Murder suspect priest said Mass in Wexford

By Sean O’driscoll
Times (UK)
May 15, 2017

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/murder-suspect-priest-said-mass-in-wexford-jfx7w9lnx

Joseph Maskell was accused of murdering a nun in the United States

A defrocked priest who fled from the United States to Ireland to escape murder and sexual abuse allegations worked as a psychologist in Co Wexford, the Ferns diocese has said.

A file compiled by the diocese on Joseph Maskell shows that he had a contract with the local health board to provide counselling services, according to Father Joseph Carroll, a spokesman for the Ferns diocese.

He also posed a priest and said Mass in Wexford, even though he had been stripped of his ministry.

The archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland, last year paid out compensation to 11 women who said that Maskell sexually abused them while he was offering psychological and career counselling at their high school. In 1994, Maryland police found a box of the girls’ psychological reports that Maskell buried in the grounds in a Catholic cemetery, after a tip off from the cemetery groundskeeper. The Baltimore archdiocese stripped him of his ministry as a result.

Maskell, who fled to Ireland in 1995, is a suspect in the murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, whose body was found in Maryland in 1970.