Fortunately for them though they do not see it as fortune they have not been accused. They have no sense of "there but for the grace of God go I." Still, there have been times when I think of them, and of other priests I know, and I am grateful this happened to me and not them. I have survived thus far. I believe that many of my brother priests would not have survived this.
There is no more difficult place to be a Catholic priest than in prison. There is no one more closely watched by other prisoners and guards alike, ready to zero in on any hint of despair or anger, any sign of a loss of faith, any unpriestly slip-up whatsoever. For sixteen years, I have had to be prepared to be taunted, talked about, ridiculed even beaten and doused with human waste in my first weeks here all without ever showing a glimmer of retaliation, hatred, or despair. There is no faking priesthood in prison, and there is no faking faith.
There's no faking innocence either. I have been in a fishbowl in prison for sixteen years with men barely older than the age my accuser was when he claimed that I assaulted him during 1983 counseling sessions. I have had assigned cellmates who were barely out of their teens. In sixteen years of living in such close proximity, there has not been a single claim, not even a hint of a claim, that I would ever be inclined toward such misconduct. And there is no hiding such a thing here. This was best summed up in "On the Record"- by a now retired prison chaplain:
"Many, particularly the younger inmates in Father MacRae's living unit are quite vulnerable to predators. In ten years, I have never seen or heard in any form anything that would suggest he was à ‚¬ ¨ever involved in any way with any type of inappropriate behavior including that which his accusers attributed to him."
But the lack of evidence isn't evidence of anything at all. That has been the very heart of the issue all along. There has never been any evidence beyond the word of persons who stand to gain hundreds of thousands of dollars from making such claims. Yet, they are spontaneously believed while the priests they accuse are condemned just as spontaneously.
As the Year of the Priest draws to a close, the cruelest tyranny of all is best summed up in something Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in "A Priest's Story." It is that thing that I fear the most, more than false witness itself, more than prison, more than the endless demonizing aimed in my direction. It is the end of priesthood itself, and the fact that it can be taken from me even as I lay here in prison slowly dying, suffocating under the avalanche of agendas and rhetoric that mark the sex abuse crisis in the Church.
"His tone is, as usual, vibrant, though shading to darkness when he thinks of the possibility of his expulsion from the priesthood -- a reminder that there could be prospects ahead harder to bear than a life in prison."
Dorothy Rabinowitz, "A Priest's Story," The Wall Street Journal, April 27/28, 2005.
And it is for priesthood alone not for freedom, not for vindication that I must fight for the truth to my dying breath. If priesthood was not worth such effort, why have a Year of the Priest at all?
"But the goat upon which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to makeà ‚¬ ¨atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel "
" And when he has made an end of atoning for the holy place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat. Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, and all their sins, and he shall put them on the head of the goat and send him away into the wilderness " to a solitary land."
Leviticus 16:10, 20 22)
Thus ends The Year of the Priest.
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