NEW YORK (AP) - A Roman Catholic tribunal has defrocked a monsignor who once led fundraising for the Archdiocese of New York after deciding he had molested a teenage student in the 1980s.
The archdiocese announced the decision regarding Monsignor Charles Kavanagh on Friday.
The panel's action came eight years after a man came forward and claimed that the clergyman had touched him inappropriately when he was a boy and climbed into his bed during a trip to Washington, D.C.
Kavanagh insists he didn't do it.
His sister and lawyer, Ann Mandt, says the church's decision was an attempt to cover up its mishandling of other sex abuse cases by cracking down on an innocent man.
She says her 73-year-old brother "will never give up his fight for justice."
Kavanagh was the archdiocese's vicar of development in the 1990s.