Saturday, March 26, 2011

Bà mẹ sinh 8 được mời đi đóng phim khiêu dâm

Một hãng giải trí của Mỹ đã đề nghị trả cho bà mẹ 8 con Nadya Suleman 500.000 USD để cô xuất hiện trong một đoạn phim sex kéo dài một giờ.

Nếu cô đồng ý, hãng Vivid Entertainment sẽ sắp xếp để thanh toán hết khoản nợ mà Nadya Suleman đang gặp phải với hạn chót phải trả là 9/10.

Nadya Suleman bên 8 đứa con. Ảnh: Splash.

Trước đó Radaronline cho biết bà mẹ 8 con đã phải từ bỏ giấc mơ làm truyền hình thực tế vì có nguy cơ bị tịch thu mọi tài sản và phải sống bằng trợ cấp xã hội do không kiếm đủ tiền để nuôi con.

“Nadya tốn rất nhiều tiền để nuôi 14 đứa con cũng những người trông trẻ”, một nguồn tin nói với Radaronline. “Cô ấy cần rất nhiều tiền chỉ để chi trả những nhu cầu cơ bản. Giờ thu nhập gần như đã cạn kiện và trong cả năm rưỡi qua cô không thể kiếm được gì để nuôi sống gia đình”.

TMZ cũng cho biết Suleman thường xuyên không trả kịp tiền thuê nhà và người chủ đang chuẩn bị thủ tục tịch thu tài sản để thế nợ. Cô cũng suýt bị đuổi ra khỏi nhà vào tháng 4.
Đầu năm nay, Suleman đã chụp ảnh trong trang phục bikini cho tạp chí Star, chưa đầy một năm sau khi sinh liền 8 đứa con. Cô tuyên bố, cô không hề phẫu thuật thẩm mỹ để có được cơ thể như vậy.

Suleman, 34 tuổi, sinh 8 con hồi đầu năm 2009. Cô đã có 6 con, đều chưa tới 8 tuổi, trong đó có một cặp song sinh. Một người hàng xóm cho biết tất cả các con trước của cô đều ra đời bằng phương pháp thụ tinh trong ống nghiệm và từ một người hiến tinh trùng. Trong một bài phỏng vấn, Suleman cho biết cô sinh nhiều con vì quá cô đơn.

Anh Minh
Theo Vnexpress

24/03 How Gandhi Became Gandhi

March 24, 2011
By GEOFFREY C. WARD

GREAT SOUL
Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India
By Joseph Lelyveld
Illustrated. 425 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.

Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.

A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

But wasn’t it a central tenet of the Mahatma’s teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

“We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji’s birthday,” the secretary answered, “as a symbol to show that we understand his message.”

Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated. Most Americans — many middle-class Indians, for that matter — know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley’s Academy Award-winning screen portrayal. His was a mesmerizing performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man, who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha (truth force), a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.

It is this last avatar that interests Joseph Lelyveld most. “Great Soul” concentrates on what he calls Gandhi’s “evolving sense of his constituency and social vision,” and his subsequent struggle to impose that vision on an India at once “worshipful and obdurate.” Lelyveld is especially qualified to write about Gandhi’s career on both sides of the Indian Ocean: he covered South Africa for The New York Times (winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book about apartheid, “Move Your Shadow”), and spent several years in the late 1960s reporting from India. He brings to his subject a reporter’s healthy skepticism and an old India hand’s stubborn fascination with the subcontinent and its people.

This is not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi’s life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is helpfully divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it’s sometimes harder than it should be to follow the shifting course of Gandhi’s thought.

But “Great Soul” is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, nuanced and cleareyed. The two decades Gandhi spent in South Africa are too often seen merely as prelude. Lelyveld treats them with the seriousness they deserve. “I believe implicitly that all men are born equal,” Gandhi once wrote in the midst of one of his campaigns against untouchability. “I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch.”

It actually took a long time for the Mahatma to turn that implicit belief into explicit action, Lelyveld reminds us. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in a dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics: in an early advertisement he proclaimed himself an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.” But, Lelyveld writes, “South Africa . . . challenged him from the start to explain what he thought he was doing there in his brown skin.”

Initially, Gandhi was simply affronted that discriminatory laws and bigoted custom lumped educated well-to-do Indians like him with “coolies,” the impoverished mine, plantation and railroad workers who made up the bulk of the region’s immigrant Indian population. The nonviolent campaigns he waged to bring about equality between Indians and whites over the next 20 years would lead him — slowly and unsteadily, but inexorably — to advocate equality between Indian and Indian, first across caste and religious lines and then between rich and poor. (His identification with the aspirations of black people would not come until long after he had left Africa.)

As Lelyveld shows, the outcomes of Gandhi’s campaigns in South Africa were neither clear-cut nor long-lasting: after one, his own supporters beat him bloody because they thought he’d settled too quickly for a compromise with the government. But they taught him how to move the masses — not only middle-class Hindu and Muslim immigrants but the poorest of the poor as well. He had, as he himself said, found his “vocation in life.”

Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the “four pillars on which the structure of swaraj” — self-rule — “would ever rest”: an unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of nonviolence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India’s approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the evil concept of untouchability. Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi’s noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.

He made a host of enemies along the way — orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary. But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader — still largely unknown in the West — who saw the Mahatma’s nonviolent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word ­Gandhi coined for his people — “Harijans” or “children of God” — as patronizing; he preferred “Dalits,” from the Sanskrit for “crushed,” “broken.”

Sometimes, Gandhi said Indian freedom would never come until untouchability was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after independence was won. He was unapologetic about that kind of inconsistency. “I can’t devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, ‘Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj,’ ” he told a friend. “All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.” It was also like the politician he said he was, always careful to balance the demands of one group of constituents against those of another.

As Lelyveld has written in “Move Your Shadow,” “Gandhi had hoped to bring about India’s freedom as the moral achievement of millions of individual Indians, as the result of a social revolution in which the collapse of alien rule would be little more than a byproduct of a struggle for self-reliance and economic equality.” Foreign rule did collapse, in the end, “but strife and inequality among Indians ­worsened.”

Gandhi is still routinely called “the father of the nation” in India, but it is hard to see what remains of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his “nimbus.” His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned. Hindu-Muslim tension still smolders just beneath the uneasy surface. Untouchability survives, too, and standard-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted electric-blue suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothed Mahatma wherever Dalits are still crowded together.

Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired. The real tragedy of his life, Lelyveld argues, was “not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world.”

Nonetheless, Lelyveld also writes, while he may have “struggled with doubt and self until his last days,” Gandhi “made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has.” And, for all his inconsistencies, his dream for India remained constant throughout his life. “Today,” Gandhi wrote less than three weeks before he was murdered by a member of his own faith, “we must forget that we are Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims or Parsis. . . . It is of no consequence by what name we call God in our homes.”

That was a revolutionary notion when he first urged Indians to unite against their oppressors in South Africa before the turn of the 20th century. It was revolutionary when he came home to India at the time of World War I, and still revolutionary in 1947 when India was simultaneously liberated and ripped apart by the religious hatred he had repeatedly risked his life to quell, and sadly, it remains revolutionary today — for India and, by extension, for the wider world as well.

Geoffrey C. Ward, a biographer and a screenwriter for documentary films, spent part of his boyhood in India and is currently writing a book about partition.




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23/03 Military arsenal: Libya vs. allies

China.org.cn, March 23, 2011


Editor's Notes:

During the air strike to Libya, European and North American countries are armed with modern and sophisticated weapons. On the contrary, most Libya's firepower are old ones from former Soviet. Here in China.org.cn, we list the major firepower used during the military operation.

“Nữ hoàng phim truyền hình” khoe vòng 1 đầy đặn

Không chịu thua chị kém em trong làng giải trí, Audrina Patridge vừa gật đầu với đề nghị xuất hiện trên bìa của tạp trí FHM số ra tháng 2/2011.

Audrina Patridge được giới mộ điệu biết tới rộng rãi kể từ khi bắt đầu tham gia trương trình ca nhạc dài kì có tên The Hills. Kể từ đó tới nay, cô nàng sinh ra và lớn lên tại Yorba Linda, California này đã góp mặt nhiều chương trình khác và gây được ấn tượng tương đối mạnh như MAD TV, Do Not Disturb, Family Guy, The Audrina Show hay Dancing with the Stars. Vì thế, Ở Mỹ, cô có vinh dự được gọi là “Nữ hoàng phim truyền hình”.

Audrina khoe vòng 1 đầy đặn trên FHM

Ngoài công việc dẫn chưong trình, Audrina Patridge còn được biết tới trong vai trò diễn viên. Cho tới thời điểm này, cô nàng sinh năm 1985 này đã từng xuất hiện trong những cuốn phim như Into the Blue 2: The Reef, Sorority Row, Take Me Home Tonight và gần đây nhất là Honey 2.

Ngắm nhìn “Nữ hoàng truyền hình” trên FHM:






Các bài viết khác:
Hình ảnh người đẹp Hoa Ngữ khoe khéo vòng một
Elly Trần nóng bỏng với những bức hình khoe vòng một
Tay súng nữ đã đột kích trường quay truyền hình trực tiếp
Thiếu Lâm Tự truyền kỳ: Hé lộ bí kíp chân truyền
Xì ta Việt – Thời đại khoe vòng 1 lên ngôi?

Người đẹp Miranda Kerr chụp ảnh bầu nude

Bà bầu xinh đẹp của chàng cướp biển Orlando Bloom liên tiếp xuất hiện trên trang bìa các tạp chí bất chấp việc cái bụng mỗi ngày một to ra.

Hình ảnh nude của Miranda Kerr trên tạp chí W số mới phát hành

Thiên thần của Victoria’s Secret đã ghi tên mình vào danh sách những bà bầu thích nude khi quyết định cởi đồ trên tạp chí W số mới nhất với chủ đề gia đình.

“Đối với tôi, gia đình chính là lẽ sống,” chân dài 27 tuổi tới từ nước Úc chia sẻ cùng độc giả của W. “Quyết định xây dựng một gia đình không hề phức tạp hay khó khăn như chúng ta vẫn tưởng.”

Sau nhiều năm hẹn hò, Miranda Kerr kết hôn cùng Orlando Bloom hồi cuối tháng 7 vừa rồi. Cô cũng không hề nghĩ mình lại được làm mẹ sớm tới mức này. Cô phát hiện mình đang mang thai khi tham gia chiến dịch quảng cáo của Jil Sander ở Paris. Nhớ lại lúc đó, cô nàng tiết lộ: “Tôi cứ tự hỏi tại sao mình lại mệt mỏi và hay buồn nôn tới mức đó!”

Tới tận bây giờ, cả Miranda Kerr lẫn Orlando Bloom đều không chịu mở lời hỏi bác sĩ sản khoa giới tính của đứa con sắp chào đời: “Chúng tôi muốn đó là một bí mật cho tới tận ngày đứa trẻ xuất hiện.”

Hiện đang là gương mặt đại diện của nhiều thương hiệu thời trang lớn như Jil Sander, Prada, hay Victoria’s Secret, nhưng với Miranda Kerr, sự nghiệp không phải là tất cả: “Tôi đã có những thành công và một vị trí nhất định trong làng người mẫu nhưng đó không phải là tất cả cuộc sống của tôi. Tôi không hề cảm thấy buồn chán hay áp lực khi tạm rời xa công việc.”
Ngắm những đường cong chết người của Miranda Kerr trên tạp chí Chicago Social.












Những hình ảnh tuyệt đẹp mới nhất của Miranda Kerr trên tạp chí Chicago Social
Thùy Chi
Theo Bưu điện Việt Nam & Zing

28/10/2010 Sexy photo album of Zhou Weitong

China.org.cn, September 28, 2010


Chinese model Zhou Weitong (Cica) [photo/Sina]



29 Comments

anon

2011-01-24 14:05

she's inviting a breast rub and lots of fondling

Lao Tze

2010-12-18 08:51

- and the sick in mind call this pornographie

Justme

2010-12-18 02:35

Why are people shocked by beauty? She dosn't show more than is seen on TV. The evil is not her beauty but the minds of some people.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

2010-12-09 01:51

yedi poorimole azhikkedi ninte sheddi'

na

2010-12-08 16:14

just the promotion of prostitution so China can degenerate for the happiness of the imperialists.
This is a change of tactics after the failure of 1989. The sugar-bullet.

ali

2010-12-08 06:39

my god,,,, hot girl ..you have love sex i?

你他媽的

2010-12-02 09:05

This comment has been removed by the moderator.

你他媽的

2010-12-02 07:21

This comment has been removed by the moderator.

observer

2010-12-01 20:05

do you need it? If you start to atract people this way, you change your face - this is not revolution, this is surplus of nothing.

superattackpea

2010-11-29 17:21

They put this on CHINA.ORG? That's just....

cory brown

2010-11-16 03:34

VVVV ZOMFG ME TO!!!!!!

Craig Weston

2010-11-16 03:33

This comment has been removed by the moderator.

cory brown

2010-11-16 03:22

ZOMFG this is awesome!

SmokeyMack

2010-11-12 23:15

these pictures feel out of place on this site... i like it a lot :p

discreetfun

2010-11-09 12:58

Big

Jacky

2010-11-05 10:32

WOW

High Morals

2010-10-29 07:25

These are nude pics that shows high lack of morals and promotes pornography and needs to be banned. There is a fine line between being in fashion and a model.

kettle

2010-10-28 21:15

it's all recycled stuff. guess the entertainment industry don't really know how to take it to the next level with females. it's the same old, same old. I find the males much more interesting. the females all look the same, kinda one dimensional.

Mark

2010-10-27 23:50

Wow, she sure is pretty.. Is she smart too?

low morals

2010-10-18 13:29

anon-

Women are eager to expose their breasts. It doesn't matter hwere they are from.


26/03 Japanese reactor fuel rods likely damaged

CNTV, March 26, 2011

Japanese officials say fuel rods may have been damaged in reactor number-three, leading to radiation injuries of workers trying to contain the nuclear disaster.

Two workers had been taken to a hospital with possible burns, after water seeped over their boots as they attempted to repair the massive damage. According to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the radiation level of the contaminated water was "10-thousand times higher than usual levels."

Tap water in several areas of Japan - including Tokyo - have radiation levels considered unsafe for infants. The scare caused a run on bottled water in the capital, and prompted city officials to distribute bottled water to families with babies.

The National Police Agency says the twin disasters have killed more than 10-thousand people. More than 17-thousand others are unaccounted for. Here's Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan expressing his concern regarding these latest developments.

Naoto Kan, Japanese Prime Minister, said, "The current condition of the Fukushima nuclear power plant does not allow for any optimism yet. We will do our utmost to prevent the situation from deteriorating further."

26/03 Libyan Woman Struggles to Tell Media of Her Rape

March 26, 2011

Jerome Delay/Associated Press
Eman al-Obeidy displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TRIPOLI, Libya — A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning and fought off security forces as she told journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of the Qaddafi militia. After nearly an hour, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.

“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet.

She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up, and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”

She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here, they are going to take me to jail.”

For the members of the foreign news media here as guests of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — and largely confined to the Rixos Hotel except for official outings — the episode was a reminder of the brutality of the Libyan government and the presence of its security forces even among the hotel staff. People in hotel uniforms, who just hours before had been serving coffee and clearing plates, grabbed table knives and rushed to physically restrain both the woman and the journalists.

Ms. Obeidy said she was a native of the rebel stronghold of Benghazi who had been stopped by Qaddafi militia on the outskirts of the city.After being held for about two days, she said, she had managed to escape. Wearing a black robe, a veil and slippers, she ran into the Rixos Hotel here, asking specifically to speak to the news service Reuters and The New York Times. “There is no media coverage outside,” she yelled at one point.

“They swore at me and they filmed me. I was alone. There was whiskey. I was tied up,” she told Michael Georgy of Reuters, the only journalist who was able to speak with her at length. “I am not scared of anything. I will be locked up immediately after this.” She added: “Look at my face. Look at my back.” Her other comments were captured by television cameras.

A wild scuffle ensued, captured in a video published by The Telegraph in London, as journalists tried to interview, photograph and protect her. Several journalists were punched, kicked and knocked on the floor. A television camera belonging to CNN was destroyed in the struggle, and security forces seized a device that a Financial Times reporter had used to record her testimony. A plainclothes security officer pulled out a revolver.

. Two members of the hotel staff grabbed table knives to threaten both Ms. Obeidy and the journalists.

“Turn them around, turn them around,” a waiter shouted, trying to block the foreign news media from having access to Ms. Obeidy. A woman on the staff shouted: “Why are you doing this? You are a traitor!” and briefly put a coat over Ms. Obeidy’s head.

There was a prolonged standoff behind the hotel as the security officials apparently restrained themselves because of the presence of so many journalists, but Ms. Obeidy was ultimately forced into a white car and taken away.

“Leave me alone,” she shouted from the garden as one man tried to cover her mouth with his hand.

“They are taking me to jail,” she yelled, trying to resist the security guards, according to Reuters. ”They are taking me to jail.”

Questioned about her treatment, Khalid Kaim, the deputy foreign minister, promised that she would be treated in accordance with the law. Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, said that she appeared to be drunk and mentally ill. “Her safety of course is guaranteed,” he said, adding that the authorities were investigating the case, including the possibility that her reports of abuse were “fantasies.”

Charles Clover of The Financial Times, who had put himself in the way of the security forces trying to apprehend her, was put into a van and driven to the border shortly afterward. He said that that the night before he had been told to leave because of what Libyan government officials said were inaccuracies in his reports.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 26, 2011


An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a Financial Times reporter. He is Charles Clover, not Glover.


16/03 OP-ED COLUMNIST; Avenging Altar Boy

March 16, 2011
By MAUREEN DOWD
PHILADELPHIA

The district attorney is burning a eucalyptus-spearmint candle on his desk.

''I think the press looks down upon the D.A. drinking Jack Daniels during the day,'' R. Seth Williams says with a broad smile, ''so I light my little stress-relief candle.''

It's understandable if the former altar boy at St. Carthage in West Philly needs to light a votive. The 44-year-old Catholic, who still attends Mass with his family at the same church, now called St. Cyprian, is the first U.S. prosecutor to charge a church official for a sickeningly commonplace sin: Endangering children whom the Roman Catholic Church was supposed to protect by shuffling pedophile priests to different parishes where they could find fresh prey.

Williams, the first African-American elected district attorney in Pennsylvania, was an orphan given up by his unwed mother. He was put into two foster homes before he was adopted at 20 months old by a Catholic family.

''I grew up treating the hierarchy of the church kind of like rock stars,'' he said in his 18th floor aerie, where he keeps a small iron crucifix and a cross fashioned from Palm Sunday fronds. ''If you're going to meet the cardinal, you're supposed to kiss the guy's ring, all this stuff. But it is what it is. I wish I knew the Latin translation for that.

''There's no get-out-of-jail-free card for raping, sodomizing, groping, doing anything wrong to kids.''

Msgr. William J. Lynn, who served from 1992 to 2004 as the secretary of clergy reviewing sexual abuse cases for then-Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, appeared in court Monday. He is charged with felonies for allegedly helping the cardinal cover up molesters and transferring them to other parishes.

''It was a conspiracy of silence to ensure the church's reputation and to avoid scandal,'' said Assistant District Attorney Evangelia Manos.

Monsignor Lynn, a round, ruddy man in black priest's garb, sat silently in court behind his two lawyers -- paid by the archdiocese -- as a cheering squad of priests and parishioners watched.

Lynn's co-defendants sat beside him: a rabbity-looking Rev. James Brennan, 47, charged with raping a 14-year-old boy named Mark in 1996 in his apartment; and the unholy alliance of a priest, the sepulchral Charles Engelhardt, 64, a defrocked priest, Edward Avery, 68, and a former Catholic schoolteacher, Bernard Shero, 48 -- all charged with raping or sodomizing the same 10-year-old altar boy 12 years ago.

Lynn's lawyer, Thomas Bergstrom, told reporters that the charges against his client were ''a stretch'' and that he was pleading not guilty.

And Richard DeSipio, one of Brennan's lawyers, went on the attack against his client's accuser, now 29. ''Their witness is in prison in Bucks County for stealing his sister's credit card and using it,'' DeSipio told Mensah Dean of The Philadelphia Daily News. ''He's a convicted liar.''

On a local radio show on Tuesday, Brennan -- a priest suspended by the church in 2006 -- said he was uninterested in a plea deal, and his lawyer continued to paint the accuser as troubled.

Even with a global scandal that never seems to stop disgorging disgusting stories, the Philadelphia grand jury report is especially sordid.

It tells the story of a fifth-grade altar boy at St. Jerome School given the pseudonym Billy. Father Engelhardt plied him with sacramental wine and pulled pornographic magazines out of a bag in the sacristy and told the child it was time ''to become a man,'' the report says.

A week later, after Billy served an early Mass, the report states that Engelhardt instructed him to take off his clothes and perform oral sex on him. Then the priest told the boy he was ''dismissed.''

''After that, Billy was in effect passed around to Engelhardt's colleagues,'' the report says. ''Father Edward Avery undressed with the boy, told him that God loved him,'' and then had him perform sex. ''Next was the turn of Bernard Shero, a teacher in the school. Shero offered Billy a ride home but instead stopped at a park, told Billy they were 'going to have some fun,' took off the boy's clothes, orally and anally raped him and then made him walk the rest of the way home.''

Billy fell apart and turned to heroin.

The report says Brennan knew Mark from the time he was 9. When he was 14, the priest arranged with Mark's mother for a sleepover. ''Brennan showed him pornographic pictures on his computer, bragged about his penis size and insisted that Mark sleep together with him in his bed.'' Then the priest raped him as he cried, according to the report.

Mark also fell apart and attempted suicide.

Out of the church's many unpleasant confrontations with modernity, this is the starkest. It's tragically past time to send the message that priests can't do anything they want and hide their sins behind special privilege.

In Seth Williams's city, the law sees no collars, except the ones put on criminals.

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04/03 In Philadelphia, New Cases Loom in Priest Scandal

March 4, 2011

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Gina Maisto Smith, an ex-prosecutor, has been hired by the archdiocese to examine procedures.


By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

PHILADELPHIA — Three weeks after a scathing grand jury report said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had provided safe haven to as many as 37 priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior toward minors, most of those priests remain active in the ministry.

The possibility that even one predatory priest, not to mention three dozen, might still be serving in parishes — “on duty in the archdiocese today, with open access to new young prey,” as the grand jury put it — has unnerved many Roman Catholics here and sent the church reeling in the latest and one of the most damning episodes in the American church since it became engulfed in the sexual abuse scandal nearly a decade ago.

The situation in Philadelphia is “Boston reborn,” said David J. O’Brien, who teaches Catholic history at the University of Dayton. The Boston Archdiocese was engulfed in a scandal starting in 2002 involving widespread sexual abuse by priests and an extensive cover-up that reached as high as the cardinal.

Some parishioners say they feel discouraged and are caught in a wave of anxiety, even as they continue to attend Mass.

“It’s a tough day to be a faith-filled Catholic,” Maria Shultz, 43, a secretary at Immaculata University, said after Mass last weekend at St. Joseph’s Church in suburban Downingtown.

But Mrs. Shultz, who has four daughters, expressed no doubt about how the church should deal with the 37 priests. “They should be removed immediately,” she said.

The church has not explained directly why these priests, most of whom were not publicly identified, are still active, though it is under intense pressure to do so. Cardinal Justin Rigali initially said there were no active priests with substantiated allegations against them, but six days later, he placed three of the priests, whose activities had been described in detail by the grand jury, on administrative leave.

He also hired an outside lawyer, Gina Maisto Smith, a former assistant district attorney who prosecuted child sexual assault cases for 15 years, to re-examine all cases involving priests in active ministry and review the procedures employed by the archdiocese.

“There is a tremendous sense of urgency here,” Mrs. Smith said in an interview this week at the archdiocese, where she said she and a team had been working around the clock, without interference from the church hierarchy. “They’ve given me the freedom and the independence to conduct a thorough review,” she said, with “unfettered access to files.”

She added that announcements about her initial review would be coming “sooner rather than later.”

“The urgency is to respond to that concern over the 37, what that means, how that number was derived and what to do in response to it,” she said.

Philadelphia is unusual in that the archdiocese has been the subject of not one but two grand jury reports. The first, in 2005, found credible accusations of abuse by 63 priests, whose activities had been covered up by the church. But there were no indictments, mainly because the statute of limitations had expired.

This time, the climate is different.

When the grand jury issued its report on Feb. 10, the district attorney immediately indicted two priests, Charles Engelhardt and James Brennan; a parochial school teacher, Bernard Shero; and a man who had left the priesthood, Edward Avery, on charges of rape or assault. All four are due in court on March 14. He also indicted Msgr. William Lynn on charges of endangering the welfare of children — the first time a senior church official has been charged with covering up abuse in the sex scandal in the United States.

When the archdiocese learns of reports of sexual abuse, it is now supposed to report them to the district attorney, which is what led to the most recent grand jury investigation. Extensions on the statute of limitations also made prosecutions possible this time.

But even with these changes, some were surprised to see the grand jury paint a picture of a church where serious problems still festered.

“The thing that is significant about Philadelphia is the assumption that the authorities had made changes and the system had been fixed,” said Terence McKiernan, the president of BishopAccountability.org, which archives documents from the abuse scandal in dioceses across the country. “But the headline is that in Philadelphia, the system is still broke.”

The grand jury said 20 of the active priests were accused of sexual abuse and 17 others were accused of “inappropriate behavior with minors.”

In response, Cardinal Rigali issued a statement the day of the report, saying, “I assure all the faithful that there are no archdiocesan priests in ministry today who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them.”

The phrasing spoke directly to the church’s policy of “zero tolerance” of priests who sexually abuse minors. If any active priests have such allegations against them, the policy calls for their suspension until the charges are resolved.

Still, six days later, he placed three priests on administrative leave — a tacit acknowledgment that perhaps there were priests facing such accusations.

The uncertain fate of the 37 active priests, whose names the archdiocese turned over to the district attorney, all but guarantees a continuing spectacle here. So do the indictments, a flurry of civil suits against church officials, victims who continue to step forward and the potential for courtroom drama.

Three weeks into the scandal, the archdiocese said it was not clear how much the revelations had hurt attendance at Mass and donations. Daniel E. Thomas, an auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia, said he had heard both sides: some parishioners were attending church more to pray for the victims and “the good priests, the faithful priests,” and some have told him, “We’re angry, we’re confused and we’re distressed.”

He also said that some priests had told him that donations were not down but that he was aware of “at least a few people who have said, ‘I’m not going to be giving to the church’ ” and that some were not fulfilling their pledges to give to the church’s capital campaign. He said money for the capital campaign goes specifically to help the church fulfill its charitable mission; it cannot go toward the defense of priests or legal fees, he said, and so only the poor, the sick and the needy would suffer if those donations dried up.

Jon Hurdle contributed reporting.



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28/02 Acts of Contrition

February 28, 2011

One can scarcely imagine the pain borne into St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin last month at a prayer service — “A Liturgy of Lament and Repentance” — offered for the victims of sexually abusive priests.

It was a reminder that the scandal, a global catastrophe for the Roman Catholic Church and a national tragedy in Ireland, is also a universe of individual tragedies. But there was also hope that some church leaders, at least, are facing up to that pain and that catastrophe. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, and Cardinal Séan O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, presided over the prayer service, which went to unusual lengths to involve victims and to gaze unflinchingly at their suffering.

With 400 people in attendance, lectors read long passages from official reports on decades of abuse in Irish parishes and schools — horrific reading for a sacred space. A few victims interrupted the proceedings with their own stories of shame and terror.

Just as unusual, even startling, was the way the archbishop and cardinal made personal the church’s act of contrition. They lay prostrate in silence before a bare altar. They washed and dried the feet of eight abuse victims — just as the Catholic clergy do at Mass on Holy Thursday to recall how Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, a gesture of humility and service.

Archbishop Martin offered what may be the most specific apology yet, showing an understanding — rare among his peers — of the difference between lip service and true repentance. “When I say ‘sorry,’ ” the archbishop said, “I am in charge. When I ask forgiveness, however, I am no longer in charge. I am in the hands of the others. Only you can forgive me; only God can forgive me.”

Not all survivors of abuse will likely accept the apology. They are right that the church has a long way to go to cleaning house and repairing trust with its flock. Reforms are lagging, many victims are still waiting for compensation and a full accounting of crimes. Some predator priests are still in ministry. Bishops have largely avoided punishment or credible repentance.

Still, gestures and ritual can be meaningful, and forgiveness has to begin somewhere, which is why the Dublin prayer service seemed to be a true step forward. “We want to be part of a church that puts survivors, the victims of abuse, first,” Cardinal O’Malley said, getting it right.

And for that Sunday, anyway, the victims took precedence. “What the hell did I do wrong as a child?” asked a man, Robert Dempsey, who told of being abused in a mental institution. “What the hell did any of us do?”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 3, 2011


An editorial on Tuesday about a service in Ireland for victims of sexually abusive priests described the rite incorrectly. It was a prayer service, not a Mass.

18/02 Chilean Priest Found Guilty of Abusing Minors

February 18, 2011

The Rev. Fernando Karadima shown celebrating Mass in 2006.

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and PASCALE BONNEFOY

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — After an internal investigation, the Vatican found the Rev. Fernando Karadima guilty of sexually abusing minors in Chile and ordered him to retire to a “life of prayer and penitence,” the archbishop of Santiago said Friday.

The ruling, announced by the archbishop, Ricardo Ezzati, said that Father Karadima, 80, would be relocated to a place where he would have no contact with his former parishioners or “persons that have been spiritually guided by him.”

The accusations by former parishioners against Father Karadima last year stunned Chile, a conservative and predominantly Roman Catholic nation unaccustomed to questioning its priests, especially one as revered as Father Karadima. He had trained five bishops and dozens of priests, acting as a spiritual leader and father figure for young men who later accused him of molesting them.

The decision is a rare case of a powerful church figure being called to account for the charges of sexual abuse that have swept the Catholic world the past few years.

The Vatican decision “is going to mark a before and after in the way the Chilean Catholic Church proceeds in cases like these, or at least it should,” said Antonio Delfau, a Jesuit priest in Santiago, the capital. “From now on, every case of sexual abuse must be treated with meticulous care and not be based on the gut feeling of a given church official.”

For the accusers, including at least four men who said Father Karadima abused them when they were young parishioners, the decision was a long-awaited vindication. One original accuser said the abuse began when he was 14.

“At last the truth was revealed and acknowledged,” said an emotional Juan Carlos Cruz, 47. “This was like having a father who abused you and a mother who slapped you in the face,” he said of the Catholic Church. “Now I feel like this mother has taken me in.”

President Sebastián Piñera reacted to the decision by vowing that his government would “defend children and minors from sexual abuse with all the strength in the world and force of the law.”

Father Karadima has not been prosecuted criminally. A judge investigating the accusations against him closed the case late last year, ruling that there was not enough evidence to charge him.

An appeals court in Santiago is still deciding whether to reopen the criminal investigation. It remains unclear whether the Vatican’s decision will prod the Chilean authorities to do so.

The Vatican ruling announced Friday said that Father Karadima was subject to “lifelong prohibition from the public exercise of any ministerial act, particularly confession and the spiritual guidance of any category of persons.”

In consideration of his age, the Vatican deemed it appropriate “to impose on the accused his retirement to a life of prayer and penitence, also in reparation to the victims of his abuses,” said the ruling, read by Archbishop Ezzati.

If he violates the conditions of the ruling, Father Karadima could face stricter sanctions, including removal from the priesthood, the archbishop said.

Juan Pablo Bulnes, Father Karadima’s lawyer, said the priest maintained his innocence and would appeal the Vatican’s decision. He said the priest, respecting the ruling, had already retired to a religious convent in Santiago, away from anyone in his El Bosque parish.

The Chilean Catholic Church referred the case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last June, sending a 700-page investigative report to the Vatican.

Last month, the Vatican quietly issued its ruling and informed the Chilean church on Jan. 16. Archbishop Ezzati said he notified Father Karadima the next day and immediately identified a new residence for him.

Alexei Barrionuevo reported from São Paulo, and Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago, Chile.

16/02 Pennsylvania: Priests Suspended on Abuse Allegations

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 16, 2011

The Philadelphia archdiocese has suspended three priests accused in a grand jury report of molesting children and has pledged to reopen complaints against 34 others. Fathers Joseph Gallagher, Stephen Perzan and Joseph DiGregorio were removed from ministry while their cases were reviewed. Cardinal Justin Rigali said a former child abuse prosecutor would examine complaints made against the others.

14/02 More Shame

February 14, 2011

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in this country has promised accountability and justice for children sexually abused by priests. We fear it has a long way to go. A new inquiry has found that nearly a decade after the scandal engulfed the American church, children are still in peril and some leaders are still stonewalling investigations.

A grand-jury report released Feb. 10 accused three priests and a teacher in the Philadelphia Archdiocese of raping two young boys in the 1990s. It also accused a senior church official of knowingly endangering thousands of children by shielding accused priests for years.

The Philadelphia district attorney brought sexual-assault charges against the priests and teacher, and charged Msgr. William Lynn, with two counts of child endangerment, apparently the first time a church leader has been criminally charged with covering up abuse.

Monsignor Lynn was secretary of the clergy under retired Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, responsible for investigating abuse allegations from 1992 to 2004. Instead, according to the grand jury, he shuffled credibly accused priests among unsuspecting parishes, putting “literally thousands of children at risk of sexual abuse.”

The report said at least three dozen accused priests remain in active ministry in the archdiocese, nearly all unidentified. The grand jury asked the archdiocese for its records on the accusations against those priests; months later, the archdiocese has not fully complied.

These are not the first accusations against the Philadelphia Archdiocese. A blistering grand-jury report in 2005 exposed the abuse of hundreds of children by more than 60 archdiocesan priests, lamenting that the church’s cover-up had succeeded since the statute of limitations made it impossible to prosecute the predators.

The recent grand jury said it had no doubt that the scale of the crimes and the extent of the official cover-up went far beyond the cases of sodomy and rape it documented in horrifying detail. It cited continued institutional weaknesses that allowed such crimes to go undetected or unpunished — an obsession with secrecy, a concern for abusers over victims, the inherent conflict in having “victim assistance coordinators” who are supposed to help stricken families but who are church employees with divided loyalties.

The grand jury has implored the current leader of the archdiocese, Cardinal Justin Rigali, to fully cooperate with its investigation and institute reforms, beginning with opening its files on abuse accusations, swiftly removing credibly accused priests from ministry and financing truly independent investigations.

It also urged Pennsylvania to suspend for two years the civil statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims.

States across the country should do the same. There will be no justice or healing until all victims’ voices are heard and the church finally shows true accountability.



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11/02 A Priest, His Victim and the Los Angeles Archdiocese

Published: February 11, 2011

A Priest, His Victim and the Los Angeles Archdiocese
The Rev. Martin P. O’Loghlen was once a leader in his religious order and was also appointed to the Archdiocesan Sexual Abuse Advisory Board, although officials knew at the time about his admission of sexual abuse and addiction.

12/02 Los Angeles Archdiocese to Dismiss Priest Over Admission of Molesting Girl

February 12, 2011

Fr. Martin O'Loughlin
Rev. Martin P. O’Loghlen

By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — A priest accused of having a long-term sexual relationship with a teenage girl, writing her decades later to ask for forgiveness and declare that he was a sex addict, is being removed from ministry in a parish, and the diocese’s vicar of clergy has also resigned, officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles said Friday.

The priest, the Rev. Martin P. O’Loghlen, was once a leader in his religious order and was appointed to an archdiocesan sexual abuse advisory board, although officials at both the order and the archdiocese knew at the time about his admission of sexual abuse and addiction. He served on the board, which was meant to review accusations of abuse by priests, for at least two years in the late 1990s, according to church and legal documents.

Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said church officials planned to announce the removal of Father O’Loghlen from his current parish in San Dimas on Sunday. Church officials decided to act after being contacted by a reporter about the priest’s history of sexual abuse.

Mr. Tamberg said in a statement that officials of the priest’s religious order assured the archdiocese in 2009 that Father O’Loghlen was fit for the ministry. He said that the archdiocese’s vicar for clergy, Msgr. Michael Meyers, resigned on Friday. Monsignor Meyers had been in the position since July 2009 and it was his job to grant clergymen what are known as faculties to serve as priests.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese, led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, has been rocked by sexual abuse accusations for years. In 2007, it agreed to a $660 million settlement with 508 people who said that priests had sexually abused them as children.

“The failure to fully check records before granting priestly faculties is a violation of archdiocesan policy,” Cardinal Mahony said in a statement. “We owe it to victims and to all our faithful to make absolutely certain that all of our child protection policies and procedures are scrupulously followed.”

Father O’Loghlen had sex on several occasions with Julie Malcolm in the 1960s while she was a student at Bishop Amat High School in nearby La Puente, Ms. Malcolm said. Nearly three decades after the abuse ended, Father O’Loghlen tried to reach Ms. Malcolm, who was then living in Phoenix.

After receiving several phone messages from Father O’Loghlen, Ms. Malcolm filed a complaint with the Diocese of Phoenix and later filed a lawsuit against the priest and his religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. In 1999, she settled the lawsuit for $100,000, Ms. Malcolm said.

“I am deeply sorry for our becoming involved and readily accept the fact that I was the responsible one in our relationship,” Father O’Loghlen said in a five-page handwritten letter dated June 23, 1996. “Clearly, I was the one in power position. If I had not made a move nothing would have happened between us. I sincerely hope that there were some moments of joy for you in our relationship, but ultimately it caused you much significant pain.”

Father O’Loghlen goes on to say that since Ms. Malcolm filed her complaint, he has undergone psychological evaluations, which determined that he is “not a pedophile” or a “sexual predator.” But, he adds, “I do have a sexual addiction.”

Copies of the letter and other documents were provided to The New York Times by Joelle Casteix, the southwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who had received them from Ms. Malcolm.

Father O’Loghlen, 74, was ordained in Ireland in 1961. He began teaching at Bishop Amat later that year and remained there for six years. In 1967, around the same time of his involvement with Ms. Malcolm, he moved to Damien High School, a boys’ school nearby, where he was vice principal and principal for more than 10 years.

In 1995, Father O’Loghlen became the provincial leader in the western region for the religious order of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. After he contacted Ms. Malcolm in 1996, leaders in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and officials with the religious order based in Rome exchanged several letters.

According to copies of those letters, Father O’Loghlen admitted to molesting Ms. Malcolm and told his superiors that he was undergoing counseling. Msgr. Richard Loomis, then the vicar for clergy in Los Angeles, told officials in Rome that he would not remove Father O’Loghlen from the archdiocese but that his service should be limited.

Several months later, Monsignor Loomis removed all restrictions on Father O’Loghlen and, in a letter, thanked him for agreeing to serve on the sexual abuse advisory board. He writes that both he and Cardinal Mahony “feel that you will bring valuable insights to the work of the board.”

In a deposition in 1999, Father O’Loghlen said he had attended some of the review board’s meetings. Mr. Tamberg said it was not clear why Father O’Loghlen was appointed to the board. Father O’Loghlen remained the provincial for the religious order until 2001, according to the church records. Then, for five years beginning in 2003, he was a pastor in the Philippines.

Mr. Tamberg said the provincial, the Rev. Donal McCarthy, who now oversees the religious order in California, wrote to the archdiocese in March 2009, asking that Father O’Loghlen serve as a priest in Los Angeles. The letter included assurances that Father O’Loghlen “manifested no behavioral problems in the past that would indicate that he might deal with minors in an inappropriate manner” and had “never been involved in an incident or exhibited behavior which called into question his fitness or suitability for priestly ministry due to alcohol, substance abuse, sexual misconduct, financial irregularities, or other causes.”

He was appointed as an associate pastor in the San Dimas church four months later. Father O’Loghlen also worked at the parish’s elementary school.

The archdiocese’s Vicar for Clergy’s Office “did not fully consult” other records of the priest’s “previous assignments in the archdiocese, which would have indicated that he admitted to having had a sexual relationship with a female minor,” Mr. Tamberg said.

American bishops adopted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2002 that bars from the ministry any priest who has abused minors. Mr. Tamberg said that the archdiocese had not received any complaints about Father O’Loghlen in his time at the San Dimas church. He said officials would review records to verify that there had been no other errors.

Father McCarthy said he could not comment. “I can’t say anything about the placement of a priest, that’s our policy,” he said.

John C. Manly, a lawyer for victims in dozens of sexual abuse cases, said Father O’Loghlen’s case was egregious because of his time on the sexual review board. “He was personally selected for a board that is meant to protect people from priests like him,” Mr. Manly said.

Ms. Malcolm, now 61, said in an interview that Father O’Loghlen had been her debate coach at Bishop Amat High School and that he was particularly encouraging. Sometime around the time she was 16 years old, she said, Father O’Loghlen, who was around 29 at the time, met her at a home where she was baby-sitting. After a few minutes of sitting on the couch talking, Ms. Malcolm said, Father O’Loghlen kissed her. They began having sex more than a year later, Ms. Malcolm said.

“I was so naïve, I thought this was some kind of special treatment,” Ms. Malcolm said. “We would meet somewhere like it was this clandestine romance. We would periodically break up, but he would call and apologize and ask to see me again and I always agreed.”

She said she never considered filing a complaint until Father O’Loghlen tried to contact her.



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10/02 Kardinaal Simonis gaf pedopriester bescherming

Kardinaal Ad Simonis vorig jaar in Lisse, waar hij opgroeide, bij de opening van een expositie over hem. Foto NRC Handelsblad / Rien Zilvold

door Joep DohmenBINNENLAND

Kardinaal Simonis heeft in de periode dat hij aartsbisschop van Utrecht was een veroordeelde pedofiele priester beschermd. Hij hielp hem in 1991 aan een nieuwe baan als pastoor in Amersfoort. Daar misbruikte de priester opnieuw kinderen. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van NRC Handelsblad, de Wereldomroep en het tv-programma Nieuwsuur.
Aartsbisschop Wim Eijk, de opvolger van Simonis, heeft de priester vorig jaar alsnog disciplinair gestraft voor het seksueel misbruik. Hij mag geen pastorale taken meer uitoefenen. Simonis, van 1983 tot 2007 aartsbisschop, had deze sanctie eerder geweigerd.

Het Openbaar Ministerie meldt dat tussen 1987 en 2008 zes slachtoffers van de priester aangifte hebben gedaan. In totaal zouden tientallen kinderen misbruikt zijn.
Simonis was door toenmalig bisschop Philippe Bär van Rotterdam geïnformeerd dat de priester in zijn oude standplaats Zoetermeer minderjarige jongens misbruikt had. Volgens het aartsbisdom wilde Bär van de priester af.

Het verleden van de pastoor werd door Simonis verzwegen voor de parochianen in Amersfoort. Simonis voorkwam ook niet dat de man in 2005 pastor werd in Eindhoven, in het bisdom Den Bosch.

Ouders die bij Simonis klaagden over de priester vonden geen gehoor. Hanneke Brunt, moeder van een misbruikte misdienaar van twaalf jaar: „Simonis zei tegen mij: ‘Dit bestaat niet in de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk. Daar doen wij niet aan’.”

Volgens slachtoffer Erwin Meester heeft Simonis „willens en wetens een pedoseksuele priester in bescherming genomen, terwijl hij eigenlijk zijn gelovige gemeenschap had moeten beschermen.”

Het beschermen van pedofiele priesters door bisschoppen wordt sinds 2009 door het Vaticaan gezien als een ernstig vergrijp. Het leidde onder meer tot ontslag en berisping van Ierse bisschoppen.

Simonis, inmiddels met pensioen, verklaarde vorig jaar in het tv-programma Pauw & Witteman misbruikzaken altijd „zeer zorgvuldig” te hebben afgehandeld. Nu weerspreekt Simonis in een reactie dat hij de veroordeelde priester heeft beschermd. Wel zegt hij de gang van zaken te betreuren.

Opvolger Eijk wil, naar aanleiding van deze kwestie, nieuwe priesters voortaan beter screenen.

Lees vanmiddag in NRC Handelsblad het achtergrondverhaal ‘Jongens misbruikt? Onmogelijk zei de kardinaal’. Of lees het artikel via het webabonnement in de digitale editie.

LEES MEER OVER: KARDINAAL SIMONISPEDOFILIESEKSUEEL MISBRUIK

10/02 News Reports Say Cardinal Protected an Abuser

February 10, 2011
By STEPHEN CASTLE

BRUSSELS — The sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands deepened Thursday when one of its senior figures was said to have shielded a pedophile priest.

Reports in three news media outlets increased the pressure on the cardinal, Adrianus Simonis, the retired archbishop of Utrecht, who last month testified as a witness in a legal action taken by one of almost 2,000 people who have said they were victims of abuse.

The crisis in the Netherlands is another setback for the Roman Catholic Church, which has been roiled by sexual abuse allegations from Ireland and Belgium to the United States.

Cardinal Simonis caused some distress in the Netherlands last March, when he was asked on television about the hundreds of complaints surfacing against the church and replied in German rather than Dutch, saying “Wir haben es nicht gewusst” — or, “We knew nothing.”

The phrase, which is associated with Nazi excuses after World War II, drew uncomfortable parallels for the church, which has been accused of covering up the issue of sexual abuse.

The reports on Thursday, by Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the NRC Handelsblad newspaper and the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur, said the cardinal was told by the then-bishop of Rotterdam, Philippe Bär, that a priest had sexually abused boys in his parish in Zoetermeer. Archbishop Simonis later arranged for the man to be moved to a parish in Amersfoort.

The name of the suspected abuser was not given in the news reports.

In a statement issued Thursday, Cardinal Simonis said the priest in question had been allowed to stay in the church but only after undergoing lengthy therapy and on the basis of a psychological report.

If new evidence about the case emerged it would have to be reassessed, he said, and that would be regrettable.

On Thursday Martin de Witte, a lawyer acting for several alleged victims, said the article proved that pedophiles were systematically protected.

“He didn’t do anything, he said of the cardinal, adding, “He was not protecting the children, he was protecting the people who did the abuse.”

Figures released in December showed that almost 2,000 people had made complaints of sexual or physical abuse against the church, in a country with four million Catholics.

10/02 Philadelphia Priests Accused by Grand Jury of Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up

February 10, 2011
By JON HURDLE

PHILADELPHIA — A grand jury on Thursday accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to stop the sexual abuse of children more than five years after a grand jury report documented abuse by more than 50 priests.

The new report said a senior church official charged with investigating allegations of sexual abuse by priests had in fact allowed some of those accused to remain in posts that gave them continued access to children. It charged him with endangering the welfare of minors and accused three priests and a teacher of raping two boys between 1996 and 1999.

“By no means do we believe that these were the only two parishioners who were abused during this period,” the report said.

At least 37 priests who are subject to “substantial evidence of abuse” are still in roles that bring them into contact with children, the new report said, and 10 of those have been in place since before 2005, when the last grand jury made its allegations.

The Rev. Edward Avery, 68, and the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, 64, were charged with the rape and indecent assault of a 10-year-old boy in St. Jerome Parish in Northeast Philadelphia in 1998 and 1999. The teacher, Bernard Shero, 48, was accused of assaulting the same boy in 2000.

The Rev. James Brennan, 47, was accused of assaulting a 14-year-old boy in 1996. All three priests were under arrest on Thursday.

The report also charged Msgr. William Lynn, secretary of clergy in the archdiocese under former Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, with endangering the welfare of children by allowing “dangerous” priests to remain in place. Monsignor Lynn was responsible for investigating abuse allegations from 1992 to 2004.

“The rapist priests we accuse were well known to the Secretary of Clergy, but he cloaked their conduct and put them in place to do it again,” the grand jury said.

Monsignor Lynn faces a maximum of 14 years in prison if convicted on all charges.

In a statement issued late on Thursday, Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia, rejected the report’s assertion that there were active priests who had been credibly accused of abuse.

“I assure all the faithful that there are no archdiocesan priests in ministry today who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them,” he said.

The report accused the archdiocese of lacking urgency in its efforts to eradicate sexual abuse by its priests.

It said a panel looking into the allegations dismissed charges against a priest by two independent victims, saying their evidence lacked credibility.

“These are simply not the actions of an institution that is serious about ending sexual abuse of children,” the report said.

The 124-page report, which contains graphic descriptions of abuse of the 9- and 10-year-old boys, said the grand jury decided “reluctantly” not to press charges against Cardinal Bevilacqua, who stepped down in 2003 after 15 years as archbishop, even though he worked closely with Monsignor Lynn, because it did not have enough evidence.

In 2005, a grand jury report accused the church of an “immoral cover-up” that had exposed hundreds of children to sexual assault. That report recommended no criminal charges.

If convicted on all charges, the priests and the teacher each face a maximum sentence of 67 years in prison, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office said.

Burton A. Rose, a lawyer for the teacher, Mr. Shero, declined to comment on the case. Lawyers for the other defendants did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.