PHILADELPHIA _ West Virginia's attorney general on Tuesday accused Michael J. Bransfield, a former Roman Catholic bishop of Wheeling-Charleston, W.Va., and his predecessors of "knowingly employing pedophiles" _ including some featured in last year's Pennsylvania grand jury report examining decades of clergy sex abuse and cover-up in that state.
In a lawsuit, West Virginia authorities allege that Bransfield, 75, failed to disclose the danger those priests posed to parents of children who attended the state's churches and parochial schools.
In some cases cited in the filings, admitted child molesters were allowed to stay in posts that brought them into routine contact with children.
Meanwhile, the diocese was publicly boasting of the strides it had taken to protect minors from sex abuse, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey's office said in a news release Tuesday.
"Today is a sad day, but the attorney general still believes there are so many priests and deacons in the Catholic church _ who are good men _ who will support this effort so we can really seek meaningful changes in how the church handles sexual abuse," Morrisey's office said.
Bransfield has faced repeated accusations of sexual misconduct himself, starting with a claim that emerged in 2007, when he was a Philadelphia priest.
He was suspended from all priestly ministries last week at the conclusion of a separate church-led investigation of claims that he had sexually abused and harassed adult seminarians in West Virginia, where he was named bishop of the statewide diocese in 2005.
The results of that probe have been sent to the Vatican, but Bransfield has consistently denied those allegations, saying in an interview with the Inquirer last week that he had cooperated with the investigation.
He added, however, that investigators' questions "were not, in my estimation, that formidable."
He could not be immediately reached for comment Tuesday on the claims that he harbored other accused and admitted abusers within his diocese.
