PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
By Joseph A. Slobodzian
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Philadelphia prosecutors confirmed Friday that they were considering calling defrocked priest and admitted pedophile Edward Avery as a witness in the trial of a Philadelphia priest and a former Catholic schoolteacher accused of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old altar boy.
The information was made public at a hearing where the delayed Sept. 4 trial of the Rev. Charles Engelhardt and teacher Bernard Shero got a new date – Oct. 22 – and a new judge in Common Pleas Court, Ellen Ceisler.
Avery, 70, is serving a 21/2- to five-year prison term after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting the same 10-year-old altar boy in 1999 when Avery, then chaplain at Nazareth Hospital, lived in the rectory of St. Jerome’s parish in Northeast Philadelphia.
But of more significance to Engelhardt and Shero is the prosecution’s allegation that Engelhardt, the parochial vicar at St. Jerome’s, first molested the child in 1998 and “passed him along” to Avery and then Shero.
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