“How are you? How’s your roommate?” My home pastor peppered me with the questions of a concerned father as I leaned up against my cinder-block dorm wall, sticky from the record-breaking humidity and dozens of coats of paint from previous dorm-dwellers. I pressed the phone up to my ear and sighed. I was a mere few days into my first college semester, and I already felt cheated by all the people who told me college would be “the best four years of your life.” It certainly didn’t feel like that.
“This is bad, Olivia,” his tone shifted to something more serious. I could hear the hum of the highway through the phone. “Yeah, yeah. It’ll get better,” I shrugged it off, unaware that he had changed subjects. “No, the scandal. This is the worst scandal the Church has probably ever seen. I predict that these next few months more accusations will continue to come into the light.” He paused; I stayed silent. “This will be the greatest war in the Church to date. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s nowhere near over. This is bad, really bad.”
It was September 2018, and he was driving to the crisis meeting that Cardinal Seán had called at St. John’s Seminary in response to a seminarian’s letter that revealed the events that surfaced in 2002 were far from over. I was in a state of denial; I thought that St. John’s was a fluke. A bad man or two, who happened to be priests. Cardinal Seán will fix it. I trust him, right?
Later that afternoon, I stood in the dorm lounge of my new home, silent and motionless in front of the TV screen. Other girls chatted throughout the common room, but I froze on my way to the laundry room, eyes locked on a WBZ reporter standing in front of St. John’s. B-roll cut in of protesters on the seminary sidewalk with hand-lettered signs scrawled with “Come clean, Cardinal Seán!”
My friends are seminarians there, only half a mile down the street from my dorm. My pastor is sitting inside after his drive up. My shepherd is there, too. This is my Church. It is not a detached problem of the past, or a blip of a problem that Philadelphia encountered the prior spring. I stood there, staring at the TV, hearing Father’s voice in my head. “This is bad, really bad.”
I was born in 2001. Ten months later, the Boston Globe exposed the decades of abuse and cover-ups in the Archdiocese of Boston. Eighteen months later, Cardinal Seán O’Malley came to Boston. With a good track record of sifting through the rumble after abuse shakes a diocese, Cardinal O’Malley got to work, selling off the cardinal’s mansion (now BC’s School of Theology & Ministry), and instituting rules to make sure that it would never happen again.
I grew up with it being normal to never be allowed to be in a room alone with a priest, even in confession. I knew no different. I knew nothing other than a period of healing and progress. I saw the darkness and confusion as a closed epoch of the past––or so I thought.
And now, 20 years later, I’m sitting in it––personally this time. On one front, I’m an investigative journalist now, uncovering stories I wish were never there to be uncovered. This week though, I’ve been left to help lead a local parish before I am even 20, navigating a parish community reeling from a sudden pastor change, a measure by the Archdiocese to not let history repeat itself, no matter how overly cautious it may seem. As the parish phones rang off the hook this past weekend with confused, angry, and hurting parishioners, I had to answer the question, “Can I speak to the pastor, please?” with “We don’t have one right now,” while tears welled in my eyes.
I wish this was never a topic I would consider, but my mind is spinning, and my heart is broken and numb. The blessing in the chaos is that I get to see a glimpse of 2002, a time in Church history that I could not previously empathize with. In our parish office this weekend, we played Chris Rezema’s song “I Don’t Want to Go” on repeat. Lord, I don’t wanna go if You’re not going before me. Anywhere you are, I wanna be there… even if that is Your broken, burning, and crumbling Church. Because it’s Yours, Lord.
Featured image courtesy of Scott Maentz via Flickr
Previously the Campus News Editor and Catholicism 101 Editor, Olivia dabbles in The Torch’s writing and photography. She is a senior studying theology and applied psychology and human development with a minor in journalism. She is unashamedly passionate about youth ministry, Haiti, all things charismatic, the Oxford comma, and CatholicTV––where she can often be found as an on-camera news reporter or host of the To the Heights podcast.
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