MASSACHUSETTS
Cape Cod Times
By Ethan Genter
egenter@capecodonline.com
Posted Jun. 16, 2015
A Falmouth man who alleges he was sexually abused by a St. Anthony’s Parish priest more than 200 times as a child has filed a lawsuit against the priest’s supervisor, the former bishop of the Fall River Diocese.
The civil suit, filed June 5 in Middlesex Superior Court, maintains that former Bishop Daniel A. Cronin knew or should have known about the abuse by Msgr. Maurice Souza.
The Falmouth plaintiff is joined in the suit by a man from Marlboro. The two were altar servers at St. Anthony’s from the late 1970s until the mid 1980s. Although both are identified in the suit, the Times is not naming them because of the allegations of sexual abuse.
Souza died in 1996, and Cronin, who served as bishop of the Fall River Diocese from 1970 until 1991, retired in 2003 after leading the Archdiocese of Hartford for 11 years.
The lawsuit originally was filed in Connecticut, but was dismissed there and filed in Massachusetts when Cronin agreed to travel here to testify and to waive the statute of limitations as a defense, according to Mitchell Garabedian, the plaintiffs’ attorney.
“It’s unusual that a defendant would waive the statute of limitations,” Garabedian said Monday. “Most of these cases the defendants raise the statute of limitations as a defense.”
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