MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe
By Sacha Pfeiffer GLOBE STAFF APRIL 18, 2017
No one taught me more about the incalculable damage of sexual abuse, and the surprising resiliency of the human spirit, than Joe Crowley.
I met Joe in the fall of 2001, when my Spotlight Team colleagues and I were searching for people who had been molested by Catholic priests. Through a network of lawyers and advocates, I contacted Joe, then 42. He was smart, funny, and articulate, but also nervous, insecure, and still trying to recover emotionally from what had happened to him decades earlier.
Joe grew up in Dorchester in the 1960s and ’70s in an extremely unstable family: his mother struggled with mental illness, his father was mostly out of the picture, and he and his four siblings spent years living in a children’s home.
As a teenager, Joe suspected he was gay, which is why he wound up being “counseled” by Father Paul Shanley, a long-haired, denim-clad Boston priest who created a “ministry to alienated youth’’ for runaways, drug abusers, and adolescents confused about their sexual identity.
Of all the abusive priests I covered, Shanley was the most insidious, because he deliberately surrounded himself with vulnerable, troubled teenage boys. For 15-year-old Joe and many others, the “counseling” they received culminated in coerced sex, often in Shanley’s private apartment in the Back Bay.
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