UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Michelle Boorstein
For decades, Michael Mack imagined conversations with the priest who had invited him, a skinny 11-year-old, into the rectory to make costumes for a church play, molested him and then vanished.
Throughout Mack’s childhood in the Washington area and then later as an adult in Massachusetts, the unanswered questions ran through his life “like a thread,” he said.
Sometimes he’d picture himself asking the priest something basic: What was that about? Or the priest apologizing. Other times, his visions were detailed: the two finding that they shared things in common, like poetry. Or when the clergy sex-abuse scandal exploded in the early 2000s, Mack envisioned himself with the priest on a traveling, healing church road show.
But it wasn’t until a few years ago, when he attempted to actually have those conversations, that Mack, now 57, began healing. And for the past two years, he has been telling the story of that journey in a one-man play, “Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith.” The show, which Mack is bringing to his home region Saturday for the first time, recounts his attempts to contact the priest, the unexpected people he meets on that journey and the way forgiveness has helped loosen the grip abuse has had on his psyche.
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