PITTSBURGH — Last Sunday a city parish on the top of a steep hill overlooking the city aptly named Observatory Hill waited for her faithful to arrive for Sunday Mass as it has every Sunday for over 102 years.
It was 9:00 a.m. and just a handful of days after the Pennsylvania state grand jury report into sexual abuse in 54 of the state’s 67 counties, a report that has rocked this tight-knit community.
Some came, some did not, those who did had difficulty holding back tears.
The somber music played by the organist reflected the silent despair in the pews.
The parish had been hit hard in the 884-page document released the week by a grand jury. The report identified over 1,000 children who became victims of more than 300 abusive priests in parishes large and small across the state.
This compounded the losses the parish has suffered as the neighborhood’s population has become more secular and transient — a big change from the working-class Catholic population who walked to Mass there in the 1960s and 1970s.
That’s back when I attended Nativity of Our Lord, over on Pittsburgh’s North Side. I adored Fr. John Maloney, a young priest who came to our church when I was five years old, and going to church at five meant different things than it does to an adult. For me it was the honor of wearing a lace covering over my head the way the grown-up women did. (Before Vatican II, it was mandatory for females.)
But it also meant the mysterious rhythms of the Latin Mass that seemed to be telling sacred secrets. Mass meant being with my parents, sometimes my entire extended family of aunts and uncles and grandparents — all warm, comfortable, safe feelings that helped draw me in to what faith would mean for me as an adult.
As I entered first grade, Fr. Maloney was the parochial vicar (vice pastor). He said Mass every Tuesday for the entire student body of a parish that was at its peak, absorbing the blue-collar baby boom children in the 1960s.
Before school and during recess we would play on the asphalt playground that was attached to the parish school. It was sloped at an odd angle and littered with loose rocks, but we didn’t ever seem to notice.
Sometimes if we were lucky, Fr. Maloney, who was just 22 years old, would come out and watch us play, as we jumped rope, picked teams for dodgeball, or played a vigorous game of “It Tag.”
We were taught to respect and revere his station, it wasn’t hard, he was young, handsome, and charismatic. When he talked about the Scripture or Jesus he made you feel as though he knew Jesus personally and he was simply sharing the stories that his close friend wanted you to know.
It was he who administered my first two sacraments outside of my baptism: He heard my first confession, (I do not remember what sins I committed, but I do remember it did not require me to be sent to the principal’s office) and my first Holy Communion, which for a young Catholic child is a monumental moment.
When Fr. Maloney was transferred to another parish when I was 11, I was sad.
When Fr. Maloney’s name appeared last week on the list of deviant offenders, I was devastated.
How could someone who had our complete trust abuse it in such a heinous way? How could he have robbed children of their childhood?
The grand-jury report named 99 priests in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Three of them served in my parish when I or one of my siblings attended the school: Fr. Maloney, Fr. Ray Rhoden, and Fr. James Somma.
How can we trust the bishops that allowed this to happen?
Simply, we cannot. All of those responsible must be held accountable.
The actions of those priests and those in charge cannot take our faith away, but they have made it impossible for me to trust this Church.
I’ve always held a deep fondness for that asphalt playground that strained to hold my boundless energy, along with that of hundreds of other children. For eight years, it was a place of carefree joy, where the only thing I dreaded when I stepped out of the school and onto the grounds was if I would be picked last for dodgeball.
Now I cannot erase from my mind the knowledge that some child was deeply hurting on that playground. Some child was holding in a secret so dark and so humiliating that their soul burned with the shame and the fear they felt every day.
And I cannot forgive.
In the past I have stood by my Church in past crisis, because surely they will get it right somehow. This time, that feels impossible.
I will stand by my faith — a faith that has guided and shaped me at my core and is difficult to square with the corrupt institution that allowed sick men to steal my classmates’ lives and then facilitated them to do the same elsewhere.
The only things that are uncertain now is how I find forgiveness.
Every time I search in my mind’s eye and scan the faces of my classmates in that playground looking for signs of who needed help, I find it difficult to imagine that forgiveness coming anytime soon.
