Celebrating the 11:30 a.m. Mass, he preached of the need to open one’s heart to Jesus in these days before Christmas. “He understands we are not perfect,” he said, “but he will not give up on us.”
But Timone, by the Roman Catholic Church’s own apparent standards, should not be presiding at the altar. Two settlements were paid by the Archdiocese of New York for substantiated allegations that Timone had sexually abused teenage boys he was counseling, one of whom killed himself after what his widow said was a decadeslong struggle with what had happened to him.
As the clergy abuse scandal roils the Catholic Church, dioceses across the country have been under tremendous pressure to prove that they have brought accountability to how they handle the issue of child sexual abuse.
The crisis was highlighted again on Wednesday, when the Illinois attorney general said in a scathing report that the Catholic Church in Illinois had withheld the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors.
The Illinois attorney general contended that Catholic dioceses in the state often seemed to find ways to avoid substantiating claims of sexual abuse, saying that the dioceses were incapable of investigating themselves.
The case of Timone seems to indicate similar failings in how the Archdiocese of New York handles sexual assault accusations.
The archdiocese is essentially allowing Timone to continue serving as a priest because of a bureaucratic technicality — a position that seems to fly in the face of the pledge by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of the New York Archdiocese, to aggressively handle sexual abuse accusations.
The archdiocese maintains that Timone has been allowed to remain because the church itself did not rule on his fitness; that judgment was made by a separate, church-sponsored panel, the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. The settlements were paid in 2017 through that program, which Dolan established the previous year to provide closure and a measure of justice to victims of sexual abuse by priests.
The archdiocese has its own internal process for substantiating abuse claims. And though it initially suspended Timone and investigated an allegation lodged against him in 2002, its review board did not substantiate the accusation at the time, the spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said last week.
Responding to questions from The New York Times, Zwilling added that the case had now been reopened to determine if Timone should be removed from ministry, but that he would not be suspended during that investigation. Timone did not return repeated calls and emails for comment.
Advocates for clergy sexul abuse victims said the archdiocese’s explanation amounted to a dodge. They were shocked by how openly Timone has continued to function as a priest.
“It is a staggering violation of the bishops’ zero-tolerance provision,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy abuse. “It is deeply irresponsible of Cardinal Dolan. It is brazen and it is a disservice.”
The cardinal has taken steps to show he is moving to address the issue of abuse in the church. In the face of a civil investigation by the New York attorney general, he appointed a former federal judge to review the archdiocese’s policies on abuse this year.
It was his review board that substantiated decades-old abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick last summer, leading to the downfall of one of the nation’s most powerful prelates. Still, he has declined to release a full list of accused priests as other bishops have. “I, for one, don’t exactly see why we should, because the names are already out there,” he said in September. Victims’ rights groups have disputed that claim.
Through it all, Timone, 84, has continued to preside at Masses, teach college students in California and work with Courage, an international Catholic ministry that counsels people with same-sex attractions to refrain from homosexual sex, which the Catholic Church considers contrary to natural law.
And in 2013, after protests over a speech about same-sex attraction that Timone was to give at a Bronx high school, Dolan personally praised Timone in an op-ed in The Daily News.
The cardinal, who is the ex officio chairman of Courage International’s episcopal board, wrote that Timone was “a remarkably gentle and holy man.”
On Dec. 2, Timone warmly greeted parishioners before Mass in Middletown, and afterward sat in a pew chatting and offering advice. There was no hint of scandal.
Martin Suchy, a parishioner, was shocked when told that the archdiocese had paid for a sex abuse settlement regarding accusations against Timone. So was another parishioner, Clarisse, who asked to be identified only by her first name.
“There is no way,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “That’s an unjust accusation.”
The widow of one of Timone’s accusers, Susan Cassinelli-Murphy, 63, said she was particularly upset after hearing that the priest had offered Mass that morning.
“I don’t think he gets it,” she said. “I feel like saying, ‘Are you serious? Couldn’t you apologize to him?'”
‘I really believe they believed me’
Timone started his career as a high school teacher and priest in the Bronx and several upstate parishes, including St. Joseph’s Church in Millbrook, New York, where he met Timothy P. Murphy as a young man.
Murphy, his widow recalled, was the second son in a large Catholic family. He was an altar boy who as a teenager became a rebel, popular with classmates and girls, but uninterested in studying. His mother asked Timone to take the boy under his wing, she said.
The priest began taking Tim on trips in 1967, when he was 13 or 14, according to a police report that Murphy filed in 2002 with the Dutchess County district attorney. The outings including going to Bash Bish Falls, a secluded park where they would swim in the nude, he told the police.
A few times, Timone asked him to stay overnight at his residence, the report stated. Timone would dry him off after he took a shower and then put powder on his body or ask him to exercise. Sometimes, he asked Tim to lie on his bed, and rubbed ointment on his thighs, legs and buttocks and massaged him. Once, the report said, he used a vibrating massager.
“This man was obsessed with nudity, and I became a toy for his pleasure without really understanding what was happening,” Murphy wrote in his 2006 memoir, “From Crack to the Cross: A Journey of Hope,” in which he referred to Timone as Father X. He added that Father X kept T-shirts in boys sizes in his dresser and would ask him to wear one without underwear, “because the shirt was long.”
During these encounters, Timone would also show him pictures of women’s vaginas and breasts, “in an attempt to instill in him the distorted belief that women’s bodies were disgusting and dirty,” Cassinelli-Murphy said in her statement to the compensation panel. She said the abuse had made Murphy phobic of sexual intimacy, a common effect of child sexual abuse. The abuse lasted until 1970, the police report said.
After high school, Murphy found success as a manager in the restaurant industry, but drug and alcohol addictions repeatedly derailed him. In 2000, he was sentenced in Florida to a drug-rehabilitation program in prison after a series of drunken-driving convictions. While there, he said he had a spiritual awakening, becoming a born-again Christian. Shortly afterward, he recounted in his memoir, a counselor encouraged him to report the abuse that had happened three decades earlier.
In 2003, after Murphy went to the police, the archdiocese sent its attorney and Monsignor Desmond O’Connor to meet with him, according to his lawyer, Donald D. Brown Jr. The archdiocese did not challenge Murphy’s claims at the time, Brown said last week, and archdiocesan officials offered Murphy therapy.
“They were candid with us; they were apologetic to us,” Brown said. “They confirmed that there were other children in the same time frame that made similar complaints against Timone.”
Murphy testified later that year before a 12-member archdiocesan review board in Manhattan.
Cassinelli-Murphy recalled of that day: “When he came out, he said, ‘I really believe they believed me.’ ”
In 2015, Murphy killed himself at age 61.
When, in 2016, the reconciliation program reached out to Brown, inviting Murphy to submit a claim, his widow submitted one on his behalf. Cassinelli-Murphy produced documentary evidence to The New York Times that she had received a six-figure settlement in May 2017. It was within what lawyers say is the typical range for the program of $100,000 to $500,000.
Murphy is not the only person who has received a settlement from the reconciliation program over allegations of abuse by Timone.
A man in his 60s, who asked not to be identified, said last week that he had also reported sexual abuse by Father Timone to the archdiocese in 2002. He said he did not hear back about the allegation until 2016, when he was invited to submit a claim to the reconciliation program, as were all clergy abuse victims known to the archdiocese. It awarded him $150,000 in March 2017. He showed a copy of the check to The Times signed by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the administrator of the compensation program.
The man explained how in 1972 his parents sent him to see Timone for counseling after being kicked out of a Catholic high school. He said he had been sexually assaulted by a different clergy member there, but never told his parents.
Last week, he recalled of his sessions with Timone: “He used to have me come over to the residence and make me take a shower,” he said. “Then he would dry you off and fondle you.”
In his filing to the compensation program, the man wrote that the archdiocese sent O’Connor, then the director of priest personnel for the archdiocese, to St. Joseph’s Church in Millbrook in the late spring of 2002 to interview people who might have been abused by Timone. “They interviewed us all,” the man said.
“This kind of situation when you are a child ruins your life, it does,” he added. “I am speaking from experience.”
O’Connor declined to comment, referring all questions to the archdiocese.
Still serving at the altar
Brown said he was told in 2003 that Timone had been removed from his duties, and sent to a place where they send offending priests. No legal action could be taken because of New York’s statute of limitations on child sexual abuse.
“We assumed he was on his way to being defrocked,” Brown said. He was shocked, he said, to hear that the archdiocese now says it did not substantiate Murphy’s allegations. “They are playing fast and loose with the truth on this,” Brown said.
Zwilling, the archdiocese spokesman, said last week that Timone had never been sent to a treatment facility for abusive priests. He also said that there was “only one allegation” at the time that Murphy reported his claims, despite the testimony of another victim. He said he could not comment about other settlements by the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program.
Though it is church policy to immediately suspend any employee who has been accused of abuse of a minor, Zwilling said Timone will continue to work as the case is reopened because he had already been suspended during the original 2002 investigation.
Advocates for abuse victims said that did not make sense, adding that the case showed why law enforcement needs to investigate how the Catholic Church handles abuse cases.
“As a basic child protection premise, it would seem that if you have a substantiated claim against a living, working priest, that individual should be isolated,” said Michael Reck, a lawyer working with many victims in the archdiocese.
Rev. Leo Fisher, the chaplain of the Hudson Valley chapter of Courage, said last week that Timone remained active with the chapter “informally,” counseling Courage members and their families. A spokeswoman for Courage said that he had not been an official chaplain for about 10 years.
Parishioners at St. Joseph’s said in December that Timone divides his time between New York and California. When in New York, he lives at the rectory of St. Joseph’s on Cottage Street, where he is officially a priest in residence, and presides at Masses during the week and on weekends.
In California, he celebrates Mass at the Church of the Nativity in Rancho Santa Fe, and was scheduled to do so as recently as last Sunday. He also teaches at John Paul the Great Catholic University, in Escondido, California; this winter he is scheduled to lead a theology capstone independent study class.
In the final decade of his life, Murphy himself became a therapist and counseled others, trying to find the meaning in his own suffering. But it was not enough to allay his pain.
“I have been unsuccessful at this thing called life,” he wrote in his suicide note to his wife on Jan. 8, 2015. “I need to go home to Jesus, if He’ll have me.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.