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	Naked Confessions of Foley's Priest Are Hard to Stomach By Howard Goodman South Florida Sun-Sentinel [Florida] October 22, 2006 http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnists/sfl-phoward22oct22,0,790191.column Now, that's a relief: It was only saunas and massages in the nude, skinny-dipping and fondling. Thank God it was nothing like sex. The interview confessions of the Rev. Anthony Mercieca induce a kind of stunned amazement that any man of the cloth would so easily admit to behavior that's so patently wrong, while blithely acting as though everything was quite all right. Mercieca is the Roman Catholic priest who says he cavorted with a young altar boy named Mark Foley when he was assigned to Sacred Heart Church in Lake Worth in 1967. Foley grew up to be the six-time Republican congressman with the secret life that included a nasty habit of engaging teenage boys in Internet-message sex talk. As the whole world knows, the 52-year-old from Fort Pierce abruptly resigned last month when some of his cringe-producing exchanges with congressional pages became public. After disappearing into his undisclosed recovery bunker, Foley had a lawyer announce that the disgraced pol was (a) a secret alcoholic and (b) molested by a clergyman. Thus hitting the Daily Double of excuse-making, Foley then wanted us to know that none of this was an excuse. The stage was set for enterprising reporters to find Mercieca, who at 69 is retired and living on the small Maltese island of Gozo, a geography trivia answer in the Mediterranean Sea. Mercieca has proved a most obliging subject. "We were friends and trusted each other as brothers and loved each other as brothers," Mercieca told The Associated Press. He said he and Foley would go into saunas naked, but "everybody does that." Oh, sure. Lots of parents want to see their son or daughter dipping naked in the spa with their minister or rabbi. In all his interviews, he denied having sexual intercourse with Foley, then all of 13. "It's not something you call, I mean, rape or penetration or anything like that, you know," he told WPTV-Ch. 5. "It was just fondling." Anybody else out there having trouble holding down their breakfast? As mea culpas go, Mercieca's sounds as persuasive as Bill Clinton's protestations about the oral ministrations of Monica Lewinsky not counting as sex. But according to David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, there's a big difference. Clinton undoubtedly lied to save his job. But "the priest's crimes are so egregious and so taboo, I think he's lying to protect his twisted psyche." Clohessy, of St. Louis, is himself a childhood victim of a priest's abuse. "If I had to guess," he said, "the priest's heart is filled with turmoil and guilt and confusion and shame. And the brain would be clear and neat and orderly and make these distinctions. And that's how he can talk so dispassionately about this." Richard Sipes, a former monk and priest who wrote a classic work on the sexual and celibate practices of Catholic clergy, A Secret World, said Mercieca is very typical. "Dioceses throughout the United States are now recording an average of 7 percent priest abusers of minors in their records," Sipes writes in a soon-to-be-published report. The tawdry doings are rationalized as "tickling," "a massage," "friendship." The result is a fascinating, perverse psychological hall of mirrors. In Merceica, you have a priest who plays naked with boys and touches them in the wrong places, but sees nothing wrong in it. In Foley, you have one of those boys growing up to be a denouncer of this very behavior -- going so far as to raise public alarms over a youth nudist camp that has run for years without complaint. Is he trying to protect a younger, wounded version of himself against another, predatory version of himself? Because all the while Foley is blasting the exploitation of minors, he is secretly engaging in it. It's only when he is caught that he suddenly comes forward to reveal being abused by the priest. It's dizzying. And sickening. E-mail: hgoodman@sun-sentinel.com
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