Yonkers priest accused of 'parading' sex abuse victim toward other men

By Frank Esposito
Westchester Journal News
December 2, 2019

https://bit.ly/2DFjdkM

A former Yonkers priest, who was thrown out of the church after he committed a sex act on a teenager, was named in a child sex abuse case from a different event. 

Daniel Calabrese, along with nine other defendants, were charged with abusing a then 13-year-old boy while a student at Saint Joseph's Seminary, according to a Westchester court filing.      

Calabrese was accused in the lawsuit of taking the unnamed plaintiff into the showers at Saint Joseph's and performing a sex act on him while another unnamed defendant also attempted to sexually assault him, according to court documents.

The plaintiff had later realized that this abuse was most likely planned, according to court documents

"Plaintiff had a sense of being paraded before the other men," wrote Barbara Hart of White Plains-based Lowey Dannenberg in the lawsuit. "Plaintiff later realized that he was brought to Saint Joseph's Seminary's campus by Calabrese as a trophy catch."

This latest lawsuit is one of more than 1,100 cases filed under the New York Child Victims Act, a law which allows people to sue for abuse regardless of the statute of limitations.

Prior to this filing, Calabrese was sentenced to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to a sex act on a teenage boy in a rectory at St. Mary's Church in Poughkeepsie in 1992; he spent 60 days in jail, according to Journal archives. In 2005, the Vatican removed him from the priesthood.

Calabrese also served as a priest in St. Paul's Parish in Congers, Rockland County, and Blessed Sacrament in Staten Island during the late 1980s and early 1990s.