LOWELL (MA)
The Sun

November 9, 2020

If there’s indeed a hell, it’s a fitting final destination for Paul Shanley.

Shanley, a former Roman Catholic priest who played a pivotal role in the sexual-abuse scandal that rocked the Archdiocese of Boston two decades ago, has died, authorities said Friday. He was 89.

Police in Ware, a town in west-central Massachusetts where Shanley had lived since his release from prison in 2017, confirmed his death, but not the circumstances.

WFXT-TV, Boston’s Fox News affiliate, said he died of heart failure on Oct. 28.

Shanley was known in the 1960s and ’70s as a hip, street-wise priest who reached out to troubled youths. But in 2005 he was convicted of repeatedly raping and fondling a boy at a suburban parish in the 1980s, and he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison.

During the trial, Shanley’s accuser, then a…