Keith C. Burris: The sins of the fathers

By Keith C. Burris
Post-Gazette
March 09, 2019

https://bit.ly/2ESpZ75

I was painting an attic wall, actually slathering on KILZ before applying paint, and was happy for an interruption. It was from my brother John — a text. Had I read the list of clergy abusers released by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus? It was printed in the Columbus Dispatch. My brother knew a couple of the names. He thought I might know more.

I did.

I attended St. Charles Preparatory School in Columbus, a truly great school then and now and a place for which I have abiding affection. Back in the day, St. Charles also had a college, a minor seminary, in the same building. I knew eight of the names on the list — some because they were what we called then “the collegians” and some because they were faculty members. One, recently accused, and eventually beloved by the St. Charles community, was the supervisor of my dorm. Seeing his name stunned me. We crossed swords many times and he threatened to expel me at least once. But we also had long talks about poetry, writing, and politics. I admired him.

Two people on the list did not surprise me. One was a collegian and one (Fr. X) the onetime assistant pastor of my church. The first was gifted, a charmer, and the last person I would have thought a predator — until I saw something that much later clicked in my head. The latter you would not think a predator either. But a guy with a screw loose, yes. His thing was the Boy Scouts. He was a Boy Scout chaplain.

When I lived in Connecticut, we had a local doctor, another “good guy,” who was heavily into Scouting, and, as it turned out, child porn. He was sentenced to prison. Did he diminish Scouting in Connecticut? Not the idea. But certainly the organization.

Did these priests diminish Catholicism in central and east central Ohio? Not the idea. But certainly the organization.

They operated with impunity, in church after church, for decades. None went to prison.

Magnitude of the problem

It is also true that almost none of us, in the day that these Columbus priests had an active ministry, knew the full extent of the monster we were dealing with. This is not an excuse for all the bishops and archbishops who enabled abuse and abusers for what we now know to be two or three generations. At a certain point, they had seen so much they should have been aware and responsible. But I think many people in the laity sensed they were dealing with troubled men but did not know how to help them.

This was true of my parents, who were distinguished Catholic lay people with deep, deep roots in Catholicism. My mother was, for many years, an obsessively dedicated religious education director. Her father had been a patron of churches and priests broken by loneliness or drink, though always anonymously. My grandfather’s rule was that all good works should be hidden.

My Dad had perhaps the deepest religious faith of any human being I have ever known, and he, taking after his parents (his mother made religious vestments) was a sort of collector of priests. He and my mother, whose marriage was, I now see, cemented by Catholicism, created a sort of safe space for priests in their home — a guy could come and have a drink, listen to show tunes, and never have to talk shop.

My mother knew there was something seriously wrong with Fr. X when he was at our parish. She went to higher authorities to warn them. But she had no evidence and could barely articulate her sense of foreboding. My Dad simply could not face such things. And I think the sort of revelations coming out now, in this latest wave of uncovered abuse (some of the allegations in the Diocese of Pittsburgh are really of sadism and torture), would simply be beyond his capacity to process. I bless him in the heavens for that.

I am thankful that my father did not live to see the church he loved so deeply and personally so debauched and disgraced.

Father Pseudo

One person on the new Columbus list was a lifelong friend of my parents. When they were all young, my Dad and he went skiing together. He was funny and he was hip. One day my Dad and I visited him in Columbus and he played a record for us that he’d just bought and said we had to hear. It was called “Alice’s Restaurant.” I still remember my Dad’s laughter in that rectory parlor.

My brother named this priest “Fr. Pseudo.” For every year he went to Europe and every year he came back with new slides of frescoes in ancient churches which he came to our home to review and display. When the lights went down for the slideshow, my mother was the first to escape, via the kitchen route. And then my brother. And then me. That left my Dad to endure the travelogue and tell Fr. Pseudo that this year’s slides revealed the best damn frescoes yet.

But I never thought Fr. Pseudo could be a molester, a child abuser, or a sexual predator. And maybe he wasn’t. There he was on the list, though, as one about whom the diocese itself said credible evidence of abuse had been given.

Due process

There is a serious due process problem in so many of these cases. Fr. Pseudo is dead. We don’t know precisely what the accusation is. And the alleged incidents in these cases run the gamut, from inappropriate passes made at physically grown men to rapes of children. There is a difference between inappropriate behavior and the taking of innocence and childhood itself. Surely not every fool is a creep and not every creep a monster.

And yet I find no case that I have read of, in Atlanta, in Pittsburgh, in Columbus, where an incident was not part of a pattern and on some level intentional. Some of these priests are lucky to be dead. They need not answer what they cannot answer.

And I see a church organization that, after 20 years of shocking scandal and sin, is still in very intentional damage-control mode. A generation of bishops enabled this abuse. The next generation was complicit. They are still covering for the sins of the fathers rather than repenting.

I once interviewed the late, fearless founder of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), Barbara Blaine — a Toledoan and herself a victim of abuse. For her, the mission was to tell every story. The truth would set souls free and maybe the church, too. One day. But I think now the goal ought to be repentance. The church itself has still not repented.

I don’t want Fr. Pseudo to have been a predator. I recall being ill as child and my parents sending him to my sick room to bless me — in Latin. But the other day I remembered that one summer day while I was cutting the grass he arrived at my parents’ home with a companion who was a teen-aged boy — a “troubled youth.” Fr. Pseudo was “counseling,” we were told.

Cover your eyes, Dad.

I feel compelled, somehow, to end this with a litany of saints — priests I knew at St. Charles and in my hometown who kept their vows and gave their very lives as servant leaders: My parents’ great old friend Monsignor Joe McGlynn who, when faced with a devout atheist at our wedding, said: “Pour me a scotch and we’ll talk about it.” My great mentor and teacher at St. Charles, Fr. William Dunn, my dear friend to this day. He drove, several times, two hours each way to visit my dying mother in the hospital and drove farther to say her funeral Mass, though he never knew her. My childhood pastor, Fr. John Graf, who taught small-town Ohio Protestants about Catholicism and Catholics about Protestants, in a village of much religious bigotry. In later life Fr. Graf taught the poorest of the poor in Appalachia not how to pray but how to grow their own food and survive. And there were many others who did good and did it right and “knew it was never enough.”

There must be due process. There must also be institutional repentance and penance. And we must be able to see resilient goodness as well as unfathomable sin.