This Corrupt Catholic Group Helps Priests Accused of Child Sexual Abuse
By Hemant Mehta, July 29, 2019

The Associated Press has discovered a secretive network within the Catholic Church, albeit with no formal affiliation, that helps people dealing with child sexual harassment. They offer money and legal assistance. They help people relocate. They say they want to do anything they can to help the victims.

But they’re not talking about the kids.

Instead, Opus Bono Sacerdotii helps the accused priests.

Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman, and Garance Burke learned about the network through multiple interviews with former employees, Freedom of Information requests, and hearing from priests themselves.

For nearly two decades, the group has operated out of a series of unmarked buildings in rural Michigan, providing money, shelter, transport, legal help and other support to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse across the country.

Opus Bono focuses on what it considers the neglected victims: priests, and the church itself.

“All of these people that have made allegations are very well taken care of,” Opus Bono co-founder Joe Maher said in a radio interview, contending that many abuse accusations lodged against priests are false. “The priests are not at all very well taken care of.”

Basically, the group takes priests in the middle of a scandal and relocates them to a location where they won’t be known or bothered. Sometimes they hire the priests in question. That may explain how the group was able to raise more than $8 million between 2002 and 2016. (One of the men who started the group, Rev. Eduard Perrone, was banned from the ministry just this month after an oversight board at his church said there was a “semblance of truth” to allegations that he molested a child decades ago.)

(snip)

While Joe Maher is no longer allowed to run the group, or any non-profit in Michigan, he has since created a virtually identical group in Indiana called Men of Melchizedek. Both groups have the same lawyer.