In his first public appearance since resigning last week as head of the Boston Archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law offered another apology and asked for forgiveness yesterday for his role in the clergy sex abuse scandal. He told reporters at a brief news conference, As I said last Friday, it is my hope and it’s my prayer that my resignation as archbishop might held the Archdiocese of Boston to experience healing, to experience reconciliation and to experience unity.
America’s Roman Catholic bishops won Vatican approval yesterday for a revised sex abuse policy that they say will remove any priest from ministry who has ever molested a child. The plan becomes effective March 1. The approval was expected after initial differences with the Vatican were worked out by a joint U.S.-Vatican commission that met early last month.
The Diocese of Brooklyn says in legal papers it has no duty to warn parishioners about pedophile priests. The claim filed in State Supreme Court in Queens is part of the diocese’s attempt to knock down a $300 million lawsuit filed by 39 current and former parishioners who allege that they were abused by clergy as children growing up in Brooklyn and Queens.
Cardinal Bernard Law and seven of his current and former bishops, including Bishops William F. Murphy of the Diocese of Rockville Centre and Thomas V. Daily of Brooklyn, have been subpoenaed to testify in front of a criminal grand jury investigating the child sex abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic church. Massachusetts officials said the state may ask the grand jury to charged Law, Murphy, Daily and other bishops who are now in Wisconsin, Louisiana and New Hampshire with obstruction of justice, conspiracy or accessory to sexual assault.
Three more upstate former altar boys have filed lawsuits alleging they were sexually molested decades ago by the Rev. Albert Cason. Cason was assigned to churches in Owego and Spencerport. The boys alleged they were sexually abused by Cason, although the priest is not named as a defendant in any of the lawsuits. The lawsuits allege that Cason, a co-pastor at St. Patrick’s Church in Owego from 1073 to 1985, fondled the plaintiffs and had sex with them. Most were pre-teens or in their early teens when the alleged abuse
The Rev. John Banko, a New Jersey priest, is described as having a pattern of sexually inappropriate behavior toward minors dating back 30 years. Banko was convicted yesterday of molesting an altar boy. He was the first priest here to be charged criminally in a sex case since the Roman Catholic Church became embroiled in a national scandal earlier this year. He was convicted of aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault and child endangerment. The boy, now 20, was abused by Banko in 1993 and 1994 at the community center of
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