Unforgiven

"You're God's chosen one," he told her. "He has a special job for you."

A few minutes later, after Roney's sexual urges had been satisfied, he told her something else: She must never, under any circumstances, tell anyone what had happened. If she told, he warned, God would show his fury by harming someone she loved. Roney pointed to the younger of her brothers as they swam to shore. "He's not a strong swimmer," the priest remarked.

It would take nearly 40 years for that little girl—now a gray-haired, overprotective mother of three—to come forward with her story. In 2005, she and four other women filed a lawsuit against the Diocese of New Ulm and their parishes, alleging not only that Roney repeatedly sexually abused them, but also that the diocese did nothing to stop him.

The mountain of documents constituting Roney's personnel file paints a deeply disturbing picture of a pedophile priest whose taste for young children went unchecked and unpunished for decades. And it doesn't end in Minnesota. According to a sworn affidavit secured by the women's lawyer, Roney spent his retirement years at the diocese's mission in Guatemala, where he took up with a prepubescent orphan girl whom he planned to adopt.

"Their attitude was, 'It's okay for him to abuse kids in Guatemala, because they probably won't say anything,'" Kathleen Stafford, an attorney representing the women in the suit, says of the church leadership. "The whole thing makes me sick."

David Roney, a square-jawed manwith a reassuring air of quietconfidence, grew up the second oldest of four in a strict working-class family in Depression-era St. Paul. His bookkeeper father and receptionist mother, neither of whom went to high school, had big dreams for their children.

Young David, bookish and bright, showed great promise. At age seven, he skipped second grade. As the youngest in his class all through school, Roney was also the smallest boy. As a consequence, he became cripplingly shy, he would write years later in a self-evaluation handed over in the lawsuit. Although he got good grades, Roney didn't make any close friends as a kid. He never figured out how to talk to girls, and despite a passion for baseball, he was always one of the last chosen for ball games. "I always felt kind of on the outside," Roney wrote.

As he hit adolescence, growing six inches in a single year, his ingrained shyness morphed into the suppression of his sexual urges, his self-evaluation makes plain. Aside from an awkward, fruitless attempt by his father to explain the birds and the bees, everything Roney learned about sex came from books. In 10th grade, the gawky teenager followed his few friends into the preparatory seminary.

From the occasional offhand joke, Roney knew that his fellow seminarians were sexual creatures, he wrote in his self-evaluation, but felt certain that "none were as bad as I."

Years later, reflecting on his decision to become a priest, Roney conceded that he didn't know why he'd done it. "Maybe it was inertia," he wrote, "maybe it was a genuine vocation but it wore out." Ordained in 1945, Roney would struggle with his spirituality throughout his life.

A kindly man with simple tastes,Bishop Raymond Lucker eschewed a house of his own to take up residence in the diocese's main pastoral center. It sits atop a hill on the outskirts of New Ulm, where he kept a vegetable garden.

In spring 1987, he received a startling letter. "I have prayed and agonized over this for at least five years," it began. In unsparing detail, the writer told the story of a day nearly 20 years earlier when her 13-year-old daughter was practicing the organ at St. Mary's Church in Willmar. Father Roney, the parish priest, walked over to the girl and exposed himself. It happened only once, the woman wrote, and Roney had never touched her daughter. Still, she felt "sick with loathing and confused emotions to hear that our pastor, friend, sacramental celebrant, confessor, and guest in our home could have subjected our daughter to this kind of behavior."

Lucker was staggered by the news. Roney, in his estimation, was one of his finest men: intelligent, capable, and always eager to serve his parishioners. Yet only two weeks later, Lucker got another letter even more disturbing than the first.

"This letter is long overdue," it began. "I've composed parts of it in my head many times in the last decade."

The writer was a 29-year-old woman from Willmar. As a girl of about 10, she wrote, she and her friend, having gone to church, found Roney standing near the organ. He called the girls over to him, and guided their hands inside his pants. "He wore no underwear," she wrote, and "if we tried to pull away and remove our hands, he held them there—until he decided we could remove them." Afterward, Roney took the girls to his office, offering them M&M's from his brandy snifter.

Lucker thanked each of the women for coming forward and told them they were in his prayers. Roney needed help, the bishop acknowledged, and he would get it.

Lucker quietly shipped Roney off to Foundation House, a remote facility alongside a dusty two-lane road in the high desert of New Mexico. For nearly 20 years, between 1976 and 1995, Foundation House was the place where the Catholic Church sent its wayward clergymen. All told, some 500 priests and monks underwent the "program," which mingled psychotherapy, medication, and various tests that purported to both diagnose and treat sexually troubled men of the cloth. Among the tools reportedly in use was a plethysmograph, a contraption that hooks on to the penis and gauges its responses to various erotic images and sounds in order to diagnose sexual preferences.

Roney spent a week at the center. While there, he completed a "personal history" form. It paints a picture of a man who, despite his chosen vocation, never felt spiritually satisfied. "I really want to feel a closeness to God and I have not so far experienced it," he wrote. "I enjoy presiding at baptisms and, strangely, funerals. I would be happy if I never had to preside at a wedding again. I feel old."

After returning home from his week in New Mexico, Roney got a letter from William Perri, Foundation House's director. Perri advised that it would be best if Roney enrolled in the six-month treatment program. But Perri didn't expect Roney to sign up. "We feel that we need to make other recommendations since you may decide not to come," he wrote.

Among the recommendations was therapy, and Roney duly started seeing a shrink the following year. From 1988 to 1990, Roney met 15 times with Ken Pierre, a St. Paul psychologist and priest with a history of treating pedophile pastors. Although Pierre didn't return calls for comment, his September 1990 report on Roney, prepared for Bishop Lucker, spells out how far he felt the priest had come during their time together. Upon completing the course of therapy, Pierre wrote, Roney seemed to have more energy for life, and a better understanding of the terrible price others had paid for his sexual gratification. Roney was, he wrote, "motivated to move beyond that behavior now."

But Pierre still had some concerns. Although Roney hadn't molested young girls in more than a decade, the psychologist wrote, he continued to have "strong sexual curiosity" and admitted "touching a woman in Guatemala in an inappropriate way." Pierre, who didn't expand on this revelation, didn't know quite what to make of the incident, given the "cultural differences" and Roney's "role in the Guatemalan mission."

Nestled amongst the green hills of central Guatemala on the shores of Lake Atitlan, the Diocese of New Ulm's mission in the small town of San Lucas Toliman was established in 1962. Almost from the start, it has been run by Greg Schaffer, an outgoing pastor who has maintained a pale Minnesota complexion despite more than 40 years living near the equator. Schaffer has established programs to train people to plant and sell coffee, build houses, and grow trees. He has also helped found a clinic, a school with several hundred kids, and an orphanage for victims of the brutal civil war that raged there from 1960 to 1996.

Schaffer first welcomed Roney to the mission in 1974, when Roney organized a weeklong trip for a group of his parishioners. Roney was instantly smitten with the place, both for its rugged beauty and the people. Going there, he later wrote, "probably changed the course of my life as much as anything."

He organized another trip the following summer, then another. In 1976, Roney arranged to spend five weeks at the mission studying Spanish. A few days after he got there, a massive earthquake hit, killing 25,000 people. The town—and particularly the mission—became a command center for getting food and medical care to survivors. Roney's language classes were canceled, but his bond to the mission was sealed.

In 1980, Roney started to help run the mission office in New Ulm, raising money, organizing trips, and prepping parishioners who planned to visit the mission. The job required frequent trips to Guatemala.

In time, the bishop would be faced with a decision: Should he allow Roney to keep going there, what with all the young children at the mission's school and orphanage?

In 1990, amid a slowly dawning acknowledgement of the nationwide clergy sexual abuse epidemic, Bishop Lucker established the New Ulm Diocese Sexual Abuse Review Board. Set up to advise the bishop on cases of sexual misconduct within the diocese, it was among the first of what became a national trend toward reconciling the church's history of sexual abuse.

Three years after Lucker set up the board, a third woman came forward with allegations against Roney.

Like the others, she was a young girl during Roney's time in Willmar. As she recounted, on a cool but sunny fall day in the early 1970s, the girl and her three sisters were waiting for their mother to pick them up after a morning at the nursery. As they stood in the sun, Roney joined them, giving each a hug and a kiss.

But when it was her turn to embrace the priest, Roney took her hand under his cape, she recounted. As he chatted with the other girls about school, he pulled her hand down and she felt something strange. Confused, she pulled up his cape. His erection exposed, Roney embarrassedly told the girls he was late for a meeting, and rushed off.

The following Sunday, the girl told her mother she was sick and refused to go to church. She never went back. The loss of church in her life, the woman wrote, was devastating. It had been a lifeline, and then it was gone. "How did I survive?" the woman wrote. "Why did I survive? I ask myself these things continually."

Eugene Burke, the bishop's point man on sexual abuse, was charged by the sex-abuse board with taking a fresh look at Roney's misdeeds.

But the board wasn't just worried about Roney's past. With three complaints now lodged against the priest, it also asked Burke, a punctilious priest-turned-therapist, to look into Roney's frequent trips to Guatemala.