WASHINGTON (DC)
Journal Gazette
By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post
WASHINGTON – On a balmy, hint-of-spring day in late March, Michael Donovan drove his rented car slowly past Holy Name School, where a billboard read, “He who angers you, controls you.”
The 63-year-old Vietnam veteran and retired businessman from California was on a mission into his past, a mission to banish his own anger and regain control. A mission of healing.
Almost 50 years ago, during Donovan’s eighth-grade spring break, he was sexually abused at Holy Name by Thomas Schaefer, then 30, a newly ordained Roman Catholic priest.
Schaefer went on to molest at least 20 more boys in the Washington Archdiocese, according to church officials, before pleading guilty in 1995 in five of those cases. Only one other priest in the archdiocese, Robert Petrella, had more known victims, officials said. About 25 people have reported being molested by Petrella. The two priests were responsible for more than a third of the 123 reports of sexual abuse by clergy in the archdiocese’s 59-year history.