JACKSON (MS)
Metro News
January 22, 2019
By Jimmy McCloskey
A pedophile priest abused a young boy – then blamed the child for making him molest him, and made him confess it as a sin.
Mark Belenchia was abused by the Reverend Bernard Haddican from around 1969, when he was just 12 years old. Haddican would tell the child afterwards that he had committed the sin of ‘self abuse,’ then order him to confess the supposed wrongdoing to the man guilty of perpetrating it.
Recalling how Haddican escalated his campaign of abuse, Belenchia told the Clarion-Ledger: ‘That was my first sexual experience with another person. ‘I don’t know if you can call it a sexual experience – a nightmare.’
Belenchia was abused while living in Shelby, Mississippi, and says Haddican charmed locals by dressing in casual clothes, and acting in a far more personable way than his precedessors. He says Haddican began abusing him six months after he arrived, and would invite children over to watch baseball games, before plying them with liquor.
Haddican continued to groom his victims by hosting ‘sleepovers’ at his rectory, before molesting Belencia. The victim, who is now campaigning for justice said: ‘The actual abuse started off slow. I can’t recall all of it, I just know that I ended up in the bed.
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