{"id":7261,"date":"2004-05-19T08:22:48","date_gmt":"2004-05-19T08:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html"},"modified":"2004-05-19T08:22:48","modified_gmt":"2004-05-19T08:22:48","slug":"scranton_trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html","title":{"rendered":"Scranton trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesleader.com\/mld\/timesleader\/8698473.htm\">Scranton priest charged.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>An investigation conducted by a private investigator for the Diocese of Scranton has led to sexual assault charges against a priest who formerly served at Sacred Heart Church in Duryea.<\/p>\n<p>The Rev. Albert M. Liberatore Jr., 40, was charged Monday with indecent assault and corruption of a minor after an altar boy alleged he was molested about two years ago inside an office at the University of Scranton, where Liberatore taught.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Orzel said Liberatore has been a professor of theology at the university since July 2003. Before that he served as an administrator at Sacred Heart from July 1997 to July 1998, when he became the church&#8217;s pastor. He held that post until he left for the teaching position.<\/p>\n<p>Previous to Sacred Heart, Liberatore was head of the faculty at St. Pius X seminary in Dalton, and also served as a pastor at St. Peter&#8217;s Cathedral in Scranton and St. John the Evangelist church in Pittston<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I found the process rather interesting&#8230;the diocese hears of this from a third party, the victim denies it, the diocese hires a private investigator, who then comes up with other evidence, including, finally, a statement from the victim.  A bit of a change from the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scranton priest charged. An investigation conducted by a private investigator for the Diocese of Scranton has led to sexual assault charges against a priest who formerly served at Sacred Heart Church in Duryea. The Rev. Albert M. Liberatore Jr., 40, was charged Monday with indecent assault and corruption of a minor after an altar boy&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Scranton trouble - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scranton trouble - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Scranton priest charged. An investigation conducted by a private investigator for the Diocese of Scranton has led to sexual assault charges against a priest who formerly served at Sacred Heart Church in Duryea. The Rev. Albert M. 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An investigation conducted by a private investigator for the Diocese of Scranton has led to sexual assault charges against a priest who formerly served at Sacred Heart Church in Duryea. The Rev. Albert M. Liberatore Jr., 40, was charged Monday with indecent assault and corruption of a minor after an altar boy&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2004-05-19T08:22:48+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html","name":"Scranton trouble - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2004-05-19T08:22:48+00:00","dateModified":"2004-05-19T08:22:48+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/scranton_trouble.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Scranton trouble"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}