“There is no way,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “That’s an unjust accusation.”

The widow of one of Father Timone’s accusers, Susan Cassinelli-Murphy, 63, said she was particularly upset after hearing that the priest had offered Mass that morning.

“I don’t think he gets it,” she said. “I feel like saying: ‘Are you serious? Couldn’t you apologize to him?’”

‘I really believe they believed me’

Father Timone started his career as a high school teacher and priest in the Bronx and several upstate parishes, including St. Joseph’s Church in Millbrook, N.Y., where he met Timothy P. Murphy as a young man.

Mr. Murphy, his widow, Ms. Cassinelli-Murphy, recalled, was the second son in a large Catholic family. He was an altar boy who as a teen became a rebel, popular with classmates and girls, but uninterested in studying. His mother asked Father Timone to take the boy under his wing, she said.

The priest began taking Tim on trips in 1967, when he was 13 or 14, according to a police report that Mr. Murphy filed in 2002 with the Dutchess County district attorney. The outings including going to Bash Bish Falls, a secluded park where they would swim in the nude, he told the police.

A few times, Father Timone asked him to stay overnight at his residence, the report stated. Father Timone would dry him off after he took a shower and then put powder on his body or ask him to exercise. Sometimes, he asked Tim to lie on his bed, and rubbed ointment on his thighs, legs and buttocks and massaged him. Once, the report said, he used a vibrating massager.

“This man was obsessed with nudity, and I became a toy for his pleasure without really understanding what was happening,” Mr. Murphy wrote in his 2006 memoir, “From Crack to the Cross: A Journey of Hope,” in which he referred to Father Timone as Father X. He added that Father X kept T-shirts in boys sizes in his dresser and would ask him to wear one without underwear, “because the shirt was long.”