Church sex abuse: Dolan paid problem priests to leave

Jul. 2, 2013 7:39 AM



Cardinal Timothy Dolan / Carucha L. Meuse/ The Journal News, file

Written by
M.L. JOHNSON
Associated Press



MILWAUKEE — Then-Archbishop of Milwaukee Timothy Dolan wrote a letter in 2003 to the Vatican office overseeing clergy sex abuse cases begging it to remove a priest who had repeatedly abused children, showed no remorse and at least once engaged in sexual activity with a young boy, the child’s mother and her female friend.

The archdiocese provided the priest with counseling and alcohol abuse treatment, limited his job assignments, eventually ordering him to stop dressing as a priest and barring him from seminary buildings. It only received more reports of abuse.

In 2003, nearly 40 years after some of the earliest reported abuse took place, Dolan, now New York cardinal, sought permission to have the priest, Daniel Budzynski, officially defrocked. Despite the egregiousness of the priest’s crimes, the Vatican office in charge of sex abuse cases, then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, took more than a year to formally dismiss him.

The correspondence was made public Monday along with thousands of pages of other documents detailing sex abuse by dozens of priests in the archdiocese covering southeastern Wisconsin. The documents were released as part of a deal reached in federal bankruptcy court between the archdiocese and victims suing it for fraud. Victims have accused the archdiocese of transferring abusive priests to new churches without warning parishioners and covering up their crimes for decades.

The Budzynski case was among at least a half-dozen Dolan inherited when he took over the archdiocese in 2002 amid the growing clergy abuse scandal. It shows some of the difficulty church leaders had in dealing with serial molesters and a church bureaucracy that in many cases sat on pleas for priests’ removal for years.

While other church leaders, including Dolan’s predecessor, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, have acknowledged they didn’t immediately grasp the extent of the problem, Dolan appears to have quickly determined a crisis was in the making. He moved to push out problem priests, even paying them to leave the priesthood, and later acted to protect church assets by transferring $57 million from a cemetery fund into a trust as the archdiocese moved toward bankruptcy.

Read more

.