Child Sex Abuse Bill Dies, Archbishop Caught in Catholic Abuse Scandal

Shanley clergy abuse recovered memory case

For 5th Year, Child Sex Abuse Bill Dies in Legislature By PAUL VITELLO June 2, 2010
For four years, advocates for sexually abused children had fought a battle in the New York Legislature to open a legal window that would allow victims to file lawsuits against predators long after the statute of limitations had expired.

Though the bill died each year, it passed in the Assembly three timesand earned the support of two governors. And the renewed attention to sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church augured well for the cause this year....Dennis Poust, the communications director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said the vote represented an emerging consensus that time limits on legal liability were an important civil rights protection.

The conference is the policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops, the bill’s most formidable opponents....Since it was first introduced in the 2006-7 session, the Child Victims Act has been fervently opposed by the Catholic Church and several Orthodox Jewish groups, which saw potentially devastating financial implications in opening an opportunity for victims, regardless of age, to bring lawsuits for sexual abuse suffered in
childhood. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/nyregion/03abuse.html


German Archbishop Caught up in Catholic Abuse Scandal By Tristana Moore / Berlin Jun. 03, 2010 Already reeling from a series of sexual abuse accusations, Germany's Catholic Church has taken another hit, and this time the scandal has reached into the upper echelons of the organization. On Monday, German prosecutors confirmed that they've launched a preliminary criminal investigation into allegations that the head of Germany's Catholic Church, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, was an accessory to the sexual assault of children.

The case threatens to further deepen a crisis that has already tainted the image of the Catholic Church in Germany, not least because, as head of the German Bishops' Conference, Zollitsch is tasked with dealing with the sex abuse scandal. Prosecutors say that in 1987, Zollitsch re-appointed a priest who was facing abuse allegations to work in a monastery in Birnau, in southern Germany by Lake Constance. "According to the complaint filed by a man at the end of May, Archbishop Zollitsch assigned further work to a priest ... despite knowing that this priest had sexually abused children in the past," Wolfgang Maier, the senior public prosecutor in the south German city of Freiburg, tells TIME.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1993737,00.html?artId=1993737