MANILA (UCAN): An American priest, Father Kenneth Bernard Hendricks, was arrested on December 5 by Philippine police and immigration officials and United States (US) Homeland Security agents for allegedly sexually abusing dozens of boys over the last four decades.
 
The 78-year-old priest was detained inside the Catholic church in Naval, a town in Biliran province, in the Eastern Visayas region of the central Philippines.
 

VATICAN (CNS): Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who is president of a board of review handling abuse cases within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said on September 14 that Pope Francis’ convoking a meeing of the heads of every Catholic bishops’ conference in the world sends “a very strong signal of a hearty commitment to defend dignity, to safeguard minors in the Church.”
 

VATICAN (CNS): In a letter to Catholics in Chile, Pope Francis expressed shame for the Church’s failure to listen and defend survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy.
 
Released by the Chilean bishops’ conference on May 31, the letter said that the time of “revision and purification” in the Church was possible through the efforts of abuse survivors “who, against all hope or painted as discredited, did not tire of looking for the truth.”
 

ROME (SE): Whether or not the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, George Cardinal Pell, would return to Australia from his present posting in the Vatican to appear before a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, which has now shifted its base from Ballarat to Sydney, has been an ongoing saga in the Australian media over recent weeks.