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Three more priests accused of sexually abusing children have been defrocked, bringing to 17 the number of priests in the Philadelphia Archdiocese who have been defrocked since the clergy abuse scandal broke four years ago.The Vatican defrocked Edward V. Avery, Stanley M. Gana and James E. McGuire over credible allegations of abuse, the archdiocese announced in a notice Thursday inside its weekly newspaper, the Catholic Standard & Times.None of the 17 priests faces criminal charges because of Pennsylvania's statute of limitations for prosecuting sex crimes. Avery, Gana and McGuire were named in a grand jury report released in September that...

CINCINNATI -- The Vatican has removed from the priesthood a man accused of sexually abusing girls at a Catholic high school where he was chaplain.Thomas Brunner, who resigned in 2003 as pastor of St. Patrick Catholic Church in Troy, is permanently stripped of all clerical functions and privileges, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati said Wednesday. Brunner had been on administrative leave, barred from functioning as a priest, because of the abuse accusations stemming from his time at Mount Notre Dame High in the late 1970s and 1980s.Pope Benedict XVI approved Brunner's petition for what the church calls "laicization." Brunner signed documents...

The Vatican has defrocked a local priest accused of sexually abusing an altar boy who later committed suicide, the Archdiocese of Seattle announced Monday.Gerald Moffat, 75, most recently a pastor at St. Hubert Parish in Langley on Whidbey Island, had been on administrative leave since July 2002, when molestation allegations against him first surfaced. Moffat continues to deny the accusations, according to his attorney Steven Moen, who represented Moffat in two lawsuits involving accusations of sex abuse.The archdiocese's announcement comes little more than three years after one of Moffat's alleged victims, Jeff Alfieri, committed suicide in the parking lot of...

San Diego police Sgt. Martha Sainz, who was accused of physically attacking a subordinate officer in front of children, has been notified she is being fired, police sources said. Sainz was served with papers about two weeks ago indicating that she is being terminated in connection with the incident at a camp for sixth-graders, said the sources, who declined to be named because personnel matters are confidential. The firing is not effective until her appeals within the department are exhausted. Sainz's attorney, Donovan Jacobs, declined to discuss the case or disclose whether his client plans to appeal. “We're not going...

SAN BERNARDINO (AP) - In a rare heresy trial, the local diocese has convicted and excommunicated a priest who joined a denomination that doubts papal infallibility and doesn't follow church teachings on homosexuality, abortion and ordination of women clergy. The Rev. Ned Reidy received a 30-page letter last week notifying him that a three-priest tribunal of the Diocese of San Bernardino had found him guilty of heresy and schism and that his authority to conduct priestly functions was revoked. The one-day trial was held Dec. 13. Reidy said he would not appeal the decision because he has not considered himself...

A 73-year-old Roman Catholic priest was in hiding last night after it was disclosed that he had a child by his 31-year-old mistress. Fr Maurice "Mossy" Dillane, described as youthful, with a golf handicap of six, was a popular priest admired for his charisma, community work and liberal views. But parishioners were shocked to learn that he had fallen in love with a woman 42 years his junior and had recently fathered a son. Fr Dillane has resigned from his duties as curate at the Woodford-Looscaun parish in Co Galway as a result of the birth of the baby boy...

LOS ANGELES -- A rare heresy trial was held Tuesday for a Roman Catholic priest who joined a denomination that doesn't accept papal infallibility and has ordained women clergy. The Rev. Ned Reidy did not attend the one-day closed trial, which was conducted by three priests at the Diocese of San Bernardino. Reidy, 69, called the trial "medieval" and contends it has no authority because he stopped being a Roman Catholic in 1999. Rev. Howard Lincoln, spokesman for the diocese, said Reidy was automatically excommunicated when he went to another denomination, but under church law he remains a Roman Catholic...

A NEW South Wales priest excommunicated from the Catholic Church has been stripped of his holy orders and responsibilities by the Pope because of his association with William Kamm's religious sect. Kamm, known to his followers as The Little Pebble, was last month jailed for at least three-and-a-half years for indecently assaulting a then 15-year-old member of his outlawed Order of St Charbel, at Cambewarra, near Nowra on the south coast. Malcolm Broussard, who has been with the sect for 20 years, is a self-proclaimed bishop and major superior residing in the Cambewarra community known as Gethsemene. One of Kamm's...

The Vatican has decided that two local priests accused of child sexual abuse — the Revs. George Barry Ashwell and David P. Jaeger — will no longer serve as priests, the Seattle Roman Catholic Archdiocese announced Monday.The Vatican defrocked Ashwell, 62, who served in several local parishes, including more than two decades as pastor of St. Augustine Church in Oak Harbor. Defrocking — or, in church terms, "forcible laicization" — is the most severe church penalty available in the abuse cases that have come to light nationwide since 2002.The Vatican granted Jaeger's request to leave the priesthood — a "voluntary...

CHAPEL HILL -- The dismissal of a writer from a student newspaper over a controversial column usually would stir a tempest only on campus. But not at UNC-Chapel Hill, a frequent battleground in the national culture wars. In the first sentence of her opinion column Tuesday in The Daily Tar Heel, Jillian Bandes wrote: "I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport." Referring to conservative writer Ann Coulter's comment that if she ever wanted physical intimacy, she would walk through airport security, Bandes wrote: "I want Arabs to get...

If two suspended Catholic priests in the Madison Diocese are found guilty of sexual abuse in trials conducted by the church, they could join the growing ranks of defrocked predators sent into the community with no supervision. At a time of heightened national concern about the need to track sex offenders, the Catholic Church in America has begun cutting loose dozens - perhaps hundreds - of priests who have molested children. The church had already suspended the clerics after finding the child-abuse allegations against them to be credible. Now, as it defrocks them, expelling them from the priesthood, the men...

Defrocked molesters fall below the radar At a time of heightened national concern about the need to track sex offenders, the Catholic Church in America has begun cutting loose dozens - perhaps hundreds - of priests who have molested children. The church had already suspended the clerics after finding the child-abuse allegations against them to be credible. Now, as it defrocks them, expelling them from the priesthood, the men are quietly reentering civilian life with only the barest notice to the public, and no ongoing oversight by the church. Nor is law enforcement certain to be watching them.

The Vatican has defrocked the priest who was the first in Massachusetts convicted of sexual abuse more than two decades ago, the Boston Archdiocese said Friday.In 1984, Eugene O'Sullivan was sentenced to probation after he admitted sodomizing a 13-year-old altar boy. A condition of his sentence was that he not be allowed to work with children.But O'Sullivan was later assigned to four New Jersey parishes. He was recalled to Boston in 1992 after church officials learned of another allegation against him dating to his time in Massachusetts.The Vatican's action to defrock O'Sullivan means he may no longer function as a...

The Vatican has defrocked six priests from the Archdiocese of New York — including one who paid for sex with an underage boy and another who was convicted of sodomizing a drunken teen, officials said yesterday. All the men lost their pensions and will not be allowed to perform priestly duties and were stripped of their collars by the Roman Catholic Church following allegations of sexual abuse. A seventh priest, who was also accused of sexual abuse, Rev. Alfred Gallant, of Orange County, was allowed to retain his title of priest and keep his pension, but not allowed to perform...

PHILADELPHIA -- Seven more priests removed from their duties by the Philadelphia Archdiocese in recent years for allegedly abusing minors have been defrocked by the Vatican, the archdiocese announced Thursday.Among them, the priests had served in about 35 parishes and five Catholic high schools across the Philadelphia region over the past four decades.The seven had been removed from their ministerial duties in the archdiocese years ago. The Vatican's decision to laicize, or permanently remove them, is the most serious action the Roman Catholic Church can take against a priest. They are barred from ever administering sacraments or serving as priests...

(Boston - AP) — The Vatican has defrocked six priests from the Boston archdiocese who were accused of sexually abusing children.They include John Connell, Denis Conte, Peter Frost, John Hanlon, Richard Matte and Paul David White.The men may no longer act as priests, except to offer absolution to the dying.They are also no longer part of the archdiocese and are cut off from any financial support.Connell was accused in a civil suit of molesting a twelve-year-old boy while spending a week with him in a Florida hotel during the mid 1970's.In 1994, the archdiocese removed him as chaplain at St....

MANCHESTER — Ronald E. Corriveau, accused of molesting a teenage boy in Manchester in 1982 and possessing Internet pornography three years ago, is the first Roman Catholic diocesan priest in New Hampshire to be defrocked since the clergy sexual abuse scandal became public in early 2002, the diocese announced yesterday. The late Pope John Paul II made the decision to laicize Corriveau, 60, on March 21, less than two weeks before the Pontiff's death. "By virtue of this decree, Ronald Corriveau is no longer bound to the obligations of the sacred priesthood, has no faculties to act as a priest...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Federal prosecutors are appealing a judge's dismissal of a Chinese-American business woman accused of copying classified intelligence documents. Katrina Leung, 60, is accused of taking documents from the briefcase of her longtime FBI handler, James J. Smith, with whom she was having an affair. Prosecutors accused Leung of secretly working for the Chinese government but never charged her with giving the documents to a foreign government. In January, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper dismissed the case, saying prosecutors engaged in misconduct by keeping Smith from communicating with Leung and her attorneys. A notice of appeal was...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Attorneys for Katrina Leung, who was accused of using her romantic ties with a retired FBI agent to gain access to classified documents, asked a federal judge Wednesday to reject the government's bid to reinstate the case. U.S. District Judge Florence Marie Cooper dismissed all charges against Leung last month, saying prosecutors deliberately tried to keep defense attorneys from preparing properly for trial. A motion asking the judge to reconsider was filed this month. On Wednesday, Leung's attorneys submitted a 35-page response that called the motion "procedurally impermissible and substantively wrong." "The court's dismissal order was...

NEW YORK WashingtonPost.com is no longer running the cartoons of hard-hitting liberal Ted Rall. Rall said he thinks the site dropped his work because of a Nov. 4 cartoon he did showing a drooling, mentally handicapped student taking over a classroom. "The idea was to draw an analogy to the electorate -- in essence, the idiots are now running the country," he told E&P. "That cartoon certainly drew a significant amount of negative comment from our users," said WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Doug Feaver when contacted by E&P. But he added that the decision to drop Rall was a "cumulative" one...