ALBANY (NY)
BishopAccountability.org
Summary of Case: Dozia J. Wilson was a priest of the Diocese of Albany, ordained in 1972. Early on he was an assistant parish priest in Albany, Diocesan Director of Urban Ministry and Chaplain at the La Salle School for Boys. In May 1976 Wilson was transferred to the Archdiocese of Boston, where he was Administrator of St. Joseph’s in Roxbury until April 1979. He was moved to a Rochester NY parish for several months, to St. Ann’s in Fort Ann for a short while, followed by a decade at St. Mary’s in Hudson. While there he was Chaplain at the Columbia County jail and Columbia-Greene Community College.
Allegations against Wilson are first known to have surfaced in 1976, when some parents complained to the District Attorney that Wilson had sexually abused two boys at an Albany hotel. The diocese was given an ultimatum by the D.A.: either move the priest out of the area or he faces prosecution. Wilson was quietly moved to Boston. In 1997 a young man reported to Cardinal Law in a letter that Wilson sexually abused him over a two-year period, beginning in 1976, when he was a 15-year-old boy. The man said that Wilson had begun giving him alcohol and marijuana in Albany in 1973, and that he and his younger brother were taken by Wilson to Boston, where they lived with him in the rectory of St. Joseph’s. The man filed a civil lawsuit which was settled in 2003. In another lawsuit, filed in 2004, Wilson was accused of the sexual abuse of a boy from 1980 to 1985, beginning when the boy was age 14. This accuser said he first met the the priest at St. Ann’s at age 14, and considered him a father figure. Wilson allegedly would give the boy gifts and take him on trips, including to Boston and the West Coast, and abused him after plying him with alcohol and marijuana.
Records show that Wilson was sent for treatment in November 1978 and that, in May 1979, he asked the Bishop of Tulsa OK for permission to work in his diocese. Nothing came of that. In 1991 he was sent to a rehabilitation for the treatment of alcoholism, after which he was not reassigned. He resigned from ministry in 1993.
Wilson went on to work for ten years as a spiritual advisor at a residential treatment program for boys in Dobbs Ferry. He was fired in 2003 after being beaten up by an 18-year-old male he had picked up in Manhattan.
Ordained: May 13, 1972
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