By Natalie Costanza-Chavez

Redstone Review

FORT COLLINS – This column is about a boy who was abused by a priest and survived the invisible smash and tatter of such a thing. It happened almost over 40 years ago, in this country, though it could have been anywhere. He’s a good man, centered and whole and only occasionally bitter – about any manner of things just like the rest of us. Surprisingly, he’s good all around with God. It’s the feet of powerful men he holds to the flame.

He believes that powerful people need be accountable to gentleness and conscience and integrity – even if it costs them everything. He knows that not all powerful people hold themselves accountable to these things – or to anything. He doesn’t think of what of what happened to him as a dirty secret; and he doesn’t consider it anti-catholic to speak the truth to power.

The boy wanted to be a priest. No one pushed him, except and perhaps God. He told me this, but it’s still not something I can clearly imagine. He says he knew he was going to be a priest for as long as he can remember, though he told no one, until he asked to go to seminary years later.

First, he became an altar boy and grew to love the church even more deeply, the rituals and depth and pure physical exaltation of it. When he tells me about his, I picture the masses I yawned through as a child, I picture fiddling with my charm bracelet, and an elastic hat strap too tight under my chin. During those same sorts of masses, he was learning what I could not understand; he believed things I knew nothing about. He, at ten, believed that priests got to touch the body of Christ.

He believed that, after celebrating communion, priests blessed people with their thumb and forefinger pinched together because those finger-spots were holy, and until wiped could touchnothing else. To explain this to me, he made the sign of the cross in the air with three fingers up-stretched and the two that would have touched God held tightly together, protecting the brush of holy between them.

He knew the meanings not because he had to learn them, but because they lived in him.

He speaks of a huge, black, wooden cross that rose up from behind the alter at the seminary he enrolled in, far from his home. He speaks of the candles flickering, the Gregorian chant, sometimes the Latin mass, the lull and cradle and sea-movement calm the words held, wrapped, rocked him in. He speaks of the touch of the mass. He speaks of a holy that has nothing to do with men.

So, you see what was taken from him. He left the seminary and told no one why. He held his pain close and hidden, like a hand of cards you know is lost. Now, he’ll name pedophilia. He’ll name the bad priest who hurt him in the early 1960s, and he’ll note how records show that before he ever enrolled in seminary reports and complaints about the abuser-priest had already been filed within the church. For 30 years the file grew fatter. From his ordination in 1957, the priest went on to serve in 23 different churches and schools – in six different states – surrounded by each one of the hundreds and hundreds of children that became his victims. He wasn’t put into a state penitentiary until 1993.

What was taken from this young boy, a victim of a priest and of a church far more concerned about protecting itself than its children, fills me with shudder and awe: what was taken is the shudder, that this boy never fully left God is the awe. What he says he learned is this:  that the holy of God has nothing to do with the church – any church. That holy isn’t ruled by men, or dogma, or money or power. And that God is a kind of holy that can’t be directed or imposed or taken away from you. He learned that God is a kind of holy that’s untouchable, safe, and only yours.

Natalie Costanza-Chavez is an award-winning journalist and freelance writer living in Ft. Collins with her family. She writes a column called Grace Notes.  She can be reached at grace-notes@comcast.net or at her website www.gracenotescolumn.org.

Back to Top