NEW YORK (NY)
Irish Central
October 29, 2018
By Tom Deignan
According to Google Maps, St. Joseph-St. Thomas parish is a five-minute drive, via Amboy Road, from Our Lady Star of the Sea, where all four of my children were baptized.
Tack on three minutes if you want to travel via Father Drumgoole Road, named for the Longford-born priest best known for housing and educating thousands of destitute Irish and other immigrant children on the once-rural South Shore of Staten Island.
It was another Irish-born, Staten Island priest who was in the news last week, Monsignor Charles Coen, who served as pastor of St. Joseph-St. Thomas in the 1970s and 1980s. Numerous media outlets reported Coen, now 85 and ill, had been accused of sexual assault by church investigators.
Coen has vehemently denied the charges.
“I am not only denying the charge, but it couldn’t possibly have happened,” Coen, now 85, told the Irish Voice last week. “One thousand percent, I didn’t do this. I never got a proper chance to defend myself from the Archdiocese.”
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