The Most Reverend Nicholas DiMarzio, Bishop of Brooklyn, was exonerated in September by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican of charges that he sexually abused minors. Anyone who knew anything about him, as well as the lawyer who sued him, knew he was innocent from the get-go.
It is a credit to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who was authorized by the Vatican to conduct an investigation, that he took this assignment seriously by hiring a law firm that retained former FBI Director Louis Freeh to do this job.
In November 2019, Mitchell Garabedian, an unethical lawyer, announced that he was suing DiMarzio for abusing an 11-year-old boy, Mark Matzek, when he was a young priest in the 1970s.
DiMarzio categorically denied the charges and Garabedian took several months before he acted.
In June 2020, Garabedian said he found another “victim” who said he was abused around the same time as Matzek. Once again, the Boston-based attorney did not move quickly against DiMarzio, settling for a PR smear of the bishop; he eventually followed through.
The alleged second victim, Samier Tadros, said DiMarzio abused him in Holy Rosary Church in the Archdiocese of Newark. Yet as the bishop said, Tadros “did not attend the parish or the parish school and does not appear to have been Catholic.”
Bishop DiMarzio is an honorable man. He should never have had to go through these ordeals.
