Priest who led diocesan Office of Child Protection charged in abuse case (CNS) A retired priest of the Diocese of Arlington, who for seven years oversaw the diocese’s program on protecting minors from clerical sexual abuse, was indicted shortly before Christmas on two counts of sexually abusing a minor. A trial is scheduled next October for Father Terry Specht, 68, who now lives in Donegal, Pennsylvania. The priest was the director of the diocese’s Office of Child Protection from 2004-2011…
Pope: Think of the Holy Family fleeing Herod and pray for migrants (CNS) Meditating on the scene of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous rage, Christians cannot close their eyes to the fact that too many people in the world today also feel forced to flee their homelands, Pope Francis said. “Herod is a symbol of many tyrants of yesterday and today; for these tyrants, people don’t matter, power matters, and if they need space or power, they eliminate people, and this is happening today. We don’t have to go to ancient history” to find such examples, the pope said Dec. 29 at his weekly general audience…
‘I was sexually abused by a priest. Then I became a priest’ (Huffington Post) While I am certainly not the only victim of a priest’s abuse, I also belong to a smaller subset within that community. In the spring of 1993, seven years after the abuse ended, I was ordained a Catholic priest myself…
Celebrating Christmas in Pakistan (UCANews) Speaking for and from Pakistan, non-Muslim citizens are permitted to take a couple of days off for their festivals. Christians are a tiny minority in Pakistan forming roughly 1.5 percent of some 200 million predominantly Muslim people. We are lucky because Dec. 25 is a public holiday as it is the birthday of the nation’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, also referred to as Quaid-e-Azam or the Great Leader. The student community gets a longer winter break with schools and colleges closing on Dec. 23-24 until Jan. 2-3…
