Will always be hurt
WHEN PETER Marghella hurt his ribs wrestling with some friends at summer camp, he had no idea it would change his life forever.
Marghella, who was 12 in 1973, was away at Camp Spes Mundi in upstate Hope Falls when, he says, a priest sodomized him inside a private house.
The priest, Kenneth O’Connell, suggested Marghella stay with him after the injury, away from the other campers, so he could keep an eye on him throughout the night.
“Sometime in middle of the night, I woke up and O’Connell had crawled into bed with me naked and sodomized me,” Marghella recalled Tuesday. “It was brutal,” he added. O’Connell, who was chaplain of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting from 1973 to 1975, left the Adirondacks camp next day.
Marghella again.
In January, roughly 44 years later, the Archdiocese of New York reached out to Marghella and offered him a “high six-figure” settlement as part of its Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, Marghella said.
The program, created by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, compensates people who were abused by clergy. All told, 118 victims have received money, and no one has refused, said Joseph Zwilling, an spokesman.
“I think that speaks to the integrity of the program,” Zwilling said.
Marghella, 56, accepted the money, but remains haunted by the abuse and furious with the never saw him archdiocese Catholic Church.
“The church has never apologized,” he said. “It kind of felt like it was hush money — like shut up and go away.”
As an adult, Marghella hoped to confront O’Connell, and called his church in Larchmonth, Westchester County. That’s when he found out O’Connell had been promoted to Monsignor before he died in 1984 at 54.
Professionally, Marghella, a father of three, served in the Navy for 20 years. He says he suffered nearly paralyzing panic attacks and twice came close committing suicide, including one near attempt, when he was in Bahrain before the first Gulf War, and he put a loaded gun in his mouth.
About 17 years ago, he looked into filing a lawsuit against the archdiocese. But the case was never brought due to New York’s strict statute of limitations, which requires victims to come forward by age 23 with their abuse charges.
With three weeks to go in the legislative session, advocates are still pushing for passage of a Child Victims Act that would do away with the statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases, create a one-year window so survivors who can’t bring cases under the current law could do so, and treat public and private institutions the same.
The bill still faces a tough road in the GOP-controlled state Senate, where it has been blocked for years.
Gov. Cuomo has said the issue would be a priority for him this legislation session, which is scheduled to end June 21. The Assembly currently has a bill that advocates dubbed too weak.
The Daily News launched a campaign last year to pressure officeholders to support the Child Victims Act.