BishopAccountability.org
	Parishes Not Warned of Priest's Past Capital Times November 10, 1993 The Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese moved a priest from parish to parish without warning anyone about allegations that he sexually abused children and had a drinking problem, a newspaper reports. If there had been no publicity of a complaint filed against the priest, no one would have learned the true reason for his removal from his last parish, according to testimony quoted in court documents reviewed by the Milwaukee Journal and reported Tuesday. Rev. William Effinger, 60, is serving a 10-year prison sentence for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy at Holy Name Catholic Church in Sheboygan, the last parish where Effinger served. The priest, the archdiocese and the parishes where Effinger served are also being sued by a number of men and women who claim they were victimized by Effinger when they were children. Lawsuits brought by five of them are pending before Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Frank Crivello. At the request of defense lawyers, Crivello has ordered that testimony taken in pretrial depositions from several top local church officials not be made public. Briefs filed by Robert Elliott, a lawyer representing the alleged victims, however, are part of the public file obtained by the newspaper. Those briefs give a summary of what the depositions contain. For the first time, the records give an indication of the scope of the problem of pedophile priests. According to Elliott's brief, there were 29 reports of sexual abuse of children by priests between the time Archbishop Rembert Weakland arrived in Milwaukee in 1977 and September 1992. It is unclear how many of those complaints were filed by multiple victims accusing a single priest. The archdiocese does not have a policy regarding child sexual abuse, and it has never conducted a program to educate teachers and administrators of their obligation to report suspected cases of sexual abuse of children, Elliott said. According to Elliott's briefs, archdiocesan officials who gave testimony in depositions said they all believed the complaints that Effinger had sexually abused children. It was unclear from Elliott's briefs exactly when the first allegations were made against Effinger. One of the alleged victims, who filed his lawsuit under an alias, said he went to the principal of the elementary school at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Kenosha, Effinger's first post, to report that he and his brothers and sisters were being abused by the priest. In 1979, a couple from St. Francis de Sales parish in Lake Geneva, where Effinger was next assigned, wrote Weakland and said their son had been abused. Weakland sent Effinger to a Milwaukee therapist for counseling. The therapist said alcohol might present Effinger with problems in the future. (The following paragraphs were not published.) Before receiving the report from the therapist, Weakland assigned Effinger to St. Peter of Alcantara, a parish in Port Washington. Later in 1979, he moved to Holy Name in Sheboygan. Effinger testified that no one monitored or supervised his contact with children while at Holy Name.
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