Bishops and religious leaders on Tuesday (Feb. 7) held an unprecedented service of repentance in Rome, seeking atonement for lapses in church management that led to the abuse of thousands of children by predatory priests.

“We implore forgiveness for those who have abused in various ways,” Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, said during the rite at the Church of St. Ignatius.

“This evil is within us and severely tarnishes our testimony,” he admitted, and said church leaders have at times “become an instrument of evil” toward those they were charged to protect.

The ceremony was organized as part of a Vatican-sponsored conference at Rome’s Gregorian University to help bishops meet a May deadline to craft voluntary “guidelines” to improve the church’s handling of abuse cases.

Representatives of six groups who were in various ways involved in sexual abuse — including the head of a religious order, a teacher and a priest — apologized to Mary Collins, an abuse victim from Ireland who served as a representative of all abuse victims.

At the end of the service, Collins asked God for the “strength” to forgive, so that the church “may be healed.”

The vigil started with 15 minutes of silence as the church was shrouded in darkness, and ended with the lighting of candles held by the participants. Earlier in the day, Collins told conference participants of her personal experience of abuse.

“Those fingers that would abuse my body the night before were the next morning holding and offering me the sacred host,” she said of the priest who abused her when she was 13.

She also recalled the “collapse” of her confidence in church authorities, as the archbishop she had confided her story to focused on trying to protect the “good name” of the priest, and refused to suspend him from ministry.

During the conference, Monsignor Stephen J. Rossetti, a professor at Catholic University of America and the former director of a Maryland treatment center for troubled priests, told bishops that predator priests usually lie when confronted with an accusation.

By contrast, he said, abuse victims usually tell the truth when they recount their ordeal. Rossetti also warned that abuser priests are not easily cured and need constant monitoring, and that returning them to ministry is almost impossible.

“Once a priest has sexually molested a minor,” he said, “he forever loses his privilege of ministering as a priest.”

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VATICAN CITY — After a 15-year process, the Holy See on Friday (Jan. 20) gave its final approval to the Neocatechumenal Way, a lay movement that has been criticized for its unorthodox liturgical practices but that has been successful in attracting followers.

The movement relies on tightly knit small groups, modeled on early Christian communities, that share a decade-long spiritual growth path under the guidance of a priest.

Pope Benedict XVI told around 7,000 members of the movement that Neocatechumenal communities could continue in their tradition of celebrating a special Saturday evening Mass, as long as the local bishop approved and the celebrations remained open to the public.

Nevertheless, he encouraged the movement’s members not to remain “separate” from their parish community.

The pope praised the Neocatechumenal Way as a “special gift” of the Holy Spirit for modern times, especially as secularism “has eclipsed the sense of God and obscured Christian values.” The movement, he said, can help Christians rediscover the “beauty” of their faith.

The Way’s founder, Kiko Arguello, said Friday’s approval was a “historic moment” after the “many troubles” the movement had faced in the process of receiving the Vatican’s approval.

The movement’s focus on preaching in secular contexts resonates with Benedict’s recent focus on “re-evangelizing” Western countries where the faith has grown weak.

At the end of the audience, Benedict sent out 17 new teams of Neocatechumenal missionaries, who will work mostly in Europe and in the U.S. Each team is made up of three or four families accompanied by a priest.

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The head of Poland’s largest child protection agency has urged the Roman Catholic church to respond to growing complaints of sexual abuse by its priests.

“It’s not the scale of this phenomenon which is worrying, but the church’s attitude. So far, the Bishops Conference has said nothing,” said Jakub Spiewak, director of the independent Warsaw-based Kidprotect Foundation, which runs a hotline for abuse victims and seven separate child protection programs.

“The Catholic church occupies a special position here, but could begin to lose it if it fails to address problems like this,” said Spiewak, speaking in the wake of the publication of a book of interviews with Polish Bishop’s Conference president Archbishop Jozef Michalik, who says Polish church leaders are doing everything possible to counter “inappropriate behavior” among Catholic priests.

Kidprotect has launched a campaign, “Silence is Not Golden,” to encourage victims to come forward. However, Spiewak said police and civic officials were sometimes afraid to challenge priests suspected of abuse in small towns and villages, where they were “often the most powerful people.”

Leading Roman Catholics, including Poland’s Children’s Rights Spokesmen, have urged clear church procedures for handling abuse claims since 2002, when the archbishop of Poznan, Juliusz Paetz, resigned after media reports he had molested local seminarians.

A movement of priest’s victims, recently formed with U.S. backing, says several dozen Polish priests convicted for molestation have received only light suspended jail terms, while most are still serving in parishes, often working with children.

Many cases were not reported by the Polish church’s Catholic information agency, KAI, which has covered abuse scandals in other countries extensively.

Sexual abuse claims against priests have severely affected the Roman Catholic church in several countries over the past two years, including Ireland, Germany, Austria, and the United States.

In May, the Vatican instructed all Bishop’s Conferences to have abuse guidelines in place by May 2012, and to introduce child protection programs, exchange information about clergy transferring between dioceses and ensure “spiritual and psychological assistance” for victims.

However, in a recent special issue, a Catholic monthly called “The Link” said the Polish church lacked psychological checks for its clergy and “transparent norms” for vetting employees, and had no “information policy” or “norms of conduct” for handling abuse accusations. It also cited a “lack of co-operation between church and state” on abuse issues.
Spiewak says the Catholic journal’s warnings have been ignored, adding that most bishops were showing “extraordinary laxity.”

“There’s growing frustration here; any criticism of a priest, even by loyal Catholics, is treated as a frontal attack on the church and faith,” Spiewak said.

“If the church doesn’t uphold the law and stop sheltering its priests from canonical and criminal responsibility, it will face the same crisis as the church in other countries. But its leaders seem to think they can simply avoid the issue.”

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A Catholic nun who worked with lepers is on the verge of becoming Hawaii’s second canonized saint, after Vatican officials attributed a second miracle to her intercession.

Mother Marianne Cope, a German-born Franciscan nun who spent 30 years caring for lepers on the island of Molokai, died of natural causes in 1918. She succeeded St. Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest known as “Father Damien,” who died of leprosy in 1889. Damien, who was canonized in 2009, is considered the patron saint of Hawaii and of HIV/AIDS patients.

Pope John Paul II declared Marianne “Blessed” in 2004, after recognizing as miraculous the 1993 cure of a teenage cancer patient in Syracuse, N.Y., who was dying of organ failure until a Franciscan nun prayed for Marianne’s intercession. A second miracle, occurring after beatification, is required for canonization.

On Tuesday (Dec. 6), the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, based in Syracuse, announced that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints had recognized another healing as both medically “inexplicable” and due to Marianne’s intercession.

The canonization still requires the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, expected sometime next year, and the sisters say they will not reveal the details of the miracle until then.

“For little Hawaii, with our population and we’ve come up with two saints,” Sister Joan of Arc Souza of Honolulu told the local KHON2 television station. “This is spectacular.”

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The Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, who has distanced his diocese from the national denomination since its sanction of openly gay bishops, has not “abandoned” the Episcopal Church, a church committee announced Monday (Nov. 28).

Bishop Mark Lawrence, an outspoken conservative, has said that he wants to remain part of the Episcopal Church, even as he decries its “false gospel of indiscriminate inclusivity.”

The Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire in 2004, and a lesbian priest as an assistant bishop in Los Angeles last year.

In protest, the South Carolina diocese, which covers the eastern portion of the state, has declared itself “sovereign” within the national denomination, rejected the leadership of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and withdrawn from some governing committees.

However, the church’s Disciplinary Board for Bishops “was unable to make the conclusions essential to a certification that Bishop Lawrence had abandoned the communion of the church,” said Bishop Dorsey Henderson, the panel’s chairman.

Under church law, bishops who reject the doctrine, worship or discipline of the national denomination are deemed to have abandoned the church.

Henderson, the former bishop of the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, said that it is “significant that Bishop Lawrence has repeatedly stated that he does not intend to lead the diocese out of the Episcopal Church — that he only seeks a safe place within the church to live the Christian faith as that diocese perceives it.”

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For four years, Jose Feliciano told a jury on Monday (Nov. 28), his rage grew.

The former church janitor said his employer, the Rev. Edward Hinds, had been extorting him, forcing him into unwanted sexual contact under the threat of exposing Feliciano’s criminal past.

The janitor grudgingly allowed the priest to continue touching him, he said, because to do otherwise would have meant the end of his job at St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church in Chatham, N.J.

And then, on Oct. 22, 2009, five months before Feliciano’s expected retirement, Hinds called him into the rectory and fired him, he said.

“All this time he’s been using me, and now he’s saying I have to go,” Feliciano testified. “I told him, ‘You promised me.’ We got into a very heated argument and I pleaded with him not to do that to me.” Hinds, he said, began belittling him, saying he was “like a child, crying and begging.”

That’s when Feliciano noticed the small steak knife on a table in the kitchen, he said. Grabbing the weapon, he said, he “just went crazy,” stabbing the 61-year-old priest over and over.

A medical examiner would later determine Hinds suffered 44 stab wounds.

Monday’s dramatic testimony came as Feliciano seeks to convince jurors the killing was an explosive crime of passion spurred by years of blackmail and abuse, not an act of premeditated murder.

Prosecutors contend the account is fiction, arguing that Hinds fired Feliciano after learning his employee had been wanted on criminal charges in Pennsylvania since 1988. The allegations included indecent assault on a 7-year- old girl and corrupting the morals of a minor.

The Diocese of Paterson was conducting an audit at the time to ensure all church employees who had contact with children had undergone criminal background checks. Feliciano’s fingerprint card had not been returned to the state police, as required, prompting Hinds to conduct his own investigation, according to church officials.

Feliciano, 66, mostly calm and unemotional, testified in his own defense the entire day, answering questions from Balin Baidwan, one of two public defenders assigned to his case. The testimony was, at times, unsparingly graphic.

Feliciano said Hinds grabbed his genitals, masturbated him and performed oral sex on him over the years, mostly in the rectory at St. Patrick.

It began in late 2003, he said, when Feliciano was fingerprinted in keeping with diocese policy. Feliciano said he told the priest that returning the fingerprint card to the state police would reveal his “problems” in Pennsylvania. Hinds agreed not to send it in, Feliciano said.

Then in March 2004, Hinds wanted to know more about the charges, Feliciano said, so he told the pastor about the charges during confession.

Hinds, he said, was “not too happy” and asked him to move out of the house on the grounds of the church where Feliciano was staying with his wife and two children. Feliciano ultimately moved to Easton, Pa.

Then one day later in 2004, Hinds called him into the rectory and “asked how I was doing in Easton,” Feliciano testified. Hinds put his hand on Feliciano’s lap and “he went and grabbed my privacy,” Feliciano testified.

“I pushed him to the side and said, ‘Father, what are you doing?’” Feliciano said.

Hinds’ response was, “It was not for me to worry about,” Feliciano said. “He had my fingerprints.”

Feliciano said Hinds “grabbed” him more aggressively for the first time in October 2005. “He said he had urges for a long time and this is the first time he had done this,” Feliciano said.

Feliciano said he endured the contact because he believed Hinds would allow him to finish out his time at the church before retirement. Hinds “made a promise to me,” Feliciano said.

(Ben Horowitz writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. Staff writer Mark Mueller contributed to this report.)

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With a stairwell for a confessional and a folding table for an altar, the lobby of the DCU Center arena here, about 40 miles west of Boston, doesn’t look especially holy ― until a band of circus workers gathers for Mass.

That’s when the Rev. Jerry Hogan dons a colorful chasuble festooned with images of big tops, lions and zebras. As he administers the Eucharist, off-duty performers help sanctify the space by kneeling on the marble floor, praying and breaking spontaneously into Portuguese song. The event is no act, even if it is associated with a three-ring circus.

After months of living together on a train and performing hundreds of shows a year, these 50 Catholic circus workers and their children are a beaming bunch as they hug the priest and nuns who’ve prepared them for this day. “This gives me a way to know Jesus and to be protected,” said trapeze artist Ingrid Silva as she prepared for the sacrament.

The Circus and Traveling Show Ministries of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops provides the spiritual lifeblood for about 4,500 Catholics who work in North America’s 41 traveling circuses, as well as thousands more who work in carnivals, rodeos and auto racing.

Since the workers’ lives are too transient to allow many of them to get to church, the church instead comes to them. Now the ministry is being reformed to depend less on religious professionals and more on laypeople.

For years, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus employed nuns as teachers for circus workers’ children; they led religious programs for adults on their own time. Circus employment has now ended for Sisters Dorothy Fabritze and Bernard Overkamp, who are leaving to travel with other circuses, staying a few weeks to train workers to serve as religious educators and relying on donations to sustain their ministry.

“We’ve had others come forward, in this circus and other circuses by the grace of God, and say, ‘We want to do what the sisters are doing,’” Fabritze said. “We’ll help them organize classes and find out what people are asking for.”

As the ministry gets revamped, circus workers are pausing to give thanks and consider the importance of church outreach. Call it the high-wire effect: something bad could happen any night, and they want to be right with God if it does.

Consider Paulo Cesar, a 27-year-old Brazilian dwarf who rides a motorcycle in a death-defying loop-de-loop. A few hours before showtime, he availed himself of four sacraments ― confession, baptism, confirmation and first Communion ― as he grinned widely. “Anything can happen on the motorcycle or the trampoline,” he said. “But my job is good because I have Jesus in my heart.”

For some, the ministry also helps build much-needed virtues. Hungarian national Sandor Eke, 35, has been on the road as a fire-juggling clown for 14 years. He’s needed to develop patience, he said, for living out of a 6-by-10-foot room in a train car. He married a fellow circus performer, but after they divorced, he had to work every night with his ex-wife until she left the circus two years later.

“Here, in a train, you have to work with (your ex-wife), you have to dance with her,” Eke said. “It’s a lot more difficult than in any other relationship … The sisters teach us to read the Bible, to analyze it, to ask what would Jesus do. It just helps me to calm down.”

The Circus and Traveling Show Ministries have evolved with the industry since taking root in 1928, when a monsignor started blessing the train. Soon after, Boston priest Ed Sullivan began officiating at weddings for circus workers. Hogan, who’s been fascinated with the circus ever since he went backstage as a child, has been president and chaplain since 1993.

Today’s circus is an international display of talent, with many performers hailing from Latin America and Eastern Europe. “I smile in a lot of languages,” Hogan said. But behind the smile is admiration for the sacrifices circus workers make in order to give audiences a couple of hours of enjoyment.

“When they’re performing, the arena is a sacred place,” Hogan said. “It’s their temple. It’s where people come to be entertained and forget about what’s going on in their life … My job is to help enhance their skills with a support system.”

As part of his traveling ministry, Hogan takes brief breaks from his full-time priestly duties at St. Michael parish in North Andover, MA. He travels on a shoestring budget, often staying with priests or monks. When the circus comes to the Northeast, he invites workers to his parish, where some park their circus vehicles for several days. If they need a mechanic, a dentist or new eyeglasses, he steers them to merchants who won’t take advantage.

“If their car breaks down, a guy could be shady and say, ‘Oh, you’re with the circus?’ and charge them an extra $200,” Hogan says. “You’re always dealing with these subtle prejudices. So they say, ‘Father Jerry, can you get me a mechanic?’ And I do.”

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About 70 Protestant Christians lived in the village of San Rafael Tlanalapan, Puebla state, until Monday (Sept. 12), when they faced a frightening ultimatum – leave immediately or be “crucified or lynched.”

Traditionalist Catholics in the village, near the municipality of San Martín Texmelucan about 60 miles from Mexico City, reportedly threatened to burn down or otherwise destroy their homes.

The Protestants left.

The traditionalist Catholics, who practice a blend of indigenous and Catholic rituals, reportedly asserted that 20 years ago an assistant village president had vowed that no temple of any non-Catholic faith would ever be permitted in San Rafael Tlanalapan. Protestants in Puebla, Hidalgo, Chiapas and other states sometimes refuse to help pay for and participate in traditionalist Catholic festivals, which often include drunken revelry and what they regard as idolatrous adoration of saints.

In 2006, the Protestants in San Rafael Tlanalapan asked for government help after Catholics led village authorities to cut off their water supply.

Tensions reached a crisis level two weeks ago, when local priest Ascension Benitez Gonzalez reportedly said in a Sept. 4 sermon that his parishioners should pressure the Protestants to leave for good. Although their number has grown to 70, the evangelical Protestants have been allowed no place of worship.

On Sept. 7, the village’s assistant president, Antonio Garcia Ovalle, reportedly met with the Protestants. The evangelicals promised to leave, though the 200 traditionalist Catholics present sought to beat them and expel them right then. According to Puebla online news portal Quince minutes.com, the priest rang the church bells continually during the meeting.

The evangelicals’ departure date was set for Monday (Sept. 12). In a newscast two days later on TV Azteca of Puebla, area traditionalist Catholic Irma Diaz Perez rejoiced, saying, “They will never return, because we have drawn up a document wherein they have no permission to come back now or ever.”

On the same segment, another traditionalist Catholic, Hortencia Minero Garcia, said critics should not finger the priest for the expulsion.

“We are strong Catholics and respect our religion and don’t want anyone to touch our priest, because he has nothing to do with this – it is the people,” Minero Garcia said.

In the city of Puebla, the state capital, Catholic leaders tried to soften prejudices.

“It is necessary to respect the traditions of the towns,” Puebla Archbishop Victor Sanchez Espinosa told the daily La Jornada de Oriente. “The Catholics feel attacked, but we would hope there would be no violence. I invite the community, totally Catholic, and the small Christian community, to prudence, order and respect.”

The Protestants sought refuge in nearby towns, including the municipal center of San Martin Texmelucan, where their churches have become prominent. Others have reportedly fled to a church building in Alto Aposento.

The “Uses and Customs” section of the Mexican constitution grants indigenous communities some autonomy to exercise traditional law, although Protestant attorneys say it is misused to allow local authorities to violate minority communities’ religious freedom. The “Uses and Customs” article is designed to protect indigenous customs from government obliteration, but traditionalist Catholics evoke it to jail or expel those who differ from them, the attorneys say.

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The Catholic archdiocese of Chicago will soon release a list of priests accused of child sex abuse. Meanwhile, critics in Boston slammed recently Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s list of priests last week, saying it is incomplete.

Chicago’s archdiocese has decided to release a partial list of 35 names of former priests who were charged with child sexual abuse. This will comprise part of a legal settlement that it has reached in a lawsuit with 12 victims of clergy sex abuse.

A lawyer for the Chicago abuse victims said the latest move by the third-largest Catholic diocese in the U.S. is significant because it will help to protect children from predators in the clergy.

Jeff Anderson, lawyer of the abuse victims told Reuters, “This establishes a strict protocol … [which] if implemented, is on the front end of the child protection movement.”

Victims’ advocates say that the publication of such lists help to ensure that priests who have been accused credibly are rendered inactive. It is also a way to validate victims, which is a major step in their healing process.

Anderson has worked on over 100 clergy sex abuse cases in Chicago which led to some $50 million collected in settlements. However, the partial list will just be a beginning, as up to 65 former Chicago clergy have been accused of child sexual abuse.

Standard for transparency

Last week Boston’s archdiocese published the names of 159 members of clergy charged with child sex abuse, establishing a fresh standard for transparency.

However, not everybody in Boston is satisfied. The list excludes the names of 91 other priests. Those not on the list include priests who are deceased and were never accused publicly, priests with unsubstantiated accusations and priests who worked in Boston but were not under the payroll of the archdiocese.

The names in O’Malley’s list had been previously made public, but not always through the Boston archdiocese. Some of the names in the list are still active priests who were cleared of charges of abuse.

Outraged and dissatisfied victims

One victim, Robert Perron, told Boston Herald that he is disappointed that the name of a priest (now deceased) who abused him as a child was not included. “I think that’s outrageous. What happened to me doesn’t count at all.”

Another victim, Gerald Sypek, said, “I kept that secret [of abuse] for 39 years. [O’Malley] is waging a war against children [by omitting the abuser’s name]. And children are gong to lose.”

Sypek stayed in a Jamaica Plain orphanage as a child, and said he was abused by Paul Hightower, who in 2003 was also accused of abusing two other children at Nazareth children’s home.

Hightower, who died in 1994, studied at Cardinal O’Connell Seminary at the time that he had been charged with child abuse. He never became a priest.

In a statement that came with the release of the names, O’Malley said, “In the present environment, a priest who is accused of sexually abusing a minor may never be able to fully restore his reputation, even if cleared after civil or canonical proceedings,” The AP reported. “Reputational concerns also become acute in cases concerning deceased priests, who are often accused years after their death with no opportunity to address the accusations against them.”

Letting daylight in

Stephen Clifford is the victim of a priest who is still alive, but whose name is not included in the list. In Clifford’s case, he never publicly aired his experience. However, he did bring the matter up to the archdiocese, who funded the bill for his therapy.

Clifford told the AP he was glad that through the list, the archdiocese is “letting some more daylight in.” But of his personal experience he said, “I know that they know what this priest did to me. And the fact that he’s not on this list really makes me wonder, ‘Gosh, how many more are there like him that should be on the list, who aren’t?’”

Not criminally charged

In the pending list to be released by Chicago’s archdiocese, the name of one ex-priest, Joseph Fitzharris, is likely to appear. In 1991 Fitzharris was defrocked. However, he is still living in Chicago and has not been criminally charged, largely because, as in the case of many clergy with similar accusations, time has lapsed within the statute of limitations.

Arnel Santiago says he was abused by Fitzharris as an adolescent, but kept silent until after both his father and sister had died.  Santiago, now a father of two, told Reuters all abusive clergy should be named. “I’m here to protect kids. I’m not afraid anymore.”

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