PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
By John P. Martin
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The top lawyer for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia testified Monday that church’s leaders lied to him when he asked them a decade ago about a secret list of 35 area priests suspected of sexually abusing children.
“Everyone I spoke to said they didn’t know where it was, and they didn’t have a copy of it,” the lawyer, Timothy Coyne, told jurors at the landmark conspiracy and clergy sex-abuse trial against Msgr. William J. Lynn.
He added: “Somebody lied to me — or a lot of people lied to me.”
But defense lawyer Thomas Bergstrom pressed Coyne to concede he had no proof that Lynn lied to him, but sufficient reason to think others did. Coyne also acknowledged that the potentially incriminating list finally came to light this February, less than two weeks after the death of Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, the retired archbishop of Philadelphia whose tenure is at the center of the scandal.
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