The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files | Culture News | Rolling Stone

Secrets and Lies…

 


The five co-defendants sit close enough to shake hands in the Philadelphia courtroom, but they never once acknowledge one another. Father James Brennan, a 47-year-old priest accused of raping a 14-year-old boy, looks sad and stooped in a navy sweater, unshaven and sniffling. Edward Avery, a defrocked priest in his sixties, wears an unsettlingly pleasant expression on his face, as though he’s mentally very far away. He and two other defendants – the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, also in his sixties, and Bernard Shero, a former Catholic schoolteacher in his forties – are accused of passing around “Billy,” a fifth-grade altar boy. According to the charges, the three men raped and sodomized the 10-year-old, sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-catholic-churchs-secret-sex-crime-files-20110906#ixzz1wJNol22kThe Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files | Culture News | Rolling Stone.


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