Lawrence Welsh
Catholic bishop (1935-1999)
Lawrence Harold Welsh (February 1, 1935 – January 13, 1999) was an American Catholic prelate who served as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis from 1991 to 1999. He previously served as Bishop of Spokane from 1978 to 1989.
Biography
Early life
Lawrence Welsh was born on February 1, 1935, in Winton, Wyoming. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Rapid City by Bishop William Tibertus McCarty on March 26, 1962, at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Bishop of Spokane
On November 6, 1978, Pope John Paul II appointed Welsh as bishop of Spokane. He was consecrated by Archbishop Raymond Gerhardt Hunthausen on December 14, 1978.
Welsh was accused of reassigning Reverend Patrick O'Donnell to another parish after three families brought allegations of sexual abuse of children by O'Donnell to the knowledge of Bishop Welsh.
Welsh was investigated by the Spokane Police Department in 1986 on an assault allegation from Chicago. On September 9, 1986, a male sex worker claimed that Welsh, in Chicago for a Knights of Columbus convention, had picked him up and transported him to a motel. While the man was performing oral sex on Welsh, he said that Welsh "began to strangle him." During his police interview, Welsh admitted to picking up a so-called drug addict and taking him to his hotel room, supposedly for counseling.
“Lawrence Welsh” enters the record as catholic bishop (1935-1999). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lawrence, Welsh and Catholic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lawrence Welsh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.