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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…