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  Advocacy Group Seeks Names from Catholic Diocese

By Anne Pressly
KATV
October 17, 2007

http://www.katv.com/news/stories/1007/464736.html

Little Rock - A victim's advocacy group new to Arkansas is pushing the Catholic Diocese to release names of clergy known to be abusers.

(David Brown, Jr., Abuse Victim) "For years and years and years, I would wake up in the middle of the night and smell of a very stale, smoky breath--I was smelling the breath of my perpetrator as he was raping me. My wife would ask me, 'What's going on?' And I would say, 'Sinuses'."

David Brown, Jr. was a student at Father Ryan High School in Nashville, Tennessee when he met Reverend Paul Haas. What Brown says started as a student-teacher relationship in 1961, soon turned into the unthinkable.

(Brown) "He abused me and raped me repeatedly. It ended in 1962. He was arrested in Centennial Park in Nashville that summer."

Haas was then transferred to Memphis, where he taught for three years before moving to Little Rock. Haas was a teacher at Catholic High School for Boys for one year before he was sent to Kentucky for what a bishop accountability website refers to as "treatment."

(Brown) "They play a geographical game, and why they're doing that, your children are at stake."

And Brown says the Little Rock Diocese isn't helping, refusing to release a list of church employees who have either been proven or credibly accused of abuse.

And until there is such disclosure, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) exists to support victims like Brown.

(Brown) "We'll help them any way we can, but just let them know they're not alone, that's the important thing."

Reverend Haas died in 1978. He has no known victims in Arkansas. Channel 7 News contacted the Little Rock Diocese about the release of the names, with no response.

 
 

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