Posted on 03/08/2002 2:41:46 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. (AP) - A Roman Catholic bishop admitted molesting a teen-ager at a Missouri seminary more than 25 years ago and resigned Friday, becoming the highest-ranking clergyman brought down in a wave of allegations touched off by the sex scandal in Boston.
"I am truly deeply sorry for the pain, hurt, anger and confusion I have caused," said the Rev. Anthony J. O'Connell, bishop of the Diocese of Palm Beach. "I've been loved since I entered this diocese, far more than anyone should be loved."
O'Connell, 63, admitted to the allegations leveled by Christopher Dixon, his former student at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal, Mo. O'Connell was the rector there at the time.
Dixon, now 40, said they two touched inappropriately in bed after he sought out O'Connell for counseling. Dixon said the abuse began when he was in the ninth grade and continued through the 12th grade.
"For those who will be angry, I certainly ask, when the time is right, that they pray for my forgiveness," O'Connell said.
Asked whether he had been involved with any other youngsters, O'Connell said there could be "one other person of a somewhat similar situation, in a somewhat similar time frame." He would not elaborate.
The nation's latest and biggest sex-abuse scandal involving priests began in the Archdiocese of Boston, where Cardinal Bernard Law admitted that a former priest molested children for years but was shuttled from parish to parish anyway. More than 130 people have come forward to say the defrocked priest, John Geoghan, abused them.
Since January, when the Boston case gained national attention, dozens of priests out of more than 47,000 nationwide have been suspended or forced to resign, and priests' names have been turned over to prosecutors.
O'Connell, who has been a priest for 38 years, was bishop of Knoxville, Tenn., before coming to Palm Beach in 1999. He succeeded J. Keith Symons, the first U.S. bishop to resign because of sexual involvement with boys.
After that scandal, Florida's bishops began background checks for all clergy, lay employees and volunteers who work with children, elderly and disabled people.
O'Connell said he failed to tell his superiors about the relationship when he was asked to replace Symons. "It should have come up from myself," he said.
O'Connell's admission came only hours after Florida's bishops issued a statement calling sexual abuse "both criminal and sinful" and assuring their 2.2 million followers that the church has procedures to deal with such allegations.
David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests in St. Louis, called O'Connell's disclosure "one more painful reminder that an enormous gap exists between the church's wonderful, flowery words and its leaders' terrible deeds."
O'Connell offered his resignation to the pope's top representative in the United States. No one was available to comment at the papal nuncio in Washington.
O'Connell's admission was first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"I was as wrong as I can be in taking that approach with him and I am sorry," he said. "There was nothing in the relationship that was anything other than touches."
The Jefferson City, Mo., Diocese paid Dixon $125,000 in a 1996 settlement, and he promised not to pursue further claims against the diocese, O'Connell and two other priests. The diocese did not admit any wrongdoing by Dixon.
The other priests are the Rev. Manus Daly, who allegedly abused Dixon at the seminary, and the Rev. John Fischer, who allegedly began abusing Dixon at a Catholic school when he was 11. Daly was removed from a Marceline, Mo., church this week and Fischer was removed from the priesthood in 1993 after allegations involving other children.
Dixon said he thought he could trust O'Connell when he told him about the abuse from Fischer. "But under the guise of trying to help me come to terms with my own body, he ultimately took me to bed with him," Dixon said.
Dixon himself was a priest for five years before he was diagnosed with depression in 1995. He said the depression came after he was assigned to work at the Hannibal seminary under Daly - a move that brought back memories of abuse. He later left the priesthood.
"I had a wonderful way of burying the impact it had on me, emotionally and psychologically," Dixon said Friday. When it resurfaced, "I was either going to kill myself or get help."
O'Connell is not the highest-ranking clergyman felled by a sex scandal.
In 1993, Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, N.M., resigned over his involvement with several women, some of them teen-agers. Archbishop Eugene Marino of Atlanta and Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, Calif., resigned after sex scandals involving adults.
The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in Chicago was accused of abuse in a 1993 lawsuit, but the accuser later recanted.
Defense of the priesthood in general makes you as bad as a pedophile?
That's kind of like saying "How many people do you think the police force loses because they are unable to uphold the law?"
Somebody isn't thinking with his head. Should we have shut down the US Government permanently because of the crimes of Bill Clinton?
Oh, I forgot; the Constitution is irrelevant.
Sorry, but the church is a HUGE target because it transfers these sorry bastards so they can commit their depravity against young boys again. If they'd all been FIRED afaer each first episode, the Catholic Church wouldn't be having to borrow money and sell property to pay off the judgements against it.
The gall in that statement is just stunning. It is similar to the tactics the Clinton defenders used to employ all those years. "It's just about sex," they would say, "You Clinton-bashers are just using the sex scandals as a tool to beat up on our hero, Bill Clinton." Never mind that any office manager in the nation would be tossed out on his arse if he was caught receiving oral sex in his office from one of his workers. But if we dared raise our voice about what Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, we were attacked as Clinton-bashers.
Pedophiles are the scum of the earth in our society. Even hardened criminals are disgusted by them and want nothing to do with them. We find out that the Catholic Church not only protected pedophiles but knowingly shuffled them around so that they could abuse other children, and we are Catholic-bashers for having a problem with that?
Please get your head out of the sand. The Catholic Church has been engaging in criminal activity. They have been harboring and enabling known pedophiles to prey upon the children of their own parishes. Parents bring their children into the Catholic Church and put their full trust in the church to help raise them as good Christians. The abuse of trust here is incalculable. Unspeakable. There are many priests, bishops and even a cardinal or two who deserve to spend the rest of their lives behind bars for what they have done. Cardinal Law of Boston, who shuffled known pedophiles from parish to parish, should spend the rest of his life in a maximum security prison. It's not Catholic bashing. It's simply a matter of enforcing the laws against pedophilia and child abuse that we have on the books here in America.
The Catholic Church has by their actions, forfeited all the moral authority they ever had and have done irreparible harm to organized religion and Christianity. That is why I am so angry with them. They can begin to regain their moral authority by casting out the perverts, freaks and pedophiles and giving full cooperation to law enforcment so that the U.S. criminal justice system can put these sick bastards in jail where they belong.
Uh, I didn't see any of her post defending anything the Bishop did, only defending the Catholic Church--which clearly does not condone, and in fact condemns, that type of activity (anymore than the Assembly of God condoned what Jimmy Baker or Jimmy Swaggert did). And I don't have an agenda.
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