HOUSTON (TX)
The Catholic Observer [United States]

August 21, 2024

By Gary Gately

The annual SNAP conference highlighted the need for reforms to hold religious organizations accountable, including lifting statutes of limitations on child sexual abuse claims.

For more than 15 years, David Clohessy says, he fondly recalled all the camping, skiing, canoeing and hiking trips with his parish priest, Father John Whiteley.

Then while watching “Nuts” with his girlfriend (now his wife, Laura) — a movie in which the protagonist suffered sexual abuse as a child — it all came rushing back to Clohessy: waking to the priest lying on top of him, sexually molesting him, then turning over and drifting off to sleep.

Recalling the long-suppressed sexual abuse that he suffered over the course of four years as a child, Clohessy curled up into a fetal position and sobbed uncontrollably.

Since then, Clohessy, now 67, has cried almost every day over the abuse by the priest at St. Pius X, his parish in the Diocese of Jefferson City, Missouri — and the abuse so many others have suffered at the hands of clergy and other Catholic Church employees.

The abuse victims of Father Whitely — listed by the Church as “credibly accused” but never criminally charged — include three of Clohessy’s brothers. Among them: Kevin Clohessy, who went on to become a priest who sexually abused a student in 1993 at Northeast Missouri State University, where he was assigned. He was also accused of abusing a boy and another priest and has since left the priesthood.

Full Story>>>https://thecatholicobserver.substack.com/p/for-countless-clergy-abuse-victims