“Pure evil”: Siblings are among victims of priests

It took 50 HARRISBURG, years, until the release of a landmark investigative report, for sisters Mary Robb Jackson and Cynthia Carr Gardner to realize that the parish priest in the Pittsburgh-area suburb where they lived as children had molested both of them, a couple of years apart.

The sisters’ discovery — during a long-distance telephone conversation between Massachusetts and Pennsylvania — added theirs to the cases of siblings cited throughout the state grand jury report on the sexual abuse of children by clergy within six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania.

The nearly 900-page report, released Aug. 14 after a two-year investigation, cited at least two dozen sets of siblings victimized by clergy among the scores of abuse cases it documented going back to the 1940s. Two of the cases involved five siblings.

Clergy members often won the trust of parents before going on to molest siblings, sometimes in a home while parents were present, sometimes on trips with the children, the report said. The priests then parlayed that trust into leverage against children, who were afraid to say no to an authority figure trusted by their parents.

The predator priests often warned their victims to keep quiet. That and shame often kept victims quiet and unaware of their siblings’ trauma for years.

Jackson did eventually complain to her mother, a devout Roman Catholic, about the Rev. Lawrence O’Connell’s abuse, which consisted of groping and kissing while she performed office tasks in the St. Gabriel parish house practically next door as part of an after-school job. Her mother promptly ended the after-school job, Jackson said.

Jackson went off to college, and the girls’ mother died suddenly. O’Connell soon invited Gardner — who was 11 or 12 at the time and lived with their father — to spend her afternoons doing office tasks in the parish house, and went on to molest her, Gardner said.

Jackson, away at college, never knew that O’Connell had invited Gardner in, she said. Neither Jackson nor her mother had said anything to the other family members about O’Connell, and neither Gardner nor her father had any reason to refuse a job offer from a man who had bestowed gifts on the girls.

“Was it calculated? I don’t understand that kind of mind-set. But, if it was, that’s just pure evil,” said Gardner, now 63. “That’s pure evil calculation if you take advantage of a family who’s had a horrific life event and you prey on the younger version of the sibling.” O’Connell died in 1986. Child sex abuse cases in which the victims are siblings are more common when the predator is part of an organized religion, said Ben Andreozzi, a lawyer who has represented victims of Catholic clergy and of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach now serving a long prison sentence.

“Parents will at times unknowingly legitimize the perpetrator to the children,” Andreozzi said.