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A child abuse inquiry witness has told how he was raped by priests during "satanic" drink-fuelled sex parties. Dave Sharp also described a catalogue of sexual, physical and emotional violence at St Ninian's in Falkland, Fife, between 1971 and 1975.

As the U.S. bishops prepare to meet next week for their general assembly in Baltimore, they must be hoping it won’t be a repeat of this one.

(RNS) — New questions about how Catholic leaders deal with sexual misconduct arose Tuesday (June 4) after a Texas woman claimed in a news report that church officials in Houston allowed a priest with whom she had a sexual relationship to continue in ministry at a parish two hours away.

The U.S. Catholic Church spent $10.6 million on lobbyists to prevent victims of clerical sex abuse from suing for damages.

CLEVELAND-- It’s a crime that’s violent, traumatizing and often goes unreported. On Monday, Ohio’s highest law enforcement official announced a proposal to eliminate the statute of limitations for rape. Under current Ohio law, a person who commits rape, cannot be prosecuted for the crime after 20 years have passed.

During the fall of 2017, along with the rest of the country, Jules Woodson watched the Me Too movement play out in the media. As women came forward to expose the predatory behavior they’d survived, the Colorado Springs-based flight attendant reflected on a night in 1998, when Andy Savage, the youth pastor at her local church in her hometown of The Woodlands, Tex., offered her a ride home. At some point, Woodson says, Savage passed the turn to her home and drove down a dirt road, where he reached a dead end and switched off the headlights. He unzipped his jeans and asked Woodson, then 17, to perform oral sex. A few minutes later, she says, Savage jumped from the truck, fell to his knees and told Woodson she must take what happened to the grave.

Victims of sexual abuse can never appeal their sentence. They have to live with the results of abuse for the rest of their lives.

In the shadow of the Washington Monument, the messages were scrawled in Sharpie, stitched in yarn, written in paint. There were thousands of them, woven onto red quilts that stretched across the length of four football fields:

Washington D.C., May 31, 2019 / 08:30 am (CNA).- The U.S. bishops’ conference has released its annual report on the protection of children. The report records an increase in the number of new allegations of clerical sexual abuse being brought forward following the launch of independent compensation programs in some states.

When one of the longest-serving Western Massachusetts bishops was accused of child sexual abuse, a successor rose to his defense.