BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | October 1, 2005
In quavering voices and anguished tones, they described how the priest had betrayed them and destroyed their lives, how the sexual abuse he committed when they were boys led to heroin addiction, suicide attempts, fear of intimacy, and loss of faith.
Moments after former Catholic priest Robert Burns pleaded guilty yesterday to sexually abusing five boys at two Boston parishes in the 1980s and 1990s, four of the victims, now young men, told a judge that his crimes were all the more horrific because he was an admired priest.
''It is easy to blame the stranger in the alley who takes advantage of people, but how do you get mad at the person who helps you get into heaven?" said a 34-year-old Boston man who said he has never been sexually intimate because of the abuse.
A 28-year-old Charlestown man, one of three members of an extended family whom Burns admitted abusing, said, ''Bob Burns, now it's time to take your hell on earth."
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford, who could have imprisoned the 56-year-old defendant for the rest of his life, imposed a sentence of 8 to 11 years behind bars, with 10 years of probation to follow.