GARDEN CITY (NY)
Long Island Herald
February 13, 2020
By Ronny Reyes
The Rev. Eligio Della Rosa served the parish of the Church of St. Rocco for more than 15 years. Although he first arrived in Glen Cove in 1965 for a four-year stay, it wasn’t until he returned in 1975 that he solidified his legacy in the city by reinstating the famous Feast of St. Rocco’s, a five-day festival celebrating the church and the city’s Italian-American heritage.
The annual festival, known locally as the “Best Feast in the East,” attracts hundreds of visitors to the city. For Della Rosa’s work at St. Rocco’s, the church named a parish center after him. Della Rosa died while serving at the church in 1991.
While he is remembered for his service in Glen Cove, an allegation of sexual abuse against him recently resurfaced: The attorney for a man who claims the priest abused him more than 50 years ago, at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Rocky Point, is demanding that the priest’s name be removed from the St. Rocco parish center. The attorney, Mitchell Garabedian — who was portrayed by actor Stanley Tucci in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe’s series of stories detailing the abuse allegations against priests in Boston — said he had reached an out-of-court, low-six-figure settlement with the Diocese of Rockville Centre last September for Della Rosa’s alleged abuse of the man when he was a teenager in 1964, a year before Della Rosa came to Glen Cove.
“He asked my client to meet him in the pews of the church, and my client did,” Garabedian said by phone at a news conference outside the Church of St. Rocco on Feb. 5. “And that’s where my client was sexually abused by Father Della Rosa, by Father Della Rosa instructing my client to perform oral sex on Father Della Rosa at the age of 14.”
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