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New charges shock Boston as church scandal deepens

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jim Smith

BOSTON — Explosive allegations about a priest who allegedly raped boys in parishes and youth centers around Boston for decades have sent shockwaves throughout a city already reeling from the widening scandal in the Catholic church.

At a televised press conference Monday, a lawyer for an alleged victim of Fr. Paul Shanley released documents showing that the priest had publicly condoned and advocated sex between men and boys. During “man-boy” conferences held in Boston and Rochester, N.Y., in the late 1970s, Shanley reportedly proclaimed that boys are often “seducers” of men and benefit from sexual encounters with adults.

Her is reported to have said: “The adult is not the seducer — the ‘kid’ is the seducer, and further the kid is not traumatized by the act per se, the kid is traumatized when the police and authorities ‘drag’ the kid in for questioning.”

Those conferences eventually led to the formation of the North American Man Boy Love Association, a group that promotes sexual relations between men and boys.

Shanley, who is now 71, was first reported to archdiocesan authorities in 1967 after he had allegedly masturbated a boy at a summer camp at LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro, south of Boston. Ten years later, a Rochester woman wrote to Cardinal Humberto Medeiros about published remarks that Shanley had made about men and boys having sex.

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Two years later, the documents reveal, Vatican officials wrote to Medeiros about reports that Shanley, who was then working as a popular “street priest,” was lecturing openly about homosexuality and having sex with minors. In his response to Vatican officials, Medeiros described Shanley as a “troubled priest,” and recommended that seminaries be purged of men of homosexual orientation.

“We are saying quite explicitly that homosexuals should not be admitted to the seminary,” Madeiros said in the letter of Feb. 12, 1979.

Despite his concerns about Shanley, Medeiros transferred him to a parish in Newton later in 1979. In 1985, Cardinal Bernard Law promoted Shanley to pastor of that church, St. John the Evangelist.

At Monday’s press conference, 34-year-old Gregory Ford said that Shanley repeatedly raped him in the rectory of St. John’s during a six-year period in the 1980s.

“I believe he molested hundreds of boys over a 30-year reign of terror,” Ford said. “I hope he rots in hell.

Shanley was eventually put on sick leave and transferred to St. Anne’s parish in San Bernardino, Calif., in 1990, where church officials are now expressing outrage that they were never told of Shanley’s past. During his part-time ministry as a parish priest in California, Shanley and another priest from the Boston Archdiocese, Rev. John White, were co-owners and managers of a Palm Springs motel that catered to gay clients.

In 1995, Shanley moved to a guesthouse in New York City, the Leo House, where he became assistant director in 1996. In June 1997, Cardinal Law recommended Shanley for the position of executive director of the Leo House, which was run by an order of nuns. Shanley eventually moved to San Diego after the late Cardinal John O’Connor rejected his application to direct the guest house.

Another of Shanley’s alleged victims, Arthur Austin, delivered a scathing rebuke of Cardinal Law during Monday’s press conference, stating: “You are a liar; your own documents condemn you. You are a criminal . . . You are an affront to Jesus Christ, and I call on Almighty God to bear witness to the foulness and treachery of your behavior, the evil you have nurtured and condemned, and the minds, hearts and souls you have destroyed . . . ”

Civil and criminal proceeding against Shanley are being initiated. His current whereabouts are unknowed.

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