News Story of the Day

SAN JOSE, Calif. (WLS) - William Lynch, the California man who admitted he pummeled a priest who he said abused him as a boy, has been found not guilty of felony assault and elder abuse charges.

One of the state's most senior Catholic education officials failed to report the sexual assault of four of his students at a southern Sydney school in the late 1970s, a confidential internal investigation has found.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI fired a 52-year-old Slovak bishop for apparently mismanaging his diocese in a rare show of papal power over bishops that could have implications for U.S. sex abuse cases.

Mueller's appointment to a powerful job the pontiff himself held for more than two decades - prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - comes at a time when the Vatican is beset by controversies including allegations of corruption and internal intrigues, as well as a lingering child abuse scandal.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The first Catholic bishop criminally charged in the decades-long clergy sex abuse crisis will have to grant prosecutors access to a range of files regarding his diocese's response to previous accusations of clergy abuse, a county judge ordered Thursday.

After months of testimony and deliberations the Philadelphia jurors who found Msgr. William Lynn guilty of child endangerment did more than any Vatican official has ever done to address the problem of sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. This was made possible by the simple fact that the men and women of the jury confronted him as a peer, in a system that confers equal rights and responsibilities upon all.

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A St. Paul priest has been removed from his post after allegations surfaced that he sexually abused a minor.

Prosecutors in the San Jose priest-beating trial have said they pursued the case despite the accused man's understandable motive -- retaliating against the cleric he said brutally molested him as a child -- because it's the right thing to do.

SO IT'S still not over. After an 11-week trial, with almost 2,000 documents, 60 witnesses, multiple references to a dead cardinal and a defendant's suggestion that taking a 14-year-old to bed after watching porn with him was "borderline inappropriate" and not wrong, wrong, wrong, the jury has yet to reach a verdict in the landmark trial of Philadelphia Archdiocese Monsignor William Lynn and the Rev. James Brennan.

There is no statute of limitation (i.e., a time frame set by government in which a crime may be prosecuted) in the U.S. for murder. So why are there state-by-state time limits for sexual assault, and why is the Catholic Church actively attempting to protect sex offenders from prosecution?