SUMMARY: A new investigation by the Associated Press and FRONTLINE finds allegations of physical and sexual abuse for some migrant children who are moved into government-funded foster care after they are separated from their families. Jeffrey Brown talks to the AP’s Martha Mendoza about details of the allegations, who oversees the foster homes and why additional lawsuits may be forthcoming.
SUMMARY: A scathing new grand jury report in Pennsylvania describes decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. At least 1,000 children were molested by more than 300 clergy, the panel found, which also claims a conspiracy of silence extended all the way to the Vatican. Judy Woodruff sits down with Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Fr. Thomas Reese of Religion News Service.
SUMMARY: One of the most recognized faces of the American Catholic Church was removed from the public ministry last month, making Cardinal Theodore McCarrick the highest ranking Catholic official in the nation to be removed for sexual abuse of a minor. Now the New York Times reports that McCarrick touched young adult seminarians. John Yang learns more Rev. James Martin of America magazine.
SUMMARY: Decades of sexual abuse have been uncovered at one of the nation's elite prep schools. A new investigation details the experiences of 24 adult alumni of Choate Rosemary Hall who, between 1963 and 2010, allegedly suffered offenses such as kissing, groping and rape. Hari Sreenivasan discusses the report with Paul Mones, a sexual abuse attorney, and Jonathan Saltzman of The Boston Globe.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The report released last night focused on a dozen former teachers at the prestigious boarding school in Connecticut, Choate Rosemary Hall.
It recounts the experiences of 24 adult alumni who were allegedly abused between 1963 and 2010. Investigators said the offenses ranged from kissing to groping to rape.
Choate hired a law firm with no previous ties to the school to lead the investigation.
Jonathan Saltzman was part of The Boston Globe Spotlight team that helped break the story. And Paul Mones is an attorney who has represented sexual abuse survivors at private schools and other institutions. He is not involved in any of the Choate cases.
Jonathan, I want to start with you.
You and your team launched this series a while back about this happening at elite prep schools in the Northeast. What did this report reveal to you?
JONATHAN SALTZMAN, The Boston Globe: Well, we had reported on about 110 private schools in New England that had faced allegations of sexual abuse over the past 25 years.
And we mentioned Choate. But this report was initiated in response to that story, and it laid out in extremely graphic detail the accounts of about 24 survivors of abuse.
And as you said in your introduction, some of these are extraordinarily graphic descriptions of abuse, rape. And, to me, the most startling thing about the report was that, first, the school named 12 teachers that they said had abused kids. That's an extraordinary number, and we haven't seen that before in other schools.
And then what they also did was they essentially owned up to the fact that they had never reported these cases of abuse to child welfare authorities in Connecticut, even though it had been required.
Pope Francis has approved the creation of a Vatican tribunal for judging bishops accused of covering up or failing to act in cases of child sexual abuse by priests, an unprecedented step long demanded by victims in the more than three decades that the Roman Catholic Church has publicly dealt with the abuse scandal.
Bishops, regarded as “princes of the church” and sovereign in their dioceses, until now could be disciplined only directly by the pope, but until Francis, no pope had publicly confronted or demoted even those bishops accused of gross negligence. Under Francis’ predecessors — Pope Benedict XVI and, before him, John Paul II — the Vatican defrocked about 850 priests for sexual abuse and penalized about 2,500 more, but there was no similar judicial mechanism for bishops.
Advocates for abuse victims had a range of reactions, from skepticism to watchful optimism.
Francis’ move could affect bishops around the world as awareness of sexual abuse and calls for accountability spread, even to the church in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where the topic is still largely taboo.
It will also bring new scrutiny to a number of bishops currently under investigation over accusations that they covered up abuse by priests. They include Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of Minneapolis and St. Paul, whose archdiocese was indicted last week; Cardinal George Pell of Australia, the head of the Vatican’s finances, who was recently called to testify by a government commission in Australia; and Bishop Robert W. Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, who was convicted on a misdemeanor charge for negligently handling a case involving a pedophile priest. He resigned his post recently but remains a bishop.
A mechanism for holding bishops accountable has been a high priority of the 17-member papal commission on abuse that was also created by Francis. That commission includes two abuse survivors and many laypeople, and it is headed by Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, who was sent to Boston at the height of the abuse scandal there, and to two other dioceses before that, to clean up scandals left behind by previous bishops.
There are many unanswered questions as to how the tribunal will conduct its inquiries and proceedings, including what punishments it would impose on bishops found guilty.
Peter Saunders, one of the two abuse survivors on the commission, said he was pleased that Francis seemed to be listening to their recommendations but said, “When allegations against senior clergy are brought to the tribunal, we’ll see whether it’s working.”
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in St. Louis for their semiannual meeting, said they had no advance knowledge of the creation of a new tribunal. (Among those attending the meeting was Archbishop Nienstedt.) In interviews, bishops said that they welcomed the step as a move toward transparency and would cooperate fully.
“It’s something new and necessary in the church because it does provide a standard and a policy that holds bishops accountable in the way we’ve held our clergy accountable,” said Bishop Christopher J. Coyne of Burlington, Vt., who was a spokesman in the archdiocese of Boston at the height of the scandals there in the early to mid-2000s.
The five-point plan announced on Wednesday says the tribunal will be housed in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that polices adherence to church doctrine and that already handles the cases of priests accused of abuse.
Francis will choose a secretary, and additional permanent staff members will be hired for the tribunal, said the Vatican’s chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi. The procedures will be re-evaluated in five years, he said.
Father Lombardi said the tribunal would also examine some of the abuse cases perpetrated by clergy members that were “still pending” at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. “They are still very numerous and have accumulated,” he said. The tribunal will “accelerate” matters, he said, noting that money had been set aside to bolster the new section.
Father Lombardi said that the tribunal’s responsibility for judging bishops would include questions of omission: “what one should have done and didn’t do,” he said. “This is another kind of responsibility and shortcoming, and has to be judged in an appropriate way with appropriate rules.”
Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a support and advocacy group for victims, said in a statement that she suspected that the new panel “won’t make a difference” because it relies on church officials to judge other church officials. She said that a more effective move would be for the church to support the reform of secular laws to strengthen the prosecution of those responsible for abuse.
Voice of the Faithful, a church reform movement first created to respond to the abuse scandal, said, “These steps are the most promising the Vatican has yet taken.” Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, a Boston-based group that documents cases of sexual abuse by priests, called the development encouraging because it “provides a structure, personnel, a budget and a brief for actually acting.”
In the United States, where the church has been struggling with the question of sexual abuse by members of the clergy since the first case of serial abuse became public in Louisiana in the 1980s, the problem remains far from resolved.
Last year, there were 37 allegations of sexual abuse made to the church by those who were currently minors, and another 600 “historical allegations” made by those who are older, said Francesco C. Cesareo, chairman of the United States bishops conference’s National Review Board on sexual abuse, in his report to the bishops on Wednesday. Six of the current allegations made last year were substantiated, and other cases were still open, he said.
Given that, he said, “it should not be concluded that the sexual abuse of minors is a problem of the past that has already been addressed.”
“This is the missing link in the church’s response to the abuse crisis,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of the Jesuit weekly magazine America. “It is a long overdue and delayed response to this problem, but it’s an absolutely indispensable step. This is what everyone was waiting for and all were calling for in all quarters of the church.”
Father Martin suggested that action had been slow to come because there was a “lingering reluctance to hold bishops accountable if they themselves had not committed the abuse” and because, after the Second Vatican Council shifted greater power from Rome to the bishops, of “the traditional authority of bishops over their dioceses.”
SUMMARY: More than 800 priests have been defrocked over the years in connection to sexual abuse scandals, and 2,500 have been penalized. Now a Vatican tribunal is being established to publicly judge and discipline bishops accused of covering up or failing to act on reports of child sex abuse. John Allen of The Boston Globe joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the historic move.
SUMMARY: In San Francisco, a woman is suing the Jehovah's Witnesses for failing to protect her from a known child abuser when she was a child. The Center for Investigative Reporting has shed light on accusations that religious leaders led a cover-up of child sex abuse. Special correspondent Trey Bundy of the CIR’s Reveal reports on how the organization is using the first amendment to fight these charges.
Editor’s Note: The graphic appearing in the introduction of this report mistakenly contains an image of a cross. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not use the image of a cross as a symbol for Christianity. We regret the error.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Next, an investigation into child sexual abuse among Jehovah’s Witness and accusations that religious leaders led a cover-up within inside some of the group’s 14,000 U.S. congregations.
Our colleagues from the Center for Investigative Reporting obtained confidential memos shedding new light on the revelations.
Special correspondent Trey Bundy has the story from Reveal, a new Web site, radio show, and podcast run by the center.
TREY BUNDY (NewsHour): At a convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses in California, new members are taking the plunge.
MAN: At your baptism, you said yes.
TREY BUNDY: They’re joining more than eight million members worldwide.
Believers are taught to renounce secular society because it’s controlled by Satan, and not to socialize too much with outsiders. But charges of sexual abuse have brought this insular community under greater scrutiny. And now, in this San Francisco courtroom, the first child abuse case against the Jehovah’s Witnesses to go to trial is under way.
Candace Conti is suing the organization for failing to protect her from a known child abuser when she was 9 years old.
CANDACE CONTI, Plaintiff: If I were to sum up our goals in this case, it was to attack the policies and procedures that where in place that let a serial molester continue to molest children.
TREY BUNDY: Conti’s lawyer says instructions from Jehovah’s Witness leaders have enabled child molesters.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): The Vatican has long been criticized for its handling of sexual abuse cases, but today’s report from a United Nations panel was especially harsh.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child said the Vatican had not adequately acknowledged past crimes, and cultivated a code of silence that provided immunity for perpetrators. The Vatican calls the report distorted and unfair, in that it ignores corrective actions taken by the church.
Here to flesh out those arguments are Reverend Thomas Rosica, chief executive officer of Canada’s Catholic Salt and Light Television Network and an English-language spokesperson for the Vatican, and Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
SUMMARY: The revelation that the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago hid decades of child sex abuse was revealed through documents as part of a settlement with victims. The papers describe how church leadership reassigned priests accused of abuse to different parishes. Gwen Ifill talks to Jeff Anderson, attorney for the plaintiffs.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In the public imagination, France is renowned for many things: its cuisine…its culture… as well as a very open embrace of female beauty.
You can’t walk a city block in Paris without seeing the scantily clad models showcasing France’s high fashion industry. This is the nation that gave us Brigit Bardot And Catherine Deneuve, and welcomed former supermodel Carla Bruni as its first lady… this after her many years modeling with very little – or nothing at all -- on.
Given all that, it’s maybe a bit surprising that a controversy has erupted in France over what some argue is the ‘hyper-sexualization” of young girls…. Girls like 9 year old Anais Agogue… Anais regularly competes in what are called “mini miss pageants.”
More than two decades after the body of a young girl was found inside a cooler, the New York Police Department is seeking help identifying the victim dubbed "Baby Hope."
On Tuesday, the 22nd anniversary of the discovery, police offered a $12,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest and conviction in the unsolved crime.
Baby Hope.JPEG
Officers put up posters and handed out fliers with sketches of how the victim might have looked.
The cooler was found in Washington Heights, on an embankment off the Henry Hudson Parkway.
The girl was believed to be between 3 and 5 years old. Tests showed she was malnourished and had been sexually abused.
DNA testing has yielded no matches with databases of convicted felons or active missing person cases.
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, for more than 25 years the savvy shepherd of the Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles, retired nearly two years ago to a renovated yellow house behind his childhood parish, pledging to stay in the spotlight by continuing to fight for the rights of immigrants.
But the cardinal now finds himself in a most unwelcome spotlight, one that he sought for years to avoid. Internal church personnel files released this week as part of a civil court case reveal that he and his top adviser knowingly shielded priests accused of child sexual abuse from law enforcement. In one letter, the cardinal ordered a clergyman to stay in New Mexico, where he had been sent for treatment, to avoid the possibility of being reported to the police in California.
Lawyers for the Los Angeles Archdiocese fought for years to prevent the release of the files, but a demand for transparency was a primary goal of the more than 500 victims of clergy abuse who signed a record settlement for $660 million with the archdiocese in July 2007. When a judge ordered the files to be made public despite the church’s objections, the archdiocese fought to be allowed to redact names and identifying details. But it recently lost that battle and now awaits an imminent cascade of 30,000 more documents that could further tarnish Cardinal Mahony’s legacy.
“He played a very prominent role as social and spiritual leader,” said William Deverell, the director of the Huntington-University of Southern California Institute on California and the West. “He’s a native, knows greater Los Angeles exceedingly well and presided over an already globally changed city, leading it into the next phase. He earned a great deal of ecumenical trust and leadership, which is now going to be re-examined.”
In his long tenure in the nation’s largest archdiocese, Cardinal Mahony, now 76, distinguished himself as a keen politician in both civic and church circles. He was an early champion of Hispanic immigrants, marching with César Chávez, the founder of the United Farm Workers of America, and is beloved by many Hispanics, who make up 70 percent of the four million Catholics in the archdiocese.
Cardinal Mahony, who was archbishop from 1985 until 2011, cultivated friendships with politicians like former Mayor Richard J. Riordan, and raised nearly $200 million to build the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, a postmodern landmark downtown. In an increasingly conservative Catholic Church, he was known as one of the last relatively progressive prelates, embracing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and encouraging increased participation of women and laypeople. He hosted what has become the largest annual gathering of Catholics in ministry, the Religious Education Congress.
But his tenure was shadowed by the abuse scandal. In 2003, the California Legislature temporarily lifted the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases for one year, allowing new lawsuits to be filed. The legislation ultimately led to the settlement with more than 500 victims in 2007.
In 2009, the Los Angeles Archdiocese became the first in the nation to be the subject of a federal investigation into the handling of clergy sexual abuse. The United States attorney, Thomas P. O’Brien, convened a grand jury, which was reported at the time to include an investigation into the role of Cardinal Mahony and his chief lieutenants in protecting accused abusers. No charges were ever brought.
SUMMARY: A report by former FBI director Louis Freeh concludes that leaders at Penn State, including head football coach Joe Paterno, did not do enough to protect the children who were abused by former assistant coach Jerry Sundusky. Judy Woodruff talks to Cate Barron of The Patriot-News and Mark Dent of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And -- and we return to the Penn State story with a wider perspective on what's happened and what should be taken from it.
For that, we're joined by Teresa Huizar, executive director of the National Children's Alliance, which works with groups around the country to provide services for victims of child abuse, Elizabeth Letourneau, a researcher and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Scott Berkowitz, founder and president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): A jury convicted a U.S. church official for the first time for the handling and cover-up of sexual abuse claims.
Sixty-one-year-old Monsignor William Lynn of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was found guilty of child endangerment. Prosecutors said he recommended reassigning priests accused of abuse to unsuspecting parishes when he served as secretary of the clergy from 1992 to 2004. The jury acquitted him on one count of conspiracy and another of endangerment. He could face up to seven years in prison.
The jury could not agree on a verdict for his co-defendant, Rev. James Brennan. He was accused of sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy in 1996.
