|
| |
|
THE CHURCH &
FLORIDA STUDENTS |
Priest will fight sexual assault lawsuit
Lawyer: Jacksonville priest will fight sexual assault lawsuit - By The Associated Press
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - A former parishioner sued a priest and a Greek Orthodox church on allegations of sexual assault, though the priest's attorney said the lawsuit is frivolous.
The suit against the Very Rev. Nicholas T. Graff, the St. John the Divine Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America was filed Monday in Duval County Circuit Court. It does not identify the 22-year-old parishioner or his family members by name.
The suit claims that when the parishioner became a teenager, Graff "began exhibiting undue, obsessive and inappropriate interest" in him, including taking the parishioner to and from school every day and buying him an automobile and clothing.
The lawsuit also claims Graff gave the teenage parishioner $500 a week over a six-year period; paid travel expenses, phone bills and tuition; and induced him to move into Graff's home.
The behavior escalated into sexual misconduct when the parishioner turned 16, the suit alleges.
In the summer of 2003, Graff offered the parishioner's mother $300,000 to surrender parental rights, but the mother refused, the suit said. The suit alleges that about two years later, Graff sexually assaulted the parishioner and filed a petition to formally adopt him.
The suit also alleges the church knew that Graff was under investigation for misconduct. Father Frank Marangos, executive director of communications for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America in New York, said he had no comment because the archdiocese had not been served with the lawsuit.
Phone calls to Graff's home and the Jacksonville church were unanswered. Graff's attorney, Tom Fallis, said he had not been served with the lawsuit.
"We think it has no merits and think is frivolous," Fallis said. "We have every intention of defending the suit, vindicating our client as well as counter suing."
Attorney Robert Spohrer, who represents the man and his family, declined to discuss the case.
The parishioner suffers from severe emotional distress, has required hospitalization, therapy and counseling, and will require future care, the suit said.
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
|
Palm Beach County,
Florida - Priest
says he fondled Republican Congressman Mark Foley in late 1960s
By
Amie Parnes, Michelle Shelldone - Friday, October 20, 2006
WASHINGTON — A
Roman
Catholic priest admitted Thursday that he had once fondled Mark Foley
when the former congressman was a teenager, but denied that he raped
him.
Anthony Mercieca, 72, a retired priest who lives on the Maltese
Island of Gozo, confirmed in a telephone interview with station WPTV
in West Palm Beach that he is the clergyman whom Foley has accused of
sexually abusing him when the disgraced ex-lawmaker was between 13 and
15 years of age at Sacred Heart in Lake Worth.
After moving from Brazil in 1967, Mercieca said, he and “a very
friendly” Foley quickly bonded and became “great friends.”
“...We became attached to each other, but we didn’t do anything
dirty or so, you know?” he said, describing how they became
companions and “like brothers.”
“Then, uh, once — and maybe I touched him or so, you know, but
because it’s not something you’d call rape or penetration or
anything like that, you know?” Mercieca said in the interview. “It
was just fondling. It was sort of like more like a spontaneous thing.
“See, ‘abuse’ is a bad word, you
know?” Mercieca continued. “Because you abuse someone against his
will, but it was just spontaneous, you know? For some people it’s
molestation. Maybe for other kids it’s fun, you know? At the time
you see it in this sense, you know?”
The 52-year-old Florida Republican, who resigned from Congress last
month after it was discovered that he sent sexually explicit e-mails
to teenage congressional pages, “would come all the time to the
rectory and used to seem to like my company.”
David Roth, Foley’s criminal defense lawyer, could not be reach
for comment. “Yeah, we were great friends, you know?” Mercieca
said. “When I came I didn’t know anybody, you know? And he was —
to be very friendly — and we became friends like that.” Mercieca
said he and Foley frequented the rodeo, the arcade and even visited
Washington and New York together, visiting museums.
The priest said he and Foley also went to the beach together, but
“we did not do anything indecent.”
“There was the sand and, uh — the naturalness, you know?” he
said.
But the priest continued to deny any
wrongdoing in the interview.
“I would say that if I offended him, I am sorry, but that to
remember the good time we had together, you know?” Mercieca said.
“And how we enjoyed each other’s company. And to let bygones be
bygones.
“This was ... almost 40 years ago, so why bring this up at this
stage?” the priest added. In Palm Beach
County, where the alleged molestation occurred, Chris
Storch breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Mercieca’s confession
on television Thursday.
The Lake Worth restaurant manager was in Foley’s class at Sacred
Heart, and she and her family were “upset” as they waited in
recent days to find out the name of the accused clergyman.
Their concerns were put to rest when the found out when news
accounts linked Mercieca to Foley.
“There were a lot of priests at that parish we were very close
to,” said Storch, now 51. “They’d come over to our house for
dinner and everything. I was hoping against hope it wasn’t someone
who was a dear friend of the family. Thankfully, it wasn’t.”
State Attorney Barry Kirscher’s office would not say whether
Mercieca was the same man Foley accused of molesting him, but it did
release the name to Archdiocese of Miami attorney J. Patrick
Fitzgerald, who was in depositions, according to a telephone recording
at his West Palm Beach office.
The State Attorney’s office is not investigating the Foley
accusations because Foley is not filing criminal charges, spokesman
Mike Edmondson said.
“Speaking generally,” Edmondson said, “if, in fact, someone
is a pedophile, they generally do not just offend once.”
During Mercieca’s time at Sacred Heart, Storch was in about the
fourth grade, she said. Her seven siblings — including two former
altar boy brothers slightly younger than Foley —also attended the
K-8 Lake Worth Catholic school.
Storch said she never noticed anything unusual about Mercieca or
his behavior around young boys, including her brothers.
Around campus back then, it wasn’t unusual to see the boys with
priests and the girls with nuns, she said.
“A fourth-grader doesn’t know any better,” Storch said. “He
was a priest, you know? To me he was just a priest, someone I looked
up to.”
Storch said she knew by high school that Foley was gay and that
they often ran into one another on holidays, at weddings and funerals.
She called the recent e-mail scandal where Foley allegedly sent
salacious messages to teenage boys “horrible for everybody
involved.”
Meanwhile on Thursday, the Miami
Archdiocese released a statement encouraging anyone who has been
sexually abused by a clergy member or church employee to contact the
victim’s assistance coordinator at (866) 802-2873 or their local law
enforcement department.
Anyone seeking to file criminal charges would have to be specific
in their allegations so that the State Attorney’s Office could
research the statutes back then and determine if they still apply,
Edmondson said.
“The question is whether other victims ... would want to
proceed,” he said. “That remains to be seen.”
© 2006 Naples Daily News and NDN Productions. Published in Naples,
Florida, USA by the E.W. Scripps Co.
|
|
The priest accused of abusing Mark Foley as a teen could face
sanctions, the Miami Archdiocese said Friday. It also offered the
embattled ex-congressman an apology for the priest's
"morally reprehensible" behavior. Foley accused the
priest after checking himself into rehab in the wake of his resignation
for having sexually explicit online chats with teen congressional pages. |
Another Stain for Roman Catholic Church
Aired March 9, 2002 - 22:23 ET 
| THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT.
THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR:
Another stain for the Roman Catholic Church. The bishop of the
Palm Beach Diocese in Florida has resigned after admitting that
he sexually abused a teenager more than a quarter century ago.
Here's CNN's John Zarrella with that story.
JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The bishop of
Palm Beach has become the latest Catholic priest caught in a
sexual abuse scandal.
BISHOP ANTHONY O'CONNELL, PALM BEACH, FLORIDA: And I'm saddened
and embarrassed and ashamed.
ZARRELLA: Late Friday, Bishop Anthony
O'Connell admitted having a sexual encounter with a teenaged boy
at a Catholic seminary in Missouri more than 25 years ago.
O'CONNELL: There was nothing in the relationship that was
anything other than touches.
ZARRELLA: O'Connell went public after his accuser, Christopher
Dixon, now 40, told his story to "The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch" newspaper. It's an episode in his life
O'Connell says he thought was buried in the past for good
because Dixon, who himself became a priest for a time, had
settled his claim in a secret agreement with the church; a
secret broken when Dixon went public.
CHRISTOPHER DIXON, ACCUSER: As those sessions went on, in his
attempts to try and help me be comfortable with my body and to
understand that there's nothing about my body, whether it's my
face, my fingers, my genitals or what have you, nothing about it
is bad. And that led to him trying to prove that nothing was bad
about that by taking me to bed with him.
This ruined my life in many respects, although I'm well on my
way to recovering and making a life for myself. But it's also
affected the lives of many other people. And as hard as it is,
people have to remember that these people are just men, they're
not gods.
ZARRELLA: As this latest incident came to light, the ten bishops
of Florida, including O'Connell himself, issued a statement
condemning sexual abuse by priests. The statement said in part
-- quote -- "The people of God have a right to be able to
trust those who minister to them in God's name."
A spokeswoman for the Archbishop of Miami pointed out the people
of the church are not infallible.
MARY ROSE AGOSTA, ARCHDIOCESE OF MIAMI: It is obvious that the
Catholic Church is a human institution. And while we, as a
church, always strive to be pure, as humans, we cannot be.
ZARRELLA: The revelation in south Florida is just more salt in
the wounds of the U.S. Catholic Church, after months of
controversy in the Boston diocese. Eighty priests there are
accused of misconduct, and a former priest is serving time for
indecent assault. Ironically about a month ago, Bishop
O'Connell, when asked about the Boston case, defended Catholic
priests.
O'CONNELL: As reprehensible as it is, and it is, the bulk of our
Catholic priests are totally faithful to their commitment to
celibacy, are totally trustworthy in their parishes.
ZARRELLA: At his press conference Friday, O'Connell said the
Dixon incident wasn't his only fall from grace.
O'CONNELL: There could be one other person of a somewhat
situation and in a somewhat similar timeframe.
ZARRELLA: O'Connell has offered his
resignation to the Vatican.
John Zarrella, CNN, Miami.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR
USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
|
|
Vatican,
3 U.S. dioceses covered up abuse, suit alleges
2 men say they were molested as youths- Associated
Press - Posted April 4 2002
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Two men
sued the Vatican and three Roman Catholic dioceses yesterday, accusing
them of covering up sexual abuse at a Catholic boarding school in Florida
and an Oregon monastery.
The lawsuits claim that the Holy See; the archdioceses of Portland, Ore.,
and Chicago; the Diocese of St. Petersburg, and two religious orders hid
two abusive clergymen by moving them to parishes and monasteries across
state and national lines. "Church leaders have been guilty of making
deceitful choices," said Jeffrey Anderson, who has represented more
than 400 plaintiffs in abuse lawsuits against church officials since the
1980s.
A message left for the Vatican ambassador to the United States was not
returned. A spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declined
to comment.
No one has successfully sued the Vatican in a sex abuse lawsuit, although
a handful of lawyers have tried, said the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest who
co-wrote a 1985 report warning more must be done to stop abuse.
He said he expects church lawyers will argue that the Vatican is a country
with diplomatic immunity and cannot be sued.
In the St. Petersburg case, Rick Gomez, 28, of California, said Salesian
Brother William Burke abused him in 1987 when he was a seventh-grader at
the Mary Help of Christians boarding school in Tampa. The priest is
currently believed to be working in New Jersey.
"These were the people I looked up to and respected," said
Gomez, who cried at a news conference.
The Very Rev. James Heuser, vice provincial of the order, said Burke is a
fully ordained priest who is not in active ministry. He declined to say
where Burke lives, but said he had contacted him and he did not want to
comment.
In the Portland case, an unnamed man said the Rev. Andrew Ronan molested
him in the mid-1960s in a Portland monastery and elsewhere when he was
about 16.
Ronan, who died about 10 years ago, allegedly abused children in Ireland
before being transferred to the United States, the lawsuit said.
The Chicago archdiocese was named because Ronan was transferred from a
Chicago parish to Portland after allegedly molesting children, Anderson
said.
Last month, Anderson filed a lawsuit accusing all U.S. bishops and three
dioceses of covering up sexual abuse by a former Florida priest more than
25 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of New York said it has given the Manhattan
district attorney a list of cases from the past four decades of priests
accused of molesting youngsters.
|
|
Florida Legislators Draft Bill to Aid Clergy
Victims
By Noaki Schwartz and Nicole Sterghos
Brochu - Sun-Sentinel - June 30, 2002
Reacting to mounting claims of clergy
sexual misconduct, South Florida legislators are working on legislation
that would require church officials to report allegations of child
abuse, give victims more time to file lawsuits and allow law enforcement
to prosecute older cases.
“It’s a very, very serious issue that
usually has lifetime consequences for the children involved,” said
Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton. “I think we really need to take a look
at whether the current law, as it stands, really punishes the people
committing these sexual abuse acts or whether technicalities are
allowing abusers to go unpunished. I don’t think the community will be
satisfied if there’s one technicality after another allowing people to
get away.”
If Klein and others are successful,
Florida
would join a growing list of states taking legislative action to protect
the rights of children molested by clergy.
|
Church settles day-care lawsuit
By CHRISTINA E. SANCHEZ
VENICE, FL -- Venice Presbyterian Church has settled one of more than
a dozen lawsuits filed by parents who say teachers at the church's day
care abused their children.
Approved by a judge last week, the settlement calls for the church to
pay more than $25,000 to one couple for emotional and physical pain
suffered by their child, according to court records.
Parents accuse employees at the church's
Early Childhood Center of force-feeding their children, pulling their
hair and slamming them to the floor as punishment.
Another 14 suits are pending in the courts, including two filed in the
past month, saying the church was aware of the abuse and did nothing
to stop it.
Two of the pending cases are set to go to mediation in May.
But the resolution of one case does not set precedent for the outcome
of the others, said lawyer Adam Balkan, who filed one of two recent
lawsuits.
"The facts are heavily stacked against the church, but each case
stands on its own merits," Balkan said.
A 500-page Venice police report released in May said that day-care
staff -- including the church's pastor and the day-care director --
knew of accusations of abuse but did not report them to the
authorities, as required by law.
Details of the abuse also were revealed in the police reports, which
accused two former teachers of child abuse. No criminal charges were
filed.
In the two most recent lawsuits, the parents are seeking a minimum of
$15,000 in damages for alleged abuse. One couple says their daughter,
A.P., was dragged across the room by her hair.
A different couple says their son, M.K., was forced to eat food he
didn't like as punishment.
The children's names and ages are not included in the lawsuits. Both
children are in counseling to deal with the abuse, according to court
records.
A.P. attended the day care from September 1999 to August 2004.
M.K. attended from August 2004 to October 2004.
The two most recent suits are also the first to blame the former
director of the day-care center, Susan Bensen, and the church's
current pastor, the Rev. Chris Romig, for allowing the abuse to occur.
Romig, who is still pastor of the church, declined to comment on any
of the cases Tuesday.
"We're just trying to move forward," he said.
Balkan, who represents three families in the lawsuits, said the
children can't forget what happened to them.
"It's not about money for these families," Balkan said.
"It's about what happened to these kids and the ddeprivation of
their childhood."
In the lawsuit that was settled last week, the couple said their
daughter, identified as D.R., came home from day care with nosebleeds,
a broken collar bone and unexplained bruises. After pressing the
day-care staff for answers, the family sued and now believes she was
abused numerous times from 2002 to 2005.
The settlement agreement was reached by mediation in December, and
accepted by a judge last week.
A confidentiality agreement keeps the exact amount from being
disclosed, court documents show.
The first reports of abuse were made in October 2004 and sparked
investigations by the Venice Police Department, the state Department
of Children & Families and the Sarasota County Health Department.
Soon after, the church fired the two teachers involved in the
complaints and Bensen resigned.`
In the 500-page report detailing the allegations, police recommended
29 criminal charges be brought against six staff members.
But the state's attorney decided in May not to pursue the charges.
Prosecutors said they could not prove the teachers broke the law
because of a 2004 Florida appellate court ruling. In that case, the
appeals court said spankings that cause significant bruising or welts
do not meet the legal requirements of felony child abuse.
Parents of the children who attend the day care said, however, that
the day care broke its own policy that prohibits corporal punishment.
Since the allegations of abuse, the church has changed the name of its
day-care center to Preschool in the Pines.
|
|
Archdiocese of Miami
Issues Abuse Report
Report
says its insurers paid $9.3 million to settle claims of sexual
misconduct by priests, lay personnel and religious brothers and sisters.
BY JAY WEAVER AND DONNA GEHRKE-WHITE
- December 15, 2003
Insurers for the Archdiocese of Miami
have paid $9.3 million for settlement, legal and counseling costs to
resolve sexual-abuse claims against its priests and other employees
since it began insurance coverage in 1966, says a church report released
over the weekend.
The payments covered some of the
archdiocese's 90 abuse claims by minors through Dec. 1, but church
officials could not say exactly how many. Nor could they say how much
the archdiocese paid for such coverage or whether it also resolved any
claims from its own resources.
''No parish money is used for this,''
including donations, archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said on
Sunday.
The eight-page report,
which included a letter of apology from Archbishop John C. Favalora for
the nationwide clergy scandal, disclosed for the first time that 38
South Florida priests were accused of sexual misconduct since the
archdiocese was founded in 1958.
The report stressed that the number
represented less than 1 percent of 4,340 priests who have served the
archdiocese during the past 45 years.
But the archdiocese
said it would not release the names of the 38 priests or the
dates of the alleged incidents.
One Florida lawyer who has battled the
Catholic Church over sexual-abuse complaints for two decades said he
believes that the numbers in the report are misleading.
The lawyer, Sheldon Stevens of Cocoa
Beach, said the archdiocese may have received abuse complaints against
38 priests since 1958, but that figure should
be considered a minimum.
''Based upon the history of the behavior
of victims, many of the abuses are not reported,''
said Stevens, who has brought 50 complaints against the Catholic Church
in Florida, including three involving priests in the Archdiocese of
Miami.
''The number reported by the archdiocese
actually only represents a percentage of the priests who engaged in that
kind of conduct,'' he said.
The archdiocese's report also said its
insurers paid a total of $5.5 million to cover some of the 64 claims
submitted for alleged misconduct by priests only.
Of that total, $2.1 million was for
actual settlements, according to the report. The balance was for the
archdiocese's legal costs and psychological counseling for priests and
victims.
One of the payouts was for a $500,000
settlement disbursed in September to a teenager who accused an
archdiocese priest of molesting him on visits to his ailing grandmother
in a nursing home four years ago. It was the first settlement of about
30 sexual-abuse lawsuits filed against the Miami archdiocese since the
nationwide clergy scandal broke last year.
REPORT FLAWED?
Stevens said he believes that the
archdiocese's report is also flawed regarding the $2.1 million in
insurance settlements.
He noted, for example, that he settled
three sizable complaints as part of confidential agreements in the late
1990s. Those payouts -- along with the $500,000 settlement in the
nursing-home case -- totaled almost $2.1 million, he said.
''I don't consider their figures
reliable,'' Stevens said. ``The involvement I've had in three cases that
have been paid out -- coupled with the most recent settlement -- would
leave a negligible amount to resolve the other 60 claims.''
Agosta, the spokeswoman, declined to
comment about Stevens' assertions.
Since last year, the archdiocese has
notified Miami-Dade and Broward prosecutors of about 30 abuse complaints
filed as civil lawsuits. But prosecutors said all of the alleged
incidents against minors occurred long ago, and no criminal charges
could be filed because of a four-year statute of limitations.
Favalora said the new report -- inserted
in the Dec. 11 issue of The Florida Catholic, an archdiocesan newspaper,
and circulated throughout the 118 parishes in Miami-Dade, Broward and
Monroe counties -- was meant ''to help restore the bonds of trust and
communion'' as the Catholic Church grapples with the clergy scandal.
Favalora also apologized ``for any action
or inaction on my part that has lessened your sense of trust in the
Catholic Church and its ministers.''
Asked specifically what Favalora was
apologizing for, Agosta declined to elaborate. ''If there was something
that he or the archdiocese didn't do, then he's apologizing for it,''
she said.
Archdiocese leaders said the report
includes information for a survey by the John Jay School of Criminal
Justice in New York City, which was commissioned by the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops to consolidate all priest sex-abuse complaints since
the 1950s. That survey is scheduled for release Feb. 24.
The Miami archdiocese and 194 other
dioceses also have provided information for a nationwide audit on
compliance with the bishops' reforms -- from prompt reporting of clergy
sex-abuse complaints in criminal investigations to lay-committee reviews
of allegations to providing counseling for victims.
That audit, conducted by the Gavin Group
of Winthrop, Mass., found in a visit in September that the Miami
archdiocese was in full compliance, according to the archdiocese's
report. The U.S. bishops' Office for Child and Youth Protection is
scheduled to release that audit on Jan. 6.
PRIESTS AND OTHERS
According to the archdiocese's report, 64
sexual-abuse claims were submitted for local priests, 20 others for lay
personnel and six more for religious brothers and sisters.
The archdiocese's insurance program paid
a total of $9.3 million -- with most of that covering claims for
archdiocese priests and the balance for lay personnel and religious
brothers and sisters.
In a question-and-answer section of the
report, the archdiocese stressed that no parish funds were used to pay
settlements or legal fees.
But the report asked: ``Even if insurance
covers liability, aren't we as Catholics paying the insurance
premiums?''
''Yes,'' the report answered. 'Like
families, individuals and businesses, the archdiocese pays premiums for
all kinds of insurance such as workers' compensation, general liability,
property . . . and auto liability.''
|
|
