Posts Tagged Kevin Clarke

The complicated legacy of state investigations of the Catholic sex abuse crisis / America: The Jesuit Review

Posted by Voice of the Faithful in Catholic Bishops, Clergy Sexual Abuse, Voice of the Faithful on August 14, 2023

The reports should encourage contemporary Catholics ‘to find out what is happening in their parish and diocese today and to begin to ask questions if they have concerns. I think that’s what should be a big takeaway,’ she (Kathleen McChesney, first executive director of the USCCB Office of Child Protection) says. ‘Be very interested, be very curious and evaluate for yourself: What does this really mean? What does it mean now?’

By Kevin Clarke, America: The Jesuit Review

“Philadelphia is a “very Catholic city,” Barbara Daly will tell you. When you meet people in Philadelphia, ‘they don’t ask you what you do for a living.’ Instead, she says, they ask what parish you belong to or what Catholic high school you attended.

“This very Catholic city has been hammered in recent years by stories of the abuse of children by Catholic priests recounted in a series of grand jury reports, which culminated in a statewide grand jury investigation and a report released by the attorney general of Pennsylvania in August 2018. These events returned national attention to the church’s abuse scandal and inspired a flurry of similar investigations across the country.

“Ms. Daly is the pastoral associate at St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Ambler, Pa., outside Philadelphia. Lots of folks in the area, she recalls, reacted defensively to the city and state reports. Some felt that prosecutors were piling on, that the church was not offered an opportunity to defend itself …

“Twenty-one years after the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People bound most U.S. dioceses to new commitments and policies for the protection of children, there are few Catholics in the United States who are not familiar with the institutional and personal failures that propelled those important changes.”

By Kevin Clarke, America: The Jesuit Review — Read more …

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A priest ordained in 2017 is now serving a life sentence for sex abuse. How did he slip through the cracks? / America: The Jesuit Review

Posted by Voice of the Faithful in Clergy Sexual Abuse, Priests, Voice of the Faithful on December 3, 2021

“Despite it all, Father McWilliams, who has not yet been laicized, made it through to ordination and placement in a parish where he soon began a process of internet ‘catfishing’ and sexual extortion involving three teenage boys.”

America: The Jesuit Review

“Just two years after his ordination in 2017, the Rev. Robert McWilliams was charged with a cascade of sexual assault and child pornography charges. He was sentenced to life imprisonment a few weeks ago, on Nov. 9, in a federal criminal court in Cleveland.

“The McWilliams case came as an unhappy shock to Catholics in the Diocese of Cleveland and all over the United States who might have hoped that years of procedural changes and an enhanced screening process for seminarians would have put an end to the ordination of priests like Father McWilliams. The most recent report card from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection, released the same day as Father McWilliams’s sentencing, offered some reason for optimism. Although 4,228 allegations of sexual abuse by clergy surfaced between July 1, 2019, and June 30, 2020, only 22 came from individuals who are now minors; the rest reflected historical cases, most of them from decades ago.

“Father McWilliams entered the seminary system in Cleveland in 2008, six years after the abuse crisis detonated on the front pages of The Boston Globe. He could not have been unaware of the fall-out from that crisis and the greater scrutiny that candidates for the priesthood would draw because of it. Despite it all, Father McWilliams, who has not yet been laicized, made it through to ordination and placement in a parish where he soon began a process of internet ‘catfishing’ and sexual extortion involving three teenage boys.

“At the Nov. 9 sentencing, defense attorney Robert Dixon pleaded for leniency to allow Father McWilliams to ‘secure the therapy necessary to confront demons from his childhood and the addictions and heinous behavior of his adulthood.'”

By Kevin Clarke, America: The Jesuit Review — Read more …

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