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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