Sexual abuse scandal in Cardiff archdiocese

Last updated

The sexual abuse scandal in Cardiff archdiocese is a significant episode in the series of Catholic sex abuse cases in various Western countries.

Contents

John Lloyd affair

In 1998, Father John Lloyd, a parish priest and Bishop John Aloysius Ward's former press secretary, was imprisoned for sexual offences involving children. Parents had written letters to Ward to complain of Lloyd's behaviour: he reportedly passed the letters on to Lloyd. In 1999, Lloyd was laicized by the Pope. Later in 1999, Ward himself was accused of raping a woman with a crucifix on the altar of his parish church in the 1960s. He was arrested, but never charged. The allegations appeared in the press, and Ward made impassioned statements of his innocence, claiming that the allegations were entirely false. [1]

Joseph Jordan affair

In October 2000, Joseph Jordan was imprisoned for indecent assaults on boys, and for downloading child pornography from the Internet. Jordan had been ordained by Ward in 1998, despite Ward being warned about Jordan's behaviour by Christopher Budd, Bishop of Plymouth, under whom Lloyd started his training for the priesthood. A BBC Panorama investigation accused Ward of failing to take action, and he was pressured to resign. [2]

Early episcopal retirement

Bishop John Aloysius Ward suffered a stroke and then a deep vein thrombosis in November 2000, and went on sick leave, with Bishop of Wrexham Edwin Regan deputising for him. The Catholic Herald defended Ward, but The Tablet called for his retirement. After a period of recuperation, he said he was ready to return to his office. Ward was interviewed by Pope John Paul II, and resigned shortly afterwards, on 26 October 2001. He was replaced as Archbishop by Peter Smith. Ward retired to a bungalow, where he displayed his Archepiscopal coat of arms over his front door. [3]

Posthumous allegations against Ward

According to the Times March 28, 2007 (the day after Archbishop Ward's death): [4]

The nightmare had begun in January 1999, when a woman claimed that he [Ward] had raped her with a crucifix on the altar of his London parish church in the 1960s. Her story, deemed improbable by four police stations in Britain and Ireland, was finally accepted by a fifth. The allegation was reported in a tabloid newspaper before the police had even approached the archbishop. He was later arrested, but released without charge.

Related Research Articles

Catholic Church sexual abuse cases Sexual abuse and pedophilia claims within the Catholic Church

There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, nuns, Popes 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.

Theodore McCarrick 20th- and 21st-century American Catholic, former cardinal and laicized Bishop

Theodore Edgar McCarrick is a laicized American bishop and former cardinal of the Catholic Church. Ordained a priest in 1958, he became an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York in 1977, then became Bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, in 1981. From 1986 to 2000, he was Archbishop of Newark. He was created a cardinal in February 2001 and served as Archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006. Following credible allegations of repeated sexual misconduct towards boys and seminarians, he was removed from public ministry in June 2018, became the first cardinal to resign from the College of Cardinals because of claims of sexual abuse in July 2018, and was laicized in February 2019. Several honors he had been awarded, such as honorary degrees, were rescinded.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington Latin Catholic jurisdictions in the United States

The Archdiocese of Washington is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or archdiocese of the Catholic Church in the United States. Its territorial remit encompasses the District of Columbia and the counties of Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince George's and Saint Mary's in the state of Maryland. It was originally part of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans Roman Catholic archdiocese in the United States

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans is an ecclesiastical division of the Roman Catholic Church spanning Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, and Washington civil parishes of southeastern Louisiana. It is the second to the Archdiocese of Baltimore in age among the present dioceses in the United States, having been elevated to the rank of diocese on April 25, 1793, during Spanish colonial rule.

Roman Catholic Diocese of Nashville Latin Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Tennessee, United States

The Diocese of Nashville is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church that encompasses 38 counties spread over 16,302 square miles of Middle Tennessee. The Catholic population of the diocese is estimated at approximately 76,000 individuals registered in parishes, which represents about 3.4% of the overall population in Middle Tennessee. As of 2016, Mass was offered in Spanish, Vietnamese, Latin, and Korean. The diocese has 75 priests and 70 permanent deacons serving 59 churches. There are 24 seminarians currently studying for the priesthood. The Cathedral Church of the Incarnation, located on West End Avenue in Nashville, close to the Vanderbilt University campus is the present seat of the Bishop of Nashville.

Donald Wuerl American cardinal

Donald William Wuerl is an American prelate, a cardinal, of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Washington, D.C., from 2006 to 2018. He was elevated by Pope John Paul II to serve as auxiliary bishop of Seattle (1986–1987), and bishop of Pittsburgh (1988–2006). He was named archbishop of Washington by Pope Benedict XVI and made a cardinal by him in 2010.

Peter Joseph Jugis American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church

Peter Joseph Jugis is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who has been serving as the bishop of the Diocese of Charlotte in North Carolina since 2003. Jugis succeeded Bishop William Curlin as bishop of the diocese and is seated at the Cathedral of St. Patrick in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Thomas John Curry

Thomas John Curry is an Irish-born American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church.

John Aloysius Ward was a British Roman Catholic prelate. He served as Bishop of Menevia from 1 October 1980 until his appointment by Pope John Paul II as Metropolitan Archbishop of Cardiff on 25 March 1983. He served as Archbishop until his retirement on 26 October 2001.

This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.

Anthony Sablan Apuron Former Catholic archbishop

Anthony Sablan Apuron is an American former archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Agaña in Guam from 1983 until 2016, when the Vatican removed him as archbishop for child sexual abuse crimes.

Richard Stika American Catholic prelate (born 1957)

Richard Frank Stika is an American prelate of the Catholic Church, serving as bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville in Tennessee since 2009. He is accused of covering up the rape of a diocesan employee by a seminarian in an ongoing 2022 lawsuit.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal was part of a series of Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in the United States that revealed widespread crimes in the American Roman Catholic Church. In early 2002, TheBoston Globe published results of an investigation that led to the criminal prosecutions of five Roman Catholic priests and thrust the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy into the national spotlight. Another accused priest who was involved in the Spotlight scandal also pleaded guilty. The Globe's coverage encouraged other victims to come forward with allegations of abuse, resulting in numerous lawsuits and 249 criminal cases.

Sexual abuse cases in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin

The sexual abuse cases in Dublin archdiocese are major chapters in the series of Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in Ireland. The Irish government commissioned a statutory enquiry in 2006 that published the Murphy Report in November 2009.

Dale Joseph Melczek

Dale Joseph Melczek is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit in Michigan from 1982 to 1992 and as bishop of the Diocese of Gary in Indiana from 1996 until 2014.

James Clifford Timlin is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as bishop of the Diocese of Scranton from 1984 to 2003. Timlin was accused in a 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report of covering up sexual abuse crimes by priests in his diocese while bishop.

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 referenda to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion rights in 2018.

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.

The parish transfers of abusive Catholic priests, also known as priest shuffling, is a pastoral practice that has greatly contributed to the aggravation of Catholic Church sexual abuse cases. Some bishops have been heavily criticized for moving offending priests from parish to parish, where they still had personal contact with children, rather than seeking to have them permanently returned to the lay state by laicization. The Church was widely criticized when it was discovered that some bishops knew about some of the alleged crimes committed, but reassigned the accused instead of seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood.

Joseph R. Binzer American Catholic bishop

Joseph Robert Binzer is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Ohio, from 2011 to 2020.

References

  1. ↑ Obituary Archbishop resigns after abuse criticism
  2. ↑ Obituary, The Guardian , 28 March 2007
  3. ↑ Obituary [ dead link ], The Daily Telegraph , 29 March 2007
  4. ↑ "The Most Rev John Ward". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 2021-11-17.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.