PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
May 02, 2012|By Joseph A. Slobodzian, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
In 1996, the Rev. Michael C. Picard was accused of disobedience, and brought up on the ecclesiastical equivalent of a court-martial for besmirching the name of a fellow priest to prevent him from becoming an associate pastor at Picard’s growing Bucks County parish.
On Wednesday, the tables turned.
Picard sat in the witness box of a Philadelphia courtroom 15 feet from Msgr. William J. Lynn, whom he accused of falsifying the disobedience charge because Picard had tried to stop the reassignment of a problematic priest..
Through Picard’s words, and reams of internal correspondence from the secret archives of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington portrayed now-Msgr. Picard as a whistleblower. Lynn and church superiors, including the late Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, had retaliated against Picard in an effort to tamp down the threat of public scandal over the 1996 assignment of the Rev. Donald J. Mills to Picard’s St. Andrew parish in Newtown, the prosecutor said.
As secretary of clery from 1992 to 2004, Lynn was Bevilacqua’s designated investigator of allegations of sexual abuse against priests. Now 61, he is charged with conspiracy and endangering the welfare of children for enabling some priests to be transferred to other parishes despite accusations of improprieties.
Lynn, the highest-ranking church official criminally charged in the church sex-abuse scandal, has denied the charges. His attorneys have argued that he was thrust into the job without legal training and was often the first to stop what has been described as a revolving-door policy of reassigning
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