Church in the World

Paedophile priest faces life sentence

Americas

Paul Shanley, a disgraced priest who has become one of the most notorious figures in America's sex abuse crisis, was found guilty this week of serious sexual abuse against a six-year-old boy.

Shanley was convicted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Monday. The court heard he had repeatedly raped and fondled the boy when he worked at a church on the outskirts of Boston in the 1980s. Bail was revoked, and Shanley, 74, went straight to prison to await sentencing next week. He is one of a small number of priests jailed in the United States for child abuse. One of them, John Geoghan, was murdered in prison while serving a 10-year sentence for indecently assaulting a 10- year-old boy.

Shanley's conviction was hailed by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) as a triumph. "Because of the courage of those who came forward", said SNAP's president, Barbara Blaine, "innocent children and vulnerable adults are safer now." But in fact the prosecution and verdict in this case was based on the long-suppressed memories of one man, a 27-year-old fireman. Shanley's lawyer, Frank Mondano, says he will appeal, commenting bitterly that "It appears the absence of a case is not an impediment to securing a conviction."

The priest's offences against boys, and occasionally girls, began to be reported to the authorities in Boston archdiocese as early as 1967, and in the Seventies the archdiocese was aware he had helped established the local chapter of the National American Man-Boy Love Association. Complaints had also been made to Rome about Shanley's public statements in support both of pederasty and of adult homosexual acts. But the long-haired bejeaned "street priest", was regarded by his superiors as an apostle to alienated youth, and was never seriously disciplined. He continued to find church work in Massachusetts, and after 1980 in California, where he owned and ran a successful gay sex resort in Palm Springs, openly listed as his address in the church directory. He retired in 1996, when Cardinal Bernard Law praised his "impressive record."

Shanley's fall came only with the Geoghan scandal, and the courts' intrusion into Boston's archdiocesan files, which were made public in 2002. He was then arrested in San Diego, extradited to Massachusetts, and in due course defrocked by Rome.

In 2002 a grand jury in Middlesex County indicted Shanley for the rape of four boys two decades before. The four accusers reached civil settlements with the archdiocese for large sums, but the criminal accusations of three of them collapsed in court. The phenomenon of repressed memory is increasingly controversial amongst psychologists, and expert evidence was called on both sides.
Richard Major, New York