Michael R. Unglo had a history of attempting suicide. In May 2010, at least a month after the church announced that it would stop paying for his care, Mr. Unglo killed himself.
Mr. Unglo had claimed that he was the victim of “extreme sexual abuse” by a priest, Richard Dorsch at All Saints Church in Etna between 1982 and 1985, when he served as an altar boy and attended a school linked to the church. The priest was never charged criminally with molesting Mr. Unglo. Dorsch was sentenced to 11 to 23 months in jail after molesting a 13-year-old boy he had invited to North Park near Pittsburgh for a day of swimming and golfing, court records show.
In June 2008, Mr. Unglo attempted to commit suicide. A month later, the diocese began to pay for his mental health treatment. Later that year, Bishop David Zubik told two of Mr. Unglo’s brothers and said he would do “whatever it takes to right the wrong,” according to court documents.
Mr. Unglo attempted suicide again in June 2009. The diocese paid for him to receive treatment at Bellevue Hospital in New York, Sheppard Pratt in Maryland and Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts.
In “early 2010,” the diocese sent Mr. Unglo a letter saying it would give him one final payment of $75,000. On April 5, 2010, a doctor at Austen Riggs Center told the diocese Mr. Unglo needed more treatment. Almost a month later, on May 4, 2010, Mr. Unglo committed suicide at the center.
The estate of Michael Unglo sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, alleging he committed suicide this year after the diocese stopped paying for his mental health treatments following two other suicide attempts.
The diocese decided to stop paying for Unglo’s treatment even though the diocese continued to pay for the priest’s health insurance and paid the priest an unspecified monthly stipend, Alan Perer, attorney for Unglo’s estate, said Thursday at a news conference.
“There was money to fund a convicted, pedophile, defrocked priest and yet not enough money to continue to provide for the victim of that priest who ultimately killed himself,” Perer said.
The lawsuit alleges negligence by the diocese and Bishop David Zubik and seeks at least $50,000 in damages for factors including Unglo’s pain and suffering, his medical expenses, his future lost income and his family’s loss of his companionship.
The diocese issued a statement Thursday denying negligence or any responsibility for Unglo’s death, noting that it “provided hundreds of thousands of dollars for counseling and residential treatment” that continued until his death.
The Rev. Ronald Lengwin, a diocesan spokesman, confirmed the diocese continues to pay the former priest, Richard Dorsch, a monthly stipend of about $1,000.
“As a matter of policy we don’t want to see anyone go homeless,” Lengwin said. “If we provide a stipend that doesn’t mean we’re supporting that priest in terms of the allegations, but he is a human being and we have to care for him in a minimum way.”
It’s been a very big loss. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Eduardo, Barbara Boehland said.
Boehland’s son, Eduardo Ramon, committed suicide back in 1997. She says he did it because of sexual abuse by a priest.
He was sexually assualted by a catholic priest named Carlos Lozano, in San Antonio Texas at the age of 16.
Barbara Garcia Boehland said after a San Antonio priest abused her son Eduardo twice in 1993 at a seminary boarding school he changed dramatically. “He had a lot of nightmares, on going nightmares, he couldn’t trust people, constantly scared, could never eat. We constantly went to therapy sessions. He just became somebody else he wasn’t,” Boehland said. Just four years after his abuse, 20-year-old Eduardo killed himself in 1997.
‘I remember falling to my knees and crying because it didn’t happen at my house. It happened at my grandparents’ house where he hung himself, Boehland said.
Boehland says the Catholic Church needs to be held accountable. She’s part of a nationwide group that supports survivors of religous sexual abuse.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)petitioned the International Criminal Court to investigate its 84-page legal complaint that the pope and several cardinals knowingly condoned sexual abuse and did very little, if anything, to stop it.
I have a lot of faith in God that his trial will happen and the church will pay for all that they have been hiding… all this scandal, Boehland said.
The court has yet to take action on SNAP’s complaint. It was originally filed back in 2011.
But to increase support for its cause, SNAP’s leadership made its way to Vatican City to attempt to ask Pope Benedict, before he steps down Thursday, to provide police with any records that the Catholic Church might have involving sex crimes by its priests.
Boehland hopes this fresh push for accountability can help others avoid the pain she’s endured for the past 15 years.
Some of the days are harder. Holidays. He and I share the same month of birthday. Four days seperate us. He’s January 4th. Mine is the 8th, she said. It’s really hard to celebrate a loss. Any parent who’s lost a child knows exactly how I feel.
A local woman believes there are striking similarities between a sexual abuse scandal involving a former Penn State University assistant football coach and an alleged cover-up of sex abuse cases by the Catholic Church.
Barbara Garcia-Boeland is the local president of a group called, SNAP, or Support Network for Those Who’ve Been Abused by Priests.
Her own son, Eduardo, was among many people worldwide who accused the Catholic Church of covering up cases of sexual abuse involving its priests.
Eduardo committed suicide in 1997 at the age of 20 — four years after she said he was sexually assaulted by a priest at a local seminary.
“There’s shame, embarrassment. You feel guilt,” said Garcia-Boehland, explaining what might cause victims to end their own lives. She said she fears a similar fate could befall some of the alleged victims in this latest scandal.
“Keeping this a secrecy thing, in order not to scar the university or scar their own names, or embarrassment. Well, what do they think these victims feel?” Garcia-Boehland said.
She said she plans to continue working through her organization to make sure there are no future cover-ups. One way, she said, is through encouraging the victims not to remain silent.
“This thing happens all the time but it has to come to a stop,” said Garcia-Boehland. “Hopefully, they’ll find the courage to tell somebody.”
An alleged victim of clergy sexual abuse, the Rev. Robert H. Greene took his story public last Saturday from an unlikely spot: behind the pulpit at a Los Angeles church.
In a liturgy designed for fellow molestation survivors, the Anglican cleric told his story of alleged abuse as a teenager by a Roman Catholic priest, let others share their experiences, and offered communion to those who wanted it.
About 30 people who attended the service heard original music and poems by victims of sexual abuse.
At the end of the service, the church bell at the Church of Our Savior on Wilshire Boulevard rang 170 times, once for each victim of clergy sexual abuse who has committed suicide in the U.S., according to statistics gathered by the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
“We almost broke the bell,” said Greene, a part-time cleric for the Anglican Province of Christ the King. The denomination was formed in 1977 by traditionalists unhappy with changes within the Episcopal Church in America.
A former Catholic seminarian, Greene, 51, is among more than 550 people who filed claims in 2003 against the Los Angeles Archdiocese alleging sexual abuse by clergy and church officials.
He said he decided to hold last week’s unusual church service for those who were unwilling to visit a Catholic parish but still longed to reconnect to God — and for others who had attended Catholic Church healing services but wanted more.
Other victims, who had lost their faith, simply came to support fellow survivors.
“This is what liturgy is supposed to do: connect people with their creator where they are at,” said Joe Beckman, 45, of Long Beach. “This service was by, for and from survivors who shared a common tragedy. I found it very freeing.”
The fact that Greene is a clergyman and an alleged victim of sexual abuse carried special weight.
“His story is powerful,” said Mary Grant, regional director for the survivors network, which helped organize the event. “I just see a tremendous amount of courage. I cannot imagine how overwhelming it must feel to be abused by a priest and then, as an adult, you work as a clergy member.”
But Greene said his initial anxiety about the service — especially that bitterness and bad memories could overwhelm the sacred — gave way to serenity.
“I walked away with a great sense of inner peace,” he said. “The vast majority of people walked away with a feeling that you can express your anger in a sacred environment.”
In 2003, Udo Strutynski of Highland Park had attended one of the healing services offered by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to help molestation victims and came away uplifted. Still, he said he felt uneasy in a Catholic parish, listening to priests he didn’t know and didn’t completely trust.
But with fellow survivors running the service and in the pews at Church of Our Savior, Strutynski, 62, said he was “completely secure.”
“It was really, really good,” said Strutynski, an alleged abuse victim who had dropped out of the Catholic Church long ago. “I felt extremely welcomed.”
He added that during parts of the service, he found himself responding in the Latin he learned as an altar boy. “It came right back to me,” Strutynski said.
Officials with the Catholic archdiocese said efforts such as Greene’s from other denominations should be welcomed and applauded.
“Healing can come from many places,” said spokeswoman Carolina Guevara, adding that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has held eight private prayer and healing services for victims and their families this year.
Greene’s lawsuit alleges that as an altar boy, he was befriended by a visiting Catholic priest who plied him with wine and sexually abused him, beginning at age 16.
The relationship continued with sporadic visits during Greene’s freshman year at the archdiocese’s St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, where he was studying to be a priest.
At the same time, Greene’s mother, without her son’s knowledge, contacted church officials with concerns about the cleric’s inappropriately close relationship with her son and about how her son often came home drunk and was depressed.
The priest was removed from the archdiocese and, according to a 2003 report by Mahony, the church found that the alleged perpetrator had never received official permission to work in the archdiocese. In his lawsuit, Greene also wants the archdiocese to explain how the cleric could work without proper paperwork.
Greene dropped out of St. John’s and gave up his dream of entering the priesthood.
He also started to confide in some priest friends about the abuse. He said one of them warned him to keep quiet if he ever wanted to be ordained.
Greene graduated from Cal State Long Beach with degrees in finance and English literature and began a business career.
But he continued to struggle with the emotional and spiritual fallout from his molestation.
“I was having problems making a connection to God and with other people,” Greene said.
A Morristown, N.J., man who was instrumental in organizing New Jersey residents who had been abused by priests apparently committed suicide Sunday by walking in front of an eastbound New Jersey Transit commuter train.
James Thomas Kelly
The man, James Thomas Kelly, 37, was killed when a Hoboken-bound train from Dover struck him in the predawn darkness at 5:17 a.m.
Penny Bassett Hackett, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit, said the train’s engineer recounted seeing a man stepping onto the tracks as the train was about an eighth of a mile from the Morristown station. Mr. Kelly’s car was found in the parking lot of the station, she said.
The news of Mr. Kelly’s death stung those active with the New York and New Jersey chapters of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Mr. Kelly, a Mendham native, helped found the New Jersey chapter and was an active speaker with the New York unit.
There was no note left, and family and friends of Mr. Kelly said that they did not know why he might have killed himself. They cautioned against linking the suicide directly to the abuse by a priest that he and some of his brothers had suffered as children.
In April 2002, amid the flurry of revelations about the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, Mr. Kelly publicly acknowledged that he had been sexually abused by his parish priest, the Rev. James T. Hanley, then of St. Joseph’s in Mendham.
Mark Serrano, a regional director of the abuse survivor’s network and a victim of Father Hanley as well, said that Mr. Kelly, like so many abuse victims, had not shared what had happened to him until then.
Allegations against Father Hanley first surfaced in the 1990’s and were quietly investigated by the Morris County prosecutor, who later concluded that the statute of limitations had tolled on most of the instances of abuse that dated back to the 70’s and 80’s. In 1995, a maverick priest in the parish went public with the allegations, many of which were the subject of confidentiality agreements arising from court settlements with victims of abuse by the priest. Father Hanley was removed as a priest but was never charged.
”We have gone through life in such darkness and shame and silence,” Mr. Serrano said of abuse victims in general, and Mr. Kelly in particular. ”But through speaking to others, Jim was able to turn the abuse around. His death was a great tragedy that we may never be able to understand.”
Those who heard Mr. Kelly speak said he often opened by movingly recalling the murder in 2002 of a former girlfriend who was stabbed while fighting off a would-be rapist. Tearfully, he would pay tribute to the woman’s resistance to becoming a victim. Then he would note that children like himself and others who had been abused by trusted religious figures did not have the power to fight back.
It was a story that he told at the inaugural gathering of the northern New Jersey chapter of Voices of the Faithful, which drew more than 150 people to a catering hall in August 2002. Theresa Padovano, a former nun who helped start the 30,000-member lay group, which emerged as a national response to the abuse revelations, said the audience was visibly moved by his speech and accounts of abuse at the hands of Father Hanley.
News of Mr. Kelly’s death spread quickly by e-mail yesterday, she said, noting that she found several messages about his death when she awoke.
”He was a very decent, innocent man who had been grossly abused,” she said. ”I feel sick at heart.”
Recently, according to friends, Mr. Kelly was volunteering and making himself available for more and more speaking opportunities. David Cerulli, a board member of the New York chapter of the survivors group who ran their speakers bureau, said people were always moved by his honesty. ”Jim was my go-to guy whenever I needed somebody,” he said. ”He was always available to break the silence.”
A graduate of Rowan University in Glassboro and a salesman with Nextel, Mr. Kelly was described as a talkative and gregarious man who seemed to enjoy the bonhomie of sales work.
The Rev. Kenneth Lasch, the current parish priest at St. Joseph’s and an outspoken advocate for the survivors of abuse by priests, said that in spite of Father Hanley’s sexual abuse, ”there was no crisis of faith” for Mr. Kelly.
”He didn’t seem alienated,” Father Lasch said. ”He had sought professional help outside of the support group, but we all know that midlife is a tough time. We also know that life is a matrix, and we don’t know what triggered this death.”
Father Lasch will officiate at a funeral Mass for Mr. Kelly tomorrow at noon at St. Joseph’s in Mendham.
Parents of man who committed suicide over alleged abuse sue St. Louis Archdiocese
John Doe SON
The parents of a man from Florissant who committed suicide in 2009 sued the St. Louis Archdiocese Thursday claiming their son’s death was the result of sexual and emotional abuse by a Roman Catholic priest at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in Shrewsbury.
The lawsuit filed in St. Louis County Circuit Court says Bryan Kuchar, who was suspended by the archdiocese in 2002 and defrocked by the Vatican in 2006, molested the plaintiffs’ son at the seminary’s overnight camp between 1999 and 2002. The boy — known in court documents as John Doe SON — was between 12 and 14 at the time.
In 2003 Kuchar was found guilty of molesting a 14-year-old boy eight years earlier, when the priest was serving at Assumption Catholic Church in south St. Louis County. He was sentenced to three consecutive one-year terms in the St. Louis County Jail.
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese, Angela Shelton, said officials there had “not been served a copy of this lawsuit involving Kuchar, and we do not comment on pending litigation.”
David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said there had been perhaps “a couple dozen” lawsuits across the country over the last decade in which the plaintiffs blamed a loved one’s suicide on clergy sexual abuse.
“It’s not unheard of, but it’s far from common,” he said.
In the most infamous case, five victims of the Rev. Robert Larson in the 1970s and 1980s killed themselves as adults. Larson now lives at the St. John Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer, Mo.
At least two other lawsuits over clergy sexual abuse where suicide was a factor have been settled by the St. Louis Archdiocese.
Kenneth Chackes, the attorney for the couple who filed the newest suit, said John Doe SON had made “several” suicide attempts between the ages of 14 and 21, when he died. He said John Doe SON spoke to at least one of his therapists and to other medical staff about the sexual abuse while he was hospitalized after suicide attempts.
Chackes said the parents took four years to file a lawsuit because they needed “a long time to deal with the suicide and how it happened.”
In a statement, the parents said they had approached the St. Louis Archdiocesan Review Board — which responds to accusations of clergy sexual abuse — but were dismissed.
“The fault lies with the church officials who failed to keep our son and other victims of predatory priests safe,” according to the statement.
Patrick McSorley: A Prominent Accuser in Boston Abuse Scandal Is Found Dead
Patric McSorley
BOSTON, Feb. 23 — Patrick McSorley was 12 when a priest named John J. Geoghan took him out for ice cream, offering comfort to a boy whose father had just committed suicide.
Instead, as Mr. McSorley described it years later, Father Geoghan molested him in his car.
Father Geoghan would become a central figure in the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the parishes of Boston. He was defrocked in 1998 and sentenced to prison in 2002 for fondling a 10-year-old boy. And Mr. McSorley would become one of the scandal’s most public accusers, appearing at news conferences, demonstrations and court hearings.
But on Monday, after years of struggling with the scars of his ordeal, Mr. McSorley, 29, was found dead in a friend’s apartment in Boston’s North End. A Police Department spokesman, David Estrada, said the cause of death would not be known until autopsy results were analyzed.
Mr. McSorley was one of the first people to come forward with accusations of abuse, telling his story in January 2002, as the scandal was erupting. He was also one of the younger men to speak publicly about his experience.
“It would usually take people at least until they were in their mid-to-late 30’s to come forward,” said Phil Saviano, founder of the New England chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “For a guy at his age to go public about that sort of experience has to take a tremendous amount of courage. I know a lot of survivors who have not had the courage to do that themselves, and someone like Patrick would have been very inspiring to them.”
By all accounts, Mr. McSorley wrestled with demons, even after Mr. Geoghan went to prison, and even after Mr. McSorley and 85 others who said they were molested by Mr. Geoghan shared a $10 million legal settlement in September 2002.
“The money’s nothing,” said William Oberle, a friend of Mr. McSorley who said he was a victim of abuse. “It doesn’t bring closure.”
Last June, Mr. McSorley was found face down and unconscious in the Neponset River after walking with a friend in Pope John Paul II Park in Boston.
Mr. McSorley recovered, and he later said that he did not know how he had ended up in the water but that he had not attempted suicide.
In July, Mr. McSorley was charged with drug possession when, the police said, they found him and some friends in a suburban motel room that contained marijuana, the painkiller fentanyl, hypodermic needles and evidence of heroin use. He pleaded not guilty.
In August, Mr. Geoghan was strangled and beaten in prison; another inmate was charged in the killing.
“I said when Geoghan died, at least he’ll never molest another child again,” Mr. Oberle said. “But he’s still molesting them. He’s still affecting these children.”
Alexa MacPherson, a friend who says she too was molested by a priest, said Mr. McSorley, who was helping to raise his 4-year-old son and his girlfriend’s younger daughter, spent time in a drug rehabilitation program last fall.
“He wanted to get clean for his son and for himself and just wanted to live a good, normal life,” Ms. MacPherson said. “For him, I think, his demons really had a hold on him, and he really didn’t know how to shake it.”
Ms. MacPherson said that appearing at news conferences had a “therapeutic value” for Mr. McSorley but that he had also tired of it and “didn’t want to be known as just a victim.”
He was still very aware of developments related to the abuse scandal, however, and his lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, said that Mr. McSorley called him last Friday and requested that the two meet this week because “he was still interested in being a voice of the victims” of sexual abuse by clergy members.
Several people who said they were abused said that news related to the scandal often served as a painful reminder of what they had gone through.
“It could be anything,” Ms. MacPherson said. “You’re just walking down a street and something triggers a memory. Or a certain smell will remind me of something, and I just want to jump out of my skin. I know that Patrick went through a lot of that as well.”
The suicide death of clergy sex abuse victim John Pirona has devastated an entire community in the Hunter region of NSW, and saddened and enraged his fellow victims around the country.
The news was made all the more tragic because John disappeared nearly a week before his body was found, leaving room for hope. But with knowledge of his history as one of dozens of victims of a notorious paedophile priest, and the existence of a suicide note telling of the overwhelming pain of his abuse, it was hard to see any other outcome of the search for John Pirona this week.
Until his body was found, we could cling to even the tiny chance of finding him alive, and avoid facing the fact that another innocent had been cut down by this awful epidemic. But as the terrible news broke yesterday, many were unable to hold back tears, overcome by his needless suffering and preventable death.
As his family struggles to cope with the lifelong loss of a beloved husband, father, son and brother, questions must be asked about the criminal conspiracy which sacrificed John’s safety, his entire human potential, his family’s happiness, and finally his life.
John did not have to die. His abuse did not have to result in a suicide note and a search for his body. He could have recovered. He could have become a survivor and lived to see his kids grow up.
But the fact of his abuse threatened the interests of the secretive, wealthy and influential catholic church. A callous, self serving institution ruled by a hierarchy that routinely sacrifices innocent children’s lives, while proclaiming its superior understanding of love and compassion.
An institution claiming moral leadership and demanding generous tax concessions for its commercial enterprises, while systematically engaged in crimes against humanity, while imposing upon all its members a conspiracy of silence and while hiding behind a criminal coverup of serious child sex crimes.
With the right help, it is absolutely possible for most child sex victims to overcome the effects of their abuse. These efforts are made easier if:
the abuse is stopped and does not continue for years
the child is supported and offered help as soon as possible after the abuse occurs, or as soon as they report the abuse
the child is treated with respect, understanding, sympathy and consideration, and is listened to, believed and taken seriously, and action is taken to hold the perpetrator responsible for their crimes
the child is helped to feel that they have no reason to be ashamed of or feel guilty for what happened to them
the child is helped to feel less powerless and worthless and to rebuild their life, including learning techniques to deal appropriately with ongoing effects of the abuse such as PTSD
In Australia few victims of any child sex crimes receive the best possible help. In many cases nothing is ever done to help them. Our society simply does not take this crime, or the hidden damage it inflicts, seriously enough. It is a tough topic to address and we prefer to avoid it, to allow it to stay hidden, to consider victims somehow “wrong” rather than looking for what has caused their damage, to not believe or help victims so we can go on pretending it doesn’t exist in epidemic numbers in all sections of society.
Unfortunately that attitude only ensures plenty more children will suffer abuse in the future, and struggle to recover for most of their lifetime.
But of all the victims of child abuse, those little children preyed on by predator priests not only don’t receive the help they need, they all also suffer an ongoing and devastatingly damaging campaign of re-abuse by a huge and powerful organisation, that makes their job of recovery so much harder. And in the case of far too many courageous innocents like John Pirona, it becomes impossible.
In the catholic church no one lifts a finger to protect the children and get them out of harm’s way, instead leaving them to endure regular abuse for years. It is common for responsible adults including priests, bishops, teachers, principals, in some cases even parents, to be aware of or told of the child’s suffering, but instead of helping, ignore this knowledge or even punish the child, and send them back for more abuse.
This abandonment is often accompanied by emotional manipulation or threats to prevent public knowledge of the abuse, which are devastating enough by themselves, and doubly so in conjunction with sexual abuse.
With victims, families and witnesses under enormous pressure to remain silent, very few of these dangerous criminals are ever reported, tried or convicted, which means serial child sex predators continue to convincingly pretend to be trustworthy and respectable, and exploit the community’s trust and respect in order to ruin as many lives as possible.
The children find themselves utterly alone, unable to tell those supposed to care for them, or betrayed by them in the most devastating manner. Somehow, traumatised and disconnected, they make it to adulthood, and one day, often decades later, are able to or forced to face their abuse.
This is the stage most likely reached by John in 2008, when he spoke out about his abuse. While dealing with the lifetime of buried pain that emerges as part of the healing process, survivors can sometimes feel stronger than ever before, but are also extremely vulnerable and fragile. They need plenty of support. But they also need to learn how to stop being a victim, how to properly care for themselves, how to live and how not to be drawn relentlessly towards self harm and death. Even at this stage it is possible to overcome abuse and re-abuse. This is made easier if survivors are listened to, believed, and if they find justice, truth, and an acknowledgement of their experience, if they know their abuser is facing responsibility and serious consequences for his crimes, and are reassured that concrete changes have been made that will prevent anyone else suffering as they have done.
It is not a lot to ask.
But the catholic church begrudges even this to victims of its crimes.
It is not just that the church never considers the human lives it is sacrificing when it protects child rapists and keeps them out of jail and free to rape, and imposes them on unsuspecting communities, blessed with a disguise which makes their horrendous crimes frighteningly easy to commit.
It is not just that the church denies, dismisses, minimises, excuses and shifts blame for these crimes, and in every possible way undermines victims’ already fragile self worth and ability to survive the emotional and psychological devastation wrought by the abuse, and encourages them to feel ashamed and guilty about what happened to them.
It is not just that the church keeps victims in the dark about this incredibly personal issue, and buries the truth under a mountain of lies and excuses.
It is not just that the church never offers any form of help to victims in their efforts to recover, in order to discourage all but the strongest, most vocal, or best supported from ever coming forward, and so ensuring the majority of victims suffer in silence, and do not challenge church lies about the scale of this problem.
It is not just that victims must somehow find the strength to face the church’s determined obstruction of any police investigation, or the heroic defence of dangerous criminals they know to be guilty, brutal treatment of victims in any court proceedings, and use of a range of legal loopholes and technical defences to comprehensively deny justice to the majority of victims.
It is not just that the church will not even pay for the most basic form of support such as counselling, unless victims submit to either an aggressively antagonistic mediation or civil court process, or a biased, misleading, in-house system which pretends to be designed to help victims, but serves primarily to protect the church’s reputation, and to minimise publicity and financial compensation.
It is not just that the church makes ludicrous claims to have child protection measures in place when no measures exist to limit the crimes committed by the child rapists already protected and enabled by the church, and the only efforts consist of feeble attempts to limit the number of new rapists entering the priesthood, plus a PR campaign to promote a misleading facade of safety to lull catholics into complacency around this issue.
It is not just that the church manipulates politicians and lobbies ferociously against any law reform or judicial investigation that might actually improve child protection or force the church to be held accountable for its actions, or be forced to comply with the law, all the while making fallacious claims of willingness to co-operate.
It is not just that many church personnel treat survivors with a thinly veiled mixture of resentment, suspicion, contempt, condescension, disbelief and hostility, and act as if survivors are unpredictable and childish aggressors being humoured by the grown ups and guilty of attacking an innocent and unfairly victimised church.
On top of all those huge challenges the church conducts an aggressive campaign of PR stunts and media statements which paints a completely false picture of this issue, claiming to already be doing the very things victims most want to see, but inflicting devastating additional harm on large numbers of victims every time they are quoted in the media, as victims know from painful personal experience that church leaders are lying, while survivors’ voices trying to tell the truth are undermined or drowned out by the aggressive and manipulative church PR machine, and rarely heard.
Put together, this overall treatment of victims results in devastating re-abuse, serious impediment to, if not total prevention of healing, and an almost insurmountable obstacle to leaving the pain of the past behind and getting on with their lives.
John Pirona did not die simply because of his abuse. He died because the way he was treated by catholic church leaders compounded the effects of his abuse and made him feel too powerless and worthless to live.
It is completely unacceptable that John Pirona and so many others were killed by the catholic church in this tragic, tragic way.
It is completely unacceptable to allow the catholic church to kill any more victims.
There is no question that if this issue involved any other organisation there would have been exhaustive police investigations, arrests and convictions. We cannot trust the catholic church not to try to circumvent our democratic system of government and dictate public policy so that they can continue to commit their crimes in secret and remain above the law.
Many other victims are devastated by this loss, whether or not they had the privilege of knowing John. Many are thinking of the times when their own despair at their treatment by church leaders led them to contemplate suicide. They know “that could so easily have been me”.
There is no time to wait. We cannot allow church leaders to cause another death.
Our politicians for years have flatly refused to come to the aid of victims of this brutal organisation. But support of the catholic church is fast moving towards becoming electoral poison.
Either we move directly to desperately needed law reform.
Or immediately put in place a Royal Commission to investigate these crimes and make recommendations for law reform.
Make a commitment to end the deaths and relieve the suffering.
To do nothing is to admit we are happy to live in a totalitarian theocracy by stealth with no respect for truth, justice, human life or human dignity. Or the law.
For the sake of my own recovery I try not to wallow in anger about the abuse and injustice I have suffered at the hands of the catholic church.
But I am very, very angry that another victim has had to die while we wait for even a semblance of justice.
We cannot bring back the loved ones already lost.
But we can refuse to let them kill any more innocents.
It is time to write to your politicians and demand change. My next post contains a draft letter for those who would like help to do this.
Stay safe everyone and if you feel you are not coping, promise me one thing.
LOU Pirona is a father who must live with the awful sadness of his son’s last words.
“When I was young I was frightened. When I went to school I was bullied and abused by people who should have been nurturing and guiding me.”
The body of John Pirona, 45, of Belmont North, was found in a car at Tomago yesterday morning, five days after leaving the letter his family had always feared, which ended with the words “Too much pain”.
A victim of a notorious Hunter paedophile priest in 1979 when he was 12, John Pirona was sexually assaulted at least one year after both the school principal, Father Tom Brennan, and the late Maitland-Newcastle bishop Leo Clarke were told the priest was a sex offender.
Yesterday, his father, a prominent solicitor and Catholic, said the church had an obligation to “root these people out who prey on others, whether it be through a royal commission or public inquiry”.
Governments should also “force people who don’t have the character and the will to do the right thing” to reveal the truth about the church’s handling of sex-offender clergy.
“We’re just seeing the reality of the failure of a lot of people to look after people who should have been looked after, and that reality is devastating,” Mr Pirona said.
The second of eight children and the eldest son, John was “a lovely man, a big fellow with a very soft heart”, his father said.
“What has happened is a brutal thing for all of us.”
John Pirona’s wife Tracey, who received the news in Adelaide where the couple’s daughter was competing at a national sporting championship, was devastated.
On Wednesday Mrs Pirona said her husband was proud to have reached a point in his life where he could speak in public about being sexually abused as a child, to provide support for other victims.
Yesterday Mr Pirona struggled to find words to describe his grief, and that of his wife, children, extended family and friends.
“We don’t know the extent to which his experiences affected him. He was brutalised by someone who should have protected him.
“He carried it for many years. I just don’t know what was going on in the dark recesses of his mind, notwithstanding the love his family had for him, and the love he had for his family.”
Other victims of the paedophile priest, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were devastated by the news.
Other parents of victims, including Trish and Michael Day who are friends of the Pirona family and whose son attended St Pius X school Adamstown where John Pirona was sexually assaulted, were heartbroken.
A Newcastle man who reported the paedophile priest’s offending to police in 1999, securing convictions the following year despite Father Brennan’s statement that no one had reported the priest’s offending to him, said many of the priest’s victims had already died after tragic lives.
“We’ve lost so many. If this was addressed all those years ago, we wouldn’t be confronted by these sad events now,” the man said.
Bishop Bill Wright, who said yesterday that he was “broadly supportive” of a public inquiry or royal commission into the church’s handling of child sex abuse, said he was personally writing to the family.
“The Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle will make no further comment and will endeavour to respect the privacy of a grieving family,” he said.
Bill Zeller was a talented programmer whose work we’ve featured on Lifehacker. He took his own life on Sunday and left an explanation that I think it’s important you read.
Zeller was a victim of sexual and psychological abuse. It’s clear from his writing that the abuse left him unable to interface with the world in any way that didn’t leave him feeling he was too sullied to have the same experiences that he thought others had. He had a self-described “darkness”, which despite his prostration it’s clear he handled more ably than perhaps he ever realized.
Programming was a solace, but only temporarily. Zeller never felt he could escape the things that had happened to him because he carried his torment with him everywhere.
I think a person has the right to live or end their life as they choose. If Zeller really felt that suicide was his only option, so be it. But as someone who has had similar experiences in my own life, I want to say to anyone else who feels the way Zeller felt: You can’t escape your past. Not completely. But you can deal with it. You can contextualize it. You can learn how to prepare for the times when you feel like it’s not even on your radar and then it totally broadsides you.
And you can talk to people. You really can.
Bill Zeller
I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.
My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.
This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.
At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.
The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.
Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.
I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.
Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.
Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.
I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.
I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.
Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.
Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn’t the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.
Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.
So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.
I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.
I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.
I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.
I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.
So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.
I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.
I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.
There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.
You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.
People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.
Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.
I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.
I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.
—-
I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.
They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.
A random example:
“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.
If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.
Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.
I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.
Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.
I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live. All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.
—-
To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.
I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.
Bill Zeller
—-
Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.
Philadelphia (CNN) – A new wrongful death claim against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and Archbishop Cardinal Justin Rigali was filed Wednesday on behalf of the family of Daniel Neill, a 36-year-old former St. Mark Parish altar boy who committed suicide in 2009 after reporting he had been sexually abused by a priest.
Neill’s suicide and allegations of sexual abuse were included in a recent Philadelphia grand jury report released in February.
The case is just one chapter of a broader legal story for the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The wrongful death lawsuit is the second civil suit filed against the archdiocese and Rigali involving an alleged victim named in the 2011 grand jury report. Three additional civil suits alleging sexual abuse, by parties not named in the grand jury report, also have been filed against the Philadelphia archdiocese since February.
Neill’s sister, Michelle Forsyth, and mother, Mary Neill, filed the lawsuit so that children can be better protected, they said in a statement on Tuesday.
“It is simply our desire to perhaps get the Archdiocese officials to recognize their obligations and to do a better job of healing the wounded and protecting the children – instead of being concerned about their reputation. Our family member said more than once, ‘I am not looking for anything other than for the Church to believe me,’ ” the family said in the statement.
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia declined to comment on Wednesday’s lawsuit, an archdiocese spokesman said.
This year’s grand jury report is the city’s second report issued regarding priests’ alleged sexual abuse in Philadelphia. The first grand jury report came out in 2003. And this is the first time that a Catholic church leader has been charged criminally for an alleged cover-up.
These lawsuits were filed in response to new information released in the 2011 grand jury report that involves Monsignor William Lynn, who is facing criminal charges, accused of endangering the welfare of children and having knowledge about perpetrators.
Lynn served as the secretary for clergy under the former Philadelphia Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua. Lynn is expected to plead not guilty, according to his attorney, Thomas Bergstrom.
The 2011 report led to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office criminally charging three Philadelphia priests and a parochial school teacher with raping and assaulting boys in their care, while a former official with the archdiocese was accused of allowing the abusive priests to have access to children, the city’s district attorney’s office said. All five have also been charged with conspiracy.
The grand jury report says that on October 15, 2007, Neill reported to an archdiocese victim assistance coordinator that Rev. Joseph J. Gallagher had repeatedly fondled him when he was a minor and served as an altar boy at St. Mark Parish in Bristol, Pennsylvania.
According to the grand jury report, Neill told the victim assistance coordinator that during his childhood, Gallagher discussed masturbation during confession; fondled him during outings in the priest’s car, at the house of the priest’s mother, upstairs in the rectory, in a utility room in the sacristy and in a loft in the church; and that the priest also hit the boy.
According to the grand jury report, on July 24, 2008, Neill was notified that the Archdiocese Review Board could not substantiate his allegation. Neill committed suicide on June 6, 2009. The grand jury report also said that Gallagher, though retired, still regularly assisted at St. Jerome and St. Timothy parishes in Philadelphia as well as St. Thomas Aquinas in Croyden, Pennsylvania.
Attempts by CNN to reach Gallagher have been unsuccessful. In addition, no criminal charges have been brought against Gallagher.
Following the release of the 2011 grand jury report, Cardinal Rigali removed Gallagher from active ministry on February 16.
As of March 7, 23 priests in the Philadelphia area have been placed on administrative leave, including two retired priests placed on leave on March 30.
“I want to be clear: These administrative leaves are interim measures. They are not in any way final determinations or judgments,” said Rigali said in a statement on March 8. On March 25, Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes imposed a gag order barring all parties involved in the criminal case from talking to the media.
Michael R. Unglo
Voices From the Grave 