Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God Page #2

defends and produces

sexual abusers.

I went to bed one night

and, before I fell asleep,

I could see Murphy

creeping into our room,

like a ravenous wolf.

I could see him sit on a bed

in the dim light

of the illuminated exit sign.

And I saw that he was

molesting a boy.

I imagined Jesus crying

on the cross with a broken heart

wondering why Murphy

was doing this.

Why was Jesus just watching?

He would walk in like a cat.

Of course we couldn't hear him,

but someone would open their eyes

and see a dark shadow passing by

and they knew it was him.

I would see how he would go

and pick out certain boys.

He knew which boys wouldn't object

if he went to them.

The boys noticed that Father Murphy

would single out students

with hearing parents

who couldn't sign

so that the children

couldn't tell their parents

what was happening to them.

He favoured me. He wanted me.

He wanted me.

He liked seeing me ejaculate.

He got what he wanted and he would

leave, that was his thing.

He was..

sick.

I was afraid to tell my mother

because I didn't think

she would believe me.

She'd say, "A priest would never do

something like that to children."

I kept it a secret.

My mother had already been

through so much pain.

My brother

had been electrocuted,

my father

had hung himself.

My mother had been through so much

pain and I didn't want to hurt her.

It was hard for me

to communicate with my father

and so, my dad would speak and

Father Murphy would interpret.

My father never wrote back and forth

because I didn't know

how to write well,

so I depended on Father Murphy

and the nuns

to communicate with my father.

My parents were hearing,

so we used home signs,

not true American Sign Language.

We had some gestures for things like

eating and for how the scolded me,

but they wouldn't actually sign

"Bad",

they would wag their finger at me.

And there was no TTY,

and my parents were far away,

so how could we possibly

have communicated?

Murphy took advantage

of children in that situation.

My question is,

what about the sisters?

Where were the nuns who were supposed

to be watching the children?

The nuns should have been

able to hear,

but they turned their heads

and looked the other way.

Murphy wasn't the only one

that nuns should have heard

creeping through the dorms at night.

Murphy enlisted older boys

in an organized system of abuse.

One of these was Tom Tannehill,

a high-school student who

had been molested by Murphy.

As a dorm supervisor,

Tom had used threats of discipline

to force victim

to perform oral sex on him.

Pat Kuehn was only seven

when Tom first molested him.

He now believes that Tom

was breaking him in for Murphy.

I was very innocent, naive.

After the first time Tom played

with me, I got used to it.

I felt so excited that he chose me

out of all the others.

It made me

feel special.

Bambi was the first movie

that I watched with captioning.

Which was really exciting.

I was sitting towards the back

of the audience, on the boys' side,

Father Murphy walked up behind me and

pushed me in the back of the head.

So I looked up and I waived because

I thought he was just saying hi.

And then,

I went back to watching.

And he nudged me again,

so I acknowledged him.

I think about it now

and it was probably his penis

bumping up against me.

He was playing with me.

In 1963, Father Murphy

went away for a few weeks.

During his absence,

there was a visiting priest

from Chicago named Father Walsh.

I could see Father Walsh signing

and I was watching him

and I thought, "You know what? I'm

going to try my best to tell him."

I think it was in confession.

And so, I told Father Walsh

about Father Murphy molesting me.

He didn't say anything, but I could

see his facial expression change.

A week went by and I knew his last

day was going to be Friday

and Father Murphy

had come back.

Father Murphy comes walking

into my classroom

and called Father Walsh.

When I saw that, I knew this was it.

I got up from my chair

and I went and peeked around

the coroner from my classroom.

I could see Father Walsh and Father

Murphy getting into a huge fight

down the hallway.

I went back and sat at my desk

and I didn't say a word about it.

Murphy came back

and nothing was ever said.

The following year, I was hoping

Father Walsh would return,

but he didn't come back.

He didn't come back the second year,

he didn't come back the third year,

he just never came back.

During the summer months,

Murphy would take some of the boys

up to his cabin,

in northern Wisconsin.

Murphy would ask the boys

to choose

which one of them would sleep

in the bed with him.

They all pointed at me to have to

sleep in the same bed as Father Murphy

And Father Murphy

molested me again

But I never touched him,

I refused,

but he would touch me.

And everybody knew that,

and they just left me alone,

and didn't say anything.

Father Murphy asked who was

going to sleep with him.

And all of us pointed at this kid,

Joe, and said, "He is."

I didn't want to be picked.

Poor Joe, I feel bad

that we picked him.

Murphy encouraged many of the children

he abused to raise money for St John's.

As deft students they

were told to target bars

with sympathetic drinkers

who were more free with their money.

Terry raised so much money

he won a motorbyke.

When Murphy took Gary and

the other seniors on a road trip

to look at colleges

in Washington and New York,

he molested Gary

almost every night.

I was afraid if I said "No",

he would be mad.

I just didn't know what to do.

I got used to it and didn't care.

I just wanted to graduate

and get out of there and feel better.

You know, between the ages

of 26 and 31, I was baptized

in a very radical way

to know that this

wasn't an anomaly,

that this

was a pattern,

that there are treatment centers.

Before ordination,

I had no idea that we had treatment

centers around the world

for priests to go to

when they sexually molested,

raped and sodomized kids.

I didn't know that.

My parents didn't know that.

I didn't know that we had

55 molesters in my monastery.

I didn't know there were

more than 70 molesters

operating in the US dioceses.

That wasn't public knowledge.

Shortly after his ordination,

at St John's Abbey,

in Collegeville, Minnesota,

Patrick Wall was given

a special assignment -

traveling the country putting out

fires for the Church.

The sexually abusive priest

has to be completely removed,

his stuff was removed,

and then, there's another guy,

basically, another black-and-white

who's placed in there,

to make sure that

the normal things happen -

that people are baptized, people

are married, people are buried

and the normal life

of the parish can continue.

I thought I was going there

to uncover the crime,

to heal the wounds,

I thought it was pastoral care,

you know, comfort the afflicted,

what we're ordained for.

But the people sending me in

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