MISSOURI
BishopAccountability.org
Summary of Case: Ordained a priest of the St. Louis archdiocese in 1969, Joseph D. Ross has been accused by at least five people of child sexual abuse. He was convicted in 1988 of the sexual abuse of a boy in 1986. During that investigation he admitted to police that he’d been arrested twice previously for sexual misconduct involving adults, and that he was accused of molesting an 8th grade boy at a parish in the 1970s. Ross was sentenced to two years’ probation and sent to treatment. He was subsequently allowed to resume ministry; parishioners were not informed of his history of sexual misconduct, including the conviction. Ross was removed from ministry in March 2002 due to his earlier conviction, during a time of widespread public revelations in the U.S. of clergy sex abuse against children. He was laicized by the Vatican several months later. In September 2008 Ross was arrested in Arkansas, where he’d been living since his removal from the priesthood, on charges of the rape and molestation of a child. His accuser was a teen girl who reported that Ross sexually abused her in Missouri beginning when she was 5 or six years-old in the late 1990s, into the early 2000s. Ross was her family’s parish pastor at the time. Criminal charges were dropped just before trial in August 2010. The now young woman filed a civil lawsuit in Oct. 2011. A civil trial is scheduled for July 2014.
Ordained: 1969
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