When the Beloved Priest From Your Childhood Turns out to Have Been a Monster

PITTSBURGH -- Last Sunday, a city parish on the top of a steep hill overlooking the neighborhood aptly named Observatory Hill waited for her faithful to arrive for Sunday Mass, as it has every Sunday for over 102 years.

It was 9:00 a.m., just a handful of days after a report was released by the Pennsylvania state grand jury on alleged sexual abuse in 54 of the state's 67 counties, a report that has rocked this tight-knit community.

Some came to Mass. Some did not. Those who did had difficulty holding back tears.

The somber music played by the organist reflected the silent despair in the pews.

The parish had been hit hard in the 884-page report. The report identified over 1,000 children who became victims of more than 300 abusive priests in parishes large and small across the state.

This compounded the losses the parish has suffered as the neighborhood's population has become more secular and transient -- a big change from the working-class Catholic population who walked to Mass there in the 1960s and 1970s.

That's when I attended Nativity of Our Lord, over on Pittsburgh's North Side. I adored father John Maloney, a young priest who came to our church when I was 5 years old, and going to church at 5 meant different things than it does to an adult. For me it was the honor of wearing a lace covering my head the way the grown-up women did. (Before Vatican II, it was mandatory for women.)

But it was also the mysterious rhythms of the Latin Mass that seemed to be telling sacred secrets. Mass meant being with my parents, sometimes my entire extended family of aunts and uncles and grandparents -- all warm, comfortable, safe feelings that helped draw me into what faith would mean for me as an adult.

As I entered first grade, father Maloney was the parochial vicar (vice pastor). He said Mass every Tuesday for the entire student body of a parish that was at its peak, absorbing the blue-collar baby-boom children in the 1960s.

Before school and during recess, we would play on the asphalt playground that was attached to the parish school. It was sloped at an odd angle and littered with loose rocks, but we didn't ever seem to notice.

Sometimes, if we were lucky, father Maloney, who was just 22 years old, would come out and watch us play, as we jumped rope, picked teams for dodgeball or played a vigorous game of tag.

We were taught to respect and revere his station. It wasn't hard; he was young, handsome and charismatic. When he talked about the Scripture or Jesus, he made you feel as though he knew Jesus personally and he was simply sharing the stories that his close friend wanted you to know.

It was he who administered my first two sacraments outside of my baptism: He heard my first confession (I do not remember what sins I committed, but I do remember they did not require me to be sent to the principal's office) and did my first Holy Communion, which is a monumental moment for a young Catholic child.

When father Maloney's name appeared on the list of deviant offenders last week, I was devastated.

How could someone who had our complete trust abuse it in such a heinous way? How could he have robbed children of their childhood?

The report named 99 priests in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Three of them served in my parish when I or one of my siblings attended the school: father Maloney, father Ray Rhoden and father James Somma.

The actions of those priests and those in charge cannot take our faith away, but they have made it impossible for me to trust this church.

I've always held a deep fondness for that asphalt playground that strained to hold my boundless energy, along with that of hundreds of other children. For eight years, it was a place of carefree joy, where the only thing I dreaded when I stepped out of the school and onto the grounds was whether I would be picked last for dodgeball.

Now I cannot erase from my mind the knowledge that some children were deeply hurting on that playground. Some children were holding in a secret so dark and so humiliating that their souls burned with the shame and the fear they felt every day.

I have stood by my church in past crisis, thinking surely it will get it right somehow. This time, that feels impossible.

I will stand by my faith -- a faith that has guided and shaped me at my core and is difficult to square with the corrupt institution that allowed sick men to steal my classmates' lives and then facilitated them to do the same elsewhere.

Every time I search in my mind's eye and scan the faces of my classmates on that playground, looking for signs of who needed help, I find it difficult to imagine that forgiveness coming anytime soon.

When people are taught from the cradle, that the Catholic Church is the only Church, and is inerrant, that if you leave it, you are damned to hell, and that a priest is a holy and authoritative representative of God on Earth, I imagine it is extremely hard to leave. But since the Bible tells us that the Church is the body of Christ, and is made up of a body of believers, not an organization or an hierarchy, even though he appoints and calls some to be shepherds over the Church (the people who make up the body of believers), then you are not bound to stay in a group that allows these crimes to be perpetrated, and you can still be a believer and part of the body of Christ (not to be confused with the Bread of life, what Catholics call the Eucharist). All believers are not Catholic, and all Catholics are not believers. There are millions of non-Catholic Christians, despite what you have been taught. Stay a believer, by all means, but do NOT stay in a system that refuses to clean up its most heinous sins. As a protestant, if I knew of such things going on in my church, unless they were cleaned up, and the perpetrators ousted, I would go elsewhere. Jesus said, in Matthew 18:20, “Where two or more are gathered in my Name, there am I, in the midst of them”.

You’ve got to get beyond this notion Protestants are all the same

That’s like all Latinos speak Mexican

I’m southern baptist

Calvary Baptist Jackson Miss

Brentwood Baptist nashville area

I’m godfather to a great lady Beaumont area

Priest was exposed later as a huge molestor and shuttled away

I knew he was a freak when I did the orientation

But I’ve helped make sure she’s of the faith and she’s in my will

I love her like a distant daughter

Only so called Prods I’ve seen personally who say y’all are going to hell are posters here many of whom are former Catholics

And on this very thread is someone saying we’re outside Gods grace

It feels like you guys venerate clergy and are Catholic above all

It’s just strange to us but I sure don’t care

What I do care about and what’s become clear to me is this homosexual molestation issue in your faith is not being dealt with by parishioners

I see too many parse it like Laura and the insufferable Arroyo

The Church preserved western civilization which I do venerate

I’d like to see you guys prevail over this

You need to purge homos chaste or otherwise

It seems my comment earlier today has offended quite a few other FReepers. I took a hard line in defense of the Catholic Church, and I don’t apologize for that. I do see that what I posted was thoroughly misunderstood. I don’t intend to respond to any who have pinged me directly! as I feel it won’t do any good... but I will respond collectively.

I don’t think most people here can understand how angry, disgusted, and saddened I am as a Catholic who works closely with my parish and diocese. I won’t give details, but people that I love have been harmed by these sins of sex abuse by priests. This is a medium that does not allow me to convey how disgusted and infuriated I truly am. Nothing can justify the evil done by the priests and bishops who have committed and enabled this abuse. Nothing destroys individual lives and souls than the sins of a priest, and nothing destroys the Church more and prevents the spread of the Gospel. Countless innocent souls have been harmed in countless ways, directly and indirectly.

I hate the idea that these priests and bishops have gone untried and unpunished. I hate that the ones that are innocent have not had a chance to have the truth aired and their innocence proclaimed. Far more than that, I hate and am disgusted by the fact that the guilty ones (and I believe that far more of the accused are guilty than are innocent!) have not been forced to face their accusers and answer for their crimes. I am disgusted by the ones that have died without facing justice in this life. I am disgusted by the ones that have been permitted to retire or be laicized and shrink into obscurity. I am disgusted by the fact that public crime demands public trial and public punishment, yet so often victims and the public have been deprived of it. I want to see the return of the Rite of Degradation of Clerics, so that the guilty bishops and priests can have all the honors of their state be publicly stripped from them as they have stripped away the faith and innocence of so many others... and then have them be relinquished to the civil authorities to receive the justice that civil society demands.

For Christians who have have been raised in and/or baptized into any other church, I don’t expect you to agree with me in standing by the Catholic Church in spite of all of this, and I can’t force you to. I can’t even convince you to. You carry the presuppositions and Scriptural interpretations of those churches, and this scandal, perhaps more than any other, confirms the bias that the to be Christian—to be a member of the Church—is only to be part of a merely spiritual community of believers where any visible structure is merely accidental.

As a Catholic, I reject that notion as contrary to Scripture and Tradition... it is not and was never part of the Catholic Faith. I believe that when Christ founded the Church, the one that continues today as the Catholic Church, He founded it as a spiritual community with a visible hierarchy and structure—the Successor of St. Peter as the Pope, the Vicar of Christ, and the Successors of the Apostles as bishops; the presbyters (“priests”) and deacons to assist them, and all of them to serve all the baptized as the People of God. I know some bad ones, but I also know many, many good ones. But I’m not Catholic because of them (bad or good)... sometimes I’m Catholic in spite of them. I’m Catholic because I love Christ and believe that my Catholic Faith is the one I received from Him.

Even when one (or many) choose by their actions to become Judases in their betrayal of Christ, it does not justify vilifying the entire structure, nor does it justify leaving. It is understandable why some do... that is what scandal does and why scandal is evil. But the Catholic Faith is an indivisible thing, and it was given by Christ and unpacked over centuries—and you either accept it all or you accept none of it—a Catholic cannot choose to accept some pieces and not others. Many Catholics do this badly; at times, I have done it badly. But because I love Christ, and I love His Church, my only response is to reform it from within... first by striving to be holy, then by encouraging others to do the same. That is not the response of one trapped in a “dictatorship”... that is the response of someone free in Christ Jesus.

Nobody—absolutely nobody—no matter how offended, scandalized, or even victimized, has the RIGHT to convince somebody to leave the Catholic Church—to abandon the Church that Jesus began. Nobody inside the visible Church, and certainly nobody outside. Of course, on Judgment Day, those inside will be more harshly judged, and those clergy who drove others to leave through the scandal of their sins most of all. The abuse was evil. The enabling heaped on an additional evil. The calls to leave heap on a further additional evil. My conscience won’t let me stand idly by, and I will denounce all of them as I am able. I don’t want to have to answer for my silence. My anger directed toward the ones inciting apostasy comes from my belief that the Catholics who leave are depriving themselves, urged into starvation by the sins of others. As they endanger the souls of others, they endanger their own as well.

Some of you here see me as calloused, blind, unprincipled, perpetuating the cycle of abuse, foolish, deluded, lacking in faith. Some of you have accused me of some of these things earlier in this thread. This is fine, because I know what is in my heart, and I am confident in my beliefs. Your alternate suggestions, palatable to some, are unacceptable to me—neither to accept myself, nor to concede as a viable option to others. Here I stand, and I cannot do otherwise.

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