ROME (ITALY)
Crux
June 4, 2019
By Elise Harris
Last week representatives of the Liberian bishops’ conference traveled to the Vatican to address accusations from a local priest that two of the country’s bishops were guilty of soliciting him for sex.
Bishop Anthony Borwah, President of the Liberia Bishops’ Conference, traveled to Rome to meet with Vatican officials after Father Gabriel Sawyer, a parish priest from Monrovia, raised accusations against the current Archbishop Lewis Zeigler, who heads the archdiocese, and against Bishop Andrew Karnley of Cape Palmas – located on Liberia’s southern coast – of sexual advances and abuses of power.
Reportedly accompanying Borwah to the Vatican were Father Dennis Cephus Nimene, secretary of the bishops’ conference and Archbishop Dagoberto Campos Salas, Vatican envoy to Liberia.
In a lengthy 17-page August 2018 letter to Campos Salas, Sawyer said that when he was in seminary in Monrovia in 1997, Karnley, who was vocations director at the time, had made inappropriate advances and attempted to have sex with him while on trips to say Mass outside of the seminary.
Sawyer alleges that after refusing, Karnley threatened to block his ordination to the priesthood and made his life both pre- and post-ordination difficult. When Zeigler was named archbishop of Monrovia in 2011, Sawyer said he also made sexual advances, and harassed him after he resisted.
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