NEW YORK (NY)
Episcopal News Service
February 24, 2020
By Egan Millard
The Rev. Gregory Lisby, a priest in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on Feb. 21, having been charged after FBI agents raided the rectory where he was living in September. The same day, the diocese also revealed that, since Lisby’s arrest, it has “received devastating credible evidence” that Lisby sexually abused a teenager.
Lisby had been living with his husband, then the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Worcester, in the church’s rectory with their two children when the FBI found nearly 200 images and videos of child pornography in a Microsoft account Lisby used, according to court records.
At the time, Lisby was working as a kindergarten teacher in a public school in Holyoke, having been suspended in 2018 from his position as rector of All Saints Church in Worcester “for an inappropriate relationship with an adult that did not involve sexual contact,” Western Massachusetts Bishop Douglas Fisher wrote in a letter to the diocese shortly after Lisby’s arrest. Fisher added in that letter that the diocese had “no reason to believe that children in our diocese have been victimized in this situation.”
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