IOWA
Telegraph Herald
Mar 6, 2006
by MARY NEVANS-PEDERSON
Most of the children and teens predatory priests abused were male, but girls were not safe, either.
Of the 20 plaintiffs in the recent $5 million settlement with the Archdiocese of Dubuque, 12 were men and eight were women. Five of those women identified one priest, the Rev. Patrick McElliot, as their abuser.
By contrast, only one of the 37 plaintiffs who settled lawsuits with the Davenport (Iowa) Diocese in 2002 was a woman.
In court documents, Mc- Elliot's female victims described bizarre rituals in which the priest forced them to participate.
He abused one girl as she held up her dress while praying the rosary. He took pornographic pictures of another girl in the church rectory. One girl was forced to read sexually explicit material while the priest tape-recorded her. He then pulled down her panties, blessed her with a medal and sexually abused her.
A handful of women have accused the Rev. Henry Dunkel of sexually abusing them in the late 1940s. Some of them were his own nieces.
Jane Flynn Rodell said Dunkel "groomed" her for two years before he started sexually abusing her at St. Columbkille Catholic Church in 1947.
One night, the priest, then 26, instructed her to sneak out of a school dance to meet him for a driving lesson. He stopped the car near a cemetery and started to kiss her.