Hurting in the Church. Fr. Thomas Berg
as well as that of her perpetrator—we’ll call him Father Bill. In order to comply with her request, I have altered the details of the setting in which her story unfolds. Those alterations do not in the least alter the content of her personal story.
Jean’s abuse happened when she was between the ages of fourteen and twenty, in the late sixties into the early seventies, and her allegations have been deemed credible by authorities within the diocese where her abuse occurred.
Why she did not report the abuse sooner will become clear.
How grace has triumphed through her darkness will also become readily evident.
This is Jean’s story.
Jean is in her mid-sixties and still radiates a kind of farm-girl wholesomeness. She is quick to smile, her eyes are bright, and she expresses herself spontaneously with small-town simplicity. It did not take long to discover in her a vast reservoir of spiritual depth and insight emerging from her personal experience of repeated sexual abuse. She bore the hurt for nearly forty years until the recurring nightmares were too much for her. Her personal tragedy did not stop her from becoming a nurse, marrying, and raising a family.
Jean began our meeting by showing me her first Communion photo taken with her classmates, the girls in dainty white first Communion dresses, the boys with meticulously combed hair in their white suits. Father Bill, the proud pastor—in his cassock, with hands folded reverently—stood behind them, beaming for the photo, flanked at right and left by altar boys. Jean identified herself and her twin brother for me. Then, referring to Father Bill, she explained: “This priest baptized me. He heard my first confession. He gave me my first Communion, and he buried my little sister.” Father Bill was the priest at the altar when Jean and her husband were united in marriage. He had been a priest at Jean’s parish—most of the time as its pastor—for more than forty-seven years until he eventually retired in the local community.
And in such a small community—Norman Rockwellian in its wholesomeness and simplicity—it was no surprise that Father Bill was a celebrity. His long years as pastor gave him a kind of mythical stature. He was a constant presence in the local media and had an in with most community leaders.
The parish also had a beautiful Marian shrine on the property that Jean absolutely loved. The parish church, offices, grounds, and shrine required a small body of employees to whom Father Bill offered a generous daily wage. He was especially fond of hiring teenage girls.
The summer Jean turned fourteen, Father Bill personally invited her to join the staff. Jean was thrilled. Her pious Catholic upbringing had instilled in her a lively faith, and a profound veneration for her pastor, who, although not a regular presence in Jean’s home, had nonetheless been very close to the family. The first sexual assault occurred on her second day on the job. Jean recounts:
The second day of my employment, he entered the tiny building where [I was working]. He pushed me back to the counter and thrust his tongue into my mouth.
I gagged.
It tasted so bad from pipe and cigar tobacco. I thought I was going to vomit, but I didn’t. I remember thinking: If you slap a priest, do you go to hell? I didn’t know what to say or do. He just turned around and walked out. The abuse continued and worsened. I told him to stop, but he continued to abuse me. He was forty-five and I was fourteen. That’s how it started.
Eventually Father Bill would rationalize the abuse by chiding Jean, saying he didn’t want her to be a “cold fish” when she got married. He also pointed out to her that another teenage girl who had worked before Jean’s time at the parish had, unlike Jean, “responded well” to Father Bill’s treatment of her. As Jean explains, Father Bill sought out every possible opportunity to abuse her:
About once a month Father Bill would take the group of four or five teens who worked for him to a nearby movie theater after closing. I didn’t want to go. My work uniform was a blue skirt and a white blouse. No matter where I sat, he made sure that he moved people so that he could sit next to me. He would always sit on my left side, which allowed him to move his right hand from my knee to my thigh, and then to my underpants. I felt like, “What’s wrong with me—that he does it to me and not to everybody else?”
When I was fifteen years old Father Bill called my parents one evening to say that he would take me home after work that night, saving them the long trip to town. What he didn’t tell them was that he was planning on stripping me of my blouse and bra, and touching me. And as always he put his tongue in my mouth. When we finally got home, he sat down at our dining room table and ate homemade chocolate-chip cookies and drank coffee with my mom and dad while I cried in my room.
The abuse went on for six years. As she grew older, the episodes took on more of the character of attacks—a word Jean used several times in our interview. She would often end up going home with nicks, scratches, and bruises:
Only once did I think he was going to rape me. He stopped before it got to that point. He was noticeably shaken by what he had attempted to do. I can’t tell you how many times he attacked me. And yet, there is a part of me that respected him; he was a priest.
For the perpetrator, on a very deep psychological level, abuse is about power, control, and self-affirmation. Father Bill seems to have been no exception, and perhaps it should not surprise us that he went so far as to use sacramental confession to manipulate Jean into believing that she—not he—was the guilty party:
One of the things that he did—I never understood at the time how bad it was—he would come to me and say, “I’m going to hear confessions now; would you like to come? I think it’s a good time for you to go.” So I would go. And I would say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” And from then on, I never said a word. He told me all the sins I had committed. And I didn’t even understand what those words meant. And I was like—okay, he was there; he knows; he’s the priest. He said my sins were forgiven, and I left. And I would pray my three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and three Glory Bes.
Jean observed that such sacrilegious confessions happened more than once:
And he didn’t take any responsibility for what had happened. He didn’t say, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done this.” He never, ever apologized. Ever. He never once said, “Oh, that was wrong.” Never.
In addition to the sexual abuse Jean endured, there were many other hurts. When her father passed away, for example, Father Bill came to the funeral home to lead the family and friends in prayer. At one point he invited Jean to approach the casket and kneel with him on the kneeler. She watched, horrified, as Father Bill extended his hand and gruffly smacked the folded hands of the cadaver four or five times: “You were a good man, Jim.” The slapping motions smeared away enough makeup to expose the blackened skin of Jean’s father’s folded left hand. Jean broke down into uncontrollable sobs, but never said a word. Reflecting back on such a painful episode today, Jean sees it as one more instance of how this priest “could never, ever, keep his hands where they belonged.”
Ultimately, after Father Bill’s death, he was buried in the cemetery in proximity to her mom and dad; she had to walk past his tombstone on the way to her parents’ graves. She could not get away from this man, it seemed:
I was so mad … and what came to my mind was: if I would vomit on his tombstone, would my stomach acid be strong enough to erase his name? So nobody would know who he is. Why did he have to be buried there? It just wasn’t right.
It would take most of Jean’s adult life, much prayer, and much patience to finally receive the grace of forgiving her perpetrator.