WHEN I met Father Timothy Lambert last summer, I was pleasantly taken aback.
Square-jawed and athletic, at 6-foot-4 and 215 pounds, he’s not your standard stooped and silver-haired man of the cloth.
Yet when Father Tim, as he’s known, looks in the mirror, he does not see the movie-star looks.
He sees a worthless man.
For three decades, Father Tim says, his life has been ruled by an ugly secret. A secret that he says stole his childhood, turned him toward alcohol and drugs before he was shaving, and denied him the ability to develop normal relationships.
In a case that seems destined to create headaches – and perhaps spur a major shakeup for Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Diocese – Father Tim claims that, as adolescents, he and his brother were molested repeatedly by the man they trusted more than anyone.
That man was a priest. He still is.
When he finally got up the courage to complain, Father Tim says, the Brooklyn Diocese turned him away.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think ill of myself,” Father Tim, now 44, told me.
“It’s a struggle, every day, just to cope.”
The priest he accuses is Father Joseph Byrns, now at St. Rose of Lima Church in Brooklyn. Frank DeRosa, spokesman for the Brooklyn Diocese, told me Byrns denies Lambert’s charges “unequivocally.”
He said Lambert’s counseling had been discontinued when he went on leave from his parish in Metuchen, N.J., and moved for a time to Manhattan. Lambert is still on leave.
Timothy Lambert grew up in Queens, the youngest child in an Irish-Catholic family of four boys and a girl. His father, an alcoholic, had little to do with the family, leaving his mother to raise the brood alone.
Around 1969, his local church hired a young priest, Joseph Byrns, as associate pastor. Byrns took an interest in young Tim. “He asked me about myself, my family. He took me to a Ranger game,” Lambert says.
Tim remembers being about 12 when incidents started happening. “I don’t think I’d ever kissed a girl yet.”
Tim claims he called off the relationship when he was about 15. “Get the f – – – out of here,” he says Byrns railed. Later, he says, his brother Robert revealed to him that he was the priest’s next victim.
Tim’s mother eventually found out. But when she approached another priest about taking the matter to the pastor, he warned, “He’ll never believe you,” the mom wrote in an affidavit.
What does Father Tim want out of this?
An apology, he says. He deserves it.