WESTTOWN (PA)
Daily Local
JOHN ROSSOMANDO, Staff Writer 09/26/2005
WESTTOWN -- Sunday’s Mass was unlike those of other Sundays for parishioners at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church, as recent revelations about the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s failure to rein in priestly sexual abusers hung over their heads.
As in many parishes throughout the archdiocese this day, the priest devoted his sermon to the scandal.
"A word that I could use to describe the fraternity of the priesthood in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia today is ‘empty,’" said Parochial Vicar Fr. John Schiele.
An embarrassed Schiele related his dismay at reading newspaper accounts of the scandal, and the breaking report that preceded the accounts, only to learn a former seminary classmate was listed among them.
"I didn’t want to refer to the report, and I wouldn’t want to, either, read the paper and look at a picture of a (seminary) classmate who was recently laicized,’" he said in his sermon. "This was a guy who came in and did the entire eight-year program right out of high school, who I was together with the entire time I was in the seminary."
Schiele said he and this classmate, who he declined to name, were never close and that he had almost come to blows with him at times "because he was being a jerk," including on his day of ordination in May 1993.