APPLETON (WI)
Green Bay Press-Gazette
Written by
Jessie Van Berkel
Gannett Wisconsin Media
APPLETON — When an Outagamie County jury decided the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay covered up a priest’s history of child molestation, it sent a message to the rest of Wisconsin, an advocate for sexual abuse victims said.
The outcome of Todd and Troy Merryfields’ civil lawsuit against the diocese Monday empowers victims across the state to come forward, said Peter Isely, the Midwest director for Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. For others who have reported sexual abuse by priests, this “should increase the pressure to bring these cases to a just resolution.”
“That is always something that occurs when this culture of secrecy … is pierced and opened by cases like this,” Isely said.
Rev. John Feeney molested the Merryfields in 1978, when they were 12 and 14 years old. In 2004, Feeney was convicted of sexual assault of the brothers. After the criminal trial, the brothers said they learned the priest had a history of similar assaults in the 1960s and 1970s that the diocese knew about and hid from parishioners at St. Nicholas Church in Freedom, which the Merryfields attended.
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