KANSAS CITY (KS)
National Catholic Reporter
October 4, 2017
By Anita Hofschneider
Chalan Pago-Ordot, Guam — B.J. pushes aside the ferns as he approaches the edge of the muddy river in central Guam. Hunched over and carrying a cane, he is looking for the spot where he was tied to a tree decades ago. Mosquitoes descend ferociously with every step he takes. Apart from the gushing water, the jungle is quiet.
“Look, if you yell, nobody can hear you,” he says. “Or if anything happens to you, nobody will know.”
The river looks completely different from that day 46 years ago when B.J. says he was raped repeatedly by Fr. Louis Brouillard, a priest and then-Boy Scout leader. B.J. was only 11 years old, and remembers the water was calm. The trees weren’t pressed so hard against the water’s edge.
“He had me strapped to one of these trees like this,” he says, pointing to the trees next to him. “He went down there, right, and then he started to slowly swim back here, right, and he got up here to me, right? That’s when everything changed.”
B.J. is one of more than 100 men and women who have filed lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Agana on Guam alleging abuses that occurred between the 1950s and 1980s.
Sex abuse scandals have roiled archdioceses throughout North America for the last two decades. But only in recent years has the church in this small, intensely Catholic U.S. territory begun confronting its own legacy of abuse.
The magnitude of the claims is staggering. According to a recent USA Today analysis, Guam, with a population of only about 160,000, has a per-capita rate of abuse claims more than five times higher than in Boston. So far, 16 priests have been accused of sexual abuse. About a third of them are deceased and some have left the priesthood. One was defrocked.
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