My fingers trembled when I dialled the phone. It was the early ’90s, back before texting or email. In fact, I’d just replaced my beige wall phone with a chunky wireless. Four rings in, I was about to hang up when my brother’s voice finally answered. I sputtered out what I needed to say: When I was a little girl, one of our family members sexually molested me. The abuse went on for years.
My therapist thought it would be healing for me to tell my family. She warned me that sometimes families can react in unpredictable ways. They might call me a liar, say that I’m crazy or sever the relationship. She told me that in her practice, she’d seen people written out of inheritances, banished from their homes and blamed for having been victims. I guess she just wanted me to be prepared.
On a wooden chair under a dim overhead light, I stared at the burn mark on my dining room table. I was 28 years old and struggling. I’d already told my two sisters about what happened, but opening up to the guys in my family was harder. After I gushed out my news, there was silence. At first, I wondered if we’d been disconnected, but I could feel my brother’s attention on the other end of the line. I could picture him taking in the secret I’d kept all my life. My fingers were white from clutching the phone, and I waited for him to say something.
“Just like me,” he said, finally. “Just like what Father Sean did to me.”
The phone fell from my grip, clattered on the hardwood floor. I picked it up, my breath gone.
“Oh,” I said, the sound barely coming out.
From the shakiness in his voice, I could tell he’d never told anyone, even though he was 34 years old. I slipped from the chair to the floor and listened to the details unfold: the shotgun he bought with money he’d saved from his paper route; how he positioned himself in the juniper bushes just outside the rectory and waited for Father Sean to give him a clean shot. I could see him — my big brother when he was only 12 years old — crouched in the shrubbery with a trembling finger on the trigger.
He never went through with his plan.
My mind flashed back to seeing that gun in the basement — how scary it was and how I hoped it would never be aimed at me. My attention returned to the shaky voice on the phone.
“I thought I must be gay,” he said. “I thought since he picked me, it must have meant I was gay.”
When we hung up, I retched into the toilet and then wept as my rage and sadness swelled. At 4 a.m., Father Sean was still haunting me. Two hours later, I got up and got ready for work. Snippets of the conversation floated around my head, and I had a million questions.
My response to that phone call was oversized. I began to obsess about where that priest was — and about taking him down. I was enraged at him and at all the people who protected him. I was furious that the church I loved betrayed me.
When I made that phone call, I was in the midst of a debilitating depression, slogging my way through work days and collapsing on the couch in the evenings. My therapist told me that my depression was anger turned inward — that somehow the anger I should have felt about my own suffering had turned itself into sadness.
Even as thoughts about Father Sean battered my soul, I knew they were misdirected. I didn’t feel any anger over the molestation that had happened to me. When I thought about myself as a 5-year-old — hot breath on my skin and the shame that consumed me afterward — I only felt grief and profound sadness. Maybe the rage I felt toward Father Sean was precluding me from getting mad at my own abuser.
In those days, long-distance phone calls were expensive and there was no such thing as the internet, but I wanted to find out what happened to Father Sean. Since I worked in the international marketing division at a long-distance phone company, I could make calls anywhere in the world without racking up expenses. I got out a piece of paper and started making lists of where Father Sean might be and of people who might know him.
After a couple months, I found him. He’d been moved from parish to parish to parish all over Missouri, but I learned that he’d be starting a new position at a school in a little farming community I knew well. I remembered playing basketball in that town when I was in middle school, one small Catholic school against another.
I called the school’s office and pretended to be a parent. “When’s back-to-school night?” I asked. I told the secretary I wanted to get it on my calendar so I’d be sure not to miss it. Then I got out paper and a pen.
Dear Parents, I wrote. Without naming my brother, I told them about Father Sean. I provided as many details as I could to ensure my letter was taken seriously, and I signed my name and provided my address.
On back-to-school night, I drove several hours from my small apartment in Kansas City to the school. When I arrived, the parking lot was overflowing. Every street in the area was lined with cars, and I watched families excited about the new school year file into the building.
I parked my red Sentra where I could make a quick getaway. Then, I grabbed my manila folder full of photocopies of the letter and walked to the far end of the parking lot. My heart was pounding. I took the first letter off the stack, folded it in half and tucked it under the windshield wiper. Then I went to the next car and did the same thing. When every car on the lot had a letter, I moved to the ones on the street.
As I was working, a dad-looking man exited the building, and we made eye contact. Then, he returned to the school, and I resumed making my way around the parking lot. Within an hour, I was back on the road. Two days later, I called the church and learned that Father Sean was no longer affiliated with that parish.
But I wasn’t going to let him disappear into the ether only to resurface in some other unsuspecting community full of kids. I became relentless about tracking him down — and about preventing him from exploiting anyone else. During the process, I met a young man about my brother’s age who had also been Father Sean’s victim, and he told me about two other boys who had been abused by him too.
I was convinced that the sexual abuse I’d suffered was the root cause of my loneliness, my inability to trust people, my lifelong depression, my lack of self-esteem and my tendency to neglect myself. It sickened me that my brother was in that same lonely prison.
By making a lot more phone calls, I learned that Father Sean was good friends with the bishop to whom he reported. The bishop put Father Sean in a luxurious spiritual healing centre — essentially a country club-like place that had a pastry chef and an army of landscapers — while he continued to collect a salary provided by the church. I couldn’t help comparing his lifestyle with mine, and it added another layer to my fury. I kept making phone calls and yelled at the bishop, his secretary and plenty of others who probably didn’t have anything to do with this guy. Some of those people knew full well what that priest had done — and could still be doing — and they covered it up. I was determined to do everything I could to keep him from hurting anyone else.
Meanwhile, at my own parish, I made an appointment to talk with my priest. In tears, I told him my story. He said that anyone could be accused of abusing a child, even him. I looked up mid-sob. “What?” I asked. It was such a peculiar response that it stopped my tears cold and made me wonder if my own priest had something to hide.
Eventually I started a clergy abuse support group at my parish. Headlines were starting to pop up about priests who abused children, and while I knew I couldn’t change anything on a global stage, I thought at least I could make a difference in my own community. However, whenever I scheduled a meeting, the church secretary would “forget” to put it in the bulletin. When it was time to make announcements after Mass, they’d “forget” to include information about my group. Once, I scheduled a clergy abuse survivor to speak to our group, but when she arrived, my priest said that he’d arranged for a nun to speak instead. He walked my speaker to the door, and that’s when I understood that the church was sabotaging my efforts.
I realised that there was no longer a place for me in the church I loved. My dreams of a Catholic wedding, a Catholic family and living a Catholic life were being ripped apart. Aside from theology, Catholics bond over fish fry dinners, snippets of Latin, guilty consciences and inside jokes — to be Catholic is to have a home in the world.
Leaving the church seemed like shedding not just my religion but my identity. It would alienate me from my ancestors and drive a wedge between my parents and me. But it got to the point that I couldn’t even look at a Catholic Church without seeing the bewildered, tortured face of a child I loved, the smug face of our priest, and the network of people and resources protecting him. So, my heart shattered, I left and I looked for another path.
Like many Catholic families, mine is large. But my parents, my six siblings and my cousins mostly weren’t comfortable with conversations about sexual abuse. After I initially disclosed what happened to me and then what happened to my brother, the door to those discussions closed. In fact, I never told my brother about how hard I tried to keep that priest from victimising other children, and Father Sean’s name never came up in my family again.
It’s been 30 years since that horrible phone call when two truths were revealed, but the trauma I experienced has stayed with me. When I asked my brother if it would be OK to tell this story, he said he’d forgotten all about Father Sean. For me, forgetting isn’t an option — it would be like forgetting about being locked in a burning building — but I realise that we all cope in our own way.
In the intervening decades, my oldest friend, also a victim of incest, died by suicide. I endured triple negative breast cancer that spread to other parts of my body. I lost two houses to California wildfires. Both of my parents died, and I was the victim of terrible crimes. None of these traumas was as difficult as being 5 years old.
The family member who sexually molested me repeatedly when I was so little ultimately apologised in a heartfelt letter, and I’ve forgiven him. I don’t keep in touch with him, but he seems to have a peaceful, productive life.
The little girl I was at 5 — and the young woman I was at 28 — taught me to endure and to overcome. Not everyone can wage a war against injustice. But I learned that when I stand up for others, I’m also fighting for myself.
Nancy Brier is an entrepreneur who writes about family, rental property and cancer. Her work appears in the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Insider and other outlets. She lives in Southern California with her husband, and they have a fabulous daughter. If you’ve been impacted by clergy abuse, please contact SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
Help and support:
- Rape Crisis services for women and girls who have been raped or have experienced sexual violence – 0808 802 9999
- Survivors UK offers support for men and boys – 0203 598 3898
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