President of Pa. charity linked to abuse resigns (AP)

PITTSBURGH – The youth charity at the center of the child sex-abuse charges against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky received donations in recent years from hundreds of corporations, community groups and individuals — including the judge who arraigned Sandusky earlier this month.

On Monday, The Second Mile's president resigned, saying he hoped his departure would help restore faith in its mission. The group also announced it had hired Philadelphia's longtime district attorney as its new general counsel.

Jack Raykovitz, a practicing psychologist, had led the group, which was founded by Sandusky in 1977, for 28 years.

Raykovitz had testified before the grand jury that recommended indicting Sandusky on child abuse charges. The panel said Sandusky found his victims through the charity's programs.

Annual reports show how widely popular the charity was before the scandal hit. Hundreds of corporations, community groups and individuals donated each year.

Among them was State College District Judge Leslie A. Dutchcot, who set Sandusky's bail earlier this month. She and her husband donated between $500 and $999 to The Second Mile in 2009, and she volunteered for the group, according to annual reports and her website.

The judge set bail for Sandusky at $100,000 unsecured — meaning he did not have to post collateral to be freed but would have to post $100,000 if he ever failed to show up for a hearing.

Dutchcot did not immediately respond to a question on whether she will recuse herself from the case because of those past ties to The Second Mile. She has also removed the mention of The Second Mile from her website.

Major companies and their foundations also have given to The Second Mile. Between 2008 and 2010, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Highmark Foundation, The Hershey Company and State Farm Companies Foundation all gave $50,000 or more to the charity.

Raykovitz said in a statement Monday that he hopes his resignation would mark the beginning of a "restoration of faith in the community of volunteers and staff" at The Second Mile.

Tax forms indicate that Raykovitz's wife, Katherine Genovese, was executive vice president of The Second Mile. She has been with the group since 1984. It's not clear if she still works at the charity, as the staff biography page has been removed from the website.

The Second Mile has said that its youth programs serve as many as 100,000 children a year.

Sandusky, who retired from Penn State in 1999, informed The Second Mile board in November 2008 that he was under investigation. The charity subsequently barred him from activities involving children, charity officials said.

The ex-coach allegedly assaulted eight children over a 15-year span. His attorney has said he's innocent.

Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President Gary Schultz were charged with perjury. Both have denied wrongdoing and have left their university posts.

The scandal led to the departure of university President Graham Spanier and the dismissal of legendary head coach Joe Paterno after law enforcement officials said they didn't do enough to stop suspected abuse when it was reported to them in 2002.

The Second Mile also announced a new general counsel on Monday. Lynne Abraham is replacing Wendell Courtney, who resigned last week.

Abraham served as the top prosecutor in Philadelphia for nearly two decades, during which she was known for her no-nonsense approach. The city's first female district attorney, she earned the lasting nickname "one tough cookie" from former Mayor Frank Rizzo. She decided not to run again in 2009 and became a partner at the Philadelphia office of the Archer & Greiner law firm in early 2010.

The Second Mile board also said that it would conduct an internal investigation to assess policies and make recommendations regarding future operations. They hope to have those findings by the end of December.

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Ireland unveils new report on Catholic child abuse (AP)

DUBLIN – A new investigation into the Catholic Church's chronic cover-up of child abuse found Wednesday that a rural diocese and its bishop ignored Irish church rules requiring all suspected molestation cases to be reported to police — and the Vatican encouraged this concealment.

The government, which ordered the two-year probe into 1996-2009 cover-ups in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, warned its findings suggest that parishes across Ireland could pose a continuing danger to children's welfare today.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter pledged to pass a new law making it an imprisonable crime to withhold knowledge of suspected child abuse as he published the investigation into the Cloyne diocese in southwest Ireland.

Shatter said previous pledges by Irish church leaders to place Irish civil law first and report all abuse cases dating back to 1995 had been "built on sand."

The 341-page Cloyne report is the fourth such government-ordered probe into how church leaders for decades protected their own reputation — and their own pedophile staff members from the law — at the expense of Irish children. The previous reports and scandals since 1994 have decimated the church's reputation and standing in this once-devoutly Catholic nation.

Wednesday's report by an independent panel of investigators found that former Cloyne Bishop John Magee, who resigned last year without admitting he'd covered up crimes, and senior aides failed to tell police anything about most abuse reports from 1996 to 2009 and withheld basic information in all cases.

It documented a catalog of errors in the church's suppression of information on 19 suspected child-abusing priests, only one of whom is currently facing criminal charges.

Shatter and Children's Minister Frances Fitzgerald called Magee's failures particularly shocking because they were so recent and followed a series of Irish church initiatives to protect children from abuse.

"That's the most horrifying aspect of this document. This is not a catalog of failure from a different era. This is not about an Ireland of 50 years ago. This is about Ireland now," Fitzgerald said.

The primate for Ireland's 4 million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady, and the official who replaced Magee in Cloyne, Archbishop Dermot Clifford, issued immediate apologies and pledged greater openness and cooperation with state authorities. Brady himself last year admitted he helped to conceal the crimes of one serial-rapist priest from Irish authorities in the mid-1970s but rejected calls to resign.

Magee, a former senior Vatican official and private secretary to Popes Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, said he took "full responsibility" for what he called "the flawed implementation of the church procedures."

"I now realize that I should have taken a much firmer role in ensuring their implementation," said Magee, who was the fifth Irish bishop to resign amid accusations they encouraged the endangerment of children.

But Irish government leaders and abuse-rights advocates said the Vatican also bore heavy responsibility particularly for encouraging the most recent known cover-ups.

They and the investigators emphasized that Ireland's bishops formally agreed in 1995 to begin reporting suspected child-abuse cases to police in rules that became valid Jan. 1, 1996. The Irish church took that step after the first abuse victims went public with their lawsuits, a development that opened the floodgates for more than 13,000 such cases.

But a confidential January 1997 letter from the Vatican's diplomat in Ireland to the Irish bishops warned them that the Irish church's child-protection policies were invalid under Catholic canon law; those internal church laws must be respected foremost; and any accused priests were likely to have any punishments successfully appealed in Rome.

That letter from the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, then Pope John Paul II's ambassador to Ireland, dismissed the Irish policy as representing "a study document." The Associated Press was the first media organization to publish that letter in full in January.

Shatter said the Vatican's criticisms of the 1996 child-protection initiative "was entirely unhelpful, giving comfort and support to those who dissented from the guidelines. We want to say as clearly as we can that this approach, when the state was entitled to rely on assurances about the operation of the guidelines, was wholly unacceptable."

The Vatican offered no immediate response.

In his 2010 pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state. Benedict was widely criticized in Ireland for failing to admit any Vatican role in covering up the truth.

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