A former Palma High School chaplain and teacher has admitted in sworn testimony that he sexually assaulted a Palma student. In a videotaped deposition, the Rev. Gerald Funcheon claimed he molested just one student at Palma and that the boy was his last. The redacted video does not include the names of any of the priest’s alleged victims. Five men have leveled claims that Funcheon molested them when they were students at the school during the Crosier priest’s tenure from 1984 to 1985. Funcheon testified that he did not believe his conduct was perverted or criminal at the time. Though h…
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Thirty-two former students of the Horace Mann School have said they were sexually abused by teachers and staff members, and they have been meeting with school officials in the past two weeks to negotiate compensation, according to a person knowledgeable about the talks. Last June, an article in The New York Times Magazine recounted episodes of abuse at the school from the 1970s to the 1990s, citing the accounts of several men who had accused former teachers of having sex with them or trying to seduce them. Since then, more students have come forward to say they had been sexually abuse…
You can’t get more red-blooded American macho than Al Chesley. Now 55, he is still — at 6 feet 3 inches and at least 250 pounds — a bear of a man, a former NFL middle linebacker nicknamed “Mad Dog” who played on a Philadelphia Eagles team that went to the Super Bowl.
But at age 13, he was but a child — putty in the hands of a larger-than-life and revered neighborhood police officer who loosened him up with booze, showed him porn flicks, then molested and raped him for nearly five years.
“He told me that he wanted to teach me how to become a man — how ironic,” Chesley said this week about…
Rome (CNN) — The spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI, surprised the world Monday by saying he will resign at the end of the month “because of advanced age.” It’s the first time a pope has stepped down in nearly 600 years. “Strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,” said Benedict, 85, according to the Vatican. Read more: Who is Pope Benedict XVI? The news startled and shocked the Catholic world and …
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles released 12,000 pages of internal files last Thursday on priests accused of sexually abusing children, saying that it was finally abiding by a settlement it signed with victims six years ago to make the painful history public. But it now appears that the files the church released with much fanfare are incomplete and many are unaccounted for, according to the abuse victims’ lawyers. In addition, on many documents the names of church supervisors informed of abuse allegations were redacted by the archdiocese, in apparent violation of a judge’s o…
Statute of limitations is the main stumbling block to prosecuting Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and aides in the sex abuse files from the 1980s released this week, experts say.
Who is more deserving: victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, or dead people moldering their graves? When he was Archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan chose the dead people, placing $55 million into cemetery trust funds and out of the reach of local abuse victims suing the Church. (They want compensation for the suffering caused by childhood sexual trauma.) Dolan left Milwaukee to take the most visible post in Catholic America — cardinal of New York City – but he could not escape his choice. The victims asked a federal bankruptcy judge to reverse him, and on Fri…
PARIS (Reuters) — Germany’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday canceled a study into the sexual abuse of minors by priests, prompting the investigator to accuse them of trying to censor what was to be a major report on the scandals. The independent study, examining church files that sometimes date to 1945, was meant to shed light on undiscovered cases after about 600 people filed claims against priests in 2010 following a wave of revelations of sexual abuse. The German scandals were part of a series of abuse scandals that also shook the Catholic Church in Ireland, Belgium, the Netherland…
On a Saturday night in the summer of 1998, an undercover officer logged in to a child-pornography chat room using the screen name Indy-Girl. Within minutes, a user named John introduced himself and asked her, “Are you into real life or just fantasy?” Indy-Girl said that because of the “legality of it” she had never acted on her fantasies. But she soon revealed an adventurous spirit. She was a bisexual college sophomore, she said, and had learned about sex at an early age. “My mother is very European,” she explained. John, a thirty-one-year-old soldier stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky,…
Just as we think we know what an abuser looks like, we think we know what an abusive religious community looks like. We may think it is highly insular — like the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, a prominent member of which was convicted last month of sexually abusing a young girl sent to him for help. Or it is hierarchical and bureaucratic: if the Roman Catholic Church did not have so many bishops and archbishops who refused to dismiss or defrock molesters in their ranks, would so many pedophile priests have been able to carry on for so long? But we don’t …