A date has been set for former Bishop Raymond Lahey’s criminal trial on possession of child pornography.
The trial was scheduled to begin in April but is now set to proceed May 4, 2010 in Ottawa.
I saw an interesting article in the Toronto Star last weekend.
Reverend William Hodgson (Hod) Marshall is facing 2 dozen criminal charges of sexual assault and indecent assault involving 16 boys (now men) who say they were sexually abused by Marshall while he was teaching in Catholic schools in Windsor, Toronto and Sudbury.
The current Roman Catholic Bishop of London Ontario is Ronald Fabbro. The article traces the relationship between Fabbro and Marshall.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but childhood sexual abuse is a world wide problem.
Lat week I posted about Oprah’s show about male survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Since the show aired there have been a number of news stories about Canadian men who survived childhood sexual abuse who participated in the show.
My wife is a big fan of Oprah Winfrey. She is certainly one of the most influential people in North America (Oprah, not my wife). So I was pleased when my wife told me that Oprah had devoted two days to a show about male survivors of sexual abuse. The first part aired last week. Part two is scheduled to be aired today.
The show is about the stories of 200 adult men who were molested as children. I applaud Oprah’s efforts to encourage male survivors of sexual abuse to come forward.
Disclosure Painful
Convicted sexual abuser and former catholic priest, Donald Grecco has been arrested again. But this time it’s not for sexual abuse. It’s for violating the terms of his parole.
One of Grecco’s victims has filed a sexual abuse compensation claim against Grecco and former Bishop James Wingle. But when lawyers tried to serve notice of the lawsuit on Grecco, the former priest wasn’t living where he was supposed to be under the terms of a court order.
Grecco was charged with sexual abuse in September 2008. He pleaded guilty in April 2010 and heis scheduled to be sentenced this month.
Seraphim Storheim the Canadian Archbishop of the Orthodox Church in America, has resigned from his duties and requested a leave of absence after police began investigating Storeim for allegations of sexual abuse involving pre-teen boys.
The Orthodox Church in America (OCA), has released a public statement saying Archbishop Seraphim Storheim is on a leave of absence while police investigate the sexual abuse claims.
The Church has indicated it is cooperating with the police investigation and that the Church is conducting it’s own internal investigation.
From time to time sexual abuse survivors have named the Vatican as a defendant in priest sexual abuse lawsuits.
So far as I am aware, none of these claims have been successful.
I read an interesting post recently on the SLAW blog about the basis of the Vatican’s claims for sovereign immunity (the right of the head of a foreign state to be immune from arrest and prosecution).
Ontario Priest Charged With More Sexual Abuse Crimes
Catholic Priest Rev. William Hodgson Marshall a former Windsor high school principal is facing two criminal charges of indecent assault in Toronto when Marshall was teaching and coaching basketball at St. Michael’s College school in 1953.
More Charges
Today Windsor police announced that Marshall has been charged with six additional charges of indecent or sexual assault for incidents alleged to have occurred in Windsor during the 1950s and ’80s.
Terry Kohut has kept a dark secret for nearly 50 years. Now he is breaking his silence, becoming a key figure in the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and the growing controversy over what Pope Benedict XVI did about it.
When Terry Kohut was barely a teen, he says he was sexually molested and assaulted by Father Lawrence C. Murphy, the headmaster and priest of the school where he lived, St. John’s School for the Deaf, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
According to court and church documents Murphy raped and molested as many as 200 deaf boys who lived at the school between 1950 to 1974.
Father Charles J. Picot is a former priest from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bathurst, New Brunswick. Picot was ordained in 1974 and served in the Bathurst Diocese until 1993.
In 1993 Picot was found guilty of two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault.
In March of this year he was found not guilty of the indecent assault against a boy who was a member of his parish in Dalhousie, New Brunswick in the 1970s.
