The Roman Catholic bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., resigned Friday, admitting that as a priest he had fondled a teenage boy at a Catholic seminary in Missouri in the 1970s. He became the highest-ranking cleric brought down by the sexual abuse allegations that have spread from Boston to other dioceses.
"I am truly, deeply sorry for the pain, hurt, anger and confusion I have caused," Bishop Anthony J. O'Connell, 63, said Friday, in admitting the allegation at a news conference after submitting his resignation.
O'Connell's resignation followed a story Friday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which published an interview with the victim, now a 40-year-old former priest living in St. Louis. O'Connell was named in the story and acknowledged the accusation. O'Connell also said there might be "one other person of a somewhat similar situation."
The paper had contacted O'Connell on Thursday just hours after he and the nine other bishops in Florida issued a statement denouncing clergy sex abuse as "both criminal and sinful."
The pope in 1998 promoted O'Connell from bishop of Knoxville, Tenn., to bishop of the larger diocese of Palm Beach, despite the church having paid a private settlement to his victim in 1996.
The victim, Christopher Dixon, had gone to O'Connell in 1977 seeking counseling after he had been abused by two other priests. But the counseling turned into fondling in the priest's bed. In letters to Dixon after he complained in the 1990s, O'Connell apologized for his "misguided help."
O'Connell is the first bishop named as an abuser since The Boston Globe reported that the Boston Archdiocese reassigned priests despite knowing of sexual abuse allegations against them. In previous years, other bishops have acknowledged sexual misconduct, including the bishop O'Connell replaced in Palm Beach, which has 237,000 Catholics.
"I don't feel like a victim now," Dixon said in an interview after O'Connell resigned. "But this is bittersweet. Had this been taken care of appropriately years ago, we wouldn't have to be going through this now."
Dixon said the touching began in 1977 when he was a sophomore in high school. He already had been molested at age 11 by a priest at a Catholic school in Hannibal, Mo., and had been touched by another priest at age 14 at St. Thomas Aquinas, in Hannibal, the seminary high school of the diocese of Jefferson City, Mo.
Dixon, who is gay, said he was struggling with his sexual orientation, feeling guilt and shame, and told O'Connell, who was his school counselor, about the abuse.
Dixon said O'Connell fondled him three or four times over two years. The young man went on to become a priest in that diocese, and in 1995 he was assigned to work and live in the same seminary where he had been abused.