sham
SNAP: “Saying ‘sorry’ is wrong without clear changes”
Group wants outreach about “sadistic yet ignored teacher”
And victims say Bartchak’s letter on Sunday was “pure public relations”
What:
Holding signs and childhood photos, clergy sex abuse survivors and their supporters will demand that Altoona’s Catholic bishop
–fire a nun and his abuse panel,
–work with the Attorney General to pick replacements, and
–disclose more about a high school librarian who is named in last week’s grand jury report – but has been ignored by news media even though he downloaded “hundreds of pages of violent child rape stories and chats” and was on the job for eight years.
They will also urge the bishop to
–move quickly in posting predators’ name on his diocesan and church websites,
–include their photos, whereabouts and work histories, and
And the group will urge any who saw, suspected or suffered clergy sex crimes or cover ups in Altoona to come forward now to secular authorities, not church officials.
When:
Tuesday, March 7 at 1____ p.m.
Where:
On the sidewalk outside the Altoona-Johnstown diocese headquarters, 927 S. Logan Blvd. (corner of Hawthorne St.) in Hollidaysburg, PA
Who:
Two to three members of a support group called SNAP (the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), including a Pittsburgh woman who is the organization’s local volunteer director
Why:
1) Last week, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General released a scathing grand jury report that concludes “nothing has changed” in the Altoona-Johnstown diocese regarding child sex crimes and cover ups. The report was particularly critical of how Catholic officials deal now with abuse reports, saying there is “no privacy or confidentiality” for victims and that an abuse “review board” is not “unbiased or neutral” and was, in fact, set up to “convince the public that the days of a mysterious bishop deciding how to handle a scandalous report of child molestation and sodomy were over,” but “in reality, the bishop still makes the decision.”
The jurors also found that the work of a so-called “victims advocate” does not, in fact, “remotely resemble advocacy” but instead is “fact-finding” for church defense lawyers, and that victims’ information “is forwarded to lawyers whose interest is solely in protecting the diocese.”
SNAP wants Bishop Mark Bartchak to fire the nun who is the purported “victims advocate” and every member of the board, especially, Fr. Joseph Byrnes, a board member who “pled the Fifth” and refused to answer questions from the grand jury. (Staff and board members include Sister Donna Marie Leiden, Colleen Krug, D.J. Bragonier, Fr. Joseph W. Fleming, Dr. Russell Miller and Dr. Mary O’Leary Wiley.) http://www.ajdiocese.org/children-and-youth
2) The group wants Bartchak to voluntarily work with Attorney General’s office staff to choose replacements.
3) SNAP also wants Bartchack to reveal more about Mark Powdermaker who, as librarian at Bishop Guilfoyle High School, used school computers to “download graphic stories of rape and torture” of girls and “actively discuss” on “chat logs” his “desire to sexually assault and torture a child with other men on line.” Even though investigators found “hundreds of pages of his violent child rape stories and chats” in diocesan offices and jurors concluded that school and diocesan staff “helped him keep his secret” and Powdermaker “spent eight years (1994-2002) amongst the teenage girls he dreamed of raping.” (pages 140-141)
4) Even though the grand jury noted that Bartchak’s “power is nearly absolute,” it said that the “purge of predators is taking too long.” SNAP feels the same way about Bartchack’s pledge to post predators’ names on church websites. The group wants him to provide details and to make sure the information is posted on parish websites too, not just the diocesan website.
5) SNAP is also very critical of a three-page letter Bartchak had read in Altoona area parishes this weekend that repeatedly stressed “mercy” (ten times), “sin” (nine times) and “reconciliation (three times), but not once mentioned the words “crime”, abuse, molestation or cover up and announced not one single reform and contained no plea for victims, witnesses or whistleblowers to come forward.
“The letter repeatedly begged Catholics not to leave the church but said nothing that might make kids safer, expose more predators, unearth more cover ups or deter future recklessness, callousness and deceit,” said SNAP’s Judy Jones.
6) Finally, for all the “tragedy and evil” in the 115,042 pages of diocesan abuse records, the grand jury said Bishop Mark Bartchak and his predecessor Bishop Joseph Adamec had one “brief conversation on the subject (of abuse),” “no detailed briefing,” and Bartchak was “unaware of the number of historical predators in the diocese when he appeared before the grand jury.
SNAP believes this was a deliberately self-serving move by Bartchak and is calling on him to explain why he cared so little to learn about this crucial crisis.
Contact:
Judy Jones 314 974 5003, SNAPjudy@gmail.com, Fran Unglo-Samber 717 514 9660, samber13431@comcast.net, David Clohessy 314 566 9790, davidgclohessy@gamail.com, Barbara Dorris 314 503 0003,bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-08 03:25:222016-03-08 03:25:22Action Alert: PA SNAP event in Hollidaysburg Tues March 8
Last week, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane released a damning grand jury report about the rampant sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese – and the failure of anyone in authority to stop it.
News of the report hit me hard. I was born and raised in Altoona. For 16 years I attended a Catholic church in that diocese. I spent eight years in a Catholic school appended to one of its churches.
The nuns occasionally punished us in ways that were inappropriate, but I never suffered the kind of abuse detailed in the report. Still, I felt like I’d been socked in the gut. As I read the report, I kept coming across the names of familiar towns, churches and people.
The report is not easy reading. It goes into explicit detail about the horrors inflicted on these children. Be aware of that if you decide to take a look.
I was especially disgusted by how the powers that be in both the church and the state failed the victims. If you’ve seen the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight,” you know how church officials reacted: They created, then hid, secret files on problem priests. They did not report them to authorities. They attacked the victims. They shipped molesters off to other parishes where, inevitably, the priests sought more victims.
In Altoona, Johnstown and in other communities, government officials simply refused to act. They were completely deferential to the church. The report discusses a priest named Leonard Inman who was known to be soliciting boys for sex. Altoona police began to investigate, but all it took was some pressure from the diocese, and they backed off.
“The Grand Jury finds that Inman was actively engaging in prostitution and oral intercourse with minors at Cathedral of Blessed Sacrament Altoona,” reads the report. “Altoona Police were aware of allegations and investigated the matter. The Diocese sought to protect the image of the institution rather than protect children or hold Inman accountable. No charges were ever filed in part due to the undue influence of the diocese over local officials.”
Things were so bad in Altoona and Johnstown, the report asserts, that church officials actually had the power to pick candidates for certain municipal jobs. At one point, a law-enforcement official asked why there was no follow-up in an especially egregious case of clerical abuse in Cambria County. A judge told him, “You have to understand, this is an extremely Catholic county.”
This is a pattern that has played out in other parts of the country. In Orleans Parish, La., a priest was accused of molesting several teenage boys in the 1980s. Investigators brought the matter to the attention of Harry Connick Sr., the local district attorney. Connick declined to press charges, later admitting that he didn’t want to embarrass “Holy Mother the Church.”
People sometimes ask us at Americans United why we are so intent on separating church and state. Religion, some of our critics assert, is a good thing. Why shouldn’t it be able to help out the government and vice versa? What’s the harm in letting church and state get a little closer?
Our usual answer is often along the lines of, “That’s not what the founders intended.” But there is another answer, one that is hard for many Americans to face but is nonetheless true: Sometimes religious groups do things that are not good – things that are, in fact, evil, vile and disgusting.
When a church does these things, when its top officials knowingly violate the law as surely as its clergy violated the bodies of innocents in Pennsylvania, only one institution has the power and the resources to hold it accountable. That institution is the state.
Yet when church and the state are linked, when they are in partnership, when they are reliant on one another and when a mutual dependency is fostered, the government can’t assume the aggressive stance that’s necessary to enforce the law. So the law is laid aside and eyes are turned away – even as more and more kids are victimized.
That’s a difficult lesson. It’s one my hometown has had to learn. We must take steps to ensure that no other communities are forced to learn it anew.
Full article: https://au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/innocence-abused-a-lethal-combination-of-church-and-state-fails
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He only recently learned of his full name, Gordon Hill, and his date of birth. He used to be called Number 29.
You see Hilly was placed in the Catholic St Joseph’s orphanage in Ballarat when he was very young. He was just a number to them. And when, in his early teens, they needed to make room for the new-comers, they heartlessly kicked him out. Number 29 was around 14yo at the time, all alone in this world, left to fend for himself. St Joseph’s gave him the meagre sum of two shillings and nine pence, enough money to pay to return by post the suitcase they lent him. Because he couldn’t read, he didn’t realise he was meant to return it. So he kept it. He still proudly has the suitcase.
During his years at the orphanage, he was treated with brutal inhumanity, ostensibly by religious people. Individuals who pray regularly to their God, people who believed the rest of us were going to pay gravely for our sins, unless, of course, we joined them.
He was deprived of his dignity and basic human rights; no education, food deprivation, mental abuse, brutal physical and sexual assaults, and the like. The nuns used to force him and his peers to cut the whips from the trees with which they would brutally assault them. They even pulled out his teeth with pliers; he was caught eating a carrot he found while working because he was starving. While as an adult he received false teeth, they no longer fit in his mouth due to the damage they caused to his cheek bones when the brutes pulled out his teeth. As you can imagine, Hilly has scars all over his body – not to mention his emotional scars. As he tearfully told me, he never even got a hug. Listening to his harrowing ordeal, I had to wipe away my tears, too.
Hilly was constantly on the run. He pretty much ran as far as he could within Australia; from Ballarat (Victoria – Australia’s East) to Western Australia.
Despite his brutal introduction into this world, Hilly made a life for himself. He got married, has four children, and several grandchildren. He taught himself to read and write. In fact, he’s currently writing a book about his life. He’s worked on cattle stations. Most importantly, Hilly has regained his identity. And it’s not as if he had it all going for him in his adult life. His dear wife died of cancer a while ago.
And he’s a caring, loving and beautiful soul. He’s even volunteered plenty, earning recognition from the Rotaries – a medal he wears proudly around his neck to prove it.
Due to his age and experience, the Ballarat group of courageous survivors, their family members and support staff in Rome – there to attend the Royal Commission public hearing with Cardinal George Pell – referred to Hilly as their shepherd. But as Hilly told me, even a shepherd needs to be looked after. And he feels he has that in this incredible group I was honoured to spend time with in Rome.
So next time you’re struggling, take inspiration from this incredible human being, Hilly. Indeed, from this entire group of courageous survivors whose stories are no less harrowing. I’ll certainly endeavour to do so.
I’m proud of my new mate and hero Hilly. In fact proud of the entire courageous Ballarat group. And I’m delighted to call them mates.
Full article: http://www.mannywaks.com/blog/meet-hilly-one-of-my-new-mates-and-heroes-and-meet-the-courageous-ballarat-group-mates-and-heroes
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-07 03:20:472016-03-07 03:20:47Manny Waks, Meet Hilly. One of my new mates and heroes. And meet the courageous Ballarat group. Mates and heroes., MannyWaks.com
Was anyone not moved to despair, or maybe even outrage, watching Cardinal George Pell’s evidence at the royal commission on child sexual abuse? Even if Pell didn’t know, as implausible as it looks, that Father Gerald Ridsdale and a cabal of priests and brothers was systematically raping children in the 1970s and ’80s, his church’s guilt is palpable.
Why was Pell, a big strong outspoken man in his younger years, so timid when a generation of children was being terrorised by cowardly, sadistic brothers and priests? If he’d been a reserved, retiring kind of man we might have imagined he didn’t have the nerve to confront those who covered for Ridsdale and his like. But Pell is not that kind of man. He’s never flinched in a public debate about Catholic doctrine or the failings of sinners. A man of the old world, George Pell was never one to mince his words.
Yet when acting as a “consultor” to Bishop Ronald Mulkearns it seems he never asked one forthright question about why a known sadistic “sinner”, Ridsdale, was being moved from parish to parish. All the while, says Pell, those with knowledge of these crimes either lied to or failed to confide in him. Whatever the truth of what he knew, there can be no mistaking his indifference to the lives of young boys at Catholic schools. While some men in his predicament might have shed a tear for those who have suffered, the cardinal from Ballarat is made of sterner stuff. His testimony was all about survival and proving that, because he was ignorant of the crimes, he had no moral culpability.
Now that we’ve established the church’s culpability, we need to answer other, very serious questions. Why could men supposedly called to God act so sadistically? Were there reasons, other than the protection of the church’s name, that induced its leaders to protect those men engaged in a brutal misuse of power? Were some church elders burdened by what they believed were their own guilty secrets?
Just as importantly, we must ask what part notions of male entitlement played in the crimes about which Pell has been interrogated. It’s all too convenient to reduce these crimes to the acts of “evil paedophiles”, as if men weren’t committing the same crimes against women and children with impunity in the broader society.
Pell and the men who refused to name the rapists and molesters did not make their decisions in a vacuum. They acted in a social milieu where notions of male entitlement were rampant and institutions routinely belittled women and children when they cried rape. In 1974, a year after Father Ridsdale fled Apollo Bay, a man in Richmond abducted and raped a nine-year-old-girl living across from his house. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail. Six years later he would have a conviction for molesting two young girls quashed. Such outcomes reflected the flawed attitudes of the times.
In researching the crimes of men against women and children in those dark days, I’ve come to the conclusion that the institutional responses were profoundly defective, with the judicial response on many occasions as appalling as that of the Catholic Church. It is no secret to professionals working in the sector that the under-reporting of rape was chronic and that the police response was undermined by patriarchal assumptions. The inconvenient truth is that Gerald Ridsdale and his cohorts were abusing and raping children in a society whose institutions were complicit in the violence.
The Catholic Church has ample enemies among baby boomers born into a cultural setting where the old Protestant/Catholic divide provided fertile ground for prejudice. Compounding this latent antipathy is the fact that the church’s position on homosexuality and abortion has alienated many young people. It’s hardly surprising therefore that its defenders would raise the spectre of a witch-hunt against Pell and his church, a proposition a lawyer imperiously asked him to dismiss on day four of the hearing.
If only Pell had asked the lawyer in question whether she believed there’d been a witch-hunt against women and children alleging rape in the “old days”. If only he’d reminded her that the abusive brothers and priests being named in the commission were like so many other men outside the church’s jurisdiction who were also offending. Men whose lawyers used every means available to discredit victims like those who travelled to Rome to confront Pell.
Yet again a royal commission – as was the case with the 2015 Victorian royal commission on violence against women and children – has missed the opportunity to consider the institutional context of the violence and abuse it is examining. Submerged in the mire of Pell’s antiquated views and a cover-up by the church, the commission has unwittingly camouflaged the complicity of major institutions in the catastrophe of violence by men.
As a student at St Joseph’s Pascoe Vale in the mid-1960s, where Brother Keith Weston was molesting pre-pubescent mates of mine, I came to understand the consequences of assigning unbridled power to men whose sexual gratification was founded in the abuse of boys. We could so easily have concluded that it was a manifestation of homosexuality rather than something peculiar to men. Now that the women’s movement has lifted the veil of secrecy on the litany of crimes by an underbelly men in the 1970s and ’80s, there should be no such confusion.
George Pell’s contemporaries were not doing anything that unusual when they covered for Ridsdale and his lot. In fact, they were apeing the behaviour of men on the street, in the family home, in our parliaments and in our courtrooms.
These were different times, Pell told the royal commission. Unfortunately, those lawyers who queued up to expose his failings did not canvass the implications of that plea. They did not address the role their profession and the law played in silencing and marginalising abused women and children.
Until such time as we acknowledge that Cardinal George Pell speaks for a society that enshrined the rights of men at the expense of their victims, there can be no true reconciliation and we will have learnt little from this disgraceful episode.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-06 20:52:082016-03-06 20:52:08Phil Cleary, After Pell, the questions we all need to answer, The Age
Hundreds of children were sexually abused over a period of at least four decades by priests or religious leaders in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, a statewide investigating grand jury has concluded.
The findings by the grand jury, released Tuesday by the office of state Attorney General Kathleen Kane, detail widespread abuse involving at least 50 priests or religious leaders. The findings reveal a troubling history of diocesan superiors concealing the child abuse as part of an effort to protect the church’s image.
The 147-page report details — at times graphically — accounts of sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests and church leaders. The late Monsignor Francis B. McCaa, the report notes, was “a monster” who groped and fondled the genitals of at least 15 boys, many of them altar boys. McCaa was assigned to Holy Name Church in Ebensburg for more than 20 years.
At least one of his victims committed suicide, the investigation found.
The grand jury found the case of Joseph Gaborek, 70, to be “particularly heinous example of the Diocese exercising authority and influence to cover up the sexual abuse of a child at the hands of a Diocesan priest.”
Gaborek, who was assigned to St. Michael’s Church in West Salisbury and St. Mary’s Church in Pocahontas in the early 1980s, sexually violated a boy after recruiting him to work at the parishes, according to the report.
Monday’s report is the latest case in the global sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. The repercussions of that scandal in the United State has driven parishioners from the church, forcing parishes in some communities to shutter their doors amid dwindling attendance.
Allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the Altoona-Johnstown diocese, and allegations that diocesan officials ignored or covered up reports of abuse, have been reported by various news media for decades.
Similar allegations of child sexual abuse at the hands of priests have been made across scores of diocese in the U.S., from the largest to the smallest in recent decades.
Few have been as stunning as the scandals that played out in Boston, the fourth-largest diocese, and Philadelphia.
In Boston, after decades of allegations and investigations, church officials in 2003 agreed to pay $85 million to settle more than 500 civil suits accusing priests of sexual abuse and church officials of concealment.
“Spotlight,” the film that on Sunday won the Oscar for best picture Sunday, is the story of the Boston Globe’s investigation of the allegations of sexual abuse and cover up in the Boston diocese.
And in Philadelphia, in the wake of a 2011 grand jury report that found widespread clergy sexual abuse and concealment by church officials, the diocese has removed a number of priests deemed unsuitable for the priesthood. Philadelphia also resulted in the conviction and sentencing of Monsignor William Lynn, the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic Church official convicted in a child sex abuse scandal.
A Pennsylvania appellate court recently ordered a new trial for Lynn, overturning for a second time his landmark verdict. A three-judge Superior Court panel found that Lynn’s 2012 conviction had been tainted by prosecutors’ presentation of nearly two dozen examples of the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s failure to handle pedophilia within its ranks.
A 2014 study commissioned by the Catholic Church found that more than 4,000 U.S. priests had faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years. The cases involved more than 10,000 children – mostly boys.
Between 2004 and 2013, the Catholic Church spent more than $2 billion in a settlements, therapy for victims, support for offenders and attorneys’ fees with regards to clergy sexual abuse.
Tuesday’s grand jury report detailed accounts of abuse by Martin Cingle, 69, a priest who in 1979, groped the genitals of a child while sleeping next to the boy on a cot in his underwear.
In a two-year exhaustive investigation, the grand jury reviewed more than 200 exhibits and heard testimony from numerous witnesses, ultimately executing a search warrant last August at a diocesan office, where officials uncovered a “secret archive.”
Papal Mass at Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
Pope Francis in 2014 created the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors to advise him in the fight against child sexual abuse has reiterated that Catholic bishops have “a moral and ethical responsibility” to report suspected abuse to civil authorities. In this photo taken in September 2014, Francis celebrates Mass at Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. James Robinson, PennLive.com
James Robinson
Found within boxes and filing cabinets detailing the sexual abuse of children, authorities found internal correspondence related to the sexual abuse, including handwritten notes of Bishop James Hogan and letters and documents sent to Bishop Joseph Adamec. Investigators removed approximately 115,042 documents from the diocese office.
Investigators used the materials to detail the actions of Hogan and Adamec, who led the Altoona Diocese from the mid-1960s through 2011. The bishops were at the forefront of the cover-up, the grand jury noted in its report.
Kanes said diocesan officials endangered thousands of children and allowed known child predators to abuse additional victims.
“The heinous crimes these children endured are absolutely unconscionable,” said Kane, speaking at a press conference at the Blair County Convention Center. “These predators desecrated a sacred trust and preyed upon their victims in the very places where they should have felt most safe.”
Kane said the cover-up carried out by clergy leaders, which allowed the abuse to continue for decades, was equally troubling.
“They failed in our society’s most important task of protecting our children.
Although the investigation is ongoing, none of the criminal acts detailed in the grand jury report can be prosecuted due either to the deaths of alleged abusers and the statute of limitations, which in most cases, has expired.
Additionally, the grand jury deemed that “deeply traumatized victims” were unable to testify in court.
The grand jury has issued recommendations, including lifting the statute of limitations for sexual offenses against minors and urging the Legislature to suspend the civil statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims.
The grand jury also found several instances in which law enforcement officers and prosecutors failed to pursue allegations of child sexual abuse within the diocese.
In the case of Gaborek, for example, investigators found that Bishop Hogan assured police investigators that he would send the priest to “an institution.” Gaborek was sent on sabbatical to a school for boys where no psychological or psychiatric treatment was provided. Gaborek was later reassigned to another parish.
The diocesan files detail Hogan’s intervention in the police investigation. One of the files notes that Gaborek “would have been prosecuted and convicted of [sexual contact with a 16-year-old boy] except that the bishop intervened and he was sent to Michigan for treatment and then placed in another parish upon his return.”
In the case of Cingle, the files show that the alleged 1979 victim met with Bishop Adamec in 2002. The bishop sent the young man for “treatment,” which lasted one month. The diocese, the files show, found no evidence of “psychopathology in the psychological data” with regards to the priest. Cingle was returned to full-time ministry.
During his testimony before the grand jury, Cingle acknowledged that he could have accidentally fondled the boy’s genitals. Cingle, the report stated, told Adamec the same version of the story, but the account does not appear in diocesan records.
Cingle was removed from the ministry last year at the urging of the Office of Attorney General. Investigators concluded that Adamec wanted to avoid scandal. The matter was never reported to law enforcement.
In the case of McCaa, the grand jury found that he had abused children during confession; other times, he abused his victims while they were standing together.
Hogan kept detailed notes of his meetings with two prosecutors who worked for the Cambria County district attorney’s office, the report states. The bishop transferred McCaa to work as a chaplain at a West Virginia hospital.
The Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown covers an eight-county region that includes Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Centre, Clinton, Fulton, Huntingdon and Somerset counties. More than 90,000 parishioners are members of the diocese.
In a report last year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops found that between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013, a total of 857 people came forward in 191 Catholic dioceses and eparchies to make 936 allegations of sexual abuse.
Full article with links: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/03/altoona_diocese_catholic_clerg.html#incart_big-photo
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-03-01 17:11:262016-03-01 17:11:26Ivey DeJesus, Priests and church leaders sexually abused hundreds of children in Altoona Diocese: AG office, Penn Live
Both Were Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing
/in International /by SOL ReformFormer Pitcairn mayor found guilty over child abuse images, Kenya Child Abuse
– Kenya child abuse: US ex-missionary gets 40yrs’
Former Pitcairn mayor found guilty over child abuse images
Michael Warren, who downloaded more than 1000 images of child abuse while working in child protection, will serve his sentence on the tiny Pacific island
Eleanor Ainge Roy in Dunedin Monday 7 March 2016
The former mayor of Pitcairn Island has been sentenced to 20-months in prison after he was convicted of possessing more than 1000 images and videos depicting child pornography.
The tiny British territory in the South Pacific, which has a population of around 50 people, gained international notoriety in 2004 when seven of the island’s 12 men were accused of a total of 55 sex crimes, some dating back 40 years.
Pitcairn mayor charged with possessing child abuse material wants to face ‘local law’
According to crown prosecutor Kieran Raferty, former mayor Michael Warren – who served as the island’s mayor from 2008 to 2013 – began downloading images of child abuse in 2004.
During the years Warren downloaded the images he was working in child protection on the island – and travelling to New Zealand and the United Kingdom in an official capacity for further training in child protection.
Raferty said Warren’s initial defence was that he had downloaded the images because he wanted to understand child pornography after the 2004 sex abuse cases.
Warren has also been found guilty of engaging in an internet “sex chat” with a person purporting to be a 15-year-schoolgirl, and of possessing a video that showed a bound and gagged naked woman….
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/former-pitcairn-mayor-found-guilty-over-child-pornography
Kenya child abuse: US ex-missionary gets 40yrs’
2016-03-07
Oklahoma City – A former missionary convicted of sexually abusing children at an orphanage in Kenya was sentenced on Monday to 40 years in a US prison.
Matthew Lane Durham, 21, had faced up to 30 years on each of four counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. He was ordered to pay restitution of $15 863.
Durham asked the court for mercy. “All I wanted was to follow God’s plan for me,” he told the judge.
Defence attorney Stephen Jones has said Durham plans to appeal. He has described Durham, who was 19 when he was charged, as “an emotionally vulnerable teenager” who was struggling with sexual identity while being a devout Christian.
Prosecutors alleged Durham targeted orphans while volunteering at the Upendo Children’s Home in Nairobi between April and June 2014. Durham had served as a volunteer since 2012 at the orphanage, which specialises in caring for neglected children.
Orphanage officials and five of the children travelled from Kenya to testify at the trial.
Prosecutors asked that Durham be placed under supervision for the rest of his life in the event he is ever released from prison.
“He raped or sexually molested by force or threat four children ranging in ages from 5 years to 14 years – some multiple times – in a span of just 33 days,” prosecutors wrote….
http://www.news24.com/World/News/kenya-child-abuse-us-ex-missionary-gets-40yrs-20160307
Action Alert: PA SNAP event in Hollidaysburg Tues March 8
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformVictims blast Altoona Catholic officials
Bishop should fire a nun and his abuse advisors
Grand jury showed “victims advocate” is a sham
SNAP: “Saying ‘sorry’ is wrong without clear changes”
Group wants outreach about “sadistic yet ignored teacher”
And victims say Bartchak’s letter on Sunday was “pure public relations”
What:
Holding signs and childhood photos, clergy sex abuse survivors and their supporters will demand that Altoona’s Catholic bishop
–fire a nun and his abuse panel,
–work with the Attorney General to pick replacements, and
–disclose more about a high school librarian who is named in last week’s grand jury report – but has been ignored by news media even though he downloaded “hundreds of pages of violent child rape stories and chats” and was on the job for eight years.
They will also urge the bishop to
–move quickly in posting predators’ name on his diocesan and church websites,
–include their photos, whereabouts and work histories, and
And the group will urge any who saw, suspected or suffered clergy sex crimes or cover ups in Altoona to come forward now to secular authorities, not church officials.
When:
Tuesday, March 7 at 1____ p.m.
Where:
On the sidewalk outside the Altoona-Johnstown diocese headquarters, 927 S. Logan Blvd. (corner of Hawthorne St.) in Hollidaysburg, PA
Who:
Two to three members of a support group called SNAP (the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), including a Pittsburgh woman who is the organization’s local volunteer director
Why:
1) Last week, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General released a scathing grand jury report that concludes “nothing has changed” in the Altoona-Johnstown diocese regarding child sex crimes and cover ups. The report was particularly critical of how Catholic officials deal now with abuse reports, saying there is “no privacy or confidentiality” for victims and that an abuse “review board” is not “unbiased or neutral” and was, in fact, set up to “convince the public that the days of a mysterious bishop deciding how to handle a scandalous report of child molestation and sodomy were over,” but “in reality, the bishop still makes the decision.”
The jurors also found that the work of a so-called “victims advocate” does not, in fact, “remotely resemble advocacy” but instead is “fact-finding” for church defense lawyers, and that victims’ information “is forwarded to lawyers whose interest is solely in protecting the diocese.”
SNAP wants Bishop Mark Bartchak to fire the nun who is the purported “victims advocate” and every member of the board, especially, Fr. Joseph Byrnes, a board member who “pled the Fifth” and refused to answer questions from the grand jury. (Staff and board members include Sister Donna Marie Leiden, Colleen Krug, D.J. Bragonier, Fr. Joseph W. Fleming, Dr. Russell Miller and Dr. Mary O’Leary Wiley.) http://www.ajdiocese.org/children-and-youth
2) The group wants Bartchak to voluntarily work with Attorney General’s office staff to choose replacements.
3) SNAP also wants Bartchack to reveal more about Mark Powdermaker who, as librarian at Bishop Guilfoyle High School, used school computers to “download graphic stories of rape and torture” of girls and “actively discuss” on “chat logs” his “desire to sexually assault and torture a child with other men on line.” Even though investigators found “hundreds of pages of his violent child rape stories and chats” in diocesan offices and jurors concluded that school and diocesan staff “helped him keep his secret” and Powdermaker “spent eight years (1994-2002) amongst the teenage girls he dreamed of raping.” (pages 140-141)
4) Even though the grand jury noted that Bartchak’s “power is nearly absolute,” it said that the “purge of predators is taking too long.” SNAP feels the same way about Bartchack’s pledge to post predators’ names on church websites. The group wants him to provide details and to make sure the information is posted on parish websites too, not just the diocesan website.
5) SNAP is also very critical of a three-page letter Bartchak had read in Altoona area parishes this weekend that repeatedly stressed “mercy” (ten times), “sin” (nine times) and “reconciliation (three times), but not once mentioned the words “crime”, abuse, molestation or cover up and announced not one single reform and contained no plea for victims, witnesses or whistleblowers to come forward.
“The letter repeatedly begged Catholics not to leave the church but said nothing that might make kids safer, expose more predators, unearth more cover ups or deter future recklessness, callousness and deceit,” said SNAP’s Judy Jones.
6) Finally, for all the “tragedy and evil” in the 115,042 pages of diocesan abuse records, the grand jury said Bishop Mark Bartchak and his predecessor Bishop Joseph Adamec had one “brief conversation on the subject (of abuse),” “no detailed briefing,” and Bartchak was “unaware of the number of historical predators in the diocese when he appeared before the grand jury.
SNAP believes this was a deliberately self-serving move by Bartchak and is calling on him to explain why he cared so little to learn about this crucial crisis.
Contact:
Judy Jones 314 974 5003, SNAPjudy@gmail.com, Fran Unglo-Samber 717 514 9660, samber13431@comcast.net, David Clohessy 314 566 9790, davidgclohessy@gamail.com, Barbara Dorris 314 503 0003,bdorris@SNAPnetwork.org
Rob Boston, Innocence Abused: A Lethal Combination Of Church And State Fails Pennsylvania’s Children, Americans United
/in Pennsylvania /by SOL ReformLast week, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane released a damning grand jury report about the rampant sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese – and the failure of anyone in authority to stop it.
News of the report hit me hard. I was born and raised in Altoona. For 16 years I attended a Catholic church in that diocese. I spent eight years in a Catholic school appended to one of its churches.
The nuns occasionally punished us in ways that were inappropriate, but I never suffered the kind of abuse detailed in the report. Still, I felt like I’d been socked in the gut. As I read the report, I kept coming across the names of familiar towns, churches and people.
The report is not easy reading. It goes into explicit detail about the horrors inflicted on these children. Be aware of that if you decide to take a look.
I was especially disgusted by how the powers that be in both the church and the state failed the victims. If you’ve seen the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight,” you know how church officials reacted: They created, then hid, secret files on problem priests. They did not report them to authorities. They attacked the victims. They shipped molesters off to other parishes where, inevitably, the priests sought more victims.
In Altoona, Johnstown and in other communities, government officials simply refused to act. They were completely deferential to the church. The report discusses a priest named Leonard Inman who was known to be soliciting boys for sex. Altoona police began to investigate, but all it took was some pressure from the diocese, and they backed off.
“The Grand Jury finds that Inman was actively engaging in prostitution and oral intercourse with minors at Cathedral of Blessed Sacrament Altoona,” reads the report. “Altoona Police were aware of allegations and investigated the matter. The Diocese sought to protect the image of the institution rather than protect children or hold Inman accountable. No charges were ever filed in part due to the undue influence of the diocese over local officials.”
Things were so bad in Altoona and Johnstown, the report asserts, that church officials actually had the power to pick candidates for certain municipal jobs. At one point, a law-enforcement official asked why there was no follow-up in an especially egregious case of clerical abuse in Cambria County. A judge told him, “You have to understand, this is an extremely Catholic county.”
This is a pattern that has played out in other parts of the country. In Orleans Parish, La., a priest was accused of molesting several teenage boys in the 1980s. Investigators brought the matter to the attention of Harry Connick Sr., the local district attorney. Connick declined to press charges, later admitting that he didn’t want to embarrass “Holy Mother the Church.”
People sometimes ask us at Americans United why we are so intent on separating church and state. Religion, some of our critics assert, is a good thing. Why shouldn’t it be able to help out the government and vice versa? What’s the harm in letting church and state get a little closer?
Our usual answer is often along the lines of, “That’s not what the founders intended.” But there is another answer, one that is hard for many Americans to face but is nonetheless true: Sometimes religious groups do things that are not good – things that are, in fact, evil, vile and disgusting.
When a church does these things, when its top officials knowingly violate the law as surely as its clergy violated the bodies of innocents in Pennsylvania, only one institution has the power and the resources to hold it accountable. That institution is the state.
Yet when church and the state are linked, when they are in partnership, when they are reliant on one another and when a mutual dependency is fostered, the government can’t assume the aggressive stance that’s necessary to enforce the law. So the law is laid aside and eyes are turned away – even as more and more kids are victimized.
That’s a difficult lesson. It’s one my hometown has had to learn. We must take steps to ensure that no other communities are forced to learn it anew.
Full article: https://au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/innocence-abused-a-lethal-combination-of-church-and-state-fails
Manny Waks, Meet Hilly. One of my new mates and heroes. And meet the courageous Ballarat group. Mates and heroes., MannyWaks.com
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformMeet Hilly. One of my new mates and heroes.
He only recently learned of his full name, Gordon Hill, and his date of birth. He used to be called Number 29.
You see Hilly was placed in the Catholic St Joseph’s orphanage in Ballarat when he was very young. He was just a number to them. And when, in his early teens, they needed to make room for the new-comers, they heartlessly kicked him out. Number 29 was around 14yo at the time, all alone in this world, left to fend for himself. St Joseph’s gave him the meagre sum of two shillings and nine pence, enough money to pay to return by post the suitcase they lent him. Because he couldn’t read, he didn’t realise he was meant to return it. So he kept it. He still proudly has the suitcase.
During his years at the orphanage, he was treated with brutal inhumanity, ostensibly by religious people. Individuals who pray regularly to their God, people who believed the rest of us were going to pay gravely for our sins, unless, of course, we joined them.
He was deprived of his dignity and basic human rights; no education, food deprivation, mental abuse, brutal physical and sexual assaults, and the like. The nuns used to force him and his peers to cut the whips from the trees with which they would brutally assault them. They even pulled out his teeth with pliers; he was caught eating a carrot he found while working because he was starving. While as an adult he received false teeth, they no longer fit in his mouth due to the damage they caused to his cheek bones when the brutes pulled out his teeth. As you can imagine, Hilly has scars all over his body – not to mention his emotional scars. As he tearfully told me, he never even got a hug. Listening to his harrowing ordeal, I had to wipe away my tears, too.
Hilly was constantly on the run. He pretty much ran as far as he could within Australia; from Ballarat (Victoria – Australia’s East) to Western Australia.
Despite his brutal introduction into this world, Hilly made a life for himself. He got married, has four children, and several grandchildren. He taught himself to read and write. In fact, he’s currently writing a book about his life. He’s worked on cattle stations. Most importantly, Hilly has regained his identity. And it’s not as if he had it all going for him in his adult life. His dear wife died of cancer a while ago.
And he’s a caring, loving and beautiful soul. He’s even volunteered plenty, earning recognition from the Rotaries – a medal he wears proudly around his neck to prove it.
Due to his age and experience, the Ballarat group of courageous survivors, their family members and support staff in Rome – there to attend the Royal Commission public hearing with Cardinal George Pell – referred to Hilly as their shepherd. But as Hilly told me, even a shepherd needs to be looked after. And he feels he has that in this incredible group I was honoured to spend time with in Rome.
So next time you’re struggling, take inspiration from this incredible human being, Hilly. Indeed, from this entire group of courageous survivors whose stories are no less harrowing. I’ll certainly endeavour to do so.
I’m proud of my new mate and hero Hilly. In fact proud of the entire courageous Ballarat group. And I’m delighted to call them mates.
Full article: http://www.mannywaks.com/blog/meet-hilly-one-of-my-new-mates-and-heroes-and-meet-the-courageous-ballarat-group-mates-and-heroes
Phil Cleary, After Pell, the questions we all need to answer, The Age
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformWas anyone not moved to despair, or maybe even outrage, watching Cardinal George Pell’s evidence at the royal commission on child sexual abuse? Even if Pell didn’t know, as implausible as it looks, that Father Gerald Ridsdale and a cabal of priests and brothers was systematically raping children in the 1970s and ’80s, his church’s guilt is palpable.
Why was Pell, a big strong outspoken man in his younger years, so timid when a generation of children was being terrorised by cowardly, sadistic brothers and priests? If he’d been a reserved, retiring kind of man we might have imagined he didn’t have the nerve to confront those who covered for Ridsdale and his like. But Pell is not that kind of man. He’s never flinched in a public debate about Catholic doctrine or the failings of sinners. A man of the old world, George Pell was never one to mince his words.
Yet when acting as a “consultor” to Bishop Ronald Mulkearns it seems he never asked one forthright question about why a known sadistic “sinner”, Ridsdale, was being moved from parish to parish. All the while, says Pell, those with knowledge of these crimes either lied to or failed to confide in him. Whatever the truth of what he knew, there can be no mistaking his indifference to the lives of young boys at Catholic schools. While some men in his predicament might have shed a tear for those who have suffered, the cardinal from Ballarat is made of sterner stuff. His testimony was all about survival and proving that, because he was ignorant of the crimes, he had no moral culpability.
Now that we’ve established the church’s culpability, we need to answer other, very serious questions. Why could men supposedly called to God act so sadistically? Were there reasons, other than the protection of the church’s name, that induced its leaders to protect those men engaged in a brutal misuse of power? Were some church elders burdened by what they believed were their own guilty secrets?
Just as importantly, we must ask what part notions of male entitlement played in the crimes about which Pell has been interrogated. It’s all too convenient to reduce these crimes to the acts of “evil paedophiles”, as if men weren’t committing the same crimes against women and children with impunity in the broader society.
Pell and the men who refused to name the rapists and molesters did not make their decisions in a vacuum. They acted in a social milieu where notions of male entitlement were rampant and institutions routinely belittled women and children when they cried rape. In 1974, a year after Father Ridsdale fled Apollo Bay, a man in Richmond abducted and raped a nine-year-old-girl living across from his house. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail. Six years later he would have a conviction for molesting two young girls quashed. Such outcomes reflected the flawed attitudes of the times.
In researching the crimes of men against women and children in those dark days, I’ve come to the conclusion that the institutional responses were profoundly defective, with the judicial response on many occasions as appalling as that of the Catholic Church. It is no secret to professionals working in the sector that the under-reporting of rape was chronic and that the police response was undermined by patriarchal assumptions. The inconvenient truth is that Gerald Ridsdale and his cohorts were abusing and raping children in a society whose institutions were complicit in the violence.
The Catholic Church has ample enemies among baby boomers born into a cultural setting where the old Protestant/Catholic divide provided fertile ground for prejudice. Compounding this latent antipathy is the fact that the church’s position on homosexuality and abortion has alienated many young people. It’s hardly surprising therefore that its defenders would raise the spectre of a witch-hunt against Pell and his church, a proposition a lawyer imperiously asked him to dismiss on day four of the hearing.
If only Pell had asked the lawyer in question whether she believed there’d been a witch-hunt against women and children alleging rape in the “old days”. If only he’d reminded her that the abusive brothers and priests being named in the commission were like so many other men outside the church’s jurisdiction who were also offending. Men whose lawyers used every means available to discredit victims like those who travelled to Rome to confront Pell.
Yet again a royal commission – as was the case with the 2015 Victorian royal commission on violence against women and children – has missed the opportunity to consider the institutional context of the violence and abuse it is examining. Submerged in the mire of Pell’s antiquated views and a cover-up by the church, the commission has unwittingly camouflaged the complicity of major institutions in the catastrophe of violence by men.
As a student at St Joseph’s Pascoe Vale in the mid-1960s, where Brother Keith Weston was molesting pre-pubescent mates of mine, I came to understand the consequences of assigning unbridled power to men whose sexual gratification was founded in the abuse of boys. We could so easily have concluded that it was a manifestation of homosexuality rather than something peculiar to men. Now that the women’s movement has lifted the veil of secrecy on the litany of crimes by an underbelly men in the 1970s and ’80s, there should be no such confusion.
George Pell’s contemporaries were not doing anything that unusual when they covered for Ridsdale and his lot. In fact, they were apeing the behaviour of men on the street, in the family home, in our parliaments and in our courtrooms.
These were different times, Pell told the royal commission. Unfortunately, those lawyers who queued up to expose his failings did not canvass the implications of that plea. They did not address the role their profession and the law played in silencing and marginalising abused women and children.
Until such time as we acknowledge that Cardinal George Pell speaks for a society that enshrined the rights of men at the expense of their victims, there can be no true reconciliation and we will have learnt little from this disgraceful episode.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/after-pell-the-questions-we-all-need-to-answer-20160304-gnasb9.html
Ivey DeJesus, Priests and church leaders sexually abused hundreds of children in Altoona Diocese: AG office, Penn Live
/in Pennsylvania /by SOL ReformHundreds of children were sexually abused over a period of at least four decades by priests or religious leaders in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, a statewide investigating grand jury has concluded.
The findings by the grand jury, released Tuesday by the office of state Attorney General Kathleen Kane, detail widespread abuse involving at least 50 priests or religious leaders. The findings reveal a troubling history of diocesan superiors concealing the child abuse as part of an effort to protect the church’s image.
The 147-page report details — at times graphically — accounts of sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests and church leaders. The late Monsignor Francis B. McCaa, the report notes, was “a monster” who groped and fondled the genitals of at least 15 boys, many of them altar boys. McCaa was assigned to Holy Name Church in Ebensburg for more than 20 years.
At least one of his victims committed suicide, the investigation found.
The grand jury found the case of Joseph Gaborek, 70, to be “particularly heinous example of the Diocese exercising authority and influence to cover up the sexual abuse of a child at the hands of a Diocesan priest.”
Gaborek, who was assigned to St. Michael’s Church in West Salisbury and St. Mary’s Church in Pocahontas in the early 1980s, sexually violated a boy after recruiting him to work at the parishes, according to the report.
Monday’s report is the latest case in the global sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. The repercussions of that scandal in the United State has driven parishioners from the church, forcing parishes in some communities to shutter their doors amid dwindling attendance.
Allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the Altoona-Johnstown diocese, and allegations that diocesan officials ignored or covered up reports of abuse, have been reported by various news media for decades.
Similar allegations of child sexual abuse at the hands of priests have been made across scores of diocese in the U.S., from the largest to the smallest in recent decades.
Few have been as stunning as the scandals that played out in Boston, the fourth-largest diocese, and Philadelphia.
In Boston, after decades of allegations and investigations, church officials in 2003 agreed to pay $85 million to settle more than 500 civil suits accusing priests of sexual abuse and church officials of concealment.
“Spotlight,” the film that on Sunday won the Oscar for best picture Sunday, is the story of the Boston Globe’s investigation of the allegations of sexual abuse and cover up in the Boston diocese.
And in Philadelphia, in the wake of a 2011 grand jury report that found widespread clergy sexual abuse and concealment by church officials, the diocese has removed a number of priests deemed unsuitable for the priesthood. Philadelphia also resulted in the conviction and sentencing of Monsignor William Lynn, the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic Church official convicted in a child sex abuse scandal.
A Pennsylvania appellate court recently ordered a new trial for Lynn, overturning for a second time his landmark verdict. A three-judge Superior Court panel found that Lynn’s 2012 conviction had been tainted by prosecutors’ presentation of nearly two dozen examples of the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s failure to handle pedophilia within its ranks.
A 2014 study commissioned by the Catholic Church found that more than 4,000 U.S. priests had faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years. The cases involved more than 10,000 children – mostly boys.
Between 2004 and 2013, the Catholic Church spent more than $2 billion in a settlements, therapy for victims, support for offenders and attorneys’ fees with regards to clergy sexual abuse.
Tuesday’s grand jury report detailed accounts of abuse by Martin Cingle, 69, a priest who in 1979, groped the genitals of a child while sleeping next to the boy on a cot in his underwear.
In a two-year exhaustive investigation, the grand jury reviewed more than 200 exhibits and heard testimony from numerous witnesses, ultimately executing a search warrant last August at a diocesan office, where officials uncovered a “secret archive.”
Papal Mass at Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
Pope Francis in 2014 created the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors to advise him in the fight against child sexual abuse has reiterated that Catholic bishops have “a moral and ethical responsibility” to report suspected abuse to civil authorities. In this photo taken in September 2014, Francis celebrates Mass at Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. James Robinson, PennLive.com
James Robinson
Found within boxes and filing cabinets detailing the sexual abuse of children, authorities found internal correspondence related to the sexual abuse, including handwritten notes of Bishop James Hogan and letters and documents sent to Bishop Joseph Adamec. Investigators removed approximately 115,042 documents from the diocese office.
Investigators used the materials to detail the actions of Hogan and Adamec, who led the Altoona Diocese from the mid-1960s through 2011. The bishops were at the forefront of the cover-up, the grand jury noted in its report.
Kanes said diocesan officials endangered thousands of children and allowed known child predators to abuse additional victims.
“The heinous crimes these children endured are absolutely unconscionable,” said Kane, speaking at a press conference at the Blair County Convention Center. “These predators desecrated a sacred trust and preyed upon their victims in the very places where they should have felt most safe.”
Kane said the cover-up carried out by clergy leaders, which allowed the abuse to continue for decades, was equally troubling.
“They failed in our society’s most important task of protecting our children.
Although the investigation is ongoing, none of the criminal acts detailed in the grand jury report can be prosecuted due either to the deaths of alleged abusers and the statute of limitations, which in most cases, has expired.
Additionally, the grand jury deemed that “deeply traumatized victims” were unable to testify in court.
The grand jury has issued recommendations, including lifting the statute of limitations for sexual offenses against minors and urging the Legislature to suspend the civil statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims.
The grand jury also found several instances in which law enforcement officers and prosecutors failed to pursue allegations of child sexual abuse within the diocese.
In the case of Gaborek, for example, investigators found that Bishop Hogan assured police investigators that he would send the priest to “an institution.” Gaborek was sent on sabbatical to a school for boys where no psychological or psychiatric treatment was provided. Gaborek was later reassigned to another parish.
The diocesan files detail Hogan’s intervention in the police investigation. One of the files notes that Gaborek “would have been prosecuted and convicted of [sexual contact with a 16-year-old boy] except that the bishop intervened and he was sent to Michigan for treatment and then placed in another parish upon his return.”
In the case of Cingle, the files show that the alleged 1979 victim met with Bishop Adamec in 2002. The bishop sent the young man for “treatment,” which lasted one month. The diocese, the files show, found no evidence of “psychopathology in the psychological data” with regards to the priest. Cingle was returned to full-time ministry.
During his testimony before the grand jury, Cingle acknowledged that he could have accidentally fondled the boy’s genitals. Cingle, the report stated, told Adamec the same version of the story, but the account does not appear in diocesan records.
Cingle was removed from the ministry last year at the urging of the Office of Attorney General. Investigators concluded that Adamec wanted to avoid scandal. The matter was never reported to law enforcement.
In the case of McCaa, the grand jury found that he had abused children during confession; other times, he abused his victims while they were standing together.
Hogan kept detailed notes of his meetings with two prosecutors who worked for the Cambria County district attorney’s office, the report states. The bishop transferred McCaa to work as a chaplain at a West Virginia hospital.
The Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown covers an eight-county region that includes Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Centre, Clinton, Fulton, Huntingdon and Somerset counties. More than 90,000 parishioners are members of the diocese.
In a report last year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops found that between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013, a total of 857 people came forward in 191 Catholic dioceses and eparchies to make 936 allegations of sexual abuse.
Full article with links: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/03/altoona_diocese_catholic_clerg.html#incart_big-photo