PHILADELPHIA — A former church official jailed for his handling of priest sexual abuse complaints is no longer housed at a Philadelphia jail that Pope Francis plans to visit.
Monsignor William Lynn is serving a minimum three-year sentence for endangering children in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He’s the first U.S. church official prosecuted over the alleged church cover-up.
Lynn has been held at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Center while appealing his 2012 conviction.
But defense attorney Thomas Bergstrom says his client is back at a state prison. Appeals courts have been split on whether Lynn should have been convicted under the child-endangerment law, and he has been in and out of prison.
Pope Francis is scheduled to visit inmates at the city prison during his U.S. trip in September.
Injured missionary gets settlement
HELENA, Mont. — Insurers for the Southern Baptist Convention have agreed to pay $26 million to a South Carolina man who was paralyzed and suffered brain damage in a rollover crash during a 2009 missionary trip in Montana, attorney Anders Blewett said Tuesday.
The insurance companies agreed to pay the full coverage limits of their policies within days of a judge’s ruling that the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention Inc. was liable for Jeremy Vangsnes’ injuries, Blewett said.
District Judge Mike Salvagni ruled June 19 that the driver, Scott Minear of Marietta, Ga., was acting within the course and scope of his association with the mission group at the time of the July 2009 wreck.
Minear, Vangsnes and two of Vangsnes’ brothers — Ryan and Daniel — were returning from a trip to Glacier National Park when the crash happened near Belgrade.
Police say vandalism at church a hate crime
MELBOURNE, Fla. — Authorities say the vandalism of a black church on Florida’s Space Coast was a hate crime.
Melbourne Police Department officials are offering a cash award for information leading to any arrests. Police say vandals wrote “SS Charleston 2” on the side of a pickup truck parked at New Shiloh Christian Church and then ransacked a section of the church. Police say they believe the graffiti refers to the June 17 massacre of nine churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
Exhibit explores interaction with Jews
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — An exhibit looking at Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Jewish Americans opens next month in Springfield.
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum will open “With Firmness in the Right: Lincoln and the Jews” on Aug. 3. It runs through Nov. 15.
Library officials say the exhibit includes documents, photographs, letters, Bibles and other artifacts from many different sources — some of which haven’t been publicly displayed before.
The exhibit is a revised version of an exhibit that opened at the New York Historical Society earlier this year. It was inspired by the book Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell.