A NEW YORK socialite who claims that he was molested by a priest as a child is to sue the Roman Catholic Church for £2.8 million, alleging that the ordeal made him grow up gay.
J. David Enright IV says that Father Joseph Romano sexually abused him at a Christian youth camp in the early 1960s, when he was seven years old, telling him that it was “a rite of passage”.
Were it not for the repeated assaults, which are said to have taken place behind a log cabin after evening prayers, Mr Enright, 51, is convinced that he would be straight.
“I believe that my life would be very different now. I’d probably be married, living in Greenwich with four children in boarding school,” he said.
“Romano bent my life.”
Mr Enright, a scion of two of New York’s most aristocratic families, who made his millions as an advertising executive for the Broadway production of 42nd Street, said that for years he kept his homosexuality private, dating women in the 1980s but secretly trawling for male companions. “I had a straight life in business, socially on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Then there was the other world, slinking around in Greenwich Village gay bars, finding mates,” he said.
The alleged incidents took place in 1961 and 1962 at Camp Tekakwitha, a children’s summer retreat in upstate New York run by the Diocese of Albany. Father Romano, then aged 21 and working as a camp counsellor, molested him up to eight times, it is claimed.
Mr Enright has filed a legal notice of claim in the Manhattan Supreme Court, in which he names Father Romano, the diocese and its current bishop, the Right Rev Howard Hubbard — whose tenure postdates the allegations — as defendants in a planned lawsuit.
Father Romano, who became a chaplain to the Albany Fire Department, is now 65 and living in Florida. He was suspended by the diocese in 2003 after a church review panel found claims that he sexually abused children in the 1970s and 1980s to be “credible”.
Father Romano, who has denied the charges, is seeking a canonical trial, a traditional Catholic inquisition sanctioned by the Vatican. Such hearings are controversial because they are held behind closed doors and conducted largely through paper submissions.
He is one of 20 Albany priests removed from the ministry since the 1950s for alleged sexual misconduct and one of hundreds facing complaints in the US as accusers step forward decades later, seeking justice — and compensation — from the Church.
In Boston, the Church paid £48.5 million to settle 60 years of abuse claims against more than 500 priests in 2003. Last year the Diocese of Orange County, California, paid £57 million to settle 85 claims.
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