Predators Are Telling Children “You Are Special.” Why Aren’t Our Communities?

The most powerful three words of a child predator are: “You are special.” When a predator tells a child she is “special,” he is using the ultimate con, filling a huge void in a vulnerable ...Read More

Lessons for the Catholic Church from an Unlikely Source—Penn State

During the past week, the media and the American public could not help but draw comparisons between the recent child sex abuse scandal at Penn State and the endemic sex abuse scandal in the Catholic ...Read More

Occupy the Vatican?

Father Roy Bourgeois, a beloved Catholic priest who has supported women’s ordination, was briefly detained in Rome yesterday after he and about a dozen women marched on the Vatican. The marchers ...Read More

More Priests, More Abuse

The world waits with bated breath to see if the International Criminal Court will take up a case filed by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the Center for Constitutional Rights ...Read More

This Week in Priest Abuse

As SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) anxiously await news from the International Criminal Court (ICC) on whether they will try Pope ...Read More

Pope Makes Less-Than-Triumphant Return Home

Pope Benedict XVI is in his native Germany for a long weekend, but it’s not going to be a party. Many German Catholics have turned their backs on the ancient institution and parted ways–180,000 ...Read More

Abuse Survivors Will Try To Take Pope to Court

For eight years, I walked through the doors of my Catholic elementary school under the words “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” I haven’t thought about my grade school, Patronage ...Read More

Warren Jeffs’ Conviction Exposes the Coercion of Polygamy

Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs was found guilty on August 4 of sexual assault on two girls–a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old who he considered his “spiritual wives.” On August ...Read More

Catholic Church Takes Action to Stop Sexual Abuse–Or Do They?

The Catholic Church has been accused in the past of dragging their feet on predatory priests. Now, they’re taking steps to show us they’re serious. The U.S. Catholic Church has plunked ...Read More

Song of Bernadette: An Irish-Catholic Mother’s Tale

The 20th century Ireland of my mother’s childhood was marked with class distinction, the stigma attached to poorness inescapable. The Catholic Church influenced everything. Irish children attended ...Read More

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