Philadelphia Monsignor's Cover-Up Conviction Questioned; Newark Archbishop Blasted for Priest's Assignments
By Peter Smith
The Catholic hierarchy’s handling of sexual abuse is getting mixed news this week. An investigative reporter is challenging the case against Philadelphia Monsignor William Lynn, who last year became the first high-ranking Catholic official to be convicted and sentenced to jail for covering up sexual abuse by a priest. Meanwhile, the archbishop of Newark, N.J., faces claims that he knowingly allowed a priest to minister with children despite a legal agreement forbidding him from doing so — reached to avoid a re-trial of the priest on a sexual-abuse charge. *** First, Philadelphia. A star witness who testified against a former priest accused of sexual abuse — and whose conviction led to that of Lynn’s — has serious credibility problems, and prosecutors themselves questioned his reliability. The former priest in question — Edward Avery — is himself a dubious witness, but there’s evidence he’s telling the truth when he says he pleaded guilty to sexual abuse because he was offered a sweetheart deal for a short prison sentence by prosecutors, journalist Ralph Cipriano writes in the National Catholic Reporter: “If you believe Avery, Lynn is sitting in jail for a crime that never happened. And he’s not the only one.”It’s a long and complicated story, and Cipriano isn’t reporting it out of any admiration for the church hierarchy. “I’m the last person to defend the Philadelphia archdiocese. … In 2005, I covered a Philadelphia grand jury report for NCR that cracked open the archdiocese’s secret archive files, formerly kept in a locked safe. It was like opening Pandora’s box. The 45,000 pages of secret documents pried loose with search warrants amounted to a dark river of human tragedy.But, Cipriano said, justice isn’t served by punishing Lynn in this case. It sounds like Lynn may become the Ted Stevens of the clerical world. *** As soon as one case against the hierarchy gets undermined, however, here comes another. The Newark Star-Ledger is questioning Newark Archbishop John Myers’ handling of a priest whose conviction on sexual charges was overturned on a technicality and who later returned to ministry that put him in contact with children, even going on youth retreats and trips and hearing children’s confessions. Blogger Mark Silk of Religion News Service, a religion professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, writes: “The new revelation about Fugee presents Pope Francis with his first case of a bishop providing an abusive priest with continued opportunities to abuse minors. How Rome handles it, whether by action or inaction, will send a signal around the world. In the long night of the Church abuse scandal will this papacy be a new day, or a false dawn?”Update: The Catholic League argues that the legal agreement only specified that Fugee have no unsupervised contact with minors. Here’s a link to the agreement. It says the “contact” should not be unsupervised, but it goes on to say without qualifier that he should not “supervise or minister to any minor/child.” Those are distinct things. Contact is any incidental interaction. Supervision and ministry involve exercising clerical authority and a position of trust. There’s nothing in the language of the legal agreement that would indicate Fugee could do supervision or ministry under someone else’s supervision.
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