PUTNAM (CT)
Norwich Bulletin
By GREG SMITH
Norwich Bulletin
PUTNAM -- A decades-long struggle for accountability for abuse in the Diocese of Norwich and the Catholic Church has reached a conclusion for Gene Michael Deary of Brooklyn.
The priest who Deary said raped and molested his brother, Thomas Deary, in the 1960s has been removed from the priesthood.
Thomas Deary took his own life in 1991.
The Most Rev. Michael R. Cote, bishop of Norwich, notified Deary in January that Pope Benedict XVI had dismissed the Rev. Bernard Bissonnette from the priesthood.
It ends a part of Deary's crusade, one that included countless meetings with two past bishops of Norwich and started in the 1980s to get the church to admit to wrongdoing.
"This has been 20 years in the coming," Deary said. "The fact is what Bissonnette did was wrong, but nobody was willing to say that for the longest time. Now they have."