JACKSON (MS)
Associated Press
Dec. 19, 2019
By Juliet Linderman
Mark Belenchia didn’t stay quiet.
He told his mother and his uncle, in the mid-1970s. He told a parish priest, then the vicar general, in 1985. Still, the clergyman Belenchia said sexually abused him when he was a child in Shelby, Mississippi, remained in collar and cassock.
“It showed me that the system says you’re insignificant. It doesn’t matter what you said, or what happened to you,” Belenchia said.
Belenchia would not be ignored. Over the years, his quest for answers, to try and make sense of his own personal tragedy, transformed into a crusade against clergy abuse that’s become his life’s focus. Activism, he said, gives him purpose and direction. Through this work he makes use of his pain, to help other survivors struggling to cope with theirs.
The abuse began when Belenchia was 12 and lasted three years, he said, maybe four. But the events of his youth cast a shadow over his life for decades after.
He felt shame and guilt for allowing himself to get close the priest, who’d decorated the church rectory like a clubhouse and plied young boys from the neighborhood with liquor.
He felt anguish and panic when, at 43, Belenchia plunged into a depressive episode that resulted in hospitalization, intensive psychiatric treatment and an extended leave from his systems engineer position at IBM that eventually turned into medical retirement.
He felt defeated when a bishop told him his story was a one-off, “an anomaly,” and resigned when he reluctantly accepted a $44,000 settlement from the Diocese of Jackson in exchange for a promise not to tell. (In a statement to The Associated Press, a lawyer for the diocese acknowledged Belenchia’s abuse, and said the diocese has not included a confidentiality clause in any settlement agreement since 2002 unless it was insisted upon by the victim.)
He felt empowered to go public after reading an article about two local brothers suing the church, and validated when five men from across Mississippi came to him afterward with stories of their own abuse at the hands of the same clergyman.
And then, Belenchia got angry.
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