COLLATERAL DAMAGE- WHY THE CATHOLIC PRIEST ABUSE SCANDAL IS WORSE THAN THEY THINK

One of the worst-kept secrets in history exploded to the forefront this summer when the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office published their report about sexual abuse by priests and the ongoing cover-up attempts by the church.

Details of how 300 priests groomed their victims and sexually assaulted almost 1,000 people did not come only from victims’ accounts, but from secret church documents that included detailed confessions from the offenders.

Elaborate efforts to buy silence and carefully move offenders from the parishes where their deeds were discovered are not limited to Pennsylvania or even the United States. Investigations in Argentina, Chile, and Ireland found the same schemes exist around the world.

Similar terminology and explanations for the movement of suspect priests point to a systematic process that leads right to the Vatican.

Thus, it is appropriate that federal prosecutors opened an investigation into eight Pennsylvania archdioceses using the RICO Act, statutes traditionally used to break and prosecute organized crime rings.

My town, your town, every town…

No matter how many people wind up indicted, jailed, or defrocked, I fear the full scale of this scandal will never be recognized. The Catholic Church needs to understand this is about more than the assault victims.

All the publicity about the Pennsylvania case led to a rehashing of past suspicions and a bevy of new allegations. My tiny little hometown in New Jersey apparently played a bigger role in the scandal than I suspected.

There appeared another news article, a coming-out of sorts, from an established political writer regarding his experience. The author grew up a generation behind me, but was an altar boy (now called altar servers) in the same church I was raised in.

He told the story of how he was abused by a popular priest in that parish. This guy braved it all to admit what happened, and more importantly, how it affected his future relationships and life path. Certainly, he had to worry his story would offend friends of his assaulter in such a small-town environment.

Fortunately, by most accounts, the town rallied around him. As it turns out, his story inspired others to come forward with allegations against the same priest. The man was still actively serving in another New Jersey parish until the story broke.

Then, the floodgates opened…

When scandals like this happen, there always seems to be a wave of validating or new claims. It was no surprise that others soon shared their own suspicions and stories from years past.

What surprised me was how the floodgates of my own mind opened up.

No, I don’t believe I was abused in the way others were. When I first heard there was an abuse issue in the church, I thought about how the senior altar boys made some of us kneel on our fingers when we made a mistake. It was nothing that would scar me for life.

But suddenly my mind was opened to other things. Stories, anecdotes, and personal events took on a whole new light when I read the recent abuse stories. A Facebook page dedicated to updates on the cases involving my former church only served to keep me up at night wondering how naïve I must have been growing up in that small town.

My first thought went right to one of my fellow altar boys. He had a tough family life that no one should have to endure. When I learned he was an alcoholic, I blamed his family issues.

Now I was thinking about how many times he was asked to stay behind after a mass and how many times I saw him walking out of the rectory (where the priests live). Did I completely fail my friend?

Why didn’t we say something?

When I was about 22, some friends and I went on a camping trip. We were almost at our destination when another car with New Jersey license plates appeared behind us.

At first, we were disappointed someone else was headed to our favorite spot. But as it turned out, the other car carried the same priest who had told us about this place years before.

It also carried four young boys.

It seemed odd. One of the boys was his nephew, but the other three were from this priest’s new parish. When he moved out of our town, nothing seemed abnormal. He was a talented play director and the other parish had a large Easter production he took charge of.

We camped about 100 feet away from each other, but we were at their site every evening. We drank beer and got drunk with a priest. It seemed surreal, but he also served mass on a lakefront picnic table and gave a sermon about friendship I thought was great.

On the way home, my friends and I talked about how weird it was that parents would let their kids go away with a relatively new priest. No one said the obvious. We were typical of the devout Catholic families of the day in that we didn’t want to believe anything nefarious about our favorite priest.

Years later, his name appeared in a news article about a settlement made to “alleged” victims of sexual assault in the Newark Archdiocese. He had already died. For some reason, I defensively thought how easy it is to accuse someone who is dead. I never thought twice about the Maine trip.

What did my mom know?

My mother was a wonderful woman, one of the smartest and most insightful people I’ve known. She was also what you might call “a pillar of the church”. She served on our Parish Council for years. She ran the school’s lunch program and served as president of the parents’ association three times. All of her children were altar boys, choir members, and/or belonged to the CYO.

She was also a master fund-raiser, which is why pastors loved her. When mom died, she was given a con-celebrated, high mass funeral. The pastor led the mass along with a monsignor sent by the archdiocese. The associate pastor and another young priest were the altar servers.

But here’s the thing. When my mother died, she hadn’t been inside a church in years. She hadn’t participated in any events or committees since my younger sister graduated from the school years ago.

I know she had a fairly public falling out over the way the sisters of the convent treated students. That didn’t totally explain why such a devout church member seemed to just walk away.

When the priest we met in Maine first came to our parish, my mother’s radar clicked immediately. She obviously didn’t trust him and didn’t like when I said nice things about him. I shrugged it off as an older parishioner not liking young priests with “modern” ideas.

She didn’t leave the church, however, until shortly after the priest showed up who assaulted the young man I spoke about earlier. I had a young brother-in-law then who was an altar boy. Years later, I learned from my mother-in-law that mom had warned her not to let her son be alone with that priest.

More family clues

Then there was my mother’s sister. She graduated from a Catholic high school and went right into the convent.

But for some reason, I have no memory of her as a nun. I do remember we were warned not to ask about her time in the convent.  There were several episodes where my aunt’s disdain for the Catholic Church presented itself.

As far as I can remember, she never had a relationship with anyone. She also suffered greatly from anxiety and depression, occasionally missing family events because she couldn’t leave the house.

When she had cancer, a hospital chaplain convinced her to try and seek Christ. But it was obvious entering a church, even for my mother’s funeral, was difficult for her.

My mother’s brother was mostly estranged from the family. He showed up annually for Christmas. I really don’t know much about him except that he was very close to a priest he met as a youth right up until he (my uncle) died.

Recent events have me wondering about my mysterious uncle. He also had no relationships that we know of. The childhood priest and younger clergyman from the same church were all he talked about.

Thinking differently

None of these things struck me as being related to the Catholic Church scandals until I read the piece by our parish’s young victim. Now, everything has me thinking twice about friends who were “lucky” to be invited to spend weeks at a priest’s summer shore house or whose parents hosted “Men of God” for Sunday dinners.

I remember an old girlfriend who said memories of a closet and a priest came out during therapy sessions. I blew it off as the power of suggestion because the memory popped up while the Boston abuse scandal was in the news.

Another friend whose parents were strong members of the church attempted suicide when we were still teenagers. His death at age 25 was ruled an accident, but now I wonder.

Was the church successful in brainwashing me enough to ignore warning signs? Was I programmed to blindly listen to their explanation that the priests in question went away because they “suffered from mental exhaustion?”

Is it because my knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church now includes details of the Great Schism, the Reformation, the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition that I now think differently? Catholic schools didn’t teach me those things or about how early popes accumulated the church’s wealth and power.

Whatever they taught us, I bought it. I wasn’t just an altar boy, I was a star altar boy. My friend and I got pulled out of classes and called in on Saturdays for all the biggest funerals and most important weddings. People were not only convinced I’d be a priest, but there was also a time you could have gotten even money on me becoming the first American pope.

Yeah… what about that?

By the time I graduated high school, I was a prolific binge drinker. I don’t think I was quite an alcoholic because when I finally had one near-death experience too many, I was able to stop without experiencing withdrawal.

But what happened with that? I went from being a faith-driven, future pope to a boozing and carousing rebel in the blink of an eye. Whether it is because of the alcohol or something else, I have precious few memories of my youth. I am always amazed when friends recount events and classmates with such detail when I barely recognize the names involved.

Going through the names of my fellow altar boys and some of the other families my parents were tight with, it is amazing how many had some kind of alcohol or drug history. Most of us who married are divorced at least once. What happened to the most-Catholic young men of the parish?

I honestly don’t recall anything resembling an uncomfortable encounter with our priests. But I can remember what the darkened hallways of the residence level looked like in our rectory, and I have no idea why I would have been up there.

Everybody around us…

In the article by my younger peer, he talks about how difficult his relationships have been. He couldn’t explain his anger or anxieties. I am not sure at what point he connected the violation of trust perpetrated by a predator priest to his relationship issues.

In the outpouring of support after he released his story, he learned he was not alone. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the people who supported him were also victims and whether they even knew it.

I compare the phenomena to children of alcoholics. They often have inexplicable problems in relationships that they can’t relate to their past either. It is natural to think there is something wrong with us and it must be our fault.

How many innocent family members and friends have been subjected to heartbreaking indifference, neglect or abuse because of the damage done to their loved one by the church’s unwillingness to manage what they knew was a problem for decades?

Can the church fix themselves?

The Roman Catholic Church is no stranger to bad press and scandals. They have historically been adept at using distraction, denial, and retribution with conditions. In other words, when all else failed, they paid victims off.

But they have never faced this big a scandal in an age of social communication like we are in now. Pope Francis made a few token dismissals and gathered his bishops for a conference, but this requires more effort than that. This time the survival of the church as they’ve known it is at stake.

The answer might be to abandon the church as they know it. At the very least, every priest who has already admitted to wrongdoing has to be let go. Files on past abuses must be released to civil authorities for grand jury consideration.

Any additional priests with credible allegations have to be removed from active ministry pending a civil investigation.

If the projected number of predators are correct, the church will probably have to consolidate parishes.

Then the Vatican has to break into the vaults and release enough money to offer free counseling to every victim, including marriage counseling if the victim is in a struggling relationship.

Finish the creation of a no-tolerance culture with additional training and screening of incoming priests. This might be the time to reconsider female priests. For sure, it is time to increase and promote the role of women in the hierarchy.

Can they fix us?

There are bad people everywhere in the world. Pastoral abuse is not limited to the Catholic Church or even religious organizations. Anyone in a position of authority or counsel will be tempted to take advantage of compromised subjects and weaker personalities. Priests are probably not any more prone to this type of abuse than any other segment of society.

But they covered it up. Not only did they cover it up, but they also made regular Catholics like me a party to it. For years, we bought the idea that priests were somehow special and above reproach. How many victims did we ignore? 

Can you imagine inviting a priest to your home every Sunday only to find out years later they were abusing your son or daughter? Can you imagine having scolded your child for being afraid of a priest?

How about all the wives and husbands who found their loved ones damaged mentally or even sexually by a rapist priest? What if they find that priest still saying mass and teaching at the grammar school today?

This requires more than counseling and mea culpas. If the church wants their victims to feel safe and at home in the Catholic Church again, they have to publicly purge all the offenders and show the victims they are loved and valued more than the men the church protected for too long.

Nothing less will recover what they have lost in this scandal.