A Leisure World resident, a retired priest, was convicted Friday, March 23, of molesting a young boy almost 20 years ago in the city of Costa Mesa.
Denis Lyons, 78, Seal Beach, pleaded guilty today to four felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14. He is expected to be sentenced to one year in jail, five years of formal probation, and lifetime sex offender registration at his May 25 sentencing hearing.
The crime occurred almost two decades ago in the rectory and sacristy at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Costa Mesa.
Lyons was arrested Monday, July 20, 2009 by Costa Mesa Police detectives as he played cards at a community center near his Leisure World home. Lyons has been out on $200,000 bail since shortly after his arrest.
The District Attorney’s Office announced the charges against Lyons the next day.
According to past statements by the DA’s Office, the crime came to the attention of the authorities when a lawyer representing Lyons’ accuser contacted the county prosecutor’s office. The lawyer had been representing the now grown man in an unrelated civil matter when the lawyer was told about the abuse.
In September 2008, John Doe filed a report with the Costa Mesa Police Department.
Sexual assault of John Doe
Between Jan. 1, 1992, and Dec. 31, 1995, Lyons molested a young male student, called John Doe by the authorities, while the victim was a second- and third-grade student at St. John the Baptist Catholic School. The school was part of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Costa Mesa, where Lyons served as a priest.
On four occasions, Lyons sexually assaulted the 7 to 9-year-old John Doe twice in Lyons’ room in the parish rectory and twice in the church sacristy. (The Sun, being a family news organization, is not going to describe the crime in detail.) A rectory is the residence and administrative office for the parish priests of a church. A sacristy is a room inside the church used to store religious garments, church documents, and sacred vessels.
This wasn’t Lyons’ first run-in with the law.
A prior child abuse case
In April 2003, the OC District Attorney charged Lyons with molesting another boy under the age of 14 between 1978 and 1981. Two other male victims were identified in the complaint, but no charges were filed in those cases because the statute of limitations had expired. All three of the boys attended St. John the Baptist Catholic Church while Lyons was a priest there.
The April 2003 case was dismissed for the following reason: Prior to 1994, California law allowed for charges to be filed for sexual crimes within six years from the date of violation. In 1994, a California law was passed stating that criminal charges can be filed for sexual crimes that occurred outside of the six-year restriction without limitation as long as certain criteria were met.
In July 2003, three months after Lyons was charged, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the timeline for filing sexual charges to go back infinitely. The court determined that California law could not be used retroactively and only applied to crimes that occurred from the time the law went into effect. Any crime that occurred prior to the passage of the law were subject to the six-year limitation. As a result, sex crimes that occurred before 1988, or six years prior to the passage of PC 801 could no longer be prosecuted. The 2003 case against Lyons had to be dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired on the 1978 to 1981 molestations.
In August 2004, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests held a demonstration outside Leisure World to let the public know that two retired priests living in the gated community had been accused of child sex abuse in the past.
One of those men was Lyons.
According to a recent staff report to the Seal Beach City Council, seven of the registered sex offenders living in Seal Beach reside in Leisure World.
In 2004, the Diocese of Orange issued a report on priests accused of abusing children. That report identified by name 16 priests who had been “credibly accused” of child sex abuse. Lyons was one of the 16 priests named.
A sin in all faiths
As previously reported in the Sun, figures about clerical child abuse are hard to come by and are sometimes contradictory. This is partly because the Catholic Church has a centralized chain of command and other religions do not.
In June 2007, the Associated Press found that Protestant churches throughout the United States received an average of 260 child abuse reports a year. The figure was based on claims filed with three insurance companies.
According to Insurance Journal.com, the Roman Catholic Church has found 13,000 credible claims of child abuse against priests since 1950.
That works out to roughly 228 cases a year—32 fewer cases a year among Catholic priests than among Protestant clerics.
The Catholic League took a look at the same issue in February 2004 in a report called “Sexual Abuse in Social Context.”
“In a 1984 survey, 38.6 percent of ministers reported sexual contact with a church member, and 76 percent knew of another minister who had had sexual intercourse with a parishioner,” the Catholic League report said.
The Catholic League report said that a Washington Post survey put the figure for pedophile priests at 1.5 percent. A New York Times survey: 1.8 percent.
According to “Pedophiles and Priests” Pennsylvania State University professor Philip Jenkins as many as 2 to 3 percent of Protestant clerics may be pedophiles—compared with 0.2 to 1.7 percent of Catholic priests.
