Prosecution Rests in Defrocked Priest Case

[emad]

Tuesday February 1, 2005 3:01 PM
Guardian
By DENISE LAVOIE

Associated Press Writer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - Prosecutors rested their case against the defrocked priest at the center of Boston's church abuse scandal with testimony on recovered memory, a topic the defense also hopes to tackle.

Prosecution witness Dr. James Chu, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said it is not uncommon for adults who suffer trauma as children to repress memories of the experience.

The testimony was an attempt to bolster the account of a 27-year-old firefighter who says he remembered in early 2002 that he'd been repeatedly raped and molested by former priest Paul Shanley from 1983 to 1989.

Under cross-examination from Shanley attorneys, Chu acknowledged there is an intense debate within the psychiatric community about the validity of repressed memories. He also conceded false memories can be implanted in a person's mind through repeated suggestions by someone they trust.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4770670,00.html

[bin.dare]

1. This is a complex case; i recommend as a good background ...

... source the article:

Priest Abuse and Recovered Memory
The Passion of Paul Shanley
By JOANN WYPIJEWSKI

http://www.counterpunch.org/jw01292005.html

...
IN HIS JANUARY 2002 LETTER TO LOVED ONES, Shanley confessed: "I am sorry beyond telling for the wrongs of my life and for the sorrow and anguish of which I have been the occasion. How I envy those who say in their declining years: 'if I had it to do over I would not do anything differently.' For me it is the opposite: I would do many things differently. For one, I would never have become a priest and tried to wrestle with mandatory celibacy and the myriad consequences of that folly. But who knew?"

...
As for Shanley, should he lose, any sentence is likely to be a life sentence, given his age. His silence, for a man whose life was distinguished by rebellion, indicates how much he has already lost. Shanley's defeat came long before his name was made tinder for scandal. When he decided to resign his pastorship at St. Jean's in November 1989, by his account because he could not take an oath committing pastors to give "internal assent" to the Pope's position on any issue, his lifetime of loyal opposition and prophetic witness was finished. As he wrote then to the cardinal: "I do not leave in protest, or for a woman, or from disillusionment. I leave the active priesthood in grief. . . . To take this oath would dishonor the priesthood. . . . With rage at the dying of the light." From there, his archdiocesan file traces his decline-ailing, without a mission, estranged from the family of the church, full of doubt and disappointment though not without a brittle humor, finally accused.