UNITED STATES
Providence Journal
By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer
Posted Jan. 10, 2016 at 2:01 AM
Watching “Spotlight,” the movie about The Boston Globe’s investigation of Massachusetts clergy who raped children, and reading about employees of St. George’s School in Middletown who sexually abused students, has prompted memories of my 1960s and ‘70s childhood.
Only luck, I have concluded, spared me and my friends the fate of these many victims.
Back then, we were youngsters in a world where authority was accepted without question, and where certain authorities with sanctioned access to children — clergy, teachers, coaches and scout leaders among them — were almost god-like in stature.
It was a world of blind obedience and absolute trust of elders. And it was a world where monsters cloaked in authority roamed free, although no grownup warned us of that.
A resident of Wakefield, Mass., a Boston suburb, I spent eight years at St. Joseph parochial school and was an altar boy during much of that time at the parish church, which was under the control of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The priests I knew best at St. Joseph were good stewards. But another, William F. Maloney, whom I saw only at Mass, was later accused of sexually abusing someone in the late 1960s at another parish in North Reading, four miles from my home.
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