In 1964, when I was 13 years old, my family’s summer vacation consisted of a drive from our home in New York to the apartment my grandparents had just bought in Miami Beach. That’s right, along with hundreds of other Northerners streaming south for Freedom Summer, my family decided that it might be a fun family event [...]
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who has problems of his own in his former Milwaukee archdiocese, is leading a procession of lawsuits opposing a national requirement of health insurance companies to cover contraceptives. The cardinal called it “totalitarian incursions against religious liberty.” His principle argument is that religious institutions should not “… be forced [...]
The most powerful three words of a child predator are: “You are special.” When a predator tells a child she is “special,” he is using the ultimate con, filling a huge void in a vulnerable child’s life. This grooming behavior allows a criminal full access into a child’s psyche to make it easy to sexually [...]
During the past week, the media and the American public could not help but draw comparisons between the recent child sex abuse scandal at Penn State and the endemic sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. But there are major differences that are hard to ignore. At Penn State, the predator and those who covered [...]
Father Roy Bourgeois, a beloved Catholic priest who has supported women’s ordination, was briefly detained in Rome yesterday after he and about a dozen women marched on the Vatican. The marchers held a banner reading “Ordain Catholic Women” and chanted: “What do we want? Women priests! When do we want them? Now.” Bourgeois and two [...]
The world waits with bated breath to see if the International Criminal Court will take up a case filed by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against the Pope and three other high-ranking Vatican officials over sexual abuse cover-ups. Meanwhile, more allegations of both priest abuse and [...]
As SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) anxiously await news from the International Criminal Court (ICC) on whether they will try Pope Benedict XVI and several top Vatican officials for crimes against humanity for the epidemic of clergy sexual abuse and coverups, new allegations concerning sexual abuse [...]
Pope Benedict XVI is in his native Germany for a long weekend, but it’s not going to be a party. Many German Catholics have turned their backs on the ancient institution and parted ways–180,000 in 2010 alone–as allegations of sexual abuse by priests continue to surface. The Pope is coming home to a Germany that [...]
For eight years, I walked through the doors of my Catholic elementary school under the words “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” I haven’t thought about my grade school, Patronage of St. Joseph, in a very, very long time. But as I listened the other night to Barbara Blaine, founder and president of [...]
In a courtroom in San Angelo, Texas, in August 2011, Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) leader Warren Jeffs defended himself against the charge of sexual assault on the basis of religious freedom. It was an outrageous defense given that the women and children of his FLDS have no freedom whatsoever, religious or otherwise. Their minds have been coerced, cajoled and controlled since the moment of birth.
