Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Catholic Church and Pedophilia (Part IV)


Prevalence

Argentina

On August 17, 2019, Argentina Bishop Sergio Buenanueva of San Francisco, Cordoba, acknowledged the history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Argentina.  Buenanueva, who was labeled as a "Prelate" for the Argentine Catholic Church, also stated that the church's sex abuse crisis in Argentina, which also happens to be Pope Francis' native country, was "just beginning."

Australia

The Gillard Government instituted the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2013. The Commission reported that 7% of all Catholic priests in Australia were "alleged perpetrators of child sex abuse;" the children's average age at the time of the abuse was 11.5 for boys and 10.5 for girls. Alleged perpetrators were overwhelmingly male (90%) and religious brothers were disproportionally highly responsible (having the most claimants and some 37% of all alleged perpetrators, despite being numerically inferior to priests and religious sisters). Most reported incidents of sex abuse occurred between 1950 and 1989, however it was noted that there was on average a delay of 33 years between when a victim was abused to when it was reported,[63] which skews the statistics towards older incidents of abuse. Some reported incidents occurred as early as the 1920s and the latest after 2010.

Of the 201 Church authorities surveyed, 92 (46%) reported having received at least one claim of child sexual abuse. Overall, some 4,444 claimants alleged incidents of abuse in 4,756 reported claims over the period 1950-2015 (86% of claims related to pre-1990 incidents). The 3,057 claims resulting in a payment for redress amounted to $268 million between 1980 and 2015. Claims had been made against 1,880 alleged perpetrators, with 30% against priests, 32% non-ordained religious brothers, 5% non-ordained religious sisters, 29% lay people and 4% of unknown religious status. By means of a weighted index, the Commission found that at 75 archdioceses/dioceses and religious institutes with priest members examined, some 7 per cent of priests (who worked in Australia between 1950 and 2009) had allegations made against them (this finding did not represent allegations tested in a court of law).  Between 1980 and 2015, the Christian Brothers, which operated a number of residential facilities, made the highest number of payments to victims at 763, totaling $48.5m.

Australia's Catholic leaders had been among the first in the world to publicly address management of child abuse: In 1996, the church issued the Towards Healing Protocol, which it described as seeking to "establish a compassionate and just system for dealing with complaints of abuse".  Papal apologies for abuse in Australia were made by John Paull II and Benedict XVI.

Wrongful conviction of the Archbishop of Adelaide

In May 2018 Philip Wilson, Archbishop of Adelaide, was wrongfully convicted of failing to report allegations of child sexual abuse to civil authorities in 1976 when he was an assistant parish priest in East Maitland, New South Wales, and then acquitted by an appeal court. The appeal judge considered he had been convicted because he was Catholic priest, and not because the prosecution had proved the case beyond reasonable doubt. He rejected substantial elements of the case against the archbishop, questioned the accuracy of the evidence of a key witness, and said: "It is not for me to punish the Catholic Church for its institutional moral deficits, or to punish Philip Wilson for the sins of the now deceased James Fletcher by finding Philip Wilson guilty, simply on the basis that he is a Catholic priest." He said the large element of media in the room "may amount to perceived pressure for a court to reach a conclusion which seems to be consistent with the direction of public opinion, rather than being consistent with the rule of law that requires a court to hand down individual justice in its decision-making processes."

George Pell trials

On 29 June 2017 the Victorian Police charged Australian Cardinal George Pell with multiple counts of historical sexual assault.  Several charges were thrown out for "fundamental defects in evidence" and credibility issues over witnesses, but two trials proceeded over alleged assaults on minors in public places in the 1970s and 1990s, with Pell pleading "not guilty" to all charges.  An August 2018 trial pertaining to allegations he had assaulted two children at St Patrick's Cathedral after a Sunday Mass in 1996 resulted in a hung-jury.  A subsequent retrial reached a "guilty" verdict in December, but was subject to a suppression order while a subsequent trial pertaining to allegations continued. When the judge dismissed this second case in February for want of evidence, the suppression order over coverage of Pell's December conviction ended.   Pell continues to maintain his innocence and is appealing the matter. Pell's bail was revoked on 27 February 2019 and on 13 March 2019 was sentenced by Judge Peter Kidd to serve six years in jail with a non-parole period of three years and eight months.

On 21 August 2019, the Supreme Court of Victoria's three Court of Appeal judges voted 2-1 to uphold Pell's convictions.

Austria

In November 2010, an independent group in Austria that operates a hotline to help people exit the Catholic Church released a report documenting physical, sexual, and emotional abuse perpetrated by Austrian priests, nuns, and other religious officials. The report is based on hotline calls from 91 women (28%) and 234 men (72%), who named 422 perpetrators of both sexes, 63% of whom were ordained priests.

 Belgium

In June 2010, Belgian police raided the Belgian Catholic Church headquarters in Brussels, seizing a computer and records of a Church commission investigating allegations of child abuse. This was part of an investigation into hundreds of claims that had been raised about alleged child sexual abuse committed by Belgian clergy. The claims emerged after Roger Vangheluwe, who had been the Bishop of Bruges, resigned in 2009 after admitting that he was guilty of sexual molestation.  The Vatican protested against the raids.  In September 2010, an appeals court ruled that the raids were illegal.

Canada

In the late 1980s, allegations were made of physical and sexual abuse committed by members of the Christian Brothers, who operated the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John's, Newfoundland. The government, police, and church had colluded in an attempt to cover up the allegations, but in December 1989 they were reported in the St. John's Sunday Express. Eventually more than 300 former pupils came forward with allegations of physical and sexual abuse at the orphanage.  The religious order that ran the orphanage filed for bankruptcy in the face of numerous civil lawsuits seeking damages.[85] Since the Mount Cashel scandal, a number of priests across Canada have been accused of sexual abuse.

In August 2006, Father Charles Henry Sylvestre of Belle River, Ontario pleaded guilty to 47 counts of sexual abuse of females, aged between nine and fourteen years old, between 1952 and 1989.  Sylvestre was given a sentence in October 2006 of three years, and died 22 January 2007 after three months in prison.

Chile

Early in 2018, Pope Francis met with Bishop Juan Barros from Chile. Before his visit to Chile to meet with the bishop, there were serious sex abuse charges concerning the priest, Fernando Karadima. Barros was accused of covering up several sex crimes by Karadima.  Many laypersons and victims of sexual abuse came forward to condemn Barros for having covered up the sex crimes. When Pope Francis came to visit the bishop, he was asked by local reporters about the sexual abuse scandal surrounding Barros. Pope Francis quickly reprimanded critics, even the victims of Karadima, by calling the scandal a "slander". In addition, Pope Francis chastised reporters by stating, "The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not one piece of evidence against him. It is calumny. Is that clear?"  Following the pope's defense of Barros, Boston Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, a key Vatican advisor on clergy abuse, acknowledged that Francis’ comments about Barros were “a source of great pain” for victims. Francis then appointed Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta to investigate the allegations of abuse in the Chilean church.  Upon receiving Scicluna's report, Francis wrote on 12 April that he had “made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially because of a lack of truthful and balanced information.”  He also declared that the Chilean church hierarchy was collectively responsible for “grave defects” in handling sexual abuse cases and the resulting loss of credibility suffered by the church. Following Francis’ remarks, 33 Chilean bishops offered their resignation.  Pope Francis later apologized to the victims of the sex abuse scandal. In late April 2018, three victims were invited to the Vatican.

On 11 June 2018, Francis accepted the resignations of Bishop Juan Barros Madrid of Osorno, and two prelates past retirement age who had not been linked to the abuse scandal, Archbishop Cristián Caro Cordero of Puerto Montt and Bishop Gonzalo Duarte García de Cortázar of Valparaíso, and on 28 June those of Bishops Horacio Valenzuela of Talca and Alejandro Goić Karmelić of Rancagua.  In September he accepted those of those of Carlos Eduardo Pellegrín Barrera of Chillán and Cristián Contreras Molina of San Felipe.  Karadima was laicized on 28 September 2018.

On 13 October 2018, Pope Francis laicized two former archbishops: Francisco José Cox Huneeus of La Serena and Marco Antonio Órdenes Fernández of Iquique.  In March 2019, Francis accepted the resignation of Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, a target of advocates of victims of abuse who had submitted his resignation as required when he turned 75 in January 2017.

On 21 August 2019, Chile's nuncio announced that the Vatican had launched an investigation into claims that Bernardino Piñera, an influential Chilean priest who is also a paternal uncle of Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, sexually abused at least one child 50 years prior.  Piñera was also caught admitting that he had "impeccable behavior."

Costa Rica

Different scandals of sexual abuse involving members of the Catholic clergy have been made public in Costa Rica, as more than ten priests have been formally accused.  However, one of the most recent and most dramatic events due to its media exposure occurred in 2019 when judicial accusations against the priests Mauricio Víquez and Manuel Guevara led to the search and seizure of the Episcopal Conference by the Judicial Investigation Department on 7 March 2019.  Víquez, who was the Episcopal Conference's spokesman and professor at the University of Costa Rica, was dismissed from the clerical state by the Holy See and the process for removal of his university tenure was started. He is currently a fugitive overseas reason for which an international arrest warrant was issued against him.  In the case of Guevara, parish priest of Santo Domingo de Heredia was arrested by the authorities.

Another priest wanted for sexual abuse, Jorge Arturo Morales Salazar, was arrested by the authorities while trying to escape through the Panama border and held on preventive custody.  Other notable cases are Father Enrique Delgado, popular figure due to his TV show La Hora Santa (The Holy Hour) who was sentenced to prison for rape and sexual abuse against three minors, Father Enrique Vazquez who escaped the country apparently with financial help from San Carlos' bishop Angel Sancasimiro, and Father Minor Calvo, another TV personality with his TV show An encounter with Christ and as director of the Catholic radio station Radio Maria who was found in a car with a teenager in the La Sabana Park at midnight (although Calvo was convicted for corruption and embezzlement he was not convicted for sexual abuse).

Croatia

There are three main known cases of sexual abuse in Croatian Catholic Churches: in Archdiocese of Zagreb, Archdiocese of Rijeka and Archdiocese of Zadar.

In Archdiocese of Zagreb guilty convicted priest was Ivan Čuček (2000), in Archdiocese of Rijeka Drago Ljubičić (2011), and in Archdiocese of Zadar Nediljko Ivanov (2012).

Dominican Republic

Jozef Wesolowski, a Polish citizen who had been a nuncio (papal ambassador), was laicized in 2014 because of accusations of sexual abuse of minors during the five years he served as Vatican ambassador in Santo Domingo.  The Holy See refused to waive his diplomatic immunity in order to allow him to be judged in Santo Domingo, but charged him in before the Vatican criminal tribunal. However, in July 2015 the trial was postponed due to Wesolowski's ill health and he died on 27 August 2015 before a trial could be held.

El Salvador

In November 2015, sex abuse scandals in El Salvador's sole non-military Catholic diocese, the Archdiocese of San Salvador, started coming to light when the Archdiocese's third highest ranking priest Jesus Delgado, who was also the biographer and personal secretary of the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was dismissed by the Archdiocese after its investigation showed that he had molested a girl, now 42 years of age, when she was between the ages of 9 and 17.  Due to the statute of limitations, Delgado could not face criminal charges.  In December 2016, a canonical court convicted Delgado and two other El Salvador priests, Francisco Galvez and Antonio Molina, of committing acts of sex abuse between the years 1980 and 2000 and laicized them from the priesthood.  In November 2019, the Archdiocese acknowledged sex abuse committed by a priest identified as Leopoldo Sosa Tolentino in 1994 and issued a public apology to his victim. Tolentino was suspended from ministry and began the canonical trial process.  Another El Salvador priest was laicized in 2019 after pleading guilty to sex abuse in a Vatican trial and is serving a 16 year prison sentence after being convicted in a criminal trial.

France

Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the Archbishop of Lyon, was convicted on 7 March 2019 of failing to report sex abuse allegedly committed by a priest.  On 5 July 2019, it was announced that Pope Francis laicized Bernard Preynat, the priest who Barbarin was accused of protecting.  Barbarin also afterwards served a six-month suspended prison sentence. On November 9, 2019, the Conference of French Bishops approved a resolution agreeing that every French Catholic Bishop would pay compensation for abuse which took place in the French Catholic Church.

Germany

In September 2018 a report by the German Catholic Church found that 3,677 children in Germany, mostly 13 or younger, had been sexually abused by Catholic clergy between 1946 and 2014.
Guam

In March 2018, Archbishop Anthony Apuron was removed from office by the Vatican.  Apuron had been accused of sexually molesting altar boys in the late 1970s. Moreover, in the latest case, priest Louis Brouillard was charged for having raped altar boys during “sleepovers” as a teenager. There are fifteen priests, two archbishops, and a bishop who have been recognized in sex abuse cases, from the 1950s until the 1990s.

Honduras

In 2018 Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Juan Jose Pineda, A close aide of Cardinal Maradiaga, following revelations of sexual abuse and financial scandal.

India

In 2002, Mathew N. Schmalz noted that Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in India are generally not spoken about openly, stating "you would have gossip and rumors, but it never reaches the level of formal charges or controversies."

In 2014, Raju Kokkan, the vicar of the Saint Paul's Church in Thaikkattussery, Thrissur, Kerala, was arrested on charges of raping a nine-year-old girl. According to Kerala Police, Kokkan had raped the child on several different occasions, including at least thrice in his office during the month of April. Kokkan promised to gift the child expensive vestments for her Holy Communion ceremony before sexually assaulting her. The abuse was revealed after the victim informed her parents that she had been raped by Kokkan on 25 April 2014. The priest subsequently fled to Nagercoil in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, and was arrested by police on 5 May. Following the arrest, the Thrissur Archdiocese stated that the vicar had been removed from his position within the Church. Between February and April 2014, three other Catholic priests were arrested in the state of Kerala on charges of raping minors.

In 2016, the Catholic Church reappointed a convicted and jailed priest in the Ootacamund Diocese in Tamil Nadu, with little regard for victims’ rights and children's safety.

In 2017, Father Robin Vadakkumchery of St Sebastian church in Kannur was arrested in Kochi on the charge of repeatedly raping a 15-year-old girl who later gave birth to a child. The baby is reported to have been taken to an orphanage without the mother's consent.  He has been sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Thalassery POSCO court.

In 2018, after much public outcry, Bishop Franco Mulakkal was arrested on 21 September by the Kerala Police. The Vatican had just 'temporarily' relieved him from his pastoral responsibilities. The nun who complained against Bishop Franco had mentioned to the police that he had repeatedly had unnatural sex with her on multiple occasions between 2014 and 2016.

Ireland

In the Republic of Ireland, starting in the 1990s, there were a series of criminal cases and government enquiries related to allegations that priests had abused hundreds of minors over previous decades. State-ordered investigations documented "tens of thousands of children from the 1940s to the 1990s" who suffered abuse, including sexual abuse at the hands of priests, nuns, and church staff in three dioceses.

In many cases senior clergy had moved priests accused of abuse to other parishes. By 2010, a number of in-depth judicial reports had been published, but with relatively few prosecutions. The abuse was occasionally made known to staff at the Department of Education, the police, and other government bodies. They have said that prosecuting clergy was extremely difficult given the "Catholic ethos" of the Irish Republic.[citation needed] In addition, in 2004 the Christian Brothers had sued for a civil settlement that barred prosecution of any of its members or the naming of any Christian Brother in the government investigatory report. Christian Brothers had a higher number of allegations made against their order than were made against others. Neither was any victims named in the report.

In 1994, Michael Ledwith resigned as President of St Patrick's College, Maynooth when allegations of sexual abuse by him were made public. The June 2005 McCullough Report found that a number of bishops had rejected concerns about Ledwith's inappropriate behavior towards seminarians "so completely and so abruptly without any adequate investigation", although his report conceded that "to investigate in any very full or substantial manner, a generic complaint regarding a person's apparent propensities would have been difficult".

Fr. Brendan Smyth was reported to have sexually abused and indecently assaulted 20 children in parishes in Belfast, Dublin and the United States, during the period between 1945 and 1989. Controversy over the handling of his extradition to Northern Ireland led to the 1994 collapse of the Fianna Fáil/Labour coalition government.

Six reports by the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church have up until 2011 established that six Irish priests were convicted between 1975 and 2011.

Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and politically independent of the Republic of Ireland), the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry started in January 2014. It was the largest inquiry in UK legal history into sexual and physical abuse in certain institutions (including non-Catholic ones) that were in charge of children from 1922 to 1995. The De La Salle Brothers and the Sisters of Nazareth admitted early in the inquiry to physical and sexual abuse of children in institutions in Northern Ireland that they controlled, and issued an apology to victims.  A 2017 report also stated that the local police, who had also poorly investigated claims of sex abuse at the non-Catholic Kincora Boys' Home, had played a role in assisting the local Catholic officials in covering up reported sexual abuse activity at four Catholic-run homes for boys in the Belfast area and that these four homes had contained the highest level of reported sex abuse of all the 22 homes which were investigated.

Italy

In October 2018, Italian victim rights group Rete l'Abuso released a statement asserting that the Italian justice system has treated about 300 cases of predator priests and nuns and netted 150-170 convictions since the year 2000.

Norway

After revelations by Norwegian newspaper Adresseavisen, the Catholic Church in Norway and the Vatican acknowledged in 2010 that Georg Müller had resigned in July 2009 from the position of Bishop of Trondheim which he held from 1997, because of the discovery of his abuse of an altar boy two decades earlier. The Vatican cited Canon (Church) law 401/2 but as is customary gave no details. The Norwegian Catholic Church was made aware of the incident at the time but did not alert the authorities. Norwegian law did not allow a criminal prosecution of Müller so long after the event.

Poland

During 2013 the public in this deeply Catholic country became concerned about reports of child sex abuse scandals within the Church, some of which reached the courts, and the poor response by the church. The Church resisted demands to pay compensation to victims.  In October 2013 the Catholic Church in Poland explicitly refused to publish data on sexual abuse, but said that, “if the data were to be published, the scale would be seen to be very low.”  Bishop Antoni Dydycz said that priests should not be pressed to report sexual abuse to state authorities, invoking the ecclesiastical "seal of confession," which bans them from revealing what is said in the rite of confession.

On 27 September 2018, Bishop Romuald Kamiński of the Warsaw-Praga Diocese issued an apology to those who had been sexually abused by priests in his Diocese and that church leaders in Poland had completed work on a document to address the abuse of minors and suggest ways to prevent it.  According to Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the head of Poland's Catholic Church, the document will also include data on the scale of priestly sex abuse in Poland. By early 2019, however, the document still had not been made public.  On October 8, 2018, a victims group mapped out 255 cases of alleged sex abuse in Poland.

Statistics were released on 14 April 2019, commissioned by the Episcopal Conference of Poland and with data from over 10,000 local parishes. It was found that from 1990 to mid-2018, abuse reports about 382 priests were made to the Church, with 625 children, mostly under 16, sexually abused by members of the Catholic clergy. There were opinions that the figures underestimated the extent of the problem, and failed to answer questions church officials had avoided for years. Marek Lisinski, the co-founder of Don’t Be Afraid, which represents victims of clerical abuse, said "Tell us how [the priests] hurt those children and how many times they were transferred to different parishes before you paid notice". The data were released a few weeks after Pope Francis had called for "an all-out battle against the abuse of minors". After pressure from the Pope, in the preceding years Poland's Church had publicly apologized for abuses, and accepted the need to report those accused of such crimes. In earlier times clergy to whom sexual abuse of minors was reported were not required by their superiors to notify the police, but to investigate themselves, and if necessary inform the Vatican.

On May 11, 2019, Polak issued an apology on behalf of the entire Catholic Church in Poland.  The same day, Tell No One, a documentary detailing accounts of sex abuse by Catholic Church clergy in Poland, went viral, reaching 8.1 million viewers on YouTube by May 13.  Among many, the film featured a priest known as Father Jan A., whose case is being reviewed by the Diocese of Kielce, who confessed to molesting many young girls.  The film also alleges that Rev. Dariusz Olejniczak, a priest who was sentenced for molesting 7-year-old girls, was allowed to continue working with young people despite his conviction On May 14, 2019, Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has long had an alliance with the nation's Catholic Bishops, agreed to increase penalties for child sex abuse by raising the maximum prison sentence from 12 years to 30 years and raising the age of consent from 15 to 16.  Prosecutor and PiS lawmaker Stanislaw Piotrowicz, who heads the Polish Parliament's Justice Commission, has also been criticized for playing down the actions of a priest who was convicted for inappropriately touching and kissing young girls.

United Kingdom

In 2013, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the Archbishop of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, resigned following publication of allegations he had engaged in inappropriate and predatory sexual conduct with priests and seminarians under his jurisdiction and abused his power.

United States

In the United States, which has been the focus of many of the scandals and subsequent reforms, BishopAccountability.org, an "online archive established by lay Catholics," reports that over 3,000 civil lawsuits have been filed against the church, some of these cases have resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements with many claimants. In 1998 the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas paid $30.9 million to twelve victims of one priest ($47.5 million in present-day terms).  From 2003 to 2009 nine other major settlements, involving over 375 cases with 1551 claimants/victims, resulted in payments of over US$1.1 billion. The Associated Press estimated the settlements of sex abuse cases from 1950 to 2007 totaled more than $2 billion.  Bishop Accountability puts the figure at more than $3 billion in 2012. Addressing "a flood of abuse claims" five dioceses (Tucson, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Davenport, Iowa, and San Diego) got bankruptcy protection.  Eight Catholic dioceses have declared bankruptcy due to sex abuse cases from 2004 to 2011.
Although bishops had been sending sexually abusive priests to facilities such as those operated by the Servants of the Paraclete since the 1950s, there was scant public discussion of the problem until the mid-1960s. Even then, most of the discussion was held amongst the Catholic hierarchy with little or no coverage in the media. A public discussion of sexual abuse of minors by priests took place at a meeting sponsored by the National Association for Pastoral Renewal held on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in 1967, to which all U.S. Catholic bishops were invited.

Various local and regional discussions of the problem were held by Catholic bishops in later years. However, it was not until the 1980s that discussion of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clerics began to be covered as a phenomenon in the news media of the United States. According to the Catholic News Service, public awareness of the sexual abuse of children in the United States and Canada emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s as an outgrowth of the growing awareness of physical abuse of children in society.
In September 1983, the National Catholic Reporter published an article on the topic.  The subject gained wider national notoriety in October 1985 when Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty to 11 counts of molestation of boys.  After the coverage of Gauthe's crimes subsided, the issue faded to the fringes of public attention until the mid-1990s, when the issue was again brought to national attention after a number of books on the topic was published.

In 2002, the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of sexual abuse cases involving Catholic priests drew the attention, first of the United States and ultimately the world, to the problem.  Other victims began to come forward with their own allegations of abuse, resulting in more lawsuits and criminal cases.  Since then, the problem of clerical abuse of minors has received significantly more attention from the Church hierarchy, law enforcement agencies, government and the news media. One study shows that the Boston Globe coverage of the cases "had a negative and long-lasting effect" on Catholic school enrollment, and explained "about two-thirds of the decline in Catholic schooling."

In 2003 Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee authorized payments of as much as US$20,000 to sexually abusive priests to convince them to leave the priesthood.

As recently as 2011 Fr Curtis Wehmeyer was allowed to work as a priest in Minnesota despite many people having reported concern about his sexual compulsion and suspicious behavior with boys. Wehmeyer was employed as a priest without proper background checks. Wehmeyer was later convicted of sexually abusing two boys. After Wehmeyer's arrest there were complaints the responsible clergy were more concerned with how to spin the story in a favorable light than in helping victims.

In July 2018 Cardinal Theodore McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals (the first Cardinal to do so since 1927) following allegations of abuse and attempted homosexual rape at a seaside villa.  In August, a "systematic coverup" of sex abuse by more than 300 priests in Pennsylvania parishes was revealed.  Reviewers of the situation indicated that many more victims and perpetrators were likely undiscovered.

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