TERRE HAUTE — “He seemed to like it, you know? So it was sort of more like a spontaneous thing … See, abuse, it’s a bad word, you know, because abuse, you abuse someone against his will. But it involved just spontaneousness, you know?”
— The Rev. Anthony Mercieca on nude massages and “fondling” former Rep. Mark Foley when Foley was an altar boy
Before the bullet-train blur that is today’s news cycle passes, can we take just a few minutes to study the Rev. Anthony Mercieca and his role in the life of a now-disgraced United States congressman from Florida?
This isn’t about Republican and Democratic party politics. It’s about betrayal, denial, the insidiousness of the sex abuse of minors and one of the darkest chapters in the 2,000-year existence of the Catholic Church.
Mercieca may now be retired to a remote island off Malta in the Mediterranean Sea, but — until last week when he spoke openly with the news media about what he did with and to the adolescent Foley — he was a functioning priest, saying Mass and hearing confessions.
To read his admissions and his insistence that he did nothing wrong, is to question one’s ability to comprehend English.
Can this be true? After all the multi-million-dollar lawsuit settlements, all the bishops’ conferences, all the apologies and zero-tolerance position papers from church officials, a priest in good standing — who served for years in the United States — wonders why everyone is getting so upset because he swam nude with an altar boy, massaged his naked body, slept naked overnight in the same room with him and “once maybe I touched him or so.”
“(I)t’s not something you call, I mean, rape or penetration or anything like that, you know,” Mercieca told a reporter for WPTV, a CNN affiliate in West Palm Beach, Fla. “We were just fondling.”
Just fondling.
What? They don’t get newspapers or any radio or TV reception on the island of Gozo? The Vatican doesn’t bother to send its memos? None of Mercieca’s fellow clergy ever mentions something in a phone chat about the child sex abuse scandal that has rocked and is still rocking the church?
Apparently not.
Consequently, Mercieca may be completely out of touch with reality, but — until he talked with reporters about “the good time” he and the young Foley had — he was qualified and fit enough to offer parishioners on his native island the consecrated body of Christ and absolution for the sins they confessed to him.
Despite truly incredible odds against a Catholic priest anywhere remaining ignorant of a church scandal that is now well into its second decade, suppose for a moment Mercieca was blissfully unaware. Suppose he somehow didn’t know that priests fondling altar boys is a universal no-no, that is was a no-no back in the 1960s when he was assigned to Sacred Heart Church in Lake Worth, Fla.
What do you do with his response to Foley’s fate?
A six-term Republican congressman gets outed as a homosexual and an alcoholic when lecherous e-mails he sent to teen-aged male pages become public. The representative resigns in a storm of shame, causing a tsunami of political fallout. As part of his explanation for his secret life and substance abuse, the congressman includes the information that he was molested as a minor by a clergyman.
Mercieca’s advice:
“I would say that if I offended him, I am sorry, but to remember the good time we had together, you know? And how we really enjoyed each other’s company. And to let bygones be bygones. Don’t keep dwelling on this thing, you know?”
All right. So there’s no mea culpa in the works. How about a little compassion? Perhaps a sliver of understanding of the burden Foley has carried since he was 13 or 14, the self-hatred, the sexual ambiguity, the escape into alcohol? How about an appreciation for the size of the hole from which he now is attempting to crawl?
“Let’s say it was 40 years ago, almost 40 years ago,” Mercieca told the WPTV reporter. “So why bring it up at this late stage? Anyway, he will overcome it, with a psychiatrist, you know. Mark is a very intelligent man.”
Of course. That’s all it takes: smarts and a few sessions with a shrink. Foley will be good as new in no time.
Besides, looking back, the 29- or 30-year-old priest and the altar boy had such a good time on their trips to the beach and to New York and Washington, D.C., what’s really to get over? The kid seemed to like it, you know?
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.
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