Author Archive

A nationally renowned psychiatric hospital that for years has treated clergy accused of sexual misconduct now says it was deceived by the Roman Catholic Church into providing reports that the church used to keep abusive priests in the ministry.  The institute may have unwittingly provided the clinical cover cited by New York Cardinal Edward Egan and other church officials as their reason for not suspending some accused priests.  A case in point is the Rev. Raymond Pcolka, whom Egan sent to the Institute of Living in 1989 after a mother

My Dear Friends in the Lord,

There can be no doubt: sexual abuse of children is an abomination.  It is both immoral and illegal and I will not tolerate it.  Be assured, that I will continue to do everything in my power to ensure the safety and security of every child in this Archdiocese.  Should any priest sexually abuse a child, he will be removed from pastoral ministry.  My heart goes out to any and all victims and their families.

The explosive headlines of the last few weeks have focused

In 1996 and 1999, it is alleged that Charles Frederick Sr., had sex with two 13 year old girls who lived in the house he shared with his wife, his eldest daughter and three grandchildren.  The indictments don’t spell it out, but what arrest warrants, family members and law enforcement officials allege, is that the victims were Frederick’s granddaughters, and that one of the girls and a grandson were the result of decades of incestuous rapes of his four daughters in the isolated houses where they grew up.  His daughters

Cardinal Edward M. Egan yesterday defended his handling of sexual abuse allegations against priests when he was a bishop in Connecticut and said any priest who sexually abuses a child will be remove from pastoral ministry.  In a two-page pastoral letter, being distributed to 2.4 million Catholics across the 413 parishes of the Archdiocese of New York, Egan repeated his earlier condemnation of sexual abuse of children by clergy, calling such acts an abomination and both immoral and illegal.

(New York)

Bishop Thomas Daily stood his ground yesterday, reiterating that his Brooklyn diocese won’t tell cops when its priests are accused of sexually molesting kids, but said he regretted his handling of a predatory cleric in Boston.  Daily is named in numerous lawsuits accusing the former Boston archdiocese official of covering up for a serial child-molesting priest in the 1980s.  In that situation, I acted in good conscience, with the knowledge gained from consultations.  But, in hindsight, I profoundly regret certain decisions, Daily wrote without identifying those decisions.

The following are

New York priests say they can no longer wear their collars with pride because they are humiliated by the child-abuse scandal rocking the Catholic Church.  They have told The Post that the long-running scandal had turned their collars into symbols of shame, making them self-conscious in public and the targets of derogatory remarks.

(New York)