WEST VIRGINIA
Parkersburg News and Sentinel

WHEELING -Bishop Michael J. Bransfield issued a statement Thursday denying the allegations made Wednesday in a trial in Philadelphia.

“I have never sexually abused anyone,” Bransfield said in a statement released by the Wheeling-Charleston Diocese.

Bransfield said he was in Rome attending meetings at the Vatican when this “false story” was publicly released by the media without my knowledge or input.

“To say I was shocked and saddened would be an understatement.”

A man Wednesday testified at the trial of the Rev. James Brennan, accused in a 1996 child sex assault, that a priest raped him in the 1970s at a beach house owned by Bransfield. The man said he was told Bransfield also sexually abused a boy and testified he saw Bransfield with a car full of boys at a farm owned by his accused abuser, the Rev. Stanley Gana, whom the…