BERGEN (NJ)
Bergen Record
Dec. 9, 2019
By Abbott Koloff and Deena Yellin
A former New York Giants football team chaplain accused of sexual abuse more than 15 years ago and later reinstated by church officials — just in time to get a Super Bowl ring — was named in a lawsuit filed Monday by one of the two men who had come forward years ago.
The priest, the Rev. William Dowd, was returned to ministry in 2007 after a church tribunal made up of priests had acquitted him in a closed-door hearing. That decision came five years after a Newark Archdiocese review board, which included lay people, determined the allegations warranted further action by church officials.
Also on Monday, five women said in court papers that they were abused as young girls by a Bergen County priest while their families attended parishes in Hackensack and Glen Rock.
The priest, Augustine Giella, died more than 15 years ago while awaiting trial after being charged with the sexual assault of a child. He’s been accused of abusing five sisters from Pennsylvania after being transferred to that state from New Jersey. A Pennsylvania grand jury report listed him last year among 300 allegedly abusive clerics and called him an example of the Catholic Church’s “wholesale institutional failure that endangered the welfare of children.”
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