Priest was evil one, says cover-up victim;
Fr Paul Shanley says cardinal abused him in seminary, U.S. Cardinal Law's secret trip to Rome, hierarchy conspiracy to hide Shanley since 1967. Victims’ lives broken:
‘Evil, be thou my good. ... embrace darkness’
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The abuse suffered by Arthur Austin epitomises
the crisis that has embroiled the Catholic Church
in the U.S., writes Roy Eccleston in Boston
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THE first question Boston priest Paul Shanley asked the distraught and fragile young man seeking his counsel was this: How big is your penis?
Arthur Austin can still hardly believe it all these years of depression and lost opportunity later.
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Yet the charismatic priest must have had a reason to ask, Austin recalls thinking. He stood, after all, in persona Christi -- in place of Christ.
But Shanley was the devil himself. "This is him, this is the evil one, it's the real thing," the 54-year-old says, eyes reddened by the tears that flow intermittently as his awful tale pours out.
Austin says Shanley followed up his question with some psychobabble, and convinced him that he could help.
He offered the 20-year-old his body, told him he would take moral responsibility, and the following day and for the next six years: "I was his whore."
Once, when he tried to reject Shanley, Austin was left alone in a freezing farmhouse until he thought he would die.
When the furious priest returned, Austin submitted like a whipped cur -- "and I never said no to him again."
According to Church documents released by a court last week, Shanley used his priestly authority over three decades to abuse dozens of victims of both sexes, some as young as six. The case is the latest, and perhaps foulest, eruption yet from a cesspool of priestly abuse now being exposed across the U.S.
The revelations have left the U.S. Catholic Church battling its greatest crisis. The names of almost 50 priests in Boston alone have been handed over to authorities -- although only 10 of them were still working -- and since January 55 priests in 17 dioceses around the U.S. have been removed.
But the scandal is not just about the abuse from Boston to Florida and New York to Los Angeles -- it's the conspiracy in the Church hierarchy to hide it.
When confronted by victims, the Church practice has been to pay compensation -- hundreds of millions of dollars -- in exchange for silence. Then it allowed some priests to continue their crimes, sacrificing children for the Church's reputation.
Now the country's most powerful Catholic, Boston's conservative Cardinal Bernard Law, has been implicated in the cover-up and is fighting calls from 65 per cent of Boston Catholics who want him to quit. Several other cardinals and bishops are also under scrutiny.
And in an extraordinary move, the Pope has summoned the American cardinals to a crisis meeting next week in Rome -- where, it turns out, Cardinal Law spent three days this week when his spokeswoman said he was in prayer.
Suddenly, the moral authority of the Church is being eroded, financial donations in some dioceses are plummeting -- severely hurting Catholic charities -- and there's a fresh push from liberals to get rid of celibacy and ordain women.
Read more in
The Weekend Australian, April 20-21, 2002, p 16
The controversy is largely thanks to The Boston Globe newspaper, which revealed in January the Church's role in supporting serial-abuser priest John Geoghan, now serving a 10-year sentence. Then came Shanley.
Austin, contacted by the newspaper, agreed to put his name to allegations and the story was published in January. It had an instant effect -- especially at the home of Rodney and Paula Ford.
Alerted to the story by a friend, the pair mentioned it to their son Greg, 24. But the young man denied ever knowing any Paul Shanley -- even though he had been the parish priest for a decade.
"Then he just had a complete breakdown," says Rodney. "He collapsed on the floor and cried for 20 minutes."
Greg Ford now accuses Shanley of molesting him from 1983 to 89. "I just blacked it out," he said as the family left court this week, their lawyer having won the right to take a sworn statement from Cardinal Law on the case.
The Fords got access to hundreds of pages of documents last week that show the Church had known of allegations against the priest going back to 1967.
They reveal that despite complaints of abuse and knowledge of Shanley's support for incest, bestiality and man-boy sex, the hierarchy did very little -- and in fact supported his move to a Church guesthouse in New York that sometimes housed teenagers.
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[Picture of a white-haired man wearing a skullcap and glasses]
Implicated: Cardinal Law
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In one damning document, Cardinal Law even supported Shanley's bid to run the guesthouse -- in 1997.
"For the life of me," admits Boston archdiocese spokesman the Reverend Christopher Coyne, "I can't understand why we treated him (Shanley) like we did."
Terry McKiernan, a local Catholic infuriated by the scandal, questions whether Shanley was blackmailing someone in the Church to be able to survive so long. In fact, Shanley, now 71, does say in one document that he kept a promise not to reveal that he had been abused as a seminarian by a priest, a pastor, and an unnamed cardinal.
It took six years for Arthur Austin to break free of Shanley. It was 1997, though, before a therapist helped him make the connection between the abuse and his long-time depression and anxiety.
In 1998, he told the Church what had happened, and received an apology and the news that he wasn't Shanley's only victim.
Austin says he cried with relief. But when the Church sought his silence in a legal settlement, he rebelled. He wanted kindness and healing -- "I wanted Christ" -- but saw it was about shutting him up.
"The Cardinal and his henchman achieved what Shanley could not -- they drove me from the Church," he says.
They committed the one unforgivable sin: "It is to say. 'Evil, be thou my good'. It's to embrace darkness. That's what they did."
Roy Eccleston is The
Australian's Washington
correspondent
The Weekend Australian, "Priest was evil one, says cover-up victim," Roy Eccleston, April 20-21, 2002, p 16
©The Australian at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/ Letters to the Editor e-mail:
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