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  Priest Removed from Post after Speaking about Abuse

TheBostonChannel.com
May 18, 2006

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/9240485/detail.html

BOSTON -- A priest was removed from his post after he spoke out about being sexually abused as a seminarian.

NewsCenter Five's Amalia Barreda reported Thursday that the Rev. James Moran's openness cost him his life's vocation.

"They knew I was a victim, but still they didn't care. They just (said), 'you know this is the way it is. This is the rule. This is the law. You've broken it. We don't like the way you work. You're gone,'" Moran said.

Moran, 60, is a priest in title only. His sacramental duties were stripped away within hours after he revealed in a homily during Holy Week that he was raped when he was a 25-year-old seminarian assigned to Sacred Heart Parish in Roslindale.

His alleged attacker is the Rev. Anthony Laurano, who is now 81 years old. Laurano is charged with rape of a child and indecent assault on a mentally retarded person.

Moran said that he tried to tell another priest supervisor and even called rape crisis centers to no avail.

"And so I just did the Irish thing and lived with it. I had nowhere else to go with it," Moran said.

But decades of depression began to boil over when the priest sex abuse scandal exploded in 2002.

"I was overwhelmed. I can't do enough good in my own life to offset that evil," Moran said.

He decided he needed to meet with Cardinal Bernard Law, who offered to pay for counseling.

"And I'm sitting there, and I'm saying, 'Where's the validation of me as a good person? Where's the validation of me as a victim? Where's the validation of me as being a good priest?'" Moran said.

His health suffering, Moran arranged to retire on a medical disability in the end of May. But when he publicly revealed his painful secret just before Easter at his post in Washington, D.C., the archdiocese there immediately relieved him of his faculties.

"They just snatched the rug out from under me and tore my heart out," Moran said.

 
 

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