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Accused Hub priest ordered held on bail

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jim Smith

BOSTON — Accused pedophile priest Paul R. Shanley, who was arrested on a warrant in San Diego last Friday, was arraigned Tuesday in Newton District Court and ordered held on $750,000 cash bail. He is charged with three counts of rape of a young boy.

Shanley, who is 71, had endorsed sex between men and boys in the late 1970s during formative meetings of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. During that period, he was serving as Boston’s “street priest,” ministering to troubled youth in the inner city, some of whom now claim that he sexually abused them.

More than 1,600 documents recently released by court order reveal that Shanley was shuffled from one assignment to another despite knowledge by archdiocesan officials of his deviant behavior. Some of those records suggest that Shanley, who angrily resisted attempts by Cardinal Humberto Medeiros to remove him from his street ministry, had attempted to blackmail Medeiros in 1979 by publicly exposing alleged homosexual activity at St. John’s Seminary.

Medeiros transferred Shanley to St. John the Evangelist Parish in Newton later in 1979, and Cardinal Bernard law promoted him to pastor of that church in 1985. The man who filed the criminal complaint against Shanley, which led to Shanley’s arrest last week, claims that Shanley raped him in the rectory, in the confessional, and in the men’s room at that parish over a six-year period until 1980.

During the arraignment Tuesday, prosecutor Lynn Rooney referred to correspondence between Shanley and archdiocesan officials in 1994 which indicated that he was considering moving to a country such as Mexico or Costa Rica to avoid prosecution. The high bail was set in response to that concern about Shanley being a flight risk. The case is due back in court on May 30.

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