BishopAccountability.org
	Widow Sues Priest, Catholic Church after Husband Commits Suicide By Robert Patrick St. Louis Post-Dispatch March 13, 2006 http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/ story/E1587543B1263EEA86257130006E1F3F?OpenDocument A St. Louis area widow filed a wrongful death suit against a jailed priest and the Catholic Church Monday, claiming the priest's sexual abuse of her late husband caused him to commit suicide last year. The man, known in court papers as "John Doe GS," filed his own lawsuit just two months before his death. The suit says Romano Ferraro abused him at St. Joan of Arc parish in south St. Louis multiple times between 1980 and 1983, when the man was between 10 and 11 years old, and says the St. Louis Archdiocese knew or should have known that Ferraro was a danger. His wife, also filing anonymously as Mary Doe GS, is amending the lawsuit on behalf of her self and her husband's estate and changing the wording to reflect his death. John Doe GS, a computer industry worker, suppressed his memory of the abuse until the latter half of 2004, the lawsuits say. He struggled with episodic depression throughout his life. When he finally realized the root cause, he began to suffer more severe bouts of depression and attempted suicide on multiple occasions, even though he aggressively sought therapy, according to the lawsuits and a statement released by the widow Monday. He died of a gunshot wound on July 14, 2005. "Words are inadequate to describe the torment that my husband experienced before ending his life," the widow said in her statement, which was released at a Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests press conference. "When Romano Ferraro abused my husband as a child, he forever broke something inside of the little boy." The amended lawsuit is the second in the St. Louis area to allege that sexual abuse at the hands of a priest led to a suicide, according to SNAP That suit was filed by the father of Christopher Klump, a former Marine who died in 2003 of a cocaine overdose shortly after learning it was too late to file criminal charges against the priest. SNAP says that one other man also committed suicide as a result of his abuse. Ferraro is currently serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for sexually assaulting a young boy there. He lived at St. Joan of Arc in the early 1980s while serving as a chaplain at Jewish Hospital. A spokesman for archdiocese did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.