UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Now that I’ve finished reading Norbert Krapf’s Catholic Boy Blues: A Poet’s Journal of Healing (Nashville: Greystone, 2014), I thought I’d share some parting thoughts about the book with you. I’ve blogged about it previously here and here.
As my previous postings about Catholic Boy Blues have noted, Krapf grew up in a closely knit German Catholic farm community in rural Indiana. It was in the context of that community, a beloved community, that he experienced repeated sexual abuse at the hands of his parish priest. He was not alone in the experience: as he knew at the time and then as he also learned down the road when he sought to come to terms with the childhood abuse, the priest was molesting other boys, too. In fact, he apparently abused boys for a number of years during which he pastored the parish in which Krapf grew up.
Catholic Boy Blues is Krapf’s attempt as an adult to come to terms with what happened to him as a child. It’s an attempt to exorcise the memory and effects of his abuse at the hands of a religious leader his parents and the rest of his community implicitly trusted. To banish the harm done to him — to remember it in a way that opens the painful memories to healing — he employs the poetic device of inviting a Greek chorus of voices, as it were, to mull over what happened to the devout young altar boy treated as an object by a grown man, the same trusted religious figure whose hands moved from grasping his child’s penis to putting holy oil on the head of a dying parishioner, blessing and baptizing the new-born babe, and consecrating the union of a man and a woman in marriage, as Krapf tells us in a poem entitled “The Hand” (49).
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