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	Sex abuse report shames Catholic Church by Reuters / AFP & agencies Belgium / Ireland   Sep 2010 (AFP)   A Belgian Catholic Church-backed commission has released harrowing testimony from around 500 cases of alleged sex abuse involving more than 100 victims, 13 of whom were driven to suicide.   The testimony from victims of clergy and church workers reveals 13 suicides and six attempted suicides "in relation to sexual abuse by a cleric", said the report published by the Commission on Church-related Sexual Abuse Complaints, set up by the Catholic Church.   The commission, headed by independent child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens, said it had looked into 475 complaints between January and June this year.   "Almost every institution, every school, particularly boarding schools, at one time harboured abuse," Mr Adriaenssens said.   "It"s the Church"s Dutroux," he said, referring to the mid-1990s trauma caused in Belgium by the arrest of serial rapist and killer Marc Dutroux - serving life for six rapes and four murders.   The scale of the abuse has stunned the church.   "We realise that we were totally misinformed and that we weren"t aware of the gravity of the situation and that these victims were hurt for life," the Bishop of Tournai, Guy Harpigny, said.   "Some committed suicide. This is extremely serious. Mindsets are changing and I think the church authorities are also ready to act towards change," added the bishop, who has been tasked with looking at paedophilia in the church.   Most of the complaints received by the commission were related to charges of sexual abuse committed between the 1950s and the late 1980s by Catholic clergy, but also by teachers of religion and adults working with youth movements.   The victims are today aged between 50 and 60.   The 200-page report which contains testimonies from some 124 anonymous "survivors" - as they are called - reveal that the sexual abuse for most victims began at age 12, although one was two years old, five were aged four, eight aged five and 10 aged seven.   While the description of the alleged sex abuser is often imprecise, where verification had been made 102 were found to have been members of some 29 religious orders, the report said.   "We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members," the report"s authors wrote.   Two-thirds of the alleged victims were male.   The commission said it received most of its testimony after the forced resignation in April of the bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, who admitted having sexually abused his nephew between 1973 and 1986.   A woman in the report testified that she was abused at age 17 by a priest and tried to seek help from a bishop in 1983.   "I told him "I have a problem with one of your priests". He told me: "Ignore him and he will leave you alone," she said.   March 2010   Victims disappointed by Pope abuse letter. (Reuters)   Irish victims of clerical child sexual abuse say they are disappointed by Pope Benedict"s letter of apology as it fails to address the role of senior church leaders, a group representing victims said.   "My first response was deep disappointment in the letter," said Maeve Lewis, executive director of victims group One in Four. "We feel the letter falls far short of addressing the concerns of the victims."   She said the Pope"s letter focused too narrowly on lower-rank Irish priests without recognising the responsibility of the Vatican and senior Irish clerics for protecting offenders and dealing with victims.   "There is nothing in this letter to suggest that any new vision of leadership in the Catholic church exists," she said.   Pope Benedict expressed his "shame and remorse" for episodes of child sex abuse, saying "serious mistakes" were made by Irish bishops in responding to allegations.   "You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry," the Pope said in the letter. He said priests and religious workers guilty of child abuse "must answer" for their crimes "before properly constituted tribunals".   The Pope announced a mission to Irish dioceses rocked by sex scandals to assist "the local church on her path to renewal" and said he was ready to meet again with victims of child abuse.   Predominantly Catholic Ireland has been shocked by three judicial reports in the past five years that revealed ill-treatment, abuse and cruelty by clerics and a cover-up of their activities by church authorities.   New abuse scandals have also come to light in the Pope"s native Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland.   Nov 2009   Sex abuse report shames Irish Catholic Church, by Andrew Bushe. (AFP)   The Catholic Church in Ireland covered up widespread allegations of "evil" child sex abuse by priests for decades, according to a damning report released today.   Four archbishops routinely protected abusers and failed to inform police of the allegations, according to a three-year investigation into the Dublin Archdiocese, the country"s largest.   Responding to the report - the latest to reveal the scale of Catholic sex abuse - the government immediately apologised for failing to protect children in church care, and vowed in a statement that "this can never happen again".   "Whatever the historical and societal reasons for this, the government, on behalf of the state, apologises, without reservation or equivocation, for failures by the agencies of the state in dealing with this issue," it said.   The judicial probe discovered that the archbishops did not report abuse to police until the 1990s as part of a culture of secrecy and an over-riding wish to avoid damaging the reputation of the Church.   The report said: "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities."   It found that children who complained "were often met with denial, arrogance and cover-up and with incompetence and incomprehension in some cases. Suspicions were rarely acted on."   The study comes just six months after a landmark report in May horrified mainly Catholic Ireland by revealing widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in Catholic-run institutions dating back to the 1930s.   Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said he read the findings with "a growing sense of revulsion and anger" and promised there would be "no hiding place" for the perpetrators.   "The report catalogues evil after evil committed in the name of what was perversely seen as the greater good," he said.   "There is no escaping the cruel irony that the church, partly motivated by a desire to avoid scandal, in fact created a scandal on an astonishing scale.   "In many, many cases the welfare of children counted for nothing and the abusers were left free to abuse, to visit evil on the innocent.   Marie Collins, who was abused as a child in 1960, said: "This is the end of a very long road for victims of abuse and particularly for those of us who spoke out for so many years, and who were vilified by the church (and) called liars".   The 750-page landmark report by judge Yvonne Murphy is damning in its criticism of failures to protect vulnerable children.   The probe examined complaints of abuse of over 320 children involving a representative sample of 46 priests in the Dublin Archdiocese between 1975 and 2004.   One priest admitted to sexually abusing over 100 children, while another accepted that he had abused on a fortnightly basis over 25 years.   It said the phrase, "don"t ask, don"t tell" was appropriate to describe the attitude of the archdiocese to clerical sex abuse for most of the period covered by the report.   "Typically, complainants were not told that other instances of child sexual abuse by their abuser had been proved or admitted," it added.   Responding to the report, human rights group Amnesty International called for an urgent referendum to enshrine children"s rights in the Irish constitution to prevent future abuse.   "This report makes for deeply shocking reading, even after all that has gone before it," said executive director of Amnesty International Ireland Colm O"Gorman, who was himself a victim of the sexual abuse by priests.   "Bishops in Dublin colluded with child abusers, protecting them and hiding them, enabling them to prey on the innocent. Children were deliberately sacrificed to protect the Church," he said.
	Bloody Sunday report: 38 years on, justice at last by Henry McDonald and Owen Bowcott The Guardian United Kingdom   15 June 2010   After a 38-year struggle for truth and justice campaigners for those killed in Derry on Bloody Sunday tonight celebrated the Saville Report"s exoneration of the victims and the report"s unequivocal conclusion that the shootings were "unjustified".   The Bloody Sunday tribunal"s repeated use of the term "unjustifiable" throughout the 5,000-page report, and its verdict that soldiers had lied to the inquiry, now opens up the possibility of legal action against former troops involved in the atrocity.   Fourteen unarmed civilians were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment which had been sent into Derry"s Bogside on 30 January 1972. The deaths propelled a generation of nationalists into the Provisional IRA.   Saville"s conclusion that none of the 14 dead was carrying a gun, no warnings were given, no soldiers were under threat and the troops were the first to open fire, marked a final declaration of innocence for the victims of the biggest British military killing of civilians on UK soil since the Peterloo massacre in 1819.   Northern Ireland"s director of public prosecutions confirmed tonight that he was considering whether prosecutions for murder, perjury or perverting the course of justice could arise from the report.   Sir Alasdair Fraser QC will be asked to assess the report to decide whether there is sufficient evidence for "a reasonable prospect for conviction" of paratroopers found to have participated in the killings.   Lord Gifford QC, who represented the family of civil rights marcher Jim Wray who died on Bloody Sunday, said: "There are a number of possible charges arising from this report which has been thorough and even-handed. Murder is of course the obvious one. But the report also found that soldiers deliberately attempted to mislead the inquiry."   As David Cameron announced the findings and apologised on behalf of the British state, a crowd of up to 10,000 people watching his statement on a television screen in Derry"s Guildhall Square cheered wildly.   "I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our army, who I believe to be the finest in the world," Cameron told the Commons.   "But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong."   It was a previous Tory prime minister, Ted Heath, whose troops carried out the massacre in the bloodiest year of the Troubles.   In a measured and dispassionate report Saville, a supreme court judge, concluded there was no justification for shooting at any of those killed or wounded on the banned civil rights march.   "None of the firing by the Support Company (Paratroopers) was aimed at people posing a threat or causing death or serious injury," he said. "Despite the contrary evidence given by the soldiers, we have concluded that none of them fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks by nail or petrol bombers. No one threw or threatened to throw a nail or petrol bomb at the soldiers on Bloody Sunday."   A copy of the discredited 1972 report by Lord Widgery, which accused the victims of firing weapons or handling bombs, was torn apart by one of the families representatives in Derry . "My brother was running away from the soldiers when he was shot," Joe Duddy said of his brother, Jackie. "He was posing no threat. [The Widgery report] destroyed our loved ones good names. Today we clear them. I"m delighted to say that Jackie was innocent."   Saville"s 10-volume report also found that some of the paratroopers who gave evidence to the tribunal had lied. It said these soldiers had "knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing".   But the report did not find any conspiracy in the government or in the higher echelons of the army to use lethal force against either rioters or demonstrators in Derry. The shootings "were not the result of any plan to shoot selected ringleaders", the report said. The operation was "not a justifiable response to a lethal attack by republican paramilitaries but instead soldiers opening fire unjustifiably," the report said.   Kate Allen, Amnesty"s UK director, said: "The right to redress of the victims and their families is only partly met by establishing the facts about what happened that day; full accountability for any unlawful actions by state agents will also need to be ensured."
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