Three Recent Troubling NY Clergy Sex Cases Involving Dolan

By David Clohessy
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
January 6, 2012

http://www.snapnetwork.org/three_recent_troubling_ny_clergy_sex_cases_involving_dolan

In Milwaukee, Dolan posted names of child molesting clerics on his archdiocesan website. In New York, he refuses to take even this simple, inexpensive step toward protecting kids. He's going backwards, not forwards, regarding child safety.

Here are three recent clergy sex cases in which Dolan has acted irresponsibly.

--Two months ago, Mount St. Michael Academy in the Bronx, the public learned that there was child porn on an assistant principal Lawrence Gordon's school computer.

But Catholic officials – including Dolan - kept silent for nine months about the child porn, giving the criminal and his supervisors ample time to destroy evidence, fabricate alibis, intimidate witnesses, threaten whistleblowers and thwart law enforcement.

For a solid decade, Dolan and his peers have promised to be "open" about child sex crimes. But for most of last year, he was keeping such crimes secret. There's just no excuse for Catholic officials keeping parents in the dark about child porn at their kids' school month after month.

--Last August, Dolan similarly made no moves to help resolve child sex accusations against Fr. Jaime Duenas.

In a short statement on the archdiocesan website, Dolan didn't ask Catholics or citizens to do a thing when Duenas was arrested. It is crucial that victims, witnesses and whistleblowers be urged to call police and prosecutors. Dolan is not dumb. He knows appeals like this are often effective. But instead of begging anyone with information or suspicions to call the cops, he said nothing.

Dolan suspended Duenas. Big deal. That's the absolute bare minimum a Catholic official should do when an alleged child predator is arrested. Any other employer would do the very same thing (and likely more).

--In 2010 Dolan quietly let a prominent and powerful priest, Msgr. Wallace A. Harris, resign from his Harlem parish and left the impression that Harris is stepping aside because of alleged health problems.

Harris is an accused pedophile priest who was temporarily suspended in 2008 and who faces at least ten men who report that he abused them as kids. But Dolan only hinted to only one group of parishioners at only one church that the accusations against Harris were credible, letting many of them believe their pastor was innocent but beset with health issues and leaving for that reason.

Dolan clearly enjoys talking with reporters and has been praised as 'a good communicator. 'Yet in child sex cases, he says little or nothing and has his public relations professionals say little or nothing substantive or helpful.

Dolan has an awful – but carefully hidden - track record on child safety and is not making children safer.