The Ghosts of St. Elizabeth: For Kansas City's Catholic sex-abuse victims, this was a parish of pain.

The cold face of the St. Elizabeth rectory gives no indication of comfort within. Inside, its walls are painted in bright crimsons and calming blues, adorned with pictures of the Savior. Some priests ended their lifework here, meeting their Maker in the bedroom where windows overlook the courtyard behind the church. Built in 1948, the rectory was designed to house four priests and a live-in housekeeper. Today, the priest lives alone.

Robert Bates has not been inside the building for more than 20 years, though it often crosses his thoughts.

Bates did not attend the church. He and his mother were members of St. Vincent de Paul at 31st Street and Flora, where his mother did clerical work for the church. His father left when he was 2, and his nearest male relative was a half brother, from his mother's first marriage, who was already old enough to have fathered a boy the same age as Bates.

In 1980, a young man named Earl Johnson came to St. Vincent de Paul to finish his education and preparation for the priesthood. He was a tall, burly man, with a rough beard and rosy cheeks. While he worked at St. Vincent de Paul, Johnson lived in the St. Elizabeth rectory.

He took an interest in Bates, then 12, and the two became friends. Johnson tried to provide everything Bates needed. He bought the boy so many meals at Kentucky Fried Chicken that Bates still avoids the restaurant.

Bates and his friends — three neighborhood brothers known as good athletes — became regular guests at the rectory on weekend nights. There were few rules. They would stay in the rectory's entertainment room, eating popcorn or watching movies all night. "We pretty much ran the block," Bates remembers.

The priests at St. Elizabeth were heavy drinkers, and they encouraged the boys to share their habits, Bates says. He could always ask the priest for a bottle. Once, when Bates and his friends were drinking in a nearby park and saw police walking toward them, they ran for shelter at the rectory, leaving the beer behind.

If gifts didn't convey his affection for Bates, Johnson would grip him and pull him close, whispering in his ear that he was a good boy, that Jesus was proud of him and loved him.

"I'd never been around men before," Bates says. "I didn't know how to take any of it. Then he'd be bear-hugging me when we were alone and talking to me and bringing God into it. I didn't know if that's how men acted."

Only once did Bates question Johnson's friendship. On one Saturday visit, he and a friend had agreed to help clean the rectory. Johnson greeted them and insisted that they change so they wouldn't dirty their good clothes. Johnson provided them with T-shirts and shorts two sizes too small and gave each a feather duster. Then he set them to work reaching up to dust the light fixtures. As Bates dusted the dining-room lights, he looked down at a gathering of priests eating dinner together. They were giggling, whispering and pointing at him. Bates dismissed it as a social mannerism of adult males that he didn't yet understand.

Two weekends after cleaning the rectory, Johnson called Bates. He invited him to the rectory and promised him that the athlete brothers would be there. It was late summer.

Johnson picked him up that night and drove him to the rectory. Other priests were there, some whose names Bates didn't know. The brothers weren't there, but Johnson promised they'd be along.

"Oh well, I guess that's just more fun for us then, right?" Johnson told him later when the brothers didn't show up.

Johnson suggested that they camp out in the basement. Bates followed him down the stairs, then into a room where Johnson laid out a sleeping bag.

Bates lay in the dark trying to sleep, feeling Johnson shift against his body. He pretended to be asleep, then he felt the man's hands.

God just save me, Bates thought. If you save me from this please, God, I'll do anything. Please, God Jesus.

A door opened, and light cut into the room. Standing there was a lean, balding priest. Bates didn't know who the man was.

Thank God. Thank God. He sent you here to save me ...

The priest looked at the bundle on the floor. "I'm sorry," he said. Then he shut the door and left them alone.

Later, Bates says, Johnson cried and asked for forgiveness. He begged him not to tell anyone and promised to buy him things. Bates just lay there. For another two summers, they repeated the scene. Bates told no one.

In August, Bates and 46 other victims of sexual abuse were awarded $10 million from the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. The settlement brought an end to a case filed by attorney Rebecca Randles, who began representing victims in 2002, one year after reports from Boston spurred a Catholic sex-abuse scandal nationwide. Along with Johnson, the suit named 11 current and former priests. At least three of them lived at St. Elizabeth. Randles says approximately half of the cases involved the rectory.