Cardinal Timothy Dolan has dismissed
reports that he paid off priests accused of sexually abusing minors.
The charges were made in a New
York Times article last week.
“Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New
York authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive
priests as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the
priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee,” the paper
wrote.
Documents unearthed by the Times
reveal that the “archdiocese did make such payments to multiple
accused priests to encourage them to seek dismissal, thereby allowing
the church to remove them from the payroll.”
Dolan's New York Archdiocese spokesman,
Joseph Zwilling, told the New
York Post that there was no “payoff” to pedophile priests
– only “charity.”
“The New York Times does not
have a reputation for fair and accurate reporting when it comes to
this issue,” Dolan said after Mass on Sunday. “So, to respond to
charges like that – that are groundless and scurrilous – in my
book it's useless and counterproductive.”
The 62-year-old Dolan, as president of
the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has led
Catholic opposition to gay marriage laws in the United States. He
also vociferously opposed passage of New York's gay marriage law,
describing gay unions as “immoral” and a “violation of what we
consider natural law.”