Trail of Reports Prompt Question: Did Church Enable More Priest Abuse?

By Travis Hairgrove
Herald Banner
February 6, 2019

https://www.heraldbanner.com/news/local_news/trail-of-reports-prompt-question-did-church-enable-more-priest/article_1b19b982-29ad-11e9-9bcc-3fc8900b7cba.html

It began more than a half-century ago: the trail of lawsuits, settlements, internal Catholic Church documents and public reports of sexual abuse allegations against Patrick J. Lynch.

Lynch is one of 31 former Diocese of Dallas priests whose name was released last week on a list of priests with “credible allegations of sexual abuse” against them. The accusations against the priest date back to 1966 and include several lawsuits and settlements, records show.

Now deceased, Lynch was never removed from service; instead, he was reassigned to new parishes at least 12 times over the course of his 36 years in the priesthood.

He retired in 1997, after the Diocese of Dallas “discovered a church memo” dated 1966 in his personnel file revealing the sexual abuse had been known and documented even then.

Since Lynch’s retirement from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Richardson in 1995, the diocese has paid out several settlements to individuals alleging that Lynch sexually abused them as children.

The diocese’s court costs in defending Lynch – which had climbed to $130,000 by early 2002, according to a letter written by former Dallas Bishop Lawrence Brahman – coupled with his frequent reassignments have caused many to question if many of the alleged abuses could have been prevented.

Lynch worked at St. William the Confessor Catholic Church in Greenville for about six months in 1972, according to a Greenville native who served there as an altar boy at the time. He asked to remain unnamed in this report.

“Father Lynch appealed to young and old alike,” the man said. “He was a great homilist (preacher), and a lot of times, people would be standing outside church after mass, talking about how much they loved his energy and sermons, and some would say he’d make a good bishop someday.

“But, one day, when I was at work at the store where I had my first paying job, I saw Father Lynch walk in and he was crying,” the man recalled. “He started speaking with the manager. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there was a lot of sobbing. After Father Lynch left, my manager walked up to me and told me, ‘Father Lynch is being transferred,’ and that was the last time I saw him.”

The man, who contacted the Herald-Banner about his memories of Lynch in Greenville, said he was surprised about the allegations when he heard about them much later, but he did recall Lynch’s willingness to spend extra time with the boys of the church.

“He taught a bunch of us boys soccer back when it wasn’t that popular in the U.S., and I had no clue (about any possible abuse), not even in retrospect, that he would do something like that,” the former altar boy added. “Years later, when I read about all the accusations against him and remembered how suddenly he left, it was shocking.”

Twenty-three years after he left St. William – and many church assignments later – Lynch retired from St. Joseph in Richardson, initially telling parishioners he was taking time off due to a heart condition. But in truth, he moved back to his native Ireland and had residences in England as well, according to the Dallas Morning News. That same year, two men alleged publicly that Lynch had sexually abused them as children.

Two years after those accusations – one of which was settled – church officials with the Diocese of Dallas told the Dallas Morning News that Lynch’s retirement came shortly after their discovery of a memo from 1966 in Lynch’s personnel file that said he had been reported for “becoming sexually involved with a student while stationed at St. Pius X Church, Dallas, Texas. This should be kept confidential ... .”

The revelation of the memo in the 1997 newspaper report encouraged another man, Stephen Tomac, to speak out with his own allegations against the priest. He told the Dallas Morning News that Lynch had abused him for months in 1981 when Tomac was preparing for confirmation at St. Joseph in Richardson.

One of the incidents that Tomac related involved Lynch “quizzing him about his masturbation practices and sexual fantasies” while the priest was giving him a ride to a high school production of the musical “Camelot.” Tomac also reported receiving several sexually explicit phone calls from Lynch over the next several weeks.

Tomac, a writer and actor, also told the Dallas Morning News that, during college while seeing a therapist, he wrote a play titled “Sins of the Saints,” which featured a character named Father Patrick that was inspired by Lynch.

Two days after Tomac came forward with his allegations, the diocese revoked Lynch’s right to “celebrate the sacraments,” but diocese officials did not get around to notifying Catholic bishops in the United Kingdom and Ireland until two years later.

An aide working for former Bishop Grahmann wrote in a letter to Cardinal Basil Hume in England: “We have heard indirectly that Father Lynch is living in the London area and may be functioning as a priest … We pray that this is not the case."

In the late 1990s, a man named Lance Donohue, who said he was suicidal and had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, began speaking publicly with more allegations toward Lynch.

Donohue told the Dallas Morning News in 2003 that Lynch raped him on multiple occasions while he was serving as an altar boy at St. Joseph in 1977, when Donohue was 10 years old.

"He told me that it's OK," Donohue testified in a suit against the Diocese of Dallas, "that if there was anything wrong with it that God wouldn't allow it to happen, and that it would upset my family (if someone found out) ... and that if I didn't do it I would go to Hell."

Donohue won the lawsuit and the diocese agreed to pay for his counseling.

Afterward, Bishop Grahmann sent a letter to Lynch in Ireland explaining that the legal fees “incurred as a result of your misconduct” exceeded $130,000 and that the cost of therapy for “victim Donohue” was $40,000.

While living in retirement in Ireland and England, Lynch never returned any calls to the press, and diocese officials often claimed they didn’t know how to find him – even though the diocese continued mailing his monthly pension check to his overseas bank until he died in 2014.

The Greenville native who shared memories of Lynch’s time at St. William said the bishops who helped protect allegation-riddled priests like Lynch were essentially enablers and should be held accountable as well.

“When we were confirmed, which usually takes place around the sixth grade, part of the ceremony involved the bishop (Thomas Tschoepe at the time) walking up to each of us, asking for our saint name and asking if we were brave enough to spread and defend the faith, after which he’d give us a little slap on the face, meaning that you’d go so far as death to defend the faith,” the man recalled.

“The very man who slapped my face and asked me to defend my faith was the same man who moved this guy around,” he said. “I think the bishops need to be held accountable, and if it’s found out that any of them knowingly covered up any of the abuse, their pictures should be taken out of the chancery, and any schools named after them need to be renamed.

“They’re literally killing souls – not just the priests, but the bishops too.”