Predator priests shuffled around globe, $1.4 million in Boy Scout abuse case

AP IMPACT: Predator priests shuffled around globe By BRADLEY BROOKS and ALESSANDRA RIZZO (AP) 4/14/10 RIO DE JANEIRO

There he was, five decades later, the priest who had raped Joe Callander in Massachusetts. The photo in the Roman Catholic newsletter showed him with a smile across his wrinkled face, near-naked Amazon Indian children in his arms and at his feet.
The Rev. Mario Pezzotti was working with children and supervising other priests in Brazil.

It's not an isolated example. In an investigation spanning 21 countries across six continents, The Associated Press found 30 cases of priests accused of abuse who were transferred or moved abroad. Some escaped police investigations. Many had access to children in another country, and some abused again. A priest who admitted to abuse in Los Angeles went to the Philippines, where U.S. church officials mailed him checks and advised him not to reveal their source. A priest in Canada was convicted of sexual abuse and then moved to France, where he was convicted of abuse again in 2005. Another priest was moved back and forth between Ireland and England, despite being diagnosed as a pederast, a man who commits sodomy with boys.

"The pattern is if a priest gets into trouble and it's close to becoming a scandal or if the law might get involved, they send them to the missions abroad," said Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and critic of what he says is a practice of international transfers of accused and admitted priest child abusers. "Anything to avoid a scandal." Church officials say that in some cases, the priests themselves moved to another country and the new parish might not have been aware of past allegations. In other cases, church officials said they did not believe the allegations, or that the priest had served his time and reformed.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jF3SgJdO8u1pi0PkautQAtzuJKaAD9F33EE03

$1.4 million awarded in Boy Scout abuse case William McCall, Associated Press April 14, 2010
Portland, Ore. - A jury delivered an embarrassing rebuke to the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday when it found that the organization failed to protect a man who was molested by an assistant scoutmaster in the early 1980s. Jurors awarded $1.4 million to the former Portland man and decided that the Irving, Texas-based organization was liable for up to $25 million in punitive damages to be decided in a separate phase of the trial. Over the first three weeks of testimony, secret Scout "perversion files" - records of known sex offenders - were used as evidence, though it's unclear if jurors consulted the documents while deliberating over two days.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/14/MNGR1CU7K1.DTL