Free Republic

Victims of abuse within France’s Catholic Church welcomed a historic turning point Tuesday after a new report estimated that 330,000 children in France were sexually abused over the past 70 years, providing the country’s first accounting of the worldwide phenomenon. The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and an unknown number of other people involved in the church — wrongdoing that Catholic authorities covered up over decades in a “systemic manner,” according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.

Ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick — the former archbishop of Washington, DC, who was kicked out of the priesthood over sex abuse allegations — has been charged with molesting a teenage boy in Massachusetts in the 1970s. The charges filed Wednesday make McCarrick, 91, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic official in the US to face criminal raps in the clergy sex abuse scandal, according to the Boston Globe.The predatory priest is accused of groping a 16-year-old boy’s genitals on June 8, 1974, during the wedding reception of the teen’s brother at Wellesley College.McCarrick allegedly told the boy that he “needed to go to...