St. Cronan's Priest Defends Work of Catholic Pastors

By Jeremy Kohler
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
January 29, 2016

http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/reviews/st-cronan-s-priest-defends-work-of-catholic-pastors/article_9346728b-2fa1-5f24-a461-f8906f9444bb.html

Priests are supposed to love children.

That’s the message of a self-published book, “Are You Still a Priest?” by the Rev. Gerald J. Kleba, pastor of St. Cronan Roman Catholic Church in St. Louis.

About 14 years ago, Kleba took over as pastor of a parish devastated by sexual abuse and cover-up.

The sex abuse scandal was erupting in the Boston Archdiocese, thanks to the Boston Globe’s reporting into its failures to protect children from predator priests. In the last week of February 2002, as the Post-Dispatch was preparing its own story about secret settlements by the St. Louis Archdiocese to victims of sexual abuse, the archdiocese removed two priests from their assignments.

One was the Rev. Joseph Ross, pastor of St. Cronan. The archdiocese had assigned him there in 1991 after he had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a minor; the archdiocese did not tell members of his new parish he could be a threat.

Kleba stepped into a church that saw about half of its 400 families walk away and never return.

Most of those who remained were angry. They didn’t want a new pastor so quickly. Not one forced on them by an institution that had betrayed them.

Taking nothing away from the horrors of abuse, or the work of journalists, there’s room for a reminder that most priests are good guys, Kleba has said.

He thinks the public is yearning for stories that will help “restore their hope that good people do exist, after all, in these troubled times,” he said in a press release about the book.

The memoir contains eight stories, each sketched with loving detail.

There is the girl to whom he penned letters from Santa Claus after the death of her brother. The little girl who brought him to school on Grandparents’ Day and brought him a cupcake with pink icing. The little boy with whom he posed for a photograph for the cover of the YMCA brochure.

“Some of the richest and most generous people in St. Louis are going to get a copy of this with our picture on the cover,” he told the boy. “So that means that thousands of people who don’t know us at all only know one thing about us.”

The boy answered, “They know we’re friends?”

The most touching memory concerns his first days at St. Cronan, which is in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood. Church secretary Delores Blount told him if he wanted to get off to the best start, he shouldn’t hang around St. Cronan.

He should head to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital.

There he found the parents of Jeremiah Busiek, 7, who was suffering from a brain tumor. The family had been longtime members of St. Cronan.

As he entered the hospital, “I too was anguished, not knowing if I would be welcomed and embraced as a healing presence or found questionable, maybe even despicable, because of the stain of abuse” caused by Ross.

Rebuilding St. Cronan started in that hospital room.

He gave Jeremiah his first Holy Communion that day.

“Here I was presenting myself out of the blue to these people, who knew nothing about me,” he wrote.

Jeremiah lived for another year. When he died, his parents asked Kleba to join them in the most intimate of acts: bathing their son.

Kleba’s plain writing and clear memories carry the stories.

“It was reverent; it was slow, still, silent; all of us doing what we had never done before with profound homage for the sacred and tender teamwork. After dressing him in underwear we wrapped him in a soft blue blanket and placed him in (his mother’s) arms in a rocking chair. The view from the third floor was of a blustery March day in St. Louis.”

It’s a beautiful and tender scene that lets this caring priest recapture a little of the spotlight.