Tag Archives: Catholic Church

Just in from Catholic League president Bill Donohue: While some Catholics are spinning out of control over cases of sexual abuse committed by the dead and the laicized, MTV will present the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award to Jennifer Lopez on August 21. No one from the media, and certainly no finger-pointing Catholic, will question why there is an award ...

USA Today reports: A surge in calls to a clergy abuse hotline in Pennsylvania is breathing new life into a vast investigation of “predator priests” and Roman Catholic Church leaders accused of protecting them. The hotline has drawn more than 300 calls since the release of a withering grand jury report last week claiming church leaders protected hundreds of accused ...

NBC News reports: Pope Francis on Monday issued a letter to Catholics around the world condemning sexual abuse and cover-up, and demanding accountability in response to new revelations in the United States of decades of misconduct by the Catholic Church. Francis begged forgiveness for the pain suffered by victims and said lay Catholics must be involved in any effort to ...

The Associated Press reports: A Pennsylvania bishop named in a grand jury report on rampant sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy said Friday he has “profound remorse” and offers his “heartfelt apology” to the victims. Speaking at a Mass of Forgiveness, Harrisburg Bishop Ronald Gainer opened by reading the first paragraph of this week’s stunning report that said more than ...

From a Christian Newswire press release: When asked about what is at the root of the crisis Cardinal Burke said “it seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root. It is of course a ...

CNN reports: The Vatican broke its silence on Thursday about a Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed decades of sexual abuses by priests and cover-ups by bishops, calling the accusations “criminal and morally reprehensible.” “Regarding the report made public in Pennsylvania this week, there are two words that can express the feelings faced with these horrible crimes: shame and sorrow,” ...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue today posted a lengthy “debunking” of media reports about the still-unfolding and massive molestation scandal wracking the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. Donohue’s missive includes his usual charges of anti-Catholic bigotry and personal attacks on “salacious” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. There’s also this: Shapiro said that “Church officials routinely and purposely described the abuse as ...

CNN reports: The Vatican has declined to respond to an explosive grand jury report detailing decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups by priests and bishops in Pennsylvania, refusing even to say whether church officials in Rome have read the damaging documents. “We have no comment at this time,” Paloma Ovejero, deputy director of the Vatican’s press office, said Wednesday. But ...

The Allentown Morning Call reports: George said he never discussed the nude Polaroids, or the twisted, secret gift he and the other kids had been given decades ago by the men who preyed on them. These weren’t the kinds of things you could share without feeling humiliated, especially not if you grew up tough, like he did on the South ...

Via press release from blowhard Bill Donohue: The grand jury report will attract the prurient interest of the public, much to the delight of the media. But when the dust settles, what counts are the facts.  The media are saying that the report will name “more than 300 predator priests.” Not true. Many of those named are not priests: the ...

The Allentown Morning Call reports: A scathing grand jury report released Tuesday reveals sexual abuse by hundreds of priests that went unchecked for decades in dioceses across Pennsylvania, including Allentown. Instead of reporting pedophiles, dioceses routinely shuffled them from parish to parish, enabling them to prey upon new victims, the document shows. The statewide grand jury spent two years on ...

Via press release from blowhard Bill Donohue: Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro needs to explain why he never convened a grand jury to investigate the sexual abuse of minors in the public schools. That’s where the action is — his state has one of the worst records on this score of any state in the nation — so why is ...

Irish Central reports: Irish leader Leo Varadkar will bring up same sex marriage to Pope Francis when he meets him in Ireland on August 25th saying that such marriages are the same as any conventional marriage and should be treated as such by the church. Varadkar is Ireland’s first gay leader. Questioned on what he would say to the Pope ...

Penn Live reports: At a news conference Wednesday in Westmoreland County, Attorney General Josh Shapiro called Father John Sweeney of the Greensburg Diocese a predator. Sweeney, 75, is the first priest convicted as a result of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, which recently concluded an investigation into sexually abusive priests and clergy in six of the state’s eight Catholic ...

USA Today reports: Pope Francis has changed church teaching about the death penalty, saying in a new policy published Thursday that it is always “inadmissible” because it “attacks” the inherent dignity of all humans. The Vatican said Francis had approved a change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church – the compilation of official Catholic Church teaching. Previously, the catechism ...

The New York Times reports: The pope has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and a prominent diplomat who has been at the center of a mushrooming scandal after several men came forward with allegations of decades-old sexual abuse, the Vatican announced on Saturday. In a statement, the Vatican said: “Yesterday evening the ...

The Idaho Statesman reports: The house where a retired Boise priest lived for 15 years — until he was accused in February of sharing child pornography online and of drug possession — has been cleaned out, freshened up and blessed by an exorcist, according to the priest preparing the property for sale. “We bless houses all the time,” said Father ...

The South China Post reports: Philippine Catholic bishops on Monday called for fasting and prayers after President Rodrigo Duterte called God “stupid” and questioned God’s existence in profane remarks that set him on a collision course with Asia’s largest Catholic Church. Archbishop Romulo Valles and the association of bishops that he heads called for a day of prayers on July ...

The Philippine Star reports: President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday vowed to immediately resign if Christians can prove that their God exists. “If there is anyone of you there, the noisy ones, who would say that you have been to heaven, talked to God, saw him personally, and that He exists, the God that is yours, and if He does is ...

The BBC reports: A Catholic archbishop in Australia has been given a maximum sentence of 12 months in detention for concealing child sexual abuse in the 1970s. Philip Wilson, now archbishop of Adelaide, is the most senior Catholic globally to be convicted of the crime. He was found guilty by a court last month of covering up abuse by a ...