WHAT’S A NAME FOR IT?

I know you’ve read of the sexual abuse by priests within the Catholic Church.  I’ve never really met one who was abusive in that way.  However, I did have an experience with a different kind of priest.

My mother left my father the year I was seven and had made my first communion.  We moved to a smaller town about 20 minutes away from our former home that summer.  After two years in Catholic School, my brother and I started public school that fall which meant on Saturday we had to attend catechism classes held in our small church.

Going to confession for the second time, I started going through the ritual I had learned, when the priest said to me “Where did you learn to go to confession like that? Get out of here and don’t come back until you can do it right!” Exactly that! Do you think I could ever forget those words?

I sat outside the confessional trembling as I went over what I had learned. After quite a while and still shaking, I went back in. I guess I passed the test because I got to leave.

I went home too embarrassed to tell my mother and grandmother what had happened.

The following Saturday when I was expected to attend my catechism class, I started sobbing and couldn’t stop and no one could figure out why.  They tried to soothe me and by the next week I calmed down enough to return to class, but I was still frightened to be there.

On Saturday, classes were held in the church itself.  Each age group occupied several rows with their individual teachers, so there were groups scattered throughout our small church as the priest walked up and down the center aisle with his perpetual sneer glaring at everyone in the groups.  He never said anything to anyone, just wanted everyone to be aware of him. I was totally afraid of him.

For the five years we lived in that town where we went to Mass every Sunday.  In the late 1930’s not too many people had cars, but the ones who had them escaped to the small towns around us on Sundays. Many years later when the priest finally died, the parishes all around said they knew he was gone because attendance had dropped when our people went back to their own church.

I’ll tell you more about why the people disliked him in another blog. Also something my Mother told me many years later which may explain why he treated me so horribly.