sex abuse

A 28-year-old priest is charged with sexually abusing an altar boy over a five-year period in a Vatican City youth seminary. Another priest, the former rector, is charged with covering up the abuse.

A lawsuit filed in 2017 claims that Loren Culp and two other law enforcement officers didn’t properly investigate the claims of a 17-year-old girl, who said she’d been molested by a relative since she was five.

The largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. faces allegations of sexual abuse by ministers and controversy over its opposition to women preachIng in church.

The Boy Scouts of America's own records show that more than 12,000 children have been sexually assaulted while participating in the organization's programs. The documents came to light through court testimony given by a researcher whom the Scouts had hired to do an internal review. The records reveal allegations against thousands of Scout leaders — allegations that date from the 1940s.

Not surprisingly, when Pope Francis summoned more than 100 bishops to a meeting in Rome to address the "Protection of Minors in the Church," the announcement raised expectations that it could mark a turning point in the Church's lagging response to the ongoing clergy abuse crisis. The three-day meeting begins Thursday.

Theodore McCarrick rose to power as a cardinal and archbishop of Washington, D.C. He became the most senior Catholic Church official in modern times to lose clerical status.

Nearly 50 dioceses and religious orders have publicly identified child-molesting priests in the wake of the Pennsylvania report issued in mid-August, and 55 more have announced plans to do the same over the next few months, the AP found. Together they account for more than half of the nation’s 187 dioceses.

A 20-month investigation shows the extent the Catholic Church's order of Jesuits, aka Society of Jesus, used Northwest Native reservations and Alaska Native communities to shuffle clergy with credible accusations of sex abuse. Instead of being prosecuted or removed from ministry, many were sent to other remote assignments, and housed in a retirement community on the Gonzaga University campus in Spokane.

The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, will meet in Rome with Pope Francis and other church leaders to discuss further investigations into abuse.

A panel of lay advisers to U.S. Catholic bishops sees a "systemic problem" in the church that can only be addressed independently of Catholic authorities.