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Priest involved in nun sexting scandal lawyers up, refuses to cooperate
with church investigation
By MaryAnn Martinez, NYPost
June 30, 2023 4:05pm Updated
The priest at the center of a sex scandal involving a nun accused of breaking her vow of chastity has been suspended from his holy duties and is refusing to say what happened between them, according to a Texas bishop.
Father Phillip Johnson, 38, has also lawyered up as accusations about him and now-fired Rev. Mother Superior Teresa Agnes Gerlach, 43, swirl.
“He would neither confirm or deny his involvement,” revealed Fort Worth Bishop Michael Olson in a video to address the growing scandal to church members.
“The superior informed me that the priest, on the advice of his own canonical counsel, refused to participate in the investigation,” Olson added.
Gerlach admitted she and Johnson had developed a long-distance sexting relationship over email and video call but claims she has not broken her vow of chasity and was unfairly ousted from the Arlington, Texas, Diocese she had presided over.
She’s now suing them for $1m saying they defamed her and illegally confiscated her phone and laptop.
Before becoming a priest, Johnson was in the Navy.
stanncatholic/Facebook
via Jason Allen/CBS
In a message to The Post the Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina, said the priest is currently suspended: “Father Philip Johnson is not currently exercising public ministry … [His] priestly faculties were restricted by Bishop Luis Rafael Zarama as a precautionary measure until more clarity regarding his status can be ascertained.”
Olson said when the Fort Worth Diocese reached out to the priest’s superiors as part of their investigation, they were also shut down.
Johnson’s miraculous journey saw him rise to become a Navy officer before being diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008, which doctors said would claim his life within a year. However, he turned to religion and “miraculously and with the help of so many prayers, he persevered” and in 2017 was assigned to the Raleigh Diocese in North Carolina since 2017, according to a religious blog.
Gerlach has also suffered from health problems and is wheelchair-bound needs a feeding tube.
The nun and the priest first came into contact in 2020, while Johnson visiting the Carmelite Monastery in Traverse City, Michigan when he requested prayers from Gerlach’s monastery in Texas.
In an explosive 40-minute audio recording played in court Tuesday as part of the defamation suit, the nun admitted to “sexting” with Johnson.
In the audio recording played in court, Gerlach admitted: “He and I were writing often to each other. And we just got very close, and that’s when it happened.”
She admitted sending emails to Johnson then indicated that “just twice, on the phone,” they had committed an unspecified sexual sin “on video chat,” according to Catholic publication The Pillar.
“I was not in my right mind when this happened … I would never do anything like this. I’m a nun … then you fall,” she said on the tape.
However, she maintained: “It was all over the phone. So, he did not come down here.”
Gerlach’s lawyers have also said she was under the influence of fentanyl and other heavy medications when the interview took place, as part of her defence.
However during cross-examination in court, Olson was asked how he could tell Gerlach had violated her vow, to which he replied: “Look, it’s her own admission that she did. I can’t much greater authority than her own admission,” according to the Daily Mail.
The Vicar General for the Diocese of Fort Worth, Father Jonathan Charles Wallis, also testifed at the hearing saying he had known Gerlach since 2007 and she had told him she had broken her vow in December 2022, adding her “words were clear.”
He also testified Gerlach’s full-time caregiver, and fellow nun, Sister Francis Therese had referred to her as a “wh—e”.
Methinks it rhymes with 'door'.
After Fort Worth church leaders became aware of alleged “sexual misconduct” between the nun and the priest, Olson was given special powers by the Vatican to investigate the matter.
Gerlach was thrown out of the monastery at the beginning of June.
She and the other nuns from her convent sued the Forth Worth Diocese in civil court after they allege Olson violated their privacy by storming onto their property to seize electronic devices from them.
Gerlach belonged to the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Arlington, Texas.
A local judge is expected to rule by the end of next week whether the case will stay in civil court or remain a church matter, Olson and his lawyers contend.
“This is a church matter; this is a pastoral matter; this is a spiritual matter,” the bishop stated in the online video.
“Others have attempted to draw me into addressing this matter in the inappropriate venues of civil court and also both in social media and the mainstream media, and I will not do so.”
The Spanish priest who sexually abused children in Senegal for 25 years:
‘When he saw children, he couldn’t resist’
Victims talk to EL PAÍS about the abuse they suffered at the hands of Manel Sales Castellà, who worked as a missionary for years, even though ‘everyone knew’ he was preying on minors
The entrance to Joseph Faye High School in Oussouye, where the missionary Manel Sales abused students for decades.
JUAN LUIS ROD
José Naranjo
Dakar - JUL 05, 2023 - 05:56 CDT
“I was 19 years old, and I wanted to be a priest. Father Manel called me to his office and after asking me for my papers, he stood behind me and began to touch my private parts. I didn’t understand anything, I thought it was a fertility test or something like that to be a priest. But I noticed that he was aroused and he was sweating a lot.
Back then, we didn’t understand that a man could have sex with another man, it’s not part of our culture. But when he saw children, he couldn’t resist.” That’s how the Phillipe (not his real name) describes the abuse he suffered at the hands of Manel Sales Castellà, a Spanish priest of the Catholic order of the Piarists who sexually abused dozens of children and young people in Senegal between 1980 and 2005.
25 years? We're probably talking about hundreds of abused kids.
Phillipe talks in a rush on the phone. It’s clear he wants to share his story, to break the silence that has shrouded this case for decades. “I’m not looking for money or notoriety, I’m just telling the sad truth,” he says. Little by little, he recounts the abuse that, in his case, occurred in 1999 at the Joseph Faye High School in the town of Oussouye, in southern Senegal. “Two companions and I were finally admitted as pre-novices, and Father Manel gave each of us a single room in the boarding school. He came by there often and if he saw that someone was sleeping, he would go into their room and try to do things to us. The rest of us then came together to come closer to watch what he was doing and stop him,” continues Philippe.
Was this priest demonically possessed? Why was he tolerated for 25 years? He has a lot to answer for including introducing homosexuality to a people who never knew it.
There is much more to this sad story. Please go to El Pais for it.
The Spanish priests accused of child abuse in the United States
who fell off the radar
Several Catholic dioceses and American newspapers have revealed cases that, until recently, were unknown to the public. EL PAÍS has discovered that, after committing their crimes in the U.S., the accused clergymen headed for Spain… and managed to disappear
Spanish Jesuit priest Segundo Llorente, center, with members of an Indigenous community in Alaska.
In the 1930s, he was one of the first evangelizers in the area. Years later, he was accused of child abuse.
ÍÑIGO DOMÍNGUEZ - ANDREA GARCÍA BAROJA
Madrid - MAY 28, 2023 - 04:45 CDT
In 2018, EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church. We maintain an updated database with all known cases. If you know of a case that has not been reported, you can write to us at: abusos@elpais.es. If your information is regarding a case in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.
─────────
Manuel Fernández is a Spanish priest who was ordained in 1959, ending up in New Jersey by 1979. But in 2002, he was accused of child abuse — which occurred in the 1980s — and was removed from his post.
However, Fernández then returned to his diocese in the city of Ourense, in northwestern Spain. From there, he continued to be a priest, living quietly, without anyone in the community knowing about his past. The bishop’s office didn’t take any special measures, claiming that there was no record about his background on the other side of the ocean.
Up until now, this case was totally unknown in Spain. But it’s not the only one to have recently come to light. There have been several cases of Spanish priests who have been accused of pedophilia in the United States, with no public disclosure.
EL PAÍS first discovered a case like this in 2018, concerning Francisco Carreras. In 1984, he was sent to Salamanca from Miami with a warning about how dangerous he was. Yet, over the course of three decades, he was able to commit dozens of abuses across the Spanish province, moving from town to town.
In some cases, these clerics returned to Spain on the run and managed to evade detection. This newspaper has identified a total of 15 Spanish priests with clear accusations or convictions, along with another five defendants (who have not been included in this article) whose investigations have been inconclusive.
The information has been collected from data disseminated by U.S. media and from the Catholic Church itself.
Similarly, there are clerics from the United States and other countries — all accused of abuse in the U.S. — who, at some point, have ended up on Spanish soil. EL PAÍS has recorded six such cases, adding pieces to the puzzle concerning the Catholic Church in Spain, which has barely collaborated with investigators to help make the truth about these abusers known.
The recent case of Bolivia — where, in the past few weeks, six Spanish Jesuit priest have been accused of abuse — was the result of information uncovered by EL PAÍS, after this newspaper gained access to the diary of a deceased pedophile priest, Alfonso Pedrajas. The perpetrator’s notes indicate that, oftentimes, a priest’s transfer to another country was precisely because of accusations of abuse in Spain.
However, in several cases in the United States, this phenomenon has also occurred in reverse, with priests escaping to Spain after being accused, arriving in the Mediterranean country with a clean file. In theory, the Catholic dioceses of departure should inform the destination dioceses of what has taken place. But it’s also unclear if the Church didn’t know about the accusations in the United States against clergy, or if the Church knew and opted to do nothing. In any case, in Spain, the trail of several priests has gone cold, as it’s been impossible to determine their dioceses of origin to ask for explanations. Of course, the Spanish Catholic Church certainly has this information, and could release it if it wanted to.
The oldest case involves the Jesuit priest Segundo Llorente. Born in 1906 in a town in the Spanish province of León, he was posted to an indigenous community in Alaska. He even became a local politician in the state legislature. And, despite all the crimes he committed, his image in Spain remains impeccable. Among the Jesuits, he is a legendary figure — his Wikipedia entry lists all his achievements, without a single mention of the abuse allegations.
There are many more cases from decades ago of priests who left Spain from the United States as young missionaries. Many lived the rest of their lives in North America, but others chose to return to Spain as a means of escape. In several of these cases, the mystery continues, given the silence of the dioceses. The priest Jesús García, for example, was accused of abuse in 1995, in Texas. He subsequently returned to Spain, where he landed in the Diocese of Alcalá de Henares, in Madrid, only to be placed in different parishes. The bishop’s office has refused to provide details about the case, only responding to EL PAÍS saying that it has informed the Ombudsman and the Spanish Episcopal Conference about the accusations.
A case that illustrates the other phenomenon — of non-Spanish priests accused in the United States subsequently ending up in Spain — is that of the Peruvian priest Edgardo Arrunategui Jiménez. After being accused in California, he left the U.S., covered his tracks and managed to settle in parishes in Madrid between 2004 and 2008, sometimes changing his name. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Madrid now confirms that he was indeed in the area, but claims that he arrived from Peru — his original diocese — without any negative reports, while affirming that there are no complaints against him in Spain. His whereabouts are currently unknown.
Good grief! Again, go to El Pais for the rest of this story.
Sexual abuse claims mount at Buenos Aires school
where Pope Francis once taught
A former instructor at Colegio del Salvador in the Argentinean capital is accused of having molested over 40 children since 1998. The victims have asked the Pontiff for help without success
The former students of the Colegio del Salvador Gonzalo Elizondo (left) and Pablo Vio, in Buenos Aires.
ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
MAR CENTENERA
Buenos Aires - AUG 30, 2022 - 11:52 CDT
Gonzalo Elizondo and Pablo Vio are two 32-year-old friends who attended Colegio del Salvador, a century-old educational institution run by the Catholic religious order of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s the same school where Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now known as Pope Francis, used to teach. Elizondo and Vio remained friends after they graduated, but it took them almost 20 years to realize that they shared a painful memory. Both were sexually abused by the same teacher, Brother César Fretes, when they were 11 years old. When they broke their silence and began seeking answers, they discovered that Fretes had victimized dozens of students: the latest count is 42.
Fretes died in 2015 without ever facing justice. (Fear not, he has faced justice). School officials acknowledge the sexual abuse, but have refused to offer a public apology or financial compensation for the victims. Nor have they heeded the victims’ demands that those in charge of the school at the time face sanctions. “There were many adults who didn’t do what they were supposed to do. They neglected and abandoned us. They knew that there was a predator, and all they did was move him somewhere else and cover it up,” said Vio in a joint interview with Elizondo for EL PAÍS.
Vio and Elizondo say that Fretes abused them in 2002 when he was their sixth grade teacher, but they didn’t tell anyone and tried to forget. A year later, the school suddenly transferred the Jesuit more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) away. Rumors of sexual abuse spread among the students. Elizondo began to rethink the incident at a spiritual retreat the year before when he woke up in the middle of the night and felt Fretes’ hand down his pants. “He told me that I was sleepwalking and that he had led me back to the room, but I never sleepwalked,” said Elizondo. “When I heard the rumors, I realized that that he was actually molesting me.” But since Fretes had already been transferred out, he decided to keep quiet.
Gonzalo Elizondo (left) and Pablo Vio during the interview with EL PAÍS in Buenos Aires.
ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
Vio took longer to realize he had been abused because he lacked the tools to understand it when he was growing up. Back then, they didn’t teach sex education in school, now a mandatory course. Many students didn’t know how to act or what to think when Fretes raised sexual topics in class. “He was grooming us little by little,” said Vio. “One day in his office, he asked me to pull down my pants. He touched my penis, ran his hands over my body, and asked me to compare myself in the locker room with my classmates, and then to tell him about it,” he recalls. “I even thought at the time that I was lucky to have someone to teach me about these things. No one had ever told me that this was wrong.”
Elizondo first approached school officials in 2019 about the abuse. Three years later, Vio and dozens of other victims have joined his cause. But they are frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the institution, which has refused to talk to the media claiming that it has already apologized to the school community and has taken measures to prevent more abuse.
Once more, there is more to this story on El Pais, including Pope Francis' silence on this file.
Child sex abuse lawsuits reveal warnings about priest years earlier
Kristy Nease · CBC News ·
Posted: May 10, 2023 1:00 AM PDT |
Rev. Dale Crampton, seen here in this archival CBC News footage from the 1980s, sexually assaulted seven altar boys in the Ottawa area in the 1970s and 1980s, crimes he pleaded guilty to in 1986. At least 16 alleged victims have filed lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall since then, starting in 2009. (CBC)
The Catholic church in Ottawa has quietly settled three child sexual abuse lawsuits involving notorious priest Dale Crampton, cancelling three separate jury trials that were scheduled to be heard in Ottawa this spring.
Two of the three plaintiffs alleged they were not only assaulted by Crampton, who killed himself in 2010, but also by his superior, auxiliary bishop John Beahen, at Crampton's cottage in West Carleton. Beahen died from a stroke in 1988.
Unlike in criminal courts, civil jury trials are rare in Canada — Ontario is one of a few provinces that still hold them. Most cases end up being settled out of court, sparing both sides the risk and scrutiny of public trials, and keeping any evidence gathered in the dark.
But documents filed in preparation for the now-cancelled trials, obtained from the Ottawa courthouse by CBC News and revealed publicly for the first time, contain disturbing new allegations about early warnings of Crampton's abuse, and cast rare light on the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall's side of the story.
The documents show that in the mid-1960s — years before the abuse alleged in the settled lawsuits and the crimes Crampton committed in later decades — Beahen was allegedly told by two different young men that Crampton had sexually assaulted boys in Ottawa.
One of the whistleblowers was Beahen's own nephew, who swore in a 2014 affidavit he told his uncle in 1966 that Crampton had sexually assaulted another member of Beahen's extended family.
The other complainant was a friend of that nephew. He swore in a separate 2014 affidavit that Crampton fondled him at St. Margaret Mary parish in 1965, and that two weeks later he reported it to Beahen, who assured the young man he would handle it.
In October 1966, Crampton was transferred to Beahen's parish, St. Elizabeth's, where the two priests lived and worked together for a year and a half, the documents allege.
Crampton became a priest in Ottawa in 1963 and served at several parishes in Ottawa, including St. Maurice, where he was pastor for years. He was a school trustee for the Carleton Roman Catholic School Board, an honorary RCMP chaplain and a marriage tribunal judge. (CBC)
The allegations are found in pre-trial memos filed by the firm that represented all three plaintiffs: Beckett Personal Injury Lawyers based in London, Ont. The firm has brought hundreds of lawsuits against the Catholic church in Canada — 16 of them involving alleged abuse by Crampton in Ottawa.
Pre-trial memos lay out each side's arguments in a case and any documents to substantiate them — evidence that may or may not end up being heard at trial. They are not typically accessible to the public.
In the affidavit contained in the memos, Beahen's nephew said he "felt a tremendous relief" after Crampton was transferred in 1966, thinking his uncle would help Crampton get the help he needed.
Crampton went on to sexually assault seven altar boys over a 10-year period in the 1970s and '80s, crimes he pleaded guilty to in 1986.
And two of the plaintiffs in the recently settled civil cases allege Beahen later assaulted them. Both plaintiffs alleged they felt like Crampton had offered them up to Beahen at the cottage.
Crampton's cottage in West Carleton, seen here in this 1980s CBC footage, was the site of abuse alleged by all three plaintiffs in the recently settled cases. (CBC archives)
There were other warning signs, lawyers for the plaintiffs outlined in records obtained by CBC.
They include a letter written by Francis J. Quinlan of Oblate Fathers on July 20, 1955, and sent to then Ottawa archbishop Marie-Joseph Lemieux, in which Quinlan described Crampton as "somewhat too fond of young boys."
Beahen, meanwhile, was stripped of his faculties for five months after becoming a priest in 1946 due to his "run-down condition," and in the fall of 1986 he was sent to Southdown, a facility that treats priests for alcoholism and sexual problems, one of the plaintiff's memos alleges.
There is much more on this story at CBCNews.
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