WISCONSIN
Kenosha News
BY JILL TATGE-ROZELL
jrozell@kenoshanews.com
Monica Barrett, 52, brought moral support with her Oct. 8 when she returned for the first time to the church where she said she was sexually abused at age 8 by the Rev. William Effinger.
“I wasn’t sure how it would affect me,” Barrett, who grew up in Kenosha and attended parochial schools there, said.
St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in Lake Geneva looks different than it did that Saturday afternoon in 1968. But the white rectory where the alleged act took place and the tree Barrett remembers crying beneath are still there.
“He kept saying, ‘You’re no good. You’re no good,’” she recalled. “He stood up, smoothed his hair back and said, ‘If you tell anyone, they won’t believe you’ and then he gave me penance to do.”
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