Manufacturing the Clerical Predator

a crisis is a Tipping Point its origin is the Greek word crino meaning to separate judge or decide in the 15th century it came into use in English to describe the climax of a disease after which a patient either recovers or doesn't historically The Sovereign determines what constitutes a crisis and The Sovereign controls and manages the response when The Sovereign declares an event a crisis it reveals that it is The Sovereign who is experiencing the crisis their aim is their own recovery what they aim to recover is the legitimacy of their Authority the revelations of widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church constitute a crisis for the authority of the papacy but that's not what it is for survivors it is a global catastrophe catastrophes are incalculable they cannot be regulated under the conditions in which they were created [Music] in his essay on the concept of history Walter Benjamin describes a painting by Paul Clee called Angelus Novus he writes it shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at his eyes are wide his mouth is open his wings are spread this is how the angel of History must look his face is turned toward the past where a chain of events appears before us he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet the angel would like to stay awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed but a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them the storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky the clergy abuse catastrophe is not the result of an external perversion of the church but rather a phenomenon inscribed into its very functioning as a social institution when the church defends itself against these crimes it is defending its most obscene Secret the exposure of this secret triggered a crisis but is it enough to reverse a catastrophe [Music] [Music] [Music] I grew up north of Milwaukee in a very Catholic ethnic Community the church Catholicism our Parish was my life and we also especially on my father's side had a lot of priests and sisters just a ton of occasions on my dad's side of the family I was ordained in 1990 as a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and then I left officially in well I left temporarily in 2005 and I left officially in 2007. so I was raised in a big Catholic Family we were very devout Catholics we'd go to mass you know multiple times a week sometimes every day I really wanted to do something with my faith when I finished high school I had a sort of grandiose idealistic idea of the church as this force in society that was going to promote renewal that was going to help people when they were at their most vulnerable and most broken it was something that made me extremely enthusiastic and zealous I thought that like the path of Catholicism was the path to like genuine human fulfillment and I thought that I would sacrifice anything to be a part of something so like important and the meaning that had for me um eventually went up against the actual reality of how the church actually operates and the people and uh forces inside the church that make it what it is and I realized quite quickly that my dream of serving this sort of grandiose mission was not going to be the reality of what priesthood was the better question is why did I Stay rather than why did you get in because that's the challenge in this in that type of Life once you're in when you start realizing what's really going on and you either adapt to it and and Thrive or you don't Thrive and get out when I entered it was an honorable profession it was looked upon with respect and we didn't know you know most people on the outside knew nothing of any of the corruption that went on on the inside it was covered in a deep deep layer of secrecy even though my journey evolved out of priesthood I came out as a gay man and it's been public you know now that I was sexually abused as a kid which I think was shocking and scary for people but I'm really fortunate because I still have so many people who are still friends so the Priestly abused me his name was Father Richard Nichols even in his first assignment he was caught sexually abusing a kid in the school and so the priest that he was with of course they didn't deal with it so his pattern was that he moved every couple of years from Parish to Parish to Parish all because you know the pastor was in dealing with the fact he's sexually abusing these kids it was back in the days of Archbishop weakland and so father Nichols asked permission to be able to go to Marquette University to get a doctorate in Psychology and to become a child psychologist and he got that permission even though there had been complaints about him that the diocese knew about he was best friends with my Dad's cousin and he had Thursdays off and because they were so close he had gotten to know our family in Belgium Wisconsin where I grew up so on Thursdays in summer father Nichols would actually really come and visit and spend the day I remember it was in the summer of 1976 when I met him because you know the kids are like oh this father Nichols and you know he's a Catholic priest so what greater thing for parents you know to have their kids around father Nichols would take us kids both boys and girls in his car and like go to Port Washington for ice cream because in our hometown there was really nothing to do or he'd take us swimming and Random Lake and now years later I see the cultivation that went on because I remember in he smoked a pipe and as kids in the car away from our parents he would let us smoke a pipe which we as kids were like well this is super naughty we knew it was super naughty but it was kind of cool and it was kind of our little secret with him he asked if I wanted to go along for a camping trip up near watoma Wisconsin his family had a trailer so I went along with actually two younger cousins of mine who were like two years younger father Nichols took us to this trailer that his family owned on what's it's a strange little lake called Beans Lake but I remember the first day we like unpacked our stuff the lake was not much more than a mud hole so it wasn't a great place to swim but he took us some places locally we went out to dinner and then I remember it was that night and there were like three areas to sleep and I was in one alone the two younger kids were together in that and then father Nichols had his own place and I remember that I had just gone to sleep and all of a sudden father Nichols came in and I was kind of startled and what I'll never forget is that was actually starting to rain and like thunder and lightning he came in and that's when the first episode of sexual abuse happened and you know for me as a kid it was the first time like anyone ever like performed oral sex on me and so it was and he was probably 45 years old and a big guy strong you know man or whatever and I remember like the mix feeling sort of of like like pleasure because this had never really happened before but almost like pain you know and just the unknown he also like um would take his finger and put his finger up my butt as a way of I guess thinking he was somehow pleasuring me when he's really basically pleasuring himself and I just remember being in shock like my body just you know like stopping is all this is going on and almost like out of body I just feel like I'm like looking down at myself and not knowing you know what to make of all of it and I remember laying there just kind of you know so afraid and this storm is going on and then like one of the worst parts for me that first night was I was always a very responsible kid and I thought you know is he going to do this the kids names were Brian and the other one was Charles we call him Chuck Chucky like is he going to do this to them and I felt like I'm the responsible kid there and as I laid there kind of listening like is he going to go in by them and do this stuff to them I really thought to myself I can't let this happen and when I think of what I went through not just the sexual abuse part but one piece that was almost more painful for me later on is I decided that night that I'd stay up as long as I could and if he went into that room and did that that I was going to get a knife and kill him and I played in my head like if I kill this guy the police are going to come what are Mom and Dad going to do am I going to get out of jail so I'm like like ruminating this stuff and I remember staying up as long as I could and then I finally fell asleep and the next morning I just wanted to get the hell out of there but there's no cell phones I don't even really know exactly where we are he drives the car you know I'm just like a a kid so I remember being very distant from him like I just shut down I didn't even talk and again here's a man with a doctorate in Psychology who's a trained psychologist and I remember him you know very much like playing up to me a little bit trying to tease me a little bit to come around and sadly that was a week that we spent with him every single night that I was there this sexual abuse you know would unfold for me when he drove us home I couldn't wait to get home like I couldn't wait to get away from him and he dropped me off at my parents house and my parents were like you know so happy to see me and they couldn't thank you know father Nichols enough and then I'll never forget my dad was like well father would you like to go out to dinner with us yet tonight we'd love to take you out to dinner to thank you for taking Kevin along and I'm thinking to myself oh my God we have to go to dinner with him now so I I remember the exact restaurant it was a local restaurant Supper Club where we went if I went in there today I could tell you where we sat who sat around the table it's that Vivid I just remember there too like auto body like I I think it must have just be my defense mechanism you know psychologically like they were all talking and I just felt like I was watching this all on Play From Above when we got home he left and I was a kind of a very affective emotional kid so I just burst out crying after he left and my mom and dad you know they were like so happy to see me and I seemed okay or whatever and I remember my parents saying like what's the matter you know and I just kept saying it was terrible and again growing up in the community I did in that era I wouldn't even have words like today I'd have the words to express what happened but you know even just talking about the acts that were you know perpetrated against me I I just at that point in my life I couldn't even put that into words oral sex any of these things it just wasn't a part of my experience of vocabulary I remember my dad pushing it because I was just like hysterically crying and he's like well did he hit you like they thought you know like maybe he was mean to me or like physically whatever I'm like no no no no no and I took my parents who again I think are kind of naive Royal people who adored priests and worshiped a priest on a pedestal and a priest could do no wrong and our families filled with clergy for my dad to be like well did he like touch you you know inappropriately like down I mean my dad was just like trying to get this out you know we've never talked about things like this and I finally told him yes and I remember my dad especially my mom just wept and my dad was just so angry you know and then my dad's like we're gonna we gotta talk to the arch the bishop about this or whatever and I remember we're in a small town super Catholic I remember we have a great aunt who never married who was like more Catholic than the pope we've got father Jerome another priest who's the first cousin all of this and I remember just freaking out at the thought of that and saying to you know like if you say anything I'm going to run away and both my parents kind of went to their grave with his regret like that they didn't do enough and I said you know at the time we had no power whatsoever and they were so concerned about me like if they did tell they didn't know what to do so sadly for them they took it to their grave this feeling that they didn't do right by me and I I said to them we were the victims me you so don't put any guilt or shame on yourself we were victimized don't don't hold on to that at no point that I can recall were victims ever upheld as brave for coming forward as heroic um they weren't even necessarily upheld as people deserving sympathy or compassion for having undergone something horrible they were spoken of very matter of factly and hardly addressed at all while I might know the names of offender priests at that time I certainly couldn't have named victims and I do remember at specific events there would be survivors usually with the survivor's network of those abused by priests snap who would stand out in front of the cathedral or the church it might be for an ordination or something holding signs and I remember one instructor telling us to stay away from them that they were the enemy that they hated the church and there was no like acknowledgment really even that they were like struggling or that there were people who had undergone great pain instead it was just this is all in the past we've instituted reforms now that we're proud of that no institution has ever instituted to respond to abuse is what they said and so victims were not a part of any education that we had about abuse in the Catholic church it was the the way in that era which came pretty close to when where we are now where this deference toward the toward the institutional Church by the institutional church I mean the governmental structure the Bishops not the people because if there was concern about the real Church the primary value would be the welfare of the victim in their family but it's the other way around but it was like diplomatic immunity they have an immunity because they're Catholic priests and they're associated with the Catholic Diocese of Chicago or Milwaukee and if you had a devout Catholic prosecuting attorney or district attorney it made it even worse so I remember it was the next Thursday because it was still summer I was home alone and who comes to our door but Father Richard Nichols and the door is locked and there was no way in heck I was going to let him in okay I'm just feeling so much fear and all that Rush of of emotion and again kind of going out of my head and um I remember talking to Father Nichols through this door and again we're dealing with a man who's a psychologist with children and it was all this stuff like I'm so sorry I want to talk to you I'm sorry about what happened all this stuff and here I am this 13 year old trusting Catholic kid okay he you know so I opened the door and father Nichols came into our home talked for a while and I was sexually assaulted another time in the same way in our family's home when my parents and my brother are at work and when that happened I really fought him off this time and I did say to him that you know like my parents knew and he just lost it okay he just blew up and said you better keep your mouth shut all this stuff and then he said to me you're coming with me he pressured me forced me like was you know raising his voice or whatever intimidating me and I went into his car which I could describe that car to a t today and we got in the car and I thought he is going to kill me we drove on you get Belgium Wisconsin Highway D to what is now Harrington Beach State Park we didn't go to the state park but you can drive down right to the lake and it's a like a public beach and boat landing and I remember driving past my church where I grew up which I very sentimental about because as I say my family's been there forever it's an ethnic church and father Nichols is like intimidating me about talking and I looked at my church in my little prochial school that I had gone to was there and I tried to think into the church the statue of Mary because we were always devoted to Mary and I just kind of prayed and said Mary you've got to save me because I thought this man would kill me we got down to the where the beach was I opened the door I ran as fast as I could to get away from him so here we have it me running down the beach and father Nichols is chasing behind me a 40-some-year-old man and he I remember him tackling me on the beach in the town of Belgium and holding me down he's like what the hell is wrong with you and he'd say [ __ ] a lot too it's the first time I ever heard that word what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] and I said to him you're not going to kill me and he's like you stupid you know [ __ ] I'm not gonna I'm not gonna kill you he kind of held me for a while and all of a sudden he got up and started walking away and I was so relieved like he's not gonna kill me so I started walking the other direction I thought I can walk a few miles home I don't care I just don't want to be near him well he said get the [ __ ] over here and I got back into the car with him and I'll never forget my last encounter with him he dropped me off not in our driveway but at the front like by the driveway of our house in front of our house and his last words were you better keep your mouth [ __ ] shut I think many people who are devout and don't want to confront the reality of abuse in the Catholic Church our clinging to a fantasy version of the church is very necessary for their own faith because it's very difficult to confront evil like this especially when it's in your backyard when it's in the place that is most precious to you as a devout believer and so some simply I think choose to just not confront it at all which is unfortunate they know that those stories are out there but they don't seek them out they don't read about it um they let it just wash over them rather than sink in and realize well no this is this is talking about your church this is talking about your community even like your diocese it's your Bishop who's not cooperating with the attorney general investigation it's not just some other person out there that has nothing to do with you it's the church you believe in that's the church you donate your time and money to it's a hard thing to hear that that organization is involved in these sorts of crimes and I guess some Catholics would rather just not confront that [Music] so when I was uh joining the Seminary so many of the priests who were recruiting for the Seminary came of age and became priests during the years of the papacy of John Paul II John Paul II was worshiped by these priests he was an icon of not only saintliness and Holiness but of masculinity values and ideals and moral character he went skiing he went on canoe trips um and he championed this idea of new evangelization of that well the gospel has been heard around the world at this point but they saw the forces of like secular society and the diminishing role of the church in public Life as a bad thing and the way to readjust it was to re-catechize Catholics uh who were catholic already but didn't necessarily have a firm grasp on what their Church even believed my job when I went to the Vatican Embassy was going to be managing the investigative process for candidates for being Bishop which was a process that still covered in 28 layers of secrecy the candidates names would be given to me I'd send letters out of inquiry to different people I would run a big background check and I would get the different candidates then I have to summarize that if there were problems I had to bring those problems to my boss bringing the problems to him and say this guy's not going to fly and he'd say you're right he's not so pull his name John Paul II was retrogressive he was going backwards so what we had I saw this list with the criteria that was given to my boss and then we had questionnaires about a with about 40 questions and the basic criteria were the first part was was Orthodoxy their Orthodoxy in matters of birth control homosexuality marriage of priests and women priests you had to have the right answers on those issues to start with personal loyalty to the Pope because he personally loyal to the person of the Holy Father and to the Holy See okay then you went down the line appearance was a big thing you know has he got any physical defects or does he stutter anything like this that was important and then his moral life and they had to write it up so that the guy walked on water and that there was nothing in his background that would could ever be questioned or whatever cause a problem most of it was administrators Canon lawyers guys who were friends of the bishop that promoted them that's how they got there so they reproduced themselves this first generation that I was responsible for creating was the first jp2 type Bishops very doctrinaire very loyal the Holy Father this the Holy Father they're like robots and then they of course reproduce themselves and they started picking up their type of guys that thought like them and promoting them so we're now in the third wave of that John Paul II is still treated as the greatest saint of modern times as one of the most important historical figures even regardless of his status as Pope so when stories emerge and I'm sure many will still emerge are still to come about the degree to which John Paul II actively in many ways facilitated the abuse of children in the church there is complete denial in some quarters about that people just simply refuse to hear that because John Paul II is upheld as such an incredible figure so I got this letter and it was from the vicar general of the Diocese of Lafayette Louisiana announcing to us that they had been involved with six families whose Sons which amounted to nine Sons with sexual abuse by this one priest Gilbert Gotti the boss said to me we've settled with these families and they've all signed confidentiality agreements so everything's okay it won't come out in the public nobody know anything about it the church is safe that's a key word the church is safe and then he said to me we're going to have to ask the pope to make an appointment of a temporary investigator what you need to do is write a report describing what this is I said okay so I wrote a 42 or 44 page report in English and it was in detail it was graphic and it explained the cover-up and the violence to the kids and I wrote it in a language that they would understand not knowing who they were going to be well it turns out that they was jp2 John Paul II and the boss decided that it had to go directly to him and he had to find a way to get it to go directly to him and we happen to know that Cardinal Crowell from Philadelphia who was tight with the Pope because they're both polish and Kroll gave him a lot of money so that opens a lot of doors and I was on good terms with Kroll I called him up and he said if you get that thing to me by Sunday night I'm flying over on Monday and I'll have it in the pope Sands by Tuesday and I will report back to you after he's read it pretty good okay my boss signed it without making any changes and you couldn't miss the point you know you could not miss the point with this so Kroll gets it flies to Rome but the second hour he's there he goes to see the Pope and he gave it to him and told him this is a serious problem you know do it do something so by Thursday we got a cable telling us that this bishop was appointed to try to straighten out the mess that's when I began to turn all he wants to do is figure ways to keep this out of the public and keep it secret and I said to myself that's not what he's there for you know he's there to do the right thing and to see how these kids are doing to make sure they're getting care he said well he hasn't met any of the kids because he doesn't want to meet the families that's the Vatican way of fixing problems so I joined in 2013. so at that point everyone knew about it it had been out for at least 10 years if you go back to the Boston Globe story in 2002. I had heard many of the stories about it and like many other Catholics I think I just believed that it was something that had already happened and been dealt with and if it was still going on to any degree it was just like individual psychologically damaged priests who were doing this that you know hopefully would be brought to Justice or would be caught within uh the Seminary there was a very interesting way that I approached the story of the abuse crisis I never really heard any priest actually like take real responsibility for it in any way never spoke of it in terms of like this was like a thing that people did in the church on purpose that they should never have done it's always spoken instead of like it's a crisis it's like you know water in the dam broke and we got to fix our failing infrastructure or it's a it just mistakes were made errors were made like typos rather than like no decisions were made by people who coordinated this who got together and made this happen and are continuing to make this happen there was never any discussion of it on on those terms I remember it was shortly before we were to begin at the Seminary a good friend of mine was also joining and we had recently heard about someone at that Seminary who left very suddenly under strange circumstances and what the rumor was is that there was some sort of like inappropriate conduct as they would say between another seminarian and him and that was like a first kind of like Point like well all these people in the Seminary are not necessarily like holy devout people a lot of them are like grooming other men for um for sex within the Seminary and so I remember speaking with him like I guess I never really thought of that I thought it was kind of like I don't know I guess there's there's bad people everywhere you got to be careful is what we said and so I remember discussing with them like I guess we'll keep our eyes out as we go and and like hopefully you know there's none of that going on there because this is a new Seminary the building I just I was there the second year that the building had um been built and so we thought well this is the new batch of priests this is the new evangelization priests and while it doesn't mean that they're perfect or anything it means that like while the surely they've taken steps to like make sure that that sort of behavior is not encouraged or taking place at all what I found at St Joe's as we called it um was quite the opposite is that there was a lot of um predatory behavior towards seminarians exhibited by people all over the Catholic church because we interacted with priests and Bishops everywhere one seminarian told me on a trip to Washington DC he kind of took me aside and he said we're going to meet uh Cardinal Theodore mccarrick he's the Cardinal of DC you'll probably get a chance to like talk to him a little bit and shake his hand here's a cigarette you should smoke a cigarette first and I was like why and he said well the story is that Ted mccarrick really doesn't like smokers so he's not gonna like be creepy to you or hit on you or try to sleep with you if he can smell it you're a smoker I heard that in 2014. and at that point when I heard that I wish I could say I was surprised but I'd already been in for a few months and heard a lot of stories like that and I knew that the facade that the church kind of put up about all the reform and all the renewal that they've done was just that it was a facade and that powerful people were allowed to continue to engage in predatory behavior even on a really exceptional scale like Theodore mccarrick with very little accountability and in fact people like Theodore mccarrick at that time were upheld as you know celebrity priests essentially like it was a great honor still that we would get to meet someone like him despite the fact that it was it was a known secret that he is praying on other seminarians I have never heard someone actually genuinely try to reconcile the Saint John Paul II with the John Paul II who ignored the victim of Theodore mccarrick the John Paul II who enabled martial Maciel any bishop or priest that is you know abused between the years of 1978 and 2004 that happened under him how many Bishops were made Bishops with a paper trail of them having to be pulled from Ministry and go to rehabilitation centers because of allegations against them as I've talked about the sort of John Paul II generation of priests there was a renewed focus on celibacy and chastity uh and in some ways in response to the abuse crisis which I think they view more as an issue of Chastity and less of one of you know criminality and uh in my experience um the way that Chastity and celibacy is spoken of by priests to seminarians can get very dangerous because it's a way for offender priests to have vulnerable seminarians open up about their sexuality and it gets them to talk about their sexual preferences and orientation and their masturbation habits and the porn that they watch and the guilt that they feel about those activities and for offender priests it's a great great way for them to um scope out territory in a way like they they know like well this person is struggling because they're for example they might be a homosexual seminarian who feels very conflicted about that and they're not sure what they want to do about that if you're a priest a predator a priest that is that is someone that you know you can Target because they're vulnerable and they opened up to you you hold their secret now um and you can exploit that against them I have seen so many priests that have promoted chastity um and uh say getting arrested for possession of child pornography um and Priests that um promote the the beauty of celibacy as I'm just like Jesus when I'm abstaining from sex like this and the Priestly lifestyle of Chastity is this holy spiritual life I've seen I've seen those same priests engage in predatory behavior towards other people in the church towards children I think that a lot of that is again a convenient smoke screen for their real predilections and what they really want to achieve celibacy is made mandatory and then is glorified so you got to convince the guys to accept it if you read books about it the history of it and if you look at some of the things John Paul II said the at one point they referred to celibacy as the Jewel and the crown of the priesthood and the issue I think wasn't if you were a priest and you were leading a celibate life you took the vows or accepted it and you were not you weren't going to get married and you weren't dating so you took it out naturally on children well that doesn't follow because being celibate doesn't give you a psychosexual disorder you may have one but celibate or not you're going to act out so that is something a lot of people think that if you eliminate celibacy nobody's going to want to abuse kids well that's not the case because the biggest sexual abusers of children are married men what is it about celibacy that has something to do with sexual abuse and I think there's a lot I think it's the the attitude that we are superior beings because we're celibate it's like clerical dress it sets you aside and it makes you and I've had this articulated to me by lay people you guys must be really powerful and strong not to have sex and so there's that Mystique the other thing is that it it keeps the clerical culture removed and therefore safe at least they think it's safe because that's an area where the where the biggest amount of secrecy exists is around the sexual lives of clerics rectories monasteries there's areas you can't go into unless you're one of the Insiders one of the big problems is that priests would take young boys to their bedrooms and their rectories and do all sorts of things to them other priests would see it and say nothing and that's one of the biggest problems because a lot of rectories a lot of monasteries of Unwritten rule or a written rule nobody goes into the private quarters of the monks or the priests and then the best part is this term that jp2 used to use the ontological change when I'm ordained I in experience an ontological change antos Greek word for being it means my very being is changed I walk out of that church I'm not a human anymore I don't know what the hell I am but I'm a priest so I'm ontologically changed I never bought that line and in a lot of the research I've done to try to illustrate how the institution itself collaborates with sexual abuse makes it possible it nurtures sexual abuse because of the image of the priesthood and part of that is this myth about this ontological change jp2 used to use the term you're conjoined to Jesus Christ when you're ordained this attitude of the superior nature of the priesthood where that came from in reality was these the French there's a school of spirituality in France that goes back to the 16th century after the French Revolution and the the enlightenment there was a reaction because they wanted to restore the priesthood they wanted to restore the Church of course it had been trampled by the by the French government and the people and one of them was to create this Mystique about priests when they're ordained are they actually take into themselves part of the personality and the person of Jesus Christ there was a Dominican at the angelicum teaching theology named Joseph LaGrange and he was really into this stuff heavily one of his pupils was John Paul II who bought it hook line and singer and he believed all that that crazy spirituality the priesthood so he becomes Pope and he starts talking about it and I never knew the word ontological change until then I never heard it in the Seminary never was never talked to us all we were ever told about the priesthood was that it's like baptism it puts an indelible mark on your soul that once you're ordained you're always ordained even if you leave if you're Laya sized no matter what happens you are always theoretically a priest so that was where a lot of that came from jp2 picks it up he wants to restore the priesthood to its former glory pre-vatican II and he starts writing these letters to priests on Holy Thursday and they're flowery and they're exalted and you're conjoined to Jesus and blah blah blah it's all because of this ontological change which only goes back to the 16th century beyond that Saint Thomas didn't talk about it there's nothing in Grayson in the early canon law nothing the Theology of the Body approach that John Paul II emphasized it definitely believes uh or speaks of abstaining from sex for the sake of a celibate religious vocation as a higher calling in a way that is almost like its own form of sexual fulfillment and that was something that I always found very strange because I wasn't sure how abstaining from sex brought could possibly bring that about and it's always explained very spiritually that it's like while the Christ is the is the bridegroom of the church and the church is the bride and so you are in the person of Christ and you are then the church is your your bride and you are in a romantic relationship with the church and like it is the height of romance to be a Catholic priest and celebrate mass and in a way it was almost as if like being a priest was its own form of like sexual gratification they're trying to recruit young men to engage in a life that on paper means they never have sex um they they emphasize that it's like well it is its own form of fulfillment it's not a denial of your sexual faculties it's a higher use of them is absolutely the language that they like to use they don't necessarily want to be really negative and just emphasize that you aren't having sex instead they emphasize that like no I'm uh I'm using my sexuality in a higher Way by serving the church the sacrifice of it makes it like you're like Christ and Christ became man Christ had a body and had presumably had a sexuality but he didn't use it you know with just one romantic partner instead it's elevated through this strange sacrificial spiritualized way where he dies and gives his life on the cross um that itself is almost like what the Priestly life is is this sort of death to self-sacrifice um where you say deny sex right that somehow fulfills the meaning and Destiny of your sexual faculties even the renunciation of enjoyment can itself be a form of enjoyment what it is that's prompting this small Cadre of young men and it's very small it's not that big who we're buying into this this traditional approach to the Catholic Church into the priesthood and they they see celibacy I think as contributing to that and a lot of it is in terms of power they interpret they believe in the ontological stuff they believe that it's a higher calling to be a celibate priest than a married person that's still believe me for me an area of a lot of Mystery these guys they all get this glued on smile and they all act the same look the same talk the same I think there's a lot of Romanticism attached to the externals if you ever have seen pictures of the coronation of Pope Pius XII take a look at them it was probably the most elaborate coronation of any king that's happened in in the past Thousand Years and I mean it was elaborate had everything and the papacy was surrounded by that stuff immersed in it special vestments all these guys with night suits swapping around and they like the rigidity the like the ritual the the there's something about all of that that appeals the habits the rigmarole that you wear the whole social structure which is monarchical you know they have to have Kings so we got these monseniors and so on and so forth and that goes with that there are a lot of people apart from the clerical world that would love to see the restoration of monarchies because they enjoy all the panoply that goes with it now that was one time part of life then it became decoration and not part of life became something on top of that and that's what I think a lot of these people want to go back to [Music] 1977 to 2006 all of that trauma was just you know buried in myself but I survived you know I'm really strong and I survived people often say well after that how could you have become a priest the church and my faith you know as a Catholic were my life like that was my core and I was a very talented musician and it was just at that era that in my little home church that there was so much trauma you know like that I was trying to deal with that for me my music in church it sounds crazy to some people but for me that was like my lifeline almost to God and healing and like a lot of victims blame God and don't believe in God anymore I've never been that way like I still my faith is is not directed by the church any longer but my my faith is just so much bigger than that and I've never lost that at the that moment in my life I didn't realize or think that the institution of the church you know was was behind so much of this and Foster I didn't understand that culture in a sense it's like I ran into one really horrible person but I didn't think or believe that the church could in a sense you know feed into this in an organized systematic way and honestly it took until 2007 stepping out a priesthood stepping out of that culture that you know clerical warped culture that so many priests are just a part of it was a part of who I was and so many Catholics just accept it or don't quite understand it I had to step out of that to see that what had happened to me was pervasive it was symptomatic of a very sick institution and the best decisions I made was to leave the priesthood it just for me and my spiritual life it just does not represent the Gospel of Jesus Christ I think for many other people and I mean that not in a Pious way but very sincerely the values that I hold very dear are just not reflected in that institution the instructors in the Seminary I as as far as I can tell their view of the problem of abuse in the Catholic Church had a lot more to do with the idea that the church was under attack somehow by a hostile press by a secular World by an anti-catholic secular atheist front um if they were conservative it was liberal forces in society and if they were liberal it was conservative forces in society but they viewed the church as somehow above all of that and pure in a way essentially they the the story that they communicated was that the church was under attack and we were there to defend the church that we were militant soldiers uh being trained to defend the church from hostile forces that wanted to destroy the church's good works and so the narrative about abuse got wrapped up in that one victim shared with me about their meeting with the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago in which they told the Cardinal about their abuse and throughout the entire meeting the Cardinal simply nodded are you finished he asks are you finished the story is finished they go their separate ways no I'm sorry no I know this was a hard conversation simply are you finished and I think that that uh that incident is a pretty telling one I think that many priests and Bishops do have that attitude about victims they are they view them as an annoyance as a frustration to the supposedly good works that the church is otherwise doing and rather than engaging with them and viewing them as as what they are victims of a horrible crime that the church was complicit in and the church covered up for they view them as instead people who are attacking the church and hostile or nuisances so I contacted Archbishop Dolan now Cardinal Dolan and you know he was he was shocked you know and I want to come up and talk to you so he did and I remember the first meeting was very uh friendly and you know oh Kevin we all love you and all this stuff everyone's praying for you but I remember the second meeting I came out to him about the sexual abuse and I could see uh Timothy Dolan's Face Drop okay he's not very good at hiding his emotions and he was stunned I could tell he felt very uncomfortable and it was a shock to him which you know I can understand but it was interesting the relationship definitely changed after that and I remember I very sincerely asked well you know Archbishop I know with sexual abuse victims the diocese wants you to contact your sexual um assault victim assistance person for the diocese whatever the title is I don't remember and I'm like should I contact her you know I want to like I wanted to do the right thing very sincerely I wasn't holding anything against him I just wanted to do what was right and I looking back now his response to me I feel was really bad and it was self-serving for him and the diocese because he was like well I would think about that a lot Kevin you know it's your choice he did say but if you come back and you know and if you told them and that gets out to people I don't know and when I think about it it wasn't a very pastoral or caring response for me because of course it would have been doing the proper thing it was more or less I think fears he had that people would find out about this and I was someone who was well known and well respected so was kind of self-serving I'll be honest and again the more I got out of the clerical culture I got to see him and other people and the institution for what it is and that is often not very authentic like I really gave the best years of my life to the church and the church meant everything to me and my family and when I needed my church they weren't there if you're part of an organization or a system or a network when it's threatened if the threat comes from inside you're going to isolate that threat and if it comes from the outside you circle the wagons because all of a sudden the institution of the organization takes on a Persona of itself it takes on an entity or identification of its own and it's not the sum total of all the people in it but it becomes like the concept of a corporation is when an org when something like that has to have legal identity they call it a corporation from the word body it's a human beings have rights and obligations now you have a non-human entity that has the same thing this was the Roman Catholic church because the Roman Catholic Church is the largest denomination on Earth it's the biggest corporation in the world and it's a monarchy there was sexual abuse going on throughout history that's there's a there's a lot of documentary evidence of that I started doing the research the way I had been trained going backwards and I kept going until I ended in the fourth Century with the Synod of Elvira and I said well this is interesting you know this stuff has been going on for a long time the the ecclesiastical world has tried to do anything to shift the blame to admit to minimize the issue to shift the blame and to exonerate themselves because one reason only because this seriously seriously threatens the strength the image The Prestige and the power of the ecclesiastical structure you know big time if you were a cleric and you grew up in that era you didn't even talk about sex because that was a sin the Bishops when they communicate with each other they had a whole string of euphemisms that they'd use they use either Latin words for example they'd say father has a problem de sexto d-e-s-e-x-t-o that didn't refer to not sex but the sixth commandment and the sixth commandment which says Thou shalt not commit adultery essentially has been interpreted to mean you can't do anything sexual and they still use that in the code of canon law today clerics who are guilty of violating children in violations of the sixth commandment pretty broad so the average late person didn't know what the hell that meant or they would use a whole string of you know father has interpersonal problems he has excessive affection they have moral issues the whole terminology for clerics having sex with children was a was a euphemism the Abominable crime that even God will not forgive well that was sex with kids and you don't you don't find explicit references to human sexuality in any ecclesiastical documentation I mean the male and the female members member of what the Knights of Columbus no you know what they're talking about they're talking about sexual organs they use them in reports they use them in letters in in speaking you know and they would cover up and minimize what was going well father only he had some improper touches well when you find out what these improper touches were they were improper they were touches but you call it rape the church's position is very secure um and so I think people who are genuinely worried that um by allying with law enforcement say to hold the church accountable for sexual abuse if they're genuinely worried that that the church will go away and all the good things about the church will go away as a result of that I think they should just look at the last 2000 years it's I mean it's lasted and uh it's very good at at lasting um I don't think it's under any real Financial threat um a because it's a private institution and it's uh it has a religious exemption they really are able to use their position to make to make money um and you can argue yeah well as they should to you know keep their institutions going and to promote um all the good works that they do but it also then feeds back into just like it means that when a victim comes forward to the church and reports that they were abused by one of their priests it means that they can throw some of the best lawyers that money can buy at them and force them to stop and be silent they had a Playbook that they still use which is denial minimization and there are plenty of instances of civil cases where they would go after the victims they would investigate the victims they would try to find something on them or on their parents or on their families the fact that we have produced as many dysfunctional priests has a lot to do with the training system with the image of what the priesthood is with the image of what the church is no matter how bad you were or what you did the church would not deprive a priest of his priesthood thought that was the the greatest gift you could get and it was so important that no matter what you are if you join the Gestapo you can't be deprived and there were priests in Germany the brown shirt priests they call them who were involved in the SS and in the gestapo and wore the uniforms and they were not layicized abuse in the Catholic church is not the result of just individualized weird people who slipped through the cracks abuse in the Catholic church is a coordinated project and it gets difficult at a certain point to talk about a a like version of the church or a pure part of the church that doesn't engage in that at all that like the non-abuse part of the church because it's the same people who are running so much of it um and who are doing this on purpose this is planned and coordinated and thought out it's not like it just happened and we're oh no we're throwing our hands up in the air how do we respond to this crisis that just emerged out of nowhere no you knew what was happening all along because you've been burying it and covering it up for years and threatening victims and throwing lawyers at them and making them so demoralized and feel so much despair that they kill themselves or overdose on drugs it's a it's a project of Silence that um Bishops and Priests and others who work to cover up abuse intentionally engaged in and so any Bishop today who talks about all of the great reforms that they've instituted ask them like who was there when they were instituting it the same Bishops who covered it up why should we simply take their word for it that they've made these reforms when we've seen all along that they haven't I ultimately realized uh that to be a priest meant to my nose would hit the marble if I were to be ordained and I would be there prostrate in front of that Bishop and give the rest of my life to him obedience every he would have complete control over everything and I looked at my Bishop and you know for a while I think well if I just make it I keep my head down I don't cause too much trouble I could be part of the reform I could like you know you know maybe not at first right but I could get to being a pastor and then I can start making decisions that you know I actually have a little bit of power over but it always gets deferred and always gets pushed down the road like well I'll wait till I'm at a parish I'll wait till I'm like a pastor I'll wait till I can like climb up and I didn't really have ambition to like be a bishop or anything um and the idea of like spending the rest of my life chasing the fleeting chance of being a reformer um didn't seem like likely and it seemed instead my nose would hit that marble I would rise beholden to this man that I had very little respect for because I saw how he had handled the abuse crisis and I saw that his main interests were Financial or avoiding litigation avoiding the blowback even just negative press not healing not compassion for the victims not Justice for the offenders I didn't want to be holding to that if you look in spite of the efforts to integrate lay people into the government to integrate women into the government of the Catholic Church the stratification is still there because the top of the Heap is still the same and I think I think and this may sound insane to people that are the only way it's going to be different is if you get rid of the monarchy the church is set up that the ordained of the clergy the hierarchy has control and and they don't want to lose that and that's what the history of the institution has been it isn't a place that's super collegial or more democratic it's very it's the structure compared to most other Mainline Christian churches the people really have the the some Authority about their Church be it who they select all of those things that's not the structure of Catholicism I'm pretty pessimistic that it can change and that there will be change I remember being in a meeting with archbishopalist techie a woman from the creditors committee who was also a victim and myself the diocese was saying we're not going to release any records because we don't want to hurt you people anymore which gets me angry to this day the reason they don't want to release any more records was not to help me it wasn't to show pastoral care for me it was to cover their ass and we shared our stories and of how we were abused to the Archbishop and he listened to those stories and then we said we're here because releasing those records will help us okay we we want Total transparency and it was beautiful the woman I was with said I am no longer a Roman Catholic she goes to some Assembly of God Church and she told her horrific story of the abuse the hands of Donald mizinski and she was a very infirmed girl it was barbaric what she went through even compared to me and she shared with archbishopless techie this is what we're asking of from the church she said when I was a Catholic kid believe it or not one of my favorite things to do was to go to confession which both Catholic people don't like it's the one of the more stressful things for a kid but she said I'd go in there I'd share what I did wrong and yes it was embarrassing and stressful but when I walked out after being absolved I felt so good again to get rid of all this stuff she said so beautifully it made me cry she said that's what we as victims are asking of you just get on your knees air everything don't hold documents don't lie to us that that's going to help us get on your knees ask for repentance and you'll feel so much better your church will be because of the clerical culture because of control Power Pride all of this they simply cannot do that whether it's clergy sexual abuse whether it's about lack of intimacy and people not being faithful to celibacy because they're what's called human beings all of that stuff so they lose their image they're so fearful of that and most importantly that they would lose the power the control and the the resources that are poor to them that's what they're most afraid of I don't think the hierarchy of changed they don't get it because if they got it you wouldn't have things like listeki refusing to cooperate you wouldn't have the bishop spending tens of millions of dollars on lawyers to pound the victims into the ground I have very little confidence that the church has actually instituted rail reforms uh to address abuse in its myths I don't think they are serious about the reality of predators already active in very important places in diocese and religious orders and in the Vatican they aren't serious about confronting an organized block of predators in their midst and the Bishops who cover up for them and as much as they say that they've achieved so many great things I think time will tell because it takes people a long time to come forward about abuse and so in the decades to come we will learn more and more about what has been going on this entire time since 2002. that's why they've been on the defensive for the past 38 years because the victims have broken out of the the deference they've changed the whole the whole approach it's like one little guy getting in a bulldozer and going up against Mount Everest but he keeps at it and pretty soon Mount Everest starts to have a hole in the side and that's made the difference and that's why today in 2022 it's drastically different than I imagined it ever would be when I get involved in this in 85 I never ever thought I'd see some of the things I've seen I think if people are tired of this and want to make an impact you're not going to overthrow the hierarchy that's got to come within the institution and that's why I'm so pessimistic but if a normal layperson like my mom and dad okay I'll use them as an example when they retired they went to mass every morning who Usher Parish Council stewardship committees baked for the bake sale we're talking everything they realized how little power basically no power they had over the situation I and all of us encountered but what did my mom and dad decide to do they sent their envelope back empty okay with big zeros on it but they wrote why they weren't contributing okay that's what more people have to do have some guts have some balls and say no more of this I have many close friends who were parishioners of mine that are practicing cow I've never tried to destroy their faith or participation in Catholicism but I just know for myself and others I've talked to especially with the issue of you know being sexually abused as a kid my journey has had to move on and it's taken me almost until now to become more outspoken because I still lived with that fear and a lot of just kind of blind respect and ah you know I can't rock the boat but I just think you know there's a scripture that says if to the one who's been given more more is expected I've met people that were sexually abused by priests who've taken their lives they've you know ruined relationships they have their families don't want anything to do with them and as much I've gone through a lot of Anguish my story is one of survival it's brought some wonderful people into my life so I figure hey I've been given more and you know I I'm so far beyond some of this now that it's just time to speak out and be more of an advocate [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Nate's Mission

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Id: gs0__4Cn1j8

Length: 68min 33sec (4113 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023