CONNECTICUT
Hartford Courant
THE REV. BILL KEANE
Thirty-two years in the pulpit have shown me that ministry isn’t based on what you plan, it’s expressed in how you stand up to what can’t be foreseen. That’s why, after wrestling with futile internal protest, and seeing no definitively informative and positive change, I decided to make public the failure of my church hierarchy to expose one of its long-term ministers as a pedophile.
On the contrary, last April, the annual report of the American Baptist Churches of Connecticut included praise and gratitude for Eli Echevarria, convicted four months before and sentenced to prison for possessing child pornography involving young girls down to toddlers. The printed endorsement nearly sucked the life out of my soul.
More than a year earlier, the same man began visiting my congregation in Branford. We welcomed him, and in the following months he mixed with the congregation, including the children.
Then, after he had been with us for several months, when I had returned from a summer holiday, it was brought to my attention that Echevarria had been recently arrested for possessing child pornography. The arrest was for behavior when he was still preaching in New Haven, well before he crossed our threshold. I then discovered he had been convicted before on charges of illegal sexual contact in 2006, put on three years’ probation and registered as a sex offender.
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