NAPLES
Members of St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Naples are reacting to reports of a priest who once pastored there.
This priest is one of hundreds charged with disruptive acts against children in Pennsylvania.
According to grand jury papers Released to Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Father Robert Brague was appointed parish vicar at Saint Ann’s in 1990, but that came after initial allegations were made in Pennsylvania.
Letters sent to a bishop indicated that Brague, then 46, had impregnated a 17-year-old girl.
The bishop responded to the letter written by the victim’s sister by saying, “Father Brague and your sister have a long and difficult road ahead of them. What happened is their responsibility and certainly Father Brague will take care of his obligations.
According to the report, he was moved there in the early 1990s by the church. Father Brague died in 1997.
We spoke to members of the parish of Sainte-Anne on Wednesday who said they hoped that this news
attention will advance the healing process.
Loretta Huenefeld has been a practitioner for 27 years and “it is very disturbing and I hope that now that it has been revealed, even though it was so many years ago, it will never happen again.”
Wednesday is a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church.
We have contacted the Diocese of Venice for comment on Father Brague, but their office is closed.
Another such man is Father Sean Kerins.
Reports say he sent inappropriate text messages to a student at Kennedy Catholic High School in Hermitage, PA.
He is currently listed as ‘under police investigation’ and lives in Naples.
Tim Lennon, with the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (INSTANTANEOUS) knows firsthand how difficult it is for children to deal with abuse. He said, “It’s hard to come forward. The vast majority of child sexual abuse never happens.
LINK: Network of Survivors of Those Abused by Priests
Lennon recalls the moment of his realization: “I moved on…I buried my memories for 30 years. It wasn’t until someone else made a public event that I said oh my God, I was abused too.
He says the more people show up, the more it will encourage others to do so, and no parishioner should overlook that.
The third accused priest lives in Fort Myers. This is Thomas O’Donnell, 88.
Parents in Pennsylvania say he forced their children to shower naked in front of him and weigh themselves.
It happened in the late 80s.
The parents also reported that O’Donnell made the children sleep next to him and talked to them about inappropriate sexual things.
Read the full grand jury indictment below. The report on Robert Brague begins on page 812.
Draft Redacted Report and Responses by timothhydrichardson on Scribd
A priest raped a 7-year-old girl while visiting her in hospital after she had her tonsils removed. Another priest forced a 9-year-old boy to perform oral sex, then rinsed the boy’s mouth with holy water. A boy was forced to confess to the priest who sexually assaulted him.
These children are among the victims of about 300 Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania who have molested more than 1,000 children — and possibly many more — since the 1940s, according to a state grand jury report released Tuesday that charged senior church officials, including a man who is now the archbishop of Washington, DC, to systematically cover up the complaints.
The “real number” of child abuse and violent priests may be higher since some secret church records were lost and some victims never came forward, the grand jury said.
While the grand jury said dioceses have established internal processes and appear to refer complaints to law enforcement more quickly, it suggested that significant changes are lacking.
“Despite some institutional reforms, individual church leaders have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote in the roughly 900-page report. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible not only did nothing; they hid everything.
Senior church officials have mostly been shielded and many, including some named in the report, have been promoted, the grand jury said, concluding that “it is too early to close the book on the sex scandal of Catholic Church“.
In almost all cases, prosecutors have found that the statute of limitations has expired, meaning criminal charges cannot be filed. More than 100 of the priests died. Many others are retired or have been fired from the priesthood or furloughed. Authorities charged only two, including a priest who has since pleaded guilty.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the investigation is ongoing.
The investigation into six of Pennsylvania’s eight dioceses — Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton — is the most thorough investigation into Catholic clergy abuse by any state, according to victim advocates. The dioceses represent approximately 1.7 million Catholics.
So far, there have only been nine investigations by a prosecutor or grand jury from a Catholic diocese or archdiocese in the United States, according to the Massachusetts-based research and advocacy organization, BishopAccountability.org.
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Diocese of Johnstown-Altoona were not included in the investigation because they have already been the subject of three scathing grand jury investigations.
The grand jury heard from dozens of witnesses and reviewed more than half a million pages of internal diocesan documents, including reports from bishops to Vatican officials revealing details of abusive priests they did not have. made public or reported to law enforcement.
The grand jury found that a succession of Catholic bishops and other diocesan leaders tried to shield the church from bad publicity and financial liability. They failed to report accused clergy to the police, used confidentiality agreements to silence victims, and sent violent priests to so-called “treatment centers”, which “cleared” the priests and ” enabled hundreds of known offenders to return to the ministry,” the report said. .
The conspiracy of silence extended beyond church grounds: Police or prosecutors sometimes failed to investigate allegations out of deference to church officials or dismissed complaints as outside of the statute of limitations, the grand jury said.
Diocesan leaders responded on Tuesday by expressing their grief for the victims, highlighting how much they had changed and unveiling, for the first time, a list of priests accused of some kind of sexual misconduct.
James VanSickle of Pittsburgh, who testified that he was sexually assaulted in 1981 by a priest from the Diocese of Erie, called the release of the report “a major victory to get our voices heard, to get our stories told.”
The report is still the subject of an ongoing legal battle, with redactions protecting the identities of some current and former clergy named in the report as the state Supreme Court weighs their arguments that his charges unjustified actions against them violate their constitutional rights. It is also expected to spark another fight by victims’ advocates for changes to state law that lawmakers have resisted.
His findings echoed many previous investigations of churches across the country, describing widespread sexual abuse and the cover-up of it by church officials. The US bishops have acknowledged that more than 17,000 people nationwide have reported being sexually assaulted by priests and other church members.
The report comes at a time of renewed scandal at the highest levels of the American Catholic Church. Last month, Pope Francis stripped 88-year-old Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of his title amid allegations that McCarrick had for years sexually abused boys and committed sexual misconduct with adult seminarians.
A senior US church official named in the grand jury report is Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who heads the Archdiocese of Washington, for allegedly helping protect abusive priests when he was bishop of Pittsburgh. Wuerl, who served as bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, disputed the allegations.
Terry McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org said the report highlighted the twin crimes of church sex abuse scandals: child abuse and a cover-up by church officials that allows the abuse to continue.
“One thing it’s going to do is put pressure on prosecutors elsewhere to look at what’s going on in their corner of the country,” McKiernan said.
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