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Priest offers details on Foley

The priest, living in Italy, said he and Foley were naked in saunas, but didn't have sex.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published October 20, 2006

ROME - A priest acknowledged Thursday that he was naked in saunas with Mark Foley decades ago when the former congressman was a boy in Florida, but denied that the two had sex.

The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, 69, speaking by telephone from his home on the Maltese island of Gozo, told the Associated Press that a report in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune about their encounters was exaggerated.

"We were friends and trusted each other as brothers and loved each other as brothers," Mercieca said. Asked if their association was sexual, the priest replied: "It wasn't."

His comments came after the Florida newspaper published a story Thursday in which Mercieca described several encounters in the 1960s that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate. Those included massaging the boy in the nude, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being nude in the same room on overnight trips.

Herald-Tribune executive editor Mike Connelly said the story is accurate, including a reference to a night in which Mercieca said he was in a drug-induced stupor due to a nervous breakdown and couldn't clearly remember what happened.

"The reporter talked to the priest four times ... and carefully reviewed his account, especially of the one night," Connelly said. "The story accurately reports what the priest said."

Foley, a 52-year-old Florida Republican, resigned from Congress last month after his sexually explicit Internet messages to young male pages surfaced.

His lawyer said shortly after his resignation that Foley was an alcoholic, gay and had been molested as a boy by a clergyman. Foley's civil lawyer, Gerald Richman, said the abuser was a Catholic priest, whose name he shared with Florida state prosecutors Wednesday.

Richman did not return phone messages left Thursday by the AP.

Mercieca worked at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth in 1967, according to church records. Foley was 13 then.

Mercieca told the AP in Rome that he and Foley would go into saunas naked when he was a priest in Florida and Foley was a parishioner, but he said "everybody does that." The priest also said he didn't think it was unusual to go on overnight trips with a young boy.

The newspaper reporter "wrote many things that I didn't say," Mercieca told the AP, his voice trembling and sounding feeble at times. "He quotes me as saying I had one-night stands with him. That's not true."

Matthew Doig, an investigative reporter with the Sarasota paper who talked to Mercieca on Wednesday, said he did not record their phone conversations but was "100 percent confident" his story was right.

The priest was not quoted in the story as saying they had any "one-night stands." However, the newspaper reported that Mercieca said there was one night when he was in a drug-induced stupor as he was suffering from a nervous breakdown and "there was an incident he says he can't clearly remember that might have gone too far."

Doig said Mercieca would not directly describe the behavior on that night, claiming it was obscured by many years and his use of tranquilizers and alcohol at the time.

Mercieca told the AP that at the time he knew the young Foley, "I had a nervous breakdown and was taking some pills and alcohol, and maybe I did something that he didn't like.

"I don't know what I did to him," the priest said. "I wonder why 40 years later he brought this up?"

He said the two became friends when he was assigned to Foley's parish, and he even had Christmas dinner at Foley's childhood home, with the boy's parents, once.

"We would go to the movies," Mercieca said, adding another boy would sometimes come, although he couldn't remember the other boy's name.

He said the last time he saw Foley was about 18 years ago when the two had dinner in a restaurant in Lake Worth.

Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the State Attorney's Office in West Palm Beach, said an e-mail from Foley's attorney identifying the alleged abuser was forwarded to the Archdiocese of Miami. The archdiocese said in a statement Thursday evening that it had received the name but was waiting for permission from prosecutors to release it publicly.

[Last modified October 20, 2006, 05:49:43]