PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Newsworks
BY HOLLY OTTERBEIN
A Catholic Church official whose child-endangerment conviction was overturned last month will stay out of public ministry for now.
Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said in a statement that Monsignor William Lynn will remain on “administrative leave” and therefore “may not function publicly as a priest.”
This week, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia provided the 10 percent of the $250,000 bail needed to release Lynn from prison.
Lynn was convicted in 2012 for his lax oversight of a priest accused of sexual assault. But a Superior Court panel found that the child-endangerment law at the time did not apply to supervisors such as Lynn.
Chaput defended the Archdiocese’s decision to bail out Lynn.
“Msgr. Lynn has already spent 18 months in prison on a conviction which Pennsylvania’s state appellate court has reversed — unanimously — as ‘fundamentally flawed,'” he said. “This reversal is not a matter of technicalities but of legal substance.”
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