Priest Spoke at Man-Boy Love Meeting
Court documents allege Boston Archdiocese knew his views
Originally published by The Associated Press, April 8, 2002
BOSTON — The Archdiocese of Boston knew that one of its priests, now accused of rape, spoke in favor of sex between men and boys at a 1979 meeting that apparently led to the founding of a national group advocating the practice, according to court documents released Monday.
Archdiocese personnel documents show that Roman Catholic Church officials also knew of sexual misconduct allegations against the priest, the Rev. Paul Shanley, since at least 1967 and continued to give him access to children in different parishes for three decades.
Shanley, now 71, was later transferred to California. California church officials said he signed an affidavit swearing that he had no record of accusations or convictions of a sexual nature.
"All of the suffering that has taken place at the hands of Paul Shanley, a serial child molester for four decades—three of them in Boston—none of it had to happen," said Roderick MacLeish, an attorney for the family of alleged abuse victim Gregory Ford, 24.
The archdiocese had no immediate comment on the information in the documents. Shanley, who lived in San Diego for seven years, has no telephone listing and could not immediately be found. He was fired last week as a volunteer with the San Diego Police Department.
Shanley was ordained in 1960 and became well known as a "street priest" over the next two decades. He established a ministry for runaways, drug abusers, drifters and teen-agers struggling with sexual identity.
Ford, who says Shanley repeatedly raped him in the 1980s, also alleges that Cardinal Bernard Law allowed the priest to remain as pastor at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Newton until 1989, despite knowledge of his behavior.
GROUP EVENTUALLY BECAME NAMBLA
MacLeish gave a multimedia presentation to reporters showing some of the 818 church records turned over under court order to Ford.
One document is a copy of a Feb. 12, 1979, issue of a publication called Gays Week that included an article titled "Men & Boys."
The article described a meeting of 150 people in Boston on the topic of man-boy love and said many speakers representing various religions endorsed such relationships, including Shanley, who was there as a representative of then-Cardinal Humberto Medeiros' program for outreach to sexual minorities.
The article described an anecdote Shanley shared at the conference about a boy "who was rejected by family and society but helped by a boy-lover."
The relationship ended when it was discovered by the boy's parents, and the man was sent to prison.
"And there began the psychic demise of that child," Shanley reportedly said. "He had loved that man. It was only a brief and passing thing as far as the sex was concerned, but the love was deep and the gratitude to the man was deep. …
"We have our convictions upside down if we are truly concerned with boys," he said, apparently referring to the punishment meted out to the man. "The cure does far more damage."
The North American Man Boy Love Association apparently was formed at the end of the conference by 32 men and two teen-agers. There was no indication in the article that Shanley was among them.
"This, we believe, was the start of the so-called NAMBLA organization," MacLeish said. "Paul Shanley was there at its inception. And within the Archdiocese of Boston is a record confirming his attendance and quoting him."
The article was sent to the archdiocese by a lawyer in New York who said he thought church officials should know.
OTHER EVIDENCE ALLEGED
But other documents suggested that the archdiocese already knew about sexual deviance claims against Shanley.
In February 1979, the same month as the NAMBLA meeting, Medeiros sent a letter to Rome in response to questions from the Vatican in November 1978 about Shanley.
"I believe that Father Shanley is a troubled priest, and I have tried to be understanding and patient with him while continuously affirming both privately to him and publicly to my people the church's teaching on sexual ethics," Medeiros wrote.
That same year, Medeiros reassigned Shanley to St. John the Evangelist Parish.
The earliest document related to sex abuse dates to 1967: A priest at LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro wrote a letter of concern to the archdiocese, relating allegations that Shanley had taken boys to a cabin and molested them.
Shanley moved to California and joined the San Bernardino Diocese in 1990 after a medical leave from Boston. He served at St. Anne Catholic Church in San Bernardino for three years without restriction on his contact with children.
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
Since January, dozens of Catholic priests out of more than 47,000 nationwide have been suspended or forced to resign on suspicion of child molestation in a scandal that began in Boston. The allegations have prompted an examination of the church's response to such accusations.
In other developments:
Six priests from the Archdiocese of New York have been suspended amid allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, and their names have been handed over to prosecutors, church officials said.
The archdiocese did not release the names of the priests because not all of the allegations had been substantiated, spokesman Joseph Zwilling said in a statement Sunday.
The Rev. Ponciano Ramos, another priest in the San Bernardino Diocese in California, has resigned after admitting that he attacked boys several years ago. Ramos was charged with child molestation for allegedly fondling three boys in Indianapolis in 1992 but pleaded guilty to lesser charges of battery and received an 18-month suspended sentence, the Chicago Tribune reported Sunday.
Ireland's Roman Catholic bishops were holding crisis talks Monday over the church's handling of cases of sexual abuse involving pedophile priests.
The bishops were expected to focus on whether the church would surrender to the government confidential records detailing when it learned of abuse cases and what actions it took. The church has admitted transferring pedophile priests to new parishes, sometimes in different countries, rather than informing police.
