The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (23 page)

In a typical case cited in the report on clerical abuse in the Diocese of Cloyne in Ireland, for example, a boy victim told the police of scattered locations of abuse originally linked with confession. The complainant, Patrick, had told police that in 1983 he was on retreat at a convent in Mallow. He went to confession, he claimed, with a priest in a private room, where the priest asked him to take off his clothes. The priest, he alleged, touched his genitals and kissed his lips. The priest admitted that abuse took place in a variety of locations, including the sacristy of the church in Shanballymore in North Cork and when they were walking together on a quiet country road. The priest pleaded guilty to three counts of indecency against a sixteen-year-old youth during 1982 and 1983 and was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence.
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A report contained in a child welfare document published by the Diocese of Cloyne revealed how confession, and accompanying abuse, could take place far distant from the church. A female complainant wrote to her bishop alleging that a certain priest ‘sexually abused her during a young people’s retreat’. She further alleged that ‘the abuse took place during the hearing of her confession which was conducted in a bedroom at the retreat house. She was instructed to lie on the bed for her confession to be heard. [The priest] then abused her.’
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At the same time, narratives of abuse show how the attitudes of priests towards sexuality and their familiarity with the young were beginning to change during the late 1950s and into the 1960s. The black suit and Roman collar were coming off, and priests were often indistinguishable from the laity in all but their special status. According to one witness, Ansgar Hocke, reporting to the Round Table Group in Germany on clerical sexual abuse at his school in 1960s, a new spirit of permissiveness had arisen among priests: ‘The days of the priests in cassocks, who shouted at their students, were deeply conservative and who saw the catechism as their only guideline, were coming to an end.’ Priests now seemed to be breathing new life into the schools, Hocke noted. ‘But we didn’t see how sick and unstable they were.’ The pupils seemed to feel that the priests had a right to sexual happiness. ‘We knew that the young priests were excluded from this happiness, and we often saw how helpless they were.’ The pupils who belonged to a Father R.’s inner circle were constantly subjected, he said, to ‘one-on-one talks’, suggesting
a continuity between the privileged access of confession and intimate counselling beyond. The sessions sometimes took place in a basement, which quickly acquired a notorious reputation among students, who referred to it as the ‘masturbation basement’ or the ‘interrogation room’. A former student said: ‘He wanted to watch me masturbate, and he touched me while I was doing it.’
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The tendency for priests to fraternise socially with young boys coincided with the easing of the physical boundaries established by the old-style confessional booths: hence Father McCallum’s practice of hearing confession in his room from the comfort of armchairs. Yet, as the boys in the German case indicate, the priests had not undergone a corresponding development in maturity to cope with the new climate of ‘liberation’. Moreover, a slippage was occurring between confession as the strict performance of the ritual, on the one hand, and, on the other, modes of counselling and hospitality that included plying even prepubescent boys and girls with cigarettes and alcohol during or after confession. In one Irish report, a Father Calder was alleged to have heard confessions in his study before repairing to his private quarters, where he offered boys alcoholic ‘concoctions’.
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In another report, a Father Drust was said to have routinely seduced a girl named Ulla by offering her sherry in his private room:

Ulla is the younger of two daughters of a family with whom Fr Drust appears to have formed a close relationship [he would also abuse Ulla’s sister]. She first met Fr Drust
when she was aged seven or eight in 1964/65. She said that the sexual abuse began a few months later. Initially the abuse occurred in his car when he put her in his lap. Some time afterwards she started to visit his house at weekends. In her statement to the Gardaí in 2002 she stated that Fr Drust would give her three or four glasses of sherry and she would wake up in bed the following morning. He would then abuse her. Sometimes he would bring her toast in bed. When she was nine he taught her to shave him. She said that Fr Drust referred to her as his ‘Lolita’.
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Privileged access and the availability of opportunities for intimate encounters were invariably preceded by chance, or contrived, ‘pious’ overtures. A priest responsible for rehabilitating abusing clerics in his diocese in England described how one abuser, popular in his diocese as confessor and spiritual director, would begin his grooming tactics by saying: ‘I have been praying about you and I feel you have sexual problems you need to talk about.’
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The potential of the penitent for abuse could thus be safely probed within the boundaries of a ‘religious’ context.

An example of the warped ‘religiose’ nature of grooming and sexual activity within the confessional situation is told by the American writer Paul Hendrickson (a former
Washington Post
journalist, later director of the non-fiction writing program at Pennsylvania State University). He describes a confession ritual in a priest’s room in the 1960s which he endured once or twice a week for more than five years, starting at the
age of eleven: ‘I would go in, sit in a chair beside his desk, talk for a short while, await his nod, unzipper my trousers, take out my penis, rub it while I allowed impure thoughts to flow through my brain, and, at the point where I felt myself fully large and close to emission, say “Father, I’m ready now.”’ The priest would then reach over and hand him a black wooden crucifix. ‘I would then begin reciting the various reasons why I wished to conquer this temptation. . . . The power of the crucified Savior in my left hand as overpowering the evil of impurity and the world in my right.’
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The sexual exploitation of the confessional could be stealthy, devious, and long-term in the planning. A ‘Mrs. GC’ wrote to me of the sexual abuse inflicted on her sister after a long process of grooming that involved the priest seeking friendship with her parents and siblings. Mrs. GC was seven at the time, several years younger than the sister who was being groomed. The priest, a Father Brown, was a former missionary and popular in his South London parish. After Mrs. GC started going to confession, the priest would press her into service to make assignations for him with the elder sister. ‘I was the go-between. “Where is your sister?” he would whisper through the grille. “Tell her to come up to my room.” It all came to an abrupt end, although I didn’t know why for many years. He had taken my sister to the races one day and sexually abused her in an extremely gross manner in an empty compartment on the train coming back. She became a depressive; I’m convinced it was because of this experience that she eventually committed suicide.’
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While some abusers were careful to cover their tracks, others were quite blatant and would take extraordinary risks in public. One Father Grennan of Monageer in Ireland even flagrantly attacked an entire class of twelve-year-old girls, one by one, on the high altar of his Church in 1984. Other attacks took place within enclosed institutions where children had no parents to whom they could report. There were even examples of deaf children being abused by priests, the perpetrators confident that they would not be reported verbally. Some sixty former students of the Montreal Institute for the Deaf are currently bringing a class action lawsuit against the religious order of priests that runs the institution, citing sexual abuse over a number of years going back to 1980. Abuse within the confessional situation was an important feature of the allegations. A similar circumstance has been revealed in the case of Father Lawrence Murphy, director of an institution for the deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and subject of the documentary film
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa
. Father Murphy routinely began his seductions, carried out over thirty years, in the confessional.
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In a much publicised institutional case in Northern Ireland, Kate Walmsley was initially abused by a priest in the confessional box while being cared for by the Sisters of Nazareth in Derry. It appears that one of the nuns who helped run the institution had colluded with the abuse. ‘Every Saturday a nun used to hand me over to a priest’, Kate reported to the media. ‘Even if I was in the middle of a group of children I used to be taken out of the queue and kept to last. The first
time this happened, when I was eight, he was putting his hands down my top and down my pants. He then started bringing me to a room behind the altar and he would abuse me there.’
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Confession is a ritual in which the penitents tell their own sins, not the sins of others; hence, it has never been a situation in which victims have felt encouraged to report occasions of abuse against themselves. But some attempts by victims to report a sexual attack by a priest to a confessor have resulted in further abuse. An example is described in the Ryan Report, which focused on abuse in Irish industrial, orphanage, and reform institutions. A victim alleged that when, in confession, he disclosed abuse by a priest, he was assaulted and raped by that confessor. According to the Cloyne Report, when priests were told of allegations against other priests outside of the confessional, they had neglected to share these charges with their bishop on the grounds that the allegations had the ‘character of a confession’, and were under the ‘seal’.
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T
HE
‘D
ATABASE OF
Publicly Accused Roman Catholic Priests, Nuns, Brothers, Deacons, and Seminarians in the US’ and the US ‘Special Reports: Catholic Bishops and Sex Abuse’ comprise allegations of many offences committed by priests in a confessional situation who subsequently confessed or were found guilty in the courts of the United States. These databases, detailed and yet hardly comprehensive, show
similarities with offences committed in many other countries. Attacks occurring during confession included kissing, digital penetration of girls, and sodomy of boys; the use of confession ‘to scout for victims’; ‘the asking of very intimate questions during confession and of using the confessional to learn people’s weaknesses’; the practice of masturbating young penitents who were ‘seated on the confessor’s lap’; encouraging children to drink alcohol before, during, and after confession; and showing children pornographic pictures in confession.
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The failure of bishops to act forms an important dimension of the abuse phenomenon in many reports. For example, in the diocese of St. Louis, Missouri, Archbishop Justin Rigali delayed dismissing priests until after the clerical abuse scandals broke in the archdiocese of Boston. One of these priests, Father Joseph Ross, had sexually abused an eleven-year-old boy during confession in 1988.

The failure of bishops and superiors of religious orders to act has been evident worldwide. Father Brendan Smyth, who joined the Norbertine Order in the Republic of Ireland in 1945, was credibly guilty of several hundred crimes of sexual abuse, many involving a confessional situation, spread over forty years in the Republic, in Northern Ireland, and in the United States. Neither the superiors of his order nor the bishops of the dioceses in which he worked reported him to the police. His first conviction followed a report to the police of his molestation of four siblings in Belfast. He fled to the Republic after his arrest in 1991 and hid out in Kilnacrott
Abbey. The failure of the Fianna Fail Labour Party coalition to cooperate with his extradition led to the resignation of the government. In 2010 Cardinal Cahal Daly’s successor as Roman Catholic archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Sean Brady, faced criticism after he admitted that he was the notary in 1975 when two teenage boys testified against Smyth in a canon law tribunal. The boys had taken an oath under threat of excommunication never to speak of their allegations again. Their submissions had been endowed, by the ecclesiastical authorities, with the secrecy of the seal of sacramental confession.

In other cases, bishops attempting to defrock priests for the offence recognised in canon law as solicitation of sex in the confessional found it difficult to prompt Rome into action. Laicisation was deemed to be the exclusive responsibility of the Vatican. For example, Bishop Manuel D. Moreno of Tucson, Arizona, failed to persuade Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to laicise a priest, despite a series of credible allegations made in 1997. The priest had been accused of five crimes, including sexual solicitation in the confessional. It took another seven years for the Vatican to defrock the individual. In the meantime, it was Bishop Moreno who took the blame publicly for the delay.