Australia will erect a statue of a homegrown sprinter who backed two Americans in their famed Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, with authorities describing the honour as "seriously overdue".
Peter Norman, silver medallist in the 200m in Mexico City, stood on the podium alongside US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who both put a black-gloved fist in the air in a civil rights protest.
The gesture caused outrage at the time but Norman quietly showed his solidarity with the Americans by wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge.
Norman had spoken to the pair before the medal ceremony and agreed to wear the badge of the OPHR, a US civil rights organisation consisting of mainly black amateur athletes that campaigned to eradicate racism from sport.
As a result, he was frozen out of future Games selection and airbrushed from Australian Olympic history until recently.
Athletics Australia said Norman's actions were now recognised as "one of Australian sports' most iconic moments and a special moment in Olympic history".
It said a bronze statue of Norman, jointly funded with the Victoria state government, would be erected outside the Lakeside Stadium in Melbourne.
"Initiatives to honour Peter Norman, such as this statue, are seriously overdue," Athletics Australia president Mark Arbib said.
EPU/AFP/File / -The Black Power salute caused outrage at the time, but Peter Norman quietly showed his solidarity with the Americans by wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge
He said Australia would also recognise October 9, the date of Norman's funeral in 2006, as Peter Norman Day.
USA Track & Field has marked the date since 2006 and Norman's actions were appreciated in America far more swiftly than in his homeland.
Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at Norman's funeral, with Carlos urging Australians to "go and tell your kids the story of Peter Norman".
When the US Olympic Committee heard that the Australians had not invited Norman to Sydney 2000 celebrations, they invited him as part of their delegation.
Norman's daughter Janita said the family had immense pride in his stance.
"That pride hasn't diminished with the passage of time, so to accept this statue 50 years on has only added to that feeling," she said.
The Australian Olympic Committee awarded Norman a posthumous Order of Merit in June this year
Pope Francis on Wednesday compared having an abortion to “hiring a “hit man” to eliminate a problematic person, in comments sure to be welcomed by conservative Catholics who have accused the pontiff of not speaking out enough on “cultural war” issues.
Abortion is a raging political battle in a number of countries, including the United States, where many conservatives hope the Supreme Court will eventually overturn the landmark 1973 ruling known as Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion.
Francis made his off-the-cuff comments on abortion, some of his toughest to date, in an address to tens of thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly general audience.
The pope denounced what he called the contradiction of allowing “the suppression of human life in the mother’s womb in the name of safeguarding other rights”.
“But how can an act that suppresses an innocent and helpless life that is germinating be therapeutic, civilized or even simply human?” he said.
“I ask you: ‘Is it right to ‘take out’ a human life to solve a problem? What do you think? Is it right? Is it right or not?” he said in unprepared remarks.
Many in the crowd shouted “No”.
“Is it right to hire a hit man to solve a problem? You cannot, it is not right to kill a human being, regardless of how small it is, to solve a problem. It is like hiring a hit man to solve a problem,” he said.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that life begins at the moment of conception and ends at the moment of natural death. It also forbids euthanasia but says that a family or a patient can decide to stop using extraordinary means to keep people alive.
Shortly after becoming pope in March 2013, Francis appeared to downplay the importance of “cultural war” issues such as abortion, contraception and gay marriage, saying in an interview the Church had become “obsessed” with them.
“It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” he said in that interview, adding that the Church’s stand on them was very clear and that it also had to address social issues such as poverty, injustice and immigration.
Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Gareth Jones
Amazon.com Inc’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.
The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.
Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.
“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”
But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.
That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.
In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.
Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.
The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.
Amazon declined to comment on the recruiting engine or its challenges, but the company says it is committed to workplace diversity and equality.
The company’s experiment, which Reuters is first to report, offers a case study in the limitations of machine learning. It also serves as a lesson to the growing list of large companies including Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc that are looking to automate portions of the hiring process.
Some 55 percent of U.S. human resources managers said artificial intelligence, or AI, would be a regular part of their work within the next five years, according to a 2017 survey by talent software firm CareerBuilder.
Employers have long dreamed of harnessing technology to widen the hiring net and reduce reliance on subjective opinions of human recruiters. But computer scientists such as Nihar Shah, who teaches machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, say there is still much work to do.
“How to ensure that the algorithm is fair, how to make sure the algorithm is really interpretable and explainable - that’s still quite far off,” he said.
MASCULINE LANGUAGE
Amazon’s experiment began at a pivotal moment for the world’s largest online retailer. Machine learning was gaining traction in the technology world, thanks to a surge in low-cost computing power. And Amazon’s Human Resources department was about to embark on a hiring spree: Since June 2015, the company’s global headcount has more than tripled to 575,700 workers, regulatory filings show.
So it set up a team in Amazon’s Edinburgh engineering hub that grew to around a dozen people. Their goal was to develop AI that could rapidly crawl the web and spot candidates worth recruiting, the people familiar with the matter said.
The group created 500 computer models focused on specific job functions and locations. They taught each to recognize some 50,000 terms that showed up on past candidates’ resumes. The algorithms learned to assign little significance to skills that were common across IT applicants, such as the ability to write various computer codes, the people said.
Instead, the technology favored candidates who described themselves using verbs more commonly found on male engineers’ resumes, such as “executed” and “captured,” one person said.
Gender bias was not the only issue. Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs, the people said. With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.
THE PROBLEM, OR THE CURE?
Other companies are forging ahead, underscoring the eagerness of employers to harness AI for hiring.
Kevin Parker, chief executive of HireVue, a startup near Salt Lake City, said automation is helping firms look beyond the same recruiting networks upon which they have long relied. His firm analyzes candidates’ speech and facial expressions in video interviews to reduce reliance on resumes.
“You weren’t going back to the same old places; you weren’t going back to just Ivy League schools,” Parker said. His company’s customers include Unilever PLC and Hilton.
Goldman Sachs has created its own resume analysis tool that tries to match candidates with the division where they would be the “best fit,” the company said.
Microsoft Corp’s LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, has gone further. It offers employers algorithmic rankings of candidates based on their fit for job postings on its site.
Still, John Jersin, vice president of LinkedIn Talent Solutions, said the service is not a replacement for traditional recruiters.
“I certainly would not trust any AI system today to make a hiring decision on its own,” he said. “The technology is just not ready yet.”
Some activists say they are concerned about transparency in AI. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently challenging a law that allows criminal prosecution of researchers and journalists who test hiring websites’ algorithms for discrimination.
“We are increasingly focusing on algorithmic fairness as an issue,” said Rachel Goodman, a staff attorney with the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU.
Still, Goodman and other critics of AI acknowledged it could be exceedingly difficult to sue an employer over automated hiring: Job candidates might never know it was being used.
As for Amazon, the company managed to salvage some of what it learned from its failed AI experiment. It now uses a “much-watered down version” of the recruiting engine to help with some rudimentary chores, including culling duplicate candidate profiles from databases, one of the people familiar with the project said.
Another said a new team in Edinburgh has been formed to give automated employment screening another try, this time with a focus on diversity.
Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Marla Dickerson
The capital of China’s Xinjiang region, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority, has launched a campaign against halal products to stop Islam penetrating secular life and fueling “extremism”.
In a meeting on Monday, the Communist Party leaders of Urumqi led cadres to swear an oath to “fight a decisive battle against ‘pan-halalization’,” according to a notice posed on the city’s official WeChat account.
Everyday halal products, like food and toothpaste, must be produced according to Islamic law.
China has been subject to heavy criticism from rights groups and foreign governments amid reports of a punitive crackdown that has seen the detention of as many as 1 million mostly Muslim ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Beijing has denied it is systematically violating the rights of Xinjiang’s Muslims, saying it is only cracking down on extremism and “splittism” in the region.
The official Global Times said on Wednesday that the “demand that things be halal which cannot really be halal” was fuelling hostility toward religion and allowing Islam to penetrate secular life.
As part of the anti-halal campaign, Ilshat Osman, Urumqi’s ethnically Uighur head prosecutor, penned an essay entitled: “Friend, you do not need to find a halal restaurant specially for me”.
According to the WeChat post government employees should not have any diet problems and work canteens would be changed so that officials could try all kinds of cuisine.
The Urumqi Communist Party leaders also said they would require government officials and party members to firmly believe in Marxism-Leninism, and not religion, and to speak standard Mandarin Chinese in public.
Chinese citizens are theoretically free to practice any religion, but they have been subject to increasing levels of surveillance as the government tries to bring religious worship under stricter state control.
The Communist Party in August issued a revised set of regulations governing its members behavior, threatening punishments or expulsion for anyone who clung to religious beliefs.
Reporting by David Stanway and Christian Shepherd; Editing by Michael Perry
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would be held after U.S. congressional elections on Nov. 6.
Speaking to reporters as he flew to Iowa for a political rally, Trump said: “It’ll be after the midterms. I just can’t leave now.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that plans were being made for his second summit with Kim and that he thought “incredible” progress had been made in U.S. talks with the long-isolated North Asian country.
He said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had very good talks with Kim over the weekend and that three or four locations were being considered.
Pompeo echoed Trump’s comments when he spoke briefly to reporters during a Tuesday afternoon visit to the White House.
“While there’s still a long way to go and much work to do, we can now see a path where we will achieve (our) ultimate goal, which is the full and final verified denuclearization of North Korea,” he said.
Trump and Kim held a historic first summit in Singapore on June 12 at which Kim pledged to work toward denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. His actions have fallen short, however, of Washington’s demands for a complete inventory of its weapons and facilities and irreversible steps to give up its nuclear arsenal, which could threaten the United States.
‘NO ROCKETS FLYING’
Still, Trump was upbeat on progress so far.
“You got no rockets flying, you have no missiles flying, you have no nuclear testing,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “We’ve made incredible progress - beyond incredible.
“But I have agreed to meet,” he said. “We have a very good relationship with Chairman Kim. I like him, he likes me, the relationship is good.”
Pompeo said on Monday the two sides were “pretty close” to agreeing on details for a second summit.
He added that Kim had said he was ready to allow international inspectors into North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear testing site and the Sohae missile engine test facility as soon as the United States and North Korea agreed on logistics.
But experts questioned what Pompeo achieved on Sunday on his fourth visit to Pyongyang this year. They said the North Korean leader appeared simply to be repackaging and dragging out past pledges.
Trump noted that the United States had not lifted the “very big sanctions” it has imposed on Pyongyang.
“I’d love to remove them, but we have to get something for doing it,” Trump said.
North Korea is very interested in reaching some sort of agreement on denuclearization so that it can grow economically with the benefit of the foreign investment closed to it now, Trump said.
The U.N. World Food Program said on Tuesday that the supply of food remained precarious in North Korea, where one in five children is stunted by malnutrition. More than 10 million North Koreans, nearly 40 percent of the population, are undernourished and need humanitarian aid, it said.
“I will tell you they’re calling, wanting to go there and wanting to invest,” Trump said. “At some point, when Chairman Kim makes that decision, I think he’s going to unleash something that’s going to be spectacular, really spectacular.
“And I think he knows it and I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re having very successful conversations.”
Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Lisa Lambert; Editing by James Dalgleish and Peter Cooney
A California man who was accused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office of operating an online auction service that trafficked in stolen identities will be sentenced on Wednesday in a federal district court.
Richard Pinedo, who pleaded guilty to one count of identity fraud in February, could face between 12 to 18 months in prison and a fine of $5,500 to $55,000, according to U.S. sentencing guidelines.
The indictment against the Russians makes no mention of Pinedo by name. However, a source familiar with the case told Reuters he is referred in the charging documents as the person who helped the Russian conspirators launder money, as well as purchase Facebook ads and pay for rally supplies, through PayPal Holdings Inc.
The criminal charge against Pinedo was announced in February by Mueller’s office at the same time it unveiled an indictment against 13 Russians and three Russian companies on charges they adopted fake online personas to push divisive messages, traveled to the United States to collect intelligence and staged political rallies.
Mueller’s investigation has issued several indictments and accepted guilty pleas as it investigates Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Pinedo’s attorney, Jeremy Lessem, has said his client had no knowledge of the identities or the motivations of those who purchased the information he sold.
According to the indictment against the 13 Russians, the defendants in 2016 used Social Security numbers and birth dates of real U.S. people to open PayPal accounts and to create fake drivers licenses and open social media accounts.
The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Russia. However, one of the Russian companies charged in the indictment - Concord Management and Consulting LLC - has hired American attorneys to fight the charges.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated his threat to slap tariffs on an additional $267 billion of Chinese imports if Beijing retaliates for the recent levies and other measures the United States has imposed in an escalating trade war between the economic giants.
Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, also said China is not ready to reach a deal on trade.
“China wants to make a deal, and I say they’re not ready yet,” Trump said. “I just say they’re not ready yet. And we’ve canceled a couple of meetings because I say they’re not ready to make a deal.”
When asked whether he was ready to levy new taxes in case of retaliation from China, Trump said, “sure, absolutely.”
He added that the current U.S. trade imbalance with China means “they’ve already retaliated.”
Last month Trump imposed tariffs on nearly $200 billion of Chinese imports and then threatened more levies if China retaliated. China then hit back with tariffs on about $60 billion of U.S. imports.
Citing the growing trade war, the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday cut its global economic growth forecasts for 2018 and 2019.
Asked about Trump’s remarks at a regular news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said a trade war was bad for the global economy and not in the interests of either country.
“But China’s resolution to protect its own legitimate interests is unwavering. No one should have any illusions about this,” Lu said.
The United States wants to pressure China to make sweeping changes to its trade, technology transfer and high-tech industrial subsidy practices.
Trump’s latest comments underline a threat by Washington that it may ultimately impose tariffs on more than $500 billion worth of Chinese goods - nearly the total amount of U.S. imports from China last year.
Additional reporting by Christian Shepherd in BEIJING; Editing by Bill Berkrot & Shri Navaratnam
A Northern Irish bakery’s refusal to bake a cake iced with a pro-gay slogan on account of its owners’ Christian beliefs was not discriminatory, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.
Ashers Baking in Belfast was found guilty of discrimination in 2015 for refusing to make a cake for a customer bearing the words “Support Gay Marriage” and a picture of characters Bert and Ernie from the television show Sesame Street.
It failed in an appeal to the local courts in 2016 but the Supreme Court, the UK’s highest judicial body, overturned that decision, saying the bakers’ objection was to the message on the cake, not to any personal characteristics of the messenger, or anyone with whom he was associated.
The bakery, which initially accepted the order from Gareth Lee, a gay rights activist, but later contacted him to cancel it and refund his money, would have refused to make such a cake for any customer irrespective of their sexual orientation, the court said.
“This conclusion is not in anyway to diminish the need to protect gay people and people who support gay marriage,” said Brenda Hale, President of the Supreme Court.
“It is deeply humiliating and an affront to human dignity to deny someone the service because of that person’s race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or belief but that is not what happened in this case.”
Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom where same-sex marriage is not allowed.
The socially conservative Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the province’s largest political party that also props up Britain’s minority government, has blocked attempts to legalize gay marriage. Party leader, Arlene Foster, retweeted news of the judgment as soon as it was handed down.
Northern Ireland’s Equality Commission, which backed Lee’s case, said it was disappointed with the judgment and the implications that the beliefs of business owners may take precedence over a customer’s equality rights.
“There is a concern that this judgment may raise uncertainty about the application of equality law in the commercial sphere, both about what businesses can do and what customers may expect,” it said in a statement.
Reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin and Amanda Ferguson in Belfast; editing by Michael Holden
Cybersecurity expert Malcolm Nance appeared on MSNBC' "Hardball" on Tuesday to dissect the new report that former Donald Trump deputy campaign manager Rick Gates sought proposals from an Israeli company to manipulate social media during the 2016 election season.
Nance is the author of the 2018 book, The Plot to Destroy Democracy. His book The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election was published in September 2016, just before the election.
Host Chris Hayes noted the proposal read like "a smaller scale version of the social media campaign that Russia ultimately carried out to benefit Trump and disparage Hillary Clinton. Thirteen Russians were indicted last February for that effort, which included the fraudulent use of fictitious online personas."
"If you look at the timeline, this conversation took place in March 2016," Nance noted. "This is just about the exact same time that the Democratic National Committee was discovering that their servers had been hacked into, that George Papadopoulos was out meeting with suspected members of Russian intelligence, and the rumor that Hillary Clinton's emails were in the possession of the Kremlin, were being floated all around at this time."
"I think that there were multiple teams," he concluded. "We've already seen evidence that there were multiple teams in the Trump camp, and their sphere, that had been looking for information related to Hillary's emails, related to psychological warfare and influence warfare operations and what the Russians and Israelis call 'perception management techniques' to find and manipulate voters."
"What do you think, how does it fit into the jigsaw puzzle of Russian collusion -- Trump/Russian collusion?" Matthews asked of the Israeli effort.
Nance explained that from the intelligence perspective, the question would be what motivated Gates' actions.
"That means he had a conversation with someone -- or heard a directive from someone -- to go out and find this information," he predicted.
"What's interesting is Trump had already had Cambridge Analytica for over a year, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon were on the board of the company, already carrying out these operations," he reminded. "Which means there was something more -- specific -- they wanted and this side group was out to try to help them acquire that information."
"Another key point to this is, Robert Mueller went to Israeli with Israeli authorities and they tore Psy-Group apart," he noted. "They interviewed everybody, went there, seized computers and documents."
"This group is a black hole in the story of which we can only learn more and see whether they were actually tied to Moscow in some way or just an independent operation that trump funded," he added.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would consider selecting Goldman Sachs executive and former White House adviser Dina Powell as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he shot down speculation he would tap his daughter Ivanka for the post.
Trump spoke to reporters at the White House before departing for an event in Iowa, hours after announcing that current U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley would step down at the end of the year. He said Haley would help him make the final pick for her replacement.
Powell served in the first year of the Trump administration as the Deputy National Security Adviser for strategy, and was a key player in diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. She returned to Goldman Sachs, where she worked for more than a decade, earlier this year. She also was a high-ranking official in the State Department of the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, according to the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is a senior fellow.
Speculation that Ivanka Trump would take on the post mounted after Haley praised her and her husband, Jared Kushner, in discussing her resignation in the Oval Office on Tuesday morning. But Trump told reporters at the White House before embarking on Marine One that, while Ivanka would be incredible in the role, he would face accusations of nepotism if he selected her.
Reporting by Jeff Mason; Writing by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Jonathan Oatis
Walmart Inc’s Canadian unit said on Tuesday it is exploring the possibility of selling cannabis-based products, but has no immediate plans to get into the business.
The company’s shares rose 2.1 percent to $96.67 in late morning trading.
Walmart is the first major retailer to show an interest in being part of Canada’s burgeoning marijuana industry, as other big U.S. companies, mainly in the alcohol and beverage industries, begin to seriously consider entering the market for cannabis-infused products.
Last month Coca-Cola Co said it was closely watching the marijuana drinks market for a possible entry, while Corona beer maker Constellation Brands has invested more than $4 billion in cannabis producer Canopy Growth.
“As we would for any new industry, Walmart Canada has done some preliminary fact-finding on this issue, but we do not have plans to carry CBD products at this time,” Walmart spokeswoman Diane Medeiros told Reuters.
Cannabidiol or CBD is the non-psychoactive chemical found in marijuana and does not cause intoxication.
Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Shailesh Kuber
On Tuesday, an arsonist reportedly hit the offices of the Internet Research Agency, the Putin-tied Russian troll factory that has been charged by Robert Mueller with meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
According to the Moscow Times and video posted by the troll farm, "an unknown suspect" broke into the first floor of the Russian intelligence operation "and threw a Molotov cocktail inside" at around 3 a.m. on Tuesday.
One of the media sites run by the trolls, Federal News Agency, posted surveillance footage of the incident.
“I believe this is tied to FAN’s activities,” operative Yevgeny Zubarev said. “We’re most often attacked online, but these types of attacks have already taken place offline.”
American authorities say the firm is directed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s “cook.” He has been indicted on charges of defrauding the U.S. government by interfering with its political process.
In the memory of many Americans, the only comparable scandal was in Massachusetts, where, in 2002, the Boston Globe published more than 600 articles about abuses under the administration of Cardinal Bernard Law. That investigation was immortalized in the 2015 award-winning film, “Spotlight.”
What many Americans don’t remember, however, are other similar scandals, some even more dramatic and national in scope.
Doubling down on secrecy
The Vatican has known about priestly pedophilia for many decades.
While the problem of priestly pedophilia might be centuries old, the modern paper trail began only after World War II, when “treatment centers” appeared for rehabilitating abusive priests. Instead of increased transparency, bishops, at the same time, developed methods for denying and hiding allegations of child sexual abuse.
During the 1950s and 1960s, bishops from around the U.S. began referring abusive priests to church-run medical centers, so that they could receive evaluation and care without disclosing their crimes to independent clinicians.
Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, who began his ministry in Boston and Quebec, was among those who advocated prayer over medicine. In 1947, Fitzgerald moved to New Mexico and founded the Servants of the Paraclete, a new order of Catholic priests devoted to healing deviant clergy. His belief in faith healing reflected a vocal minority of Catholic leaders who still viewed psychology as a threat to Christian faith.
Fitzgerald based the Paracletes in New Mexico. From 1947 to 1995, the state became a dumping ground for pedophile priests. As Kathleen Holscher, chair of Roman Catholic studies at the University of New Mexico, has observed, this practice forced New Mexico’s parishes to absorb, in effect, abusive priests from across the country.
Other priests sent to the Paracletes were returned back into ministry in their home diocese, reassigned to new parishes that had no way of knowing about their abusive past.
This system was sustained, in part, by the fact that few diocesan personnel files recorded past accusations by children and parents. As Richard Sipe, a psychologist who worked at a similar Catholic treatment center later revealed, bishops generally masked past accusations by instead recording code words like “tickling,” “wrestling” or “entangled friendship” in personnel files.
By 1956, Fitzgerald became convinced that pedophilia could not be treated, even as he continued to believe that prayers could cure other illnesses, such as alcoholism. He petitioned U.S. bishops to stop sending him their child abusers, advocating instead for firing abusive priests and permanently removing them from ministry.
Fitzgerald eventually appealed directly to the Vatican, and met with Pope Paul VI to discuss the problem in 1963.
These included Fr. Thomas Doyle, a nonparish priest who specialized in Roman Catholicism’s internal laws; Fr. Michael Petersen, a trained psychiatrist who believed that priests with abusive disorders should be treated medically; and Roy Mouton, a civil attorney who represented one of the church’s most notorious pedophile priests.
Together, they authored a 92-page report and submitted it for presentation at the 1985 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Church’s apparatus for controlling and governing American priests.
The document estimated that American bishops should plan to be sued for at least US$1 billion, and up to $10 billion, over the following decades.
In response, Doyle mailed all 92 pages, along with an executive summary, to every diocese in the United States. Yet there is no evidence that any bishops headed the report’s warnings.
1992: The nation’s first scandal
During the 1980s, victims began to speak out against the church’s systemic attempts to mask the scope of the crisis. In 1984, survivors of Fr. Gilbert Gauthe refused to be silenced by hush money, instead choosing the painful path of initiating public lawsuits in Louisiana. Gauthe ultimately confessed to abusing 37 children.
Representative of SNAP, Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests, talk to the media during a press conference in Rome, in 2010.
As these stories became public, more and more victims began to bring lawsuits against the Church. In Chicago, the nation’s first two clergy abuse survivor organizations, Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse Linkup (LINKUP) and the Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), were created in 1987.
In 1992, survivor Frank Fitzpatrick’s public allegations led to revelations that Fr. James Porter had abused more than 100 other children in Massachusetts. Widespread shock followed at the time as well as after Fitzpatrick’s appearance on ABC’s “Primetime Live,” when news anchor Diane Sawyer interviewed Fitzpatrick and 30 other Porter victims.
In spite of internal pledges to reform their culture of covering up abuses, the Pennsylvania grand jury report demonstrates that the Church’s de facto policy remains unchanged since the 1950s: Instead of reporting rape and sexual abuse to secular authorities, bishops instead continue to transfer predatory priests from one unsuspecting parish to the next.
Victims with no hope of justice
The issue of clergy sex abuse has also unleashed broader questions about justice and faith: Can courtrooms repair souls? How do survivors continue to pray and attend Mass?
As a scholar who studies communities of clergy abuse victims, I have asked Catholics to share their thoughts about the current crisis. Many of them tell me that “at least” Boston’s Cardinal Law “went to jail.” That leads to an awkward moment when I have to refresh their memory.
Cardinal Law was neither indicted nor arrested. Instead, Pope John Paul II transferred Law to run one of the Vatican’s most cherished properties, the Basilica of Saint Mary, essentially rewarding Law for his deft cover-up of the abuses in Boston.
Victims of clergy sexual abuse or their family members react after the release of the report by Pennsylvania grand jury.
In fact, no American bishops or cardinals have ever been jailed for their role in covering up and enabling child sexual abuse. Civil settlements have held the Church accountable only financially. A combination of political complacency and expired statutes of limitations has prevented most survivors from obtaining real justice.
Outraged by this lack of justice, survivors urged the International Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate the Vatican for crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court declined, citing the fact that many of the alleged crimes occurred before the court was formed, and were thus beyond the scope of the court’s “temporal jurisdiction.”
To date, the highest-ranking priest tried in an American court is Philadelphia’s Monsignor William Lynn, who was charged with conspiracy and two counts of endangering children. His 2012 conviction for one count of endangerment was vacated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2016. He now awaits an unscheduled retrial.
“There have been other reports about child sexual abuse within the Catholic church… For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.”
EPU/AFP/File / -The Black Power salute caused outrage at the time, but Peter Norman quietly showed his solidarity with the Americans by wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge
