Has it been 14 years since our American Catholic world was first rocked by the clergy abuse scandals, reported by Jason Berry in his masterpiece, Lead Us Not Into Temptation; Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children?

Granted, the book could have used more editing to help the reader keep track of what was going on where, but no one can deny the fact that Berry brought us into the sordid picture, and kept us there through 369 pages, complete with tears of anger, sadness, and disbelief.

“Not our Church!” “ Not our priests!”  “Not with our children!”  Yes, our Church, our priests, against our children.

And the accusations continued in small towns and great, among the elite and the poor, educated and those who barely made it through high school.  Democratic was the abuse. All the abusers needed were trusting, inexperienced victims, and absent protectors.

If you read the book, I’m sure you remember being transported to the region of Louisiana, where the pedophilia scandals first broke, called Acadiana.  Virgil coined the word Acadia to mean “earthly paradise.”  The people were deeply Catholic, Berry tells us, living the simple, hard-working lives of farmers.  Eventually, with their terse patois cadences, they became known as Cajuns.

By the 1950's, the people began to rise out of poverty with the growth of oil and gas drilling, and fortunes were made in the hub city of Lafayette, though farming continued to draw many to that way of life, devoted as they were to land, faith and family.

By 1983, Father Gilbert Gauthe was pastor of St. John Parish in the village of Henry, where Ella and Roy Robichaux attended Mass.  Gauthe was an outdoor man, who would accompany Roy on a cattle drive or shoot geese in low flight from the church belfry with a 357 magnum. He also killed the spirits of little children.

One evening in the month of June, Ella sat on the bed next to her son, Pete, who  sobbed into his pillow and told his mother, “God doesn’t love me.”

“Why shouldn’t God love you?” she gently prodded.

Berry continues: He told her he had done bad things.  She asked what things.  He said Father Gauthe did it too.  “What did Father Gauthe do?”

The little, halting words came out, things a child his age would never say.  “Don’t tell Daddy,” the boy entreated.

When his wife entered their bedroom, Roy saw a look of nausea on her face.  “ Pete says Gauthe molested him.”

(I’m going to continue the story as Berry told it because he captured the terrible pain of the child as few writers have taken the time and effort to do.)

Roy went immediately to the child’s bedside.  “What’s wrong, Pete?”  The child sat up in the large presence of his father.  “I love you, son.  Do you want to talk about it?”  The child’s cheeks were soaked.  Slowly, he shook his head no.  Roy peered into eyes of pain such as he had never seen.  “ This is something I need to know, son.  It looks as if Father Gauthe is a very sick man.”  As the child spoke, it tore into Roy Robichaux’s heart.  Oh, my boy, my baby boy.  Tears brimming, the boy’s whole body began to shake. Roy gathered his son in his arms and slowly rocked him back and forth on the bed.  The child was sobbing.  “Son, he croaked, “I respect you for telling me this.  It’s wrong what he’s been doin’. And it’s good you brought it out to me.  Now we can do something to stop it.”

The next day, Roy took his older sons, Jim and Hank, for a drive in the truck, and eventually learned that they, too, had been abused, along with others in families, siblings and cousins.

Roy said to himself: When others find out, someone will kill him.  I pray it is not me.  I must get help.  Someone higher up.

Since that day, how many parents have said the same thing, and were stone-walled when they sought help from someone higher up?

Now, these 14 years later, the Chicago Archdiocese has its own Father Gauthe in the person of Father Daniel McCormack.  But here we have a Catholic nun involved, the principal of Holy Family Family School on the West Side of Chicago,who learned that the priest was abusing one of the boys in her school in 2000.  She called and wrote the Archdiocese numerous times, but to no avail – the pastor continued as pastor of St. Agatha.

The Chicago Police, according to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times by Cathleen Falsani and Frank Main, January 26, 2006, and forwarded by Jack Bartz, are investigating the  37-year old priest, who was charged last weekend with sexually abusing two boys at St. Agatha’s Church in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood.

The Sun Times article quotes the nun as saying Bishop John Manz, the auxiliary bishop whose purview includes both Holy Family and St. Agatha parishes, approached her in 2000 and asked if she would be interested in having McCormack say mass once a week for the school children.  “Bishop Manz approached me.  This was an entirely black school.  And he approached me because Father Dan McCormack was – they called him a sacramental minister at Holy Familiy because they didn’t have a priest.  But he said mass there on Sunday.”

The nun said, according to the article,  “All was well until the mother of a fourth-grade student came to see her one Monday.  McCormack had celebrated mass the Friday before and allegedly had an encounter with her boy sent back to the chapel next to the school to retrieve a copy of a book of Scripture.”

When the boy returned to the chapel, he asked the priest if he could become an altar boy, and the priest said he would have to measure him first, and told the boy to take down his pants.

Eventually, the mother met with the priest and made known her charge of what he had done to her child, who simply excused himself by saying he had used very poor judgment.  The mother did nothing further.

After having received no attention to her phone calls, the nun wrote a hand-delivered letter to the school administrator in late winter or early spring of 2000.

Last September, less than two weeks after prosecutors declined to bring charges against the popular young priest, Cardinal George appointed McCormack dean of Deanery III-D, a collection of parishes in and around North Lawndale.

The Archdiocesan officials have now removed McCormack, who is free on $200,000 bond from St. Agatha’s, and is living in a monitored setting with his brother, a police officer, in the south suburbs.

In the conclusion of his book, Berry reflects the pain of millions of American Catholics, including priests, bishops and cardinals, who have also been betrayed by the sexual abuse scandals.

I began this book by focusing on one community in French Louisiana, with no idea that what happened there was being replicated in so many other regions. In the coming years, as I followed the lives of abusers and survivors, my own faith sustained a struggle I have yet to fully comprehend.  At this juncture I feel as if a great weight is lifting. Yet there is a sense of evil I know will haunt me to the grave.  When I felt its awful chill I tried to pray, and found my thoughts returning to the Jesuit teachers of my youth. The survival of my religious belief owes much to those man and I can only hope that it endures.

...As a child I was taught that faith is a gift. I know now that faith is still an odyssey, and in the darkness of this journey each of us must find a light.

 While it is difficult for you and me to face this latest abuse scandal head-on, to refuse to do so is to turn our backs on the suffering of the children involved. Christ would not do so; neither can we.

To quote Berry: “In the darkness of this journey each of us must find a light.” We shall do so together, as a family, praying for our children, and for the repentance of their abusers. God bless each of you.

Amen.

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