“I want him to be terrified and burn forever:” Gabriel Byrne recalls contacting priest who abused him

"Some part of me did not want to hurt an old man..."

Gabriel Byrne has recalled contacting the priest who sexually abused him. The actor, who is best known for his roles in The Usual Suspects and Hereditary, told of the event in his new memoir, Walking With Ghosts. Dublin born Byrne said that in 2002 he tracked down the priest who abused him and called him. The priest did not know who he was, said Byrne, and even thanked him for getting in touch. "I wanted in those last seconds to call him a c**t and say that even though I don’t believe in Hell, I hope he does because I want him to be terrified and burn forever," he wrote. "But I said nothing." "Some part of me did not want to hurt an old man with a kindly voice stuck in a retirement home who now had no memory of me or anything he’d done." In the memoir Byrne, aged 70, detailed his abuse at the age of 11 by a Christian Brother in a seminary in the UK. "Even years later, it feels like the night has been concreted over," he said. "I’ve been picking at it with a pin ever since, afraid to use a jackhammer, afraid of what’s buried in there." Byrne recently told The New York Times that the priest in question had died a long time ago. He added that although he thought the phone call would give him closure, he now thinks differently. "We love to think there’s a resolution to these things, that that’s how to deal with trauma," he said. "I confronted him; I dealt with it; I moved on. "But that’s not necessarily true. I realised that there doesn’t have to be a resolution." Byrne, who was training to become a priest at the time, said that he later left the priesthood as he realised he could not fulfil the vow of chastity. "I went down to London during a break and we got on the bus and I walked up the stairs behind two girls in miniskirts and that was the end of it for me," he said.