News Story of the Day

By Michael Short, February 25, 2017, The Age

The Catholic Church, which has presided over a decades-long international cover-up of countless cases, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of child rape and other sexual abuse is arguably guilty of crimes against humanity.

In Australia, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, launched in 2013, has heard much harrowing evidence that for decades child rapists have been protected by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. 

By Charles WhiteSunday,  26 Feb 2017, Metro.co.uk

Pope Francis has reduced punishments for paedophile priests who abused children as young as 12.

The leader of the world’s biggest faith wants to apply his vision of a ‘merciful’ church and has changed the punishments for a handful of priests.

BY NICOLE WINFIELD, ASSOCIATED PRESS, February 25, 2017

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope's own advisers question.

By Teresa Huizar, HuffingtonPost.com, February 21, 2017

Children simply cannot consent to sex with adults.

It seems that former Breitbart editor and alt-right propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos loves to be hated. He has penned incendiary anti-feminist articles opining that women experiencing online harassment should simply stop using the internet, that birth control makes women “unattractive and crazy,” and that women are underrepresented in tech because they “suck at interviews.” 

By Teo Kermeliotis, February 23, 2017, Aljazeera

Greek police say they have arrested a French cleric suspected of sexually abusing unaccompanied refugee children he had sheltered in his house in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-biggest city.

By Haidee V Eugenio, February 22, 2017, Pacific Daily News

Four more former altar boys filed separate federal lawsuits Wednesday, alleging that former island priest Louis Brouillard sexually molested them repeatedly when they were children in the 1970s, bringing to 22 the total number of clergy sexual abuse cases filed on Guam.

By Rebekah Ison, February 21, 2017, News AU

The bishop of Parramatta has made an impassioned plea for the Catholic Church to become less "elitist" while revealing he was sexually abused by clergy himself.

David Shoebridge, New Castle Hearald, February 20, 2017

Australia allows the Catholic Church to protect sexual predators, and any information the church holds on its own illegal activity, from the law. We let it do this by granting protections afforded to no other religious group. It is time this ended.

In 1973 the Australian government granted the Vatican (called the Holy See in official channels) formal diplomatic recognition. This protected the Vatican, and gave its senior officials and head office in Australia the same protection we afford embassies and staff of foreign nations. 

Posted by William D. Lindsey, February 19, 2017, Bilgrimage

'd like to recommend to you Michael Boyle's four-part series on how the sexual abuse crisis happened in the Catholic church, and what's to be done about it. As Michael says in the first installment in this series at his Sound of Sheer Silence blog, he was motivated to write these postings in response to the release of the Australian Royal Commission's report about clerical sexual abuse, which shows one in five members of some Catholic religious communities including the Marist Brothers and Christian Brothers allegedly involved in child sexual abuse.

By Olivier Uyttebrouck, February 17, 2017, Albuquerque Journal

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A judge handed down a $16 million judgment this week against a former New Mexico priest for failure to respond to a lawsuit filed by a man who alleges he was sexually abused by Arthur Perrault in the early 1990s.

Second Judicial District Judge Denise Barela-Shepherd handed down the default judgment Thursday after she found that Perrault had been properly served with the civil lawsuit, but failed to defend himself against the allegations.