PITTSBURGH (PA)
Post-Gazette
Dec. 17, 2019
By Peter Smith
A newly released portion of a 2018 grand jury report indicates that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh received an allegation of sexual abuse against a priest in the mid-1990s and that the priest admitted his sexual attraction to teenagers.
But he remained in ministry more than two decades longer because, until 2018, diocesan officials felt they didn’t have enough evidence to remove him entirely from ministry.
The new information comes in what may be the last piece of redacted information to be unsealed from the landmark 2018 statewide grand jury report into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The priest, the Rev. Richard Lelonis, died in October at age 74. He spent 48 years in the priesthood, but much of the latter half of that career was spent in restricted ministry, away from parish work but still wearing the collar as a priest in good standing, after the 1995 allegation.
Father Lelonis was one of a small number of priests who challenged aspects of the grand jury report into sexual abuse by priests in six Roman Catholic dioceses, including Pittsburgh. Most of that group wanted their names redacted entirely from the grand jury’s report, a move the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately agreed to.
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