The hour I stopped believing

Crack!

I can still hear the sound echoing in the wooden rafters of the church. Crack! Two little heads colliding. Stifled tears. Fear.

This memory from long ago came back to me the other day when I read about the release of the Ryan Report in Ireland. The report details the tragic history of sexual abuse inflicted decades ago on children in orphanages and schools run by the Catholic church. It contains   stomach-churning details of what was done to innocent children entrusted to church care.

At a recent truth-telling panel, Michael O’Brien, a 72-year-old former politician, told the story of how he and his seven siblings were sentenced to church “care” in the 1940s. His story is haunting. This from NPR:

O’Brien went on to catalog the ensuing attempt by the Catholic religious orders to cover up the abuse, and the aggressive cross-examination he received from lawyers representing the religious orders.

“You had seven barristers there questioning me and telling me I was telling lies, when I told him that I got raped [on] a Saturday, got a merciful beating after it, and then [the rapist] came along the following morning and put Holy Communion in my mouth,” he said.

via Irish Question Catholic Identity After Abuse Report : NPR.

The hypocrisy boggles the mind. Abuse one minute, holy sacraments the next.. What was going on in the minds of those sociopaths? How do you give this man his childhood back? No amount of money, no recitation of apologies can give him back what was lost so long ago.

His poignant plea brought back my own memory from a parochial school in Queens. It’s a memory that was indelibly planted in the mind of a small girl, and I didn’t realize its power until many years later.

I was a good-doobie in my youth, a girl who wasn’t one to question authority (at least out loud). But I will never forget the precise moment when the seeds of rebellion were planted in my small brain. It was second grade, and all the children were gathered in the church to practice for First Communion and First Confession. We were seven, maybe eight years old. Two little boys sitting in the front pew whispered a few words to each other. Nothing more than that. No jostling. No fisticuffs. A mere whisper. An imposing wimple-wearing nun (Sister Helen James, if I remember correctly) pounced on these two tots with the ferocity of a tiger going for the kill. Crack! She banged their heads together. Crack! I don’t remember any tears or protestations from the two boys, who could have suffered concussions for all I know. But I do remember that this nun then lined everyone up so that we could file into the confessional and learn how to have our sins absolved.

Who ought to be forgiving whom?

Who knows what else was going on behind closed doors. I shudder to think about it. When the investigation into church abuse was going on a few years ago, I checked every report to see if the name of this school appeared in any of the reports. It did not. I don’t know what became of those two stunned little boys, but I have little boys of my own now, and I know I would be banging down doors and calling out an army of lawyers if anything like this happened to them.

Ever since my former employer, the Boston Globe, doggedly chronicled the sex abuse scandal in the church, I’ve often wondered how the faithful reconciled the awful truth. I say that with all sincerity. I particularly felt for the senior citizens who spent their whole lives believing and then saw their churches, their spiritual and communal homes, being closed because the church could no longer afford to keep them open after being saddled with the cost of restitution to the victims.

As for me, I didn’t have to agonize with the question of faith. One sound — crack! — began my journey away from that institution many years ago. Mr. O’Brien’s wrenching testimony made that significant childhood memory come surging to the surface.  I didn’t understand it at the time, but that was the hour I stopped believing.