By Ian Fisher
New York Times
October 21, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/us/21gozo.html?_r=2&oref=login&oref=slogin
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A neighbor of the Rev. Anthony Mercieca in Victoria, Malta, asking journalists and others Friday to leave the priest alone. Photo by Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters |
Victoria, Malta, Oct. 20 — He is known here as Father Tony, though he does not seem to be known very well, for the Rev. Anthony Mercieca spent his career as a priest far from Gozo, the tiny Mediterranean island where he grew up. And he is not sociable anyway, say people who know him.
"He is a very solitary man," said George Borg, 52, a teacher who described himself as a family friend. "He walks alone."
That quiet ended after Father Mercieca, 69, gave several telephone interviews admitting that he had had possibly inappropriate encounters in Florida in the 1960's with Mark Foley, the congressman who resigned over explicit electronic messages to pages.
In the interviews, Father Mercieca admitted to massaging the boy, skinny-dipping with him and staying in the same room with him on overnight trips. He said, perhaps, too much — and on Friday, he refused to speak to reporters camped out on the narrow street where he lives with his brother, George, also a priest. As the diocese here investigated the accusations, many of those closest to Father Mercieca did not want to address the subject.
"Leave me alone for five minutes," his brother begged reporters as he left the family house here in the main town on Gozo, the smaller of two principal islands of Malta, a Roman Catholic nation of 400,000 south of Sicily.
The sketchiest of portraits emerged from neighbors and church officials: Father Mercieca retired here a few years ago, having spent his career mostly in Brazil and the United States, and has not been officially active here as a priest. But he said Mass at 9 every morning for several dozen worshipers at the main church here.
While abroad, he returned to Gozo several weeks a year for vacation.
One church official, who requested anonymity because he did not have the authority to speak publicly, said that until the interviews on Thursday the diocese had not known of Mr. Foley's accusations — or indeed any against Father Mercieca concerning abuse.
There seemed to be little anger at Father Mercieca among his neighbors. "There are a lot of people like this," said one, Carmel Grech, 80. "Everybody has sins. What is the big fuss here?"
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