There are now nearly 300 sexual abuse lawsuits against more than 20 priests on the deeply religious island in the western Pacific.

Roosters crow in the distance as Walter Denton gestures toward a white one-storey concrete building behind a church in Agat, a village in southern Guam.

“You know, just standing here, right behind you, that is where I was raped,” says Denton, 56.

It has been more than three years since Denton first went public with accusations that Guam’s former archbishop Anthony Apuron assaulted him, and even though he has told the story many times his voice is still heavy with emotion.

Denton says he was 12 or 13 years old and had fallen asleep in the church rectory, where Apuron had asked him to spend the night, and then “woke up screaming,” laying on his stomach with his hands pinned down and Apuron on top of him.

Denton says when the priest finally stopped, he offered to give Denton straight A’s in theology class.

The next day, Denton was in shock. He didn’t want to tell his dad what happened. It took him months to tell a friend, a fellow altar server.

Together they confided in a priest named Jack Niland.

“Well boys,” the priest allegedly replied. “Priesthood is a lonely life.” (Niland is now the subject of multiple sexual abuse lawsuits. He died in 2009.)

It wasn’t until 2015 that Denton realised his childhood trauma wasn’t an isolated incident. Back on Guam, he overheard a cousin talking with a friend about how Apuron had sexual relations with seminarians. Denton says hearing that made him so angry, and he blurted out that Apuron had raped him.

Later that year, he wrote a letter to the Vatican detailing his alleged rape. In 2016, he described his trauma at a press conference on Guam. His was among a series of public announcements organised by local critics of the archbishop who had convinced Denton and others to speak up against Apuron, then one of the most powerful people on Guam.

Though Denton didn’t realise it at the time, his allegation would help set off a chain of events that has revealed hundreds of sexual abuse cases across multiple decades on Guam and forced the church there to declare bankruptcy, shaking the foundations of a community deeply rooted in the Catholic religion.

At the time Denton went public, levying such accusations against a priest on Guam was almost unthinkable. But in the four years since, these allegations have formed a steady drumbeat in the backdrop of everyday life on the western Pacific island.

Nearly 300 sexual abuse lawsuits have been filed against nearly two dozen priests on the island, and while local newspapers still regularly publish stories detailing new accusations they’re now so familiar they no longer make the front page.

After Denton and others came forward in 2016, Apuron forcefully denied the allegations and left the island. Guam’s legislature removed the statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases, just a few years after rejecting similar legislation.

No criminal charges have been brought against Apuron, but the Vatican held a canonical trail and ultimately exiled Apuron from Guam, stripping him of his title as archbishop. Pope Francis denied the priest’s appeal of that decision, securing Apuron’s banishment.

Apuron, who still receives a $1,500 monthly stipend from the church, is now the subject of multiple civil lawsuits alleging sex abuse and has not returned to Guam. His attorney declined to comment for this story.

Roy Quintanilla, who spoke out with Denton against Apuron in 2016, says he never imagined the settlement talks would drag out for so long. “I know that this is taking a toll on the people of Guam and it’s just so sad,” says Quintanilla, who now lives in Las Vegas but follows the news developments closely.

“Sometimes I think —” he pauses, and then continues slowly. “I don’t doubt that I did the right thing, that’s for sure, because I think it needed to be said. I just didn’t realise the impact on the community.”

More than half of the total cases against the church related to one priest: Louis Brouillard, a priest from Minnesota who served from 1948 until 1981, teaching at an all-boys Catholic school and working as a Boy Scouts of America scout leader.

He is now the target of more than 150 sexual abuse lawsuits on Guam. After settling several lawsuits related to Brouillard, the Boy Scouts declared bankruptcy last month.

The cases against Brouillard describe how he lured and cajoled children, threatening, photographing and molesting them. One case filed against the priest as recently as mid-February describes how he victimised a child who was left homeless after a typhoon.

“At that time, when I was that age, I got the impression that kids liked it, so I went ahead,” Brouillard told the Associated Press in 2016. He didn’t know how many children he abused.

Brouillard, who died in 2018, was never prosecuted for his offences, because the statute of limitations for child molestation was two years. He said that other members of the church knew about his abuse but did not tell him to stop, instead telling him to pray.

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