A DARK JOURNEY OF THE SOUL

By Jason Berry. Jason Berry is the author most recently of "Louisiana Faces: Images From a Renaissance" (LSU Press),...

  I first visited Catholic Worker House on a biting winter night in
early 1990, one of several trips I made to Chicago during five years
of research about sexual abuse by clergy nationwide and the church's
efforts to cover it up. The National Catholic Reporter had sent me to
Chicago, where Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was confronting a welter of
legal actions involving sexually aberrant priests.

The Worker House, occupying the former site of the old St. Elizabeth's
convent on South Honore Street, was a welcome place. The director,
Barbara Blaine, had invited me to save motel expenses by staying in
the convent, which had become a shelter for the homeless run by The
Catholic Worker, a movement that follows a gospel of living and
working with the poor. The guests, as they were called--a dozen women
and twice as many children--had just finished dinner when I arrived.

    Blaine, then a St. Louis University graduate in her mid-30s, had
been sexually abused as a girl by a priest in Toledo. Through The
Catholic Worker, she had found a road toward healing. As she
encouraged homeless women to regroup--"to strive for something better
and make the most of life," she would recall--"I found my words
speaking to myself," she said. "Dealing with people who showed their
woundedness made me confront my own woundedness. Helping them enabled
me to challenge my pain. The work was consoling and healing."

The spartan room where I stayed at Catholic Worker House unloosed
memories of benevolent experiences I had had with nuns in grade
school, and the priests who influenced me at Jesuit High in New
Orleans. In conversations at night with Blaine and other members of
the Worker, people who were committed to the notion that if you want
peace, work for justice, I felt a presence of the church at its
deepest.

Those moments of spiritual reassurance were rare as I gathered
material that later became the book "Lead Us Not Into Temptation:
Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children." During those years
I was shadowed by the awareness of evil, something I had never felt so
closely, and in the process my spiritual moorings had become
dislodged. Sexual secrets of priests and bishops had leaked into my
life from cops, nuns, lawyers, detectives, social workers, ex-priests,
prosecutors, therapists and a number of whistle-blowing priests,
driven by moral outrage. At first, those secrets gave me a morbid
fascination about the internal dynamics of the church, "the sweating
surface of a culture that is corrupting," in the words of psychologist
Eugene Kennedy. The culture beckoned a muckraking journalist, but as
the scope of facts surfaced I also felt an immense disgust, coupled
with embarrassment about the way the church was run.

As my sense of the church changed, so did my own spiritual interior.
The altars, icons, mosaics, narratives and rites of Catholicism have
an imagery in the mind of faith. I was excavating a second church--a
shadow church that most Catholics rarely encounter, an ecclesiastical
culture honeycombed with sexual secrecy, dripping lies, lies and more
lies. As I continued the research through freelance newspaper
assignments, these two ideas clashed within me: the church I had
known, and the church I discovered.

Listening to the survivors of abuse --as those who struggled to get
past the sense of victimization called themselves--intensified the
splitting of my own spiritual life. Raised in a loving home, I felt
shaped, as it were, to accept divine love as pristine and durable
despite travails in life or horrors in the world. But now when I
attended mass, the continuity of my spiritual past sank in a gulf of
sadness. I knew too many secrets. Bishops reminded me of mobsters.
While proclaiming the sanctity of life in the womb, they had recycled
child molesters into the church community and approved legal
counterattacks against the survivors. How does one honor a teaching
authority that flouts its own rules? I was probing a power structure
that seemed pathological.

My case may have been extreme, but it mirrors, I believe, the
experience of many Catholics whose faith functions in a wobbly truce
between the Gospels' message of a many-sided divine love and the
ecclesiastical authority of the church hierarchy, an all-male,
unmarried power structure that seeks control over the most intimate
realities of the body. The 1968 papal encyclical condemning
birth-control devices, for example, created an enormous credibility
gap with the Catholic laity. There is a growing literature on the
psychology of control mechanisms in the hierarchy by Kennedy, Andrew
Greeley, Garry Wills and A.W. Richard Sipe, among other Catholic
thinkers.

In a 1986 Commonweal essay that had a profound effect on my thinking
at the time, theologian James Gaffney assessed the declining number of
people going to confession and attributed it to changing perceptions
of sin. The institutional church, he argued, betrayed an insensitivity
to women and ignorance of married life--a mentality I saw magnified in
the sex-abuse scandals and cover-ups. "Catholic moral thinking
habitually understood sin in relation to sinners more than in relation
to the victims of sin," he wrote. The victims, the sinned-against, did
not find solace in the confessionals. The sinned-against were a
primary focus in my reporting and in the book I eventually published.

More than a few survivors I interviewed were like Vietnam veterans
with post-traumatic flashbacks. My thoughts occasionally reeled with
images of priests molesting kids in sacred spaces, images drawn from
graphic legal testimony. Recovering from such severe childhood abuse
is a superhuman task. There is a psychiatric term for its worst
ravages: soul murder. If one is taught to believe in a loving God, and
that belief is stolen, the promise beyond life is empty. Abused by
priests and embittered toward the church, some survivors had no faith;
others, like Barbara Blaine, struggled to redefine it.

In time spent away from her Worker duties, Blaine had begun casting
lines to others who had been molested by priests as children, trying
to make sense of shared trauma. In 1992 she founded SNAP, Survivors
Network of Those Abused by Priests, a nationwide support group and
public information clearinghouse. SNAP helped draw media coverage to
the scandal by organizing protest demonstrations when the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops gathered, and Blaine was part of the
dialogue with the Chicago Archdiocese as Cardinal Bernardin
established a review board for accusations against priests.

Most appalling to me was the bishops' refusal to accept full
responsibility and chart a path for change. Court documents revealed a
warped secrecy about a range of sexual behavior patterns: cover up,
deny, counterattack. A perverse irony, as Greeley wrote in the
National Catholic Reporter, was that improprieties of priests with
women drew punishment from bishops, while the behavior of gay clerics
was quietly ignored.

It should be emphasized that most gay people, like most heterosexuals,
do not molest children; pedophilia is a pathology, an illness with
criminal properties, that transcends sexual orientation. But the
presence of many gays in the priesthood--when weighed against the
Vatican's denunciations of homosexuality as "an objective moral
evil"--puts a spotlight on the larger crisis in clerical culture.
Studies estimate that a quarter to 40 percent of priests are
homosexual, although there are no definitive data. Older heterosexual
priests I interviewed were dispirited by the presence of so many
younger, openly gay clerics. I got to know an ex-Marine, quite
straight, who had been booted out of seminary for protesting gay peer
pressure. His plight was not unique.

The idea of a victimized culture assuming power and victimizing others
was not politically correct then, nor is it now. But what should a
writer do when confronted with reality? What I found was a culture of
gay priests that clashed with expectations of priestly life. When the
book came out in 1992, I drew criticism from orthodox corners for not
laying full blame on "the homosexual network" and from some gays who
attacked me as homophobic. But the problem, as I saw it, was not gay
people in the clergy but a clerical culture fraught with hypocrisy and
a calcified power structure, from the pope on down, that was out of
touch with the values embraced in the daily lives of believers. With a
background in political reporting, I wrote about the sexual behavior
patterns and concealment practices as a form of corruption.

The church's crisis lies in an ecclesiastical culture that has shunted
women to its margins and glorified life without sex as central to
religious calling. This is an archaic notion of virtue, the idea that
people who supposedly do not have sexual intimacy are the only ones
fit for religious life. Most Catholics would probably support an
option for celibate and married clergy to coexist; but lay people are
never asked. In a church desperate to ordain unmarried males,
seminaries draw from a restricted pool of candidates and attract many
men with psychosexual conflicts, as well as a disproportionate number
of gays. This situation won't change as long as celibacy is the law.

The book appeared during a storm of news reports about clergy sex
abuse. In 1992, the church had lost $400 million in legal and medical
costs from cases involving 400 priests. Today more than 1,000 priests
have been involved in legal actions, according to Dallas attorney
Sylvia Demarest, who has kept a database. Greeley, in a 1993 article,
estimated that 100,000 men and women had been abused by 2,500
priests--6 percent of priests in the United States, a percentage first
advanced by celibacy researcher A.W. Richard Sipe. Financial losses
have reached $1 billion, according to Rev. Thomas Doyle, who as the
canon lawyer for the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C.,
unsuccessfully entreated bishops in the mid-'80s to adopt a response
policy.

My book and other coverage of the scandal moved some dioceses to form
review boards, respond compassionately to those making accusations,
and to see that abusers received medical treatment without being
shielded from the courts. The good news, I suppose, is that most
bishops learned it is dangerous to give pedophiles renewed
opportunities for abuse.

"Lead Us Not Into Temptation" positioned me as a critic of bishops
with a fortress-church mentality, and I was much in demand for
interviews. Becoming an expert, a public-anyone, answering questions
posed by Katie, Oprah and others gave me a mingled sense of
achievement and detachment. I was glad my work was taken seriously.
Scores of readers contacted me, many of them survivors, in letters or
by phone, wanting to be heard. I felt oddly like a confessor, or
perhaps counter-confessor, hearing the sins of the church. I had no
clerical training and, of course, no absolution to give; still, I felt
a responsibility to listen. As I heard their stories, my
disenchantment with the power structure of the church kept growing. At
times I wondered if I could really call myself a Catholic.

In interviews, I attacked church leaders for a culture that harbored
child molesters. No interviewer ever asked: "With all that you've dug
up, why are you a Catholic?"

Just in case, I had a sound bite: "Well, we didn't give up on
democracy because of Watergate, and I won't give up on the church
because of corrupt bishops." But nobody asked the question. I finally
started using the line in answering other questions. Had anyone probed
the issue of my faith, I don't think I would have had the courage to
express doubt. In truth, I had a great hunger to believe. My issue was
not with God, after all, but the men who governed the church.

Then why not become a Lutheran or Methodist?

I found the beginnings of an answer in the words of an agnostic,
Albert Camus, the French novelist and political philosopher who wrote
about resisting evil in the search for an ethos of personal
responsibility.

"What is a rebel?" Camus wrote. "A man who says no; but whose refusal
does not imply a renunciation. Rebellion cannot exist without the
feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified." In some way,
I felt, my reporting on sexual deviancy in the clergy implied the
existence of a church whose moral presence was worth preserving, the
same church in which The Catholic Worker's Barbara Blaine could find
healing and purpose.

As my work on the book drew to a close in the fall of 1991, my wife
was in the final term of pregnancy with our second child. My
misgivings about the church had not changed; but as we talked about
names for the baby and began house-hunting, it felt as though a
chapter of life was closing.

On Oct. 11, Ariel was born with Down syndrome. I had only a vague
sense of the term as the pediatrician explained that our infant
daughter would be retarded. We had no warning; insurance had not
covered amniocentesis. In the heartache of those early hours, we
decided to inform our 7-year-old daughter about the baby's condition
only later, and in gradual stages, so that she would feel joy about
her new sister. The budding ballerina pranced down the hall outside
the incubation cribs where Ariel slept.

After 18 hours at the hospital, I went home to shower and gather items
to take back. A Federal Express driver arrived with an envelope from
New York: payment for the book, the largest check I had ever received.
I told God I would give back every cent to have a normal baby. And
then the years of search and anguish came crashing down like a tidal
wave. I was enraged at God, in a state that can only be called raw
fury, bellowing profanities, cursing God as I fell to my knees,
screaming Why? Why? Why? pounding the rug with my fist, sobbing and
screaming, until a blinding force hit like a thunderbolt, shoving me
back against the bed. I realized that Ariel was life, given by God,
and at that moment, wallowing in shame, flooded with thoughts of the
baby and the sorrow surrounding her arrival, I begged God's
forgiveness, praying to be a good father and provider.

Ariel also had a "septic defect," or perforation in the heart. The
cardiologist advised that the heart might perform a natural closure,
and one hole did close, but another opened. She was so frail, yet with
a sweetness and resilience that achieved rare beauty. Her needs were
immense. At age 2 she turned blue with pneumonia and went to the
hospital. A new cardiologist recommended immediate surgery, cautioning
that she might not survive. The alternative was to watch her die
slowly. In March 1994, she underwent open-heart surgery. Ariel
recovered, and went home after a week's stay.

She is 9 now, with a diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, an
inoperable lung disease. No physician will predict her life
expectancy. Some Down's children with her lung condition have lived
into adulthood, but every cold or virus runs the risk of sinking into
her chest; she takes several medications, and oxygen as needed. The
prayers I said in Ariel's infancy were laced with desperation. I went
to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, just outside the French Quarter, and
knelt at the shrine of St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases. I wanted my
daughter to live and be happy. Thus far, those prayers have been
answered, as best I can tell. In the last year she has grown an inch
and a half and added 10 pounds. In May she finished nursery school,
the only Down's child in her class, and is now enrolled at a special
school.

I wish I could say that this child's indomitable will to live inspired
her mother and me to a new threshold in our relationship. Raising a
handicapped child strains the best of marriages; ours had problems
before her birth which we were unable to resolve. In 1996 we divorced,
with shared custody.

Barbara Blaine left St. Elizabeth's in 1993 to attend law school at
DePaul. She is now an attorney with the public guardian's office, as
an advocate for abused and neglected children. Last spring we had
breakfast when I was in Chicago. She talked about her fiance and asked
about my children, and we had a few good laughs about life after talk
shows. She updated me on SNAP members who had made the shift from
victim to survivor, "a process of healing that takes a lot of
interaction with people who live the same struggle." SNAP now has
about 5,000 members, a Web site and newsletters.

As for me, the "second church" I excavated is still a wretched reality
in my life. Perhaps it always will be. Mass is still a complicated
experience; I search for good liturgies. A year ago, I was gazing at a
pond in a lovely spot of Mississippi countryside, when a friend asked:
"Why don't you leave the church?"

"Because I haven't found a spirituality to replace it," I blurted.

In Ariel I learned how unguaranteed life can be. A sense of something
primordial and eternal came upon me slowly. I kept praying because I
didn't know what else to do. Through my child I sensed a glimmer of
light beyond the sky, a force that can blast you to the knees,
something I had only vaguely thought about before--in the tale of
Saul-into-Paul, or in the faith-bewildered characters of Flannery
O'Connor--a force outside the self that simply comes, a spirit that
upsets all one's reading and embattled purpose with the sudden mystery
of sheer love.