(No caption)
More bad news about the Catholic church: Three clergymen with Metro Detroit links are among 300 Pennsylvania priests accused of molesting more than 1,000 children since the 1940s.
The information is in a state grand jury report this week that says senior church officials hid complaints.
These men are among those accused, Jennifer Chambers writes in The Detroit News:
♦ Ronald Yarrosh, an assistant promotion director for the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions in Detroit in 1974-75. He returned to Detroit from 1977 to 1981. He worked in Pennsylvania parishes from 1982 until April 2004, when the Pennsylvania State Police searched his rooms found a "tremendous amount" of child pornography, this week's grand jury report says.
♦ Robert E. Spangenberg, an associate pastor at Old St. Mary's in Detroit's Greektown at some point between 1974 and 1977 before moving to a Pennsylvania parish. He worked in parishes in five other states through 1997. The diocese was first notified of a problem with Spangenberg's ministry in 1988. A woman wrote to the diocese and to the Vatican in order to obtain help for her son, the report says.
Documents provided by the Diocese of Pittsburgh show Spangenberg was involved with at least two children. The report does not say where those alleged incidents occurred. Spangenberg died in 2006.
♦ Anthony J. Cipolla, a priest from 1972-2002 in multiple parishes in Pennsylvania. Cipolla was first accused of sexually abusing children, specifically, two brothers who were ages 9 and 12 in 1978 while assigned to St. Francis Xavier in Pittsburgh. The abuses occurred in Cipolla' s bedroom in the rectory and also in a hotel room in Dearborn, the report said.
Cipolla was moved by his superiors from parish to parish throughout the diocese several times during his tenure, for a total of eight moves in a 16-year period, the report says. He died in 2016.
Holly Fournier, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Detroit, confirmed Wednesday for The News that Yarrosh and Spangenburg worked in Detroit. She found no record of Cipolla serving in ministry in the archdiocese.
But she found an article showing that before he was ordained as a priest in 1972, Cipolia may have taught at St. Anselm School in Dearborn Heights for one year in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
