Accountability

This is the second of two-part series looking at clergy sex abuse in Poland. Read part one here.

WARSAW, POLAND -- When Ewa Orlowska, a mother of nine, decided to confront her local priest for sexually abusing her as a child, she had little idea what was to follow. The priest, Msgr. Michal Moskwa, had been the parish pastor for three decades in the southern town of Tylawa, and Ewa had been just one of his victims. But when she’d told her mother about the abuse, her mother beat her and ordered her to apologize.

When the case came to light in 2001, Orlowska reluctantly agreed to give a statement to prosecutors. “I thought: When I stand before God and he asks me what I did for those other defenseless children, still threatened by the priest’s pedophile tendencies, what would I say?” she remembers. “Would I say I lacked courage, hadn’t the strength, was afraid of my own shadow?”

Dead Catholics have a vested interest in reducing settlements to clergy abuse survivors in Milwaukee, thanks to a shift of $55.6 million on the church balance sheets by then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan in 2008.

Dolan’s move in the twilight of his seven-year tenure in Milwaukee has emerged as a major issue in the archdiocese’s bankruptcy, which his successor, Archbishop Jerome Listecki, filed last February. One expert who has done extensive research on diocesan financial statements has described the move as “a shell game.”

SAN FRANCISCO -- A major case that could reopen the statute of limitations window for sex abuse victims to file third-party claims is now before the California Supreme Court.

Should the court rule in favor of six brothers who say they were sexually abused by a priest of the Oakland diocese decades ago but only recently linked the abuse to their psychological difficulties, the church in California could see a wave of new clergy abuse lawsuits.

Bartek Obloj's story defies description.

Before reaching his 14th birthday, Obloj hanged himself in 2007, leaving a note that his parish priest had molested him. (See: Polish church faces demands to confront sex abuse.)

The accused priest, Fr. Stanislaw Kaszowski, was moved to a new parish -- but not before personally celebrating Obloj's funeral Mass. Kaszowski continues in ministry and refuses to testify in court.