Fifteen Years After Dallas, Part Five: Naughty Nienstedt and the Vatican Shred
In 2013, Minnesota passed a landmark bill that allowed victims of child sexual abuse to use the civil courts to expose their abuser, no matter when the abuse took place. We are hoping to get one passed...
View ArticleFifteen Years After Dallas, Part Six: A seminarian in Ohio attempts to buy...
Joel Wright (being led away in handcuffs above) was a legally blind seminarian at Columbus, Ohio’s Pontifical College Josephinum in 2016 when he was arrested for attempting to buy a one- and...
View ArticleFifteen Years After Dallas, Part Seven: Sister Cathy Turns Baltimore into a...
Netflix’s recent documentary, The Keepers, has been a blockbuster for true crime and documentary fans (it was the talk of CrimeCon). A gripping tale of abuse, cover-up, and murder, the series tells the...
View ArticleFifteen Years After Dallas, (Dis)Honorable Mention: Guam and the Hope and...
This would have been Part Eight, except for one little loophole: Guam/the Archdiocese of Agaña is NOT TECHNICALLY a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The Archdiocese of Agaña is...
View ArticleBreaking: Diocese of Brooklyn announces Dolan-esque compensation plan
And the corpse of the New York Child Victims Act isn’t even cool yet. Brooklyn Bishop DiMarzio (pictured above) has issued a written statement announcing an Independent Reconciliation and Compensation...
View ArticleThe Ins and Out of the IRCP: Is it a Hoax? Why Brooklyn?
~PART ONE OF A MULTI-PART SERIES ON THE IRCP~ I had planned on talking about the Archdiocese of New York’s Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program (IRCP) in this blog, but I wanted to wait...
View ArticleGuest Post: Brian Toale
Brian Toale just sent me this regarding his work in New York on the CVA. I asked if I could publish it here. There was so much rawness here. It shows that the survivors who went to Albany were very...
View ArticleThe Ins and Out of the IRCP Part 2: Phases and Deadlines
Part two of this series was originally going to be a little about IRCP plan administrator Ken Feinberg, but since the Diocese of Brooklyn has posted its official IRCP website (full of legalese), I...
View ArticleThe Ins and Outs of the IRCP Part 3: Who is Kenneth Feinberg?
Sorry for the gap since Part 2. I was on vacation. Then I ended up on the news. He’s been called The Master of Disasters, a brand unto himself, and the Compensation Czar. Kenneth Feinberg (pictured...
View ArticleThe SNAP story you have been waiting for
I have remained quiet on the subject of the changes in SNAP, the Survivors Network. This is because I have been very deeply involved in the recent transition in leadership, our refocus and change...
View ArticleThe Ins and Outs of the IRCP Part 4: Hamlet’s Dilemma
To register, or not to register? That is the question. For those of you just catching up, the IRCPs, or the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Programs, are programs for certain survivors of...
View ArticleSome Good News in the Saga of Bruce Wellems
This week, a lawyer for the Claretian Missionaries announced that Bruce Wellems was forced to petition the Vatican to give up his collar. That’s right. He can’t be a priest. For those of you who have...
View ArticleApuron’s victims: Locked in a room with a priest on a run
Fr. Justin Wachs was hiding out. After getting caught sexually harassing a parishioner in 2014—touching her without permission and leaving her suggestive notes— he quit his job as pastor in Sioux...
View ArticleWhat’s Going on in the Philippines? A New Series
August is usually a very quiet time in my line of work. Not so much this year. There are currently more than 100 cases of child sexual abuse and a now controversial canonical trial on the island of...
View ArticleWhat’s Going on the Philippines Part One: The Priest Who Broke the Rule
In the introduction to this series, I called the Philippines the “Holy Grail” of cover-up. Simply put, it’s the place where priests accused of abuse can hang out and still be priests. In fact, it...
View ArticleWhat’s Going on in the Philippines: 101 East’s Sins of the Father
In February 2017, Al Jazeera’s 101 East produced this 25-minute documentary feature about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the Philippines. It’s a great primer for anyone interested in learning...
View ArticleAccused former All-American Boys Chorus vocal coach can be extradited, UK...
A former vocal coach for Orange County’s All-American Boys Chorus—and a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted List—can be sent back to California from the UK, a judge there ruled this week. Roger Alan Giese,...
View ArticleWhat’s going on in the Philippines, Part Two: The Horror Story
Rita Milla had a horror story. It was a story that no one could believe. It was 1978. The California teenager said she was being sexually abused by seven priests from the Philippines. She was 16. Who...
View ArticleExact Vatican Tribunal Charges Against Guam Archbishop Unknown
Even I was guilty of assuming that Archdiocese of Agaña (Guam) Archbishop Anthony Apuron was charged with child sexual abuse in his current and highly publicized Vatican Tribunal. But then I learned:...
View ArticleExclusive: Accused Vatican diplomat wrote 2003 dissertation on sex abuse...
A Vatican priest and diplomat under suspicion for violating US child pornography laws wrote his 2003 doctoral dissertation on church laws addressing how the Holy See deals with clerics accused of...
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