30-Yr Sentence, Bankruptcy, Pell's Appeal, Ped Ring Lead This Week's Catholic PnP List

Rochester Archdiocese files for bankruptcy amid sex abuse claim obligations

By Carl Campanile
NY Post

The Catholic Archdiocese of Rochester Thursday filed for bankruptcy protection amid its massive financial and legal exposure to child sexual abuse claims.

“This is a very difficult and painful decision,” said Rochester’s Bishop Salvatore R. Matano in a Letter to the Faithful and video message Thursday.

“After assessing all reasonable possibilities to satisfy the claims, reorganization is considered the best and fairest course of action for the victims and for the well-being of the Diocese, its parishes, agencies and institutions. We believe this is the only way we can provide just compensation for all who suffered the egregious sin of sexual abuse, while ensuring the continued commitment of the Diocese to the mission of Christ,” the bishop said.

Right! You're doing this for the victims! Right!

The Child Victims Act approved by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York Legislature earlier this year opens up a one-year, one-time only period to allow victims to seek civil action, regardless of how long the abuse occurred.

The law extends the statute of limitations to allow for criminal charges against sexual abusers until their victims turn 28 for felony cases, up from the current 23. It also allows victims to seek civil action against their abusers and institutions that enabled them until they turn 55.

The Rochester church’s bombshell raises questions about how many other faith-based and other institutions will file for bankruptcy protection to avoid shuttering their doors.

The Archdiocese of New York, which includes Manhattan, is not contemplating filing for bankruptcy protection, said Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for Timothy Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

State lawmakers cried foul.

“It’s despicable that the Rochester Diocese would file a voluntary bankruptcy to shield their assets from sexual abuse survivors suing through the Child Victims Act. For decades, survivors of child sexual abuse unsuccessfully pleaded for help from the church,” said Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan).

“As a result, we passed the Child Victims Act so survivors would finally have their day in court and hold accountable their abusers and the institutions that may have harbored them.”

The church is still protecting itself above its vulnerable constituents. What a disgrace!

Missouri AG Refers 12 Catholic Priests

For Prosecution For Child Abuse

DOUG MATACONIS
Outside the Beltway

In the latest legal development in the recently revived criminal investigations into the abuse scandal that has been enveloping the Catholic Church for the past twenty years or more, the Attorney General of Missouri has referred cases involving twelve Catholic Priests for criminal prosecution:

The Missouri attorney general will refer a dozen men who previously served as Roman Catholic clergy for potential criminal prosecution, his office announced on Friday after a yearlong statewide investigation into clergy sexual abuse.

The investigation found that 163 priests or clergy members were accused of sexual abuse or misconduct against minors.

“Sexual abuse of minors by members of Missouri’s four Roman Catholic dioceses has been a far-reaching and sustained scandal,” Attorney General Eric Schmitt said at a news conference Friday morning. “For decades, faced with credible reports of abuse, the church refused to acknowledge the victims and instead focused their efforts on protecting priests.”

Mr. Schmitt, a Republican who is also Catholic, said he believed that his 12 referrals for prosecution were more than any other attorney’s general investigation so far.

In one case being referred for prosecution, a priest is reported to have shared a bed on “numerous instances” with young children before the diocese placed him on leave in 2016, according to the report.

In another, a priest was allowed to return to ministry after a 2015 allegation of “detailed unwanted and inappropriate hugging and kissing of an elementary school aged child.” The priest apparently left the country this year, the report says

About 80 of the accused men are now deceased, and 16 were previously referred for local prosecution. In Missouri, the attorney general does not have the authority to prosecute these cases directly and so must refer them to local prosecutors.

Before the report was released, all four Catholic dioceses conducted their own investigations and produced their own lists of priests credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, also totaling approximately 160 names. The attorney general’s office did not provide a breakdown of which names were original to its report.

Investigators heard from more than 100 victims and spoke directly with 45 victims or their families, according to Chris Nuelle, a spokesman for the attorney general. “We did have one priest who had 21 victims come forward, so we can assume the number is in the hundreds,” he said of the number of victims.

NY child sex abuse victim nabbed his own tormentor,

became FBI agent

By Susan Edelman and Kathianne Boniello
New York Post

When Jim Clemente walked into the Bronx home of his former summer camp director, it wasn’t for old time’s sake. The twenty-something Clemente was wearing a wire. Federal agents and an NYPD detective were listening in.

And his old camp boss, Michael J. O’Hara, was showing Clemente pictures of kids he’d molested — just like he’d abused Clemente a decade prior. “I was scared to death while I was there,” Clemente, now 59 and retired from a storied FBI career, recalled of the 1986 meeting.

Clemente had convinced the predator he was a kindred spirit and had to keep his cool, or the criminal case being built against O’Hara — a Boy Scout leader, Catholic school teacher and youth-basketball coach believed to have sexually abused hundreds of kids — would fall apart.

The meeting was his sixth in three months with the violent, intimidating drunk from Long Island with the perpetual “sh-t eating smirk,” Clemente remembered. O’Hara had plied a teenaged Clemente with beer and violated him while they were alone at the Catholic Youth Organization camp in upstate Godeffroy.

A picture of Clemente around the time he was molested as a child.

Clemente at the time of the O’Hara investigation was a fledgling Bronx Family Court prosecutor. He would go on to become a criminal profiler for the feds, to his present career as a TV writer for the show “Criminal Minds.”

His quest for justice began in 1985, with a TV movie about incest. “My brother called me. He had seen the movie, ‘Something About Amelia,’ and I think Ted Danson played a sex offender. He said, ‘We should do something about the director at that camp we were at,’ ” Clemente said.

His sibling revealed he’d once snuck into O’Hara’s office to find “two paper bags filled with pictures of him molesting boys.”

“I said, ‘Oh God, I thought I was the only one.’”

‘I went in the shower, and I turned the light off … and I just cried. That was the day I kind of withdrew from everybody.’

When he asked his brother why he never told him, Clemente’s brother said O’Hara somehow suspected he’d seen his secret stash and pointed a rifle at him, pulling the trigger until the gun clicked. “It would be that easy,” O’Hara sneered.

Strangled by shame and fear, Clemente could only confide in his high school guidance counselor, a priest, Father Frank Stinner, about the abuse.

Stinner’s reply stunned Clemente.

“Say 10 ‘Our Fathers,’ and 10 ‘Hail Marys.’ I absolve you of your sin. Don’t ever speak of this again.”

For more on this appalling story please visit the New York Post.

Former New Mexico priest, 81, sentenced to 30 years

for sex abuse of altar boy

Associated Press

A former Roman Catholic priest who fled the country decades ago was sentenced Friday in New Mexico to 30 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing an altar boy at a veterans' cemetery and military base.

In ordering the sentence, U.S. District Judge Martha Vazquez said it was the worst case of child sex abuse she has handled over the course of 26 years.

At one point, the judge demanded that 81-year-old defendant Arthur Perrault look a woman in the eyes as she testified about being abused by him.

This 1989 file photo shows Father Arthur Perrault in Albuquerque, N.M. The former Roman Catholic priest found guilty of aggravated sexual abuse in New Mexico is scheduled to be sentenced Friday, Sept. 13, 2019, in Santa Fe. (The Albuquerque Journal via AP)

The judge also condemned Perrault for only being concerned about his sexual needs. "You chose as a profession the life of being a priest. It was supposed to be your job to help, not destroy," she said.

Prosecutors had asked the judge for special consideration of a life sentence for Perrault, once a pastor at an Albuquerque parish and a chaplain at Kirtland Air Force Base.

He was convicted in April of six counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact with a minor under 12.

"It is a long sentence but certainly a fitting one given the length of his conduct and devastating impact," U.S. Attorney John Anderson said.

Perrault pleaded not guilty after he was returned to the U.S. from Morocco in 2017 and maintained his innocence at the sentencing. His defense team plans to file an appeal.

In this Nov. 29, 2018, file photo, the sun sets on a sign in front of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe offices
in Albuquerque, N.M. A former Roman Catholic priest found guilty of sexual abuse in New Mexico
is scheduled to be sentenced Friday, Sept. 13, 2019, in Santa Fe, N.M.  (AP)

The abuse counts stemmed from the treatment of one boy at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and at Santa Fe National Cemetery. The two sites are within federal jurisdiction, which allowed U.S. authorities to file charges with no statute of limitations.

Several people who were not involved in the specific charges were allowed Friday to recount abuse by Perrault and describe their emotional and mental anguish.

Elaine Montoya said her first kiss came from Perrault at the start of a two-year sexual relationship. "He had convinced me that it was normal ... a gift from God," she told the court.

Charles Starzynski said his first sexual experience was with Perrault instead of any of the girls he liked. He called the former priest a con man concerned only with his image of sophistication.

"You're just a jerk," he said.

In his only comments, Perrault said he had not made initial eye contact with the people who testified because he is hard of hearing and was watching a computer to read transcriptions of what was being said. He declined several opportunities to make other remarks.

Authorities say their decades-long pursuit of Perrault led them to Morocco — a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States — and showed how far they were willing to go to seek justice.

Perrault was in jail at the time and Moroccan officials decided to honor an arrest warrant presented by U.S. authorities.

Perrault is among more than 70 clergy members identified by the Santa Fe Archdiocese as credibly accused of abusing children in New Mexico. The archdiocese is in bankruptcy proceedings as a result of the abuse scandal.

Perrault first arrived in New Mexico in the 1960s after church officials in Connecticut sent him to a center that treated priests accused of abuse. Located in the Jemez Mountains north of Albuquerque, the facility was operated by the Servants of the Paraclete religious order.

Prosecutors wrote in a recent court filing that they had tried Perrault on a "small fraction" of his crimes, saying he had many more victims. At trial, several men testified that he abused them as children in his car, a church rectory and other locations.

The victim at the center of the prosecutors' case said Perrault took him on excursions to amusement parks and to the military base in Albuquerque and had touched him inappropriately as many as 100 times starting when he was 10.

The abuse ended in 1992, the year Perrault left the state. An attorney had been preparing two lawsuits at the time against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe alleging Perrault had sexually assaulted seven children.

Revealed: How paedophile priests in Victoria
worked together to share victims

A Catholic priest left a 14-year-old boy in a seminary common room with several other boys before another priest came and "selected" him for abuse, says an explosive new statement of claim.

By Farrah Tomazin, Chris Vedelago and Debbie Cuthbertson, The Age

Some of the Catholic church’s worst paedophile priests shared victims, passed on details of vulnerable children considered easy targets and worked together to conceal their crimes as part of informal networks of sexual abuse hidden in Australian seminaries, schools and parishes.

An investigation by The Age has identified for the first time that many priests involved in historical sexual abuse of children did not simply act as individuals but formed clusters, or paedophile rings, throughout Victoria, from the western district to the Gippsland region and in suburban Melbourne.

This interactive graphic reveals the extent of each priest’s offending and the links between them.

At the centre of a number of these networks was Melbourne’s seminary - Corpus Christi - which has produced about 1000 priests over almost 100 years, including jailed Cardinal George Pell and convicted child rapist Gerald Ridsdale. According to a conservative snapshot from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, at least 75 convicted and alleged sex offenders emerged from Corpus Christi. The true figure is not known.

One Melbourne man alleges he was repeatedly abused between the ages of 12 and 14 by a network of three paedophiles coalescing around Corpus Christi Clayton in the mid-1970s: St Peter’s parish priest Ronald Pickering, assistant priest Russell Vears and then newly ordained Paul David Ryan (above right).

There is much more on this story at The Age.

Cardinal George Pell to appeal to high court

over child sexual abuse conviction

Melissa Davey
The Guardian

Lawyers for Cardinal George Pell have lodged a special leave application with the high court to try to appeal his historical sex abuse convictions, which will be his final avenue to have his conviction overturned.

The high court on Tuesday confirmed it had received the application through its Melbourne registry.

The lodging of the appeal does not mean the high court will agree to hear the case. First, the matter will be considered by a panel of two to three judges, and will either be dismissed or approved. The parties may be called to a brief hearing for further consideration. A decision about whether special leave to appeal will be granted is usually made on the same day as the hearing.

At least five and sometimes all seven justices of the high court will hear the appeal if it is granted. The appeals process can take several months, and is unlikely to be considered before 2020. In the meantime, Pell remains in Melbourne assessment prison, receiving letters and visits from his supporters. Pell has maintained his innocence throughout the process.

The 78-year-old was sentenced to a six-year prison sentence for sexually abusing two 13-year-old former choirboys at St Patrick’s cathedral when he was the archbishop of Melbourne in 1996. He will be eligible for parole after serving a term of three years and eight months.

In August, the Victorian court of appeal – the highest court in the state – dismissed Pell’s appeal. He had 28 days to appeal to the high court, with lawyers filing his application at the 11th hour on Tuesday. However, filing at the last minute is not unusual.

The jury had not been unreasonable in convicting Pell on one count of sexual penetration of a child under the age of 16 and four counts of an indecent act against a child under the age of 16, the Victorian court of appeal chief justice, Anne Ferguson, and appeal court president justice, Chris Maxwell, previously found.

A third judge, Mark Weinberg, disagreed, finding the complainant was inclined to embellish aspects of his testimony and that he could not exclude the possibility that some of what he said was concocted. But in the court of appeal, judges are required only to reach a majority decision, which meant Pell’s appeal failed.

But in the appeal filed to the high court, Pell’s lawyers say Ferguson and Maxwell were wrong. “There did remain a reasonable doubt as to the existence of any opportunity for the offending to have occurred,” the filing said.

“The majority [of judges] erred by finding that their belief in the complainant required the applicant (Pell) to establish that the offending was impossible in order to raise and leave a doubt.”

In a criminal trial it is up to prosecutors to establish proof, not the defendant to prove innocence, and the filing says the Victorian appellant judges wrongfully reversed this onus of proof.

One of Pell’s victims died of an accidental drug overdose in 2014 at age 30. His father is being represented by Lisa Flynn from Shine Lawyers. She said her client was “beyond disappointed” to hear of the appeal.

“This painful period of his life is simply not coming to an end which continues to take a toll on his health,” Flynn said. “Every time Pell takes his legal fight to the next level our client is reminded of the disgusting abuse he inflicted on his son as a young choirboy.

“He has no doubt George Pell sexually abused his son and that his son’s sudden turmoil and devastation of his life was a direct result of the abuse he suffered inside Melbourne’s St Patrick’s cathedral at the hands of George Pell. Although he knew this was a possibility, it is still very hard for him to take when his son’s abuser was found guilty by a unanimous jury.”