Deborah's Defilers antidote to The Da Vinci Code?

Here's Sean Durkan's write up from Embassy: Canada's Foreign Policy Newsweekly

Deborah's Defilers an Antidote to Da Vinci's Code?

Hidden in all the fuss over the release of the movie version of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is the growing demand for good, exciting fiction with a positive Christian twist. Former CBC journalist Deborah Gyapong is hoping to tap into it with her first novel, The Defilers.

Ms. Gyapong, who left the CBC to work in the Canadian Alliance, and now covers Parliament Hill for the Catholic and Evangelical newspapers, will launch the novel at the National Archives on June 1.

Ms. Gyapong originally began writing her suspense novel a couple of years ago for the U.S. market, where the Christian-lit phenomenon had already taken off, but found the Canadian setting and gritty gothic plot did not work for publishers there.

"Much of what Christian publishing had to offer put me in danger of getting spiritual diabetes because the stories were so treacly sweet," says Ms. Guapong. "I fell between the cracks: too raw and controversial for the Christian market, too Christian for the secular market."

Ms. Gyapong stuck with the more "gothic" theme, hoping to appeal to Christians such as herself who had "not led sheltered lives." American tastes have apparently matured because the publishers have now decided to also release the gritty novel in the U.S. this year as well as Canada.

The story remains far from treacly sweet. Heroine Linda Donner is originally from Boston but moved as a kid to Nova Scotia. Seduced by a priest as a teenager, she stopped believing in God. Now a Mountie, she investigates a pastor she suspects is guilty of arson, murder and child abuse, and finds herself pitted against evil supernatural forces that drive her to the edge of a nervous breakdown. The twist is she finds herself seeking God's help -- aided by the very pastor she suspected of committing terrible crimes.

Ms. Gyapong says she hopes her novel will serve as a counterpoint to the Gnostic messages of books like The Da Vinci Code.

Australian priest accused of ritual sexual abuse

THE Catholic Church has accepted as substantially true allegations that a Melbourne priest took part in ritualised sexual abuse in which a number of deaths occurred.

The Melbourne archdiocese paid $33,000 to the man who made the claims as compensation for repeated sexual and physical abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of the priest.

The archdiocese's independent sexual abuse investigator, barrister Peter O'Callaghan, QC, described details of the ritualised deaths and abuse provided by the victim as "extraordinary".

". . . but I have no reason or justification for doubting his credibility," Mr O'Callaghan said in a letter to the victim's lawyers in 2000.

Earlier, during a formal interview with the victim, which was recorded, Mr O'Callaghan said he was satisfied the man was telling the truth.

"I see no reason why I shouldn't accept what you say," he said. "Amazing as it is, I accept it."

The Melbourne archdiocese's Vicar-General, Monsignor Les Tomlinson, said Mr O'Callaghan advised Victoria Police about the allegations and was told the victim had already notified them that he had been "sexually abused and was a witness to murder".

"The police advised that inquiries had been made with the homicide squad and their missing persons records and intelligence was unable to confirm the allegations and that there was no current investigation into the matter," Monsignor Tomlinson said.

In a sworn statement given to the archdiocese, the 56-year-old victim said he was first abused by the priest in Melbourne in the early 1960s, when serving as an altar boy at a southern suburbs church and attending a Catholic school.

The abuse continued for three years and included being repeatedly abused during what appeared to be satanic rituals by the priest and others. He says the priest, who has since died, owned at least one firearm.

In his statement, the victim gives details of a number of rituals in which the priest was involved.

"A number of the things that I can remember are extremely gruesome," he said.

"I remember being told loudly and forcibly that God is evil and Satan is good and Satan is more powerful.

"On another occasion I was told that good is evil and evil is good, and that Satan is all-powerful and has control over the earth, and that I am evil and that is good.

"I have some gruesome memories of killings."

The statement details three deaths -- a young woman, a young man and a child -- gang rapes and other forms of sexual abuse that allegedly occurred during the rituals over a period of several years.

Animals were also killed during the ceremonies.

Pedophilia party launches in the Netherlands

The newly formed Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party of the Netherlands has introduced itself to Dutch politics as a champion of children's rights and has vowed, "We are going to shake The Hague awake!"

The NVD is Europe's first political party dedicated to promoting and legitimizing pedophilia. In a press release, the NVD's spokesman and co-founder, Ad van den Berg said among their goals is lowering the age of consent for sexual activity from 16 to 12 and eventually eliminating it completely.

"A ban just makes children curious," van den Berg told the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) newspaper. The party will also be working to decriminalize child pornography and to lower the age for which it is legal to appear in it from 18 to 16. The party suggests that in order to prevent "abuse" a governmental body be appointed to investigate whether children had been forced to appear in pornographic movies.

Pedophile Chic?

Sylvia over at theinquiry.ca has links to troubling articles about pedophile chic here and here.

While the articles explore the ways that sex between men and boys, especially adolescent boys, is seen in some circles as not damaging to the victims and in some ways even beneficial, I'm not sure I agree with the authors that sex with girls is still taboo. Maybe in polite, literary and glossy magazine circles it still is, but go a little down market and girls are fair game.

Judging from the kinds of pornographic spam emails I've been getting, sex with teens and "teenies," incest porn and all kinds of other shocking things are being sent into mailboxes around the world. Since I have never visited a porn site and only look at some of the headers and titles because make a point of reporting these to Cybertip.ca, I can assume that men who do visit these sites get even more of this stuff than I do. The sheer quantity of this kind of sick material indicates to me lots of internal barriers to this kind of degrading and disgusting behavior are coming down.

Why? Because people will start to think, hey, I'm not alone with these proclivities.
Maybe it's not "chic" to be misogynist and to degrade women, but the authors should maybe have listened to 50 Cent and some popular gangsta rappers to see that the exploitation of girls is hugely fashionable.

I recall years ago hearing from a forensic psychiatrist that about one fifth of the population has pedophilic tendencies though only a tiny proportion fall into the sadistic, violent category. With the help of this barrage of porn, how many people might be tipped into that category? And the fact that weak, sick people hate what they crave, and blame it for their weaknesses, is it surprising that the porn is becoming more brutal?

It seems odd that sexual liberation has resulted in more literal slavery for women and children, both girls and boys.

40,000 women trafficked for World Cup

In response to reports that 40,000 young women will be brought to Germany from Central and Eastern Europe to "sexually service" men attending the World Cup soccer championship next month, a Catholic group warns that many are desperately poor and will be "sex trafficked" against their will.

The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, or C-FAM, has launched a "Stop World Cup Prostitution" campaign on its website.

An estimated 3 million soccer fans – mostly men – are expected to descend on 12 German cities for the quadrennial sports event June 9 to July 9. Prostitution in legal in Germany.

The new face of slavery and human trafficking

Slaves are cheap these days. Their price is the lowest it's been in about 4,000 years. And right now the world has a glut of human slaves - 27 million by conservative estimates and more than at any time in human history.
Although now banned in every country, slavery has boomed in the past 50 years as the global population has exploded. A billion people scrape by on $1 a day. That extreme poverty combined with local government corruption and a global economy that leaps national boundaries has produced a surge in the number of slaves - even though in the developed world, that word conjures up the 19th century rather than the evening news.


"For an American audience, their conceptualization of slavery is locked into a picture from the past," says Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves (www.freetheslaves.net), a nonprofit in Washington. "It's fixed in the slavery of the deep South and it's about African-Americans being enslaved on plantations with chains and whips and so forth."

Modern-day slavery has little of the old South. Of those 27 million, the majority are bonded laborers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal - workers who have given their bodies as collateral for debts that never diminish no matter how many years, or sometimes generations, the enslaved labor on. Cooking the books is an early lesson for slaveholders.

Yet despite this new largely unacknowledged slavery epidemic, Dr. Bales is optimistic. While the real number of slaves is the largest there has ever been, he says, it is also probably the smallest proportion of the world population ever in slavery. Today, he adds, we don't have to win the legal battle; there's a law against it in every country. We don't have to win the economic argument; no economy is dependent on slavery (unlike in the 19th century, when whole industries could have collapsed). And we don't have to win the moral argument; no one is trying to justify it any more.

The fact that it's still thriving, he explains, comes down principally to ignorance about the institution and lack of resources directed at eradicating it.

Lack of public awareness is strikingly apparent in developed countries, where few are conscious that it is not exclusively a third-world problem.

Although the numbers are small relative to the worldwide challenge, in the developed world slavery happens uncomfortably close to home. For instance, between 14,000 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States annually, according to the US government, most forced into the sex trade, domestic servitude, or agricultural labor. At any one time, between 52,000 and 87,000 are in bondage. And much of that is in plain view, in towns and cities across the country, experts say. People simply don't recognize it.

In June, an Indian domestic in Brookline, Mass., won a court case against an Omani couple who had barred her from leaving their apartment unescorted for more than a year, forcing her to look after their four children, cook, and clean without proper pay or meals. An alert neighbor who caught wind of her plight helped her escape.

But that is the exception, suggests Tommy Calvert of American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston. "Law enforcement and legal professionals don't always identify a victim of slavery as such." And the public is even less likely to recognize the signs.

Last month, the State Department issued a fact sheet urging citizens "to help end modern-day slavery" and warned "it may even be happening in their own backyards."

It's where domestic violence was 35 years ago, Bales say. No one talked about it, no shelters existed, and no one had written a pamphlet laying out what it looked like.

That's about to change. A pamphlet on slavery is in the works, says Bales, who hopes to get it distributed to neighborhood watch groups around the US before the end of the year, if funding comes through. The draft, titled "How can I recognize trafficking victims" includes a list of "visible indicators" of whether an establishment is holding people against their will and the physical signs that a person might be enslaved. Once people are better informed, he expects a flood of cases.

Part of the confusion about slavery, says Bales, is that it has evolved over the centuries and what we traditionally thought of as slavery - chattel slavery - looks very different these days. But the definition remains the same: "Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised" (Slavery Convention of the League of Nations, 1926).

In his book "Disposable People," Bales says ownership is no longer an attractive proposition for most slaveholders because the price of slaves is so low. In 1850, a slave would cost about $40,000 in today's dollars. Now, you can buy a slave for $30 in the Ivory Coast. The glut "has converted them from being the equivalent of buying a car to buying a plastic pen that you use and throw away," he says. That makes maintenance of the "investment" a low priority, and little care is taken for slaves' well-being.

The most common type of slavery is debt bondage which traps 15 million to 20 million in loan agreements they can never pay off. Others are lured by false promises into forced labor situations, where they are coerced to stay under threat of violence. Slavery also includes the worst forms of child labor and sexual exploitation of women and girls.

The fastest growing type, however, is trafficking ("forcing and transporting people into slavery"). According to a Department of Justice report in June on human trafficking, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each year (and millions more are trafficked within their own countries). Of those, about 80 percent are female, and an estimated 70 percent end up in the commercial sex trade, the report says. The United Nations estimates that the profits from human trafficking (about $9.5 billion last year) rank it among the top three revenue earners for organized crime, after drugs and arms. In 10 years, it's expected to be the top source of revenue.

This rapid rise has been met with new laws in the US (the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000, which was reauthorized and expanded last December), a rapid ratification of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime put forward in 2000, which also came into force last December, and greater sharing of information and coordination among nations to combat trafficking.

The UN declared 2004 International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and its Abolition, even though, ironically, there are more slaves now than there were even at the height of the transatlantic slave trade.

Enforcement is one stalling point in its eradication. A Human Rights Watch report issued in July, for instance, looks at the pattern of exploitation of foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. Although the Saudis are held to account for a judicial system that makes its almost impossible for foreign nationals to appeal their circumstances, says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Middle East and Africa for HRW, the sending countries shirk their responsibilities, too. "They need to better protect their nationals," she says. "Unfortunately, each one [of the sending countries] says, if we make it tough for Saudi [Arabia] then they will just go to Pakistan [for foreign workers]. And Pakistan says, if we make it tough, then they will just go to the Philippines. So it's a race to the bottom."

Even when law enforcement is not in question, uncovering cases can be like looking for clues in the dark. Last year, only nine trafficking cases were prosecuted in the US with a total of 17 convictions - the smallest sliver of those working the new slave trade. "The thing that is unique about human trafficking and enslavement," says Bales "... is that it's a crime of seriousness equal to kidnapping, torture, murder etc. and yet it has the 'dark figure' [a criminologist's term for crimes that remain hidden, unreported] of bicycle theft."

The conditions of those enslaved are usually filled with physical and mental abuse and violence - or at least the constant threat of it - and sometimes unimaginable deprivations. Girls are frequently "broken in" to the profession of prostitution, for instance, through beatings and rape, and if they are rebellious, they may end up dead. Long hours, sometimes 15 or more a day, with no days off, privacy, or adequate food are common.

For those who escape servitude, the road to freedom can be uncertain. A UN fact sheet on contemporary slavery hints it may be easier to free the body than the mind: "Even when abolished, slavery leaves traces. It can persist as a state of mind - among its victims and their descendants and among the inheritors of those who practiced it - long after it has formally disappeared.

"

Christian children kidnapped into the slave trade

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan.

The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12.

They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. Using a secret camera, they filmed him accepting $28,500 (£15,000) from a Pakistani missionary posing as a businessman who said he wanted to set up an operation in which the boys would beg for cash on the streets.

Khan was observed driving from the meeting with a knapsack full of cash to the JUD headquarters at Muridke, near Lahore.

The base was funded by Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, in the late 1990s and the JUD’s assets were frozen last month by the US Treasury after it was designated a terrorist organisation.

The US State Department declared the JUD a front for another organisation, Lashkar-i-Toiba, a terrorist group banned in Pakistan which joined with Al-Qaeda in an attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in 2003.

Khan, who regularly stays at the JUD’s base, broke his promise to hand over the 20 boys on receipt of the cash and took the Pakistani missionary’s assistant hostage while he checked that the dollars were genuine.

The boys were eventually freed in a dishevelled and malnourished state after being locked in a room for five months during which they suffered frequent beatings.

Last week I accompanied six of the boys on journeys of up to 15 hours to their homes, where they were greeted with astonishment and jubilation by families who had given them up for dead.

The mother of Akash Aziz, who was kidnapped as he played with his friends after school, was so astonished that she could barely move or speak at first.

The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.

Thanks to Jihadwatch for the link.

If you'd like to do something to stop this kind of atrocity, the International Justice Mission is supporting the kind of work those undercover missionaries did in rescuing those children.

Canadians can visit the International Justice Mission Canada site.

First book signing

The Defilers has been released.

Last Thursday I had my first book signing at Hull's Family Book Store in Winnipeg.

Here I am with Hull's owners Margo and Kathie Smith.

Now I'm busy preparing for the official Ottawa launch June 1, 7:30 p.m. at the National Archives of Canada.

I hope to see you there!

Catholic Church rebounding after abuse scandal A new study has found that the scandal over sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has not caused Am

This is good news from the New York Times. While sexual abuse is a horrible thing, certainly the majority of priests were guilty of nothing. It's good that a small proportion of bad priests have not been successful in ultimately destroying the faith of ordinary Catholics. Thanks to Kathy Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic for the link.

A new study has found that the scandal over sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has not caused American Catholics to leave the church, or to stop attending Mass and donating to their parishes.

The study shows that Catholic participation in church life and satisfaction with church leadership dropped noticeably at the height of the scandal in 2002, but has now largely rebounded to prescandal levels.

The only significant decline is in the percentage of Catholics who contributed to diocesan financial appeals, annual campaigns that are usually run by bishops. While the percentage of Catholics who contributed to their local parishes remained steady, those who gave to diocesan appeals dropped to 29 percent in 2005 from 38 percent in April 2002.

"There's been an expectation that there would be more Catholics exiting the faith, and clearly the polls show that there wasn't any evidence of that," said Mark M. Gray, research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which conducted the study.

"It's a reflection of how resilient religious faith can be — that Catholics were able to disconnect their own personal faith from what was occurring among a group of clergy at a specific time in history," Dr. Gray said. "Their faith was bigger than these events. Clearly there was a lot of dissatisfaction, but people remain Catholic."

The center based the study on 10 national telephone polls of adult Catholics conducted since January 2001. Most included 1,000 or more respondents, but since the number of people polled varied each time, the margin of sampling error varied from plus or minus 2.1 percentage points to plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

The sexual abuse crisis, which first erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston in early 2002, eventually spread to nearly every diocese in the nation as accusers stepped forward and said priests had molested them as children and young adults. American bishops sent a delegation to Rome to meet with Pope John Paul II and instituted new rules for removing accused priests from the ministry. A report commissioned by the church found that from 1950 to 2004, more than 9,000 young people were victimized.

But the new study found that many Catholics knew little about the scope of the scandal, and that the percentage who said that they had heard about the bishops' responses to the scandal dropped to 40 percent in 2005 from a peak of 53 percent in 2004.

"They are just not very well informed of what is really happening," said John Moynihan, communications director for Voice of the Faithful, a Catholic reform group born in the scandal's wake.

The percentage of adult Americans who identify themselves as Catholic has remained steady at 23 percent, the study found. The percentage of Catholics who say they attend Mass at least once a week also held steady from September 2000 to September 2005 at 33 percent, with a slight rise to 39 percent immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the center's polls.

Donations at the parish level also held steady. Seventy-six percent of Catholics said in April 2002 that they had contributed to their parish collection in the previous year, compared with 74 percent in October 2005.

"This really confirms what we've heard as well," said Dr. Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities. "People are very strongly supportive of their own parish life, but contributions to national collections have dipped."

ABC News takes a look at Bob Larson and exorcism

In a hotel conference room in Bakersfield, Calif., Bob Larson, who is not a Catholic priest, says he, too, can cast out demons. He and his staff exorcize thousands of people a year, traveling around the world to perform the rituals.

Larson said people were possessed by demons, not the devil himself.

"The devil can't be everywhere," Larson said. "God can be everywhere so the devil has to duplicate the omnipresence of God by sending demons out to do his work."

According to Larson and the hundreds of other Christian deliverance ministers, these evil spirits can cause people to commit horrible acts from small sins to murder.

"More people are possessed today than ever have been in history," Larson said. "We have more permission today to do bad things than ever before. That doesn't explain the mother in Texas who chops off the arms of her baby."

Larson concedes that throughout history people have suffered from mental illness, but he also says that people have always been possessed by demons.

Janelle Mallard was exorcized by Larson. During the ceremony she spoke in a strange voice and flailed around almost uncontrollably.

"I feel refreshed, like something's lifted off my spirit," Mallard said after the exorcism.

"I can't convince anyone this is real except to say look at the newspaper headlines day by day and see if you really think the immensity of the violence and crime are truly the result of just human nature gone mad," Larson said.

Priest found guilty of murdering nun

From Catholic Online:

TOLEDO, Ohio – Father Gerald Robinson, a retired priest of the Diocese of Toledo, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison May 11 for the murder more than 26 years earlier of Mercy Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.

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Father Robinson, 68, was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs after the verdict was announced and Common Pleas Judge Thomas Osowik sentenced him. He could be eligible for parole in 15 years.

The jury deliberated for six hours and 25 minutes before handing down the verdict.

"This is a sad day for the Diocese of Toledo," Bishop Leonard P. Blair said in a statement. He called for prayers for Sister Margaret Ann, her family and the Sisters of Mercy; the judge, jury, attorneys and witnesses in the trial; and Father Robinson.

"Let us hope that the conclusion of the trial will bring some measure of healing for all those affected by the case as well as for our local church," the bishop added. "The diocese has remained steadfast in the work of the church and its ministries throughout this trial, and will continue to do so."

Bishop Blair said Father Robinson, who was suspended from all public activity as a priest in April 2004 after his arrest and retired two months later, remains barred from any public ministry.

Sister Margaret Ann, 71, was strangled and then stabbed 31 times in the chapel at the now-closed Toledo Mercy Hospital, where she and Father Robinson both worked at the time.

Prosecutors said the fact that the murder occurred on Holy Saturday and some elements of the crime – such as stab wounds in the shape of an upside-down cross, an "anointing" in blood on the nun's forehead and the use of an altar cloth in the murder – indicated that the killing had a ritualistic or Satanic nature.

Father Robinson was not charged in Sister Margaret Ann's murder until 2004 after a woman accused him and others of sexual abuse, Satanic activity and other crimes. The jury did not hear testimony about those accusations, however.

Attorneys for the state also presented evidence linking a letter opener in Father Robinson's room at the hospital to the nun's wounds, and two witnesses testified that they had seen the priest near the hospital chapel on the morning of the murder, although he told police he had not left his room during that time.

Priest's murder of nun not satanic says prosecutor

TOLEDO - The slaying of a Roman Catholic nun in 1980 was sparked by a priest's simmering anger over her domineering ways and not part of a "satanic cult killing," a prosecutor said Wednesday in closing arguments of the priest's trial.

The Rev. Gerald Robinson not only choked and stabbed Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, but he also humiliated her in death, Assistant Lucas County Prosecutor Dean Mandros told jurors.

Robinson stabbed her in the chest in the shape of an upside-down cross, anointed her with her own blood and stripped off her underwear "to degrade her, to mock her, to humiliate her," Mandros said.

"Was this is a satanic cult killing? No," Mandros said. "A man got very angry with a woman. The only difference is that the man wore a white collar, and the woman wore a habit."

Robinson, 68, is accused of killing Sister Pahl while she was preparing the Mercy Hospital chapel the day before Easter in 1980. She was choked and then stabbed 31 times.

Robinson was a chaplain at the hospital and worked closely with Sister Pahl, 71, and presided at her funeral. He was a suspect early in the investigation but was not charged until two years ago.

Robinson faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted of murder. Jurors deliberated for about four hours Wednesday after nine days of testimony. They will resume today.

The defense told jurors that DNA evidence doesn't link Robinson to the crime. The nun's underwear and fingernails had traces of DNA that was likely from a man but not from Robinson, defense attorney John Thebes said.

"It points somewhere else," he said.

The priest's attorneys also questioned the memories of witnesses who said they saw Robinson near the chapel no more than an hour before the nun's body was found inside. Defense attorney Alan Konop said the witnesses gave conflicting accounts of where and when they saw Robinson.

Robinson, who sat in the courtroom wearing a priest's collar, has been solemn throughout the trial. "Do you really think Father Robinson is some sleek killer?" Konop said. "Or is he a mild, meek man?"

Gunman told friend he needed an exorcism

Here's a fascinating story from Potomac News Online that touches on an area that fascinates me and that is where one draws the line between mental illness caused by chemical imbalance in the brain and demonic involvement. I remember interviewing a priest who took part in deliverance ministries who told me that he believe demonic forces could take advantage of organically caused mental illness.

In the minutes before Michael Kennedy died after firing 70 rounds on Fairfax County police, the teenager told a friend that he needed an exorcism.

Virginia Commonwealth University student Daniel Sforza said he was exchanging instant messages by computer with Kennedy on Monday afternoon until about 3 p.m. Less than an hour later, police say, Kennedy ran through a police station parking lot near Chantilly with an AK-47, shooting three officers and killing one of them, Detective Vicky Armel. Kennedy, 18, died when police returned fire.

"He was very upset," Sforza said Tuesday. "What he told me was he wanted to get an exorcism because he felt like medication, therapy, doctors ... nothing helped him. There's something possessing him to make him feel so miserable. And he said, 'The last thing I can think of is an exorcism.' "

Kennedy told him nothing of his plans to gun down the officers as they left the Sully District police station, Sforza said.

Sforza said he encouraged Kennedy to do his best to figure out what would help him.

"He was always searching for an answer to his problem," Sforza said.

-snip-

Neighbors said they saw little of Kennedy or his father at their residence, although the teen's younger sister frequently rode a scooter near the London Towne townhouse section where the family has lived for the past decade.

"He was quiet. He stayed indoors a lot," Mavis Powell said.

On Kennedy's MySpace.com site earlier this spring, some friends had expressed concern about his whereabouts.

Friends said Kennedy's mental health had deteriorated in the past few months and that he had delusions and hallucinations.

Sforza, who graduated with Kennedy last year from Westfield High School in Fairfax County, said that Kennedy's struggles with his mental health became apparent during their senior year.

Sforza said he would often drive to Kennedy's house to pick him up after Kennedy argued with his parents. He would listen to Kennedy's suspicious railings against the government and world conspiracies, and felt that Kennedy in turn listened to him.

"He thought he was Jesus. He talked about aliens," said Brandon Baker, a friend of Kennedy's since sixth grade. Baker said Kennedy told him he sometimes took medication. "He was talking about how he was superhuman."

Kennedy had also recently changed his MySpace profile name from Kennedy to "Herr Azriel," in reference to an angel of destruction.

On his Web site, Kennedy wrote: "sorry to all the people i hurt." It was not clear when he wrote that apology.

-snip-

High school classmates knew Kennedy as someone who played video games and felt harassed because of his appearance and dark clothes, according to Christine Craig, another friend and Westfield graduate.

-snip-

After graduation, Kennedy attended Northern Virginia Community College and worked at a drugstore, Sforza said. He considered Kennedy one of his best friends.

"I know what he did was horrible, but he was just so confused."

A.J. Hostetler is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Times-Dispatch staff writers Kiran Krishnamurthy and Rex Springston contributed to this report.

Why we must be so careful about not jumping to conclusions

Not every priest accused of sexual abuse is guilty.

Read the whole story at Catholic Online.

“Father Murphy is coming down from a long period of turmoil,” said his attorney Timothy O’Neill. “Unfortunately, the institution’s been fighting to protect itself, not the individual priest.”

“But to be fair, the church has been totally overwhelmed by the number and extent of abuse claims,” O’Neill said. “I’m not denying the holocaust, but you can feel pretty helpless when you’re removed from ministry and you know you didn’t do anything. These guys are pretty much on their own.”

The accusations made national news when the story broke. He and 14 others were named in a civil suit that claimed alleged abuse of students at the Boston School for the Deaf between 1944 and 1977. Father Murphy, who is hearing-impaired, served as director of counseling there in the 1970s.

All the claims were later withdrawn or dismissed by the court. But the story of Father Murphy’s exoneration by the church made only local news. It rated a brief release in The Pilot, Boston’s archdiocesan paper.

According to the archdiocese’s Office of Child Advocacy, 71 complaints were filed against Boston-area priests from July 2003 to December 2005. In 32 of those cases, the review board did not find that probable cause of sexual abuse of a minor had occurred.

The norms of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops state: “When an accusation has been shown to be unfounded, every step possible will be taken to restore the good name of the person falsely accused.”

Boston archdiocesan spokesman Terrence Donilon and review board members declined to explain what steps are taken to restore a priest’s reputation.

“We call it the Humpty-Dumpty restoration process,” said one Boston priest. Another said, “That policy is just lip service.”

The defendants’ attorneys in the Boston School for the Deaf cases had portrayed the plaintiffs as “opportunists trying to cash in on publicity surrounding the $85 million paid in 2003 by the archdiocese to victims of clergy sexual abuse,” according to The Patriot Ledger, a suburban Boston paper. At the time of that record settlement, Forbes magazine noted, “Litigators have parlayed the priest crisis into a billion-dollar money machine. Lawyers are lobbying states to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases, letting them dredge up complaints that date back decades.”

“Father Murphy’s case was totally without substance,” said O’Neill. He was first charged just with walking into a room where a girl was changing. When it was obvious that charge would get dismissed, O’Neill said, the same woman then later filed another claim charging the priest had fondled her.

Occult ritual involved in nun's murder says expert

Toledo -- A priest schooled in the occult testified that the 1980 slaying of a nun was filled with dark symbolism and signs that a ritual transpired.

And only "a nun, a priest or possibly a seminarian" would have the full knowledge of what all the signs meant.

A priest is on trial in the slaying -- the Rev. Gerald Robinson.

He is accused of stabbing Sister Margaret Ann Pahl 31 times -- in cluding nine times in the form of an in verted cross.

The Rev. Jeffrey Grob was the prose cution's first witness Monday morning and the 23rd since the trial began last week. He has studied and written about exorcism, the occult and religious rituals.

Prosecutors have claimed that some sort of ritual occurred when the nun was slain 26 years ago, and reports of satanic cults have circulated through northwest Ohio, both in relationship to the case and independently of it.

On the witness stand, Grob said, "Some sort of ritual activity has taken place."

He listed numerous symbols and Roman Catholic rites that appeared to be deliberately perverted during the nun's slaying.

"These are not random acts," he said.

More in the Cleveland Plain Dealer here.