PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia Inquirer
By Nancy Phillips and Mark Fazlollah
Inquirer Staff Writers
Eileen Rhoads, a former nun turned convicted sex offender, can't erase the pain she left behind. All she can do is pray.
"If I could bring every one of those kids here now," said Rhoads, 66, weeping as she sat beneath a small wooden cross in her Drexel Hill home, "I would get on my knees and beg their forgiveness."
Her victims say they can't forget or forgive. Not her - and not the church that they say failed to stop her.
Warned that Rhoads was "very disturbed," church leaders released her from her nun's vows in the early 1970s - but hired her as a teacher at a Catholic school, where she found more victims.
"Oh, my God, what she has taken from me," said Linda Curran, 39, who was sexually abused by Rhoads throughout her teens. "She is sick and twisted, a fraud and a degenerate who, just like the church, is not being held responsible for what she has done."
Among the scores of abuse cases that have come to light, Rhoads' is one of the most disturbing: A repeat offender, she spent years having sex with boys and one girl.