Priest Molested Me, Woman Says

By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Philadelphia Inquirer
April 11, 2012

www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/146938505.html

T HROUGH ALMOST 20 years of disputes with church superiors over his addiction to pornography, the Rev. Edward M. DePaoli inevitably returned to a last defense: It was fantasy; he had never sexually touched another person.

That defense crumbled in 2002, after a Bucks County woman came forward to tell church officials that DePaoli fondled her breast when she was a 12-year-old catechism student at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Doylestown.

"I jabbed him and looked at him like, 'What are you doing?' " the woman, now 56, told a Common Pleas Court jury. "I was 12 years old and no one had ever touched me like that before."

The woman, whose name is being withheld, was the final witness Tuesday to testify about DePaoli's clerical career before he was defrocked in 2005 at age 60.

The testimony was part of prosecutors' efforts to show the jury that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had a tradition of wrist-slapping priests accused of sexual misconduct - at the expense of past and future victims.

Monsignor William J. Lynn, who as secretary for clergy was the archdiocesan official responsible for investigating wayward priests, is on trial in the landmark case, the first church official criminally charged with enabling or covering up the sexual abuse of minors.

The woman said that she and her mother did not come forward when the incident occurred because they felt no one would believe them. She spoke out in 2002 after the clergy sex-abuse scandal erupted in Boston.

She said that she had two meetings with Lynn and other church officials, and later had a one-hour meeting with then-Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, who gave her a rosary and prayer book.

Lynn's three attorneys seized on the meetings Tuesday to show that Lynn had quickly responded and acted.

The attorneys also emphasized that much of the church hierarchy's dealing with DePaoli and his personal problems occurred before Lynn began his tenure as secretary for clergy in June 1992.

DePaoli was federally indicted on a child-pornography charge in 1985, while teaching morals and ethics at Bishop McDevitt High School in Cheltenham. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year's probation.

Contact: jslobodzian@ phillynews.com