With Priest-Abuse Trial Underway, Former Student's Mind Is in the Classroom

By Shannon McDonald
The Newsworks
January 17, 2013

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/AbuseTrackerArchive/2013/01/#076458

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My very best friends today are the people I went to grade school with. In 1998, we were passing notes in class and testing the authority of our new sixth-grade teacher, Bernard Shero. In early 2011, we were exchanging frenetic text messages as Shero's face popped on seemingly every TV screen in America. He and three priests from our Northeast Philadelphia parish had been named in a grand jury report for having allegedly sexually abused minors.

But since then, we've been relatively silent about it all. It's come up a few times in conversations, especially when we run into old classmates we've lost touch with. Despite having spent our childhoods surrounded by these men, none of us has much to say.

We weren't victims, fortunately, and so it almost feels unreal. There's a sense of shock, not because of the ardent Catholic faith some of my friends have, or because we'd never have expected these accusations. What's most shocking to me is that while I spent so many lunch periods with my friends groaning about Shero making us read The Phanton Tollbooth, somewhere in that same building, some of my schoolmates suffered in silence.

Shero is accused of offering a 10-year-old boy a ride home from school one day and then driving him to a neighborhood park and anally raping him. That boy is a year younger than me, one of probably 50 males in his class that year. Maybe he lived on my block, served at a mass I attended. He has not been named, but I must know him. He's not the only alleged victim, and Shero isn't the only accused.