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Chapter 2

Soul Murder

“Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

—Elie Weisel

I have not suffered the personal devastation of sexual abuse. My own personal heartbreak within the Church, as devastating as it was, pales in comparison to the raw betrayal and the unspeakable suffering of those subjected to this extreme form of physical, moral, and spiritual cruelty. Victims of sexual abuse, especially those who have suffered at the hands of Catholic priests, have been foremost in my mind and heart when writing this book and reflecting on those who have been hurt in the Church.

Soul Murder

Some 17,600 Americans have alleged they were abused by more than 6,500 clerics from 1950 to June 2015, according to a review of data by BishopAccountability.org. Many victims who were sexually abused by clergy as children refer to what they have suffered with a blunt and chilling expression. They call it soul murder. Many wait for years to open up to someone about the abuse. The reasons for this are often complex. They are afraid of not being believed;

they fear the reactions they will receive and how this knowledge will impact relationships with a spouse or child, with family or parishioners, or how it would be handled in the local news media. Yet when they do eventually begin sharing their stories, they discover that telling what happened, and being listened to and believed, is key to any possible healing. While victims are individually unique in their manner of handling the aftermath of their own abuse, most eventually want their stories acknowledged. For many, in fact, sharing their stories becomes a mission: they want to know if the perpetrator had other victims; they want those victims to know that they were not alone, that it is okay to come forward, that the abuse was not their fault.

Not “Them” and “Us”

As child sexual abuse expert Dr. Monica Applewhite shared with me, there is one enormous misperception that unfortunately shapes the attitudes of not a few Catholics toward the reality of clergy sexual abuse. “Persons who were abused are not them; they are us,” she observed emphatically. “They came from the families who were closest to the Church: they worked and volunteered for the Church, they had a child who was considering becoming a priest or nun; these were people who spent a lot of time in the Church.”

Part of the tragic story of the abuse crisis is that victims were seen as adversaries, not only by bishops and diocesan lawyers, but by fellow Catholics who held them suspect because their stories seemed too incredible and because—it was often assumed—they “just want to harm the Church.” Victims of sexual abuse by the clergy are not the adversary, and as Dr. Applewhite observes, “When victims come forward with their stories, they are giving us the gift of truth.” Here, too, the truth will set us free.

Facing the Reality

On a Sunday evening in late February 2016, I directed a screening and discussion for some thirty of our seminarians and faculty of the movie Spotlight, which recounts the story of how, in 2002, The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team of investigative reporters uncovered the massive scandal of child sexual abuse and coverup in the Boston Archdiocese. That same Sunday evening, Spotlight won the Oscar for best picture.

It was the second time I had seen Spotlight. In the movie’s final scene, the Spotlight team is manning the phones in their office on the morning that their story broke in January 2002. The phones, in fact, are ringing off the hook. We are led to understand that the scores of callers are mostly victims of abuse who have been empowered by the story to come forward.

This is followed by a series of titles that appear on screen before the final credits roll: list upon list of the names of hundreds of U.S. dioceses and of dozens of countries where clergy sexual abuse has occurred, indicating the incomprehensible magnitude of the crisis. As happened the first time I saw Spotlight, I was again left hunched in my seat, barely restraining the tears.

Spotlight reopened for me that same gnawing feeling I had not felt in years—that “shitty feeling,” as reporter Mike Rezendes puts it in one of the movie’s most poignant scenes after he finally gets his hands on documents detailing that the Boston Archdiocese had knowledge of, and flagrantly mishandled and attempted to hide, child sexual abuse by members of its clergy.

That feeling Rezendes described is something most Catholics would rather not feel, and to which they would rather not expose themselves or their loved ones. And that’s understandable, to an extent. There is a part of us that wants to keep the reality of clergy sexual abuse and its aftermath at a safe mental and emotional distance. The idea of sexual abuse of children is an acutely anxiety-provoking thought; and our minds naturally tend to filter and block such thoughts. This peculiar psychological dynamic has, in fact, shaped cultural attitudes toward sexual abuse for centuries, and in large part explains societal malaise and indolence in attempting to deal with and prevent child sexual abuse wherever it occurs.

So, naturally, Catholics recoil. While such dodging, distancing, and denial are understandable, they constitute fundamental obstacles to the Church’s healing process, and ultimately to creating and sustaining within the Church the type of environments that are truly safe for children, as well as safe havens of support, nurture, and recovery for victims of abuse. For that to become a reality, we all need to listen to victims tell their stories.

Victims of sexual abuse—particularly abuse endured in childhood—can be vulnerable and fragile. Many suffer through lifelong, often daily, emotional and psychological battles. Many are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in all its cruelty: bouts with insomnia and nightmares, anxiety attacks, flashbacks, social isolation, depression, self-destructive behaviors.

The victims who were willing to speak with me in some manner—these remarkable and courageous men and women—have taught me one simple thing: we who have not suffered the torture of sexual abuse really have no idea what victims have gone through.

So in my mind there is no more adequate way to come to grips with the horror experienced by survivors of sexual abuse than by hearing their stories—not in snippets filtered through the news media, but rather, if at all possible, in person, up close, in their own words, catching their gestures, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice.

Jean’s Story

Sadly, accounts of clergy sexual abuse recounted in disturbing detail have not been lacking online and in the news media. Survivors of abuse—not exclusively, but typically, males—have mustered extraordinary courage in sharing their stories. Each story is as unique as each victim of abuse. I could have easily incorporated elements of their stories into this book, but as I made progress on the manuscript I was blessed to meet and interview a remarkable Catholic woman we will call Jean. Jean too is a survivor of clergy sexual abuse. Thirty-nine years of her life passed before she finally felt the courage to report her abuser to authorities in her diocese, well after the perpetrator was dead. By the time we met, she felt ready to go public for the first time with her story, agreeing to do so in the pages of my book.

Our interview lasted nearly three hours. In what follows, I have quoted large portions of our conversation as well as portions of some of her written testimonials and woven them into a narrative. While not simply a transcription of our interview, this does represent a faithful account of her story as she shared it with me. Jean only requested that her identity should remain anonymous, as well as that of her perpetrator—we’ll call him Father Bill. In order to comply with her request, I have altered the details of the setting in which her story unfolds. Those alterations do not in the least alter the content of her personal story.

Jean’s abuse happened when she was between the ages of fourteen and twenty, in the late sixties into the early seventies, and her allegations have been deemed credible by authorities within the diocese where her abuse occurred.

Why she did not report the abuse sooner will become clear.

How grace has triumphed through her darkness will also become readily evident.

This is Jean’s story.

Jean is in her mid-sixties and still radiates a kind of farm-girl wholesomeness. She is quick to smile, her eyes are bright, and she expresses herself spontaneously with small-town simplicity. It did not take long to discover in her a vast reservoir of spiritual depth and insight emerging from her personal experience of repeated sexual abuse. She bore the hurt for nearly forty years until the recurring nightmares were too much for her. Her personal tragedy did not stop her from becoming a nurse, marrying, and raising a family.

Jean began our meeting by showing me her first Communion photo taken with her classmates, the girls in dainty white first Communion dresses, the boys with meticulously combed hair in their white suits. Father Bill, the proud pastor—in his cassock, with hands folded reverently—stood behind them, beaming for the photo, flanked at right and left by altar boys. Jean identified herself and her twin brother for me. Then, referring to Father Bill, she explained: “This priest baptized me. He heard my first confession. He gave me my first Communion, and he buried my little sister.” Father Bill was the priest at the altar when Jean and her husband were united in marriage. He had been a priest at Jean’s parish—most of the time as its pastor—for more than forty-seven years until he eventually retired in the local community.

And in such a small community—Norman Rockwellian in its wholesomeness and simplicity—it was no surprise that Father Bill was a celebrity. His long years as pastor gave him a kind of mythical stature. He was a constant presence in the local media and had an in with most community leaders.

The parish also had a beautiful Marian shrine on the property that Jean absolutely loved. The parish church, offices, grounds, and shrine required a small body of employees to whom Father Bill offered a generous daily wage. He was especially fond of hiring teenage girls.

The summer Jean turned fourteen, Father Bill personally invited her to join the staff. Jean was thrilled. Her pious Catholic upbringing had instilled in her a lively faith, and a profound veneration for her pastor, who, although not a regular presence in Jean’s home, had nonetheless been very close to the family. The first sexual assault occurred on her second day on the job. Jean recounts:

The second day of my employment, he entered the tiny building where [I was working]. He pushed me back to the counter and thrust his tongue into my mouth.

I gagged.

It tasted so bad from pipe and cigar tobacco. I thought I was going to vomit, but I didn’t. I remember thinking: If you slap a priest, do you go to hell? I didn’t know what to say or do. He just turned around and walked out. The abuse continued and worsened. I told him to stop, but he continued to abuse me. He was forty-five and I was fourteen. That’s how it started.

Eventually Father Bill would rationalize the abuse by chiding Jean, saying he didn’t want her to be a “cold fish” when she got married. He also pointed out to her that another teenage girl who had worked before Jean’s time at the parish had, unlike Jean, “responded well” to Father Bill’s treatment of her. As Jean explains, Father Bill sought out every possible opportunity to abuse her:

About once a month Father Bill would take the group of four or five teens who worked for him to a nearby movie theater after closing. I didn’t want to go. My work uniform was a blue skirt and a white blouse. No matter where I sat, he made sure that he moved people so that he could sit next to me. He would always sit on my left side, which allowed him to move his right hand from my knee to my thigh, and then to my underpants. I felt like, “What’s wrong with me—that he does it to me and not to everybody else?”

When I was fifteen years old Father Bill called my parents one evening to say that he would take me home after work that night, saving them the long trip to town. What he didn’t tell them was that he was planning on stripping me of my blouse and bra, and touching me. And as always he put his tongue in my mouth. When we finally got home, he sat down at our dining room table and ate homemade chocolate-chip cookies and drank coffee with my mom and dad while I cried in my room.

The abuse went on for six years. As she grew older, the episodes took on more of the character of attacks—a word Jean used several times in our interview. She would often end up going home with nicks, scratches, and bruises:

Only once did I think he was going to rape me. He stopped before it got to that point. He was noticeably shaken by what he had attempted to do. I can’t tell you how many times he attacked me. And yet, there is a part of me that respected him; he was a priest.

For the perpetrator, on a very deep psychological level, abuse is about power, control, and self-affirmation. Father Bill seems to have been no exception, and perhaps it should not surprise us that he went so far as to use sacramental confession to manipulate Jean into believing that she—not he—was the guilty party:

One of the things that he did—I never understood at the time how bad it was—he would come to me and say, “I’m going to hear confessions now; would you like to come? I think it’s a good time for you to go.” So I would go. And I would say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” And from then on, I never said a word. He told me all the sins I had committed. And I didn’t even understand what those words meant. And I was like—okay, he was there; he knows; he’s the priest. He said my sins were forgiven, and I left. And I would pray my three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and three Glory Bes.

Jean observed that such sacrilegious confessions happened more than once:

And he didn’t take any responsibility for what had happened. He didn’t say, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done this.” He never, ever apologized. Ever. He never once said, “Oh, that was wrong.” Never.

In addition to the sexual abuse Jean endured, there were many other hurts. When her father passed away, for example, Father Bill came to the funeral home to lead the family and friends in prayer. At one point he invited Jean to approach the casket and kneel with him on the kneeler. She watched, horrified, as Father Bill extended his hand and gruffly smacked the folded hands of the cadaver four or five times: “You were a good man, Jim.” The slapping motions smeared away enough makeup to expose the blackened skin of Jean’s father’s folded left hand. Jean broke down into uncontrollable sobs, but never said a word. Reflecting back on such a painful episode today, Jean sees it as one more instance of how this priest “could never, ever, keep his hands where they belonged.”

Ultimately, after Father Bill’s death, he was buried in the cemetery in proximity to her mom and dad; she had to walk past his tombstone on the way to her parents’ graves. She could not get away from this man, it seemed:

I was so mad … and what came to my mind was: if I would vomit on his tombstone, would my stomach acid be strong enough to erase his name? So nobody would know who he is. Why did he have to be buried there? It just wasn’t right.

It would take most of Jean’s adult life, much prayer, and much patience to finally receive the grace of forgiving her perpetrator.

After listening to Jean for some time as she related, in painful detail, her experiences of repeated sexual assaults, I asked why she hadn’t quit her job. After all, it was the job that occasioned the abuse. Her answer, in part, was quite simple: she loved her job.

But to understand what she meant, you have to understand that it wasn’t a job for her, even though she was paid a dollar an hour—for the times, a considerable amount of money for a teenager. And while that was undoubtedly important to her, in the long run it didn’t matter in comparison to the connection with God that she found in the parish church, and particularly at the Marian shrine:

My faith grew there. I absolutely fell in love with God. And I really felt how much he loved me. I mean, he loved us so much.… And he sent his Son … and Jesus was God! And he died. And he would have died just for me. And he would have died just for you.… He loved each one of us that much. So, religion wasn’t something I just knew; it became something very internal with me. And there was nothing Father Bill could do to take that away.

Another question I posed to her—as anyone might be tempted to ask—was why she didn’t seek help. Here the answer is a bit more complex, and here is where those of us who have not been victims of sexual abuse must set aside our “logic” and “common sense,” and try to enter the mind and heart of a person who has lived in the grip of paralyzing fear, a fear which began as a child and persisted into adulthood.

Jean’s was the fear that her parents would find out about the abuse, and what the consequences might be, not only for her family but also for the tiny close-knit community in which they lived. In particular, she feared that Father Bill’s guilt would get the better of him, and he would one day go to her parents (he had retired only blocks from them) and confess the whole thing to them.

Jean explained that on one occasion news had gotten around town about a teenage girl in a neighboring town who had become pregnant out of wedlock. Her parents had “sent her away.” Jean asked her mother if she thought that had been the right thing to do, and her mother responded affirmatively without hesitation. That response was like pouring gasoline onto the fire of a fear that was already raging inside Jean:

And I really thought they would send me away too. And where would I go? What would happen to me? I could be wrong … but in my opinion I believe [my parents] would have blamed me completely. Everything was kind of black and white [for them] and they followed the rules, and that would not have been allowed. Looking back, I maybe could’ve talked to my dad. But I think it would have torn our family apart.

This fear engulfed Jean well into her adult life until Father Bill’s death. As for her husband, whom she adored and with whom she shared forty years of marriage until his death, she could only tell him a little. Her husband adored Father Bill. “My husband knew a little bit, and he did not want to know more,” Jean explained. “And I respected that.”

But there were other attempts to get help. She would sometimes confide to a priest in confession—because this was the only place she felt halfway safe and confident mentioning it. Yet, she was often sorely disappointed:

Most priests aren’t good there. They say, “Get over it” and “You need to forgive him” and “What’s wrong with you?” And what happens is you just don’t go back. They don’t say, “I’m sorry it happened.” But what they say most often is, “Get over it.” No one says it nicely. My pain is not with what happened—I mean, it was ugly and it hurt me—but my biggest complaint is with how the clergy handles it … because they don’t know what to do with me.

As the abuse went on through the 1960s, Jean got another idea:

I got to the point where I was going to call the bishop. I thought that would work. But I didn’t have the bishop’s phone number. And if I went home and dialed and tried to get the number, there would be a charge on our phone bill. And Mom knew every bill. And then I got to thinking that I couldn’t call him anyway because we were on a party line. And everybody would listen [to each other’s calls]. You would hear this click when they picked up the phone.

Once when Jean was fifteen, she did reach out to a priest in a nearby town. But consistent with the times, this priest, though very kind, did nothing more than encourage Jean to “protect” herself, to “stay close to the doors” so she could avoid or escape Father Bill. It never crossed his mind to report Jean’s abuse to the police. For all Jean knows, he never confronted Father Bill. His words were kind, but he did nothing to prevent further abuse. “He didn’t know any better,” Jean reflected. “The world was different.”

There is a part of Jean’s story that in many ways struck me as more painful to listen to than the details of her abuse—because it is a part of her hurting that was needless, impossibly callous, and mindlessly inflicted upon her by yet another priest to whom she first turned, well over thirty years after she was abused, in a first moment of vulnerability as she sought compassion and understanding.

As Dr. Applewhite explains, when an abuse victim first opens up and is vulnerable with another person about the fact of the abuse, the reaction the victim receives is of critical importance—and positive or negative, it imprints on the psyche of the victim.

When, as an adult woman well into her fifties, Jean first opened up to a priest outside of confession—one of her own parish priests—about her abuse, after going into some detail about Father Bill’s assaults on her, the priest became visibly agitated and finally blurted out: “You scare me.… You scare me!”

Jean was nonplussed.

“I know what people like you do to priests,” he snapped, “you make wild accusations and pretty soon we’re all suspect. So you can just stay away. I don’t want to have anything to do with you!”

Jean attempted to explain that she was not accusing him or much less all priests, but he cut her off. What then followed, in Jean’s state of defenseless vulnerability, was unimaginably insensitive, and would leave her tender conscience needlessly engulfed in turmoil for a long time to come. “And by the way,” the priest retorted, “supposing what you’re saying is true, what was your part in this?”

Jean shared her story with me for a number of reasons, but principal among them was that she wanted me to be able to communicate to priests—and seminarians—how not to treat a victim of sexual abuse who opens up to them in counseling or the confessional.

I asked Jean what she would say to other victims of sexual abuse:

Number one: what he did to you was not your fault. And I’m sorry it happened. That was all I wanted to hear. Rather than being told, “You scare me, and you’re a liar.”

Jean did not report her abuse to the diocese until well after Father Bill had died. She recalled how, when the diocesan review board was going to examine her accusation, she sought to speak to them in person. This was vitally important to her:

I wanted to be there when that panel met … I wanted them to know that what they were doing was valid and important in the Church.

Today, Jean continues to heal. The abundant spiritual healing she has already received, she acknowledges, came not without setbacks, periods of discouragement, and struggles. She shared that eventually it was after fervent prayer to the Holy Spirit that she finally received relief: she was able to forgive Father Bill, and the nightmares abruptly ended.

When I interviewed Jean, she made it clear that her ability to forgive her perpetrator was a gift that was nearly forty years in coming, something superhuman, something she could not do on her own. She had only very recently gotten to that place. “I want him to be in heaven,” she insisted, referring to Father Bill. And she hopes to see him there one day.

What is particularly remarkable about Jean—and so tragically differs from the personal stories of many other victims—is how her Catholic faith, her faith and trust in the Church, remained intact, notwithstanding years of sexual abuse. And the goodness—the genuine spiritual charity—she directs today toward her perpetrator no doubt leaves the reader (as it left me) off balance.

I was angered by her story. Incensed. Shaken.

The reader can’t help but ask: How could she, in her right mind, possibly want this man to be in heaven? Is she still in some sort of denial? And how is it that she did not lose her faith, that she did not walk away from the Church? We’ll have occasion to explore and answer these questions, and return to Jean’s story, in chapter 8.

As a closing thought, it is to be hoped that Jean’s home diocese where the abuse occurred will eventually make the option to publicize all the names of accused priests from the diocese with credible allegations against them, even if the allegations came to light only after the offending cleric was deceased. Such a policy corresponds quite simply to a fundamental requirement of justice. To be forthcoming in this way, as Dr. Applewhite has pointed out, is to provide the Church with the gift of truth. And in the matter of clergy sexual abuse, the Church’s absolute transparency is the gift we can ill afford to deny future generations of Catholics.