MISSOURI
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
For immediate release: Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2015
Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those abused by Priests (314 566 9790, davidgclohessy@gmail.com)
A serial predator priest is being sued for sexually assaulting another child. We commend this brave man for seeking justice and exposing wrongdoers. We hope his courage will prompt others who were hurt as kids by clerics to step forward.
In 2013 – 31 years after child sex abuse allegations against him first emerged – Fr. Leroy A. Valentine was “permanently remove him from active ministry.” Though archdiocesan officials have paid settlements to at least three of his victims, Fr. Valentine has apparently still not been defrocked. And we believe, but are not certain, that no one from the archdiocese has been supervising or monitoring Fr. Valentine for at least the last 12 years.
In 1982, when a North County mother reported that he sexually assaulted her three sons. The St. Louis Archdiocese paid the boys a settlement – believed to be around $20,000 each – and reportedly sent Valentine for treatment and then transferred him to another parish where he kept working. Catholic officials insisted that the boys never speak publicly about the abuse or the settlements
In 2002, Valentine was an associate pastor at St. Thomas the Apostle in Florissant with an adjoining parochial school. He was one of “at least three St. Louis priests who have been accused in civil court of sexual abuse remain active in the archdiocese today, two in contact with children,” according to the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
(The other two were Fr. Bruce Forman who was – and still is – the director a youth choir in Soulard and Fr. Thomas Graham who was chaplain at a south St. Louis County nursing home. Graham was convicted in a criminal trial of molesting another boy but the jury’s verdict was later overturned. )
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