Ex-priest breaks code of silence

Portland, Maine --

In the summer of 1963, Francis McGillicuddy, a young priest and director of a church-run girls camp on Poland's Worthley Pond, noticed something odd about one of the camp's guests, the Monsignor Henry Boltz.

Boltz, a leading figure in Maine's Roman Catholic Church, had befriended a teenage boy from the camp staff. This boy, McGillicuddy observed, accompanied the elderly prelate on shopping trips and to the movies and made long visits inside Boltz's private cabin on the grounds of Camp Pesquasawasis.

McGillicuddy felt something was wrong. He couldn't say what it was, but he wanted to stop it.

"I called the staff together and said the monsignor's cabin was out of bounds," he recalled. "No one was to go down there for any reason."

Within days, Boltz left. For years, McGillicuddy never really knew why.

"You would never even breathe that a priest would commit sexual abuse," he said. "It would never be verbalized. It was unthinkable."

Read the article at pressherald.com Dated July 31, 2005

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