EAST HAMPTON (NY)
The Independent
April 3, 2018
By Rick Murphy
PEDOPHILE PRIESTS WERE COMMON ON THE EAST END.
The pedophile priest scandal in Boston, a story told in the Oscar nominated movie Spotlight, earned the Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for breaking the news.
But pedophile priests were commonplace decades earlier on the East End, a story that has, for the most part, gone untold. As reported last week exclusively in The Independent — this newspaper has followed the story since 2003 —the Diocese Of Rockville Centre often sent priests accused of inappropriate behavior to eastern Long Island, believing they would blend in better in the sparsely-populated communities here.
According to BishopAccountability.org, published reports, minutes from a Suffolk County Grand Jury investigation, and court documents, the diocese routinely reassigned accused or suspected pedophiles to churches on the East End dating back to the 1960s.
These priests served in East Hampton, Amagansett, Cutchogue, Mattituck, Sag Harbor, Water Mill, Riverhead, Southold, and Manorville.
Rather than turn pedophile priests over to authorities, the diocese discouraged the victims and their parents from filing charges, a world-wide practice the church followed for decades.
According to the grand jury report filed in 2003, “Bishop William Murphy aided and abetted the concealment of criminal conduct of defendant individual priests by failing and refusing to report sexual abuse allegations by said priests to civil authorities, which caused, allowed, and permitted additional children to be molested by predatory priests.”
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