ALLENTOWN (PA)
Morning Call
March 1, 2020
By Peter Hall, Daniel Patrick Sheehan and Sarah M. Wojcik
In May 2016 a 15-year-old girl told someone that the Rev. Kevin Lonergan had touched her inappropriately.
The allegation triggered investigations by the Northampton County Children, Youth and Families Division, Forks Township police, and the district attorney’s office.
Lonergan was suspended during the investigation, and the Allentown Catholic Diocese said Monday that it reinstated him a few months later because Children and Youth determined the accusation was “unfounded.” But the Northampton County district attorney’s office didn’t classify the case that way. And neither did the diocese’s own private investigator, who called it “unsubstantiated.”
“It was never unfounded,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Tatum Wilson, who investigated the allegation with Forks police, said Thursday.
“It’s not that we made a determination one way or the other whether there was criminal activity,” she said. “It was closed because we didn’t have a victim who would be able to testify about any criminal activity.”
It would be more than two years, and only after a second girl accused Lonergan of inappropriate sexual contact, before the Catholic priest would be charged with a crime.
When Lonergan, 31, was sentenced to one to two years in prison Monday for groping a 17-year-old girl as she helped clean up after a confirmation Mass in 2018, Lehigh County Judge Maria Dantos raised the earlier complaint of “hands-on molestation” and questioned whether the Allentown Diocese was still transferring priests to cover up abuse — a practice for which the church has drawn intense criticism and scrutiny.
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