Prince Philip hot under the collar over new book about his friend James Robertson. Photo: Telegraph

Prince Philip, James Robertson Justice and the sex that was too hot to handle

Telegraph | Jan 1, 2010

by Tim Walker

My disclosure yesterday about how the Duke of Edinburgh had prevailed upon the author James Hogg to omit some of the more lurid details about the sex life of his old friend James Robertson Justice in a biography amused Molly Parkin, the painter, whose virginity the much-loved actor took when she was 22.

“I don’t think James would have minded,” said Molly, 78. “He had a most extraordinary appetite for sex and was prepared to try anything.”

Once, at a meeting of the notorious Thursday Club, the actor told a gathering that included Prince Philip and Larry Adler, the harmonica player, that he didn’t see why there was such a fuss about boys being “deflowered” at public schools. He admitted that he had been, at Marlborough, and felt it had done him no harm at all.

Adler asked him if any of the other boys had watched. “Why on earth would they want to do that?” the actor boomed. Adler replied: “So that Justice was not only done, but seen to be done.”

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Valerine Singleton is feeling a bit Blue

Mandrake seems to see more of old Blue Peter teams on the television these days than when they were actually fronting the programme in their heydays.

Valerie Singleton was herself surprised when she popped up on The Weakest Link over Christmas. “I was in the kitchen and I could hear a lot of questions being asked about Blue Peter,” she says. “It was only when I went into the television room that I realised it was me. I think it must have been a repeat as I haven’t done any television for a while. Unfortunately I don’t get repeat fees.” Alas, she missed her former colleague Peter Purves on Eggheads on BBC Two.

1950 b/w file photo of 10 year old twins Brian Thomas Sullivan (left) and Kevin James Sullivan from Islington, London, who carry their luggage to the boat train ‘Rangitoto’ as they leave Liverpool Street station in London bound for Auckland, New Zealand. Britain and Australia are saying sorry to thousands of British children who were promised a better life overseas, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will apologize for 20th-century child migrant programs that saw thousands of poor British children sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until the 1960s. Many ended up in institutions or were sent to work as farm laborers. (AP Photo / pa File)

Australia apologizes to Brit kids sent to colonies

Associated Press | Nov 16, 2009

by Rod Mcguirk And Jill Lawless

CANBERRA, Australia – When John Hennessey was 10 years old, he was sent from a war-weary Britain to an orphanage in Australia, where he was told food was plentiful and children rode kangaroos to school.

Instead, he was beaten and sexually abused, leaving him emotionally scarred and with a stutter that persists 60 years later.

“There’s no other country in the world that has deported their children to the other side of the world and then abandoned them,” the 72-year-old said before an emotional ceremony Monday in Australia, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized for his country’s role in a shameful episode in British colonial history.

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“They stole our innocence,” he added, calling his caretakers in Australia “a ring of pedophiles.”

Rudd acknowledged the deep wounds inflicted by the programs that sent an estimated 150,000 British children to distant colonies — intending to ease pressure on post-World War II Britain’s social services, provide orphaned or abandoned children with a fresh start and supply the empire with a sturdy supply of white workers. Rudd extended condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the programs who still live in Australia, many of whom grew up in institutions where they were physically and sexually abused or were sent to work as farm laborers.

“We are sorry,” Rudd said. “Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy — the absolute tragedy — of childhoods lost.”

The ceremony at Parliament House comes one day after the British government said Prime Minister Gordon Brown would apologize next year for the child migrant programs, which lasted from 1618 to 1967. After 1920, most of the children went to Australia.

Rudd also apologized to the “forgotten Australians” — children who suffered while in state care during the last century. According to a 2004 Australian Senate report, more than 500,000 children were placed in foster homes, orphanages and other institutions during the 20th century. Many were emotionally, physically and sexually abused.

After Rudd spoke, Hennessey climbed the stage to show the prime minister a framed photograph of his mother, May Mary Hennessey, who handed her 4-week-old son over to nuns at an English Roman Catholic orphanage because she was not married. In 1947, the Irish order of Christian Brothers offered to take care of him and other supposed orphans in Australia.

“They said to us kangaroos will take us to school, there’s food everywhere, and we said: ‘of course we’ll go’ — little did we know it was on the other side of the world,” Hennessey said.

Sparsely populated Australia’s close shave with Japanese invasion during World War II inspired a national motto of “populate or perish” and triggered a wave of Australian government-assisted migration from Europe.

Australia had an immigration policy that favored British and white immigrants until the 1970s.

“The Archbishop met us at Fremantle (in Western Australia),” Hennessey said. “I can still remember his words. He said: ‘Welcome to Australia. We want white stock because we’re terrified of the yellow peril.’”

A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry, meanwhile, noted “a further motive was racist: the importation of ‘good white stock’ was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies.”

When Hennessey arrived in Boys Town orphanage — now an elite private school in the farming village of Bindoon, 55 miles (90 kilometers) north of the western city of Perth — the boys slept for more than a year on thin mattresses and iron beds on verandahs until they built their own dormitories.

“When it rained and was windy, we’d get wet and yet the brothers were inside tucked away in their lovely warm beds,” Hennessey said.

Hennessey said his stutter began with a particularly violent and harrowing assault at the orphanage when he was 12 years old. He was stripped naked and nearly beaten to death by the headmaster for eating grapes he had taken from a vineyard without permission because he was hungry.

“What terrified me most was that in my mind I thought: ‘That’s my father. What’s he doing?’ I had nobody else, and he was the one I’d looked up to,” Hennessey said.

He left Boys Town at the age of 17 and became a house painter and decorator in Campbelltown, 40 miles (70 kilometers) southwest of Sydney on the east coast.

After a 13-year search, he was reunited with his mother in England in 1999, when she was 86. She had eventually married, but three pregnancies subsequent to Hennessey’s birth had ended in miscarriages.

Hennessey said he never told his mother, who died in 2005, about the abuse he’d suffered.

“It was bad enough me not being there, but if she realized I was sexually abused and physically abused, you could image how she’d think because she had a guilt complex,” Hennessey said through reddened eyes.

Andrew Murray, a former Australian senator who was sent from Britain to an orphanage in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, called on Australia to pay reparations.

British High Commissioner Valerie Amos said her government had not yet addressed the compensation question, though Britain has been trying to make amends since the late 1990s by funding trips to reunite migrants with their families in Britain.

Brown’s office said officials would consult with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology.

Frédéric Mitterrand wrote about paying “young boys” for sex during trips abroad  Photo: AP

Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, was under pressure to resign after it emerged that he had admitted to paying “young boys” for sexual acts while on holiday in Thailand.

Telegraph | Oct 7, 2009

Frédéric Mitterrand admitted to paying for sex with ‘young boys’ in Thailand

By Henry Samuel in Paris

The revelations in his 2005 autobiography “The Bad Life” have come back to haunt Mr Mitterrand after he emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of Roman Polanski, the film director currently detained in Switzerland in connection with an outstanding conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in the US in 1977.

In his book, Mr Mitterrand, the nephew of the late Socialist president François Mitterrand, wrote: “I got into the habit of paying for boys…All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excite me enormously.

“One could judge this abominable spectacle from a moral standpoint but it pleases me beyond the reasonable.”

Curiously, there was little outcry when the book was published in 2005. However, Mr Mitterrand’s tastes were brought to the fore on Monday by Marine Le Pen, daughter of the far-right National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, on a political chat show.

Miss Le Pen read out a passage in which Mr Mitterrand wrote: “The profusion of very attractive and immediately available young boys puts me in a state of desire that I no longer need to hinder nor hide…as I know that I will not be refused.”

Her call for his resignation has become an internet hit.

On Tuesday, the opposition Socialists joined the chorus of outrage. Benoît Hamon, the party spokesman, said: “As a minister of culture he has drawn attention to himself by defending a film maker and he has written a book where he said he took advantage of sexual tourism. To say the least, I find it shocking.”

Mr Mitterrand responded on Tuesday by saying he was “flabbergasted”.

“If the National Front drag me through the mud then it is an honour for me.

“If a leftist politician drags me through the mud then it is a humiliation for him,” he added.

Xavier Bertrand, the head of Mr Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party, defended Mr Mitterrand. “The Socialists are now on the same ground as the extreme right, it’s incredible. One is not obliged to use private life for political ends,” he said.

Mr Mitterrand, who joined the cabinet in June, was considered a great catch for Mr Sarkozy and proof of his “open” style of government; the minister comes from a grand Socialist family and is admired by many in the Left-wing cultural establishment. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the first lady, was said to have had a hand in his nomination.

Politicians from across the spectrum criticised his vitriolic attack on the arrest of Mr Polanski, a French citizen who US authorities wish to extradite over his 1977 conviction. Mr Mitterrand initially described the pursuit of the director as “callous” and “absolutely horrifying”, but then toned down his criticism.

“Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls, while government inspectors failed to stop the abuse.

guardian.co.uk | Sep 28, 2009

by Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent, and Anushka Asthana

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was “busy cleaning its own house” and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that “available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.

He also quoted statistics from the Christian Scientist Monitor newspaper to show that most US churches being hit by child sex abuse allegations were Protestant and that sexual abuse within Jewish communities was common.

He added that sexual abuse was far more likely to be committed by family members, babysitters, friends, relatives or neighbours, and male children were quite often guilty of sexual molestation of other children.

The statement said that rather than paedophilia, it would “be more correct” to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.

“Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

The statement concluded: “As the Catholic church has been busy cleaning its own house, it would be good if other institutions and authorities, where the major part of abuses are reported, could do the same and inform the media about it.”

The Holy See launched its counter–attack after an international representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Keith Porteous Wood, accused it of covering up child abuse and being in breach of several articles under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Porteous Wood said the Holy See had not contradicted any of his accusations. “The many thousands of victims of abuse deserve the international community to hold the Vatican to account, something it has been unwilling to do, so far. Both states and children’s organisations must unite to pressurise the Vatican to open its files, change its procedures worldwide, and report suspected abusers to civil authorities.”

Representatives from other religions were dismayed by the Holy See’s attempts to distance itself from controversy by pointing the finger at other faiths.

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, head of the New York Board of Rabbis, said: “Comparative tragedy is a dangerous path on which to travel. All of us need to look within our own communities. Child abuse is sinful and shameful and we must expel them immediately from our midst.”

A spokesman for the US Episcopal Church said measures for the prevention of sexual misconduct and the safeguarding of children had been in place for years.

Of all the world religions, Roman Catholicism has been hardest hit by sex abuse scandals. In the US, churches have paid more than $2bn (£1.25bn) in compensation to victims. In Ireland, reports into clerical sexual abuse have rocked both the Catholic hierarchy and the state.

The Ryan Report, published last May, revealed that beatings and humiliation by nuns and priests were common at institutions that held up to 30,000 children. A nine-year investigation found that Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls, while government inspectors failed to stop the abuse.

Gianni Bisoli, foreground, has accused Verona’s late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro, of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a boy attending Verona’s Provolo Institute for the deaf. Carraro is being considered for beatification.Photo: Luca Bruno, AP

“How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me? You couldn’t tell your parents because the priests would beat you.”

In a shift for the Vatican, Scicluna acknowledged that priestly sex abuse was an age-old problem.

Associated Press | Sep 13, 2009

By Nicole Winfield

VERONA, Italy — It happened night after night, the deaf man said, sometimes in the priest’s bedroom, sometimes in the bathroom, even in the confessional.

When he was a young boy at a Catholic-run institute for the deaf, Alessandro Vantini said, priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel “as if I were dead.” This year, he and dozens of other former students did something highly unusual for Italy: They went public with claims they were forced to perform sex acts with priests.

For decades, a culture of silence has surrounded priest abuse in Italy, where surveys show the church is considered one of the country’s most respected institutions. Now, in the Vatican’s backyard, a movement to air and root out abusive priests is slowly and fitfully taking hold.

A year-long Associated Press tally has documented 73 cases with allegations of sexual abuse by priests against minors over the past decade in Italy, with more than 235 victims. The tally was compiled from local media reports, linked to by websites of victims groups and blogs. Almost all the cases have come out in the seven years since the scandal about Roman Catholic priest abuse broke in the United States.

The numbers in Italy are still a mere trickle compared to the hundreds of cases in the court systems of the United States and Ireland. And according to the AP tally, the Italian church has so far had to pay only a few hundred thousand euros (dollars) in civil damages to the victims, compared to $2.6 billion in abuse-related costs for the American diocese or $1.5 billion due to victims in Ireland.

However, the numbers still stand out in a country where reports of clerical sex abuse were virtually unknown a decade ago. They point to an increasing willingness among the Italian public and — slowly — within the Vatican itself to look squarely at a tragedy where the reported cases may only just be the tip of the iceberg. The Italian church will not release the numbers of cases reported or of court settlements.

The implications of priest abuse loom large in Italy: with its 50,850 priests in a nation of 60 million, Italy counts more priests than all of South America or Africa. In the United States — where the Vatican counts 44,700 priests in a nation of 300 million — more than 4,000 Catholic clergy have been accused of molesting minors since 1950.

The Italian cases follow much the same pattern as the U.S. and Irish scandals: Italian prelates often preyed on poor, physically or mentally disabled, or drug-addicted youths entrusted to their care. The deaf students’ speech impairments, for example, made the priests’ admonition “never to tell” all the more easy to enforce.

In this predominantly Roman Catholic country, the church enjoys such an exalted status that the pope’s pronouncements frequently top the evening news, without any critical commentary. Even those with anti-clerical views acknowledge the important role the church plays in education, social services and caring for the poor.

As a result, few dare to criticize it, including the mainstream independent and state-run media. In addition, there’s a certain prudishness in small-town Italy, where one just doesn’t speak about sex, much less sex between a priest and a child.

“It’s a taboo on top of a taboo,” said Jacqueline Monica Magi, who prosecuted several pedophilia cases in Italy before becoming a judge. “This is the provincialism of Italy.”

Breaking the conspiracy of silence, 67 former students from Verona’s Antonio Provolo institute for the deaf signed a statement alleging that sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.

While not all acknowledged being victims themselves, 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and videotaped testimony, detailing the abuse they say they suffered, some for years, at the school’s two campuses in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet. They named 24 priests, lay religious men and religious brothers.

Vantini said he, too, was silent for years.

“How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?” Vantini, 59, told the AP one afternoon, recounting through a sign-language interpreter the abuse he said he endured. “You couldn’t tell your parents because the priests would beat you.”

Vantini named two priests and two lay brothers — three of whom are still alive — but asked that their names not be printed for fear of legal action. He spoke with the nervousness and agitation he says has accompanied him all of his life from being raped as a child by a priest.

“I suffered from depression until I was 30,” said Vantini, who attended the school from age 6 to 19. “My wife said it was good that I spoke out because it lifted this weight from my chest.”

Vantini’s one-time schoolmate, Gianni Bisoli, 60, named the same men in his written declaration and in an interview, as well as 12 other priests and brothers from the Congregation, accusing them of sodomizing him, forcing him to have oral sex and to masturbate them.

In his declaration, Bisoli also accused Verona’s late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro — who is being considered for beatification — of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a student at Provolo, which he attended from age 9 to 15.

A diocesan probe cleared Carraro of sex abuse. But the investigation interviewed none of the alleged victims, limiting testimony to surviving members of the Congregation, other school personnel and their affiliates, and documentation from the Congregation and Verona diocese.

The late bishop’s beatification process was suspended pending the investigation, but is now going ahead to the Vatican’s saint-making office.

Five decades later, Bisoli still recalls the route he said he took from the institute, located on a quiet street named for the congregation’s founder, Don Antonio Provolo, along the serpentine Adige river to the bishop’s residence tucked behind Verona’s Piazza del Duomo.

Bisoli, who became deaf at age eight, said he was accompanied by one of his abusers and walked past the red brick Castelvecchio, an imposing 14th-century citadel, then along the main Corso Cavour thoroughfare or the more out-of-the-way pedestrian shopping street Via Mazzini.

“They brought me inside the curia (the diocese headquarters),” Bisoli recalled in an interview. “There was a servant who opened the door, then someone brought me inside. It was dark.”

Bishop Carraro appeared, he recalled. “The bishop started to touch me, grope me,” he said, running his hands up and down his body, pulling at his shirt and shorts to demonstrate. “I pulled away. But he continued to touch me for 15, 20 minutes. I didn’t know what to do.”

On a subsequent occasion, Bisoli says, the bishop tried to sodomize him with a banana. Another time, they were on the sofa and he sodomized him with his finger, offering him candy to appease him, Bisoli said.

Once, Bisoli said, the bishop offered him some gold crosses that had caught Bisoli’s eye.

“I said ‘at least give me 10,000-20,000 lire so I can buy a Coca-Cola or an ice cream,”‘ Bisoli recalled.

The current bishop of Verona, Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of fabricating their claims in talking in January to L’Espresso, a left-leaning newsweekly. Zenti called the accusations “lies” and a stunt that was part of a long-standing real estate dispute between the Congregation and the deaf students’ association, to which the alleged victims belong.

But when one of the accused lay religious men admitted to sexual relations with students, Zenti ordered an internal investigation into the Congregation. The results found that some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what has been alleged.

According to the diocese probe, there were episodes of physical violence against two unnamed students between 1958 and 1965. From 1965 to 1967, two would-be priests with “sexual disorders” were kicked out; while between 1965 and 1990 a religious brother had sexual relations with an undetermined number of students, the investigation found. In all cases the accused were removed.

“There could have been some episodes, some bad apples are possible,” Carlo de’ Gresti, spokesman for the Provolo institute said in an interview at the school’s Chievo campus, where a lay staff now runs a technical school for poor teens. “It happens, even in families. That there could have been 26, 27, 25 pedophiles? There is no objective corroboration from anyone who isn’t inside the (students’) association.”

Advocates, however, says the diocese’s investigation was fatally flawed because it didn’t interview the alleged victims and only people with links to the school who may have something to hide.

“If they had wanted to shed full light on it, they wouldn’t have only heard from priests and lay brothers, but from the deaf as well,” said Marco Lodi Rizzini, a spokesman for the victims.

The investigation has been forwarded to the Vatican, said the Rev. Bruno Fasani, spokesman for the diocese. He claimed former students had been manipulated into denouncing innocent priests and accused some of harboring a long-standing animosity to the church.

Zenti, for his part, asked forgiveness from the victims.

“The feeling that prevails is above all one of profound solidarity with the victims of abuse,” Zenti said in a May statement. “To them and their families, a humble request of forgiveness is made.”

Among the cases the AP tallied, there were charges of inducing boys into prostitution, participation in satanic rituals, and one notorious case in which the church itself determined that an elderly Florentine priest was responsible for “sexual abuse, false mysticism and domination of consciences.”

Where there were sentences, they ran from a two-year suspended sentence to eight years in jail, although with Italy’s notoriously lengthy appeals process it’s unclear how many have been carried out. Where civil damages were awarded, which has been rare, the amounts ranged from about $22,000 to $220,000 at today’s exchange rates.

The cases in the AP survey involve civil or criminal cases and investigations. For that reason, the Verona figures were omitted, since no criminal or civil action is pending because the statute of limitations has expired.

In 2002, when the abuse scandal was erupting in the United States, the No. 2 official in the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, was quoted as saying clerical sex abuse was so limited in Italy that the conference leadership hadn’t even discussed the matter.

But Italian prelates and the Vatican now seem to be taking the problem far more seriously. Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican prosecutor in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — which handles cases of priestly sex abuse — acknowledged that public awareness of the problem in Italy had increased as a result of the “tsunami” of cases that came to light in the United States.

“There is a change of mentality, and we find that to be very positive,” he told the AP.

In a shift for the Vatican, Scicluna acknowledged that priestly sex abuse was an age-old problem that needed to be rooted out.

“I don’t think it’s a question of happening. It has always happened. It’s important that people talk about it, because otherwise we cannot bring the healing which the church can offer to people who need it — both the victims and perpetrators.”

Missoulian | Sep 3, 2009

By MICHAEL MOORE

For more than 30 years, Judy Reel kept quiet about the Catholic priest who sexually abused her in Helena in 1969.

Then, in 2002, when abuse by priests became a national disgrace, Reel started sharing her story, quietly and unseen by the public. She told friends, she told police and finally she told the church.

“I’ve been to Helena twice to talk to church officials,” Reel said. “I haven’t spoken to the bishop yet, but they know my story. They know what happened to me.”

On Thursday, Reel spoke publicly about the abuse, about the shame it caused, about the debilitating damage it served on her life daily.

“This was 40 years ago, but even now, talking about it is very difficult,” she said. “Just talking about it, well, I still just go to pieces.”

Reel spoke as part of a news conference held on the sidewalk outside St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in downtown Missoula.

The event was organized by a Chicago-based group called SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

“In part, we’re here today to stand up for those who are no longer here to stand up for themselves,” said David Clohessy, national director of SNAP. “But we’re also here to ask people who were abused or who may have seen abuse in Jesuit churches to step forward.”

The urgency is founded in a court order issued in February, when the regional order of Jesuits, called the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, filed for bankruptcy.

That province covers Jesuit churches in Montana. Since 2001, Jesuits have paid out more than $25 million to sex-abuse victims.

The bankruptcy order requires the Jesuits to seek out possible victims, but Clohessy and attorneys already representing other victims are also trying to serve notice.

“We don’t have that much confidence in the church when it comes to victims,” Clohessy said. “We urge the church to do that job, to let the court know about possible abuse, but we also want people to know that they can come forward on their own.”

The urgency in terms of Montana comes on the heels of the discovery that two now-dead Jesuit priests – Augustine Feretti and Bernard Harris – who’d already been sued for abuse in other states spent part of their careers in Montana.

“We’ve already found about 15 people on the reservations here in Montana who were abused by Father Feretti,” said Spokane attorney John Allison, who along with Seattle attorney Tim Kosnoff and others represent victims in the Jesuit case. “It’s very difficult to find these people, and in many cases, they have no idea there’s a case going on that could affect them.”

Feretti, ordained in 1942 and known as Father Freddie, served in both Idaho and Washington. But he spent much of the 1950s and ’60s in Montana, including time on the Flathead and Rocky Boy’s Indian reservations.

“The damage done to Indian people by the church is profound,” said Kosnoff, who said a meeting for victims on the Flathead will be held early in the fall. “And yet, so many people in the Indian community don’t believe that anything will happen to the church. We’re trying to make sure those people’s voices are heard in this case.”

Kosnoff and Allison said Feretti, who died in 1982, and Harris, who worked at St. Francis Xavier during an unspecified period of years, fit a pattern for abusive Jesuit priests. Harris, who was sued for alleged abuse of four Oregon siblings from 1968-1972, died in 1999.

“Often, these guys were just moved around the region, which gave them a chance to abuse other kids,” Kosnoff said.

Those children were unlikely to report abuse.

“They’d been taught that priests were the voice of God,” Allison said. “They weren’t going to speak up about what those men did to them.”

Clohessy said far too many victims never come forward, with many taking their secrets to the grave.

Reel felt that way for decades. Because no one else took responsibility for what happened to her, she shouldered the blame herself.

“I just decided this was something that was my fault and I was just ashamed,” she said. “It really took others coming forward for me to see where the blame rests. But it’s sad. If perpetrators and the church won’t take responsibility, then victims do. And that’s wrong.”

To learn more about the bankruptcy case involving Jesuit churches in the Northwest, go to www.jesuitabuse.com. If you were abused by a Jesuit priest and want to understand your options regarding the bankruptcy, call attorneys Tim Kosnoff and John Allison at 1-888-667-0683.

Jesuit Bankruptcy

KECI | Sep 3, 2009

by Christian Hauser

Less than two months from now, anyone who was abused or molested by a Jesuit preist in Montana, or four other states, will run out of time to be a part of a settlement for the abuse. The Society of Jesus organization, has paid out over $25 million dollars to victims, but under a chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the period for filing any more claims is November 30th.

Two Montana abuse victims came to MIssoula today to encourage local churches to tell people to come forward. The victims say the church is keeping the truth from coming out by filing the bankruptcy.

David Clohessy, a victim and director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Preists, said “We think that this whole chapter 11 process stinks. We think it’ set up largely by the Jesuits largely for their own convenience and protection. And a victim should be able to come forward whenever he or she capable of it.”

We made severall attempts to call and e-mail the organization. However as of this writing we had received no response. On the groups website, Patrick Lee, a high ranking official says in a letter to the church members “This decision provides the best opportunity for healing, justice and fair compensation for those who have suffered.”

Belfast Telegraph | Jul 22, 2009

The true number of victims of clerical sex abuse within the Dublin archdiocese is likely to number in the thousands — not the 450 cited in a new report drawn up by the Irish Government-appointed Commission of Investigation, it was claimed last night.

“We believe there’s a large number of people who were abused in the Dublin diocese who haven’t come forward,” the executive director of victims’ group One in Four Maeve Lewis said.

One in Four and other support groups for victims of clerical sex abuse are now urging the Dublin government to delay publication of the report to prepare for the anticipated onslaught of victims who will be coming to terms with its explosive findings. The Commission of Investigation into the handling of clerical sex abuse in the diocese was expected to hand over its long-awaited report to the Republic’s Justice Minister Dermot Ahern yesterday.

However, victims’ support groups — including One in Four, The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA) — are all urging the minister to hold off on making the findings public until the autumn, when they have sufficient resources in place to cope with the flood of calls they expect the report will generate.

The inquiry was established in 2006 to examine how officials in the Catholic Church and the Irish state responded to widespread allegations of the physical and sexual abuse of children by the clergy between 1975 and 2004.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has warned that the revelations by some 450 victims will be both “shocking and horrific”.

But independent support groups say they are already inundated with the unprecedented number of victims who came forward since the publication of the Ryan Report into clerical abuse at church-run schools, which was published in May.

Ms Lewis said One in Four has been inundated with 700 new contacts following the Ryan report.

She fears the latest report by Judge Yvonne Murphy will open up the floodgates for victims who have not disclosed their abuse before and will be in need of emergency counselling to cope with the trauma.

“We know that only about 10% of victims come forward, so if Diarmuid Martin is talking about 450 cases it could be closer to 4,500,” she said.

“We’ve been completely inundated and we’re concerned there will be a whole avalanche of new cases.”

She and Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, have both written to the Irish Justice Minister urging him to delay publishing the report until October.

Ms O’Malley-Dunlop said it is imperative that victims have somewhere to turn once the report is published.

Yet, it also needs to clear up the backlog of new cases generated by the Ryan Report and has requested emergency funding from the government to hire additional counsellors.

In the meantime support groups believe the report will be transparent, but they insist that all perpetrators are named in the report — except for three clergymen who are currently before the Irish courts on child sex abuse charges.

It’s believed the report will name 15 paedophile priests, including 11 who have already been convicted of abusing children.

They were among a representative sample of 46 priests who were accused of abusing children since 1975.

AP | Jul 21, 2009

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK

DUBLIN — A new report by investigators into the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child abuse in Dublin details “horrific acts of depravity” that went for decades without prosecution, Ireland’s justice minister said Tuesday.

The report to Justice Minister Dermot Ahern comes two months after publication of an even bigger investigation into how scores of church-run schools, orphanages and reformatories harbored child abusers in religious orders from the 1930s to 1990s.

Irish taxpayers have already paid out nearly euro1 billion ($1.4 billion) to more than 12,000 victims from that system.

Ahern said he would publish the new report, which probes how the Dublin archdiocese’s bishops dealt with scores of priests accused of child abuse from 1975 to 2004, after Attorney General Paul Gallagher vets it for legal problems.

The justice minister suggested that the government might be advised to censor details involving criminal cases against three Catholic priests expected to face trial in Dublin next year. The Justice Department said the review could take several weeks.

“I am anxious that the matters dealt with in the report are put into the public domain as quickly as possible,” Ahern said.

The Dublin report took three years to produce under the direction of a Dublin High Court judge, Justice Yvonne Murphy.

It covers the cases of 46 priests implicated in abusing hundreds of children — and, in almost all cases, being transferred to new parishes by bishops who didn’t tell police or other child-protection authorities about the crimes or dangers. The 46 cases were drawn from a much larger pool of priests suspected of harming children.

Several of the cases are already well known to the Irish public, thanks in part to a former altar boy, Andrew Madden, who in the early 1990s became the first abuse victim to sue the church in Dublin for protecting sex-abuser priests. The Dublin archdiocese paid him a confidential out-of-court settlement — but he went public with the deal after church leaders claimed they had admitted no wrongdoing in his case.

The priest who raped Madden, Ivan Payne, was convicted in 1998 of raping at least eight boys and removed from the priesthood.

Madden predicted that the Dublin report would fire a new wave of anger at the church.

“The thing that will really shock people this time is simply seeing how many senior church people in Dublin knew exactly what was going on,” he said in an interview. “They had so much evidence of the dangers these priests were posing to children, but they just kept moving them on to new parishes.”

In Madden’s case, the priest who sodomized him was sent to a different part of Dublin — where he was placed in charge of that parish’s altar boys.

Catholic abuse scandals have done exceptional damage to the church’s standing in Ireland, a once-devout nation where Mass attendance has slumped over the past two decades.

On the Net: Dublin abuse commission,: http://www.dacoi.ie/

Hundreds of Catholic priests are expected to be implicated in alleged child abuse in Ireland in a major report released today.

Telegraph | May 20, 2009

By Sarah Knapton

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has spent nine years looking into allegations from thousands of former pupils of state schools and orphanages, some which date back more than 60 years.

It is due on Wednesday while a second report looking into how sex abuse complaints were handled by the Catholic Church will be published by the commission in the summer.

It is thought some 500 priests have been implicated in the abuse allegations.

Many thousands of children suffered at the hands of religious orders such as the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy at industrial schools and orphanages. Most of the children were born outside wedlock or came from large impoverished families that could not afford to feed them.

The commission was founded in 2000 following a documentary for Irish television which claimed there was widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse within Catholic institutions.

Mary Raffety, who produced the programme said the abuse suffered was ‘way off the scale’ and ‘designed to break children.’

At Easter, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said the report would “shock us all”.

“It is likely that thousands of children or young people across Ireland were abused by priests in the period under investigation and the horror of that abuse was not recognised for what it is,” he said during his Holy Thursday homily.

In 2003 the Irish Government offered compensation to victims of institutionalised child abuse in a move expected to cost £725 million.

The Comptroller and Auditor General said the estimated bill was based on just 10,000 of the 150,000 victims coming forward.

If all survivors claimed, the Republic could face a bill about £10.8 billion.

In the second report, due for publication in July, the Catholic Church is likely to face heavy criticism for trying to cover up abuse when it emerged.

In some instances the church simply moved abusive priests from parish to parish to avoid scandal.

“The way the Church handled the scandals, as we now know, was not exemplary to put it mildly,” said Father Vincent Twomey, Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the National University of Ireland.

New guidelines are now in place for the protection of children. In 2006 the the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church was founded.

As late as 2008, a report revealed child protection practices in the Co Cork diocese were inadequate and dangerous, thereby potentially exposing vulnerable young people to further harm.

In January this year every Catholic bishop, missionary society and religious congregation in Ireland was asked to sign a written commitment to implement agreed child protection guidelines. But many of the victims still believe the church has too much power and influence to ever be fully regulated.

In 2006 it was discovered Fr Maurice Dillane, 73, had fathered a child with his 31-year-old girlfriend.

Bishop Pat Buckley said an extremely conservative estimate was that one in 10 of the 5,000 Catholic priests in Ireland enjoyed regular sex with women and some even referred to their clerical collar as the “bird catcher”.

When the statistics were widened to take in practising homosexuals, Bishop Buckley said up to 40 per cent of the Catholic clergy in Ireland were sexually active.

The scandals have caused a rapid decline in priest joining the Irish Catholic Church. Just three priests joined the diocese of Dublin last year.

A spokesman for the Commission said: “The Investigation Committee and Confidential Committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse have prepared their reports and presented them to the Commission.

“The work of the Commission has taken longer than expected.

“The Commissioners are very conscious of the importance and urgency of the report and they appreciate the patience shown by participants and by the public and their understanding of the difficulty and complexity of the Commission’s undertaking.”