Article Title
The Church Settled Sexual Abuse Cases Against This Priest. Why Is He Still Saying Mass?
Link to Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/nyregion/reverend-donald-timone-sexual-abuse.html
Source: New York Times
Author(s): Sharon Otterman
Date: December 20, 2018
Synopsis of / Excerpts from the Article
The article describes a situation in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, wherein Donald Timone, a priest on whose account the Archdiocese paid two child sexual abuse settlements, has been openly exercising the faculties of his ministry (saying mass in public, hearing confessions, teaching at a university, and serving as a counselor for Catholics with same-sex attraction, encouraging them to refrain from acting on their homosexual urges).
According to the article:
The settlements paid by the Archdiocese of New York were for substantiated allegations that Father Timone had sexually abused teenage boys he was counseling, one of whom committed suicide after what his widow said was a decades-long struggle with what had happened to him.
The New York archdiocese is essentially allowing Father Timone to continue serving as a priest because of a bureaucratic technicality — a position that seems to fly in the face of the pledge by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of the New York Archdiocese, to aggressively handle sexual abuse accusations.
The archdiocese maintains that Father Timone has been allowed to remain because the church itself did not rule on his fitness; that judgment was made by a separate, church-sponsored panel, the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. The settlements were paid in 2017 through that program.
The archdiocese has its own internal process for substantiating abuse claims. And though it initially suspended Father Timone and investigated an allegation lodged against him in 2002, its review board did not substantiate the accusation at the time, the spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said last week.
Responding to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Zwilling added that the case had now been reopened to determine if Father Timone should be removed from the ministry, but that he would not be suspended during that investigation.