Salvadoran Catholic Priest sentenced for sex abuse*

Reuters
 November 23, 2006; 7:22 PM

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (Reuters) - The Catholic Church in El Salvador
begged forgiveness on Wednesday for a priest who raped an altar boy and
now faces charges he abused other children.

The priest, Jose Daniel Rivas, 60, will face a preliminary hearing into
accusations that he sexually assaulted two children and police are
investigating three other possible cases, prosecutors said.

The priest was sentenced on Tuesday for raping an 11-year-old boy last
year in the town of San Cristobal, east of the capital.

"This situation saddens us. We have to ask God's forgiveness and hope
this never happens again," San Salvador Archbishop Fernando Saenz told
the televisor network Telemundo.

Rivas sexually assaulted the altar boy last May when a group of children
spent the night in a church building in San Cristobal, according to the
court sentence.

Rivas is the first Catholic priest to be sentenced to prison in El
Salvador for child abuse, although others have faced charges. The court
also ordered Rivas to pay $500 in damages to the boy's family.

In November 2003, another priest was forced to pay $25,000 to a
31-year-old man for abuses suffered when he was a child.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed across the United States since a
priest abuse scandal broke in 2002. U.S. church documents have shown
that some bishops shuffled priests with histories of abuse between
parishes or sent them for counseling rather than reporting them to police.

In Mexico, the Catholic Church accused a former altar boy in September
of extortion by filing a lawsuit charging that U.S. and Mexican church
officials allowed a priest accused of sex abuse to escape justice.