ST. PETERSBURG (FL)
Tampa Bay Times
October 17, 2018
By Waveney Ann Moore
A former parishioner of Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa, now a lawyer and magistrate in the Virginia Supreme Court, has filed suit against the Diocese of St. Petersburg alleging that he was sexually abused as a child by a now deceased priest.
According to the lawsuit filed this week, Mark Cattell says he was 9 years old in 1981 when he was sexually abused by the Rev. Robert D. Huneke. Cattell, now 45, was a student at Christ the King Catholic School and attended the parish church.
During a news conference Wednesday, Cattell’s attorney, Jeff Herman, called what happened to his client “a crime that was committed at the highest level of the Catholic church.” It involved, he said, “two bishops and a pedophile priest.”
According to the lawsuit, Huneke had previously been assigned to St. Dominic’s parish in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, in Long Island, N.Y., where he sexually molested a boy named John Salveson. Herman produced letters that he said Salveson, who is not a party in the suit, wrote as an adult to the Long Island bishop about the abuse that began when he was 13 years old.
By then, Huneke was in Florida, at Christ the King. In a July 26, 1980, letter on Christ the King stationery to the Rockville Centre bishop, Huneke admits to “past incidents” in New York and says he has “undergone counseling as well as spiritual direction.”
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