By Dan Horn
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati will wait until this fall to decide whether to remove from the ministry five priests accused of sexually abusing children.

Church officials said Thursday the priests would get a hearing within the next few months before the archdiocese's review board, which will decide whether to permanently ban them.

CATHOLICS SURVEYED

A telephone survey of 402 adult Catholics in Ohio conducted Thursday by SurveyUSA for WCPO-TV found that 55 percent believe Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk has mishandled the priest sex abuse scandal. Those surveyed were asked whether Pilarczyk had been an effective leader during the crisis, or had mishandled it. Twenty-six percent said he had been an effective leader. Another 20 percent were not sure. The margin of error is 4.9 percentage points.

The archdiocese scheduled the hearings as church officials faced renewed criticism this week for their handling of the five priests, including a lawsuit filed Thursday.

Critics have repeatedly questioned why the review board has not acted sooner, even though all of the allegations date back years and, in some cases, decades.

"I'm relieved it's finally going to happen, but I don't know why they have to wait so long," said Nan Fischer, chairwoman of Voice of the Faithful in Cincinnati. "It's not fair to the priests and it's not fair to the victims."

Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk first mentioned the five priests early last year, saying they remained employed by the church despite "substantiated allegations" of abuse. Although he refused to identify the priests, the names of all but one have become public.

Public pressure to take action against the priests has grown this year as new allegations surfaced.

A lawsuit filed Thursday by five unidentified plaintiffs accused one of the priests, the Rev. David Kelley, of molesting at least five boys at St. Therese the Little Flower in Mount Airy in the 1970s and 1980s.

Another of the priests, the Rev. Lawrence Strittmatter, faced similar allegations this summer when he was accused of abusing boys while he was principal at Elder High School in the early 1980s.

And a third priest, Monsignor Daniel Pater, recently quit his diplomatic post with the Vatican after he was questioned about a 1995 lawsuit that accused him of abusing a teenage girl for years in Kettering.

The other priest known to be among the five is the Rev. Francis Massarella, an 88-year-old priest who is accused of molesting girls more than 50 years ago.

Church spokesman Dan Andriacco said the five priests would get at least one hearing this fall before the seven-member review board.

He said Pilarczyk has not acted sooner because he wants to follow procedure and present every case to the review board.

The membership of the board, which consists of six lay people and one priest, was recently shuffled to conform to new rules approved at the U.S. bishops' conference in Dallas last year.

Under those rules, the church now has a zero-tolerance policy on abuse. "Church law is inflexible on that," Andriacco said. "If the priest has (abused), he has to be permanently removed from ministry."

Some church critics say the archdiocese didn't need a year to get its review board ready.

"I think it's inexplicable and irresponsible," said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP). "To have this delay, it's very troubling and very unusual."

He said other dioceses around the country have had review boards in place for months and already have removed abusive priests.

Konrad Kircher, the lawyer who filed the suit Thursday against Kelley, said the archdiocese's policy is to delay action for as long as possible.

He said church officials knew or should have known that Kelley was a threat to children, but did nothing to stop him. In addition to the sex abuse allegations at Little Flower, Kircher alleged that Kelley gave students alcohol and pornography when he was a religion teacher at Elder.

Andriacco said the archdiocese acted as quickly as it could with the information available. He said some parents of Elder students raised concerns in 1983 about Kelley's interest in spending time with their children. And in 1987, the priest was sent to a treatment center because of sexual issues.

But Andriacco said the church did not receive a specific complaint of abuse until 1994, when a man accused the priest of fondling him when he was a teenager in the 1970s.

E-mail dhorn@enquirer.com