PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philly.com
JANUARY 10, 2016
by Mike Newall, Inquirer Columnist.
Brian McDonnell lies in his small, dark room under the crucifix on his wall, praying Hail Marys on his blue plastic rosary beads. Symbols of a church that had forsaken him, but one that he has never abandoned.
He worries that he is dying. It is all he thinks about.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to last,” he said the other afternoon. “I just feel like I’m fading quick. I just fall asleep saying Hail Marys.”
Brian suffers from schizophrenia, dementia, and depression. The manifestations of his mental illness are inextricably intertwined with the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a priest as an altar boy at now-closed St. Gregory’s in West Philadelphia.
“He suffers delusions because he cannot reconcile his faith in the Church with what happened to him,” prosecutors wrote in the 2003 Philadelphia grand jury report on sexual abuse in the archdiocese.
Brian is wasting away.
He is 70. He believes he’s 121. He believes he is “half Jesus” and “100 percent Michael the Archangel.” He believes he has raised the dead.
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