Category: Priest Sexual Abuse

The Clerical Whispers blog has reported that 60 year old priest Father Edmund Cotter has been sebtenced to 5 years for sexually abusing 10 girls and 1 boy in the 1970’s while he was a parish priest in Preston U.K.
The priest used his position of authority to threaten and manipulate his victims. He told one of his victims he was “like God” and that if she wasn’t good she would burn in hell.
The Clerical Whispers blog is a great source of information about the inner working of the Catholic Church. It is worth looking at.

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The Board of Directors of St. Ambrose University, Iowa has removed the name of Bishop Gerald O’Keefe from the library that was named in his honour.
The Board acted after a complaint by St. Ambrose alumnus, Mark Powell who was sexually abused by priests in the Davenport Diocese when O’Keefe was Bishop. Powell reported the abuse to Bishop O’Keefe who simply moved the abusive priests to other parishes. Diocese records confirm that O’Keefe was aware of abuse happening in the Diocese while he was Bishop.
Read more here.

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Father Bernard Cloutier is charged with two counts of sexual assault, indecent assault and gross indecency involving two boys between 1979 and 1983 while he was parish priest at St. Mathieu Church on Pioneer Road, and L’Annonciation Church on Northway Avenue in Sudbury.
Read more here .

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In the wake of the record breaking sexual abuse settlement by the R.C. Archdiocese of Los Angeles, many people are calling for the resignation of Cardinal Mahony.
See for example here, here, here , here ,and here.
When disgraced Archbishop Bernard Law resigned from the Diocese of Boston he was rewarded with a post presiding over the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Not exactly a stinging reprimand.
It is true that Mahony shouldn’t be allowed to remain in charge in Los Angeles; he has lost whatever credibility and moral authority he had. But as far as I am concerned, Mahony shouldn’t resign: he should face acriminal investigation.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley issued a statement indicating that may be a possibility:.
“Today’s massive civil settlement highlights the institutional moral failure of the archdiocese to supervise predatory priests who operated for years under its jurisdiction…”
But I am not holding my breath…

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This weekend I read William Lobdell’s moving, and very sad, article Test of Faith in the Los Angeles Times.
Lobdell, a committed Christian, chronicles his time as a reporter on the newspaper’s religion beat. He describes in depressing detail how he investigated allegations of sexual abuse by church leaders of every faith. At first he appears to have been suspicious of victims who came forward with allegations of sexual abuse that were sometimes several decades in the past:
But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.
After spending years covering stories about sexual abuse, fraud, and deception by people of faith he finally realized…
My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.
Many survivors of clergy sexual abuse that I have assisted have told me the biggest loss they suffered, the harm that cannot be healed, is the loss of their faith. I have nothing but admiration for the survivors that I have had the privilege to represent who not only had the strength to come forward to demand accountability from their abusers (and those in authority within the Church who allowed the abuse to continue) but who despite everything they have gone through, still maintain their faith in God, and in their Church.
There has yet to be any reported court decision in North America that has awarded compensation for “loss of faith”. Perhaps it is about time…

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In the wake of the R.C. Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ 660 million dollar abuse claim settlement the Vatican has issued a statement “reminding” the public that sexual abuse is not just a problem with the Catholic Church.
No kidding…
Pedophilia is a scourge that does not restrict itself to any particular religious faith. I have represented victims of clergy sexual abuse by Catholic’s, Anglican’s, and Baptist’s, as well as person’s in a position of authority that had nothing to do with religion.
That being said, the institutional heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, and it’s demand for total obediance to Priest, Bishop, Pope, does appear to create the kind of “power relationship” that pedophiles use to manipulate their victims.
See for example the comments of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Doe vs. Bennett case.
The relationship between the bishop and a priest in a diocese is not only spiritual, but temporal.
First, the bishop provided Bennett with the opportunity to abuse his power.
Second, Bennett’s wrongful acts were strongly related to the psychological intimacy inherent in his role as priest.
Third, the bishop conferred an enormous degree of power on Bennett relative to his victims.
Read the entire decision here.

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