CHARLOTTE (NC)
WBTV
April 4, 2019
By Nick Ochsner
Records obtained by WBTV show Catholic Church leaders in Raleigh, Charlotte and Springfield, Mass. Allowed a priest to continue working in a parish for decades after he was first reported to have abused children.
The revelation is the latest in a string of new information that is unfolding about how local Catholic leaders have handled reports of abuse for decades.
Last week, Monsignor Mauricio West—who, as Chancellor of the Charlotte Diocese, was the second-in-command for a quarter century—abruptly resigned after a lay review board found allegations of sexual misconduct against him to be credible.
The nine pages of new records obtained by WBTV show Catholic leaders in North Carolina—first in the Diocese of Raleigh and, later, the Diocese of Charlotte, after it was created—allowed Father Andre Corbin to continue working as a priest decades after first receiving complaints that Corbin had sexually abused boys.
Eventually, Corbin was reported to police in 1988, when he was charged with two counts of taking indecent liberties with a minor in Buncombe County.
He pleaded guilty to one of those counts, was sentenced to five years in jail but served just two months of his sentence before being released on probation, court records show.
According to court records, the criminal charges and conviction stems from an incident in 1966.
But a letter obtained by WBTV from then-Bishop of Raleigh Vincent Waters to Bishop Christopher Weldon, who presided at the time over the Bishop of Springfield, Mass. shows church leaders were aware of Corbin’s behavior as early as 1963.
It was sometime after the summer of 1963 that Waters, in Raleigh, wrote to Weldon, in Springfield.
“Last summer not too long after the new priests were ordained I had a difficulty with the young priest who has written me the enclosed letter,” Waters’ missive about Corbin began.
“I found that he needed psychiatric treatment,” Waters wrote. “The difficulty was boyology.”
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