Counter Pedophilia Investigate Unit

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Although allegations of child sex abuse by U.S. priests and deacons continue to surface, the vast majority involve actions taken decades ago by clergy who have since died or been removed from ministry, according to a new report.

The 2011 survey of abuse-related allegations and costs conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington was released April 10 by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. (more…)

Opening statements are scheduled for Monday in Philadelphia in the first case in which an official of a Roman Catholic archdiocese has been accused of protecting abusive priests by moving them from parish to parish.

Monsignor William Lynn has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and endangering the welfare of a child. Lynn served as the vicar of clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2004, a position in which he was responsible for investigating reports that priests had sexually abused children. (more…)

The Vatican has called for the training of priests in Ireland to be overhauled and for child protection practices to be reformed in a report on sexual abuse by clerics.

Details were published on Tuesday by the Catholic Church in Ireland, which is struggling amid a decline in public support, financial pressures and tensions with the Dublin government over how it has mishandled sex abuse inquiries. (more…)

Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of emails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. (more…)

A group representing survivors of clerical abuse has been told that a number of religious orders have begun searching their archives for evidence linked to child abuse.

The Northern Ireland Survivors and Victims of Institutional Abuse group (Savia) met Catholic primate Cardinal Sean Brady on Monday. Representatives of the religious orders were also at the Armagh meeting. Savia are seeking co-operation with the forthcoming abuse inquiry in NI. (more…)

Two men in their 70s were arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of sexual abuse of young men and children as police investigate claims of abuses by Church of England vicars decades ago.

Sussex police said that child protection detectives had been investigating the allegations for six months after a confidential review by former top judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss of abuse claims in the Diocese of Chichester. (more…)

LONDON – (AP) — The Church of England has offered an apology for failures to act to prevent child sexual abuse within the church.

Bishop Paul Butler, who heads the church’s safeguarding effort, issued the apology Wednesday following the release of a report on failures of the church in the cases of two priests, Colin Pritchard and the late Roy Cotton, who were both convicted of abusing children. (more…)

Philadelphia (CNN) — A judge on Monday rejected a motion to dismiss charges against a Philadelphia archdiocese official accused of covering up evidence of suspected sexual abuse of children.

Attorneys for Monsignor William Lynn had asked a judge to throw out charges against him based on a March 1994 memo showing Philadelphia’s archbishop at the time, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, ordered the destruction of a secret list naming 35 Catholic priests suspected of abuse. (more…)

Roman Catholic Church leaders unveiled an Internet teaching project on Thursday to help clergy around the world root out pedophiles in their ranks and protect children from potential abusers.

Ending a four-day conference on child abuse in Rome, Father Francois-Xavier Dumortier said the 1.2 million euro ($1.60 million) project would provide multilingual advice and access to research on pedophilia and how to respond to the problem. (more…)

A senior Vatican cardinal has revealed how more than 4,000 cases of sex abuse by priests on children have been investigated during the last ten years.

The shock figure was announced by American cardinal Joseph William Levada as he opened a conference on the wide scale phenomenon which has rocked the Roman Catholic church with cases reported all over the world.

Cardinal Levada, who is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, described the figure as a ‘dramatic increase’ and came in the face of global indignation at the scale of the problem and which has forced Pope Benedict XVI to apologise for previous cases during papal visits as he meets victims. (more…)