SANTA FE (NM)
Santa Fe Reporter
February 6, 2019
By Matt Grubs
Jim Field loved going to church.
As a kid, he remembers waking for morning mass.
“The sun might just about be coming up. And I’d get in the bathtub, I’d clean myself up, I’d hop on my bike and ride to Sacred Heart Church in Farmington,” he says. “And I would sit and wait for mass. I just loved being there.”
It was around 1960 and the service, he recalls, was in Latin. He didn’t understand a word, but something about the ceremony—the quiet, the reverence—resonated with him.
He was 8 years old, getting ready to turn 9 in 1961, when the abuse happened. It was summer. Father Conran Runnebaum, a Franciscan priest, had only been a cleric since 1955. Farmington was his second assignment, starting in 1958.
Field is not sure how many times the priest abused him. Once for sure. Maybe three times, he thinks.
“Conran had me pull down my pants and he pulled up his habit, like a cassock,” Field begins. He had no idea what was happening.
“How would I know what was going on? Except, I do remember at one point, enters Miguel … and he’s horrified,” Field says of another priest, Miguel Baca. Horrified—but also the same man who would later expose himself to, and further abuse, Field.
“I have a memory of later, in the bathroom, which you accessed from outside the church in those days … but it was in that bathroom where those …” Field trails off.
It would be 40 years before the memories, in terrifying flashes, started to come back to him. “My knees went weak and I fell to the floor and began to sob and cry. … It was like lava in a volcano coming up through me,” he says.
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