Updated at 10:30 p.m.: Revised to reflect that Richard Thomas Brown has been arrested.

A former Dallas-area priest who has been accused of molesting children in the 1980s was arrested in Missouri on Wednesday night.

Richard Thomas Brown (Jefferson County Sheriff's Office)

The Dallas County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that Richard Thomas Brown, who is in his late 70s, was wanted on a charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child.

Dallas police issued the arrest warrant Tuesday, and Brown was booked into a Missouri jail about 7 p.m. Wednesday, according to the sheriff’s office.

Brown was taken into custody in Dittmer, about 30 miles southwest of St. Louis, on property owned by the Servants of the Paraclete. The group operates a center at the site whose mission is to “provide a safe and supportive environment for the rehabilitation and reconciliation of priests and religious brothers.”

Missouri’s sex-offender registry shows that six convicted sex offenders live at the facility.

WFAA-TV (Channel 8) first reported on the warrant for Brown, who was among 31 priests on the “credibly accused” list the Dallas Catholic Diocese released in January 2019.

Brown and four other priests were at the center of a Dallas police investigation into abuse allegations in the Dallas diocese, according to an affidavit police used to obtain a search warrant to raid diocese offices in May.

The Rev. Richard Brown appeared at the Call to Holiness conference in 1996 in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights. (File Photo)

Two diocese officials wrote in a letter to Detective David Clark in September that they hoped police were working to find and arrest Brown. They said Brown’s attorney had informed them he was with relatives in Delaware.

“News that a warrant for his arrest has been issued fulfills the hope of the diocese that justice will be served,” the diocese said in a written statement Wednesday.

The Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, said in a statement that it hoped church officials would do all that they could to help law enforcement find Brown.

“This case is yet another example that belies the claims of church officials that the sexual abuse crisis is in the past,” the statement from SNAP said. “Sadly, children continue to be put at risk in parishes across the country because church officials themselves refuse to be open and transparent with parishioners, the public and law enforcement about allegations of clergy sexual abuse.”

Brown, who has now been formally removed from the clergy, served at several North Texas churches after he was ordained in 1980, including St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Philip, both in Dallas; Holy Family of Nazareth in Irving; Our Lady of the Lake in Rockwall; and St. Mark the Evangelist in Plano.

The warrant for Brown came after police issued a warrant in January 2019 for Edmundo Paredes, an Oak Cliff priest who is accused of sexually assaulting three teenage boys. His whereabouts are unknown, though diocese officials said they think he fled to the Philippines.

The police investigation into the Dallas diocese also has focused on Alejandro Buitrago, William Joseph Hughes Jr. and Jeremy Myers, according to the search warrant. Each has been accused of sexually abusing children.

Brown was forced out as pastor of Our Lady of the Lake in 1994, nearly a year after a young woman told church leaders he had abused her in 1981, when she was a girl and he was in Washington, D.C., on a summer study leave.

The diocese said that after the accusations emerged, Brown underwent therapy and served in adult-only ministries.

Although the diocese concluded he had abused someone, he continued to work as a priest and helped manage New York’s Trinity Retreat Center for clergy. He also helped lead conferences and spiritual retreats for adults in Michigan and other states.

In 2002, a diocese spokesman said Brown had been allowed to function “as a hermit” at a New York monastery.

At that time, the spokesman stressed that only one person — a woman who was in her early teens in 1981 — had accused the priest.

But Brown’s personnel file, which the diocese turned over to police before last year’s raid, included reports of him admitting to molesting two juveniles, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Irving.

In October 2018, a woman contacted the diocese and accused Brown of sexually assaulting her niece during the 1980s.

The niece told Clark she’d met Brown when she attended Holy Family of Nazareth with her aunt. She told the detective that Brown visited her faith formation classes, then took her back to the church offices and his home, where he made her touch his penis and penetrated her with his fingers.

The woman said that the abuse occurred over a period of months and that she’d first reported it to the diocese in 2004.

Clark tracked Brown to Pecos, N.M., where Brown identified victims who hadn’t been mentioned in his personnel file. Brown admitted he sexually abused as many as 50 children during his time at the Dallas diocese.

“It should be noted,” Clark wrote in the affidavit, “Brown has not been investigated or prosecuted for any of his acts of sexual abuse against children.”

The affidavit says Dallas police asked the diocese’s attorneys for files concerning Brown’s transfer but a diocesan lawyer described the request as “overly broad, unnecessary and inappropriate."

According to a written statement from the diocese, Dallas Bishop Edward Burns provided police with documents about Brown before last year’s release of the list of credibly accused clergy.