The former archbishop of the archdiocese of Quebec Cardinal Marc Ouellet is accused of sexual assault. He is pictured here in Rome in 2019, ahead of the Pope's "Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church." 

The name of a prominent Vatican cardinal, who is regarded as a potential successor to Pope Francis, appears on a list made public as part of a new class action against the archdiocese of Quebec, Radio-Canada's investigative program Enquête has found.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who was the archbishop of Quebec when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was taking place, is among some 88 members of the clergy who are facing allegations of sexual assault. It's the first time Ouellet's name appears in the legal proceedings.

The civil lawsuit represents more than 100 victims who were allegedly sexually assaulted, most of them as minors, by priests and other staff working for the archdiocese since 1940. 

Most of the assaults allegedly took place in the '50s and '60s, according to the class action documents. 

Ouellet is by far the most prominent person among those listed in the class action, and the one with the highest-ranking position in the Catholic Church. The cardinal is not facing any criminal accusations.

His alleged victim, who is identified as "F" in the documents, was doing an internship as a pastoral agent from 2008 to 2010 when she says the assaults occurred. She says they took place during public events.

1 year agoDuration4:41A prominent Quebec cardinal is among those named in a class-action lawsuit filed against the archdiocese of Quebec involving more than 100 alleged victims of sexual assault.

"He grabbed me and then … his hands on my back, they went down pretty low," said the complainant, who shared her version of what happened to Radio-Canada's Enquête team last spring. 

"Quite intrusive for, let's say for someone who is my superior, who is the archbishop of Quebec."

During that encounter, the cardinal allegedly told her it's the second time they had seen each other that week and he might as well kiss her on the cheek, since there is no harm in treating himself a little.

"That made me very uncomfortable, especially the word 'treating' himself. As if I was his treat," she said.

The allegations the woman shared with Enquête are the same ones found in the lawsuit documents.

On different occasions, Ouellet allegedly held the woman against his body, massaged her shoulders or vigorously caressed her back "down to the spot where the buttocks start," each time making her feel very uncomfortable.

"I felt chased after. It became more and more invasive, more and more intense to the point where I stopped attending events. I tried avoiding being in his presence as much as possible," she said.

In an email to Radio-Canada, the archdiocese of Quebec said that it is aware of the allegations against Ouellet, but declined to issue any further comments.

  At the time of the alleged assaults, Ouellet was the archbishop and the head of the archdiocese. He had the final say in who was hired as a pastoral agent, according to Alain Arseneault, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

"You have at that time a young woman in her mid-20s versus a powerful man in a position of authority, known worldwide at the time, who was maybe 60," he said. "Like most victims, she froze."

When "F" spoke about her uneasiness with those around her, she was told the cardinal is a warm man and that she wasn't the only woman who faced this type of "problem with him," the class action reads.

A priest who was active in the archdiocese at the time told Enquête there were rumours circulating about the cardinal's behaviour. 

The priest, who asked to remain anonymous, was one of the clergy members to whom the young woman shared what happened with the cardinal. He said they believed her allegations.

"We couldn't get over it. He arrived like a sheriff who was coming to bring order to the archdiocese of Quebec, he was sent from Rome." he said. "For him to have inappropriate behaviours with women, we found that really strange on his part."

Although the allegations against Ouellet seem less serious physically than other cases cited in the class action, the impact on the victim is nevertheless just as important, said Arsenault.

"It's hard to imagine that someone with his intelligence, in his position, was unaware of what he was doing and the consequences it could have," he said.

Ouellet was called back to Rome and promoted as prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops, the Vatican's department that is responsible for selecting new bishops, in 2010.

"F" said once Ouellet left and was replaced by Gérald Cyprien Lacroix, the current archbishop of Quebec, things changed significantly.

"He was a lot more adjusted. If there was physical contact, it was a simple handshake," she said.

According to the lawsuit, the woman decided to share what happened to her with the committee in charge of reviewing sexual allegations within the archdiocese of Quebec 10 years later, after a troubling encounter with another priest.

She said she went to see the committee and told them, "I don't know if I was a victim, but this is my story."

"I felt the need to tell [them] everything that I had gone through that was inappropriate since starting as a pastoral agent."

She said members of the committee told her both cases were cases of sexual misconduct, and allegedly encouraged her to file a complaint.

It's only then that the committee learned one of the priests was Cardinal Ouellet, as the woman had not shared the men's names beforehand.

The complaint against Ouellet was filed directly to the Vatican in 2021. It was assigned to priest Jacques Servais, a theologian tasked with looking into the matter. 

A virtual meeting was arranged between the victim and the Vatican, but a year and a half later the woman said she still hasn't been informed of the conclusion of the investigation.

 Prominent cardinal named in sexual assault lawsuit against archdiocese of Quebec | CBC News 

Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and day care centers. They foster and care for children.

And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP's analysis found.

A recent push by Roman Catholic dioceses across the U.S. to publish the names of those it considers to be credibly accused has opened a window into the daunting problem of how to monitor and track priests who often were never criminally charged and, in many cases, were removed from or left the church to live as private citizens.

Each diocese determines its own standard to deem a priest credibly accused, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate conversations and unwanted hugging to forced sodomy and rape.

Dioceses and religious orders so far have shared the names of more than 5,100 clergy members, with more than three-quarters of the names released just in the last year. The AP researched the nearly 2,000 who remain alive to determine where they have lived and worked — the largest-scale review to date of what happened to priests named as possible sexual abusers.

In reviewing the status of nearly 2,000 Roman Catholic clergy members and church employees credibly accused of sex abuse, The Associated Press found that the vast majority were living unsupervised by the church or law enforcement authorities — and that many had put themselves in positions where they were near at-risk or young people.

Among the AP's findings:

• 65 former clergy members were charged with crimes committed after their church service, with half of those crimes involving sexual assault, child pornography or failing to register as a sex offender.
• 76 have current, active licenses to work in schools or medical facilities or to serve as counselors or social workers. More than 190 had licenses in at least one of those fields at some point in their careers — 91 held education licenses, 52 held counseling certification, 31 had social worker licenses and 28 had medical licenses of some type. A handful had more than one kind of license.
• More than 160 continued to work or volunteer in churches, including more than 30 who moved overseas and worked as priests without restrictions. In the U.S., accused priests have been found saying Mass, officiating weddings, playing music, working in church administrative roles and acting as eucharistic ministers.
• Although over 310 had been criminally charged from their actions during their time as priests, only 85 are on sex offender registries
• More than a quarter currently live within 2,000 feet of a school, playground or child care facility
• Roughly 110 were confirmed or believed to have moved overseas after allegations arose in the U.S.

— The Associated Press

In addition to the almost 1,700 that the AP was able to identify as largely unsupervised, there were 76 people who could not be located. The remaining clergy members were found to be under some kind of supervision, with some in prison or overseen by church programs.

The review found hundreds of priests held positions of trust, many with access to children. More than 160 continued working or volunteering in churches, including dozens in Catholic dioceses overseas and some in other denominations. Roughly 190 obtained professional licenses to work in education, medicine, social work and counseling — including 76 who, as of August, still had valid credentials in those fields.

The research also turned up cases where the priests were once again able to prey on victims.

After Roger Sinclair was removed by the Diocese of Greensburg in Pennsylvania in 2002 for allegedly abusing a teenage boy decades earlier, he ended up in Oregon. In 2017, he was arrested for repeatedly molesting a young developmentally disabled man and is now imprisoned for a crime that the lead investigator in the Oregon case says should have never been allowed to happen.

Like Sinclair, the majority of people listed as credibly accused were never criminally prosecuted for the abuse alleged when they were part of the church. That lack of criminal history has revealed a sizable gray area that state licensing boards and background check services are not designed to handle as former priests seek new employment, apply to be foster parents and live in communities unaware of their presence and their pasts.

It also has left dioceses struggling with how — or if — former employees should be tracked and monitored. Victims' advocates have pushed for more oversight, but church officials say what's being requested extends beyond what they legally can do. And civil authorities like police departments or prosecutors say their purview is limited to people convicted of crimes.

That means the heavy lift of tracking former priests has fallen to citizen watchdogs and victims, whose complaints have fueled suspensions, removals and firings. But even then, loopholes in state laws allow many former clergy to keep their new jobs even when the history of allegations becomes public.

"Defrocked or not, we've long argued that bishops can't recruit, hire, ordain, supervise, shield, transfer and protect predator priests, then suddenly oust them and claim to be powerless over their whereabouts and activities," said David Clohessy, the former executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who now heads the group's St. Louis chapter.

"It was supposed to make abuse history"

When the first big wave of the clergy abuse scandal hit Roman Catholic dioceses in the early 2000s, the U.S. bishops created the Dallas Charter, a baseline for sexual abuse reporting, training and other procedures to prevent child abuse. A handful of canon lawyers and experts at the time said every diocese should be transparent, name priests that had been accused of abuse and, in many cases, get rid of them.

Most dioceses decided against naming priests, however. And with the dioceses that did release lists in the next few years— some by choice, others due to lawsuit settlements or bankruptcy proceedings — abuse survivors complained about underreporting of priests, along with the omission of religious brothers they believed should be on those lists.

"The Dallas Charter was supposed to fix everything. It was supposed to make the abuse scandal history. But that didn't happen," said Fr. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who had tried to warn the bishops that abuse was widespread and that they should clean house.

After the charter was established in 2002, some critics say dioceses were more likely to simply defrock priests and return them to private citizenship.

Before 2018's landmark Pennsylvania grand jury report, which named more than 300 predator priests accused of abusing more than 1,000 children in six dioceses, the official lists of credibly accused priests added up to fewer than 1,500 names nationwide. Now, within the span of a little more than a year, more than 100 dioceses and religious orders have come forward with thousands of names — but often little other information that can be used to alert the public.

Some of the lists merely provide names, without details of the abuse allegations that led to their inclusion, the dates of the priests' assignments or the parishes where they served. And many don't disclose the priests' status with the church, which can vary from being moved into full retirement to being banished from performing public sacraments while continuing to perform administrative work. Only a handful of the lists include the last-known cities the priests lived in.

Over nine months, AP reporters and researchers scoured public databases, court records, property records, social media and other sources to locate the ousted clergy members.

That effort unearthed hundreds of these priests who, largely unwatched by church and civil authorities, chose careers that put them in new positions of trust and authority, including jobs in which they dealt with children and survivors of sexual abuse.

At least two worked as juvenile detention officers, in Washington and Arizona, and several others migrated to government roles like victims' advocate or public health planner. Others landed jobs at places like Disney World, community centers or family shelters for domestic abuse. And one former priest started a nonprofit that sends people to volunteer in orphanages and other places in developing nations.

The AP determined that a handful adopted or fostered children, sponsored teens and young adults coming to the U.S. for educational opportunities, or worked with organizations that are part of the foster care system, though that number could be much higher since no public database tracks adoptive or foster parents.

Until February, former priest Steven Gerard Stencil worked at a Phoenix company that places severely disabled children in foster homes and trains foster parents to care for them. Colleagues knew he was a former priest, but were unaware of past allegations against him, according to Lauree Copenhaver, the firm's executive director.

Stencil, now 67, was suspended from ministry in 2001 after a trip to Mexico that violated a diocese policy forbidding clerics from being with minors overnight. Around that time, a 17-year-old boy also complained that Stencil, then pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Casa Grande, Arizona, had grabbed his crotch in 1999 in a swimming pool. The diocese determined it was accidental touching, but turned the allegations over to police. No criminal charges were filed.

In this Jan. 27, 2001 photo, Fr. Steven Gerard Stencil poses for a portrait at his church St. Mark the Evangelist in Oro Valley, Arizona. (Ben Kirkby/Arizona Daily Star via AP)

Since 2003, Stencil's name has appeared on the Tucson diocese's list of clerics credibly accused of sexually abusing children, and his request to be voluntarily defrocked was granted in 2011.

Copenhaver said Stencil passed a fingerprint test showing he did not have a criminal history when he was first hired part time by Human Services Consultants LLC 12 years ago.

"We did not have any knowledge of his indiscretions, and had we known his history we would not have hired him," she said, emphasizing that he did not have direct access to children in his job.

Stencil was fired from the company for unrelated reasons earlier this year. He later said in a post on his Facebook page that he was working as a driver for a private Phoenix bus company that specializes in educational tours for school groups and scout troops.

"I have always been upfront with my employers about my past as a priest," Stencil wrote in an email to the AP when asked for comment. He said he unsuccessfully asked years ago for his name to be removed from the diocese's list, adding, "Since then, I have decided to simply live my life as best I can."

The AP's analysis also found that more than 160 of the priests remained in the comfortable position of continuing to work or volunteer in a church, with three-quarters of those continuing to serve in some capacity in the Roman Catholic Church. Others moved on as ministers and priests in different denominations, with new roles such as organist or even as priests in Catholic churches not affiliated with the Vatican, sometimes despite known or published credible accusations against them.

In more than 30 cases, priests accused of sexual abuse in the U.S. simply moved overseas, where they worked as Roman Catholic priests in good standing in countries including Peru, Mexico, the Philippines, Ireland and Colombia. The AP found that in all, roughly 110 clergy members moved or were suspected of moving out of the U.S. after allegations were made.

At least five priests were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church because of their refusal to stop participating in other religious activity.

More than three decades ago, James A. Funke and a fellow teacher at a St. Louis Catholic high school, Jerome Robben, went to prison for sexually abusing male students together. Funke, released in 1995, was eventually bounced from the priesthood. But years later, the two men joined together again, promoting Robben as the leader of a church of his own making.

This combination of 2019 and 2017 photos made available by the Missouri State Highway Patrol shows James Alan Funke, left, and Jerome Bernard Robben. (Missouri State Highway Patrol via AP)

Since 2004, Missouri records show that Robben has listed his St. Louis home as the base for a religious organization operating under at least three different names. Beginning in 2014, those papers have identified Funke as the order's secretary and one of its three directors.

Mary Kruger, whose son committed suicide when he was 21 after being abused by the men in high school, said she raised fresh concerns about Robben in 2007 when she heard he was presenting himself as a cleric.

At the time, he was being considered for promotion to bishop in a conservative Christian order based in Ontario, Canada. Kruger said members of the order told her that Robben had dismissed questions about his abuse conviction, claiming he had merely rented an apartment to Funke and that police blamed him for not knowing what went on inside.

Robben eventually was defrocked from the Christian order, and apparently then started his own. Until last year, when its paperwork expired, the group was registered with Missouri officials as the Syrian Orthodox Exarchate. However, a Facebook post from 2017 identified Robben — photographed wearing a crown and gold vestments — as the leader of a Russian Byzantine order raising money to build a monastery in Nevada.

Funke refused comment when approached by an AP reporter, and Robben did not respond to requests for comment.

"If they could wind up in jail next week, I'd be ecstatic," Kruger said. "I think as long as they're alive, they're dangerous."

Left the church, committed criminal offenses

As early as 1981, church officials knew of allegations that Roger Sinclair had acted inappropriately with adolescent boys. Two mothers at St. Mary's Parish in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to the then-bishop saying that Sinclair had molested their sons, both about 14 at the time.

Sinclair played a game where he would shake hands and then try to shove his hand at their genitals, the mothers said in their letter, parts of which were made public last year as part of the landmark report in Pennsylvania. They said he also tried to put his hands down one of the boy's pants.

This 2017 photo provided by the Deschutes County, Oregon, District Attorney's Office shows Roger Sinclair. After Sinclair was removed by the Diocese of Greensburg in Pennsylvania in 2002 for allegedly abusing a teenage boy decades earlier, he ended up in Oregon. (Deschutes County District Attorney's Office via AP)

Other accusations emerged about Sinclair showing dirty movies to boys in the rectory, exposing himself and possibly molesting a teen he had taken on a trip to Florida a few years earlier. After a group of mothers called the police for advice, the police chief told them he had heard the rumors but took no action, according to documents reviewed by the Pennsylvania grand jury.

The church sent Sinclair for treatment, returned him to ministry and provided him with a letter that listed him as a priest in good standing so he could be a chaplain in the Archdiocese of Military Services, according to the grand jury. That assignment took him to at least four different states, including Kansas, where in the early '90s he was a chaplain at the Topeka State Hospital, a now-closed state mental hospital that had a wing for teenagers.

He was fired from that assignment in 1991 after trying multiple times to check out male teenage patients to go see a movie. Administrators said he had managed "to gain access to a locked unit deceitfully."

Sinclair was removed from ministry in 2002 while the diocese investigated claims from a victim who said the priest sexually abused him in the rectory and on field trips beginning at Sinclair's first assignment as a priest. He resigned a few years later, before the church concluded proceedings to defrock him.

When he started serving on the board of directors of an Oregon senior center and working as a volunteer there, he was required to pass a background check because the center received federal dollars for the Meals on Wheels program. But no flags were raised because he was never charged in Pennsylvania.

According to accounts from both former center staffers and law enforcement officials, Sinclair's downfall began when the center's then-director looked outside and saw him with his hand down the young man's pants. He immediately barred Sinclair from the center, but left it up to the man's family to decide whether to press charges. Three months later, after learning why Sinclair had been absent, an employee went to the police out of fear the former priest would target someone else.

Now-Sgt. Steven Binstock, the lead investigator in Oregon, said Sinclair immediately confessed to committing multiple sexual acts with the developmentally disabled man. He also confessed to sexual contact with minors in Pennsylvania 30 years earlier.

"He was very vague, but he did tell us that it was some of the same type of behaviors, the same type of incidents, that had occurred with the victim that happened here," Binstock told the AP.

The Pennsylvania diocese had never warned Oregon authorities about Sinclair because it stopped tracking him after he left the church. The diocese, which did not tell the public Sinclair had been accused of abuse until it released its list in August 2018, declined to comment on his case.

The AP's analysis of the credibly accused church employees who remain alive found that more than 310 of the 2,000 have been charged with crimes for actions that took place when they were priests. Beyond that, the AP confirmed that Sinclair and 64 others have been charged with crimes committed after leaving the church, with most of them convicted for those crimes.

Some of the crimes involved drunken driving, theft or drug offenses. But 42 of the men were accused of crimes that were sexual in nature or violent, including a dozen charged with sexually assaulting minors. Thirteen were charged with distributing, making or possessing child pornography, and several others were caught masturbating in public or exposing themselves to people on planes or in shopping malls.

Five failed to register in their new communities as sex offenders as required due to their sex crime convictions.

Priests and other church employees being listed on sex offender registries at all is a rarity — the AP analysis found that only 85 of the 2,000 are. That's because church officials often successfully lobbied civil authorities to downgrade charges in exchange for guilty pleas ahead of trials. Convictions were sometimes expunged if offenders completed probationary programs or the charges were reduced below the level required by states for registration.

Since sex offender registries in their current searchable form didn't begin until the 1990s, dozens also were not tracked or monitored, because their original sentences already had been served before the registries were established.

The AP also found that more than 500 of the credibly accused former priests live within 2,000 feet of schools, playgrounds, childcare centers or other facilities that serve children, with many living much closer. In the states that restrict how close registered sex offenders can live to those facilities, limits range from 500 to 2,000 feet.

Decades after Louis Ladenburger was temporarily removed from the priesthood to be treated for "inappropriate professional behavior and relationships," he was hired as a counselor at a school for troubled boys in Idaho.

This undated photo provided by the Bonner County, Idaho Sheriff's office in September 2019 shows Louis Ladenburger. (Bonner County Sheriff's office via AP)

Ladenburger was arrested in 2007 and accused of sexual battery; in a deal with prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. He served about five months in prison.

According to Bonner County, Idaho, sheriff's reports, students said Ladenburger told them he was a sex addict. During counseling sessions, they said, the former Franciscan priest rubbed their upper thighs and stomachs, held their hands and gave them shoulder and neck massages. If students expressed confusion about their sexual identities, the sheriff's reports say he fondled them and performed oral sex on them.

Ladenburger was fired from the school. In an interview with sheriff's officials at the time, he "admitted being a touchy person," kissing many students and having his "needs met by the physical contact" with the boys.

By then, he'd been gone from the church for more than a decade — in 1996, the Vatican had granted his request to be released from his vows. No officials from his religious order or from the dioceses in six different states where he had served had warned the school or provided details of the allegations against him when he was a priest.

In a lawsuit involving a sexual abuse allegation against another member of the Franciscan order, the complaint cited Ladenburger as an example of the harm done when church officials don't report accusations of abuse to law enforcement, saying he likely never would have been hired at the school if the Franciscans had reported him when they first became aware.

"For all intents and purposes, they set loose a ticking time bomb that exploded in 2007," the lawsuit said.

Why former priests aren't tracked

If priests choose to leave their dioceses or religious orders — or if the church decides to permanently defrock them in a process known as laicization — leaders say the church no longer has authority to monitor where they go.

After the Dallas Charter came a rush to laicize, resulting in more than 220 of the priests researched by the AP being laicized between 2004 and 2010. Roughly 40% of all the living credibly accused clergy members had either been laicized or had voluntarily left the church.

The laicized priests also are increasingly younger, giving them even more years to lead unsupervised lives, according to Deacon Bernie Nojadera, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection.

"That does create an opportunity for them to seek a second career," Nojadera said. "So this is something a number of dioceses are grappling with and trying to figure out."

For priests who don't leave the church, dioceses and religious orders have more options to impose restrictions and monitoring. But how and whether that's done ranges widely from diocese to diocese, since the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops cannot mandate specific regulations or procedures.

The AP found that the dioceses that released lists more than a decade ago have the most robust of the handful of existing programs.

In Chicago, accused priests who are removed from ministry can opt to join a program started in 2008 in which they continue to receive treatment, benefits and help, and get to "die a priest." In exchange, they must sign over their right to privacy and agree to obey rules such as not living near a school.

"The monitoring is intrusive. I track their phone usage, I require daily logs of where they go, I track their internet usage and check their financial information and records. They have to tell me where they are going to be, who they will be with. And they have to meet with me twice a month face-to-face," said Moira Reilly, the case manager in charge of the Chicago Archdiocese's prayer and penance program.

Reilly, a licensed social worker, said many Catholics don't understand why the church runs the program, instead pushing for every priest accused of abuse to be defrocked.

"If we laicize them or if we let them walk away ... no one is watching them," she said. "I do this job because I truly believe that I am protecting the community. I truly believe that I am protecting children."

In 2006, the Archdiocese of Detroit hired a former parole officer to monitor priests permanently removed from ministry after credible abuse allegations. Spokesman Ned McGrath said the program requires monthly written reports from the priests that include any contact or planned contact with minors and information on whether they attended treatment among other things.

In other dioceses, priests are sent to retirement homes for clergy or church properties that are easy to monitor, but also are often in close proximity or even share space with schools or universities.

The analysis found that many of the accused clergy members still receive pensions or health insurance from the church, since pensions are governed by federal statute and other benefits are dictated by the bishops in each diocese.

"If we laicize them or if we let them walk away ... no one is watching them."

— Moira Reilly

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Victims' advocates and others have suggested dioceses devise a system in which those benefits are contingent upon defrocked priests self-reporting their current addresses and employment.

"All a bishop has to do is tell a predator: 'Here's your choice. You'll go live where I tell you, and you'll get your pension, health insurance, etc. and be around your brothers but be supervised,' " SNAP's Clohessy suggested, adding that if the former priests don't agree, their benefits could be withheld.

But several church officials and lawyers note that robust federal laws prohibit withholding or threatening pensions.

Other experts who study child abuse have suggested the church create a database similar to the national sex offender registry that would allow the public and employers to identify credibly accused priests. But even that measure would not guarantee that licensing boards or employers flag a priest credibly accused but not convicted of abuse.

Doyle, the canon lawyer, said the bishops might not believe they can monitor defrocked priests, but that they could be forthcoming about allegations when potential employers call and could also be required to call child protective services in the states where laicized priests move.

The bishops also could address the issue of oversight by initiating a new framework along the lines of the groundbreaking Dallas Charter, which was approved by the pope, Doyle said. But he added that he didn't trust the current church leadership to meaningfully address the issue.

"The bishops will never admit this, but when they do cut them loose, they believe they are no longer a liability," he said, referring to the defrocked priests. "I severely doubt there is an incentive for them to want to fix this problem."

Nojadera noted that it isn't that simple, since decisions default to the individual bishops in each diocese.

"We have 197 different ways that the Dallas Charter is being implemented. It's a road map, a bare minimum," he said. "We do talk about situations where these men are being laicized and what happens to them. And our canon lawyers are quick to say there is no purview to monitor them."

Licensed to teach and counsel

In many cases, the priests tracked by the AP went on to work in positions of trust in fields allowing close access to children and other vulnerable individuals — all with the approval of state credentialing boards, which often were powerless to deny them or unaware of the allegations until the dioceses' lists were released.

The review found that 190 of the former clergy members gained licenses to work as educators, counselors, social workers or medical personnel, which can be easy places to land for priests already trained in counseling parishioners or working with youth groups.

One is Thomas Meiring who, after asking to leave the priesthood in 1983, began working as a licensed clinical counselor in Ohio, specializing in therapy for teens and adults with sexual orientation and gender identity issues.

This Oct. 1, 2019 image made from an online list of therapists shows an entry for Thomas Meiring. The former priest maintained his state-issued license as a clinical counselor in Ohio even after the diocese in Toledo settled a lawsuit in 2008 filed by a man who said he was 15 when Meiring sexually abused him in a church rectory in the late 1960s. (AP Photo)

Meiring maintained his state-issued license even after the diocese in Toledo settled a lawsuit in 2008 filed by a man who said he was 15 when Meiring sexually abused him in a church rectory in the late 1960s.

It wasn't until 2016 that the Toledo diocese's request to defrock Meiring was granted. State records show that Ohio's Counselor, Social Worker and Marriage & Family Therapist Board has never taken disciplinary action against the 81-year-old, who is among several treatment providers listed by a municipal court in suburban Toledo.

"We made noise about him years ago and nobody did anything. It's mind-blowing," said Claudia Vercellotti, who heads Toledo's chapter of SNAP.

But Brian Carnahan, the licensing board's executive director, said the law grants the authority to act only when allegations have resulted in a criminal conviction.

Multiple calls to Meiring at his home and office were not returned.

Few state licensing boards for professions like counselors or teachers have mechanisms in their background check procedures that would catch allegations that were never prosecuted. Some standard checks are conducted in every state, but the statutes regulating what can be taken into consideration when granting or revoking licenses vary. And because the lists of priests with credible allegations against them were so thin until the past year, there was little to cross-check.

Danielle Irving-Johnson, the career services specialist for the American Counseling Association, said criminal background checks are standard when licensing counselors, but that dismissing an application due to an unprosecuted allegation would be unusual.

"There would have to be substantial evidence or some form of documentation to support this accusation," Irving-Johnson said.

The Alabama Board of Examiners in Psychology was not aware of the allegations against former priest William Finger when he was licensed as a counselor in 2012. The Brooklyn diocese publicly named Finger only in 2017, even though he had been laicized since 2002 because of abuse allegations.

According to a complaint filed in January with the board, a woman who asked not to be named contacted Finger's employer last year to say he had abused her for a decade, beginning when he was a priest and she was 12 years old. She said he kissed her, fondled her and digitally penetrated her and also alleged he had sexually abused her sister and a female cousin.

The employer fired Finger, now 83, and reported the allegations to the state's licensing board.

In many states, allegations dating from before someone was licensed or that never made it to court would have been dismissed. But Alabama's board issued an emergency suspension because it is allowed to consider issues of "moral character" from any point in a licensed individual's life.

The decision whether to permanently suspend Finger's license is pending. He did not return multiple messages from the AP but denied the allegations in a statement to the licensing board. He also remains licensed as a counselor and hypnotherapist in Florida.

The AP also found that 91 of the clergy members had been licensed to work in schools as teachers, principals, aides and school counselors, only 19 of whom had their licenses suspended or revoked. Twenty-eight still are actively licensed or hold lifetime certifications.

That's almost surely an undercount, since some private, religious or online schools don't require teachers to be licensed and states like New Jersey and Massachusetts don't have public databases of teacher licenses.

School administrators in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, knew for years that sixth-grade teacher Joseph Michael DeShan had been forced from the priesthood for impregnating a teen parishioner. But nearly two decades later, he remained in a classroom.

DeShan, now 60, left the Bridgeport, Connecticut, diocese in 1989 after admitting having sex with the girl beginning when she was 14. Two years later, she got pregnant and gave birth. The diocese did not report DeShan to the police, and he was never prosecuted.

In assessing the status of formerly active priests and clergy members from the Roman Catholic Church, The Associated Press started with the official lists published by dioceses and religious orders naming employees who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse.

The AP hand-compiled a national list of accused priests from the 165 dioceses and religious orders that have published such documents. Another 30 dioceses have either not yet published their lists or have given no indication they plan to do so. Among the dioceses not yet publishing are those covering Idaho, Hawaii, Colorado, most of Florida and New York's Long Island.

As of Oct. 1, the AP's national list included 5,173 priests, lay persons and other clergy members. People named on multiple lists — some employees were named by as many as five different groups — are counted only once.

Each diocese determines its own standard to deem a priest credibly accused, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate conversations or unwanted hugging to forced sodomy or rape.

The AP used diocesan reporting of deceased priests to omit a majority of the listed priests who have since died. Priests whom dioceses said likely were deceased also were omitted from the review.

That left nearly 2,000 priests who were likely living.

A team of AP researchers and reporters spent months searching state and federal court records, social media websites, state licensure board data, news coverage, church bulletins, property ownership records, sex offender registries and other sources to create a general picture of what the named clergy had done since being credibly accused.

In all cases, the AP's findings are likely an undercount because researchers could not find copies of some license certifications, court filings, bankruptcies and earlier sex offender registry entries. In addition, a number of states don't make such information as property ownership records, court records and licensing checks available online to the public. California, for example, does not provide property owners' names and Massachusetts does not allow licensing searches for teachers.

In some cases, common names and a lack of other identifying information provided by dioceses made it difficult to identify anything more than the most basic information about a person; in others, the AP was able to confirm significant levels of detail about where former priests worked, who they lived with and how they spent their time.

In the case of the most egregious crimes reported since priests left the church, AP reporters tracked down many of the complaints, police reports and other documents related to those cases. AP reporters also compiled the stories of about a dozen former clergy members, interviewing victims, employers, family members, church officials and others to fill out the specifics about their time as priests and after their church service.

— Meghan Hoyer, Associated Press

By 2002, he was working as a teacher in Cinnaminson when church disclosures about his past raised alarms. After a brief investigation, administrators allowed DeShan to return to the classroom, where he remained until last year, when a new generation of parents renewed cries for his removal.

The school board tried to fire him, citing both his conduct as a priest and recent remarks to a student about her "pretty green eyes." In April, a state arbitrator ruled against the district, saying it had been "long aware" of DeShan's conduct as a priest.

The state confirmed DeShan, who did not return calls for comment, still holds a valid teaching license, but that the licensing board is seeking to revoke it. Parents say he is not in a classroom this fall, but his profile remains posted on the school website and the idea he could be allowed back is troubling, said Cornell Jones, whose daughter was in DeShan's class last year.

"When I found out about this guy being her teacher I was just, 'No way — there's no way possible,'" Jones said. "I get a traffic violation and they make me pay. You violate a child and they just put you in a different zip code. How fair is that?"

The AP determined that one former priest had been licensed as recently as May. Andrew Syring, 42, resigned from the Omaha Archdiocese in November after a review of allegations that included inappropriate conversations with teens and kissing them on the cheeks. No charges were filed.

Dan Hoesing, the superintendent of the Schuyler Independent School DIstrict in Nebraska, said he could not disqualify Syring when he applied to be a substitute teacher because the former priest had not been accused of outright abuse or criminally charged. But Hoesing instituted strict rules requiring Syring to be supervised by another adult at all times, even while teaching, and banning him from student bathrooms or locker rooms.

Syring did not return messages for comment left with family members.

In many of the cases where a teaching license was revoked, the AP found the former priests went on to seek employment teaching English as a second language in private clinics, as online teachers or at community colleges.

"If these guys simply left and disappeared somewhere, it wouldn't be a problem," said Doyle, the canon lawyer. "But they don't. They get jobs and create spaces where they can get access to and abuse children again."

Filling the vacuum

To a large extent, nonprofits, survivors groups and victims have stepped in to fill the void in tracking and policing these clergy members while they await stronger action.

Nojadera, with the bishops' youth protection division, said more and more of his emails about priests are from concerned parishioners who are taking up the cause of protecting children.

"The lay faithful definitely seem to be stepping in," he said. "Part of that is the awareness of the community in many ways based on the trainings we are having for our children and others in the parish communities."

Gemma Hoskins, one of the stars of the documentary series "The Keepers" about abuse in a Baltimore Catholic school, also is taking up the cause.

Hoskins and a handful of volunteers have started a homegrown database using spreadsheets of clergy members created by a nonprofit called BishopAccountability.org to locate priests accused of abuse and post their approximate addresses.

"We're careful. If their address is 123 Main Street, we'll say the 100 block of Main Street like the police do," she said. "We don't want any of our volunteers to get in trouble, but it's something all of us feel is necessary. If the priests are laicized, it's even scarier ... because it means the church isn't tracking where they are living. They're out there in the world as unregistered sex offenders."

"If these guys simply left and disappeared somewhere, it wouldn't be a problem. But they don't. They get jobs and create spaces where they can get access to and abuse children again."

— Fr. Thomas Doyle

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David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said reports of abuse in the church have decreased and that all indications are that fresh allegations are being properly reported.

He also said that while keeping tabs on the accused abusers is important, the public shouldn't assume all the former priests pose a big risk, noting that roughly one in every five child molesters reoffends.

"That's lower than for a number of other violent crimes," he said.

Still, he feels church leaders need to do far more to help track these clergy members, since anemic reporting in the past means little now prevents many of the priests from once again getting close to children.

"Tracking them is something they could have done as part of a general display of responsibility for the problem that they had helped contribute to," Finkelhor said.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/unsupervised-accused-priests-teach-counsel-foster-children

U.S. Roman Catholic bishops said Thursday that the church tallied 4,434 sex abuse allegations against clergy in the 2018-19 audit year, triple the number seen the previous year, with much of the increase stemming from a wave of lawsuits and claims by survivors of decades-old molestation.

In the latest annual report on clerical sex abuse, dioceses and other Catholic entities reported paying out $281.6 million during the year for costs related to allegations, including payments for cases reported in previous years.

Only 37 of the new allegations were made by people who were minors in the audit year ending June 30, 2019. Of those, eight allegations were substantiated, while most of the others were either still under investigation or had been deemed unsubstantiated.

There has been a huge overall surge in allegations over the past three years as dioceses faced unprecedented pressure to address the decades-old problem of clergy sex abuse. There were 693 allegations tallied in the 2017 report, and 1,451 in the 2018 report.

The cases cited in the new report involved 2,982 priests and other church personnel. Of the allegations, 1,034 were substantiated; many other remained under investigation or were unable to be proven, it said.

Many dioceses across the U.S. became targets of state investigations after a Pennsylvania grand jury report in August 2018 detailed hundreds of cases of alleged abuse. In February 2019, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was expelled from the priesthood for sexually abusing minors and seminarians, and investigators have been seeking to determine if some Catholic VIPs covered up his transgressions.

Many U.S. dioceses have established compensation programs for victims with credible claims of abuse, and some have sought bankruptcy protection. Hundreds of new allegations surfaced in lawsuits, for the most part filed by men in their 40s, 50s and 60s who said they were abused as children.

Lawsuits could increase further in the current fiscal year, since legislatures in New York, New Jersey, California and elsewhere approved statute-of-limitations changes giving victims of long-ago child abuse new windows to sue the church and other institutions.

The new report also details church efforts to combat abuse. In 2019, it said, more than 2.6 million background checks were conducted on clergy, employees and volunteers, and more than 2.6 million adults and 3.6 million youths were trained on identifying warning signs of abuse and how to report them.

It is the 17th abuse report issued since 2002, when the U.S. bishops established and adopted a comprehensive set of procedures to address sex abuse allegations.

Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which advocates for survivors of clergy sex abuse, expressed concern about a section of the report indicating that only 60% of parishes nationwide were performing safety audits on their own.

“We remain convinced that the best avenue for change is through secular, elected officials like attorneys general,” SNAP said. “Every single sitting attorney general should be investigating cases of clergy abuse in their state, identifying enablers and removing them from power, and ensuring that hidden abusers are made known to their communities.”

https://www.wilx.com/content/news/US-Catholic-bishops-clergy-sex-abuse-claims-tripled-in-2019-571495451.html

A dozen of Australia’s largest media organisations have been fined more than $1m for contempt of court over their coverage of Cardinal George Pell’s sexual abuse conviction.

On Friday the Victorian supreme court justice John Dixon ruled the 12 organisations had “usurped” the role of the court by breaching a suppression order on Pell’s now-quashed conviction for child sexual abuse.

Melbourne newspaper the Age was handed the biggest penalty of $450,000, followed by News Corp outlet news.com.au, which must pay $400,000. Other Nine newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, were fined $162,000 while the Today show was fined $30,000.

The media, Dixon found, “took it upon themselves” to decide “where the balance ought to lie” between Pell’s right to a fair trial and the public’s right to know.

Dixon rejected the media companies’ submission that the breaches of the suppression order was due to “an honest but mistaken belief that their reporting would not contravene the order”.

Instead he found that in most cases the reporting demonstrated that the companies “disagreed with the suppression order, and contended – either as direct opinion or as statements of others adopted without criticism – that the media should not be restrained from reporting the outcome of the trial”.

Dixon reserved his harshest judgment for the Age and news.com.au, whose articles, he said, “constituted a blatant and wilful defiance of the court’s authority”.

“Each took a deliberate risk by intentionally advancing a collateral attack on the role of suppression orders in Victoria’s criminal justice system,” he said in his judgment.

The 12 media companies had already pleaded guilty to contempt for breaching the suppression over Pell’s now-quashed conviction, agreeing to pay $650,000 to cover the prosecution’s legal fees. It will see the total paid out by the media climb to $1.7m.

Pell was found guilty of child sexual abuse charges in December 2018. Although that verdict was ultimately overturned by the high court in April last year, at the time it could not be reported on because the high-ranking Catholic official faced a second trial over a different set of allegations.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/04/cardinal-george-pell-news-organisations-contempt-court-fined-more-than-1m-over-reporting-of-sexual-abuse-verdict

One of the scariest situations for parents to face is having their child become victimized by a sexual offender. Although current laws make it nearly impossible for convicted sex offenders to live or work near places where children congregate, that doesn’t change the fact that they can live in neighborhoods where families live. It also doesn’t change the fact that a sexual offender, even with proper supervision and treatment, can easily become a repeat offender.

1. The total number of registered sex offenders that are currently in the United States: 747,000.
2. 33% of the registered sex offenders that are in the US right now are under the supervision of a corrections agency.
3. The average age of a rapist is 31-years-old and 52.2% of them are white males.
4. An estimated 24% of those serving time for rape and 19% of those serving time for sexual assault had been on probation or parole at the time of their repeat offense.
5. Only 2% of the Catholic clergy sexual abusers were ever jailed, despite over 10,000 victims and an estimated 4,300 total abusers.
6. An adolescent sex offender who does not receive treatment will commit an estimated 380 sex crimes over their lifetime.
7. 1 out of every 2 child molestations that occurs are perpetrated by an adolescent male.
8. Offenders with a previous sex offense conviction have a 37% re-offense rate.
9. Rapists repeat their offenses at rates up to 35%.
10. Sex offenders who are attracted to boys are the most likely to re-offend in some sex crime which may include rape, molestation, or a violent act.
11. The percentage of second sex offenses that occur while the offender is living in a supervised community: 60%.
12. It costs $22,000 per year in order to incarcerate a sex offender.
13. For children between the ages of 12-15, about one third of all the sex offenses that occur are from a male perpetrator who is of the same age.
14. 43% of the sexual assaults that occur happen within a 6 hour window that begins at 6pm and ends at midnight.
15. The percentage of sex crimes that occur to children under the age of 6 by an adolescent under the age of 18: 40%.
16. The average amount of jail time that a sex offender will serve out of their average 8 year prison sentence: 3.5 years.
17. 30% of the children who are abused sexually will become sex offenders later on in their adult life.
18. Although two thirds of sex offenders during an interview state that they were abused as children, only 29% of them are found to be telling the truth during a lie detector test.
19. 80% of the girls who are sexually molested had a perpetrator that was someone which they new.
20. The percentage of boys who knew the perpetrator that molested them: 93%.
21. Approximately 47% of people are victimized by their family or their extended family.
22. Repeat sex offenders in one study used romantic relationships with women to gain access to the women’s children.
23. Only 2.7% of the total number of sex offenders are estimated to commit another sex crime after being released from jail.
24. The percentage of sex offenders that will commit another crime, non-sexual in nature, after being released from jail: 70%.
25. The state of Delaware has the highest rate of sex offenders, with a rate of 517 per 100,000 in general population.
26. It isn’t just men who are sex offenders. 2% of the sex offender registry in New York State are women.
27. Pennsylvania has the lowest rate of sexual offenders: 94 per 100,000.
28. Studies have found that contemporary cognitive-behavioral treatment does help to reduce rates of sexual re-offending by as much as 40%.
29. Over a 5 year period, recidivism rates can be as low as 14% in some jurisdictions.
30. First-time offenders are less likely to create a repeat sexual offense than those who have already committed a second or third repeat sexual offense.
31. Only 10% of all sex crimes actually result in a criminal conviction.
32. The cost savings per year to place a sex offender into a comprehensive treatment program instead of jail: $15,000 per offender.
33. The average number of victims for a pedophile who prefers boys over girls: over 100.
34. It is not unusual for a sex offender to spend years developing a trustworthy reputation so that they can be near children and commit an offense that many just cannot believe.
35. Only 33% of the sex offenses that occur to children between the ages of 12-19 are ever reported. This is half of the amount of sex offenses that are reported when the victim is between the ages of 35-49.
36. Although 50 percent of violent crime victims over the age of 12 contact police, only 36 percent of sexual assault victims over the age of 12 report the crime to authorities.
37. Only about 30% of rapes are ever reported to police. Research indicates that sex offenses are one of the most underreported crimes that happen.

No one is safe from the targets of a sex offender. Boys, girls, men, and women can all become victims of a sexual crime that leads to a lifetime of scars. There are signs that someone may become a sex offender or even be one, with or without a conviction on their record. There is a 1 in 4 chance that an exhibitionist will commit a sex offense at some point in their life.

One of the difficulties in tracking sex offender statistics, however, is the fact that different legal jurisdictions have different definitions of what makes it possible to become an offender. In the United States, someone can become a sex offender by being convicted for prostitution. Obscene content in a text message, such as sexting, can cause someone to become a sex offender. Then there are the offenses on children, molestation, rape, and other violent sexual assaults that we tend to focus upon as a society.

It is not automatic that a sex offender will ever commit another crime. The problem that households face today is that they do not know if the sex offender in their neighborhood will be one of the “good” ones or one of the “bad” ones. With the amount of registered sex offenders increasing and becoming part of our society, knowing these statistics is important for your protection, the safety of your children, and even for the safety of the sex offenders who are trying to make a new life for themselves.

Virtually every pedophile will become a child molester. Not every child molester, however, is actually a pedophile.

The problem with sex offenses, as the data shows, is that most of them go unreported or unprosecuted. This tends to happen when the victim knows the offender on a personal level, which is almost always the case when it comes to a sexual offense. It cannot be a coincidence that the conviction rates are equal to the amount of cases that are perpetrated on strangers instead of someone who is known, a friend, or a family member.

Because there is such a hesitance to report a sexual crime, it is no surprise that a sex offender would be willing to spend years to create a reputation of trustworthiness within their community before committing a crime. If they are no longer a stranger to a family, there is a 9 in 10 chance that they won’t even be charged with the crime they committed. This is one reason why there are so many victims.

Shame may very well be the reason why boys are victimized so much more often than girls. Boys have a certain reputation in our society that they must fulfill in order to become a man. If they are molested or raped, then the perception is that this makes them less of a man. They were unable to protect themselves. What kind of man is unable to protect himself? That negative stigma, the victim blaming, needs to end if we are to stop seeing the high levels of victimization that we are currently seeing.

The best defense of all is to just be vigilant. Know who your neighbors happen to be and don’t allow your children to be around people in an unsupervised fashion. Although constant paranoia is not very healthy, taking common sense measures to protect yourself and your kids from harm isn’t paranoia at all. It is simply the way life happens to be today. Listen for your kids in the backyard. Don’t let them wander off in a store all alone. Keep self-defense measures close at hand when it is dark outside and you are all alone.

Being proactive may not stop every sex offender, but it may help to stop some sex crimes. Even if just one crime is prevented, that is one person who won’t have to live with a lifetime of scars.

 37 Scarey Repeat Sex Offenders Statistics - HRF (healthresearchfunding.org)