SIOUX CITY (IA)
Patheos
November 29, 2018
By Barry Duke
Investigations into abusive Catholic priests in Iowa have have brought to light a bizarre episode in which one gentleman of the cloth attempted to rape a woman at a shopping mall, then declared his intention to rape a policeman who arrived on the scene.
Father Jeremy Wind, said to have been trouserless at the time of his arrest in 2013, was allowed to resume his clerical duties after the Diocese of Sioux City satisfied itself that his “mental health episode” had been successfully treated.
The Wind case, according to this report, follows a statement made in October by the diocese’s bishop R Walker Nickless, above, which acknowledged that that it had covered up the crimes Father Jerome Coyle, who admitted to then to then-Bishop Lawrence Soens that he had sexually abused 50 boys over a 20-year period. The diocese sent Coyle to a treatment center for accused priests in New Mexico, where he lived and worked as a civilian for decades.
Soens himself was accused of abusing boys when he was a priest and principal in the 1960s in Iowa City, and the Diocese of Davenport paid settlements to his accusers. Soens, 92, never faced criminal charges and now lives in a Catholic retirement home in Sioux city.
This week the Diocese of Sioux City, in a statement, defended its decision to continue employing Wind. The statement came in response to inquiries from The Associated Press, which used the state’s open records law to shed light on a criminal case that was recently erased from public court files.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.