We went to mass on Sundays, and we thanked God on Sunday afternoons at our weekly Sunday dinner, which my mother and grandmother spent hours cooking. I went to Sunday school every week when I was little and catechism classes when I got older. Eventually, I helped my mother teach Sunday school, which she did every week for years. I did my first communion, the rite of penance, and I was confirmed in the church as a young teenager. I went to Catholic nursery school and kindergarten, Catholic elementary school, middle school, and high school. I went to a Catholic university for college. My life, everything about my existence, was steeped in Catholicism. Being Catholic was synonymous with being a part of my family, with being half-Italian, half-Portuguese. Going to school, all school, every kind of school, was an extension of this, since every school I attended was Catholic.
Like a million other kids raised this way, I hated plenty of things about growing up Catholic, and I rebelled against those things I hated. While I’d loved Sunday school, I loathed catechism classes. When I was old enough to hate getting dragged to mass on Sunday mornings, I would feign sickness whenever I could get away with it, which was not often. I lobbied my parents to go to one mass and not the other, since there were two priests in our parish and one was known to drone on with his endless homily, trapping all of us there for more than an hour, whereas the other was famous for being lightning quick and getting us in and out sometimes in under thirty minutes. (On one deadly hot and humid summer day, instead of delivering a homily, he smiled, looked out across all of us, sweating in the pews, and said, “Well, God has given us a wonderful beach day! Let’s thank him for it and that will be enough for this morning!” and sent us on our way.)
At Georgetown, when I began to meet the Jesuits, I developed a newfound respect for the priest who is also a professor. Unlike the two parish priests in my hometown, these Jesuits had PhDs; many of them had two. I was surrounded by priests who challenged me academically. I began to talk to Jesuits about theology, about the existence or nonexistence of God, and I grew to love the ways they pushed me about my ideas, my beliefs, my opinions about the Catholic tradition. My experiences with the Jesuits elevated my attitude toward the priesthood. Priests were an integral part of what made Georgetown a wonderful experience, an integral part of my intellectual awakening there.
So by the time I arrived at graduate school, having a priest who was also a professor was not only a norm, it was something I looked forward to, that I relished, even.
Someone who is not Catholic, who has never been Catholic, someone standing on the outside of the Catholic tradition, might have a difficult time understanding why it was so hard for me to get around the priest part of my professor’s identity. You may already see him for who he is and was, which is a man acting inappropriately with a young woman in his program. But I could not see this, refused to see it. It was a betrayal of everything I’d ever known, and I, like so many Catholics of the pre-scandal era, was overly prone to giving representatives of the Church the benefit of the doubt—completely.
His vow of celibacy acted as a wall I could not breach, that I could never dream of scaling. It had always been the thing, the one special thing, that turned an ordinary man into a man of God; it is what defines a Catholic priest on an ontological level. It never occurred to me that a priest would break this vow. Perhaps that makes me stupid. But even the thought that a priest might do this was so sacrilegious, so egregious, that it made me nauseated to consider it. I hated myself for allowing the possibility to enter my brain. It made me ashamed and it made me fearful. To articulate it even to myself, never mind to someone else, was to tug on the essential brick that kept the entire Catholic Church standing, like sliding out the one piece in a Jenga tower that causes the whole building to come crashing down, my family trapped inside.
To question this professor’s intentions toward me was to question the priesthood itself, and I was not up to the task. I had no idea that I was not alone in this, far from it, that American priests had been behaving like this for decades, that priests all over the world had been behaving like this for decades, knowing they could lean on the hierarchy to cover up what they’d done if anyone dared come forward. I thought I must be the only person in the universe with whom a priest was behaving this way. The more this man paid me attention, attention that was beginning to make me desperately uncomfortable, the more alone I was. The more I became mute. The thoughts I was having about him were ugly and unspeakable, so I didn’t dare speak them to anyone.
I told absolutely no one about him. Not Christopher, not Dan, not any of my other friends.
Not a soul. Not a peep. Not the letters, not the calls, not any of it.
The abuse I suffered was mental, it was emotional, it was not physical, like most of the crimes in the abuse scandal. Though, to me, it was also physical, the way he began to encroach on all the spaces surrounding my body, so much that eventually it was hard for me to walk through the world without also having to wade through his presence, submit myself to his ever-watchful eyes.
I don’t know if he stopped just short of crossing a physical, sexual line with me on purpose. If he thought that by falling just shy of the physical, he was continuing to honor his Catholic vows and that he could, in good conscience, claim that he never did a thing to hurt me. To this day I don’t know what is worse, the sustained unwanted attention I suffered, silently, until I could endure no more, until I didn’t care about anything, not even my life, or instead, the possibility that he might decide one day to cross that line into physical abuse. There were moments when I longed for him to do just this, because—however vile I sound—physical abuse might leave a mark on my body, a mark I could point to, that I could show to the police. As it stood, I had nothing to show anyone. A pile of letters didn’t seem like something that would raise any alarms. So silent I stayed. And soon I grew sick with it.
It wasn’t long before he realized that I wasn’t reading my mail.
I had no idea what was in his letters or even what he’d sent me. He’d talk about their contents, assuming I’d seen whatever they were. I’d grow confused, and this would confirm I hadn’t bothered to open what he’d sent. This prompted him to begin telling me ahead of time what he would be sending me, something I should make sure to open.
When he pressed me about what was on its way, told me how essential it was that I read it, I would tell him I would. But as the summer marched forward, I became less and less worried about complying with his wishes or offending him. He could tell me a thousand times to open a letter and I would just toss it on the windowsill of my office with the rest of the pile.
His frustration about this grew, his anger about this grew, his dismay about this grew, until they were so big and tangled he began to seem larger and more grotesque, even though he was a small man. Small and meek. But to me, his features became distorted, his innocent eyes became menacing, his elfin frame—not muscular, not strong but rather frail—became intimidating. His thick salt-and-pepper hair was ever grayer, as though he were aging quickly, before my eyes, the distance in years between us expanding by the day.
The pile of letters in my office swelled to maybe a hundred, nearly all of them unopened. They spilled every which way across my windowsill. I hated seeing them there. They produced a cocktail of guilt and revulsion and fear. I did my best to push these feelings away, to beat them back, to ignore the nauseating worry they provoked every time my eyes traveled to the place where they sat. It seemed like they were taunting me. Eventually there were so many and the mountain so unruly that one day I picked up the garbage can in my office, carried it over to the windowsill, and with one arm swiped every single one of them into the trash.
9
I tried to tell him about my boyfriend.
It was July, smack in the middle of summer. I was sitting with him in the basement of his abbey, drinking tea. There was a kind of accounting going on between us. He had taken to complaining about the things I no longer did or readily agreed to on his behalf,
listing my failures. I had taken to making all kinds of excuses as to why I no longer did these things and was desperate to make him believe my lies. At no point did I stop needing this professor’s approval and support for my graduate work.
My ability to finish my PhD depended on his willingness to get behind my candidacy, get through comprehensive exams, my dissertation proposal, and the dissertation itself. There was still so much of him that lay ahead of me. He would sit on the committee that judged both sets of my exams, and he would likely have to be on my dissertation committee, if not actually be my director. To turn this man’s approval into disapproval would be disastrous to my program. I had to make sure I didn’t do anything to jeopardize this.
So, I tried to appease him now and then by agreeing to see him. I would pick and choose among his constant invitations, try to pick wisely and sparingly, as a way to limit the time we spent together. I became aware that avoiding everything was starting to make him crazy, would only make his need to see me spike all the more, and I was trying to keep it at a low simmer. It was almost as if he were acting like my boyfriend and, like a jealous boyfriend, getting upset when I wasn’t making enough of an effort to see him, to attend to him, hang out with him. I worked so hard to hold back this comparison. It felt so wrong—but wrong on my part, not his.
The accounting between us was an accounting of effort. He felt he was making a constant effort to reach out to me, write to me, be a part of my life, be present and available, yet for the last couple of months I’d made virtually no effort to do the same in return. It upset him that he could look back on the previous school year and remember when I was making a big and obvious effort to spend time with him. He could see very clearly that something had shifted since early May, or even as far back as April. It was making him desperate, and his desperation was making me desperate to fix things.
I wanted to calm him down. I learned that a single, solid yes to one of his requests would reset the balance again for a while. He would seem to be at peace again with things, with me, would forget for a few days the growing list of my failings that plagued him.
This was how I coped.
This was also how I ended up driving my sad little Mazda Protegé across the city to the abbey where he lived with his fellow priests so we could have tea in the basement. Like all of his previous suggestions, it seemed a benign request, or one of the more benign requests compared with the invitations to go away together that kept on coming that summer. It wasn’t as if I’d be driving him anywhere in my car. I would go there alone and leave alone. I would be in a building full of priests and monks. It would be fine.
There are moments I remember that I now realize were turning points—things he did that shifted everything, or things that occurred that I could not banish from my mind afterward. Tea in the basement of his abbey is one of those moments.
By the time I arrived at the abbey and got out of my car, I was almost excited to see him. I headed up the front walk with a kind of eagerness. I had a plan for today, and it was a good one. I wanted to enact it, get it over with. When I left later that afternoon I would feel a world of relief. I would be happy to have him in my life again. Everything was going to be okay.
The plan was to tell him about Christopher.
I’d thought about doing this when I agreed to the visit, and I’d thought about it on the drive over to see him as I listened to the radio, air-conditioning blasting, convincing myself that this was going to work. Telling him about my boyfriend seemed like it might right the listing ship we were on. It would introduce something into our relationship that would make everything safe again, like it had felt in the beginning. It was going to disarm the strange tension that had settled between us like a houseguest who refused to leave.
I knocked on the front door, and another priest answered. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, or surprised that I was a young woman there to see another priest in his community. This encouraged me. It had been a good choice to meet my professor at his residence, where plenty of other priests were around, all of whom were celibate. I was going to be surrounded by people who had vowed to make themselves safe.
I was led to a place where I could wait for my professor to appear. I sat down, folded my hands in my lap, tapped my foot. I was ready to get this over with, ready to cross the distance between living with constant unease and living with the cool relief that everything was good again.
He appeared, he led me down into the abbey basement, which was arranged as a kind of sitting room where the monks could host guests for coffee and tea and snacks. There was a small table with chairs. He made us tea and filled a small plate with cookies. We sat nearly next to each other, the little table alongside us. We began to talk. I have no idea what about. Fifteen minutes passed. Thirty. Forty-five.
I kept thinking to myself, Now, Donna. Do it. This is the moment. Say it.
But I couldn’t quite figure out when or how to interject a comment about my boyfriend into the conversation. It’s not the kind of thing I openly discussed with my family, not the kind of thing I’d bring up with my own father, since in my family we didn’t talk about boyfriends or my current romantic feelings for someone. But I knew I had to take a deep breath and dive in. I was convinced the reward would be worth it. The reward was going to be my liberation from dread.
“So,” I began, after around an hour had passed. I kept my eyes on the half-eaten plate of cookies. “I have something exciting to tell you!” My voice was overly enthusiastic, shrill, nervous.
I looked up.
He was smiling as he sipped his tea.
He seemed happy as he awaited whatever news I was about to tell him. He was always pleased when I told him something important, something personal, especially lately. Those gifts of information I so freely offered my first semester of graduate school had become few and far between. He now dug for them, pressed for them, and here I was about to hand one over without any prodding on his part.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m in love! I have a boyfriend and he’s wonderful! His name is Christopher!”
Even now I cringe as I write this, cringe as I remember it, cheeks burning with the shame I still feel about the stilted, naïve way I brought this up, like a little excited girl more than a young woman; like a teenager.
I watched him. Waited for him to say something, for him to tell me how wonderful this news was, to ask me about this boyfriend like a doting parent, ask how I’d met this young man, where he’d gone to college, what he’d studied, if he had a job or was in graduate school, too. I imagined we would have a bit of gossipy conversation, like I might with a girlfriend curious to know everything about this delightful turn in my life. I was such an idiot to imagine that any of these things might happen.
His smile faltered. His happy expression crumbled. There was a moment where he seemed to have stopped breathing, the silence stretching far longer than was comfortable. Then, finally, he spoke.
He changed the subject.
I don’t even know to what. I don’t remember what he said, but him changing the subject is one of the clearest memories I have in my life.
He moved the conversation onto a new topic as though he hadn’t heard anything, as though I hadn’t just confessed to him that I’d met someone, that I was dating this person, that I’d fallen in love with him. It had felt like such a big deal to reveal this to him, an effort at a certain kind of familial or filial intimacy. But instead of being congratulated, I’d been slapped.
I’d truly believed he was going to respond by telling me he was happy for me, that he’d even like to meet this young man. At my most delusional point on the drive over to the abbey I’d fantasized about how soon the three of us would be getting together for coffee, my boyfriend, my professor, and me. How he would grill my boyfriend like a father might, to make sure his interest in me was genuine, albeit playfully. How the three of us would laugh and have such a good time. How later on I’d realize how ridiculous I’d been t
o feel any unease with this kind, grandfatherly man, whom I’d eventually invite to my wedding, who might even preside over my wedding.
He talked on and on between sips of his tea.
I sat there, stunned. My plan had backfired in the worst possible way. Not only had it failed, but the possibility of relief receded so far in the distance that it disappeared. In fact, my plan had made everything worse. Now I was the one who was crushed. I wanted to weep.
Somewhere I knew that his changing the subject, his refusal even to acknowledge my words about a boyfriend and being in love, was a kind of confession in its own right—that it meant he couldn’t bear to hear this information from my lips. That it was so unbearable that he pretended not to hear it. That he literally acted as though it hadn’t been uttered out loud. His reply was to erase it. I knew what this behavior revealed, but as with everything else to do with him, I piled up so many excuses for why he reacted this way that the knowledge was soon buried.
And I blamed myself for what happened that afternoon.
Consent Page 10
