Save it for the day of judgment
With more abuse claims and no signs of true reform, US Catholics will keep dwindling in number
Why I won’t take B’klyn diocese’s sex-abuse cash
A man who has accused a Queens priest of sexually molesting him as a boy has rejected a $200,000 offer from the Catholic Church because the money “doesn’t even come close” to delivering justice.
“I choose to stand on the side of survivors who want to fight,” Paul J. Dunn, 53, told The Post. “There’s no amount of money that will make me feel better.”
The Diocese of Brooklyn, which also covers Queens, offered Dunn a cash settlement in June after he detailed four occasions when priest Cornelius T. Otero coerced him into performing oral sex and forced him to pose naked in “hundreds” of photos when he was a boy,y diocese records show.
For the first time, Dunn is coming forward with his story, detailing his suffering to The Post and explaining why he’s turning down a settlement.
Dunn was 10 or 11 when he and Otero, who died in 1998, grew close at St. Joan of Arc Church summer camp in Jackson Heights in 1977 or 1978. Dunn doesn’t recall the exact year.
“He befriended me right away,” Dunn recalled. “He played kickball with us, took pictures of us, and I trusted him.”
One day, Otero whisked Dunn and a few other boys to a Jones Beach swimming pool for “fun.” But the sunny day took a dark turn when Otero allegedly ushered him inside a cabanastyle changing room. “He ordered me to take my clothes off while he took pictures,” Dunn said. “I was terrified and frozen with fear. I couldn’t speak or move.”
Over four months that summer, the alleged abuse escalated.
Once, Otero found Dunn and his friends playing kickball in the basement of St. Joan of Arc Catholic School and angrily instructed all the kids except Dunn to leave.
The priest then escorted the boy into a bathroom and forced him to perform oral sex while Otero took photos, Dunn alleged.
“He said God would be angry with me if I didn’t do what he wanted,” Dunn recalled.
He was allegedly coerced into performing oral sex three more times.
Otero also forced Dunn to touch the priest’s genitals while he fondled the boy, Dunn said.
“He told me it was our secret game with God and if I told anyone, I would die and go to hell,” Dunn said.
Otero would take Dunn to get ice cream afterward.
“It was typical abuser behavior,” Dunn said. “Play nice afterwards to make you confused and ashamed.”
In 1979, Otero was arrested for “selling 40 books containing obscene photographs of children” to undercover cops in a Manhattan garage, according to court documents.
But the priest dodged jail after agreeing to help the
I choose to stand on the side of survivors who want to fight. — Paul Dunn, who was offered a settlement over his clergy sex-abuse claim
NYPD net other predators as an informant, according to an April 1980 Post report. He assisted in at least two arrests, the report says.
The diocese was quick to shuffle Otero out of state, and he worked at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Conn., from 1988 to 1995.
Otero worked at two Queens churches — St. Joan of Arc (from 1972 to 1980) and St. Teresa’s (1967-1971) — and at Queen of All Saints in Brooklyn (1959-1966).
After the summer of abuse, Dunn refused to return to St. Joan of Arc church. He turned to drugs and alcohol to “numb the pain” and harmed himself.
“I acted out. I was a cutter,” Dunn said.
At age 15, he attempted suicide, slitting his wrists.
“It was a cry for help,” Dunn said.
Dunn has battled addiction, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia for the last 40 years.
He attributes three failed marriages to his trauma.
“I can’t keep a steady relationship because I can’t open up,” said Dunn, who runs an estate-sale company. “I can tell my story to somebody, but it just pushes me away from people.”
While he and his current wife have been together for five years, he still feels “vulnerable and isolated.”
“We’re not divorced yet, but we might go that way,” he said.
For the Queens native, the best medicine may be justice.
He is fighting to help pass the state Child Victims Act, which would give victims a one-year window to sue over cases that occurred beyond the current statute of limitations.
“I want my day in court with them,” Dunn said of diocese officials. “I honestly believe it’s coming sooner rather than later.”
The Diocese of Brooklyn has paid out 364 settlements through its Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. Officials have refused to disclose the sums of the settlements.
Carolyn Erstad, a diocese spokeswoman, would not address Dunn’s claims but said the diocese has “no influence over” settlements offered by the mediation panel.
Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio said he was “sad and angry to hear the story of Paul Dunn and the stories of all those sexually abused as children by members of the clergy.”
“I am grateful to all those who have had the courage to come forward,” he said.
Dunn’s lawyer, Michael Reck, praised his client.
“His selfless rejection of the church officials’ payoff is inspiring for survivors across the nation,” he said.
While Dunn seeks to hold Catholic authorities accountable for widespread sexual abuse of children, he believes Otero is getting the treatment he deserves.
“He’s in hell facing what he did right now,” he said. “And the rest will get what’s coming.”
THE Catholic bishops in the United States thought they had put this behind them: The Boston Globe publicized the horrifying sexual abuse in the church and the equally horrifying cover-ups in 2002; the movie “Spotlight” based on that story won an Oscar; settlements were paid; and there was a solemn meeting in Dallas during which the bishops adopted new rules — rules from which they exempted themselves — and promised “never again.” And here we are — again. The new round of revelations involves pornographic episodes of sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses. (The situation in Philadelphia, the state’s largest diocese, was separately documented in a 2005 grand-jury report.) On top of that, the leading figure from that 2002 convention in Dallas, the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, is accused of sexually assaulting two children in addition to carrying on a series of exploitative sexual relationships with adult seminarians — relationships that had been an open secret among his colleagues. And just last week The Post revealed that the Archdiocese of New York has paid out close to $60 million to sex-abuse victims in the last two years.
The rot is not exclusive to the United States. The Catholic communities in Chile, in Australia, in France and in Ireland have all experienced similar scandals, some of which are ongoing. Scandal has even touched Vatican City itself: At the beginning of the summer, Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella was convicted by a Vatican court of distributing child pornography and sentenced to five years’ incarceration. In 2014, Monsignor Jozef Wesolowski, previously the Holy See’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, was defrocked for abusing young boys but died before facing criminal proceedings.
There is more talk of reform. What’s needed is something closer to corporate decapitation, the wholesale replacement of an American episcopacy that has shown itself to be beyond institutional redemption.
Perhaps it is time for a smaller but better Catholic Church.
The American Catholic community has been stagnant for a very long time, and it would not be surprising if these scandals — the sheer weight of them going back decades, now — were to hasten the decline in Mass attendance and perhaps hasten an exodus of Americans from the Catholic Church entirely. If this is likely, it is in part because a considerable share of American
Catholics are not Catholic in the sense of believing what the church teaches and receiving the church’s sacraments.
Rather, for many Americans, particularly in the baby-boomer generation and those near to them, Catholicism is not a religious faith but a cultural identity. There are many Catholics who are Catholic in the sense that restaurateurs in South Philly are Italian and ward-heelers in Boston are Irish — it is an identity marker that is less about who they are and more about who their grandparents were. If Catholicism is only a social club, then membership is at this moment not highly desirable.
Still, Americans compose only 5 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics. Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines are the heaviest hitters, and the growth market is Africa, where the church faces a different kind of sexual scandal.
The baptized Catholic population of Africa has grown by a fifth in the past four years, from 186 million to 222 million. The general impression of the African church is that it is more conservative than the American or European communities — except on the matter of celibacy. Monsignor Giacomo Canobbio, a theologian and proponent of allowing more married priests, says bluntly: “In Africa a good percentage of priests de facto have a family.” Compared to McCarrick et al., a Catholic priest married to a woman hardly seems scandalous at all. And it isn’t, necessarily: The church already permits married priests in narrow circumstances.
Liberal critics of the church have long linked the practice of celibacy to clerical degeneracy, though that leaves unexplained and identical pathological degeneracy in Protestant communities, in Jewish congregations, in public schools, in the Secret Service, etc.
A more likely explanation is the one poet Ezra Pound hit upon 80 years ago: The trouble in the Catholic Church — its cultural and doctrinal crises — was rooted, he thought, in the fact that the Catholic hierarchy had ceased believing its own dogma.
Things have not improved in the subsequent eight decades. If the US bishops had truly taken to heart their own teachings, then they would not have proceeded as though their hats liberated them from the human condition and exempted themselves from the same oversight they imposed on their subordinates. A church with a laity alive to the full implications of the Catholic notion of communion would not have accepted it.
What do American Catholics believe? For the laity, the answers may be found in the polling data. For the bishops, the answer is, apparently, that they believe most intensely in their own sublimity, unholy though it may be.
That’s an old story for Christians. The oldest, in fact. There’s no putting that behind us, either.