There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, nuns, and other members of religious life. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
Brendan Comiskey, is the Roman Catholic Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Ferns. He was born in Clontibret, County Monaghan, Ireland.
St Etheldreda's Church is a Roman Catholic church in Ely Place, off Charterhouse Street in Holborn, London. The building is one of only two surviving in London from the reign of Edward I, and dates from between 1250 and 1290. It is dedicated to Æthelthryth, or Etheldreda, the Anglo-Saxon saint who founded the monastery at Ely in 673. It was the chapel of the London residence of the Bishops of Ely.
Father Eugene Greene was a Catholic Priest in the Raphoe diocese of the County Donegal, Ireland. In 1999, he was arrested for abusing 26 boys between 1965 and 1992. In 2000, Greene was sentenced to 12 years in prison, of which he only served nine. He was released in 2008.
The Diocese of Nottingham, England, is a Roman Catholic diocese of the Latin Church and a suffragan in the ecclesiastical province of the Metropolitan Diocese of Westminster.
The Rosminians, officially named the Institute of Charity, abbreviated I.C., are a Roman Catholic clerical religious congregation of Pontifical Right for men founded by Antonio Rosmini and first organised in 1828.
This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.
Sex Crimes and the Vatican (2006) is a documentary film presented by the BBC program Panorama. It aired on 1 October 2006.
As distinct from abuse by some parish priests, who are subject to diocesan control, there has also been abuse by members of Roman Catholic orders, which often care for the sick or teach at school. Just as diocesan clergy have arranged parish transfers of abusive priests, abusive brothers in Catholic orders are sometimes transferred.
St Joseph’s Industrial School, generally referred to as Ferryhouse, is located four kilometres east of Clonmel, in County Tipperary, Ireland. The original building was erected in 1884 by Count Arthur Moore, a wealthy local Catholic as a reformatory for boys. Shortly after its construction, Moore invited the Rosminians to run the school.
Allegations of abuse of children in certain institutions owned, managed, and largely staffed by the Sisters of Mercy, in Ireland, form a sub-set of allegations of child abuse made against Catholic clergy and members of Catholic religious institutes in several countries in the late 20th century. The abusive conduct allegedly perpetrated at institutions run by the Sisters of Mercy ranged from overuse of corporal punishment to emotional abuse, and included some accusations of sexual abuse by lay persons employed at the institutions.
From the late 1980s, allegations of sexual abuse of children associated with Catholic institutions and clerics in several countries started to be the subject of sporadic, isolated reports. In Ireland, beginning in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government enquiries established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children over decades. Six reports by the former National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church established that six Irish priests had been convicted between 1975 and 2011. This has contributed to the secularisation of Ireland and to the decline in influence of the Catholic Church. Ireland held referendums to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion rights in 2018.
Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in Canada are well documented dating back to the 1960s. The preponderance of criminal cases with Canadian Catholic dioceses named as defendants that have surfaced since the 1980s strongly indicate that these cases were far more widespread than previously believed. While recent media reports have centred on Newfoundland dioceses, there have been reported cases—tested in court with criminal convictions—in almost all Canadian provinces. Sexual assault is the act of an individual touching another individual sexually and/or committing sexual activities forcefully and/or without the other person's consent. The phrase Catholic sexual abuse cases refers to acts of sexual abuse, typically child sexual abuse, by members of authority in the Catholic church, such as priests. Such cases have been occurring sporadically since the 11th century in Catholic churches around the world. This article summarizes some of the most notable Catholic sexual abuse cases in Canadian provinces.
The media coverage of Catholic sex abuse cases is a major aspect of the academic literature surrounding the pederastic priest scandal.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe has affected several dioceses in European nations. Italy is an exceptional case as the 1929 Lateran Treaty gave the Vatican legal autonomy from Italy, giving the clergy recourse to Vatican rather than Italian law.
John Stanley Kenneth Arnold is the eleventh Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford. He was formerly an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster and held the titular see of Lindisfarne.
The sexual abuse scandal in the English Benedictine Congregation was a significant episode in the series of Catholic sex abuse cases in the United Kingdom. The dates of the events covered here range from the 1960s to the 2010s.
Grace Dieu Manor is a 19th-century country house near Thringstone in Leicestershire, England, occupied by Grace Dieu Manor School until 2020. It is a Grade II listed building.
Christopher Basil "Kit" Cunningham IC, MBE was a British priest. For almost 30 years, as the rector of St Etheldreda's Church, Ely Place, Cunningham was one of London's best-known Roman Catholic parish priests. His death, in 2010, was widely reported in the media. In 2011 it became publicly known that he had been involved in sexual abuse at a school in Tanzania in the 1960s.
By the Grace of God is a 2019 French-Belgian drama film directed by François Ozon. The film stars Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet and Swann Arlaud as three victims of a Catholic priest's abuse who, as adults, set out to expose the sexual abuse hidden by the Catholic Church.
