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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (79896)	10/19/2006 4:45:35 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 81568

Priest Acknowledges Relationship With Foley From Associated Press 11:49 AM PDT, October 19, 2006 ROME -- An elderly priest acknowledged today that he was naked in saunas with Mark Foley decades ago when the former congressman was a boy in Florida, but denied that the two had sex. The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, 69, speaking by telephone from his home on the Maltese island of Gozo, said a report in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about their encounters was "exaggerated." ADVERTISEMENT"We were friends and trusted each other as brothers and loved each other as brothers," Mercieca said. Asked if their association was sexual, the priest replied: "It wasn't." His comments came after the Florida newspaper published a story on today in which he described several encounters in the 1960s that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate. Those included massaging the boy in the nude, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being nude in the same room on overnight trips. Sarasota Herald-Tribune Executive Editor Mike Connelly said today the story is accurate, including the reference to a night in which Mercieca said he was in a drug-induced stupor due to a nervous breakdown and couldn't clearly remember what happened. "The reporter talked to the priest four times yesterday and carefully reviewed his account, especially of the one night," Connelly said. "The story accurately reports what the priest said." The 52-year-old Florida Republican resigned from Congress last month after his sexually explicit e-mails to young male pages surfaced. His lawyer said shortly after his resignation that Foley was an alcoholic, gay and had been molested as a boy by a "clergyman." Foley's civil lawyer, Gerald Richman, said the alleged abuser was a Catholic priest whose name he shared with Florida state prosecutors on Wednesday. Richman did not return phone messaged left today by The Associated Press. Foley's criminal defense lawyer David Roth declined to comment. Earlier this month, Roth said: "Mark does not blame the trauma he sustained as a young adolescent for his totally inappropriate" e-mails and instant messages. "He continues to offer no excuse whatsoever for his conduct." Mercieca had worked at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth in 1967, according to church records. Foley would have been 13 at the time. Mercieca told the AP in Rome that he and Foley would go into saunas naked when he was a priest in Florida and Foley was a parishioner, but he said "everybody does that." The priest also said he didn't think it was unusual to go on overnight trips with a young boy. The newspaper reporter "wrote many things that I didn't say," Mercieca told the AP, his voice trembling and sounding feeble at times. "He quotes me as saying I had one night stands with him. That's not true." Richard Sipe, a former priest who studies sexuality and the priesthood and has counseled abusive clergy and victims, said abusive priests typically deny that their activities were sexual, because they often convince themselves that only intercourse violates their vow of celibacy. "It's a lack of development," said Sipe, who has testified on the subject before grand juries and at civil trials against dioceses. "This is not what an adult reasons about sex." A study of five decades of clergy sex abuse claims, conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the U.S. bishops, found that most victims have been adolescent boys and that about 44 percent of the accused clergymen had more than one victim. Matthew Doig, an investigative reporter with Sarasota Herald-Tribune who talked to Mercieca on Wednesday, said he did not record their phone conversations but he was "100 percent confident" his story was right. According to Doig, Mercieca said he had been following the Foley story on CNN and then said, "Now it's his word against mine." The priest was not quoted in the story as saying they had any "one night stands." However, the newspaper reported that Mercieca said there was one night when he was in a drug-induced stupor as he was suffering from a nervous breakdown and "there was an incident he says he can't clearly remember that might have gone too far." Doig said Mercieca had called back three times after the initial conversation and had confirmed that paragraph but would not directly describe the behavior on that night, claiming it was obscured by many years and his use of tranquilizers and alcohol at the time.