Editor’s note: This story describes allegations of child sex abuse and contains a mention of suicide.
A lawsuit filed last week accuses a Catholic priest of repeatedly groping a teenager while the cleric led a church in Agawam a little more than a decade ago.
Before he left the priesthood, before he pleaded guilty to possessing a forged passport and before he was reassigned to churches in the Miami area, Tomasz Parzynski ran St. John the Evangelist Church between 2013 and 2015.
His departure from the Agawam church prompted hundreds of parishioners to lobby the bishop at the time to reconsider the reassignment.
“Strange” was Parzynski’s response when hearing about the civil lawsuit’s allegations from a reporter. “I have no idea about that. You’re the first person telling me these things.”
The lawsuit accuses Parzynski of repeatedly groping the buttocks and genitals of a boy while they were together in the sacristy of the church. The boy – who is referred to in the complaint as “John Doe” – was between the ages 14 and 16 at the time.
The experience left the youth with nightmares, phantom sensations of abuse and he required inpatient treatment for thoughts of suicide when he was 16, according to the complaint.
“During the incidents of sexual abuse,” the complaint says, “Father Parzynski told the young and vulnerable Plaintiff, who was merely hoping to fulfill a holy sacrament sacred to his religious beliefs, that the sexual abuse was what Jesus wanted, and that it was how Plaintiff could ‘fully embrace [Jesus].’”
The lawsuit also names the Roman Catholic Bishop of Springfield as a defendant, saying years of shortcomings when it came to investigating, reporting and disclosing instances of clergy sex abuse festered a situation that “emboldened predatory priests.”
A spokesperson for the Springfield Diocese declined to comment.
The Boston firm Sweeney Merrigan Law filed the lawsuit, a firm which is also representing a man in a recent lawsuit alleging decades-old sexual abuse at the hands of Bishop Joseph F. Maguire. Its attorneys did not return a request for comment.
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