It has been two years since the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report was published, documenting in disturbing detail at least 1,000 cases of abuse by 300 predator priests spanning seven decades.

Mr. Haas has denied any wrongdoing, calling the accusations “false, reckless and offensive.”

As the Sept. 30, 2019, deadline for filing the forms approached, program administrators reported a surge in claims, which totaled 616 as of May 30 of this year. Of those, “the overwhelming majority” have been “meritorious.”

Novices and women religious, especially those who have been assigned to a country where they don’t know the language, can be particularly vulnerable to abuses of power and conscience by superiors, and sexual abuse by their formators, said an article in “La Civilta Cattolica.”

Pope Francis instructed the Vatican to remove Archbishop Luigi Ventura’s diplomatic immunity in July 2019. The archbishop will now have to respond to his accusers at a trial in November.

The suit alleges that at age 11, the boy began to be sexually abused in 1978 by a priest at a New Jersey parish and the abuse continued at the hands of another cleric at the Catholic high school he attended, and then with McCarrick in 1982.