'My brother was in shock when he saw what the priest did to me'

Looking back now, more than three decades later, it seems the priest had his eye on the Oberle boys from the moment they moved to his parish in a working-class Irish neighbourhood of Boston.

'He took full advantage of the fact we were from a broken home. I remember when my mother was first introduced to him at the end of Mass. It was at the front door of the church and we were all coming out. She explained the situation, and he returned with: "I have a sailing boat. I'll have to take your son sailing sometime",' William Oberle recalls. 'That is where the first abuse occurred.'

It was 1969. Father Paul Mahan was the newly ordained priest of St Anne's parish, and Oberle was about 12.

His mother had moved across the country following her divorce, returning to her roots in Boston with her seven children. Oberle was the oldest of her three boys, then aged 12, 11 and seven.

All three were sexually abused by Mahan, Oberle says, but only he and his youngest brother are suing the priest.

The brothers are among the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people groped and raped by predatory priests in the Boston area. Some 400 victims have sued, touching off a financial and moral crisis in the Church that led on Friday to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of this most Catholic of American cities.

Law's resignation - or, more properly, the belated decision by the Pope to allow him to step down - was the most powerful sign of recognition from the Vatican of the immense damage done to the Church by 12 months of scandal.

Law became a symbol of the elaborate efforts of successive archdiocese administrators to hush up the abuse. The impressions of a cover-up grew stronger amid almost daily revelations of abuse, culled from church documents released to the press by lawyers for the victims.

Patrick McSorley, another victim of the cover-up, was targeted by Father John Geoghan, a former priest whose long history of abuse triggered the scandal.

Church officials say they hope Law's ignoble departure will allow a healing process to begin, perhaps as soon as this morning, when his interim successor, Richard Lennon, celebrates Mass at Boston's cathedral.

There was no word from the authorities on whether the Boston archdiocese would proceed with Law's plan to declare bankruptcy, and so lessen the financial burden on the Church of some $100 million in lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Oberle says he is still haunted by what happened on that outing on Mahan's sailboat off Marblehead Harbour, north of Boston. It started when the boy went below to go to the toilet. 'He came into the cabin behind me, and spun me around. He fondled me as he pulled down my pants,' Oberle said.

'I can still remember the look on the face of my younger brother, Paul. He was in shock when he saw what the priest did to me.'

None of the boys told his mother what happened on the boat, or on any of the other occasions Mahan sexually assaulted them. Their mother was a single parent struggling to support her children on a nurse's salary. 'We weren't going to crush her,' Oberle says.

The abuse went on for a year and a half before the boys found an escape. They stopped waking their mother - who worked the night shift - for church on Sunday.

Oberle buried the memories of what happened until 1997s, when the Oberles assembled for a family reunion in Dallas, and a sister mentioned that a cousin in New York state had been abused by a priest.

'I turned as white as that wall over there. I asked my brothers if they remembered a sailing trip with the priest, and they just looked at me with terror in their eyes.'

Oberle believes the abuse blighted his life. He fidgets and avoids eye contact when he describes the abuse, and he says he is not the kind of man to seek counselling.

Though obviously intelligent and articulate, he left school at 15 - he grew up with the expectation that he would go on to college. His brothers were also drop-outs.

Oberle did a tour in the army as a medic, drifted into labouring jobs at a local shipyard, and spent a few months in jail. He has married and divorced twice, before eventually finding stability doing kitchen and bath renovations.

Oberle's lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, says he has filed lawsuits from about 20 others who say they were abused by Mahan. The priest is only one of about 80 in the Boston area accused in what is emerging as a culture of paedophilia and sexual abuse going back to 1960.

Equally damning for the Church has been the outpouring of evidence that its leadership colluded in a culture of cover-up and denial.

From the 1980s onwards, the archdiocese received a stream of complaints from people who said they were abused by Mahan. A psychiatric report in the 1990s said he was 'untreatable' and a 'danger to men, women and children', according to church records filed in the court.

The complaints went ignored for years. Mahan was not unfrocked until 1998. 'Cardinal Law really dropped the ball on dozens of cases. On every case that went before him, he could really have gone in a different direction,' Oberle says.

'He talks about begging forgiveness. All I can say is that he should be begging forgiveness, because I am not going to give it easily.'

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