TALUSTUSAN, Naval, Biliran – The American priest’s voice echoed over the phone line, his sharp Midwestern accent softened over the decades by a gentle Filipino lilt. On the other end, recording the call, was a young man battered by shame but anxious to get the priest to describe exactly what had happened here.
“I should have known better than trying to just have a life,” the priest said in the November 2018 call. “Happy days are gone. It’s all over.”
But the young man later said those days were happy only for the priest. They were years of misery for him, he said, and for the other boys who investigators say were sexually assaulted by Father Pius Hendricks.
His accusations ignited a scandal that would shake the barangay and reveal much about how allegations of sex crimes by priests are handled in one of the world’s most Catholic countries.
He was just 12 – a new altar boy from a family of tenant farmers anxious for the $1 (about R52) or so he’d get for serving at Mass – when he says Hendricks first took him into the bathroom of the little rectory here and sexually assaulted him.
“I asked why he was doing this to me,” the rail-thin 23-year-old said, the confusion still with him years later. “‘It’s a natural thing,'” he said the priest told him, “‘It’s part of becoming an adult.'”
The abuse continued for more than three years, he said but he told no one until a non-barangay resident began asking questions about the American priest’s extravagant generosity with local boys, and until he feared his brother would be the next victim.
In November, he went to the police and told them what he knew.
Soon after, local authorities arrested Hendricks, 78, and charged him with child abuse. Since then, investigators say, about 20 boys and men, one as young as seven, have reported that the priest sexually abused them.
Investigators said the allegations go back well over a decade – though many believe it goes back for generations, and could involve many dozens of boys – continuing until just weeks before the December arrest.
Hendricks’ lawyers insist he is innocent.
His arrest was a sudden fall for a priest who had presided over this community for nearly four decades. He rebuilt the chapel here and installed rooftop loudspeakers to summon parishioners to Mass. He pressed officials to pave the barangay road. He drove the sick to the hospital, and paid school fees for poor children. Many here will still tell you how much he did. (AP)
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