SIOUX CITY
Sioux City Journal
November 6, 2018
By Earl Horlyk
The Sioux City Catholic Diocese is asking members of the public to come forward if they or their child has been a victim of sexual abuse by any priest in the diocese, which encompasses more than 70 parishes in 24 northwest Iowa counties.
This is the result of parishioner and public dismay following news that the diocese concealed for decades a priest’s admission that he had sexually abused approximately 50 boys over a 20-year period.
Now 85 years old, The Rev. Jerome Coyle, was stripped of his parish assignments in the 1980s. Coyle, who started as a faculty member at Bishop Heelan High School in 1959, an assistant pastor at Cathedral of the Epiphany and Immaculate Conception in the early-to-mid-1960s and pastor at St. Cecilia Parish, in Sanborn, Iowa, from 1978 to 1986, was never defrocked despite being publicly identified by the church as an admitted pedophile.
Through an Oct. 31 investigative report by the Associated Press (AP), it was discovered that the diocese helped Coyle move into a retirement home in Fort Dodge, Iowa, without informing administrators of a Catholic school located across the street.
“We know that the AP reporter is now investigating all of our past and present actions at the Diocese of Sioux City, in order to create his next story,” the diocese said in a news release on Tuesday. “We are researching old records with the Review Board (an advisory board made such lay people as licensed therapists, nurses, police officers, a judge and a psychiatrist).”
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