After decades of quiet suffering, Delaware priest abuse victim tells her story

BELLEFONTE (DE)
Delaware News Journal

August 16, 2018

By Xerxes Wilson

He always paid special attention to her.

Mary was a young teen. Father John Sarro was a Catholic priest making “creepy” comments about marrying her. Then there were the handwritten letters he sent her throughout her teenage years.

“God gave me a treasure when he gave me you,” she recalled him writing.

But it was more than words.

She remembers Sarro as “overly affectionate;” a tall, unkempt man who crossed the line into personal space and made people feel uncomfortable.

In the early 1990s, at age 11, Mary got a job at the rectory of St. Helena’s Catholic Church in Bellefonte, answering the few phone calls that came in at night as she finished her homework.

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