Category: Priests In Trouble

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Savannah diocese, bishops sued over priest child abuse case

The Catholic Diocese of Savannah and two of its bishops have been sued in South Carolina over alleged sexual abuse of a minor by former priest Wayland Y. Brown.

The suit, filed Nov. 16 in the Court of Common Pleas in Ridgeland, alleged that Brown abused a Savannah youth whom he met through youth programs at Savannah’s St. James Catholic Church and school in the mid-1970s.

According to the suit, the victim, a “devout Catholic” identified as John Doe, was sexually abused by Brown on various church and school properties as well as in various locations in South Carolina.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah and bishops Raymond Lessard and Gregory Hartmayer are named as defendants in the suit.

“In approximately 1976-1979, Priest Brown sexually assaulted the minor plaintiff, John Doe, on numerous occasions,” the suit alleged.

The 25-page suit also alleged the church “knew or should have known” Brown was assaulting the victim and the church used “a policy of concealment, secrecy and obfuscation of child abuse by church employees and priests.”

The suit asks for a jury trial to determine damages.

Brown, 67, was ordained in the diocese in July 1977, allegedly over the objections of some diocesan staff, by then-Bishop Raymond Lessard and in 1988 served as associate pastor at St. James Parish in southside Savannah.

Hartmayer was installed as bishop Oct. 18.

Brown was removed from active ministry in July 1988.

Bishop J. Kevin Boland, who served between the two named bishops and is not a defendant in the civil case, started the process to remove Brown from the priesthood in February 2003.

The Vatican dismissed Brown from the priesthood in December 2004. Brown voluntarily agreed to return to Maryland in June 2002 to face prosecution on charges of molesting a Maryland teenager decades earlier.

He pleaded guilty in a Maryland court in November 2002 to charges of child abuse and battery for performing sexual acts on a teenage boy and his younger brother between 1974 and 1977.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but in April 2008 was released after serving five years based on good behavior.

He was required to register as a child sex offenders on the Maryland sex offender registry

Brown has not been charged with sexual abuse in the Savannah area, but at least one man has claimed he was molested by a former St. James priest.

“Father Brown is a convicted sex offender,” said Charleston attorney D. Scott Beard, one of John Doe’s lawyers. “According to our lawsuit, he was placed in a position of authority with young boys even though church officials knew of his inappropriate sexual behavior with minors.”

Beard said Brown “left a trail of child victims in the places where he was assigned by the Catholic Church. If Church officials had not acted recklessly in allowing Father Brown to be around children, they could have prevented John Doe and others like him from being abused.”

Diocese spokeswoman Barbara King said Friday, “We cannot comment on pending legal action.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Monsignor: Philly cardinal shredded abuse list

A Roman Catholic church official facing trial in a priest child abuse scandal created a list of problem priests in 1994, but Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua had it destroyed, according to a defense memo filed Friday.

Monsignor William Lynn, who’s accused of keeping predator priests in ministry and transferring them from parish to parish, wants his child endangerment case dismissed because of new evidence turned over by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, including his list of 35 accused priests.

Lynn took it upon himself to review secret church files after becoming secretary for clergy in 1992, and he later gave a list of accused, still-active priests to his superior, Monsignor James E. Molloy.

Bevilacqua had Molloy shred four copies of the list, according to a memo signed by Molloy and a witness. But Molloy kept a copy in a locked safe at the archdiocese, where it was found in 2006, after Lynn had moved on, according to his motion.

“It is clear from the Molloy memo, and (its) belated production, that Monsignor Lynn has been `hung out to dry,'” the defense motion says.

Lynn, who is charged with conspiracy and child endangerment, maintains his innocence. He has long argued that he took orders from Bevilacqua and is being made a scapegoat for the church’s sex abuse scandal.

Prosecutors themselves blasted Bevilacqua in two grand jury reports but never charged him with a crime. They have called the archdiocese and others “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Bevilacqua appeared before the first grand jury 10 times in 2003 and 2004 and denied any attempt to obstruct the investigation, according to Lynn’s motion. He died last month at age 88.

Molloy also denied destroying any documents from the secret archives, according to an excerpt of his grand jury testimony. He also is dead.

Late last year, Bevilacqua, who was suffering from dementia and cancer, gave a videotaped deposition that can be used at trial, but the value of his testimony remains unclear. Lynn’s lawyers have fought to have it excluded, based in part on Bevilacqua’s dementia. They renewed that request Friday, saying they never had a chance to ask Bevilacqua if he had Lynn’s list destroyed.

Lynn is the first U.S. church official charged for his administrative action. Jury selection is under way, with testimony scheduled to start March 26. A priest and an ex-priest charged with rape are on trial with him, and they also maintain their innocence.

A gag order prevents prosecutors or the archdiocese, which serves 1.5 million Roman Catholics, from commenting on Lynn’s allegations. Lynn, 61, would faces up to 28 years in prison if convicted on all counts against him.

Complete Article HERE!

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200 priests suspected of abuse living in California, victims’ lawyer says

Some 200 Catholic priests suspected of sexual abuse are living undetected in communities across California, according to an attorney who represents hundreds of plaintiffs who sued the LA Archdiocese alleging molestation they say was inflicted on them by priests and clergy of the church.

Ray Boucher has mapped 60 locations where suspect priests live, in cities and towns from northern to southern California, and provided those locations to NBC4 exclusively.

“Many if not all these priests have admitted to sexual abuse,” Boucher said. “They live within a mile of 1,500 playgrounds, schools and daycare centers.”

Since none of the priests has actually been convicted of sex abuse, none can be identified under Megan’s Law, or their whereabouts revealed in related public databases.

“What the issue is here, is how you weigh the right of the people,” said Boucher, who is also one of the attorneys representing students in the Miramonte Elementary School sex abuse scandal. “In particular the right of children to be protected from molestation versus the right of privacy.”

‘Public is often too squeamish’
Among Boucher’s many clients in the church action are Manuel Vega and Dan Smith.

Vega is a former police officer from Oxnard who took special interest in sex crimes investigations because, he says, he was sexually abused as a teenager by his parish priest.

“He forced me to masturbate while he took pictures of me,” said Vega, who believes that the public is often too squeamish to recognize what child molestation actually entails – and thus not properly outraged by it.

“When we talk about sexual abuse we’re talking about sodomy,” he said. “There’s pubic hair, there’s sweat, there’re smells, there’re grunts.”
Dan Smith, another alleged abuse victim, is reeling from the recent collapse of his marriage which he blames in part on the psychological effects of the molestation he says he suffered as a child – at the hands of his local parish priest.

“He would rape me and then say this is what God’s love feels like,” Smith said, struggling to hold back tears more than twenty years after the alleged incidents.

Both men helped make legal history by joining 500 other plaintiffs in suing the LA Archdiocese for sexual molestation, with Boucher as their lead attorney.

In 2007 the LA Archdiocese reached an unprecedented $660 million settlement with many of the plaintiffs without admitting any wrong-doing.
It also agreed to let the courts decide which of the case-related church files should be made public, including those identifying alleged and admitted predators.

But according to Boucher and court documents, the Catholic Church has since engaged in a cover-up. By Boucher’s account, church officials allowed priests suspected of sexually abusing children to retire, flee the country or hide in rehab clinics until the statute of limitations on prosecution ran out.

“What the church did is take these guys and send them off to facilities where they treat pedophile priests without ever alerting police,” Boucher said. “By enabling these priests to be hidden for so many years the church protected them from being prosecuted.”

Priests’ attorney: ‘That’s not fair’
Meanwhile legal disputes delayed the release of the promised personnel files, and Donald Steir, an attorney for several priests, went to court to argue that those who’ve been accused but not convicted should have their names and privacy protected.

“They are being punished as if they have been convicted, or at least that’s the desire – to punish them,” Steir said. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s difficult if you represent an alleged terrorist or a pedophile, because people don’t really care about the rights [including privacy rights] for these type of people,” Steir said. “But once we erode the rights of a group of people we don’t like, we effectively have started down a path where other people’s rights can be similarly denied.”

The courts, expressing concern for children, overruled most of these arguments and similar ones by the Archdiocese, which declined to comment for this story.

And a judge has ordered release of some personnel files, set for some time in the coming weeks. But he also credited the church for its increased sensitivity in dealing with molestation cases and decided to withhold the names of church officials who handled the earlier cases.

It is a ruling that reminds Boucher of the breakdown in accountability in the Penn state pedophile scandal.

“Look at Penn State and see how important and significant it is when people in authority enable sexual abusers to continue,” Boucher said. “That underscores how significant it is to get these names out.”

Under the judge’s ruling the church can also keep secret, subject to further court review, the names of priests who have not been convicted and who have only one or two allegations against them or have allegations disputed by the church.

To Smith that seems like a formula for further cover-up by church officials.

“If their interests were to protect the kids, they would have released the documents,” Smith said. “As a parent not knowing who your neighbor is — that is really scary.”

Many of these unidentified priests are included in Boucher’s location map.
“The danger,” said Vega, “is that you have a person who has this sickness in them who is amongst the children.”

The plaintiffs in the church scandal are planning to appeal the latest rulings to assure broader disclosure of suspects’ names and locations. But Boucher warned this could take time, allowing suspects to keep their privacy protected, as well as their undetected presence in neighborhoods across California.

Complete Article HERE!

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Church watchdog group posts Delaware sex abuse papers

A national watchdog group Wednesday began posting on line an estimated 30,000 pages of formerly undisclosed files from the Catholic Diocese here, which went bankrupt to pay damages to victims of sexual abuse.

The Wilmington Diocese paid out $77 million to 146 victims of sex abuse by priests and other clergy last year, forcing it to declare bankruptcy. The documents are being released as part of an agreement with abuse victims to conclude that process, church lawyer Anthony Flynn said.

“It is the largest single release of documents, by far,” in the nation, said Terry McKiernan, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, who explained that more documents were at one time filed in the Boston Archdiocese scandal, but over a longer period.

“The church itself calls them ‘secret archives,'” he said of the trove of papers, which detail internal Church correspondence over the abuse allegations.

It will take days for the site to post all of the documents on its website, www.bishopaccountability/wilmington, according to co-director Anne Barrett Doyle, who spoke at a press conference outside the diocese office here Wednesday.

“It is a sad day for me because the truth is revealed in documents like these,” said abuse victim Matthias Conaty, now 43, of Wilmington, who said he was abused by a Capuchin friar from the ages of 9 to 12.

“It is sad because men who were supposed to be trusted abused children and equally awful is the fact that men who were supervising (them) found it more important to protect what they saw as the interests of the church and containment of scandal,” Conaty told reporters outside the diocese headquarters.

Doyle told Reuters that her group wants two monsignors in the diocese forced out of the ministry because of what she believes were cover-ups of sexual abuse.

Diocese spokesman Robert Krebs, however, told Reuters that Bishop W. Francis Malooly, who has headed the diocese since 2008, has seen the documents and would have removed the men if he thought it had been justified.

Child abuse accusations have rocked the Catholic Church in the United States since 2002, and the church has paid out some $2 billion in settlements to victims.

In addition to Wilmington, Delaware several other Catholic dioceses have filed for bankruptcy because of sexual abuse claims including Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, San Diego, Spokane, Washington and Davenport, Iowa.

Complete Article HERE!

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Jurors will view secret church archives on sex abuse in upcoming Philly priest-abuse trial

Jurors picked over the next month to hear a landmark priest sex-abuse case will pore over two boxes of complaint files long buried in “secret archives” of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

The files contain complaints lodged against dozens of Philadelphia priests over several decades, along with sex-therapy notes, legal advice and other sensitive material, according to summaries read aloud in recent pretrial hearings. The boxes were marked Exhibit 1 at a hearing Wednesday.

Defense lawyers for the first U.S. church official ever charged criminally for his oversight of accused priests objected to the exhibit. Monsignor William Lynn, 61, is charged with conspiracy and child endangerment.

But the secret files will be aired in court, save for a few documents excluded on hearsay or other grounds.

Jury selection starts Tuesday, and could take weeks given the church’s huge presence in this largely Catholic city and the trial’s expected four-month duration.

Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina refused Wednesday to step down from the case, denying defense claims that she is biased against the church and Lynn.

She said her comments about child-sex abuse being “widespread” in the Catholic church were taken out of context at a recent hearing on potential jury questions.

Sarmina also refused Lynn’s latest motion to sever his criminal case from those of two priests charged with rape. Lynn — a ruddy-faced, portly man who rose through the ranks to become a seminary dean and then a top aide to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua — sat expressionless beside his sister in the courtroom.

Prosecutors call Lynn the keeper of the secret files during his years as secretary of clergy, from 1992 to 2004.

The priests behind the case files include one who allegedly pinned loincloths on naked boys playing Jesus, and whipped them, as part of a Passion play; one who held what prosecutors called “masturbation camps” at the rectory; and a pastor written up for complaining to Bevilacqua about an accused priest being transferred to his parish.

Sarmina ruled that the jury can hear about 22 of the accused priests, because Lynn knew about or took some action on their case files.

“They’re admitted for the purpose of what was in his mind,” Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington said in court Wednesday. “Everything he viewed — which is basically the secret archive files — is admitted to show his course of conduct.”

Sarmina agreed, while reserving the right to exclude individual documents, and to give jurors “limiting” instructions on how they should weigh the evidence.

Lynn’s lawyers object vehemently to the jury hearing about the other priests not on trial. Some of them are no longer alive. The defense had hoped to limit the case solely to Lynn’s involvement with his two co-defendants, the Rev. James Brennan, 48, and former priest Edward Avery, 69.

They fear he will be swept up in the outrage over the alleged sins of priests throughout the archdiocese, and worldwide. Sarmina’s recent comments heightened their concern.

She said anyone who doesn’t think there was widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church “is living on another planet. Look at what happened in Boston and the convictions there,” Sarmina said on Jan. 31, according to a defense motion. “You’re not taking into account Ireland, or Mexico or Boston, all of these places where there (have) been proven admissions?”

Sarmina said jurors could fairly judge Lynn’s case even if they view the problem as widespread, much as they could sit on a drug case while believing the country has a drug problem.

Despite heated arguments over evidence Wednesday, the two sides agree on many of the underlying facts. The issue comes down to their interpretation, Blessington said.

Defense lawyers will argue that Lynn took orders from Bevilacqua. The cardinal died last month at age 88. However, prosecutors preserved his testimony in a seven-hour videotaped deposition two months ago, and could show some or all of it in court.

The defense might not object. Defense lawyer Jeffrey Lindy said he also welcomed the use of some of the material in the secret files.

“Monsignor Lynn has a story to tell (too) in this trial,” Lindy said.

Complete Article HERE!