Extortion, Lies, and Intimidation

Witness to Sorrows

It was a hot but sunny late summer day when I met Father Anthony*, a Priest who was just a few years shy of his fiftieth anniversary as a Priest. We sat down in the cozy foyer of his monastery. His demeanor, from his long white hair to his kind face, bespoke a lifetime of service and compassion for the Church and the world. “When I was in formation,” he recalled, “one time my superior told me that I smiled too much. He called me in and demanded that I stop smiling completely for a space of two months. Otherwise, I would be expelled from the community.” This man, then young, dutifully complied, and refused to let a smile pass his face for two whole months to appease his superior. Ironically, after all that effort, that superior had a mental breakdown and left the Priesthood.

Now, over fifty years since that event, Father Anthony was sent to one of several of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States, dedicated ostensibly to the care of Priests and Religious. We were fortunate to meet after he was released. “There was a nun I met once,” he continued, “who came in so cheerful and warm. Within two weeks, she stopped talking to everyone, and began to become withdrawn and disheveled in her appearance. At first we thought that she maybe had severe bi-polar or another mental illness. What she later ended up telling us was that her therapist commanded her to remain quiet as part of her supposed treatment. So she slipped into a depression, as did many there.” The old Priest smiled bitterly, as he added, “How is this different from how I was treated as a young man?”

Flash forward to an elderly nun, in her beautiful habit. She pushed brownies she had made the previous night toward me as she circled her walker around to sit down in her convent parlor. “Father,” she began, “I’m from the city and from a big family. I have lived in the ghetto. I know what tough is. But I never experienced more pain in my life than in how I was treated by my own so-called sisters.” She paused to collect herself, then added, “But neither they, nor anyone on this earth, can take my vocation away from me.” She ran afoul of her religious superior a few years previously, who sent her away for ‘evaluation’. She spent three-quarters of a year in effective exile. “Father,” she said as we ended our interview, “Give ’em hell. And take some brownies.”

Finally, consider the case of a late middle-aged Priest with advancing Parkinson’s Disease. We met in a nursing home for religious. Confined to his wheelchair, he lost the ability to walk as the disease progressed. “Father,” he began, “when I was in my religious community, my superior claimed that ‘someone’ made a claim that I physically menaced and assaulted someone in the Monastery.” He chuckled as he struggled to control the twitching of his limbs, “Look at me! Do I look like I am even capable of menacing anyone? Even at that time, I was wheelchair bound.” He later told me that by chance, he discovered his superior in a morally compromising situation, so his superior decided that sending him away for the “best of care” was the preferred course of action.

It was not easy to obtain the now notebook full of interviews which I have been able to compile in the past few months. Many have had to be done after a Priest or a Religious was released or walked out of treatment. Some were done via telephone while they were ‘in treatment’, where the interviewee expressed fear at the fact that their telephone call, including information about to whom they spoke, when and for how long, is monitored by the facility. They would lose ‘privileges’ if someone on staff decided that their telephone conversation was problematic in some way. Some had not seen the outside world for weeks or months.

There are several common themes in these vignettes which I will revisit in the coming days. We see here that in many places, the destructive psychological abuse of Priests and Religious can begin in their formation. We see how many Priests and Religious are trained, in the name of holy obedience, of being willfully ignorant, weak, and supine before the will of the superior. In the older generations, this Faustian Pact was sweetened by the assurance that Holy Mother Church would always take care of the material needs of Priests. Priests and Religious, who tend to have personalities eager for security and structure, often comply on that basis alone. Indeed, it’s easier to obey a difficult command if you know that at least you will be fed, and not be homeless. There are other themes I want to cover: the lack of human and legal rights for Religious, who have precious few protections under Canon Law; the abuse of the mental health field, and others. But today, I wish to focus on the use of Extortion, Lies and Intimidation on the part of Bishops and their apparatchiks in order to enforce their will.

Gestapo Tactics

The knock at the locked entrance came just before midnight. At the door was standing the Vicar for Clergy, as well as two lay officials from the chancery. The semi-disheveled Priest who answered the rectory door was shocked to see them, half-expecting either a mentally ill person, or a desperate situation where the need of a Priest was dire. Perhaps he was right on one of those. “You are to leave the Rectory immediately. You must turn in your cell phone and your computer. If you do not comply with this, you will be laicized.”

Is this the behavior of the Catholic Church, or the Gestapo? In what other institution, outside of perhaps the military or sensitive government posts, would any such behavior be tolerated from an employer? Unfortunately, I cannot provide too many additional details so as to put my sources at risk, but I have discovered that this is not an isolated case. As even a casual observer can notice, there are several problems with this: first, the psychological intimidation. To demand this of a Priest suddenly, and out of public view, is an action meant to frighten and knock a Priest off his balance. It is also meant to guard their action from many eyewitnesses. Second, the Church is asserting rights over persons and property which are strictly prohibited in most legal jurisdictions. Third, the assertion that a Priest can be automatically laicized on the basis of refusing a mere command, especially one that is unjust, is patently risible. I wish that the Priest had picked up his gun (this was the United States, after all), and told those men to get off his lawn, and return with a warrant. The Diocese did succeed in evicting that Priest, and he did surrender his computer and cell phone. Even if the Priest was accused of a crime, my question is: why is the Diocese involved, and not Law Enforcement? What is going on with cases like these?

Obey to your own detriment

Canon Law does not mandate what we in the United States call mirandizing, which is where an individual, when arrested, is immediately informed as to his civil rights when he enters into custody. However, Canon Law does support the right to not self-incriminate, which is a staple of the rights of accused persons for centuries. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution has this very protection for the sake of the innocent person who may find themselves under scrutiny. It has been said that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A good investigator/interrogator can lead on a witness or the accused himself to admit to whatever he or she wants, especially if the person interviewed is weakened by force of fear, or ignorant as to their own rights and obligations.

Many Priests have been called into their chanceries to answer questions of widely divergent natures, largely without being informed of their right to canonical counsel on the part of a trained advocate. A common refrain among these Priest-Victims is, “If I cooperate and do what they want, everything will be fine.” Yet even now, Priests who do cooperate, even if they are accused of no crime whatsoever, have their lives entirely thrown into chaos.

I entirely agree with anyone who says that if a Priest is accused of a civil crime, he should be interviewed and tried by Law Enforcement, not by the Church. Once, we had the sad practice that dioceses would cover up the crimes of Priests in order to avoid embarrassment. Now, the Church is utilizing a sort of aggressive, pro-active policing policy which had made certain Law Enforcement Departments the objects of lawsuits. The Church is often accustomed to hiring former police, lawyers and prosecutors from the secular world, who bring some of their same aggressive (and often anti-Catholic) tactics into the Church. Only now, they run chanceries, sometimes placed directly adjacent to Clergy Offices, without hardly any control or oversight. Bishops are terrified of reining in these people because they do not want the bad press of being “weak on sex abuse” or other such things.

Predatory Behavior

Let’s say an older Priest receives a phone call from his chancery, which goes to voicemail. He is asked to come in for an appointment. After some prayer, heart medication and perhaps a shot of fortifying spirits, he enters into the chancery. A few months from retirement, he thinks that maybe he will be able to retire early, and spend his sunset years helping at various parishes, while living with family. He is told that the diocese has received a complaint about him. It has nothing to do with sex abuse or other crime. Apparently, he sent an email or a text which had language which a parishioner didn’t like. The next step? To the psychiatric hospital for an evaluation.

The Priest dutifully goes, which is his first misstep. While at the Hospital, the Priest is subjected to a regular battery of tests, but also what is called in most places a Forensic Risk Assessment: that includes, but is not limited to, a polygraph, and various criminological tests, such as the Abel Screening Tool. Most of these tests are extremely controversial in the psychological community as universally valid tests. This must be emphasized here: these controversial tests are being administered by the Church, not by Law Enforcement, and even to people who have not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing whatsoever. The polygraph in particular, and all intrusive forced manifestations of the conscience, were explicitly condemned by no less of a figure than Pius XII, and the right of one to refuse them has been upheld again and again as a human and canonical right by the Holy See:

Now, to whomever takes cognizance of your works, it would appear that certain moral problems arise here: you reveal in fact several times the objections raised against the intrusion of the psychologist into the intimacy of the personalities of other beings. Thus for instance the use of narcosynthesis, already questioned in psychotherapy, is considered illicit in legal proceedings as well as the use of the instrument for the detection of lies, known as “Lie-detector” or “polygraph.”

Allocution to the 13th Congress of the International Association of Applied Psychology, 1958.

Although psychologists and others acknowledge that the polygraph test can, in certain limited circumstances, be employed usefully, it is with good reason that the United States does not count it as evidence in a Court of Law. Yet on the basis of this alone, some Priests lose everything.

The aforementioned Priest, who is real, passed his polygraph and Forensic Risk Assessment. Even so, Dioceses have told him and other Priests like him that they must stay in psychological treatment from four to six months, or even a year, even when the evaluating institution is incapable of formulating a diagnosis to justify that sort of stay. If the Priest refused to comply, he was threatened by his Vicar for Clergy and Bishop that he would be Suspended (although he has committed no delict) and that he would lose his pension, even though he was less than a year from retirement. And this is what they do with the ‘innocent’. What do they do with the guilty?

No Mercy

Father Xavier is a late middle-aged Priest who has a beautiful life of almost thirty years of service to the Church. Somewhere in the middle of his ministry, he had an affair with a woman his age. “I immediately regretted it,” he told me. “I was unhappy, but it was good to feel loved. I did not trust the Lord for what I needed inside, even though I had always been committed to celibacy. After a few months, I cut off the relationship, and never looked back.”

Later on, circumstances emerged which led to this matter becoming known to his Bishop. The Bishop, even though the affair had happened ten to fifteen years ago, sent the man for ‘evaluation.’ He was polygraphed. He failed. Even though he confessed to being intimate with an adult woman, he was asked appalling questions on perversions of which the Priest had never even conceived. In that nervous and outraged state, he understandably failed the polygraph. On that basis alone, the Bishop informed the Priest that he was obliged complete his course of ‘rehabilitation’ and then the Bishop would pursue his laicization in Rome. Even if he cooperated with the program and was ‘helped’, he was being persecuted by his own spiritual father.

I asked the Priest, “Why did you never consult with a lawyer?” He sadly confessed, “I was afraid. I thought if I simply did what they told me, this would all blow over. Thank God I have been able to return to live with my extended family. But I don’t even know if I can or will fight the Bishop. After all this, my name is ruined, and my life is over.” Mind you, he was not saying that his name and reputation was ruined because he had an affair. It was ruined because of how the Diocese, apoplectic, reacted to this report by digging deeper and deeper to find justification for washing their hands of a potential source of embarrassment, even resorting to ‘evidence’ which is not reliable.

As we know from Church History since Apostolic Times, Priests acting badly in many ways is old news. Many, probably most, are faithful. If a Priest misbehaved, for much of our history, we had practices to deal with non-criminal sins which closely followed our theological principles: penance, reparation, confession and spiritual renewal. In the Church of 2019, if St. Peter denied Christ in public, he would be laicized…or perhaps he wouldn’t, because while the Church of 2019 is obsessed with sexual sin, she expresses utter disinterest in the malfeasance of clerics who, by heresy or blatant disregard for Liturgical Law, strike at the heart of the Deposit of Faith and the public worship of the Holy Trinity.

Follow the Money

As with many things in practical life, it is important to look at the financial end of things to try to understand how such grave injustices can continue, hidden in plain sight. First, there is the fact that many Diocesan Priests across the country are underpaid and under-compensated. Yes, Priests do often get food and housing, but there are two problems with that: first, their ‘home’ isn’t something they own, a resource they can use or to which they can retreat. It is housing under diocesan control. Second, many rectories across the world are in appalling condition, as many Priests, especially in poorer parishes, neglect their upkeep. Some Finance Councils even stonewall efforts by the Pastor to renovate their homes, out of pure anti-clericalism. This phenomenon is even reported in affluent areas, and is not limited to the impoverished. Diocesan Priests, while they do not take promises of poverty, are exhorted to a simplicity of life. Yet they deserve a standard of living at least in keeping with the parishioners among whom they live. Standards are so low in some places, that Priests have applied for welfare and food stamps and have received them, and then were told by their Dioceses to stop.

The result of this sort of under-payment has nothing to do with virtue or love for simplicity of life: it has everything to do with control. In almost all the cases listed above, one of the factors which compels a Priest to obey his Bishop is that he lacks any effective financial independence. And because many Dioceses lack a vested pension fund, they can turn the spigot off and on for elderly Priests at will, if they feel they have done something which the Bishop doesn’t like. This sort of extortion is unconscionable. There are some elderly Pastors who literally will not preach difficult truths, teach, or govern their Parishes for simple fact they are afraid of being thrown out in the street in their old age. It is far easier to coast, and to do the bare minimum to get by. It’s too much trouble risking the chancery’s ire.

On the money front as well, we have to consider that many of these psychiatric institutions are funded for, and run by, Dioceses. We have then a situation that is unethical in the extreme: first, a Diocese which coerces a Priest into entering the institution, which is still considered a ‘voluntary entrance’. Second, the institution, which is usually owned by the Diocese or a group of Dioceses, does the evaluation, which then makes the determination whether the ‘patient’ will stay, based solely upon its own judgment. This is a conflict of interest three layers deep. Explaining this situation to a civil judge, I once heard that this practice violates not only the standards of the mental health field, but even jurisprudence: no judge should sentence a person to treatment in the same place where they are evaluated.

The ‘patient’ in many of these places is forced from Day 1 to sign over all his medical records to his Diocese or Religious Superior. So a situation emerges in which the Priest or Religious finds himself effectively imprisoned, and the judge, jury and executioner are the very people with whom he asked to cooperate for his ‘successful treatment’. How can any man or woman form a therapeutic alliance under these conditions, especially if there is a presenting issue which does in fact require care? I might also add that in many cases, estimates are that one day in these institutions, with the nursing, security, legal and psychological staff, costs upwards of $1,000 a day. There is big money in keeping Priests and Religious in seclusion this way. Lay people should be outraged that their contributions are being utilized to maintain this system.

We might also mention that these hospitals are way behind the curve in regard to the best practices in the mental health field. Very few mental disorders actually require hospitalization. Most can be solved outpatient, with a good medical professional who is employed by, and works for, the patient. Unnecessary and/or forced psychological interventions not only can be unhelpful: they can be quite harmful.

The Atmosphere of Fear

Many Priests, I know, hear these stories with sadness and trepidation. We know innocent men who were treated in these ways, and who were broken down, mentally and physically. Then there are the Priests we know who did in fact have some problems, but the Diocese made it worse, and completely broke down a person who in the beginning only needed a little bit of help to get on their feet. These practices have harmed so many, but you alone know, dear brothers, how much this very atmosphere has also harmed you. You know that at any time, this same thing can happen to you. You know that at any time, you, or a friend you care about, can simply disappear. It is time to leave our learned common helplessness behind.

The fear which Priests have is usually banished from their mind by their habitual possession of the virtue of hope. But even for the most virtuous, hope is increasingly hard to hold to in this climate. When hope is lacking, the vice of acedia takes its place, which is distinctively marked by sadness. This sadness is at the root of so much clerical misconduct, as they search for anyone or anything which will numb the pain they feel. When this vice becomes widely entrenched, the results will be an absolute disaster for everyone, not least the Priests themselves.

Future articles will focus on practical solutions as to how we can remedy this situation, but first, I want to bring it into full view. More people need to know about this. The media won’t care. Some Bishops won’t care. But the people need to know, as do the leaders of our Church. We are reaching the limit of our tolerance. We have been abused, and the Bishops continue to wonder why our parishes and seminaries are empty. In our darker thoughts, we have wondered whether we will even have a Church for the future.

If you find these essays helpful, please share them broadly. I am also interested in any Priest who wants to give an interview on any situation they may have heard or seen. Your confidentiality will be protected, and you will be heard with compassion and concern. Let me be crystal clear: this blog and my work started out of pure love for the Priesthood and for the Church. We have a duty, we who live in these dark times, to take a stand against the denigration of our sacred calling, for the sake of the whole Church. What started as a process to expel corruption is being used as a cudgel by bad actors to strike at the foundations of clerical dignity.

We have an obligation to our brothers, and to the Church, to resist.

Maria, Stella Matutina, Ora Pro Nobis!

*All names given here are pseudonyms to protect the dignity and confidentially of those interviewed.