“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.
After listening to Jean for some time as she related, in painful detail, her experiences of repeated sexual assaults, I asked why she hadn’t quit her job. After all, it was the job that occasioned the abuse. Her answer, in part, was quite simple: she loved her job.
But to understand what she meant, you have to understand that it wasn’t a job for her, even though she was paid a dollar an hour—for the times, a considerable amount of money for a teenager. And while that was undoubtedly important to her, in the long run it didn’t matter in comparison to the connection with God that she found in the parish church, and particularly at the Marian shrine:
My faith grew there. I absolutely fell in love with God. And I really felt how much he loved me. I mean, he loved us so much.… And he sent his Son … and Jesus was God! And he died. And he would have died just for me. And he would have died just for you.… He loved each one of us that much. So, religion wasn’t something I just knew; it became something very internal with me. And there was nothing Father Bill could do to take that away.
Another question I posed to her—as anyone might be tempted to ask—was why she didn’t seek help. Here the answer is a bit more complex, and here is where those of us who have not been victims of sexual abuse must set aside our “logic” and “common sense,” and try to enter the mind and heart of a person who has lived in the grip of paralyzing fear, a fear which began as a child and persisted into adulthood.
Jean’s was the fear that her parents would find out about the abuse, and what the consequences might be, not only for her family but also for the tiny close-knit community in which they lived. In particular, she feared that Father Bill’s guilt would get the better of him, and he would one day go to her parents (he had retired only blocks from them) and confess the whole thing to them.
Jean explained that on one occasion news had gotten around town about a teenage girl in a neighboring town who had become pregnant out of wedlock. Her parents had “sent her away.” Jean asked her mother if she thought that had been the right thing to do, and her mother responded affirmatively without hesitation. That response was like pouring gasoline onto the fire of a fear that was already raging inside Jean:
And I really thought they would send me away too. And where would I go? What would happen to me? I could be wrong … but in my opinion I believe [my parents] would have blamed me completely. Everything was kind of black and white [for them] and they followed the rules, and that would not have been allowed. Looking back, I maybe could’ve talked to my dad. But I think it would have torn our family apart.
This fear engulfed Jean well into her adult life until Father Bill’s death. As for her husband, whom she adored and with whom she shared forty years of marriage until his death, she could only tell him a little. Her husband adored Father Bill. “My husband knew a little bit, and he did not want to know more,” Jean explained. “And I respected that.”
But there were other attempts to get help. She would sometimes confide to a priest in confession—because this was the only place she felt halfway safe and confident mentioning it. Yet, she was often sorely disappointed:
Most priests aren’t good there. They say, “Get over it” and “You need to forgive him” and “What’s wrong with you?” And what happens
