News Story of the Day

By Haidee V Eugenio , [email protected], Pacific Daily News, 

Guam clergy sexual abuse trials could rip open secret archives that every bishop or archbishop is required to keep under canon law, U.S.-based experts on laws governing the Catholic Church said.

The church secret archives contain sensitive records that could pertain to priest misconduct such as their sexual abuse of children, substance abuse and alcoholism, as well as mental health challenges, lawyers said.

BY TOM WELLS, 3rd February 2017, The Sun

Prince Charles had penned 'dozens' of letters to Ball in the past.

A PREDATORY paedophile bishop and close pal of Prince Charles has been freed from prison halfway through his sentence.

Retired Bishop of Gloucester Peter Ball, now 84, was jailed for 32 months in October 2015 for grooming and abusing 18 teenagers and young men.

One later committed suicide.

By Tony Rhodin,  lehighvalleylive.com, February 1, 2017

Students were sexually abused over more than 50 years at a small private school in Bucks County, and although administrators knew of the crimes, they weren't reported to authorities, a county grand jury report says.

Most of the acts are past the statute of limitations so charges can't be brought, and the one case that could be prosecuted won't be at the request of the victim, the Bucks County District Attorney's Office said in a news release Wednesday.

By Steve Esack, January 30, 2017, The Morning Call

In a surprise move Monday, a Senate panel resurrected and then unanimously approved a controversial bill to lift time limits for some child sex abuse victims to sue their alleged abusers and employers who protected them.

But the bill, which is identical to Senate legislation that failed last session, would not permit victims, if they are 31 or older, to retroactively sue their perpetrators as the House had sought following scathing grand jury report into child sex abuse at a Catholic diocese in western Pennsylvania.

Associated Press, January 27, 2017, Capital Journal

By Geetika Mantri, The News Minute, January 25, 2017 

In 2013, Pastor George Fernandes of New Hope for Children orphanage in Bengaluru received an e-mail from a British citizen Richard Huckle. Huckle wrote that he was interested in spending time at the orphanage and click photographs.

The unsuspecting pastor allowed George to stay at the orphanage for two days, not knowing that he was a convicted paedophile who had abused and raped up to 200 children in Malaysia.

Pastor George said Richard was never left alone with any of the children at New Hope during his stay there and no case has been filed.

It was a case that almost didn't make it to trial.

"Everybody, from Alabama, Maine, Dallas, Houston, New York - it was a herculean task and it took a lot of people at the DA's office working hard to make it happen," said Keith Blackwood, Mobile County assistant district attorney, "to make sure I had what I needed to prove my case."

In the end, three leaders of a religious Alabama bootcamp for troubled teens were convicted on multiple counts of aggravated child abuse for what they did to the children in their care.

The convictions were thanks in large part to the testimony of five former students, who told the court about the physical and mental abuse they suffered at the school.

By Editorial Board January 22, 2017, The Washington Post,

ON THE MOST explosive and morally subversive challenge facing the Roman Catholic Church — clerical sexual abuse of children, and the bishops who tolerate it — Pope Francis has said the right things but done too little. Even now, 15 years after the explosive revelations of church complicity in enabling and covering up the predations of American priests who damaged so many young lives, not a single bishop has been explicitly held accountable and stripped of his title.

JOE LOFARO, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN, January 19, 2017

A disgraced Ottawa priest convicted of molesting altar boys in the 1960s and 1970s has been re-arrested after he allegedly visited a Lowertown swimming pool frequented by children – a breach of his release conditions – nearly 100 times.

Gatineau police arrested Jacques Faucher, 80, on Monday, nine days before he was scheduled to be sentenced on historical sex crimes involving three children. Faucher was free on bail while awaiting sentencing.