Swept under the rug

LYNCHBURG (VIRGINIA)
News & Advance

March 23, 2019

By Richard Chumney

For five decades, James Sheehan kept his most painful memory a secret.

The horror of the abuse he remembers experiencing at that hands of his local parish priest haunted him into silence. And for half a century he felt alone — isolated and, at times, lost in his own memories.

But now, Sheehan is speaking publicly after Vatican officials refused to defrock the priest at the center of the allegation, despite the fact that the Diocese of Richmond found his claim credible and recommended he be dismissed from “the clerical state.” The decision to come forward follows a renewed national focus on clergy child abuse and prompted Lynchburg police to briefly reopen its investigation into the man Sheehan says physically and sexually assaulted him in the mid-1960s.

As a teenage altar boy at Holy Cross Catholic Church, Sheehan told The News & Advance in recent interviews he was serially abused by the Rev. Julian Goodman.

Sheehan, embarrassed and fearful of Goodman, told no one at the time.

Instead, he bottled up the pain and carried the burden alone for 50 years. The trauma destroyed the young boy’s innocence, forcing him to endlessly wrestle with his own self worth and faith. Even today, as a staff member at a Catholic church in Georgia, he struggles to attend Mass.

“I’ve always felt like I was somewhat tainted,” he said.

Sheehan, 66, is now left with the emotional scars of the abuse he remembers and lingering questions that may never be answered.

How could this priest, he remembers thinking, a man who pinned my body to the ground and violated me inside my own church, use those same hands to turn bread and wine into the body and the blood of Christ? Why did he choose me? Who was this man?

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