FORT WAYNE (IN)
The Journal Gazette
September 23, 2018
By Rosa Salter Rodriguez
Wonders where the guilty ones go after dismissal
When Brian Cook was 11, he says, his divorced mother, having recently moved back to Fort Wayne, encouraged him to develop a friendship with their parish priest, thinking it would be good for him to have a male role model.
Cook says it was good – in the beginning. The priest asked him to sit on his lap while they talked and gave him a hug and a kiss. He didn’t think anything of it because his family had friendships with priests before.
But during a subsequent meeting, the priest told him he looked tense and said he’d give him a massage if he’d lie down on the bed in the next room of the man’s rectory living quarters. At a later meeting, the priest told him he should take off his clothes for a better massage.
By that time, Cook said, he was uncomfortable. He felt what was happening was wrong, and “I was getting the heck out of there,” he said.
But it was not until he reported what happened to a diocesan official in 2017 that he learned of any sexual abuse allegations against the priest.
Last week, Cook found the priest’s name among 18 priests and deacons “credibly accused” of sexual abuse of minors on a list released by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The list placed the number of allegations against the priest at six.
And Cook, who said he was told there were other victims of the same priest when he reported, is angry.
“I know if I had heard something, I would have come forward (sooner),” said the man, who no longer lives in Fort Wayne. “If (church officials) don’t disclose, no one knows.”
The list has revealed the scope of alleged clerical abuse within the diocese – and mixed messages over the years.
Hardly a parish in Fort Wayne was not staffed at one time by a priest on the list of accused abusers. Sixteen separate parishes, some of which have closed, were named as having been an assignment of an accused priest – although the list does not specify when or where any of the alleged abuse took place.
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