Monsignor John Mraz (inset) faces child porn charges in the Lehigh Valley.
A Roman Catholic priest, who used to serve as pastor for a Lehigh Valley church and as an educator at various area Catholic schools, faces child pornography charges after asking a friend and parishioner to upgrade his computer.
Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin announced child sex abuse charges Tuesday morning against Monsignor John Mraz, 66, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Mraz faces the sex abuse charges in connection to downloading child porn, said investigators.
Some of the terms Mraz searched for online included “nude boys wrestling,” “teen boys spanked,” “small boy nudes,” “handcuffed nude boys,” “boy bondage” and other terms involving boys and sexual acts, said police.
The charges stemmed from when Mraz, who formerly served as pastor at St. Ann’s Church along S 6th Street in Emmaus, gave his HP laptop to a parishioner – identified by the DA as D.M. – to perform maintenance and upgrade the computer in late July.
D.M. discovered files depicting nude males of unknown ages in the computer’s recycling bin, said the district attorney’s office in a news release.
D.M. made the upgrades and returned the laptop to Mraz who then asked D.M. to upgrade a second, older laptop, said the DA.
“In the process of upgrading the second laptop, D.M. discovered a file with a name suggesting it contained obscene images of underage males,” said the DA’s office. “These discoveries made D.M. uncomfortable, and he informed the Diocese of Allentown about what he had found on Mraz’s laptops.”
The diocese then alerted the district attorney’s office, which in turn investigated and searched Mraz’s home at the Emmaus church, taking various electronic devices, said the DA.
“As a result of the analysis, it is alleged that the user of the devices actively searched the Internet looking for images and videos of underage males engaged in sex acts,” said the DA’s office. “It is alleged that numerous image files of child pornography were on the devices as well.”
Among the numerous images of nude boys under the age of 18 recovered from Mraz’s computers was at least one photo of boys involved in a sex act, said an affidavit of probable cause.
Investigators determined Mraz downloaded the photos “for his own sexual gratification,” said the DA’s office.
In a statement, the diocese said it removed Mraz — who has been a priest for 41 years –and that he can no longer present himself as a priest.
Over his four decades as a priest, Mraz worked at various Catholic schools including Allentown Central and was vice principal at Marian High in Tamaqua. He also served as chaplain at the Newman Center at Lehigh University, said the diocese. He was a priest at St. Ann’s since 2008.
A judge arraigned Mraz, who now lives at Holy Family Villa for Priests in Bethlehem, Tuesday morning and set bail at $50,000. He faces an Oct. 3 preliminary hearing.
Reached by phone Tuesday afternoon, Mraz said he couldn’t make any comment without his attorney present. He did however reveal he has been hospitalized since July 8.
A priest who once said homosexuals had to live a “celibate life” to be good Catholics has been accused of molesting a 15-year-old boy at a Bronx church about 30 years ago.
But without a change to the statute of limitations on child sex abuse in New York, the alleged crimes committed by the man of the cloth will forever go unpunished.
Father Anthony Giuliano was running two parishes in Dutchess County — about 85 miles from Manhattan — on Aug. 16 when a 43-year-old man told police the priest had molested him in the late 1980s.
The Archdiocese of New York immediately removed him from the two parishes as the NYPD launched an investigation.
“The allegation has been found to be credible,” Reverend Gerald Walsh, the Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, to parishioners at St. John the Evangelist and St. Charles Borromeo churches, located in Pawling and Dover Plains.
The accuser told Bronx Special Victims Squad detectives that he was working in the rectory of Holy Rosary Church in Baychester between 1987 and 1988 when Giuliano befriended him. The two used to play wrestle, he told cops.
During one session, Giuliano told the teen that he was going to “take him to the back and give him a frontal,” according to police sources.
The teen thought Giuliano was talking about a wrestling maneuver — until the priest told him to lie down on the ground, pulled the teen’s pants and underwear down and molested him, police sources said.
Even if sufficient evidence is found to support the accuser’s claims, New York’s statute of limitations bars authorities from filing charges. Victims of child sex abuse have until age 23 to bring a criminal or civil case.
In June, Albany legislators failed to vote on the Child Victims Act, which would have made it easier for child sex abuse victims to seek justice against their abusers, as well as the Catholic Church and schools. The long-stalled legislation would have created a one-year window for past victims of abuse to bring charges against their tormenters.
The Catholic League called the legislation “a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the Catholic Church.”
Meanwhile, investigators are trying to determine if other, more recent victims of Giuliano can be found, police sources said.
The accusations against Giuliano shook residents of Dover Plains, a leafy town of 87,000.
“I’m totally taken aback by this,” said Dover Plains Town Supervisor Linda French. “It’s unbelievable.”
Giuliano said he did nothing wrong.
“This is a shock,” the priest told the Daily News last month when the allegations surfaced. “It never happened.”
When reached Tuesday, he refused to comment. The accuser also declined comment.
In an interview by a SUNY New Paltz student posted online in 2014, Giuliano said that homosexuals should be celibate if they want to be part of the Catholic Church.
“It must be a celibate life like with the priesthood,” he said. “We are celibate for a greater purpose.”
He also questioned Pope Francis’ push to open the Catholic Church to same-sex couples.
“We can’t say this for 2,000 years and then all of a sudden say, ‘Oh, we made a mistake for 2,000 years,’” Giuliano said.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of Bishop Accountability, said the Archdiocese of New York notoriously hides information, preventing a more complete picture of the extent of abuse among priests in the state.
“We know of very few accused priests in New York State,” Doyle said. “We know about more accused priests in the diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire than we do in the Archdiocese of New York.”
The estate of a late Ottawa man has launched a $2-million lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Ottawa for sexual abuse he allegedly suffered as a child in the 1960s.
The unusual statement of claim was filed last month on behalf of the man, whom the Citizen will identify only as John Doe. He died at the age of 63 in November 2014.
According to the claim, Doe was a victim of Rev. Jean Gravel, a Catholic priest at Ottawa’s Saint-Rémi Parish.
Gravel pleaded guilty in September 1967 to charges of gross indecency involving two teenaged boys and resisting arrest.
The new court document contends that Doe was one of those teenaged victims.
Doe’s widow said her husband of 23 years did not tell her about the abuse until he was on his deathbed. He was in hospital for the final month of his life with pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease.
Only when she asked him about whether he was scared did her husband break down and relate his long-buried story.
“I need to tell you something,” he began. The story poured out over the next two hours.
“The anguish and the fear of having to hold that in for all those years was something I had never, ever seen: I had never seen him like that,” his widow said in an interview.
Her husband, she said, was not afraid of death but of the possibility of an afterlife in which he would have to explain to God why he had disavowed his faith.
“He was terrified, absolutely terrified,” she said. “That, for me, was heart-wrenching.”
Doe, a father of three who worked most of his life for a cleaning company, died two days after that conversation.
“I think until the day he died, he was ashamed,” she said. “He was terrified about what people would think of him.”
Doe’s widow said she launched the lawsuit on his behalf to gain recognition for his suffering: “I think it gives a sense of meaning for what he went through. I think he told me for a reason: because he wanted, at some point, for the church to be responsible.”
Under Ontario law, an estate’s executor has as long as two years to launch a lawsuit on behalf of a deceased person. There’s no provision that limits when a victim of sexual assault can sue for damages.
Lawyer Robert Talach, who has litigated more clergy sex abuse cases than anyone in the country, called it a first-of-its-kind lawsuit.
Lawyer Robert Talach says the lawsuit filed by the estate of an Ottawa man is the first of its kind.
“I don’t know of any case like it,” said Talach, who represents John Doe’s estate.
The Doe case is one of four new lawsuits launched against the Catholic diocese in the three months since the Citizen published its series about clergy sexual abuse.
Three of the cases were filed by people who say they were victimized as children by Rev. Dale Crampton, the most notorious sex abuser in the history of the diocese. Those three victims are seeking a total of $6 million in damages.
The diocese has already paid out more than $740,000 in compensation to 10 of Crampton’s victims who were sexually abused by the priest between 1963 and 1982.
Crampton killed himself in October 2010 by jumping from an Ottawa highrise. At the time, the Ottawa Police Service was investigating sex abuse allegations made against him by five new complainants.
Twenty people have now come forward to say they were victimized by the priest, a two-term school board trustee.
Through interviews and court documents, the Citizen established that members of the Ottawa clergy were warned at least seven times about Crampton’s sexual misconduct, beginning in 1965.
Rev Dale Crampton.
Rev. Jean Gravel was the first priest convicted of a sex crime in Ottawa.
In September 1967, an Ottawa court heard that Gravel locked himself into his second-floor rectory apartment when police attempted to arrest him on two charges of gross indecency. The officers broke down the door, and a scuffle ensued.
Gravel was given a suspended sentence, placed on two years’ probation, and ordered to enter a treatment program for his alcoholism.
He was defrocked in 1970 — an unusual event at the time — and killed himself in August 1980.
The diocese has already been sued twice before for sexual abuse perpetrated by Gravel.
In response to a 2013 lawsuit, the Archdiocese of Ottawa issued a news release that said, “Jean Gravel’s story is tragic as it is scandalous. Ordained a priest in 1950, he exhibited behavioural problems which required diocesan authorities of the time to intervene, seeking his correction and rehabilitation.”
According to the statement of claim filed in the John Doe case, the sexual abuse began in 1962 when the victim was 11 years old. It continued, the claim says, for the following four years and escalated into rape.
To facilitate that abuse, Gravel made Doe “feel that he was special in the eyes of Gravel, the Church, and God,” the claim reads, and ensured the boy’s silence by making him believe his soul was in peril.
The allegations contained in the statement of claim have not been proven in court.
The Archdiocese of Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The Rev. Warren Hall leads a special mass for couples renewing their vows on Valentine’s Day 2014 at the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception on Steon Hall University’s South Orange campus.
Father Warren Hall said he was notified by phone on Wednesday that Newark Archbishop John Myers, an outspoken conservative, says Hall’s actions are “confusing the faithful” by supporting gay advocacy groups and backing a counselor fired for being in a same-sex marriage.
The Catholic archbishop in New Jersey has barred a gay priest from ministry because the cleric supports gay advocacy groups and has backed a Catholic high school counselor who was fired when church officials discovered the woman was in a same-sex marriage.
Father Warren Hall said he was notified by phone on Wednesday (Aug. 31) that Newark Archbishop John Myers, an outspoken conservative who has submitted his retirement papers to Pope Francis, says Hall’s actions are “confusing the faithful.”
As a result, Hall will no longer be able to celebrate Mass in public, present himself as a priest or work in the New Jersey parishes where he has been ministering.
“The problem is that we have an archbishop who doesn’t believe you can be gay and Catholic,” Hall, who is on vacation, wrote in an email.
He also tweeted about the move Wednesday afternoon:
Myers’ issues with Hall go back to May of last year, when the archbishop fired Hall from his job as chaplain at Seton Hall University for a Facebook post in which Hall showed support for the anti-bullying “NOH8” campaign that encourages respect for gay people and gay rights.
Hall, who said he remains committed to his vocation as a priest and to his vow of celibacy, a few weeks later acknowledged that he is gay.
The Newark Archdiocese said that was also a problem because “someone who labels himself or another in terms of sexual orientation or attraction contradicts what the (Catholic) Church teaches.”
The tensions seemed to have eased two months later when Myers assigned Hall to assist at two parishes in northern New Jersey across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.
But Hall has continued to publicly back several gay groups and gay Catholics in particular.
He is set to speak next week to a New Jersey chapter of PFLAG, founded as a support group for parents and friends of gay people, and he has expressed support for the gun control group Gays Against Guns, the LGBT Community Center in New York and New Ways Ministry, a Catholic LGBT organization.
Hall said that in the phone call informing him of the suspension, Monsignor Thomas Nydegger, Myers’ second-in-command, also cited Hall’s support for an unofficial gay and lesbian ministry at the church’s World Youth Day in Poland in July and his support for a guidance counselor who has sued the archdiocese for firing her over her same-sex marriage.
The woman, Kate Drumgoole, last month filed suit against Paramus Catholic High School – where she was a guidance counselor and basketball coach until her dismissal in January – and the archdiocese for violating anti-discrimination laws and intentionally inflicting emotional distress.
Lawyers for the archdiocese said she violated church teachings and the school’s code of ethics when she married her partner.
In his email, Hall said he was “upset” by Myers’ actions against him and that it would be hard to break the news to parishioners at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Hoboken and St. Lawrence Church in Weehawken, where he has served for the past year: “They fully welcomed me after my firing from Seton Hall last year, they know my personal story and made me a member of the family.
“Since my firing from Seton Hall and coming out last year I felt an obligation to use this as an opportunity to more directly let people know of God’s love for all of us and that gay Catholics should stay in the church and work for more wider acceptance,” he wrote. “I do not feel I ever preached or taught anything contrary to the Gospel (and) this is true from my entire 27 years of ordination” as a priest.
A spokesman for Myers, James Goodness, said in an email on Thursday that the suspension was not about Hall’s sexual orientation but about his public stands.
“Every Catholic priest promises to be reverent and obedient to his bishop,” Goodness said. “A priest’s actions and statements always must be consistent with the discipline, norms and teachings of the Catholic Church. When they are ordained, priests agree to accept the bishop’s judgment about assignments and involvement in ministry.”
In a statement lamenting Hall’s suspension, Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, called Hall “courageous” and said “the archbishop is saying that his church fears associating with LGBT people – a fear which is contrary to the gospel.”
Hall’s ministry, DeBernardo said, “is in line with the church’s own authentic teaching that its ministers must reach out to all those who have been marginalized. He is in line with Pope Francis’ more pastoral and welcoming approach towards LGBT people.”
Myers submitted his resignation to Francis in July when he turned 75, as required by canon law.
But the pontiff, who is reportedly overhauling the episcopal search process to find candidates in tune with his pastoral agenda, has not yet named a replacement.
The archbishop of Newark, John J. Myers, issued a statement Wednesday standing by Paramus Catholic High School’s decision to fire an employee because she’s in a same-sex marriage, asserting that her lifestyle could “create confusion and uncertainty in the moral formation” of students.
Myers’ statement — which one cleric said reflects the church’s resistance to a changing secular society — went out to all parish and school communities within the four-county archdiocese and was shared with the media by the archdiocese’s public relations office.
A harsher critic, however, said the statement highlights the contrast in Myers’ lenient treatment of priests accused or suspected of sexual abuse, as opposed to employees whom the church discovers to be in same-sex marriages.
The seven paragraph statement was offered as a response to media inquiries about the litigation filed by Kate Drumgoole, 33, of Bogota against Paramus Catholic, school President James P. Vail and the archdiocese. Drumgoole claims she was discriminated against when administrators fired her — not for being gay, but for being in a same-sex marriage.
Drumgoole’s marriage to Jaclyn Vanore, 29, both of whom are Paramus Catholic graduates, was made known to school officials by Vanore’s estranged sister, who posted their wedding pictures to Facebook pages associated with the school and Vail’s personal account. The pictures were never viewed publicly, according to her attorneys.
After meeting with Drumgoole, administrators said she no longer had “plausible deniability” and terminated her as dean of guidance and as head girls’ basketball coach.
As part of her employment, Drumgoole was required to sign a contract agreeing to abide by the tenets of the Catholic Church.
“When someone involved in Catholic education ministry offers a public counter-witness to Catholic teaching, he or she does not teach the Truth or further the mission of the Church,” Myers said.
“Such actions can create confusion and uncertainty in the moral formation of the young people he or she encounters,” the archbishop’s statement continued. “When that happens, the Church must be free to take corrective steps to maintain the identity and the integrity of her mission. This right is protected by the United States Constitution as well as federal and state law.”
Christopher Westrick, an attorney for the school, Vail and the archdiocese, tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that it involved the separation of church and state. In his motion Westrick said that the defendants did not violate New Jersey laws against discrimination because within the law, churches are allowed to require employees to subscribe to their tenets.
He argued the defendants’ conduct is protected under the First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion and freedom from government interference.
Drumgoole’s attorneys argued that her job did not consist of ministerial duties and that other employees who are divorced, living with people of the opposite sex or have children out of wedlock were not fired. They also said that the school adopts some of the state’s anti-discrimination laws, thereby making it subject to all of them.
Eric Kleiner, Drumgoole’s other attorney called her courageous for fighting “forces that are much more powerful than her.”
“Such heroism will not be muted or diffused or lessened by the extremely harsh and divisive language given by the Archbishop,” he said.
Superior Court Judge Lisa Perez Friscia last week denied the school’s motion to dismiss, allowing the case to move forward to a yearlong discovery phase in which Drumgoole’s attorneys could interview staff and faculty and have access to school documents and policies.
The case drew the attention of hundreds of alumni, parents and former faculty of Paramus Catholic who signed an online petition demanding that Drumgoole be rehired. It also was covered widely in the media.
Myers acknowledged the criticism.
“Much has been said in recent days about respect, diversity and mercy,” Myers said. “I agree that these qualities are important to the mission of the Catholic Church, especially through the ministry of Catholic education. Every person deserves to be treated with dignity, to be given respect, and to be shown the qualities of mercy.”
But, he said, “the invitation to join in the life of the Church does not include an invitation to alter or redefine what the Church believes and teaches, nor is it an invitation to allow others to define the identity, mission and message of the Church.”
“Even Jesus recognized that some people could not or would not accept His teaching,” Myers’ statement continued. “He was saddened when they walked away from Him, but He never altered His teaching. Nor shall we do so today.”
Drumgoole’s attorney, Lawrence Kleiner, said Myers’ statement “is taking an issue that has already divided its members and turning it into a chasm.”
In a 256-page document titled “The Joy of Love,” Pope Francis in April reiterated church teachings that gays should be welcomed with respect and dignity. But he resoundingly rejected same-sex marriage and said that gay unions cannot be equivalent to a marriage between a man and woman.
The positions are the same as those adopted by bishops from around the world who met in Vatican City in October 2015 for a three-week synod.
The Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter, a publication owned and largely run by laypeople, said gay marriage is “one of those areas where American culture is changing faster than the Catholic Church.”
Societal opinions about gays and same-sex marriage have changed quickly over the past 30 to 40 years, he said. But the Catholic institutions believe their employees should observe the moral example of the church.
“You’ve got these two things in conflict,” Reese said. “These things are going to be worked out over time. I think the church is going to become more accepting of their employees having these unions. But where the Catholic Church is right now, you’re going to see these things blow up.”
Reese said he believes some institutions look the other way. “It’s when these things become very public that bishops become involved and lawsuits get involved,” he said, adding, “I’m old enough to remember when Catholic teachers got fired when they got divorced. We simply don’t do that anymore.”
Mark Crawford, the state director of the New Jersey Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, called Myers’ statement “hypocritical.”
“He’ll protect those clergy he knows abused children yet hold these hard-line positions against people who love each other,” Crawford said. “It’s so backward.”
“This is what we’ve come to expect from our archbishop, unfortunately,” he said. “Hopefully, Francis will send a new shepherd our way that is more understanding, compassionate and fair.”
