NEW LONDON (CT)
The Day
February 10, 2018
By Karen Florin
[Note from BishopAccountability.org: Includes an important video interview with John Waddington, a survivor of abuse by Fr Charles Many SSE, an Edmundite priest. This article appeared on the front page of the Sunday paper.]
John Waddington felt the blood drain from his face when his girlfriend called him last month to say a former altar boy at Sacred Heart Church in Groton who was molested by a priest in the late 1970s and early 1980s received a $900,000 settlement from Catholic church officials.
Waddington’s cubemates at Electric Boat saw his face go pale and thought somebody in his family had died, the 54-year-old electrical designer said during an interview Thursday.
The news of Andrew Aspinwall’s settlement brought Waddington back to the day in 1978 when he, a 14-year-old altar boy at Sacred Heart, was sexually assaulted by former priest Charles Many.
Same church, same priest, same time period.
“It was like it happened to me again,” Waddington said.
The now-disgraced former priest had arrived at Sacred Heart a few years earlier and started a youth group. Waddington said Many kept asking him to watch a movie in his room at the rectory. The priest was “a really soft-spoken, mellow kind of guy,” Waddington said, and he relented.
“He puts on ‘The Exorcist’ and molests me, and I didn’t remember it until I was 28,” Waddington said. The intense feelings associated with a divorce from his first wife and a confrontation at work triggered the memory, he said. He suffers from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. He’s been married and divorced three times, and has had years of counseling.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.