More Suits Claim Sex Abuse by Late Orange County Priest

By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record
February 14, 2020

https://www.recordonline.com/news/20200214/more-suits-claim-sex-abuse-by-late-orange-county-priest

At least 10 people who say they were sexually abused as children by a priest who worked in Orange County for a dozen years in the 1980s and ’90s have now sued the Catholic Church under a recent law that gave them the ability to file those cases.

The latest lawsuit involving Father Edward Pipala, who died in 2013 after serving seven years in prison, was brought by two Orange County men who say he abused them many times while they were parishioners at Sacred Heart Church in Monroe, where Pipala worked from 1981 to 1988 and ran the youth ministry.

One victim says Pipala began abusing him when he was 13 and did so about 150 times over five years.

The other estimates Pipala assaulted him as many as 200 times while the priest was at Sacred Heart and then at St. John the Evangelist in Goshen, which he led as its pastor until 1992.

The assaults took place in the church basement and rectory at Sacred Heart and at a Jersey Shore condo where Pipala used to bring groups of boys for overnight stays, according to a case the two plaintiffs jointly filed on Monday against Sacred Heart and Catholic Archdiocese of New York in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.