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July 16, 2007
Dirty Little Secrets
The Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese announced yesterday it’s paying about $650 million to settle 500 cases of alleged child abuse and incest by its diocesan priests. Similar cases in other states, as well as England, Germany, France and Ireland , will cost The Church some $2 billion.
How many of us ‘fallen away Catholics’ – perhaps thousands of boomer adults – read about these cases with a heavy heart…and secret, personal memories?
I wasn’t sexually abused as a youngster by a Catholic priest – yet, might have been by “Father X."
A rather shy teenager when graduating from high school in 1962, I enrolled at a public college – and sought out The Newman Club (a club for Catholic youth attending public colleges and universities) – as a sanctuary and way to meet friends.
The Newman "Club" is a bit like a fraternity/sorority, except with an emphasis on the Catholic liturgy and Mass, student cook-outs, plus a lot of beer drinking. It even had a fraternity-type ‘house’ on the university campus, with meeting space, chapel for Sunday Mass, plus two resident priests, and office secretaries.
One of the secretaries was an attractive, middle aged widow.
It was the heady, hopeful era of Pope John XXIII, the Vatican Council: the nuns threw off their heavy woolen habits; the Church threw out the Latin Mass and turned the Altar around.
The middle-aged, ‘senior’ priest at the campus Newman Club had graduated from a Vatican university; talked about being a Monsignor, a Bishop, even a Cardinal one day; and considered himself a bon vivant, New Ager, on both sides of the Communion Rail.
The attractive widow-office secretary was blindly in love with this sophisticated “Father,” who seemed in turn to use her as friend and foil, a “cover” for his alcoholism, meanderings and Sunday morning "no shows."
I was soon invited to a few of their dinners, social events and around-the-table beer bashes; flattered these two “important,” polished adults considered me good company.
Turned out good company had little to do with it. My presence helped keep others from asking questions, or calling the Bishop’s office
“Father X” was alcoholic and evidently partial to young men.(In later years, I learned from past college-years/Newman club buddies that Father X's exploits were well known around campus.)
Within a year, his escapades at the Newman Club got him reassigned by the Bishop to a backbench, rural parish – where difficult for him to gather friends for the gourmet dinners, to sample his cabinet wines, and laugh at his jokes and the world’s foibles.
After banishment to the Catholic outback, Father X could still rely on his loyal widow-friend. She would occasionally invite me along, when she drove some 75 miles to meet her paramour at the parish rectory on Saturday afternoons and evenings.
They would cook thick steaks; smoke, drink a fifth of Chivas Scotch, and then cap the evening with tumbler glasses of iced Drambuie. I recall a lot of the conversation was poking fun at the "old" Catholic Church and its ways.
After many drinks, “Father” would slur his speech, laugh loudly at his own puns and commentary, and pressure me to “lose my shyness, inhibitions” by going to bed with him upstairs at the Rectory.
His apparent paramour would sit quietly, amused and bemused by it all; and my discomfort.
For some reason – shyness, fear, distaste – I never went up those stairs with Father X.
Through mid life, I remained distant friends with both – long after Father X was defrocked and living in New York City and later Arizona . (Father and his widow paramour never became an official pair. He left town and her life. She would later tell me: "What a strange man. When we had sex he refused to kiss me.")
And he was strange.
"It's him," my wife would say, when Ex-Father-X called in the middle of the night, rambling on incoherently about the ‘book’ he was always "just finishing" and could I possibly lend him some money until it was published.
Which I did on several occasions.
I remember the last time I talked with him. A late Thursday night, the phone rang. This distraught, drunken, angry, disbelieving voice screamed out with shock and outrage: "I have cancer! I have cancer."
He was dead by the following Tuesday.
A sad, unpleasant, even ugly, story.
I’ve never talked about it -- until now.
Yesterday, I asked a friend to read a draft of this blog. "We all have our dirty little secrets," she observed matter of factly.
Perhaps.
Some secrets are harder to forget or ignore than others.
The Catholic Church is learning that today.
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Comments
Read about this sort of stuff. Horrible.
Posted by: anne | July 16, 2007
It's so true that we all really do have our own dirty little secrets. I think it's healing to get this kind of stuff off a person's chest. Carrying around horrible secrets is about as damaging as anything I know of.
Posted by: Kelly | July 04, 2008
Well, some times I wonder, Kelly.
But most...not all...:-) ...of my life is fodder for a blogpost, book chapter...
Spend too much time thinking.....
Happens when you get old!!!! :-)
Posted by: Jim Richmond | July 06, 2008