I Am So Popular: Holy Molestation, Batman!

Yes, I was goosed by a priest. And, to make the story juicier still, this man happened to be my own blood relative. Looking back, it seems Fred actually had a thing for teenage boys. But on the occasion I happened to find his hand grabbing my ass, there were no young men around. I guess he just had to make do.

At the time, I did not mention the groping to anyone. I was a teenage girl, for one thing— who would believe me? And I was raised by a hardcore zealot father who blindly worshipped the church. I can’t even fathom what would have happened had I accused my cousin. At best, my accusations would’ve been dismissed—pardon the pun—out of hand. At worst, surely I would have been informed—as I was on so many other occasions for so many lesser things—that I was going to hell for lying.

Let’s talk about this hell thing, shall we? I am not shitting when I say it didn’t fully dawn on me until my third decade that hell is not, in fact, a geographical location. By that point, I’d abandoned the church in which I’d spent my first nineteen years being thoroughly brainwashed. Now, it wasn’t like I was walking around thinking, “There is a hell! There is a hell!” But only in my thirties did I understand that, as surely as I was made to believe in the Easter Bunny, I was regularly indoctrinated to believe there is a place, a real place, where you go to burn for all of eternity, because, say, you beat off, or thought impure thoughts, or fucked without the benefit of marriage.

All that should seem laughable now. But if ever I need to remind myself that psychological manipulation is a real thing, I simply glance back on my childhood and unsuccessfully try to add up just how many times I was informed that God was punishing me for one minor infraction or another. I bought into all this mumbo-jumbo, hook, line and sinker. Devout to the core, I spent my youth hoping and praying for some lightning bolt to strike me, hurled directly from the fist of a white-bearded god, to confirm that I was a special chosen one.

Being raised Catholic so warped my outlook that even now, twenty-seven years after I finally walked away from the bullshit, I cannot escape the damage. Sometimes, I tell Warren tales of my religious youth and he just shakes his secular Jewish head in disbelief. But it’s true, all of it, including a priest’s hand up my ass.

My father converted to Catholicism in order to marry in a church-sanctioned fashion. They say converts make the best Catholics. I’ll say this—the man couldn’t stand children and yet had nine of them. I chalk this up to the use-birth-control-and-burn-in-hell marketing the church continues to shove down the throats of so many blind sheep followers. That the purportedly celibate pope continues to condemn condoms, and spreads this nonsense particularly in Third World countries overcome with poverty, overpopulation and AIDS is the true sin.

My father so bought into the edicts of the church that before the ink had dried on Roe v. Wade, he was spending Sundays—his only day off from a job that could not support us all—protesting abortion, fighting to protect the “unborn” rather than tending to all those born children he’d spawned. He went so far as to purchase an old-school airport limousine - think a double length station wagon—upon which he had painted, in huge fluorescent letters ABORTION IS KILLING YOUR OWN CHILD. This, he toted us around in, his nine kids an unwitting, rolling performance art piece. Though forced to ride in this vehicle, we did not know what abortion was, only understood it was an uber-sin, another chance for a free ticket to damnation.

Getting back to Fred. When I was a teenager, spending summers working at the Jersey shore, I was informed that a cousin I’d never met, a priest, would be coming to spend the weekend in our shore house. This dismayed me, as I imagined having to curb my wild ways in the presence of a holy man. Thus, when he arrived with a carload of boys my age, handed us a pile of money, and encouraged us to go out drinking (we were 17) we had something that felt like excited respect for him.

Fred and I hit it off, and continued to hang out. It did not dawn on me then that his ongoing encouragement of my already out-of-control drinking might not be a good thing. And while I cannot blame him for the alcoholism that would eventually become my lot, for my part I can’t imagine going out and rounding up a bunch of teenagers and encouraging them to suck down the sauce.

Fred had a particular fondness for one of the young men he introduced me to, and once he invited me to join the two of them on a road trip. I did not attend. I do not know what happened on that trip. But years later, when Fred was charged in court with molesting boys— a charge for which he was acquitted though I have my doubts— I always wondered about that one young man. But what could I do? Call and say, “Hey, one time Fred grabbed my ass, did he ever grab yours?”

This is how the silence has been perpetuated for so many years. When an adult in your life— particularly an adult who is revered by the community— does something so wrong and absurd as to molest you, speaking out is hardly the first thing that crosses your mind. In my case, as I was about to take a seat in Fred’s car, he reached over, put his hand on the seat, and when I landed on it, he laughed, like this was just a fun game.

What could I do? I suppose I laughed, too. And I think I told myself he was “just being silly.” I did not have knowledge of boundaries or the skills to stop him or call him on his sickness. Even now, three decades later, some odd little doubt fills me as I file this report. Really—am I just making a mountain out of a molehill here?

This is how they got away with it. This is how some of them still do. They lure and coerce the littlest lambs, combining a lethal mix of sweet talk and threats. They do it in the name of God. They know they are operating within a system far more interested in protecting its image than its followers. Those of us who speak out understand the risks. When I left the church, and then began vocalizing my discontent, I lost my entire family. Sure, I still see them from time to time. But any true intimacy I might’ve had, any real familial bonding, was lost long ago, thanks in great part to the very thing, the Church, that prompted my parents to bring so many of us into the world.

In 2004, on one of my rare visits back, I even had a sister chase me down the beach, in the very same town where I first met my man-of-the-cloth cousin. She was furious and when at last she caught up with me, she yelled that my problem in life was that I had an internal conflict with Christianity. Perhaps she was right but as sure as that priest’s hand grabbed my ass, her reasons for thinking this were totally wrong. Her fear that my renunciation had damned me strayed far from the mark. I’d already been through hell, courtesy of the doctrine she continued to embrace.

Spike Gillespie still enjoys listening to Jesus Christ Superstar on Easter Sunday. She blogs for JetBlue, KnitBuzz, and herself. And she suggests that if a priest ever grabs your ass, you punch his lights out.