February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The accuser, whose name is not being published because of his status as an alleged rape victim, sobbed on the witness stand last Thursday and pleaded with the judge to let him be released from further testimony. At the urging of the judge, he did return on Friday for a final day of cross-examination by defense attorney Frank Mondano.
Shanley is charged with raping and indecently assaulting the accuser at various sites at St. Jean’s in the 1980s. The case is one of few in which prosecutors have been able to bring criminal charges against priests accused of molesting boys decades ago. This case was allowed to go forward because the statute of limitations was suspended when Shanley moved out of state.
The accuser, who is a former military police officer and currently a firefighter in Newton, was alternately distraught and combative under the intense grilling by Mondano, who at one point suggested that the man was biased against homosexuals, citing a journal entry in which the man described Shanley as “a faggot.”
Mondano also suggested that the accuser was motivated by money, pointing to the $500,000 settlement that he received last year in a civil case against Shanley.
Mondano told the jury in his opening statements that the accuser’s memories about the alleged abuse are unreliable. A witness expected this week is an expert on what she describes as “the myth” of recovering repressed memories. The accuser claims that he remembered the sexual abuse after reading about Shanley in newspapers in 2002.
In his testimony Thursday, the accuser said that Shanley would take him out of catechism class and bring him to the bathroom. “He’d unzip my pants . . . touch my penis with his hand,” the man said, continuing in more graphic detail.
The accuser also said that Shanley would fondle him in the pews and undress him in the confessional room, where he digitally raped him. He testified further that Shanley would play a card game with him at the rectory during which they both would disrobe. He said that the priest told him that no one would ever believe him if he disclosed the abuse.
Shanley, who is 73, received favorable press coverage from the Boston Globe and other publications during the late 1970s, when he served as a celebrated street priest working with alienated youth. He also spoke out publicly during that time in favor of sex between men and boys and reportedly participated in a formative meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
He used his popularity with the media and social activists to rally support for his street ministry in the face of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros’s plan to remove him from the limelight of the street and transfer him to a parish. Medeiros was ultimately successful in getting Shanley off the street and into a parish in 1979. But shortly after taking on that assignment at St. Jean’s in Newton, his alleged molestation of the accuser and other victims continued, prosecutors say.
During the same year that Shanley went to St. Jean’s, Medeiros wrote to the Vatican about Shanley. “I believe that Father Shanley is a troubled priest, and I have been trying to be understanding and patient with him while continually affirming . . . the church teaching on sexual ethics,” he stated in that letter to Rome in 1979.
Shanley, who now lives in Provincetown on Cape Cod, is free on $300,000 bail. His trial is expected to last about one more week.