An official from the US Roman Catholic Church apologized to a priest sex-abuse victim on the final day of testimony in his groundbreaking child-endangerment trial.
Jurors are set to hear closing arguments today after the defense rested on Tuesday for William Lynn and a co-defendant.
Lynn, 61, who worked for the Philadelphia archdiocese from 1992 to 2004, is the first US church official to be charged over his handling of priest-abuse complaints. He and his co-defendant James Brennan have been on trial for 10 weeks. Brennan has pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting a teenager in 1996.
Defrocked priest Edward Avery pleaded guilty to a 1999 sexual assault days before trial and is now in prison.
Lynn has testified that he tried to get priests suspected of abuse out of parishes and into treatment, but said his power was limited because the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who served as Philadelphia archbishop between 1988 and 2003, had the final say.
Lynn said Bevilacqua would not permanently remove a priest unless he was a diagnosed pedophile, which was rare among the dozens of priests suspected of raping or molesting children in the city.
Avery’s victim was abused years after Lynn had deemed the priest “guilty” of an earlier abuse complaint. Lynn said Avery was one of his first referrals, however, when an archdiocesan review board was formed following the priest-abuse crisis that exploded in Boston in 2002.
That was “way too late” for Avery’s victim, Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington said.
No other Catholic officials in Philadelphia have been charged despite two grand jury reports on abuse, one in 2005 that did not lead to any charges and another last year that led to the charges against Lynn and four others. The remaining two men, a priest and teacher charged with abuse, will be tried separately.
Lynn testified that he drew up a list of priests suspected of abuse in 1994, to let Bevilacqua and his top aides know the scope of the abuse complaints, which were contained in secret, locked archives at the archdiocese.
“I think the whole purpose in sending that list up was action should be taken on a number of people,” Lynn told the court.
Instead, the cardinal had the list destroyed soon after he read it, according to a memo turned over by the archdiocese just weeks before trial. Lynn said he never knew that until the memo surfaced.
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