Four lawsuits allege sexual abuse by Pittsburgh priests
Four men filed lawsuits Thursday in Allegheny County alleging they were abused as children by four different priests in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Named as defendants in addition to the diocese were Bishop David A. Zubik and Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, Pittsburgh’s former bishop.
The lawsuits, which allege abuse back to the early 1960s, were filed by attorney Alan Perer in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court on behalf of Paul F. Beran, James Imhoff, Glenn A. Ostrowski and Richard A. Votedian. They allege fraud and conspiracy.
All four priests — John S. Hoehl, Edward Joyce, Carl Roemele and Richard Zula — were named in the grand jury report released in August after two years of investigation by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office.
Typically the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette does not name alleged victims of sexual assault, but in this case, Mr. Perer said his clients were comfortable being identified.
Mr. Beran, 64, of Brentwood, alleged that, beginning at the age of 11, he was abused by Father Joyce from 1966 to 1968, at St. Joseph Church on the North Side. His allegations include that Mr. Joyce would give him massages while he was naked, including touching his genitals.
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Beran contacted the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office in December 2002 to report the alleged abuse.
Mr. Imhoff, 65, of Canton, Ohio,
Quigley Catholic High School in Baden.
Mr. Ostrowski said he trusted Father Hoehl and went to him for help with family issues.
One night, he stayed over at Father Hoehl’s campus residence because of problems at home, the lawsuit said, and Father Hoehl raped him.
The lawsuit alleges that Father Hoehl sexually abused Mr. Ostrowski repeatedly, and that later Mr. Ostrowski helped other boys to avoid being assaulted by Father Hoehl.
Mr. Votedian, 51, of Munhall claimed he was abused at the age of 12 or 13 until he was 17, by Zula in 1983, at St. Michael’s in Munhall.
Zula took Mr. Votedian on overnight trips, bought him presents, including a gold cross and gave him alcohol.
Among the allegations, Mr. Votedian said that Zula would bind his hands and whip him, and had him strip down to his underwear and pose like Jesus on the cross and took photographs of him while other priests watched.
The grand jury found that Zula was involved in a ring of predatory priests who used whips, violence and sadism. It reported that he regularly raped a male minor for years and arranged for other adults to abuse children and made child pornography.
Zula admitted to some allegations and was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1988 and spent two years incarcerated.
According to the grand jury report, Father Roemele was accused of engaging in sexual misconduct toward four boys when he was a parochial vicar at St. William in Pittsburgh — including attempting to bite a boy in a shower; groping altar servers at St. Joseph; masturbating a young boy at a cabin at Aleo Lake, and forcing another to masturbate him; and molesting other young boys at St. Joseph.
Father Roemele was voluntarily laicized, or removed from the priesthood, in 1978, according to the grand jury. When he was confronted by diocesan officials in February 2009, Mr. Roemele denied all allegations of sexual abuse.
Father Joyce was removed from St. Joseph and assigned to serve as chaplain of Sisters of St. Francis, Mt. Assisi, until his death in 1969.
Father Hoehl was accused of sexually abusing numerous children of all ages, including sodomizing two young boys after they intervened to stop him from raping a girl in his office in 1978, oral sex on a 9-year-old boy in 1976, making boys wear long shirts with no underwear to bed so he could touch their genitals in the middle of the night, and wrestling and showering with a 15-year-old boy in 1973 at his private home at Quigley.
He was removed from ministry in 1988, and removed from the priesthood in 2004.
He became a children’s therapist in West Virginia and surrendered his license in March 2007.
The lawsuits all allege that the diocese concealed sexual abuse histories by the priests, purposely moved them to different assignments and withheld the information from parishioners, endangering the public.
A representative for the diocese could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Perer is seeking an expansion of the statute of limitations for past victims to be able to sue based on evidence presented by the statewide investigating grand jury in August that showed the Catholic church purposely concealed the evidence for decades.
Last month Mr. Perer filed three lawsuits in Allegheny County on behalf of people claiming sexual abuse by several priests and the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua.