NEW YORK
The Villager
By Lincoln Anderson
A woman who said she turned to the former pastor of Our Lady of Pompei Church for spiritual guidance is claiming he met her need with what she at first believed to be “spiritual hugs” but that these embraces quickly went beyond the religious and became rape.
Leslie Fray is charging that Father Joseph Cogo, former pastor at the Carmine Street church, raped her at least three times. The incidents happened almost 30 years ago, when Fray, then a recent Yale graduate and convert to Catholicism, came to Greenwich Village. Fray, now 51, says she was beset by delayed-onset post-traumatic stress syndrome stemming from the alleged rapes and that it wrecked her life.
She says the recent media coverage of lawsuits against pedophile priests, her own growing awareness of what happened to her and wanting to inform others who may have had similar experiences are compelling her to tell her story now.
In June of 2004, Fray filed a complaint with the Manhattan district attorney and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The same week, she met with the superior of the Pious Society of the Missionaries of Saint Charles Borromeo, otherwise known as the Scalabrian order, with which Our Lady of Pompei is affiliated. The following month, Cogo was asked to step down as head pastor at the Village church. Three months later, he was transferred to Caracas, Venezuela, to head the Our Lady of Pompei Church there, also part of the Scalabrians’ order.