From the Washington Post …
A retired priest from Malta acknowledged today that he had intimate contact with a youthful Mark Foley in the mid-1960s that involved nudity and — on at least one occasion — “light touching,” but denied that he had “sexual intercourse” with him.
The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, in a telephone interview with The Washington Post from the Maltese island of Gozo, said he was surprised that his long-ago relationship with Foley had become linked to the former Congressman’s troubles. Foley, a former altar boy at the Sacred Heart Catholic church where Mercieca served in the mid-1960s, resigned from Congress after reports about sexually intimate electronic messages he had sent to Congressional pages.
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In the interview, Mercieca, 69, said that issues like molestation and sexual harassment are “in the eye of the beholder,” and that Foley — who was 12 or 13 at the time — might have interpreted some of their contact “the wrong way.”
“I was a little out of myself there,” Mercieca said, from his use of medication following what the Sarasota paper described as a nervous breakdown. “The whole idea is . . . that I did something that he did not like, but at the time he did not say anything.”
Foley’s claims of abuse were treated with a lot of skepticism, given the timing of the disclosure and coming on the heels of rehab treatment for alcoholism friends and colleagues didn’t believe he suffered from. But it seems like he wasn’t making this part up.
