While the 1960s were an era of massive social upheaval for American society, they also marked a time of radical change for the Roman Catholic Church and its priesthood. And in Boston, no priest embodied that change more than Rev. Paul R. Shanley.
Lie radiated confidence and charisma. Tall, handsome, bright, and self-assured, Shanley was warm and gregarious, and his captivating personality attracted admirers among both his seminary classmates and, later, his parishioners. And he had a special appeal to young people.
In 1960, when he left St. John's Seminary as a newly ordained priest, Shanley sported a youthful, clean-cut look. Photos taken around the time of his ordination show an attractive, freshly shorn young man with a broad, easy smile. But within a few years, he had cultivated a far different image, one that mirrored the counterculture sensibility of the time. He grew his brown hair long, until it fell below his Roman collar, and wore bushy sideburns that snaked partway down his cheeks. Eventually, he stopped wearing his collar altogether, trading his traditional priestly attire for plaid shirts and blue jeans.
It wasn't only Shanley's unconventional dress and shaggy hairstyle that made him stand out. In the midst of the tumult of the decade in which he was ordained, Shanley frequently challenged Church teachings, particularly its condemnation of homosexuality, and clashed vocally and publicly with his superiors, including Cardinal Medeiros.
Shanley openly embraced ostracized minorities such as gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, and in the early 1970s created his “ministry to alienated youth” for runaways, drug abusers, drifters, and teenagers struggling with their sexual identity. His unique, unprecedented ministry earned him the unofficial titles of “street priest” and “hippie priest.” His outspokenness won him hero status among many of Boston's alienated young people and placed him in frequent conflict with his superiors.
It was also what Shanley said in private that set him apart. And it was what he did behind closed doors that, four decades after his ordination, brought him far more notoriety than did his rebellious dress and preaching style.
In the parishes and counseling rooms where desperate and troubled young people sought his help, Shanley was a sexual predator, a skilled manipulator who used his power and authority to prey on those who came to him for guidance and support. Therapy sessions became the settings for molestation and rape.
The Boston archdiocese has paid at least five settlements to Shanley's victims, including a $40,000 payment in about 1993 to a man who notified Church officials that he had repeatedly been anally raped by Shanley around 1972, when he was twelve or thirteen. Another man received a $100,000 settlement in 1998 after reporting a four-year sexual relationship with Shanley that began in 1965, when he was in the fifth grade.
But the breadth of Shanley's criminal behavior, and the extent to which he was coddled and protected by top Church officials, remained hidden until a lawsuit filed in February 2002 by Gregory Ford — who alleges he was repeatedly raped by Shanley in the 1980s — forced the release of the archdiocese's confidential files on the priest. More than sixteen hundred pages of previously secret Church records made clear that, for more than a decade, Law and his deputies paid no heed to detailed 1967 allegations of misconduct against Shanley and reacted casually to repeated complaints that he had publicly endorsed sexual relations between men and boys.
Law and his subordinates were so unconcerned about Shanley's behavior that, in 1988, two decades after the detailed complaints about his aberrant behavior began to trickle into the archdiocese, an accusation that Shanley had initiated a sexually explicit conversation was ignored.
The man who made the complaint, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Shanley visited him unannounced at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility northwest of Boston, ostensibly to offer counseling. But what began as a “very pleasant conversation” suddenly became “very, very, very sexual,” the man said. “It was so bizarre. He started telling me about friends of his who were into sadomasochism,” the man recalled. “It became extremely graphic to the point of him describing what they did to each other and whips and one of them ejaculating over other people.” Yet despite evidence in the chancery's files about the 1967 accusations and Shanley's bizarre sexual views, Law's deputy Bishop Robert Banks concluded in a memo that nothing could be done because Shanley denied that the incident occurred.
The Shanley record reveals Medeiros as similarly complicit. At a talk in Rochester, New York, in 1977, Shanley publicly asserted that he could think of no sexual act that caused “psychic” damage to children, including incest and bestiality, and argued that the child is often the seducer in man-boy sexual relationships. In a letter to Medeiros written shortly after that talk, an appalled New York Catholic vented her dismay at Shanley's remarks. No apparent action was taken.
Shanley's public advocacy of homosexuality eventually attracted the attention of Vatican officials, one of whom wrote to Medeiros requesting an explanation. In his February 1979 reply to Cardinal Franjo Seper in Rome, Medeiros called Shanley “a troubled priest.” Two months later, Medeiros was alerted by a New York City lawyer that Shanley had been quoted making similar remarks in an interview about man-boy love with a publication called
Gaysweek.
The only action taken by Church officials was to remove Shanley from his street ministry and send him to a suburban parish.
In response, Church documents show that Shanley tried to blackmail Medeiros into reversing his decision, apparently by threatening to reveal to the media unspecified information about St. John's, the arch-diocesan seminary. Instead of being disciplined or permanently removed from positions that put him in contact with young people, Shanley was transferred to St. John the Evangelist Church in Newton, a prosperous suburb west of Boston. In a mild rebuke of sorts, the reassignment was accompanied by an admonition: “It is understood that your ministry at Saint John Parish and elsewhere in this Archdiocese of Boston will be exercised in full conformity with the clear teachings of the Church as expressed in papal documents and other pronouncements of the Holy See, especially those regarding sexual ethics,” Medeiros wrote in a letter to Shanley.
In Newton Shanley's career flourished. Despite his troubled track record, he was promoted to pastor six years later by Cardinal Law, then the newly arrived archbishop, in 1985. Four months after that, the archdiocese reacted nonchalantly when a woman alerted the chancery that Shanley gave another talk in Rochester in which he once again endorsed sexual relations between men and boys. In response to the second Rochester letter, Rev. McCormack wrote a friendly note to Shanley, a seminary classmate. In a letter signed “Fraternally in Christ” and containing little sense of urgency, McCormack wrote: “Would you care to comment on the remarks she made? You can either put them in writing or we could get together some day about it.” The files contained no evidence that Shanley responded to the request.
The Shanley file also revealed that top Church officials had evidence of the priest's abusive behavior at least as early as the late 1960s. In one handwritten letter, a priest at the Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, near the Rhode Island border, notified the archdiocese that a young boy had told him that Shanley had masturbated him at a cabin in the Blue Hills, a woodland reservation south of Boston. The letter reported that Shanley routinely brought teenagers to the cabin on weekends, and it provided names, telephone numbers, and addresses of other possible young victims. Church files contain no hint that the allegations were ever investigated. But with an arrogance that defined his persona, Shanley denied the charges in defiant letters in which he offered sarcastic assessments of his accusers and referred to his own “brilliance.” In another letter, Shanley used a contemptuous adage to refer to a woman who had accused him of molesting a boy: “Put a Roman collar on a lamp-post and some woman will fall in love with it.”
Shanley's diaries and occasional newsletters, undated but also in his files, showed that he contracted venereal disease and instructed teenagers on how to inject drugs. Yet despite Shanley's damning case file, Law gave him a glowing tribute when the priest retired in 1996. In a February 29 letter the cardinal declared, “Without doubt over all of these years of generous and zealous care, the lives and hearts of many people have been touched by your sharing of the Lord's Spirit. You are truly appreciated for all that you have done.”
The total number of Shanley's victims may never be known, but his involvement with children predated his years as a priest. Before his first parish assignment at St. Patrick's Church in Stoneham, north of Boston, Shanley worked with retarded children, orphans, juvenile delinquents, and poor and black youngsters at numerous organizations in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including Camp Fatima, the Cardinal's Home for Children, St. Francis Boys Home, the Catholic Boys Guidance Center, the Dorchester Settlement House, and Camp Dorchester. In Stoneham Shanley began a Friday night “Top Ten Club” for local youth at the town hall, which he transformed for the occasion into a disco with live music and psychedelic lighting. In Braintree, he ran teen folk masses that attracted scores of young people. He established a retreat house for youth workers on a ninety-five-acre farm in Weston, Vermont, and named it “Rivendell” after the idyllic valley in J. R. R. Tolkien's
The Hobbit.
He also served as chaplain at Boston State College and held appointments at Warwick House in Roxbury and Exodus Center in Milton, just south of Boston. Both involved close work with teenagers. From all those periods, victims have now come forward.
During much of the 1970s, while he ran his street ministry, Shanley lived independently in a private apartment in Boston's Back Bay, where he frequently invited teenage boys for so-called counseling sessions that routinely led to sexual encounters. That's where one teenage boy, who is now forty-two and spoke on condition of anonymity, first met Shanley. It was the summer of 1974, and the man, then fifteen, had just finished his freshman year at Boston College High School amid considerable confusion over his sexual identity. An acquaintance suggested he meet with Shanley to talk through his turbulent emotions.
Shortly into their first meeting, Shanley suggested that the man work on feeling more at ease with his sexuality. “He said, ‘You should get comfortable with your body. You don't seem comfortable with your body. Have you played strip poker?’ ” the man recalled. Shanley then stripped naked and persuaded the man to do the same, inviting him to compare their bodies in front of a full-length mirror. The nudity led to sex, the first of many times in years to come. Shanley also arranged sexual liaisons for him with other older men. The man described his relationship with Shanley as “damaging, because oftentimes I wanted and needed to talk, and it was time for sex. I began to think sex was my worth because he was charming and handsome and respected, and that was his interest in me.” It wasn't until 1982, feeling “used and angry,” that he cut off the relationship for good, when Shanley was at the Newton parish. After Shanley's abuse was made public by the
Globe
in January 2002, the man retained a lawyer and filed a claim against the Church over his abuse.
After leaving Newton in 1990 for a “sabbatical” in California, Shanley was placed on paid sick leave and surfaced at St. Anne's parish in San Bernardino, his way paved by a letter from Bishop Banks asserting that Shanley was a priest in good standing in Boston. Shanley occasionally worked on weekends at St. Anne's and — unbeknownst to his colleagues there — spent his weekdays running the Cabana Club, a “clothing optional” gay motel in nearby Palm Springs, with another Boston priest who was then also on sick leave in California, Rev. John J. White. Shanley and White co-owned the property, even as they were receiving monthly payments from the Boston archdiocese.
In the mid-1990s, with the consent of the Boston archdiocese, Shanley was acting director of Leo House, the Church-run guest house in New York. As recently as 1997 — after the Boston archdiocese had already paid monetary settlements to several of Shanley's victims — Law did not object to Shanley's application to be director of the facility. Church files contain a draft of a letter written by Law recommending Shanley for the director's position, although New York Cardinal John O'Connor vetoed the idea and the letter was never sent. So Shanley returned to California, where he worked as a “senior civilian volunteer” for the San Diego Police Department.
Speaking in 1969 about the dangers that face runaways and street kids, Shanley seemed to dare the reporter interviewing him to scratch below the surface of his ministry. “Whom do you want to get these kids first? Professional counselors or the hustlers and the psychotics who prey on young people?” he asked. In the same interview, Shanley described the teenagers he worked with as “victims of violence, of disease, sexual deviates, and drugs.”
Nearly thirty-five years after a sex abuse complaint was first made against him, Shanley finally attracted the attention of police. In early May of 2002, as many of his alleged victims came forward for the first time in the wake of newspaper accounts of his abusive past, Shanley was arrested in San Diego and pleaded not guilty to three counts of child rape dating to the 1980s. The charges were filed on behalf of Paul Busa, a former Newton man who alleged that Shanley abused him from 1983 to 1990, beginning when he was six. The seventy-one-year-old priest faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
Like Shanley, who was one of his seminary classmates at St. John's, Rev. Bernard J. Lane was the subject of numerous sexual abuse allegations; the Boston archdiocese has settled at least six molestation complaints against him. And like Shanley, Lane sought positions throughout his career that put him in regular contact with children.
In 1969 he founded a treatment center for drug-using adolescents in Malden, north of Boston, and organized retreats for youths at the churches where he worked as pastor. He was also a former chaplain at Maiden Catholic High School. But most of the allegations against him stem from his tenure as director of Alpha Omega, a nonprofit center for troubled teenage boys in Littleton, Massachusetts, north of Boston, as well as a family-owned cabin in Barnstead, New Hampshire, described by some of his victims as a “bachelor pad” with mirrored ceilings.