Former Altar Boys Accuse Dead Lowell Priest of Sex Abuse

By Marie Szaniszlo
Boston Herald
December 10, 2010

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20101210former_altar_boys_accuse_dead_lowell_priest_of_sex_abuse/

Three men are alleging a priest who is now dead repeatedly molested them in the 1980s while they were altar boys at a Lowell parish, and claim they saw him abuse at least 10 other boys.

The men allege they were between 6 and 13 years old when the Rev. Czeslaw Szywmanski abused them before Mass in the sacristy of Holy Trinity Parish until he left in 1987, said Carmen Durso, the alleged victims’ attorney.

Szywmanski belonged at the time to the Order of St. Paul the First Hermit. The order did not return a phone call yesterday.

In 1979, he went to Our Lady of Czenstochowa in Coventry, R.I., before he was transferred to Holy Trinity in 1981 and the Diocese of Peterborough in Ontario, Canada, in 1987, Durso said. He was driving there in September 1987 when he was killed in a crash in upstate New York.

In an e-mail yesterday, Kelly Lynch, a spokeswoman for the Boston archdiocese, said one prior allegation was reported to law enforcement in 2009. “A preliminary review of our records finds no evidence that would have prevented the archdiocese from giving Fr. Szymanski an assignment when he arrived in 1981,” Lynch said.