CONNECTICUT
The Hartford Courant
By EDMUND H. MAHONY, emahony@courant.com
The Hartford Courant
2:21 p.m. EST, January 31, 2012
WATERBURY—
A priest who was a former top aide in the Catholic Diocese of Hartford testified Tuesday that he arranged treatment in 1979 for a sexually abusive priest but said he has no knowledge of the church ever doing anything for the priest’s victims.
Father Gene Gianelli also testified that he decided to keep the name of the church institute where the priest was being treated from the mother of two abused brothers because he was afraid she could become “a pest.”
“I will not let this woman know where Father is receiving treatment,” Gianelli wrote in a March 21, 1979, memo to Archbishop John F. Whealon. “She could become a pest.”
Gianelli, who was Whealon’s secretary from 1972 to 1982, was called as a witness in Superior Court Tuesday by a now-adult, former altar boy who claims in a lawsuit that the Diocese of Hartford was negligent throught the late 1970s and early 1980s by failing to stop his abuse.
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