Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

Personal Preface

xiii Personal Preface I was born in 1950 and raised in the Irish Catholic culture of Lowell, Massachusetts . Catholics were known and located in the cultural landscape as much by their parish affiliation as by their street address. I was baptized and made my First Communion at St. Patrick’s where many years later Fr. Dominic Spagnolia would successfully stare down sexual abuse allegations only to resign over a homosexual affair.1 For most of my childhood and adolescence, though, I was a Sacred Heart girl, a parish recently closed by Boston Archbishop Sean Cardinal O’Malley. A public school kid through eighth grade, I attended high school at the Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, run by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. There, I was challenged intellectually, supported emotionally, and enveloped spiritually by the nuns. After high school, I followed the S.N.D. sisters to Emmanuel College in Boston for two years where Rev. William Murphy, cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts as complicit in the cover-up of sexual abuse in Boston and now bishop of Rockville Centre, New York, taught my freshman theology course.2 As a junior, I transferred to St. Mary’s at Notre Dame, run by the Sisters of the Holy Cross and sister school to the then still all-male University of Notre Dame. While I was a student, there were rumors about Fr. James Burtchaell, Notre Dame’s provost, who supposedly had “wild” parties in the penthouse of the library. In 1991, Burtchaell resigned from Notre Dame amid allegations of sexual misconduct with students.3 Like many St. Mary’s women, I married my Notre Dame honey two weeks after graduation. Children of the ’60s, we had a sometimes relationship with Catholicism as we went to graduate school, moved to New York City, and started business careers. Then, in 1983 we separated and eventually divorced. I went back to school for a doctorate in clinical psychology xiv Perversion of Power and a certificate in psychoanalysis, and began working with survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In 1994, Jody Messler Davies and I coauthored a book on treating adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. We were among the first psychoanalysts to refocus the field on the importance of early sexual trauma in the lives of substantial numbers of our patients. Until 2002, I rarely thought about religion. After I remarried, I knew that I could not come to the table at a Catholic Church unless my first marriage and my current husband’s first marriage were annulled. It seemed shabby even to think about annulling what was to me a very meaningful marriage, despite its ultimate dissolution. Although a number of priests over the years urged me to use my conscience in terms of receiving the Eucharist, I always ended up feeling guilty and ashamed or defiant in an adolescent sort of way if I partook of the sacrament. Neither is a graced state in which to take Communion. In April 2002, Therese Ragen, Ph.D., a colleague who had grown up in a Chicago Irish Catholic family and also attended St. Mary’s for a time, suggested we write an op-ed piece about the Catholic sexual abuse crisis for the New York Times. We did, it was not published, and I figured that was it. She had a friend at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), however, and in May, I was invited to address over three hundred bishops at their semiannual meeting in Dallas. The meeting that year was dedicated to discussion of the sexual abuse crisis and the topic of my talk was the long-term effects of sexual abuse. After I spoke, some bishops thanked me personally for helping them grasp more deeply the impact of abuse on survivors. Others, like Edward Cardinal Egan of New York—my home bishop—seemed to choose not to speak or make eye contact even when I was just a few feet away. Back home, I felt an itch about the scandal. I began reading and then I began writing. This book started to take shape. Many reporters and other commentators on the scandal have told me how painful it has been for them to be immersed in this material. It has been for me as well. As a clinician working for almost a quarter century with men and women who were raped or sodomized, sometimes even tortured, by family members, neighbors, teachers, or the fathers...