Sex Abuse Scandals News Articles

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Barry Davis stood before a judge and admitted to a horrific crime: aggravated sodomy of a 6-year-old girl. Davis served two years in prison and eight on probation, and his name was to live forever on an ignominious list: Georgia’s sex offender registry. But suddenly last year, all was forgiven. Georgia’s parole board granted Davis an unconditional pardon, recognizing his restored reputation and absolving ... him of his crime. The board did so without notifying Davis’ victim, her family, or the prosecutor and judge who sent him to prison. And now Davis, like at least one other pardoned child molester from Georgia, says he no longer has to comply with the state’s restrictions on sex offenders. Davis’ case underscores the near-absolute autonomy exercised by Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles, a government agency that is not accountable to legislators, judges, or even the governor who appoints its members. The board classifies almost all material in its files as “confidential state secrets.” The board does not meet in public to consider cases. It announces no justification for its decisions. Without oversight or transparency, the board quietly restored the firearms rights of more than 1,400 felons in six years. In Davis’ case, the board apparently relied only on information that Davis himself assembled. So the board didn’t hear about his victim’s years of psychological therapy. And it learned nothing about Davis’ efforts, as late as 2011, to persuade the victim to claim the crime never happened.

Note: Some progress has been made in years since this article was published, but there are still serious problems. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals and judicial system corruption.

The Peace Corps’ inspector general says she can’t oversee the agency properly without access to sex-assault records it refuses to hand over. Since 2008, Peace Corps Inspector General Kathy Buller has led internal investigations that have led to 21 criminal convictions for crimes such as rape, attempted rape, abuse of minors, embezzlement, theft and possession of narcotics. Buller charged the Peace Corps with [hindering] her office’s oversight efforts, and said the agency was not fully disclosing its sexual assault reports. In 2011, [ABC News] reported that more than 1,000 female Peace Corps volunteers have been raped or sexually assaulted in the past decade, and that some victims felt the agency either sought to cover up incidents or treated victims with insensitivity. The murder of Peace Corps volunteer Kate Puzey in Benin seized public attention in 2011. The volunteer was found dead after she reported her suspicions that a Peace Corps contractor was sexually harassing students at the school where she taught. Less than a year after her death, Congress passed reforms to protect whistleblowers like Puzey and to improve the agency’s sexual assault practices. But even after Puzey’s murder, sexual assault still remains a problem for the Peace Corps and the thousands of volunteers they send abroad.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

It's a mythical number that skeptics never question. And it's come up again and again in the national press for decades. It's purportedly the number of victims from the infamous child sexual abuse cases of the 1980s and 1990s. Not child victims, though. The victims are said to be adults who were falsely charged and often convicted of sexual abuse, victims of a witch-hunt. Christina Hoff Sommers used the number just a few weeks ago in a Time column, referring to those cases and writing that "hundreds of innocent adults faced charges of ritual child abuse." The number of accused or jailed is always impressive. The abuse is always dismissed as imaginary. The cases are always cast as witch-hunts, with a narrative typically full of lurid details. The alarming words ritual or satanic -- sometimes both -- are often added for good measure. The witch-hunt narrative has been bolstered by scores of articles and books. But the numbers don't add up. There's no evidence of hundreds of cases of false convictions of child sexual abuse in this era. In my new book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, I examine dozens of specific cases from the 1980s and early 90s. In many of the cases proclaimed to be witch hunts, looking closely at the record revealed substantial evidence of abuse and compelling reasons that jurors voted to convict. It's true that I also found cases where people were charged who shouldn't have been. Yet even in some of those cases, there was strong evidence of abuse. A crime was committed and a child was assaulted by someone who was never apprehended, but only the false accusation story lives on.

Note: The author of this essay, Ross E. Cheit, is professor of political science and public policy at Brown University. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

Reports that nearly 800 dead babies were discovered in the septic tank of a home run by nuns [have] sparked calls for accountability from government and Catholic Church officials. Some 796 children were secretly buried in the sewage tank of the home in Tuam, County Galway, where unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth in an attempt to preserve the country's devout Catholic image. The home was run by nuns from the Bon Secours Sisters congregation between 1925 and 1961. People who lived near the home said they have known about the unmarked mass grave for decades, but a fresh investigation was sparked this week after research by local historian Catherine Corless ... showed that of the hundreds of children who died at the home, only one was buried at a cemetery. She also said that health board records from the 1940s said conditions at the home were dire, with children suffering malnutrition and neglect and dying at a rate four times higher than in the rest of Ireland. The claims came to light after Corless obtained death records for the home and cross checked them with local cemetery records. According to Eoin O'Sullivan, associate professor at Trinity College Dublin, "Tuam was a former workhouse and conditions were pretty bleak," said O'Sullivan, co-author of the 2001 book Suffer the Little Children: The inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools. "Ireland's first mother and baby home, at Bessborough, in Cork, had an even worse infant mortality rate of around 82 percent: In the year ending March 31, 1944, 124 children were born or admitted there, and 102 died."

Note: For more on institutional abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The federal government’s spy-satellite agency failed to alert authorities after some of its employees and contractors admitted during polygraph tests to crimes including child molestation and lying on security-clearance questionnaires, according to a watchdog. The intelligence community’s inspector general released two reports ... saying the National Reconnaissance Office did not refer some of the cases because of confusion about reporting expectations and requirements. According to one of the reports, an Air Force lieutenant colonel admitted during a 2010 lie-detector test to touching a child in a sexual way and downloading child pornography on his work computer. The NRO only reported that case to the Air Force division that oversees security clearances instead of the Justice Department or the Air Force’s special-investigations office, the inspector general said. The NRO is not legally required to report certain state crimes such as child molestation. Thirty individuals who took NRO lie-detector tests from 2009 through 2012 admitted to child abuse or using child pornography, according to the report. The NRO failed to report three of those cases. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who requested the review after a McClatchy news investigation raised concerns about the matter in 2012, said the NRO showed a “complete lack of common sense in failing to require reporting of serious state crimes of this sort.”

Note: The NRO is the agency that was running a drill on the morning of 9/11 of an airplane crashing into one of its Washington, DC buildings, as reported in this USA Today article. It has also allegedly been involved in the UFO cover-up, as reported in this testimony.

Violence against women is "an extensive human rights abuse" across Europe with one in three women reporting some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of 15 and 8% suffering abuse in the last 12 months, according to the largest survey of its kind on the issue. The survey, based on interviews with 42,000 women across 28 EU member states, found extensive abuse across the continent, which typically goes unreported and undetected by the authorities. Morten Kjaerum, director of FRA, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, which was responsible for the survey, said: "Violence against women ... is an extensive human rights abuse that the EU cannot afford to overlook." The FRA study provides ample evidence of the size of the problem, as well as suggestions on how to fix it. In a foreword to the report, Kjaerum calls for all member states to sign and ratify the Council of Europe Istanbul convention, which demands more protection for women, as well as action from private and public organisations. Among the findings: • One in 10 women have experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 15, while one in 20 has been raped. • One in 10 women have been stalked by a previous partner. • Most violence is carried out by a current or former partner, with 22% of women in relationships reporting partner abuse. • Violence against women is one of the least reported crimes. Only 14% of women reported their most serious incident of partner violence to the police, while a similar percentage (13%) reported their most serious incident of non-partner violence. • Just over one in 10 women experienced some form of sexual violence by an adult before they were 15.

Note: For more on sexual abuse and violence against women, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

The Roman Catholic Church is enjoying some of its best press in decades. But, says a new documentary by PBS’ "Frontline," “Secrets of the Vatican,” the morally wrenching controversies that threatened to destroy the church's credibility, starting about the time Pope John Paul II died in 2005, have not fully subsided. "Secrets of the Vatican" ... takes an unsparing look at the state of the church Pope Francis inherited from his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. “2012 was an annus horribilis for [Benedict],” Antony Thomas, the ... director of the film [said]. A horrible year on many fronts, not just with mounting evidence of financial impropriety at the Vatican bank, but also with incidents of sexual abuse by clergy spreading to more than 20 countries and, further, exposure of church hypocrisy about homosexuality. At the same time, reports emerged from Rome of a “gay mafia” inside the church that included some of its top officials, who were unafraid to wield political power and at the same time live an openly promiscuous gay lifestyle. “There was a lot that came to light, including a man who was, as it were, providing choirboys as rent boys,” Thomas said. "Secrets of the Vatican" also looks at the connection between the church’s requirement that its clergy must remain celibate and the high number of sexual abuse incidents among its ranks. Thomas said the film’s specificity about the nature of sexual abuses was necessary - because it’s still an overwhelming concern.

Note: Watch this incredibly revealing documentary on the PBS website. A primary insight is that Pope Benedict really did not step down from the papacy so much as flee the job.  Then watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more, see concise summaries of sexual abuse scandal news articles.

For years, Karen and her 9-year-old daughter, whose identity CBS News is choosing not to share, were abused by Karen's husband. Fearing for their lives, Karen found help from an unlikely group of people: a 3,000-member organization committed to protecting children around the world. They call themselves BACA - Bikers Against Child Abuse. “One thing we try and do as an organization is to help that child feel empowered so they can enjoy their childhood and grow up as an adult knowing that there’s always going to be somebody there and not all adults are bad,” said Happy Dodson, President of the Connecticut chapter, which is currently helping eight families across the state. BACA helps by stepping into the void left by an overwhelmed court system - and by forming a cocoon of support around the abused child, pledging 24-7 protection. Each member goes through an extensive Federal background check and adopts child-friendly road names like Scooter, Shaggy and Pooh Bear. “If the child has problems sleeping or getting on the bus or is afraid to go to school, we’ll take you to school. When the bus drops you off, we’ll be there. We’ll take you home and if need be we’ll stay in that yard until you feel comfortable,” Dodson said. The group also shows up to court appearances to let the abuser know that the child is a part of the BACA family. BACA's motto is "no child deserves to live in fear." Because of them, this young girl no longer does. For some of the members, the cause is personal; they too were abused.

Note: For more on this most inspiring group, see this article and this great video.

On November 25th, the most notorious rape case in recent memory took yet another shocking twist. In Steubenville, Ohio, where a 16-year-old girl was raped by two high school football players in August 2012, a grand jury indicted the city's School Superintendent, Michael McVey, on felony charges of tampering with evidence and obstructing justice. An elementary school principal and two coaches in the district were indicted as well, facing misdemeanor charges including failure to report child abuse and making false statements. Shortly after the news hit that morning, Deric Lostutter, a ... 26-year-old programmer in Lexington, Kentucky, [sent] me a message. "We were called liars and more," he wrote, but "we were right about it." He had reason to feel vindicated. As one of the most notorious members of the hacker collective, Anonymous, Lostutter battled to bring justice to Steubenville, exposing secrets of a town that's still reeling from the fallout today. He just never expected that he'd get raided by the FBI, and face more prison time than the rapists in the end. Anonymous is a purposefully chaotic and leaderless collective. Anyone can proclaim themselves a member or declare an "operation" against a target. But getting others to [care] is another story. This is what makes Lostutter stand out. Less than two months after creating his alter ego as KYAnonymous, he launched and organized two of group's most renowned and righteous operations yet: battling the Westboro Baptist Church and, most famously, the town of Steubenville, Ohio, after the high-profile rape of a teenage girl by players on the high school football team.

Note: On the final page of this revealing report, Lostutter claims he is facing 25 years in prison for his heroic acts. To learn about some of the disturbing forces which perpetuate sexual abuse in our society, watch the eye-opening Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence" at this link. For more on sexual abuse scandals, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

“We have called our report Betrayal of Trust,” said [Victoria, Australia MP] Georgie Crozier as she presented the findings of the parliamentary inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other non-government organisations. “Children were betrayed by trusted figures in organisations of high standing and suffered unimaginable harm,” she said. “Parents of these children experienced a betrayal beyond comprehension. And the community was betrayed by the failure of organisations to protect children in their care.” The report’s criticism of the Catholic church is unsparing. Its recommendations are radical. If adopted they would strip the Catholic church of its virtual immunity in the courts and compel religious leaders of all faiths to report child abuse to the police. The committee has recommended that priests and other religious leaders face imprisonment if they fail to report or if they conceal criminal child abuse; or if they knowingly put a child at risk of abuse or fail to remove children to safety. Even more radical are recommendations that would open the courts to victims of abuse by clergy. All faiths would be exposed by legal changes that gave victims more time to take action and clarified the legal responsibility to protect children from offenders. But the particular legal protection now enjoyed by the Catholic church may be swept away if the Victorian government accepts the recommendation that the church – like other churches – becomes a legal entity under Australian law.

Note: For more on child abuse by trusted institutions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here. For an in-depth report showing how even police assigned to investigate child abuse were intimately involved in the cover-up, click here.

More than a million people have signed an online petition demanding justice after three men accused of brutally gang-raping a girl in Kenya were ordered to cut grass as punishment. The policemen who ordered the punishment should be disciplined for failing to investigate rape charges, the petition said. The 16-year-old was gang-raped and dumped in a pit latrine in Busia. When her case came to light earlier this month, it caused national outrage. The director of public prosecutions has ordered the national police to investigate why the local force, known as administration police, did not fully investigate the alleged rape, and instead ordered the suspects to cut grass. The alleged rapists are reported to have gone into hiding. The petition - published by online campaign group Avaaz called on Kenya's police chief David Kimaiyo to "deliver justice" for the girl, named Liz. Her alleged attackers should be immediately arrested and prosecuted and disciplinary action should be instituted against police officers who "dismally failed to handle her case", the petition said. "By holding these police officers to account you will send a strong message to police everywhere that rape is not a misdemeanour, it is a serious crime, and if police do not uphold the law they will be held to account," it added. "We call on you to ensure Liz's case is a turning point to end the war on girls." The 16-year-old was attacked after returning from a grandfather's funeral in a village in Busia, western Kenya, the local Daily Nation newspaper reported.

Note: For more on sex crimes, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Up to 30 hospitals are now under investigation as part of the inquiry into Jimmy Savile's alleged abuse of patients at NHS hospitals. Inquiries had originally just focused on Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville and Leeds General Infirmary. Revelations that Savile had sexually abused children prompted hundreds of victims to come forward, including those who said they were attacked on BBC premises and at a number of other institutions. Savile had a bedroom at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, an office and living quarters at Broadmoor, and widespread access to Leeds General Infirmary. Liz Dux, an abuse lawyer who represents more than 70 of the claimants, told the BBC she was worried the extension would prolong the distress of her clients. "These hospitals were known about - all my clients gave their evidence some time ago to the NHS investigation. These victims want the investigation concluded, naturally as efficiently as possible, but they want it over, they need closure," she said. The revelations about Savile have led to a number of inquiries. The police investigation, Operation Yewtree, ... has three strands. One looking specifically at the actions of Savile is due to report in the new year. The BBC understands it will put the number of alleged victims at over 500. The second strand concerns allegations against "Savile and others". The third relates to complaints against other people unconnected to the Savile investigations, made by people who came forward after widespread coverage of the scandal

Note: For more on sexual abuse of children in institutional settings, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

Seventeen years ago, a nervous-sounding woman rang and asked me to publicise a top-secret report. She was not the whistleblower, she explained, but a go-between. She would not give me her name: “It’s safer if you don’t know.” That secret report revealed the extensive rape and savage beating of countless children in North Wales children’s homes. It was titled “Child Abuse: An independent investigation commissioned by Clwyd County Council, period 1974-1995”. Last week, John Jillings’ report on the Clwyd scandal was finally published. But Flintshire county council – successor to Clwyd – has heavily censored it. I dug out the original and discovered, unsurprisingly, that the cover-up continues. At least one paper and a news channel independently acquired the report: clearly, others whistle-blew. The coverage was widespread, and the whistleblowers’ drip-feed strategy worked: no one was arrested or sued. Clamour mounted, and the Government announced a public inquiry. The late judge, Sir Ronald Waterhouse, took evidence over three years, and in 2000 produced a report, “Lost in Care”. His tribunal had cost millions and ultimately achieved little, other than fat fees for lawyers. It amplified the horrors described by Jillings but it did not lead to arrests or managers being disciplined or struck off. The authorities had issued such stern libel threats to Jillings’s panel that it only named a few of the accused staff who were allowed to resign unpunished. But he exposed the excuses of the jobsworths who allowed sadists to control these terrible homes. This is the real censored dynamite in the report.

Note: For more on sex abuse scandals, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.

For the second time this month, a uniformed military official whose job was to prevent sex abuse has come under investigation for a sex crime. Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division were looking into allegations that an Army sergeant first class at Fort Hood, Texas, sexually abused females in his unit and ran a prostitution ring on the base. Officials said that the soldier, who was not identified, had been assigned as an Equal Opportunity Adviser and Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program coordinator at Fort Hood with the Army’s III Corps when the allegations surfaced. The CID investigation was looking into allegations that the sergeant was involved in “abusive sexual contact, pandering, assault and maltreatment of subordinates” in his oversight of a unit of about 800 soldiers. The allegations against the sergeant surfaced a week after Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, branch chief of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault and Prevention Office, was arrested and charged by Arlington County, Va., police for allegedly being drunk and groping a woman in a parking lot near a strip club one mile from the Pentagon. Krusinski has been charged with sexual battery, and a hearing on his criminal case has been set for July. The charges against Krusinski rocked the Air Force, which was already dealing with numerous courts-martial stemming from the alleged abuse of female recruits at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. .

Note: So the officer in charge of sexual harassment and assault was also running a prostitution ring? And this according to military.com. Do we have a serious problem here? If you are ready to see how investigations into a massive child sex abuse ring have led to the highest levels of government, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence," available here.

The Pentagon [has] released a survey estimating that 26,000 people in the armed forces were sexually assaulted last year, up from 19,000 in 2010. The study, based on a confidential survey sent to 108,000 active-duty service members, was released two days after the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force was arrested and charged with sexual battery for grabbing a woman’s breasts and buttocks in an Arlington, Va., parking lot. In a separate report ... the military recorded 3,374 sexual assault reports last year, up from 3,192 in 2011, suggesting that many victims continue not to report the crimes for fear of retribution or a lack of justice under the department’s system for prosecution. The numbers come as the Pentagon prepares to integrate women formally into what had been all-male domains of combat, making the effective monitoring, policing and prosecuting of sexual misconduct all the more pressing. In 2010, a similar Pentagon survey found that 4.4 percent of active-duty women and fewer than 0.9 percent of active-duty men had experienced sexual assault. Pentagon officials could not explain the jump in assaults of women, although they believed that more victims, both men and women, were making the choice to come forward. In the general population, about 0.2 percent of American women over age 12 were victims of sexual assault in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.

An Air Force officer was arrested for sexual assault. The remarkable thing is the accused man was the chief of the Air Force sexual assault prevention unit. The mug shot of Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski shows signs of struggle on his face. The police report alleges that a drunken Krusinski "approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks." The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police. News of the incident in the Virginia suburbs of Washington broke the day before the Pentagon is scheduled to release new figures showing a continuing rise in sexual assaults in the military: A six-percent increase from 3,192 to 3,374 reports of sexual assault in fiscal year 2012 compared to the previous year. Estimates of the actual numbers of what is a notoriously underreported crime go much higher. According to the Pentagon figures, an estimated 26,000 servicewomen experienced unwanted sexual contact, up from 19,300 two years ago. Krusinski has been removed from his job, but that will not change the reality that the Pentagon's own figures show sexual assaults are on the rise in the military.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.

There are few cases that better illustrate why the military needs to create an independent office to investigate rape than that of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson. Wilkerson, a fighter pilot, was sentenced to a year in prison and dismissed from military service after being found guilty of aggravated sexual assault by a jury of his peers. His commanding officer then threw out the conviction and reinstated Wilkerson at full rank. Under the military code of justice ... the commanding officer's discretion and bias may overrule legal decisions. In this case, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, the commander of the 3rd Air Force, declined to approve Wilkerson's conviction by a jury of senior officers, all men. His decision suggests the Air Force doesn't take sexual assault seriously. Yet, an estimated 19,000 rapes or sexual assaults occur each year in the military, although just 8 percent of sexual assaults are referred to military court, according to a Department of Defense survey of active-duty members. That compares with 40 percent in the civilian court system. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-[CA], last week reintroduced legislation that calls for overhauling how the military justice system handles rape and sexual assault by taking prosecution, reporting, oversight, investigation and victim care out of the chain of command and putting it in an autonomous office housed in the military but staffed by both civilian and military personnel. "Victims of rape and sexual assault should not have to choose between career-ending retaliation and seeking judicial action against their attackers," said Speier.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.

Enough films about human trafficking have been made in recent years that the outlines of “Eden” should be painfully familiar. But that familiarity doesn’t cushion this movie’s excruciating vision of under-age women conscripted into sexual slavery by a criminal enterprise from which there is seemingly no escape. The movie, directed by Megan Griffiths, is loosely based on the true story of Chong Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to the United States as a toddler. As a teenager in the mid-1990s, she became a captive of the domestic sex trade. She eventually survived her ordeal and has become a crusader against human trafficking. In the film she is a Korean-American teenager named Hyun Jae (Jamie Chung), who works in her parents’ New Mexico gift shop. She is picked up in a bar by a handsome, friendly young firefighter who offers her a ride home. Along the way, he makes a stop and exits the vehicle. Moments later she is kidnapped and drugged and has her identification and possessions confiscated. Renamed Eden, she soon finds herself in a regiment of sex slaves, most of them immigrants, imprisoned under close guard in a converted storage facility. The women are suspended from the ceiling and whipped. After an incident in which Eden ... desperately tries to flee, she is handcuffed and thrown into a bathtub filled with ice cubes. We learn late in the film that the babies of the girls who become pregnant are sold. And it is suggested that by the age of 20, when a girl is considered to have outlived her commercial shelf life, she faces execution and burial in the desert.

Note: If you are ready to see how investigations into a massive child sex abuse ring have led to the highest levels of government, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence," available here.

Faces at the scandal-struck Vatican were even redder than usual after it emerged that the Holy See had purchased a €23 million (Ł21 million) share of a Rome apartment block that houses Europe’s biggest gay sauna. The senior Vatican figure sweating the most due to the unlikely proximity of the gay Europa Multiclub is probably Cardinal Ivan Dias, the head of the Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples. This 76-year-old “prince of the church” enjoys a 12-room apartment on the first-floor of the imposing palazzo, at 2 Via Carducci, just yards from the ground floor entrance to the steamy flesh pot. There are 18 other Vatican apartments in the block, many of which house priests. The Holy See is still reeling from allegations that the previous pontiff, Benedict XVI, had quit in reaction to the presence of a gay cabal in the curia. La Repubblica newspaper noted that the presence of “Italy’s best known gay sauna in the premises is an embarrassment”. There was further embarrassment for the Holy See when the press observed that thanks to generous tax breaks it received from the last Berlusconi government, the church will have avoided hefty payments to the Italian state. The properties are recognised as part of the Holy City. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Pope Emeritus Benedict’s widely disliked right-hand man, ... was said to have been the brains behind the purchase of 2 Via Carduccio in 2008.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on secrecy, click here.

“A life ... out of moral bounds,” is how Pope Benedict XVI described Maciel in a 2010 interview, two years after Maciel’s death. A “wasted, twisted life.” And a life that exposed shocking flaws in the Vatican and the papacy. The saga of Father Maciel opens a rare view onto the flow of money in the Roman Curia across the last half century. In the late 1940s, Maciel began sexually plundering teenage seminarians in the religious order he founded, the Legion of Christ. He also shuttled between Mexico, Venezuela, and Spain ... portraying his Legionaries as a force of resurgent orthodoxy, himself a fearless foe of Communism. Maciel won government support for seminary scholarships in Madrid, after the Spanish Civil War cemented ties between Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the Catholic hierarchy. Wealthy industrialists and patricians from the Spanish-speaking world poured money into Maciel’s fledgling order. Legionaries called their leader Nuestro Padre (Our Father). They were taught that their founder was a living saint. They took private vows, swearing never to criticize Maciel or their superiors and to report on anyone who did. The cultlike insular culture Maciel molded would reward spying as an act of faith and shield Nuestro Padre from scrutiny as the youngest victims grew up and left the order, returning to Mexico and years of grappling with his traumatic impact on their lives.

Note: Jason Berry is author of Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.