TUCSON (AZ)
The Worthy Adversary
Posted by Joelle Casteix on November 13, 2013
I could tell exactly what kind of person she was when she started wagging her finger at me. She was mean.
I hate finger-waggers. My dearly departed cat had the perfect reaction: If I ever wagged a finger at him, he’d attack (playfully, of course. But it was still an attack). Even my sister, as a super-wise 10-year-old, told me at age five, “You may be pointing one finger at me, but you’re pointing three fingers at yourself.”
Indeed.
It was last Sunday and I was standing outside of Dove of Peace Lutheran Church in Tucson. I had recently learned that their choir director Eric Holtan is a convicted child sex offender. He is possibly in violation of his probation—he is not registered anywhere, as ordered by the courts. I was there to talk to parishioners about the news, tell them how to report abuse (by Holtan or anyone else), and show them safe ways to talk to their kids about abuse. I also wanted to talk to church leaders, who had not responded to my emails and phone calls, to make sure that men like Holtan are not hired into positions of power in this church or any other.
I met a lovely family and a few nice parishioners who were anxious to talk. One women told me that her daughter had been molested as a child by a choir director. We hugged, sharing our mutual loss. I also learned that most of the families at the church only learned about Holtan’s conviction the day before, when they received a letter from the pastor in anticipation of my visit. If I had never raised the issue, would church members still be in the dark?
There were critics, too. There was the man who simply told me, “Eric is my friend. I don’t care what you say.” He was followed by people who politely declined to talk to me, saying that they knew and
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