A pastor who was put on administrative leave in September is among seven Catholic priests recently accused in lawsuits of sexual misconduct with adults.
A Buffalo man said the Rev. Joseph S. Rogliano kissed him and made unwanted sexual advances during a 2010 counseling session in a church rectory immediately following a funeral for the man’s family member at Fourteen Holy Helpers Church in West Seneca.
Rogliano has been on leave as pastor of a family of Buffalo parishes since the Buffalo Diocese announced in September it was investigating a claim of inappropriate conduct with an adult.
The Adult Survivors Act lawsuit naming Rogliano was filed Friday by attorney Paul Barr in Erie County State Supreme Court.
Barr also filed lawsuits that accuse four other priests of sexual misconduct with adults in the 1980s: the Rev. William White, the Rev. Arthur J. Smith, the Rev. Paul Keeling and the Rev. Kenneth Ward. White, Smith and Ward are now deceased. White and Smith were diocesan priests, while Keeling is a Barnabite order priest at Our Lady of Fatima Shrine in Youngstown and Ward was part of the Orders of Friars Minor Conventual.
In addition, attorney Elizabeth A. Cate filed a lawsuit Monday against St. James parish in Jamestown alleging that the Rev. Lawrence Connors groomed a young man for three years and then sexually assaulted him in the church rectory in 1976. Connors died in 1992.
And the Rev. Donald J. Joyce, a member of the Oblate order who died in 2013, was accused of having unpermitted sexual contact with an 18- to 19-year-old parishioner in Buffalo in a lawsuit filed Tuesday by attorneys Jeff Anderson & Associates and Steve Boyd.
The cases were filed just days before a one-year window suspending the statute of limitations on adult sex abuse cases closes Thursday. The window allows adult survivors of sexual abuse to sue their abusers no matter when the abuse was alleged to have happened. The Adult Survivors Act, like the…
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