News Story of the Day

A 12-year-old girl, speaking barely above a whisper in D.C. Superior Court, testified Wednesday that as a second-grader, she studied the life of a Catholic saint who had been a nun. “And I got inspired,” she said. She was 8 at the time. She told a jury that back then, she decided she wanted to be a nun, too, someday.

In a recent state Senate bill, questions of religious freedom collided with public safety concerns. SB 360 would have required clergy to alert authorities of child abuse confessed by priests or church employees.

Nearly a year after Vermont law enforcement and Catholic leaders announced separate investigations into clergy misconduct, the national Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is questioning why neither review has led to the public release of information.

David Ouellette was fooled once, as a 15-year-old victim growing up in Rochester. He wasn’t fooled last Wednesday, though. He read the list, released by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester, the one documenting priests who had been accused of sexually abusing children for decades. He noticed names, parish assignments, punishments handed out.

A retired priest in the Catholic Diocese of Jackson has been removed from public ministry after a credible accusation of abuse. 

A Sterling Heights woman said Tuesday she was victimized by a Catholic priest while working in a Detroit rectory as a teenager 42 years ago.

Kimberly Pollard first met Bishop James L'Keith Jones, a pastor in the Church of God in Christ, in Clovis, New Mexico, 1994. Pollard was helping her godmother make phone calls for a June youth convention organized by the church, also known as COGIC, which describes itself as "the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States," with 6.5 million members across 63 countries.

The visiting priests arrived discreetly, day and night. Stripped of their collars and cassocks, they went unnoticed in this tiny Midwestern town as they were escorted into a dingy warehouse across from an elementary school playground. Neighbors had no idea some of the dressed-down clergymen dining at local restaurants might have been accused sexual predators.