source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15318725

A Catholic bishop in the US has been charged with covering up suspected child abuse in his diocese, in the first case of its kind in the country.

Bishop Robert Finn, of Kansas City in Missouri, is accused of failing to alert police to a priest who allegedly kept graphic computer images of minors.

Church officials are alleged to have conspired to destroy the evidence.

Bishop Finn has apologised for his handling of the case but denied any wrongdoing.
'Unsuspecting victims'

Prosecutors in Jackson County, Missouri, said Bishop Finn had "reasonable cause" to suspect a child had been abused after becoming aware of the images on the laptop of Reverend Shawn Ratigan.

"Now that the grand jury investigation has resulted in this indictment, my office will pursue this case vigorously because it is about protecting children," Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.

"I want to ensure there are no future failures to report resulting in other unsuspecting victims," he added.

Bishop Finn and his diocese face charges of aiding and abetting the distribution of child pornography.

The diocese had been warned about Reverend Ratigan in May last year, when the head of a school at which he taught wrote that the priest had behaved inappropriately around children.

Then, last December, a computer technician found files on the reverend's laptop, showing graphic images of minors as young as two, mostly girls.

Many of the photos were allegedly taken by Father Ratigan.

Bishop Robert Finn was made aware of the case, but chose not to contact the police.

Instead, he is alleged to have tried to conceal the evidence along with other senior colleagues at the church, by returning the laptop to the brother of Reverend Ratigan.

The police were finally alerted in May of this year.

The defendants have pleaded not guilty - although the Bishop has publicly apologised for his handling of the case.

The BBC's Steve Kingstone in Washington says it is the first such criminal case against a Catholic bishop in the United States.

Rev Shawn Ratigan was charged with producing and possessing child pornography earlier this year.

Source: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/abuse-victims-sue-pope-over-church-stance-20110914-1k84c.html

An international group for victims of sexual abuse by priests say they are suing Pope Benedict XVI through the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said it had filed a complaint calling on the ICC to "take action and prosecute the Pope" for "direct and superior responsibility for the crimes against humanity of rape and other sexual violence committed around the world".

In a statement, SNAP said members from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States had travelled to The Hague to urge prosecutors to investigate the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

The US-based victims network submitted more than 20,000 pages of supporting materials including "reports, policy papers, and evidence of the crimes by Catholic clergy committed against children and vulnerable adults", it said.

SNAP members were accompanied by lawyers from the non-profit US Centre for Constitutional Rights.

"Crimes against tens of thousands of victims, most of them children, are being covered up by officials at the highest level of the Vatican. In this case, all roads really do lead to Rome," the centre's lawyer Pam Spees said in the statement.

Megan Peterson, a 21-year-old SNAP member who spoke publicly of her abuse for the first time last week, called on the ICC to "take this case seriously and do the right thing".

"I don't want any more kids to go through what I went through," she said.

SNAP also requested three high-ranking Vatican officials be investigated: Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, his predecessor Angelo Sodano and US Cardinal William Levada.

Levada is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Vatican office designated to investigate sex abuse cases forwarded to it by bishops.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi refused to comment.

"The Vatican officials charged in this case are responsible for rape and other sexual violence and for the physical and psychological torture of victims around the world both through command responsibility and through direct cover up of crimes," Spees said.

"They should be brought to trial like any other officials guilty of crimes against humanity," she added.

But Herman van der Wilt, professor of international law at Amsterdam University, told AFP he did not think the complaint "stands much of a chance before the ICC".

"Firstly, a prerequisite for crimes against humanity is that it has to be perpetrated by a State, or 'state-like' organisation," he said.

"And secondly because the ICC would not be able to investigate any crimes committed before July 1, 2002, when its mandate commenced according to its founding statute," he added.

SNAP head Barbara Blaine called on victims "across the globe" to "join us".

The association said it was "embarking on a 12-city tour throughout Europe to demand local diocese turn over relevant documents and encourage other victims of sexual abuse by clergy to come forward and provide additional evidence to add to the complaint".

In addition to The Hague, SNAP members will visit Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, London, Dublin, Warsaw and Madrid before returning to Rome to "bring the case to the Vatican's door".

The Roman Catholic Church is struggling to deal with rising anger and a string of lawsuits following thousands of child abuse claims in Europe and the United States.

Pope Benedict has expressed shame and sorrow over the clerical sex scandal and has called on bishops around the world to come up with common guidelines against paedophiles by May 2012.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/us/15bishop.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23

In the annals of the sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, most of the cases that have come to light happened years before to children and teenagers who have long since grown into adults.

But a painfully fresh case is devastating Catholics in Kansas City, Mo., where a priest, who was arrested in May, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of taking indecent photographs of young girls, most recently during an Easter egg hunt just four months ago.

Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph has acknowledged that he knew of the existence of photographs last December but did not turn them over to the police until May.

A civil lawsuit filed last week claims that during those five months, the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, attended children’s birthday parties, spent weekends in the homes of parish families, hosted the Easter egg hunt and presided, with the bishop’s permission, at a girl’s First Communion.

“All these parishioners just feel so betrayed, because we knew nothing,” said Thu Meng, whose daughter attended the preschool in Father Ratigan’s last parish. “And we were welcoming this guy into our homes, asking him to come bless this or that. They saw all these signs, and they didn’t do anything.”

The case has generated fury at a bishop who was already a polarizing figure in his diocese, and there are widespread calls for him to resign or even to be prosecuted. Parishioners started a Facebook page called “Bishop Finn Must Go” and are circulating a petition. An editorial in The Kansas City Star in June calling for the bishop to step down concluded that prosecutors must “actively pursue all relevant criminal charges” against everyone involved.

Stoking much of the anger is the fact that only three years ago, Bishop Finn settled lawsuits with 47 plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases for $10 million and agreed to a long list of preventive measures, among them to immediately report anyone suspected of being a pedophile to law enforcement authorities.

Michael Hunter, an abuse victim who was part of that settlement and is now the president of the Kansas City chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said: “There were 90 nonmonetary agreements that the diocese signed on to, and they were things like reporting immediately to the police. And they didn’t do it. That’s really what sickens us as much as the abuse.”

The bishop has apologized and released a “five-point plan” that he described as “sweeping changes.” He hired an ombudsman to field reports of suspicious behavior and appointed an investigator to conduct an independent review of the events and diocesan policies. The investigator’s report is taking longer than expected and is now due in late August or early September, said Rebecca Summers, director of communications in the diocese.

The bishop also replaced the vicar general involved in the case, Msgr. Robert Murphy, after he was accused of propositioning a young man in 1984. The diocese has delayed a capital fund-raising campaign on the advice of its priests, a move first reported by The National Catholic Reporter.

Bishop Finn, who was appointed in 2005, alienated many of his priests and parishioners, and won praise from others, when he remade the diocese to conform with his traditionalist theological views. He is one of few bishops affiliated with the conservative movement Opus Dei.

He canceled a model program to train Catholic laypeople to be leaders and hired more staff members to recruit candidates for the priesthood. He cut the budget of the Office of Peace and Justice, which focused on poverty and human rights, and created a new Respect Life office to expand the church’s opposition to abortion and stem cell research. He set up a parish for a group of Catholics who prefer to celebrate the old Tridentine Mass in Latin.

Father Ratigan, 45, was also an outspoken conservative, according to a profile in The Kansas City Star. He and a class of Catholic school students joined Bishop Finn for the bus ride to the annual March for Life rally in Washington in 2007.

The diocese was first warned about Father Ratigan’s inappropriate interest in young girls as far back as 2006, according to accusations in the civil lawsuit filed Thursday. But there were also more recent warnings.

In May 2010, the principal of a Catholic elementary school where Father Ratigan worked hand-delivered a letter to the vicar general reporting specific episodes that had raised alarms: the priest put a girl on his lap during a bus ride and allowed children to reach into his pants pockets for candy. When a Brownie troop visited Father Ratigan’s house, a parent reported finding a pair of girl’s panties in a planter, the letter said.

Bishop Finn said at a news conference that he was given a “brief verbal summary” of the letter at the time, but did not read it until a year later.

In December, a computer technician discovered the photographs on Father Ratigan’s laptop and turned it in to the diocese. The next day, the priest was discovered in his closed garage, his motorcycle running, along with a suicide note apologizing to the children, their families and the church.

Father Ratigan survived, was taken to a hospital and was then sent to live at a convent in the diocese, where, the lawsuit and the indictment say, he continued to have contact with children.

Parents in the school and parishioners were told only that Father Ratigan had fallen sick from carbon monoxide poisoning. They were stunned when he was arrested in May.

“My daughter made cards for him,” said one parent who did not want her name used because the police said her daughter might have been a victim. “We prayed for him every single night at dinner. It was just lying to us and a complete cover-up.”

A federal grand jury last Tuesday charged Father Ratigan with 13 counts of possessing, producing and attempting to produce child pornography. It accused him of taking lewd pictures of the genitalia of five girls ages 2 to 12, sometimes while they slept. If convicted, he would face a minimum of 15 years in prison.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-14224199

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has launched an unprecedented attack in parliament on the Catholic Church.

He said the recent Cloyne Report into how allegations of sex abuse by priests in Cork had been covered up showed change was urgently needed.

Mr Kenny said the historic relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again.

He said the report exposed the elitism, dysfunction, disconnection, and narcissism that dominated the Vatican.

"The rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and 'reputation'," the taoiseach said.
'Unprecedented'

"The revelations of the Cloyne Report have brought the government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture."

Opposition leader Micheal Martin said that when he met the Papal Nuncio after the Murphy report into the cover-up of abuse in the Dublin diocese in 2009, he told him the government expected the full cooperation of the Vatican into the Cloyne inquiry.

However, he said, the Vatican chose to focus on the interests of the church rather than the children abused by its clergy and shielded by its leaders.

During the debate, the church was called upon to publish the audits currently being sent to every Catholic diocese in the country.

Sinn Fein spokesperson on health and children Caoimhghin O'Caolain said the government should consider coordinating with the Northern Ireland Executive on any future inquiries - particularly as four of the Catholic dioceses straddle the border.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/world/irish-child-abuse-report-attacks-vatican-and-powerful-bishop-20110714-1hfzy.html

A DEVASTATING report into clerical child abuse in an Irish Catholic diocese has accused the Vatican of being ''entirely unhelpful'' in dealing with allegations of sexual exploitation.

It singled out an Irish bishop, who was the confidant of three popes, for deliberately misleading authorities in the Republic of Ireland about the church's internal inquiries into children's claims that priests were abusing them.

The investigation into the diocese of Cloyne, which includes County Cork, said Bishop John Magee had little interest in the way sex abuse cases were handled until 2008, when the scandal became international news.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/irish-child-abuse-report-attacks-vatican-and-powerful-bishop-20110714-1hfzy.html#ixzz1SRCswiO0

Bishop Magee was an extremely powerful figure, not only in the Irish church, but also in Rome. He was the first official on the scene when John Paul I was found dead in his quarters.

The Commission of Investigation report also said Rome's decision to brand a document on child sexual abuse as unofficial allowed individual bishops ''the freedom to ignore'' strict guidelines on protecting children.

The 431-page report examined allegations made against 19 priests in the diocese between 1996 and 2000.

The report follows other damning reports in other dioceses that found a culture of cover-ups and denial in the church hierarchy.

In stinging criticism of Bishop Magee, who resigned in March 2010, the report said: ''It is a remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008, 12 years after the framework document was adopted. Bishop Magee was the head of the diocese and cannot avoid his responsibility by blaming subordinates who he wholly failed to supervise,'' it said.

The inquiry said the fact that some child sexual abuse allegations were not reported to police was the diocese's ''greatest failure''.

There were 15 cases between 1996 and 2005 which should have been reported. Yet police were not told about nine cases.

The most serious lapse was the failure to report the two cases in which the alleged victims were minors. Andrew Madden, a victim of sexual abuse while an altar boy in the Dublin archdiocese, said the report proved that ''with occasional exceptions, Catholic bishops cannot be trusted with allegations of child sexual abuse''.

❏ Germany's Catholic Church said it would open its archives to independent researchers in a bid to shed light on all aspects of cases of sexual abuse by priests.

''We want to uncover the truth which might still lie as yet undiscovered in the archives,'' Stephan Ackermann, the bishop of Trier, said in a statement.

Bishop Ackermann said the Church would open its complete archives, which date back to 1945, from nine of its dioceses.

It would also release a cross-section of documents from the other 18 dioceses, dating back to 2000, to researchers.

''It's not just a question of enabling researchers to compile statistics and numbers, but to examine the causes with the help of independent experts so as to better understand how we got into this monstrous sexual abuse by priests and church workers,'' he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/irish-child-abuse-report-attacks-vatican-and-powerful-bishop-20110714-1hfzy.html#ixzz1SRCymGxn

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/us/11priest.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23

WINSLOW, Ariz. — Alfred Moya was stopping at a restaurant in rural Gallup, N.M., on his way home to Phoenix in the summer of 2007 when he happened to glance at a newspaper article about children who had been sexually abused by a priest.

Suddenly, his thoughts flashed to his own days as an altar boy in nearby Holbrook, Ariz., and the town’s charismatic priest, the Rev. Clement A. Hageman. “And then I started remembering,” he would later recount, according to court documents.

Over the past few years, a growing number of predominantly Hispanic men from the string of dusty towns along Route 66 in Arizona have stepped forward, alleging that Father Hageman sexually abused them as boys when he worked in local parishes from the early 1940s until his death in 1975.

A recent study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops found the rise of sexual abuse in the church coincided with the social and sexual tumult of the 1960s and ’70s. But the story of Father Hageman, as told through recently released church documents chronicling his troubles, begins much earlier.

Indeed, the priest has long haunted the deeply Catholic Hispanic communities around Holbrook, Winslow and Kingman, Ariz. His accusers said that he was “dumped” in impoverished, nonwhite communities by church officials to avoid scandal, an assertion that has emerged in other recent abuse cases.

“The premise we’ve been hearing is that the evidence is dead, the people are dead and that this was a problem of the ’60s and ’70s,” said Patrick Wall, a former priest and canon lawyer who investigated abuse cases for the church and now helps victims. “This case cracks open a door that has been closed for 60 years.”

Mr. Moya, 70, is believed to be the first to file a lawsuit against the Catholic Church over the priest’s alleged abuse, which dates to a time when the poor pockets of Mexican-Americans who lived here dared not question the local priest. His lawyer, Robert E. Pastor, said he expected to file a second suit next month on behalf of at least two more local men who say they, too, were abused by the priest. And Mr. Pastor said nine others settled with the Diocese of Gallup, N.M., over claims involving Father Hageman.

“This priest was so proficient, he abused everywhere he went,” Mr. Pastor said.

Filed in Coconino County Superior Court last August, Mr. Moya’s lawsuit names the Diocese of Gallup, which oversaw the churches where Father Hageman spent much of his career, as a defendant. It also names the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Tex., and the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, N.M., which the lawsuit contends were involved in the priest’s placements.

The suit alleges that Father Hageman started sexually abusing Mr. Moya when he was 12 and that church officials in all three dioceses covered up the priest’s behavior.

The Corpus Christi and Santa Fe dioceses have sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing they were not responsible for supervising Father Hageman after he was transferred to Arizona. In a statement, the Corpus Christi Diocese said that the accusations did not involve any current member of the clergy or church worker associated with them.

The Gallup Diocese, meanwhile, responded in court filings that it lacked “sufficient knowledge or information” to know if Mr. Moya’s accusations were true. Moreover, the diocese argued that Mr. Moya’s claims against it should be barred because Father Hageman’s alleged abuse was “completely outside the scope of his employment as a Roman Catholic priest.”

Robert P. Warburton, a lawyer for both the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the Gallup Diocese, declined to discuss the case, stating in a letter last week that further files on the priest, requested by Mr. Pastor, do not exist.

Father Clem, as parishioners called him, was born in Glandorf, Ohio, and ordained at age 25. He spent much of his life working at six rural parishes in New Mexico and Arizona, and church records recall him as popular.

But there are other memories.

“We’d all be playing on the playground, and he’d come walking, point at one of us, and move his finger to come with him inside the rectory,” recalled Joseph Baca, a Winslow man who says he was raped and molested repeatedly by Father Hageman and whose claims were detailed in an affidavit taken during settlement negotiations with the Gallup Diocese. “At first, I thought I was the only one.”

After Mr. Baca came forward, Bishop Donald E. Pelotte of Gallup apologized in 2005 for crimes committed by clergy members, calling Father Hageman and another clergyman two of the “most abusive priests of the diocese,” according to news reports at the time.

Mr. Pastor pointed to the recently released documents on Father Hageman as evidence that diocesan officials knew the priest was troubled.

In one letter from December 1940, the bishop of Gallup asked a colleague his opinion of the priest and relayed the archbishop of Santa Fe’s concern that Father Hageman “was guilty of playing with boys.”

In another, to the bishop of Gallup in 1952, Father Hageman describes being confronted by two men over his actions: “I had been drinking and perhaps while under the influence of liquor, I might have been imprudent in my dealings with boys.”

The release of such extensive documents, which came during the lawsuit, is unusual, according to experts on abuse in the church. “I believe this is the most extensive and longest sex abuse file that has ever been made public by the Catholic Church,” said Joelle Casteix, Western regional director for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

Recently in Winslow, Mr. Baca was joined by three middle-age Hispanic men who spoke of being abused by the priest. The men once attended Madre de Dios, a tiny church on the edge of town where Father Hageman worked that is ringed by ramshackle homes and a vacant field.

All but one said they had reached settlements with the Gallup Diocese. None would disclose the amount. The men also told of living broken lives in the shadow of what they said happened to them.

That afternoon, Mr. Baca and some of the men walked the grounds of their old church. One, who gave only his first name, Paul, because he had not spoken publicly about his case, motioned toward a door to the church’s sacristy. After Mass, Father Hageman locked it so the altar boys could not leave, Paul recalled.

“I don’t come here anymore,” he said.

Source: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/19/onetime-priest-now-crusades-for-abuse-victims-suing-catholic-church/?hpt=hp_c2

(CNN) - As a young man studying for the priesthood, Patrick Wall imagined life as a professor and football coach at a Catholic university.

It didn't work out that way. Two decades later, Wall has not only left the Catholic Church, he has become one of its most tireless opponents.

He's an ex-priest, driven from ministry by the feeling that his superiors used him to help cover up sex abuse by other clergymen.

And he's using the training he gained as a priest to work with victims of abuse who want to take the church to court.

Since 1991, Wall says he has consulted on more than 1,000 abuse cases, helping lawyers pick apart defenses mounted by dioceses from Alaska to Australia.

Now a senior consultant at the law firm of Manly and Stewart in Southern California, Wall spoke to CNN on the sidelines of a recent conference for legal and religion scholars at Cardiff Law School in Wales.

In Philadelphia, where four priests and a Catholic school teacher were indicted on sex abuse charges earlier this year, Wall says he is helping the district attorney build an unprecedented criminal case not only against the clergy, but against an archdiocesan official who supervised them. The priests – one of whom is the church official – and the teacher have denied the allegations.

The case is potentially historic. Wall doesn't know of another case where a U.S. prosecutor has gone after an official at the top of the church hierarchy as well as the suspected abusers themselves.

Prosecutors are trying to convict a vicar – the man who supervised the priests in the archdiocese – with child endangerment because they say he allowed suspected abusers to have contact with young people.

The case raises the possibility that a high-ranking church official will end up behind bars.

Wall hopes the threat of prison time will change the way American bishops respond to abuse allegations in a way that civil lawsuits have not.

"In the civil cases, we have taken over $3 billion, but you're not getting a lot of change in the system," he says.

There has been more than a decade of intense focus on abuse by priests across the United States and Western Europe, plus lawsuits, investigations, and Vatican statements, including instructions to bishops around the world just last month to come up with an abuse policy.

And even so, Wall says, priests are still abusing children.

"I'm working on stuff that happened in the summer of 2010," he says. "It's the same old sodomy."

A life-changing assignment

Wall was studying to be a priest at Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, when there was a life-changing knock on his door one morning after breakfast.

At his door that day in 1990 was the head of the abbey, Abbot Jerome Theisen, with an assignment, Wall says.

Wall, then 25, was to move into one of the freshman dormitories at the university associated with the abbey. The abbot wanted him to become a faculty resident, a staff position that involved keeping an eye on first-year university students in college housing. He was to make the move immediately, that very morning.

Wall knew why.

"Starting in 1989, we started getting hit with lawsuit after lawsuit" from people alleging that priests had abused them, Wall says. He says the abbot told him that credible abuse accusations had been made against the man Wall was to replace.

Brother Paul Richards, a spokesman for Saint John's Abbey, said that the monastery and university had no record of why Wall was asked to work in the dorm. Abbot Theisen has died, Richards added.

Saint John's Abbey adopted a policy on sexual abuse and exploitation in 1989, it says on its website, saying that made it “among the first institutions to adopt” such a policy.

Wall, for his part, says the abbot's request put him on the road to becoming what the church unofficially calls a "fixer," a person who parachutes in to replace clergy who have to disappear quickly and quietly.

One of Theisen's successors, Abbot John Klassen, issued an open letter of apology in 2002, saying that "some members" of the monastic community had engaged in "abusive sexual behavior with people in our schools and parishes."

A lawsuit was filed earlier this month against Saint John's by a man who says he was abused in the 1960s by a priest who later served as abbot between Theisen and Klassen. The abbey says it was “shocked” by the charges against the late Abbot Timothy Kelly, who died of cancer last year.

It says it is investigating the claims against Kelly, calling them “the first allegations that Abbot Kelly violated his vows or was an abuser.”

Wall plans to testify in that case, he told CNN.

"In the fall of '92 we had another 13 [abuse] cases come through," Wall says. "They pushed up my ordination" by a few months, Wall says, so he could step into the shoes of another priest who had to vanish.

Understanding the damage

It was after his ordination, Wall says, that he began to understand the trauma that abusive priests were inflicting, not only on their victims but on victims' families and communities.

As a new priest, Wall started hearing confessions of victims' relatives who blamed themselves for the abuse, telling Wall "I should have known, I should have seen the signs."

A heavy-set man who laughs easily, Wall still looks like the linebacker he was in high school and college. He peppers his speech with words like "dude" and casually refers to people who he thinks have done something stupid as "morons."

But relating the confessions of victims' relatives, Wall's cheerful demeanor hardens.

"I'm telling them, 'You haven't committed a sin,'" he says.

Wall says that child abuse isn't like other injury cases, such as car crashes, in which a victim might be 10% at fault. Instead, he says, "100% of the blame is on the perpetrator."

Over the next four years, Wall says that the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis sent him to four more places in Minnesota where priests needed to move out fast.

He learned a lot. Wall says he saw that there was a budget for handling cases of priestly sexual abuse as far back as 1994, eight years before the scandal blew up nationally with revelations about abuse in Boston, Massachusetts. The archdiocese could not immediately confirm that, but spokesman Dennis McGrath said he would not be surprised if it was true, saying the archdiocese had been a leader in helping victims of abuse.

Wall did what the church told him to do for as long as he could, he says, but his doubts continued to grow.

"I followed the party line," he says. "But it's pretty hard to follow the party line when you don't think the party line is moral any more."

The breaking point came in 1997. Wall was in Rome, studying for a master's of divinity degree. His abbot called from Minnesota to tell him he was being posted to the Bahamas.

It was not the dream job it might sound like.

Wall says that the Bahamas was where Saint John's was sending priests it had to keep away from people because of abuse allegations. Richards, the abbey's spokesman, flatly denies the charge.

"I basically was going to be a prison warden," Wall says.

"Without much planning, I said, 'Basta cosi,'" he says, lapsing into Minnesota-accented Italian meaning, "Enough of this." Wall had decided to leave the priesthood.

The abbot did not take that well, Wall says, warning that he would never make it in "the real world," that he would not be released from his priestly vows and that the order would bill him for the master's degree it had sponsored for him. The tab for the degree was about $48,000, he says.

Richards denies those allegations. "It has never been the abbey's practice to require payback for education from members of our community who have left," he says, "and it was not the case with Pat Wall."

Wall says the abbot's threats did not change his mind.

"All it did is piss me off even more," he says. "I left without a plan in December 1997."

Insider knowledge

Wall says he went home to Lake City, Minnesota to live with his parents, then bounced from job to job for nearly five years. He got married and had a daughter. He made good money as a salesman in Southern California but says he found the work as intellectually stimulating as "shovelling dirt."

And then, in 2002, the California state legislature did something that would change Wall's life. The state opened a one-year window to allow victims of clergy abuse to sue the church, even if the if the statute of limitations on the case had already expired.

Wall's eyes light up as he discusses the moment.

The law did not specifically target the Catholic Church, Wall says, noting that some rabbis were sued as well. But Catholic organizations were by far the largest group of defendants.

Still, suing a Catholic diocese was no easy task. "The litigation demanded a level of expertise that had never been needed before," Wall says.

Because of his religious training in canon law, as the Catholic Church's rules are known, Wall had that expertise. He knew how and where the church kept records. He knew where money came from and where it went. He spoke Italian and Latin.

In his first case, he testified against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, California, challenging its claim that it did not know the Franciscan friar at the center of abuse allegations.

Wall insisted that the archdiocese and any priest in it would have easy access to church records saying who the Franciscan was and who had jurisdiction over him.

The case settled out of court, Wall says.

The Diocese of Orange declined to comment for this article, as did the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which is the defendant in several cases currently involving Wall’s firm, Manly and Stewart.

Jeffrey Lena, a lawyer who represents the Vatican in the United States, also declined to comment.

But Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota-based lawyer who specializes in suing the Catholic Church on behalf of abuse victims and filed the suit against Saint John's Abbey, is full of praise for Wall.

Anderson calls Wall “an extraordinary researcher, academic and hands-on voice of experience from the inside.”

He praises the former priest's “courage,” and says he is a “powerful, insightful source of information based on his own personal experience and his study of the phenomenon” of abuse.

An old problem

Wall argues that the problem of abuse by priests is far older than anyone in the church admits publicly.

The earliest church records concerning sexual misconduct by priests come from the Council of Elvira, he says. That synod took place in what is now Spain in the year 309.

There was a treatment center for abusive priests in Hartford, Connecticut, as far back as 1822, Wall says, and the Vatican issued instructions to American bishops on how to judge and punish accusations of criminal acts by priests as far back as 1883.

Wall provided his translation of the 1883 instructions to CNN. They do not refer to any specific crimes, but refer to “abuses” and “evils.” They set out how to investigate, judge and punish crimes by priests, laying out rules such as the examination of witnesses in private, and the opportunity for the accused to know the charges and to respond and appeal.

The Philadelphia district attorney's office declined to comment on assistance it is receiving from Wall, saying it was prevented by court order from discussing the case with the media.

But Wall says that years of seeing how the Catholic Church handles abuse cases have convinced him that the church will not solve the problem itself.

He says he's not impressed by new instructions from Rome last month giving bishops around the world a year to come up with procedures for handling allegations of abuse.

"It's a Circular Letter," he says, using the official church term for the document. "That means it's for the circular file. Bishops are going to throw it away."

Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops revised its 2002 charter around dealing with sex abuse allegations to reflect the Vatican's new standards.

Wall believes the Catholic Church will survive this scandal.

"It's going to fix itself," he says.

"The institution is going to become radically smaller" as people abandon the church, he predicts. "The loss of membership, the problems in the criminal courts, the statements from the pope - these are all good."

Perpetrators need "access, power and money" in order to commit crimes and get away with them, Wall argues. A smaller, weaker Catholic Church won't be able to provide those things, making it less of a haven for abusers, he says, which will lead to a cleansed institution.

In the meantime, Wall says, the church should give up trying to handle abusers internally and let the law step in.

He recommends that the church "completely get out" of child protection, hand over all its files to civil law enforcement, and make bishops sign a legal oath every year that there are no perpetrators in the ministry - which would open them to criminal prosecution if they are found to have lied.

"Otherwise," he says, "I'll be prosecuting priest sex abuse cases for the rest of my life."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13621325

Dozens of Belgians who say they were abused as children by Roman Catholic priests have announced the launch of a legal case against the Vatican.

They accuse the Vatican and the Belgian Church of negligence by turning a blind eye to sexual abuse.

On Monday, the Belgian Catholic Church said it was willing to pay compensation to victims of abuse by clergy.

About 500 cases of alleged abuse by Catholic clergy in Belgium have been registered since last year.

Lawyers representing at least 70 plaintiffs said a summons would be served calling on Vatican officials and Belgian bishops to appear before a court in Ghent.

The text of the summons is being translated into Italian before being delivered to the Vatican.

One of the lawyers, Christine Mussche, said the offer of compensation by the Belgian church was positive, but for the moment "no more than words".

One of the plaintiffs, journalist and author Roel Verschueren, said: "We've all been living for years with a church which is in denial. Now we're turning the situation around."

There was no immediate comment from the Vatican.

An independent commission reported last year that abuse by Catholic priests had occurred in every Belgian diocese over several decades, though it found no indication that the Church had systematically sought to cover up cases.

Last year, a man who said he was the victim of an American paedophile priest launched a suit against the Pope and the Vatican in a US federal court.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110429/ap_on_re_eu/eu_belgium_church_abuse%3B_ylt%3DAouFaPNj8kOnZYsK8hgmQSWs0NUE%3B_ylu%3DX3oDMTFiZDM4YnBjBHBvcwM1MwRzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9uX3dvcmxkBHNsawM3MGJlbGdpYW5zZXg

BRUSSELS – A group of 70 people claiming to be sexual abuse victims of clergy will take Vatican and Belgian church officials to court, claiming they offered them insufficient protection from pedophile priests.

Lawyer Walter Van Steenbrugge said Friday he will lodge the complaint in about two weeks. He said religious officials, including the pope, had failed to take proper action to prevent such abuse.

The Belgian church got involved in a major abuse scandal last year when Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe was forced to resign after he admitted he abused for 13 years his young nephew. Later, hundreds of victims came forward with tales of abuse by clergy going back decades.

source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12868046

An order of US Catholic priests has agreed to pay $166.1m (£103.3m) to hundreds of Native Americans sexually abused by priests at its schools.

The former students at Jesuit schools in five states of the north-western US said they were abused from the 1940s through the 1990s.

Under a settlement, the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province, will also apologise to the victims.

The order had argued paying out abuse claims would cause it to go bankrupt.

"It's a day of reckoning and justice," Clarita Vargas, who said she and two sisters were abused by a priest at a Jesuit-run school for Native American children in the state of Washington, told the Associated Press.

"My spirit was wounded, and this makes it feel better."

The province ran schools in the states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

Most of the alleged victims were Native American. Much of the alleged abuse occurred on Native reservations and in remote villages, where the order was accused of dumping problem priests.

"No amount of money can bring back a lost childhood, a destroyed culture or a shattered faith," lawyer Blaine Tamaki, who represented about 90 victims in the case, said in a statement.

The pay-out is one of the largest to date in a series of sex abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church.