PITTSFIELD (MA)
The Berkshire Eagle
January 19, 2019
By Larry Parnass
It was dusk when the car reached the hotel. A priest got out and went in to register and get a room key.
Another priest waited in the car. He wasn’t alone. With him were two boys in their early teens who sported 1970s moptops. After a long drive from their homes in Pittsfield, they had no idea where they were.
Forty-six years later, one of them can close his eyes and put himself in those uncertain moments. In that car. In that hotel room. In that bed.
“The movie that I play in my head is what happened that night, with infinite detail,” said Michael Carpino, who was 13 at the time. He’s now 59 and lives in Colorado. “It doesn’t leave you. It’s a sentence for life.”
On Feb. 10, the Most Rev. Mitchell T. Rozanski, bishop of the Springfield diocese, will come to Pittsfield to hear concerns about the Catholic Church’s handling of clergy abuse, amid renewed and growing attention to the problem worldwide.
The bishop will settle into a seat blocks from the former Mount Carmel Church, where Carpino served as an altar boy for the Rev. Richard J. Ahern, a priest who spent six years in Pittsfield and was named as an abuser by multiple victims around New England.
Carpino won’t be around to tell his story to the bishop. He moved to Colorado soon after graduating from the University of Massachusetts in the 1980s and has worked there in the high-tech field.
But he detailed his abuse in phone interviews with The Eagle this past week, nearly three years after he first posted on social media about his abuse.
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