Posted on 21-5-2002

A Priest's 2 Faces: Protector and Predator
By FOX BUTTERFIELD with JENNY HONTZ, NY Times 19 May 2002

BOSTON, May 18 — The way Christine Hickey remembers it, the Rev. Paul R.
Shanley was her protector, someone who made her feel safe. He was a hero to
her parents, who even named one of her sisters, Pauline, after him.

Ms. Hickey felt especially indebted to Father Shanley for what he did after
she was sexually abused at her church in Stoneham, Mass., by another Roman
Catholic priest, James Porter, in 1967, when she was about 9. Father
Shanley reported Father Porter to the Boston Archdiocese and arranged to
have him sent for treatment to a church-run center in New Mexico. Mr.
Porter is now serving an 18-year prison sentence for child sexual abuse in
Massachusetts as one of the most serious pedophile priests ever discovered.

But Ms. Hickey had no idea then that Father Shanley had been accused of
sexual abuse himself. The father of an 11-year-old boy had reported him to
the police six years earlier, barely a year after his ordination. Nor could
Ms. Hickey have known that more than 30 people would eventually come
forward with a trail of accusations against Father Shanley that would span
the next three decades.

Father Shanley, 71, who was arrested this month on charges of raping a
6-year-old boy in 1983, has become a central figure in the sexual abuse
crisis that has spread beyond the Boston Archdiocese to convulse the entire
American church.

Like another disgraced priest, John J. Geoghan, Father Shanley was
protected by top officials of the Boston Archdiocese. Church documents show
that they vouched for his character and allowed him to continue working as
a priest despite repeated accusations of abuse.

Like Mr. Geoghan, Father Shanley has been vilified as a marauding sociopath.

But as Ms. Hickey's account suggests, his story is not that simple.
Interviews with Father Shanley's accusers, his relatives and people who
worked with him, as well as an examination of thousands of pages of court
papers and his previously undisclosed private writings, portray a man split
in two: part protector, part predator, with the church central to both
roles, providing both his mission and his cover.

It is a contradiction that some who know him find impossible to reconcile.

"I really think both sides of him are real," said Ms. Hickey, now 44 and a
school administrator in Cambridge. "On the one hand, he did wonderful
things," she said, particularly as a "street priest" in Boston in the late
1960's and 1970's, when he ran a widely admired ministry for runaway youths
and later for gays, and gained national attention, including a mention in
"Common Ground," the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Boston by J. Anthony
Lukas.

"I felt loved by him," she said. "He helped me tremendously."

On the other hand, said Ms. Hickey, who went through a period of nightmares
and alcoholism after her own molestation, "he abused and took advantage" of
some of the very people entrusted to his care.

Perhaps, she reasoned, "There is no real truth."

No one who knew Paul Shanley seemed to know who he really was. Maybe he
wanted it that way.

For from early on, he was living with a dark secret. He has said he was
molested by a priest at age 12, forced to have oral sex, according to notes
of a psychiatrist's interview with him at the Institute of Living in
Hartford, Conn., in 1994.

The Boston archdiocese released the notes as part of more than 1,600 pages
of documents it was required to produce as a result of a lawsuit filed by
Gregory Ford, who says Father Shanley molested him at St. John the
Evangelist Church in Newton from 1983, when Mr. Ford was 6, until 1989.

Father Shanley never told his family about his own abuse — not his
brothers, his sisters-in-law or his favorite niece. "That was really a
shock to me," said Estelle Shanley, the widow of Father Shanley's brother,
Donald Shanley. "He never showed any signs of any stress people might
exhibit. He was very solid and well-adjusted."

Father Shanley, who is in jail in Cambridge, could not be reached for
comment. His lawyer, Frank Mondano, did not return phone calls.

Experts have long recognized that children who are physically or sexually
abused are at risk of becoming abusers themselves. So Kay Jackson, a
psychologist who is director of the Metropolitan Center, a private center
for sex offenders in New York, said she had been waiting to see when a
priest charged with child sexual abuse would come forward to say he had
been abused as a boy.

"Our society tends to divide up perpetrators and victims into neat camps,"
Dr. Jackson said. "What if they're the same?"