PITTSFIELD — This is the story of a girl’s courage and a parishioner’s resolve. The details all came back to Russell G. Powell last weekend, 44 years after his confrontation with a priest in a Pittsfield basement.

It happened on a summer evening in Pittsfield in 1977. Powell called the Rev. Daniel L. Gill, the assistant pastor of St. Charles Parish, and asked him to come to Powell’s house, a few blocks away on Lenox Avenue.

“I told him that something important had come up and we needed to talk,” Powell said.

What happened next helps explain Gill’s abrupt departure from St. Charles Borromeo Church and offers a rare inside account of how members of a Catholic parish reacted to a report of clergy sexual abuse, decades before the issue blew up around the world.

Powell says he was moved to speak out after learning of a Cheshire woman’s 19-year battle…