Unforgiven

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.

With Father Greg Schaffer in town for a visit, Burke took him aside for a frank conversation about Roney, as Burke noted in a memo later obtained in the lawsuit. Roney had abused young girls in the past, Burke told Schaffer, and he needed to know: Was there any chance of that happening in Guatemala?

Schaffer, who had known Roney for 20 years, told Burke that on Roney's visits to the mission, he spent a lot of time with kids there—mostly with young girls. When Roney read books to the children, Schaffer said, they would sit in his lap and hug him. But Schaffer didn't think it was a problem. He'd never seen Roney alone with a girl, he pointed out, and he'd never received any complaints.

Burke asked the mission boss to "keep his eye on Fr. Roney's conduct" during his visits, according to the memo, and Schaffer told him he would.

At the August 18, 1993, meeting of the sexual abuse review board, Roney was a prominent item on the agenda. Speaking before the board, Burke presented his findings on the problem priest's time in Guatemala and handed out Roney's history of abuse, including summaries of the three complaints lodged against him, as well as a contrite apology the priest had written to one of his victims. ("I cried when I read your letter," Roney wrote, adding that he "never intended harm even when I caused it.") Burke presented the board members three options for dealing with Roney: They could advise the bishop to defrock him, recommend that Roney be limited in his work to stay away from girls under 13, or, in the words of the report, they could recommend that the bishop "do nothing."

Roney had left parish work that summer after the death of his mother, and was not the spry man of his years in Willmar. He was 72, had a bad heart, and was living at the pastoral center.

Seeing no advantage in publicly acknowledging the sins of the otherwise well-liked priest, the board decided to handle the situation quietly. Bishop Lucker, following the board's advice, took no action against Roney.

All the same, Roney remained a concern. In late 1993, Roney told Burke he was considering retiring to St. Peter to live with the parish priest. Burke, in a memo for Roney's file obtained in the lawsuit, recorded his response: "I told him I thought it would be better if he could find some other alternative, one without a school."