Priest up for ritual murder

2006-04-16 16:50

Chicago - For more than 25 years, the gruesome Easter slaying of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was a thing of legend.

The 71-year-old nun was found strangled and stabbed up to 32 times in the sacristy of a Roman Catholic hospital chapel.

Her body was covered with an altar cloth and posed to look as if she had been sexually abused.

Rumours swirled that a strange ritual had been performed in the room, that the stab wounds were in the shape of an upside-down cross and that the priest who presided over Pahl's funeral was a prime suspect.

Fact will be separated from fiction next week when Father Gerald Robinson, now 68, stands trial for the nun's murder in Toledo, Ohio.

The evidence presented will be anything but ordinary, promised the otherwise tight-lipped prosecutor, Dean Mandross.

Pahl's unsolved murder simmered for decades until a woman came forward in 2003 with claims that she had been sexually abused by a group of priests who performed Satanic rituals and held sadomasochistic orgies.

Cold-case squad

Among those she accused was Robinson, whom police recognised as a prime suspect in Pahl's murder.

A cold-case squad reopened the file and took another look at the altar cloth and a letter opener that had been seized from Robinson's room at the hospital.

The investigation took police to an abandoned house, church attics and a secret fraternity whose members dress in nun's clothing, according to an investigation by the Toledo Blade newspaper.

Three other women came forward with stories of being sexually abused in cult-like ceremonies involving altars and men dressed in robes between the late 1960s and 1986.

One of those women reached a monetary settlement with the Church, but the original accuser is still awaiting her day in court.

Allegations of a cover-up by church officials surfaced after the Catholic diocese of Toledo gave prosecutors just three pages showing Robinson's church assignments when asked for his personnel files.

Secret files

Police eventually obtained a search warrant and seized 148 documents, raising concerns that the Church had been hiding "secret files" in an attempt to protect priests who molested children.

The police were soon implicated themselves when the Blade published another investigative report detailing how police "aided and abetted the diocese in covering up sexual abuse by priests".

"It's common knowledge that priests who were in trouble would be picked up and taken to the bishop," Blade religion editor David Yonke told AFP.

But Yonke said few in Toledo believe the Church would have protected Robinson from prosecution if they believed he had murdered Pahl.

One woman who has her doubts is Claudia Vercellotti, co-director of the Toledo chapter of the survivors' network of those abused by priests.

"It's ludicrous that anyone would not talk about a cover-up, because the cover-up is so pervasive throughout the diocese," she said in a telephone interview in which she described the problems victims encounter when trying to report sexual abuse.

Settlements

The Toledo diocese was one of many in the United States rocked by the allegations of widespread sexual abuse which surfaced in 2002.

It eventually reached settlements with 23 victims at a cost of $1.2m.

Those allegations - along with the recent decision to close a number of parishes - have left the Church in a state of siege.

"It would be an extraordinary Catholic who wouldn't be affected by it," said Richard Gaillardetz, a professor of Catholic studies at the University of Toledo.

- AFP