News Story of the Day

By Michael Abrahams, January 9, 2017, The Gleaner

The recent case of a 64-year-old Moravian pastor charged with having sex with a minor is cause for great concern. According to police reports, about 9 p.m. on Wednesday, December 28, 2016, a motorised police patrol in the deep rural community of Austin in Myersville, south-east St Elizabeth, came upon a parked car in a secluded area.

It was reported that the pastor was found in a “compromising position” with a 15-year-old girl. They were taken to the Black River Police Station, where the pastor was charged with having sex with a girl under the age of 16 years.

By Jordan Frias, January 7, 2017, Spare Change News

Fifteen years after the Boston Globe’s Spotlight series uncovered the widespread sexual abuse of Catholic priest — and more than a year after it became a highly acclaimed film on the big screen — the issue of priest molesting children still exists throughout Massachusetts and worldwide.

Attorney Mitchell Garabedian and members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) held a press conference to shed light on the Catholic church’s lack of transparency and cooperation in dealing with these cases and more recent accusations of abuse.

By Tom Nugent, January 8, 2017, Inside Baltimore

January 2017 – A woman who 24 years ago tried to warn the Catholic Church in Maryland that a priest had shown her the body of a murdered teaching nun recently earned a $50,000 settlement from the Archdiocese of Baltimore (AOB) for clergy sexual-abuse “injuries” she reportedly received while attending a Baltimore girls’ Catholic high school in the late 1960s.

The mediated settlement marked the latest startling development in one of the most tangled and perplexing homicide “cold cases” in Maryland history . . . the 1969 slaying of a 26-year-old teaching nun, Sister Catherine Cesnik, who reportedly had been trying to blow the whistle on widespread sexual abuse by two priests at Archbishop Keough High School in southwest Baltimore.

BY BEN WINSLOW, JANUARY 5, 2017, Fox13Now

SALT LAKE CITY -- Lawyers for a group of people suing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over accusations of sex abuse have renewed a deposition subpoena for President Thomas S. Monson.

They want the 89-year-old leader of the LDS Church to sit for a deposition and answer what -- if anything -- he knows about accusations of sexual abuse dating back to the 1960s and '70s in a church-run program on the Navajo reservation.

By Associated Press, January 5, 2017, Washington Times

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - New York lawmakers will again face a proposal this year to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse crimes.

Supporters of the bill gathered at the state Capitol on Wednesday to urge lawmakers to pass the bill, which has faced repeated obstacles in the Legislature.

By Lisa Wangsness, GLOBE STAFF  JANUARY 04, 2017

In many ways, former Springfield bishop Thomas L. Dupre epitomized the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Dupre, who died Dec. 30 at 83, was the first Roman Catholic bishop to be indicted in the scandal, which burst into public view 15 years ago this month when the Globe’s Spotlight team began reporting about the church hierarchy’s protection of priests who abused minors. Advocates for victims say Dupre had cultivated a culture of secrecy that kept such abuse shrouded for years.

By Express News Service,  02nd January 2017, The New Indian Express

KOCHI: The police on Sunday arrested a 65-year-old priest on charges of sexually abusing an 11-year-old boy.

The police said that Fr Basil Kuriakose,  who is also serving as principal of a school, abused the boy in the dormitory of the school’s hostel when the other students had gone home to spend Christmas holidays. He committed the crime while sleeping with the boy on December 21 night.  

Dana M Williams , Pacific Daily News, December 29, 2016

A 15th accuser filed a civil lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Agana on Thursday, saying he was sexually abused by a former priest in 1987.

Washington state resident Edward Roberto Chan, 45, is suing former priest Raymond Cepeda and the archdiocese. According to the lawsuit, Chan became an altar boy in 1983, at the age of 12. When he was 15, he was scheduled to be counseled by Cepeda, who was the priest at the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica.

By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Journal Staff Writer, December 26, 2016, Albuquerque Journal

 SANTA FE, N.M. — A former Archdiocese of Santa Fe priest who surfaced in Morocco this year is the focus of a lawsuit filed last week by a New Mexico man who alleges that he was sexually abused as a teenager by Arthur Perrault at the University of Albuquerque campus.

Another lawsuit filed against the archdiocese last week alleges that a former Las Vegas priest sexually abused seven San Miguel County residents when they were children in the late 1950s and early 1960s.