Waiting for justice: Child sex abuse victims push for changing statute of limitations

By Ivey DeJesus, [email protected], April 9, 2016, Penn Live

Three successive grand jury reports between 2003 and 2011 found that church officials in the the Archdiocese of Philadelphia knew about and systematically concealed the abuse of hundreds of children by priests across several decades. The archdiocese suspended scores of priests who were named as child molestation suspects in a scathing grand jury reports. In this 2011 file photo, protestors denounce church officials outside Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) (Matt Rourke)

By the time Mike Berkery was in high school, Stanley Gana, then a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, had raped him hundreds of times.

Gana, a spectacled man of 300 pounds, began grooming Berkery in 1978 when the boy, whose family attended Ascension Church in Philadelphia, was in eighth grade.

Gana sodomized the boy repeatedly, forcing him to have oral and anal sex in locations around Philadelphia and New Jersey, and as far away as Disney World, Notre Dame University, New York and Canada.