Priest abuse victim talked through pain

By KEVIN CULLEN

New York Times News Service

Joe Crowley didn’t know how he’d feel when everybody started talking about anniversaries and commemorations and retrospectives.

It’s been 10 years since the story of the international cover-up of sexual abuse by priests exploded in Boston. For most people, it’s just that: a story.

But for Joe Crowley, a survivor, it’s his story, the only one he can tell. He was a 15-year-old student at Boston College High School, on a college path, when a predator wearing a Roman collar named Paul Shanley changed all that. Shanley abused Crowley, then sent him to other men.

Crowley’s life changed. College was pushed aside. Ambition was pushed aside. But he couldn’t push aside his shame, a gnawing sense that he, a 15-year-old boy, had somehow been responsible for a 40-year-old man’s depravity. “I was angry,” he said. “At my perpetrator. At the church, which I knew was aware of Shanley’s crimes and protected him. At myself, for allowing myself to be vulnerable.”

He was already in the process of gradually reclaiming his life when the scandal went viral. Seeing so many others come forward lessened his feelings of isolation. It forced him to confront more directly something that still made him cry at odd times, like when he was just walking down the sidewalk, and that robbed him of sleep, of ordinary contentment.

He got help and got better. He credits therapy. He credits his friends. He credits his lawyer, Carmen Durso. And he should credit himself.

“The more I talked about the abuse, the less power it had to own me,” he said.

In 2002, he walked to the front of the Back Bay apartment building where Shanley had abused him. He threw up. But he continued to defeat the past by confronting it. He summoned the courage to attend Shanley’s trial. “I was sitting 10 feet away from the man who’d raped me, pimped me, and stole my innocence,” he said.

When Shanley was found guilty, many people in the courtroom erupted with emotion. But Joe Crowley betrayed none.

Shanley was convicted on the day Crowley commemorated his ninth year of sobriety. “Watching Shanley answer to criminal charges was the real beginning of my recovery,” he says.

But everybody’s different.

“Any survivor should choose whatever path is good for them,” he said, “as long as it’s healthy.”

He didn’t join a survivors support group, but knows they help others. He never protested outside a church, but understands why others do. He testified at the State House, urging legislators to extend the statute of limitations that allowed so many to escape justice.

He considers himself lucky. A classmate with a similar story killed himself at 35. Another died of AIDS. The word “survivor” is not a euphemism. Joe Crowley and so many others are indeed survivors.

“When I look back over the last 10 years,” he said, “I’d say the biggest change is the lessening of the anger and shame I carried about being manipulated and exploited.”

He was what he carried. He is what he left behind.

In the middle of a decade of pain and recovery, Joe Crowley was working as a concierge in a Back Bay building when Cardinal Bernard Law walked in. Law had left Boston in disgrace. For all his ignominy, the Vatican had rewarded him with a beautiful church in Rome, and he was back in town for dinner with friends.

Crowley avoided eye contact with the cardinal who had moved Shanley from parish to parish and foisted him on other dioceses.

“Good evening,” said the cardinal who enabled Shanley to abuse others.

Many others would have given anything to give Law a piece of their mind. But Joe Crowley could only be himself.

“Good evening,” he replied.

And in so doing, Joe Crowley had won.