BUFFALO (NY)
Buffalo News
September 4, 2018
By Dan Herbeck
Christopher Szuflita says he still has painful memories of the day in 1970 when he tried to tell his pastor that he had been repeatedly molested by a priest at Fourteen Holy Helpers Church in West Seneca.
He said Monsignor Martin Ebner immediately told him and his father that day that his accusation against the Rev. Joseph Friel was a lie.
“The pastor became very irate, very upset and told me I was a liar. He said I was committing a sacrilegious sin by lying. He said I could be excommunicated from the church for telling such a lie,” Szuflita, now 66, recalled in an interview on Friday.
“He never conducted any kind of investigation. He never questioned anyone. He just told me, right then and there, off the cuff, that I was a liar,” recalled Szuflita, a former altar boy.
Forty-eight years later, the Buffalo Diocese in March identified for the first time 42 priests against whom it had determined credible allegations of child sexual abuse had been lodged. Friel’s name was on the list.
That admission was a bombshell for Szuflita, who in 1994 unsuccessfully sued the diocese in State Supreme Court, seeking $2 million in damages for the harm caused by Friel abusing him when he was 15 and 16 years old.
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