The man who held hostages Friday at a New Hampshire campaign office of Sen. Hillary Clinton alleged in a 2002 lawsuit that he was raped by a parish priest.
The anger came flooding back to me. I was baptized, confirmed, and raised in the Catholic Church. Like many of us, I drifted away due to laziness and convenience. I became the classic "twice-a-year" church goer; once on Easter and once on Christmas. I occassionally defended the Church against my friends' derision, stating how it was one of the primary forces for good in the Latin American dirty wars of the 1980s. I hated the Church's opposition to birth control in AIDS-ravaged Africa, but that opposition didn't completely drive me away. We had an on-again, off-again relationship for years. Then I moved to Boston... and everything changed.
The stories started leaking out in the papers as an occassional drip, lost in the daily noise. Then the dripping quickened and became the journalistic equivalent of an insomniac's hell; lying in bed staring at the ceiling, praying for the dripping to stop.
drip The priest molested how many boys?
drip The diocese has known for how many decades?
drip What? They simply moved him to another parish?!?
drip Jesus, how many priests are now being accused?
From 2001 to 2003, the Archdiocese of Boston imploded under the weight of its own sin and perversion. Weekly donations and attendance dried up. The parishoners who continued attending mass had stopped giving, in order to ensure that their money could not be used for the legal defense of child molesters. The church began selling off property. One of the most Catholic, Irish cities in America saw the virtual evaporation of entire parishes within a year. It became clear that this was not the behavior of a few rogue priests, but a systemic cancer that extended up through the Cardinal, and some feared all the way to Rome. Many parishoners of good faith stayed on, but I just couldn't. Maybe my faith wasn't strong enough. Maybe my anger was too strong. 2002 was the year that I irrevocably quit the Catholic Church.
Hostage suspect sued in 2002, saying priest raped him: CNN.com
That headline jumped out of the screen and punched me in the face. I dropped my house repairs, I turned off the stereo, and I started writing. It is well past midnight here on the East Coast, so this diary is destined to sit unread on the diary list until it is slowly pushed off the bottom before most people awake on Sunday. But that is alright. I didn't write this for you, I wrote this for me.
I am writing this diary because many at Daily Kos expressed that we should all feel pity for this poor disturbed man who took the hostages in New Hampshire, and I must admit I really didn't feel it. But now I do. Even though I can't verify the validity of his claims, he is obviously a very disturbed and hurt man. He was an adult when he was allegedly raped, unlike many of the Church's younger victims. But obviously that would not lessen the pain. So now I do have pity for Leeland Eisenberg. And I am filled with rage at the whole wretched ordeal. And once again I cry for the lost innocence and ruined lives of those trusting children of Boston.
For anyone interested, the top-notch Boston Globe is the paper that blew the lid off the whole thing, and is the gold standard on this story. You can read about it here. You will weep.