Article Title

Breaking ranks: why Boston’s cardinal intervened in an abuse case in New York

Link to Article:       https://catholicherald.co.uk/magazine/breaking-ranks-why-bostons-cardinal-intervened-in-an-abuse-case-in-new-york/

Source:  Catholic Herald

Author(s):  J. Arthur Bloom

Date:  January 10, 2019 

Synopsis of / Excerpts from Article 

On December 20, 2018 the New York Times ran a story (written by Sharon Otterman) describing 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). 

On 21 December 2018, Sean O’Malley (a.k.a. Archbishop of Boston and “Cardinal”) dispatched a letter to Christophe Pierre (a.k.a. the Papal Nuncio, or pope’s ambassador to the United States) in Washington D.C., calling his attention to Otterman’s New York Times article of the 20th, regarding Timone. In his letter O’Malley disclosed that he himself had received correspondence from someone in New York. In O’Malley’s letter to Pierre, the name of O’Malley’s New York correspondent is redacted. O’Malley in Boston wrote the following to Pierre in Washington:  “I note the seriousness of the allegations [redacted] presents with regard to Rev Timone and that today the New York Times has published an extensive report concerning the allegations against Rev Timone.”

According to the Catholic Herald article: 

Timone had been allowed to remain in ministry despite several settlements with people who had accused him of sexual misconduct. Church-watchers quickly concluded that O’Malley was, in effect, reporting New York archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan to the nuncio. 

One can safely assume that the nuncio does not need someone to read The New York Times for him, and this was more about O’Malley going on the record (at least to insiders) with his disapproval of the handling of cases in New York. Yet there is also what one might call a second track to this story. The main story is the Times report and the response to it, which revealed the settlements and questioned why the priest had been allowed to remain in ministry, and O’Malley’s decision to intervene. The second track, which played out in the Catholic press, concerns a small Catholic college trying to get a straight answer about Fr [“Father”] Timone. 

Here is the timeline of events: on December 13, administrators at John Paul the Great University in California received a letter of suitability for Fr Timone from the Archdiocese of New York, sent on December 4. Then, on December 20, the New York Times broke the news about ongoing investigations into Fr Timone, prompting the college to seek clarification from the Archdiocese of New York. On December 21, Cardinal O’Malley sent a letter to the papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre. Fr Timone was removed from ministry.

According to Ed Condon at the Catholic News Agency, Fr Timone had taught on a yearly basis at the school for a decade. Suitability letters were sent every year, as is required of priests operating outside the diocese in which they are incardinated. Fr Timone had previously been investigated in 2002 and 2003. So the archdiocese did not disclose that Fr Timone was under investigation in any of the suitability letters it sent to the college. Officials at John Paul the Great evidently felt betrayed and spoke to reporters.

Article Title

Priest Who Was Still Saying Mass After Abuse Settlements Is Suspended

Link to Article:       https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/nyregion/father-donald-timone-suspended.html

Source:  New York Times

Author(s):  Sharon Otterman

Date:  December 23, 2018 

Synopsis of / Excerpts from the Article 

The Archdiocese of New York has suspended a priest who had continued his clerical duties despite two settlements paid for allegations of sexual abuse of teenage boys.

The Rev. Donald G. Timone, 84, is the subject of an internal investigation by the archdiocese, but had continued to celebrate Mass in New York and California, more than a year and a half after an archdiocesan compensation program paid settlements to the two men, as detailed last week by The New York Times. [See the entry in this chronology for 2018-12-20.]

A spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said on Friday that the archdiocese would no longer allow Father Timone to remain in ministry while it weighed permanently removing him. 

Those settlements did not trigger Father Timone’s removal from the ministry despite the archdiocese’s “zero-tolerance” policy on child sexual abuse, Mr. Zwilling said, because the compensation program functioned separately from the archdiocese’s own internal process for substantiating abuse allegations. 

“It’s reprehensible that Cardinal Dolan allowed this priest to minister for years to sexually vulnerable minors,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy abuse. “The cardinal put other children at risk. And it raises the question: How many other accused priests is he concealing?”

Lidy Connolly, the vice president of administration at John Paul the Great Catholic University in California, where Father Timone has been working as a chaplain, spiritual adviser and teacher, said that the Archdiocese of New York had informed the university on Wednesday that Father Timone’s letter of good standing — a required credential for a priest — had been revoked. He was no longer working there, she said.

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. 

Article Title

Catholic Church in Illinois Withheld Names of at Least 500 Priests Accused of Abuse, Attorney General Says

Link to Article:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/illinois-attorney-general-catholic-church-priest-abuse.html

Source:  New York Times

Author(s):   Laurie Goodstein and  Monica Davey 

Date:  December 19, 2018 

Synopsis of Article 

Six Catholic dioceses in Illinois withheld names of 500 priests accused of sexually abusing minors.   The church neglected to investigate allegations. 

Issued on December 19, 2018 by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, the report, which is preliminary, concludes that “the Catholic dioceses in Illinois are incapable of investigating themselves and ‘will not resolve the clergy sexual abuse crisis on their own.’” 

Allegations were lodged against 690 priests but only 185 names were released as having been found to be credibly accused.  

Only nine pages long, the Illinois preliminary report does not identify the priests who have been accused or name specific bishops for negligence.

Diocesan files showed that three quarters of the abuse allegations were either not investigated by the dioceses or investigated but not substantiated. 

According to the article: 

A pattern emerged from the files in which dioceses often failed to find a claim credible if there was only one victim, the report said. They also failed to investigate at all if the accused priest was deceased or reassigned, or belonged to a religious order (such as the Franciscans, Marists or Jesuits). The dioceses often discredited survivors’ claims by “focusing on the survivors’ personal lives,” the report said.

“The priority has always been in protecting priests and protecting church assets,” Ms. Madigan said in an interview. “Time and time again, the church says, ‘Well, this all took place years and years ago.’ But it’s a crisis in the present for all the people who have had to live with it.”