has been charged with five counts of lewd acts upon a child under the age of 14, 10 counts of lewd acts upon a child age 14 or 15, three counts of anal penetration by a foreign object and one count of oral copulation of a person under 18 years of age, and a sentencing enhancement allegation for substantial sexual conduct with a child.
Under civil commitment, a convicted sex offender who has served his sentence can be committed to a state mental hospital indefinitely if medical experts believe that person is likely to reoffend. The law exists in 19 other states.
The British courts agreed. Until this week.
Chorus has a record of abuse
Giese is the second All-American Boys Chorus official to be accused of child sexual abuse.
In February 2017, Al Jazeera’s 101 East produced this 25-minute documentary feature about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the Philippines.
It’s a great primer for anyone interested in learning more about the clergy sexual abuse crisis in this VERY Catholic country.
Here’s a peek at what you’ll see:
The Catholic Church in the Philippines is the strongest institution in the country, in many ways even stronger than the government.
Victims who come forward to report abuse are met with intimidation and fear. One girl was beaten by her family for reporting. Even a lawyer for priests—men who are his friends—says that these matters are best handled “behind closed doors.” The only priest who was ever convicted for abuse soon found his conviction overturned.
Sexually abusive priests are transferred from parish to parish, without church leaders informing local Catholics that the man leading Mass has admitted to molesting children.
According to Fr. Jaime Achacoso, the secretary for the Canon Law Society of the Philippines, in many dioceses, 1 in 5 priests have fathered children.
According to retired Archbishop Oscar Cruz (who is mentioned in Part One in this series and is not one to mince words), his office reviews up to sixty cases of priest misconduct at a time. This can include sexual abuse, priests fathering children, etc. But with 82 jurisdictions in the Philippines, each bishop uses discretion and only sends the worst cases to Cruz’s office. Otherwise, Cruz says, “I might drown.”
The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines put out guidelines to prevent the sexual abuse of minors in 2001. Those guidelines were rejected by the Vatican because they allowed for priests to be able to father one child. (I will write more about that in a later post.) The guidelines were approved without the provision, but the bishops didn’t know. Al Jazeera told them about it in the interview.
In the introduction to this series, I called the Philippines the “Holy Grail” of cover-up.
Simply put, it’s the place where priests accused of abuse can hang out and still be priests. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether or not the priests abused in the Philippines or elsewhere.
Lagarejos was caught in a police anti-trafficking sting operation and couldn’t be saved by his local bishop. The global media caught wind and jumped on the story. Locals were outraged. They couldn’t believe that a priest would engage in something so horrible.
What locals didn’t realize, however, was how abuse and cover-up have been rampant in the Philippines. Lagareros just made the mistake of getting busted.
And when I say abuse and cover-up are rampant, I mean RAMPANT!
But the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is no stranger to complaints of sexual misconduct, including child molestation, against priests.
Retired Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz, who is investigating 55-year-old Lagarejos following his arrest on July 28 for bringing a 13-year-old to a motel, has been leading the CBCP’s national tribunal that probes about 60 cases of clergy misconduct every year, including those against priests involved in money scandals, priests siring children, and pedophilic priests.
Last year, the tribunal looked into 14 cases of pedophilia, Cruz said in an interview months before the Lagarejos incident.
“As per experience, there are more cases of pedophilia. More of it,” he said.
Fourteen?! In one year?! In 2017?!
If you read the whole article, the archbishop goes on to “define” pedophilia as the sexual abuse of children 13 and under. So, there are even more cases if you include the older kids.
What is even worse is that the Archbishop seems to think this is no big deal next to trafficking.
Up next: It took decades, but when a teen from Los Angeles was raped by five priests from the Philippines, she fought for her daughter, her dignity, and blew open a scandal that had been simmering for years.
But I am going to pretend it’s quiet and spend some time talking about a place that has (FINALLY) been in the news recently.
For those of us who have been working in the movement to expose and prevent sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and other institutions, this tropical locale has been the “Holy Grail” of cover-up. However, because of its location, its foreign nation status, and its devout Catholicism, the Philippines has been a tough nut to crack.
Through the next series of posts, I am going to talk about some of the worst cases of sexual abuse and cover-up out of the Philippines, the bishops’ policies that allowed the abuses to happen, and why it’s taken so long for local media to be able to cover the scandal.
Fr. Justin Wachs was hiding out. After getting caught sexually harassing a parishioner in 2014—touching her without permission and leaving her suggestive notes— he quit his job as pastor in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Church officials thought the “geographic solution” would be best: get him as far away from Sioux Falls as possible. They even had a job for him: investigate allegations of sexual abuse.
Where did he end up? Guam and Hawaii. Locked in rooms with the victims of Archbishop Anthony Apuron … rooms where their attorney, David Lujan, was not allowed.
In fact, I believe that in the end, the decision will be to allow Apuron to live a life of “prayer and penance” on the mainland. And I am betting that the decision will be kept secret.
What does that mean? Whatever Apuron wants it to mean.
Remember: this is not a criminal proceeding. No one is going to drag him off in handcuffs. Most likely, he will collect his retirement and frolic around the mainland, untouched.
For Apuron’s Victims, Tribunal is No Joke
But there are a lot of people who take the Vatican process very seriously. Apuron’s victims testified in front of the tribunal—without their attorney present. That took a great deal of trust. A great deal of trust in their church. A great deal of trust in the process.
But what if that trust had been misplaced?
What if one of the men in the room had resigned from his parish for sexual harassment claims just three years ago?
[The victims] spent several hours each with five individuals, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, notary Father Justin Wachs, Father James Conn and two attorneys who represented Apuron …
Father Wachs told Apuron’s accusers the judges could find Apuron guilty, find him innocent or find there is not enough information allowing Apuron to appeal …
[The victims] were told the proceedings would not be shared publically, but the Vatican’s decision on Apuron would. Father Wachs assured them a decision is expected by “early summer.”
Well, we know that the “early summer” statement was not the first of Wachs’s truth-stretching.
And now we know that the Vatican takes the Canonical Trial about as seriously as I do.
