Damned Pervert Priests - and other assorted Holy Scumbags

[Fake Messiah]

Pastor abuses, impregnates NJ church member, tells her to get abortion, feds say

The self-proclaimed pastor of a New Jersey church, which he founded with his wife, “spread fear” among members through religious rhetoric and forced them into unpaid labor, including one woman he repeatedly physically and sexually abused, federal prosecutors said.

Treva Edwards, 60, impregnated the woman he sexually assaulted inside his church over a span of seven years, then told her to get an abortion, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey.

He and his wife, Christine Edwards, 63, who also described herself as a pastor, ran their church, “Jesus is Lord by the Holy Ghost,” out of an apartment building in Orange, where they lured people into becoming members as part of a forced labor scheme between 2011 and 2020, according to prosecutors.

Individuals facing hardship in their lives were targeted by the Edwardses, who preached that they “would lose favor with God if they did not perform labor,” prosecutors said.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-...99771.html

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Women allege children’s pastor sexually abused them as children

She adored her pastor and the rest is history

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Victorian sisters abused by paedophile priest say High Court decision has halted quest for compensation

The sisters were abused by notorious paedophile priest Bryan Coffey — who is now dead — and the pair are pursuing the Catholic Church for compensation.

But the sisters' legal pursuit is in jeopardy after the High Court made it harder to find the church vicariously liable.

Coffey was never convicted of the women's abuse, but Trish received a letter of apology from the Ballarat bishop's office in 2015.

In 2021, another victim was awarded $200,000 by two Victorian courts, which found the church was vicariously liable for the harm caused by Coffey.

But the church appealed that ruling to the High Court and won, because Coffey was not an employee — instead, he had a relationship of a spiritual nature with the church.

The idea that Coffey was not an employee is fanciful, the sisters said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-14/v.../105286662

[Fake Messiah]

What, did he undress other kids and then told them not to tell anyone?

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Meanwhile...

Italian priest under house arrest for child porn

An Italian priest accused by police of possessing child pornography is under house arrest, his lawyer told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday, the second recent scandal to hit the northern Brescia diocese.

The 51-year-old priest was taken into custody last week, defense lawyer Paolo Inverardi told AFP, adding that a police investigation was ongoing.

News reports say police found approximately 1,500 photos and videos of child pornography on the telephone of the clergyman, who served as parish priest in the town of Castelcovati, west of Brescia.

The arrest comes just a month after another priest within the diocese, Ciro Panigara, was arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing minors.

In that case, the priest, 48, was accused of sexually assaulting children ages 10 to 12 in two parishes located between the cities of Milan and Verona.

In January, the bishop had announced to parishioners the sudden departure of Panigara, who had arrived just several months earlier.

https://www.manilatimes.net/2025/05/16/w...rn/2114427

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Learning all the lessons from the Bétharram Catholic school child abuse scandal

A sitting prime minister explaining himself before lawmakers on one of the most pressing social issues of the moment, for more than five hours: François Bayrou's hearing before the Assemblée Nationale's inquiry commission on "the state's modes of monitoring and prevention of violence in educational establishments," on Wednesday, May 14, was anything but ordinary.

Admittedly, the extended dialogue between the prime minister and the MPs did not clarify all the ambiguities surrounding the scandal, regarding acts of violence and rapes which led to more than 200 complaints against the Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram middle and high school, a Catholic institution located near the southern city of Pau, where Bayrou was, and still is, the mayor. However, though the hearing, which was broadcast live, required better management, it proved useful and revealed the different layers of interpretation in this resounding scandal. It covered a politically awkward matter for the prime minister, who was accused of having covered it up at the time, when he was the president of the local departmental council and education minister. It brought to light the terrible silence that concealed acts of psychological, physical, and sexual violence committed in the renowned religious institution between the 1950s and 2000. Finally, it highlighted the lessons that must be learned today.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/articl...01_23.html

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Raleigh children’s pastor arrested on child exploitation charges

A children’s pastor at a Triangle area church has been arrested for distributing child sexual abuse material involving a young girl.

Aaron Luke Bradley, 30, of Wake Forest was arrested on Tuesday, May 6, when Wake Forest Police Department detectives with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force executed a search warrant at a local residence.

According to arrest records and court documents, Bradley was charged with a second-degree felony count of sexual exploitation of a minor. Investigators said that on or around March 10, Bradley shared a video over an instant messaging app showing the sexual abuse of an unknown girl who appeared to be between 9 and 12 years old.

https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-li...n-charges/

[zebo-the-fat]

Priests and kids should never mix

[Mister Agenda]

Not without chaperoning, apparently.

[zebo-the-fat]

Not without chaperoning, apparently.

and CCTV

[Fake Messiah]

Accuser who settled $2 million child sex abuse lawsuit against the Catholic church dies at 43

A far southwest suburban man has died at age 43, a year and a half after reaching a $2 million settlement with the Catholic church over a lawsuit alleging he was sexually assaulted as a student by an Augustinian priest who ran Providence Catholic High School in the 1990s.

Robert Krankvich’s death in April appears to have been the result of dire health problems brought on by years of drug and alcohol abuse, according to family who believe those troubles stemmed from the sexual abuse he faced from the Rev. Richard McGrath at the New Lenox school.

Church leaders these days sometimes portray the church’s decades-long sex abuse scandal as old news. But Krankvich’s allegations gave evidence of more contemporary offenders, as McGrath remained at Providence until being sidelined in 2017 amid a child pornography investigation.

Krankvich’s case and the pornography allegations — in which a student reported seeing the image of a nude boy on McGrath’s phone — also highlighted the secretive nature of the Augustinians.

For years, they were one of the more prominent Catholic orders to refuse to release a public list of their sex offenders — even as other church officials and reformers demanded transparency from Catholic groups in the name of healing and atonement.

The order’s handling of sex abuse complaints has been under renewed scrutiny because an Augustinian from Chicago, Cardinal Robert Prevost, is helping choose the next pope and has been mentioned as a longshot successor to Pope Francis. Prevost once ran the Chicago-based province that includes Providence and St. Rita High School on the South Side, and was the order’s international leader for years.

Under pressure, province leaders released a public list of alleged offenders in 2024 but kept McGrath’s name off, saying the accusations against him “were not established” according to their own guidelines.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdo...ugustinian

[Fake Messiah]

I was sexually abused by a priest. I'm not celebrating Pope Leo.

When I was 6, I was abused by a Catholic priest. He was a "good-time Charlie" pastor, coaching the school’s baseball team by day, and drinking beer, smoking cigars and talking sports with my father and uncles at night. Despite it being known that he was abusing other children, he was not reported to the police and was transferred to a largely African-American parish in another state, where records show that additional accusations of sexual abuse were made against him until his death.

Even though the lives of young and innocent children were at stake, the first priority of Catholic bishops and priests has been self-preservation, professionally and financially.

When the new pope was leader of the Augustinian order in 2000, he allowed Father James Ray, a notoriously habitual sex offender, to live and say Mass at St. John Stone Friary in Chicago, just half a block from St. Thomas the Apostle Elementary School.

And in 2022 in Peru, three women who told police of being sexually assaulted by a priest said the new pope, who was bishop of Chiclayo at the time, neglected to file a report or even start an investigation, while permitting the accused to continue his ecclesiastical duties, leading to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests filing a formal complaint against Cardinal Prevost in 2023.

To champions of the new pope, that may not sound like much: negligence, maybe, but not malicious conduct. But if a single one of the bishops or priests had come forward in my case, crimes committed against me and others might have ended sooner, or might not have ever been perpetrated. They couldn’t have not known that their “negligence” would destroy children’s lives.

Today, the church’s negligence continues to be a problem which, it was hoped, a new pope might address. The Associated Press reported as recently as 2019 that there were at least 1,700 credibly accused priests still on the loose as teachers, coaches and counselors, and living near children.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/v...583222007/

[Fake Messiah]

SNAP asks Pope Leo XIV to sign canon law on clergy sex abuse

A group known for protecting those sexually abused by Catholic priests has sent a letter to Pope Leo XIV to ask him to sign new canon law taking a zero tolerance stance on sex abuse in the clergy, while questioning why he didn't do more in his decades spent in the Catholic Church.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests sent the letter the day the new pope stepped out onto the Vatican balcony. It calls for a number of action in his first 100 days.

The biggest ask is making zero tolerance part of the church's canon law, defining it as the permanent removal of a person from ministry following a single act of sexual abuse "admitted or established after an appropriate process," "found guilty" in the judicial system, or "found liable in a civil proceeding."

The group also spoke out about their new Conclave Watch project, writing to the pope on the day of his election, "You can end the abuse crisis — the only question is, will you?"

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/sex...-xiv-peru/

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Film festival to premiere clergy sex abuse documentary partly based on Guardian reporting


The producer of the 82-minute film is Michael Brandner Sr, who in 2018 discovered a pile of what were essentially love letters to his younger brother, Scot, from a Roman Catholic priest named Brian Highfill. Scot – who was a teenager when he received the letters – never told anyone about them and died by suicide at age 29 in the early 1990s.

Michael presented the letters to New Orleans’ Catholic archbishop, Gregory Aymond. In a recorded phone call between the men, Aymond told Brandner that the letters were likely grooming material but “weren’t explicit enough” to warrant Highfill’s inclusion on a list released by the archdiocese that identified clergymen faced with substantial allegations of child molestation.

Aymond ultimately added Highfill to that list in October 2020 after WWL Louisiana and a reporter now at the Guardian questioned the archdiocese about at least three other victims who had reported their own allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of Highfill over the previous 18 years.

God As My Witness in part recounts the experiences of Brandner’s family with Highfill, who died in 2021, and a number of people who endured being sexually molested as children by clergymen while growing up in the Catholic church in New Orleans. It also tells the stories of the attorneys who have advocated for clergy abuse survivors after the New Orleans church faced so many clerical molestation claims that it filed for federal bankruptcy protection in May 2020.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...e-festival

[Fake Messiah]

Colombian court rules Catholic church must release names of up to 5,000 predator priests. Historic ruling is the result of intrepid activists demanding justice. One of the largest roster of clergy offenders worldwide.

Spanish to English:

Journalists Juan Pablo Barrientos and Miguel Ángel Estupiñán reach a judicial decision with which they hope to reveal up to 5,000 new names of priests denounced.

The Catholic Church must declassify the information available to it on cases of pedophilia in Colombia. The Constitutional Court has agreed this Monday to two journalists who filed dozens of lawsuits against various dioceses and religious communities throughout the country so that the archives on which the allegations of child sexual abuse rest were delivered in their entirety. As they explained, the Church only gave them 13% of the requested data, with which they have revealed in the last two years the names of more than 600 priests with allegations of pedophilia.

“We are very happy. The decision guarantees that the 137 petition rights we send must be answered comprehensively ”, held in a telephone conversation by Juan Pablo Barrientos, one of the most active journalists in the investigation of pedophile cases in the Church in the country. He, along with Miguel Ángel Estupiñán, has revealed hundreds of accusations of pedophilia against dozens of priests. “If with only a fraction of the information we disclose more than 600, with the remaining 87% we can reach up to 5,000 priests denounced ”, the communicator predicts.

https://elpais.com/america-colombia/2025...astia.html

[Fake Messiah]

Ban on child marriage is deemed 'un-Islamic' by Pakistan's religious leaders

Pakistan's government last week passed the Child Marriage Restraint Bill, which aims to put an end to minors being forced into marriages and cohabitation with adults.

The legislation, set to be signed into effect by President Asif Ali Zardari, will see adults found to be cohabiting with minors punished by up to seven years in a prison and a fine of one million rupees (£2,663) on charges of statutory rape.

It is set to roll out in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, with hopes that other parts of the country will introduce the law in short order.

But Pakistan's Council of Islamic Ideology - a prominent body that advises the government of the Muslim majority nation 'whether or not a certain law is repugnant to Islam' - has opposed the bill.

The council said in a statement published Tuesday: 'Declaring marriage below the age of eighteen as child abuse and prescribing punishments for it, and other controversial provisions, are not in line with Islamic injunctions.

'Overall, the Council rejected the bill. It also clarified that this bill was not sent to the Council for review by the Parliament or the Senate.

'Marriage should be protected from unnecessary legal complications, and a public awareness campaign in this regard could prove more effective,' it argued.

The bill was passed after several female politicians who were married off as minors shared their personal support.

Pakistan ranks among the top 10 countries with the highest absolute number of women who were married before the age of 18 - more than 20 million.

Data compiled by activist group Girls Not Brides and Pakistan's National Institute of Population Studies suggest nearly 1 in 5 women in Pakistan (18%) are married before the age of 18, and 4% before the age of 15.

Researchers and activists point to a range of factors contributing to Pakistan's soaring child marriage rate, including religion, long-entrenched societal and gender norms.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...aders.html