ROME (AP) - An elderly priest acknowledged Thursday that he was naked in saunas with Mark Foley decades ago when the former congressman was a boy in Florida, but denied that the two had sex. The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, 72, speaking by telephone from his home on the Maltese island of Gozo, said a report in the Sarasota Herald- Tribune about their encounters was "exaggerated."
"We were friends and trusted each other as brothers and loved each other as brothers," Mercieca said. Asked if their relationship was sexual in nature, the priest replied: "It wasn't."
His comments came after the Florida newspaper published a story on Thursday that quoted him as saying in an interview that he had an inappropriate two-year relationship with Foley in the 1960s that included massaging the boy in the nude.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune Executive Editor Mike Connelly said Thursday the story is accurate, including the reference to a night in which Mercieca said he was in a drug-induced stupor due to a nervous breakdown and couldn't clearly remember what happened.
"The reporter talked to the priest four times yesterday and carefully reviewed his account, especially of the one night," Connelly said. "The story accurately reports what the priest said."
The 52-year-old Florida Republican resigned from Congress last month after his sexually explicit e-mails to young male pages surfaced.
His lawyer said shortly after his resignation that Foley was an alcoholic, gay and had been molested as a boy by a "clergyman." Foley's civil lawyer, Gerald Richman, said the alleged abuser was a Catholic priest whose name he shared with state prosecutors on Wednesday.
Richman did not return phone messaged left Thursday by The Associated Press. Foley's criminal defense lawyer David Roth declined to comment.
Earlier this month, Roth said: "Mark does not blame the trauma he sustained as a young adolescent for his totally inappropriate" e-mails and instant messages. "He continues to offer no excuse whatsoever for his conduct."
Mercieca had worked at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lake Worth in according to church records. Foley would have been 13 at the time.
Mercieca told the AP in Rome that he and Foley would go into saunas naked when he was a priest in Florida and Foley was a parishioner, but he said "everybody does that." The priest also said he didn't think it was unusual to go on overnight trips with a young boy.
The newspaper reporter "wrote many things that I didn't say," Mercieca told the AP, his voice trembling and sounding feeble at times. "He quotes me as saying I had one night stands with him. That's not true."
In the newspaper article, Mercieca described several encounters that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate, including massaging Foley while the boy was naked, skinny-dipping together at a secluded lake in Lake Worth and being nude in the same room on overnight trips.
He was not quoted in the story as saying they had any "one night stands." However, the newspaper reported that he said there was one night when he was in a drug-induced stupor and he couldn't clearly remember what happened.
Mercieca told the AP that at the time he knew the young Foley "I had a nervous breakdown and was taking some pills and alcohol and maybe I did something that he didn't like."
The priest said he based that statement on what he had seen on TV news accounts about the Foley case. Pressed for details about what Foley might not have liked, Mercieca said he couldn't remember because "it was a long time ago."
Foley "seems to have interpreted certain things as inappropriate. ... I don't know what I did to him," the priest said. "I wonder why 40 years later he brought this up?"
He said the two became friends when he was assigned to Foley's parish, and he even had Christmas dinner at Foley's childhood home, with the boy's parents, one year.
Mercieca described Foley as "a very happy person and he knew how to do things."
"He was 'allegro,'" Mercieca said, switching from English to use a word in Italian that means cheerful or merry.
"We would go to the movies," Mercieca said, adding another boy would sometimes come, although he couldn't remember the other boy's name.
Referring to the page e-mail scandal, the priest said: "I don't think there was a connection with our friendship and this thing now."
Mercieca brushed off other questions, saying he didn't remember much.
He said the last time he saw Foley was about 18 years ago when the two had dinner in a restaurant in Lake Worth, Fla.
The state attorney's office in West Palm Beach did not immediately return a telephone message Thursday.
Archdiocese of Miami spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta declined to comment Thursday about Mercieca "until we receive the name ourselves." Agosta said she was frustrated with the way Foley's attorneys had handled the matter.
Richman previously said the priest was still alive but that the statute of limitations for criminal charges had expired in Foley's case.
