Defrocked priest arraigned on new sex abuse charges

Moments after former priest Robert Burns was arraigned yesterday on charges of raping or sexually abusing five boys from two Boston parishes beginning in the 1980s, a red-haired man strode over and taunted him.

''You're going to get yours," he snarled as the defendant was led away in handcuffs. The man, yanked away by a female companion, later identified himself as one of Burns's alleged victims.

Burns, who has served three years in prison for sexually abusing a child in New Hampshire, was arraigned on six counts of rape of a child under 16 and seven counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. He pleaded not guilty in Suffolk Superior Court, but said nothing else.

The defrocked priest from Concord, N.H. was freed on $5,000 cash bail after Assistant Suffolk District Attorney David A. Deakin acknowledged that he posed little risk of flight. Burns made all of his court appearances after he was arrested in 1995 on sexual abuse charges in New Hampshire, served three years in prison after pleading guilty and five years on parole without incident, and then voluntarily returned to face the Massachusetts charges.

Burns's lawyer, Timothy P. O'Neill, did not return a phone call to his office.

Burns, 56, came to Boston in 1982 from the Diocese of Youngstown, Ohio, and was assigned to St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Jamaica Plain, even though top archdiocesan officials in Boston knew of his history of pedophilia.

In 1983, prosecutors said, he began sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy over an 18-month period inside the church and Burns's room in the rectory. The boy served as an after-school assistant in the rectory.

The diocese transferred Burns to St. Mary's Parish in Charlestown in 1986. Prosecutors said yesterday that the alleged abuse had nothing to do with it. After his arrival, Burns befriended a family that worshiped at the church. He began taking three boys under the age of 10 on outings in his car, where he fondled them, prosecutors say.

In the case of two of the boys, the abuse escalated, continuing in the rectory and inside the church, Deakin said. Burns's abuse of one of them continued well into his teens -- even after Burns was dismissed by the archdiocese when the family of the 12-year-old from St. Thomas Aquinas made allegations, according to Deakin.

The fifth boy Burns abused was the child of another family he had befriended at St. Thomas Aquinas, prosecutors said. During the summer of 1991 -- after Burns was no longer assigned to a parish -- he allegedly took the boy on two outings and fondled him in the car.

Burns, who has also been at the center of civil lawsuits by alleged abuse victims, moved to New Hampshire after his dismissal and took a job in real estate, Deakin said.

The archdiocese never gave parishioners at either church an explanation when it dismissed him in March 1991. The first public statement from the archdiocese was made in 1995, when Burns was arrested by police in Concord and charged with sexual abuse of a boy.

He was sentenced to prison and defrocked in May 1999.

One of Burns's alleged victims, whom prosecutors said is not among the five accusers involved in the charges he was arraigned on yesterday, spoke out against Burns in February. Paul Callahan, 32, told the Globe that Burns repeatedly sexually abused him at St. Thomas Aquinas.

Callahan, a former Jamaica Plain resident in jail awaiting trial on robbery charges, said the abuse led him to drink, take heroin, and commit crimes.

Burns's trial is tentatively scheduled for a year from now. Under the terms of his bail, he is prohibited from having unsupervised contact with anyone under age 18. He is due back in court May 17.