News Story of the Day

Marci Hamilton battles the deadline that cheats victims.

By Rebecca Webber

The Cleveland kidnapping case, the Sandusky scandal at Penn State and the revelations from prestigious private schools like New York’s Horace Mann remind us that child sex abuse can happen anywhere.

"In a generational changing of the guard, Southern Baptists are gaining a new advocate for their values in Washington and around the country as Russell Moore, a media-savvy theologian, takes the helm of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.” This news, reported last week by the Religion News Service, means that the ERLC will no longer be headed by Richard Land, who had been at the commission’s helm for nearly twenty-five years.

Catholic bishops in the Philippines are covering up “rampant sexual abuse of children by the clergy,” said a missionary priest who has been working with prostituted children for the past four decades.

DUBLIN — Experts investigating abuse within Northern Ireland children's homes appealed Monday for victims living abroad, chiefly in North America and Australia, to provide testimony so that the full scope of trauma can be documented.

Northern Ireland's Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry said it already has received abuse complaints from 271 former residents of about 5 orphanages and state-funded homes where children allegedly suffered sexual or physical harm.

IN 2002, Anne Barrett Doyle’s church involvement took a radical turn. The Boston Globe had just launched a series investigating rampant abuse among clergy in Boston’s Archdiocese, and the Catholic woman found herself protesting something for the first time in her life: her own Church.

“I was just pulled into this story, inextricably, with a force I didn’t understand,” Boston-based Barrett Doyle said.

This pull led her to help form Bishop Accountability, a clearinghouse that works to create and maintain a public record of clergy abuse in the Catholic Church. To date, the group maintains extensive paper trails (“over one million pages,” said Barrett Doyle), on reported sex abuse scandals around the country.

Nearly a decade would pass before...

Internal church records released Tuesday show that Chicago Jesuits consciously concealed the crimes of convicted sex offender Donald McGuire for more than 40 years as the prominent Roman Catholic priest continued to sexually abuse dozens of children around the globe.

They call themselves Catholic Whistleblowers, a newly formed cadre of priests and nuns who say the Roman Catholic Church is still protecting sexual predators.

Local Catholic officials received numerous reports alleging inappropriate behavior by a priest before a 14-year-old boy took his life in 1983, a motion filed this week by the boy’s parents says.

But the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese failed to act on the reports about Monsignor Thomas O’Brien, the motion alleges, and Brian Teeman committed suicide after suffering repeated sexual abuse by the priest.

Often lost in the shadow of the Archdiocese of New York, and its larger-than-life cardinal, Timothy Dolan, the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, N.J., is attracting national attention these days for all the wrong reasons. It is now the site of one of the more pathetic episodes in official Catholicism's sex abuse scandal, a case so badly mishandled that it reveals, by example, why the hierarchy can't seem to ends its long running crisis.

A support group for clergy sex-abuse victims wants two New Jersey Catholic bishops to reach out to parishioners and get them to report any allegations of abuse by a priest who once confessed to touching an underage boy.