This Week's Catholic Pervs and Paedos List > 93 y/o Ex-priest acquitted; Super-Paedo Priest Ridsdale - more charges; Pope Adviser quits CSA committee

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Ex-priest, 93, acquitted of indecent assault at Manitoba residential school

Arthur Masse was charged last year in alleged incident at Fort Alexander

dating back more than 50 years

Bryce Hoye · CBC News · 

Posted: Mar 30, 2023 5:35 AM PDT | Last Updated: 5 hours ago

Retired priest Arthur Masse, 93, leaves the Law Courts in Winnipeg on Thursday after a judge acquitted him of indecent assault against a residential school student more than 50 years ago. Manitoba Court of King's Bench Justice Candace Grammond said she believes an assault happened but could not determine beyond a reasonable doubt who did it. (David Lipnowski/The Canadian Press)

A retired priest accused of assaulting a First Nations girl at a Manitoba residential school more than 50 years ago has been acquitted.

Victoria McIntosh alleged she was assaulted by Arthur Masse, now 93, in a bathroom of the Fort Alexander Residential School in eastern Manitoba's Sagkeeng First Nation sometime between 1968 and 1970, when she was around the age of 10.

Loved ones, some wearing orange Every Child Matters shirts, hugged McIntosh in court in Winnipeg as Manitoba Court of King's Bench Justice Candace Grammond read her decision on Thursday acquitting Masse.

Grammond said she believes McIntosh was assaulted, but she wasn't persuaded that Masse in particular was necessarily the one who did it.

"I have concluded when taken as a whole her identification of the accused was not sufficiently reliable to convince me beyond a reasonable doubt that he perpetrated an assault," Justice Grammond told court on Thursday.

There is much more on this story at CBC News.

Paedo-priest Ridsdale facing more charges over historic child sexual abuse

March 31, 2023 7:38 am 

by Danielle Delalande

Ballarat Magistrates Court

Pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale is set to plead guilty to more horrific sex crimes.

The latest charge involves a young boy at Horsham in the late 1980s.

The 89-year-old faced the Ballarat magistrates court via videolink yesterday.

He’s currently imprisoned in Ararat, serving a 36-year jail sentence for abusing close to 70 victims.

Ridsdale has been serving concurrent sentences since first being charged in 1993. On 15 August 2017, Ridsdale pleaded guilty to 23 charges, including two counts of rape and one of buggery, for abusing 12 children, 11 boys and 1 girl aged 6 to 13, between 1962 and 1988 in Ballarat and the surrounding area.

He’ll return to court in June.

Key Pope Adviser Quits Over Concerns About Child Sex Abuse Committee

Alec Karam

Published Mar. 29, 2023 2:48PM ET 

The Daily Beast

Hans Zollner, a key adviser to Pope Francis and the public face of efforts to combat sex abuse of minors, has resigned over concerns of how the papal advisory works. 

“The protection of children and vulnerable persons must be at the heart of the Catholic Church’s mission,” he wrote in a statement. 

“Over the last few years, I have grown increasingly concerned with how the commission, in my perception, has gone about achieving that goal, particularly in the areas of responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency.” 

U.S. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, said that Zollner resigned due to his busy workload, contradicting Zollner’s statement. 

Does that mean that one of them is a liar? Are there liars in Christendom? There appears to be at least one in the Vatican.

The committee was formed in 2014 and has faced significant upheaval in the years since, with Zollner the last founding member remaining. In 2017, abuse survivor Marie Collins left the committee, calling out high members of the church for their resistance and lamenting its lack of resources.