News Story of the Day

A bankruptcy filing by New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese freezes sexual abuse lawsuits and could help bury the details of alleged coverups of predator priests and thousands of internal emails documenting a behind-the-scenes alliance with the New Orleans Saints.

Rod MacLeod, the victim of a pedophile priest in the 1960s at a Sudbury high school, said he hopes his latest legal victory will inspire other sexual abuse victims to come forward and “seek justice through the court.”

(RNS) — For more than a decade, abuse survivor advocates have been asking the Southern Baptist Convention to establish a clergy predator database, and for just as long they've been confronted with a denomination determined to do nothing.

Joseph C. George, Sr., was a man who changed trajectories.

The description is apt not just of his own life, but the lives of the staff, clients and the many people who faced the Philadelphia native in court. Most of those were with organizations who knowingly covered up abuse and tried to make it go away.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Clarification (5:20 p.m.): The Diocese of Buffalo originally indicated that Fr. James A. Spielman and Fr. John P. Hajduk would stop receiving benefits, but Wednesday afternoon clarified that they had both had "disassociated himself from the Diocese and moved elsewhere and has not been on the Diocesan pension plan or received any benefits."

The release of a priest convicted of molesting a teenage boy is raising questions for the judicial system and the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's taken 26 years, reams of legal documents and many tears, but Eileen Piper has done what she set out to do — cleared the name of her daughter, Stephanie, who was abused by a Catholic priest in the 1970s.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday upheld all but one of the 11 convictions of a former priest who is serving 16 years in prison for sexually assaulting a boy during multiple vacations to Maine in the 1980s.

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — In early February, the second-highest-ranking prelate in the Vatican told news outlets that a long-awaited report into the ascent of disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick would be published in the “near future.”