UPDATE, July 18, 2019:
The man I describe further into this essay as "another brother who lived among them in one dorm – and they told stories of him inviting them to his room for illicit cigarettes and requests to shower naked with him in his private bathroom" has been publicly identified as being credibly accused of sexually abusing minors abuse. So I now have more to say. To read, jump to the end.
Watching Spotlight,
the Oscar-bound movie about The Boston Globe’s investigation of Massachusetts clergy
who raped children, and reading about employees of St. George’s School in
Middletown, Rhode Island, who sexually abused students has prompted memories of my 1960s and
‘70s childhood.
Only luck, I have concluded, spared me and my
friends the fate of these many victims here in New England and others like them
across America.
Back then, we were youngsters in a world where
authority was accepted without question, and where certain authorities with sanctioned
access to children – clergy, teachers, coaches and scout leaders among them –
were almost god-like in stature. In the case of priests, they may as well have
been God, at least in the view of adults like my mother, a daughter of Irish
immigrants who was born and raised in Boston and who brought up her children with
the Baltimore Catechism. You won’t find a hint that clergy could be anything
but pure in that book.
It was a world of blind obedience and absolute
trust of elders. And it was a world where monsters cloaked in authority roamed
free, although no grownup warned us of that.
A resident of Wakefield, Mass., a suburb of
Boston, from birth until college, I spent eight years at Saint Joseph parochial
school and was an altar boy during much of that time at the parish church, which
was under the control of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The priests I
knew best at St. Joseph were good stewards, and one remained an acquaintance for
decades. But another, William F. Maloney, who I saw only at Mass, was later publicly
accused of sexually abusing someone in the late ‘60s at another parish in North
Reading, four miles from my home.
A ten-minute drive would have brought me to another
church, St. Patrick’s in neighboring Stoneham, where my parents could just as
easily have settled when buying their first house outside the city. I would
have been an altar boy there -- with Bryan Schultz, who was repeatedly and
grotesquely abused by Paul R. Shanley, one of the worst serial pedophile priests,
assigned to St. Patrick’s for seven years in the 1960s. Father James R. Porter,
another monster, was briefly with Shanley at the Stoneham parish in 1967.
As the investigative reporter played by Mark
Ruffalo declares in Spotlight: “It
could have been you! It could have been me! It could have been any one of us!”
We did not need religion to be near an apparent molester.
A local journalist who regularly visited schools, the YMCA, youth athletics and
other places was said to have a creepy interest in boys, touching them
inappropriately and sneaking into their tents after nightfall on scouting
trips. Neither I nor my close friends were scouts, but we heard these stories so
frequently we held them to be true. We never told an adult, for who would have
believed a kid with such a story?
In eighth
grade, I won a scholarship to St. John’s Prep, in Danvers, Mass., an
all-boys school run the the Xaverian Brothers where I would receive a superb education. I remember meeting
with headmaster Brother Ricardo before I enrolled; he wanted to personally
share his delight at my good fortune with me and my parents. He seemed a warm, charming
man who was devoted to God and the well-being of children. And that remained my
perception during my years at St. John’s.
I was a day student, and thus never saw Brother
Ricardo outside the classroom context. But boarders did. They saw also another
brother who lived among them in one dorm – and they told stories of him
inviting them to his room for illicit cigarettes and requests to shower naked with
him in his private bathroom. To my knowledge, this man was never formally accused
of sexually abusing a student. [UPDATE, July 19, 2019: He now has been, and his name was Brother Rudolph, born Thomas Holihan; for more, jump to end.] But Brother Ricardo, whose given name was
Richard Kerressey, was.
In 1994, a former student accused Kerressey of
sodomizing him in the school infirmary in 1966, after the headmaster had
brought him back to campus following hospital treatment for injuries sustained
when another student bullied and beat him. After the rape, according to the former
student, Kerressey threatened to keep him, a senior, from graduating if he told
anyone. The grown man claimed his life had been ruined, with suffering from
“…depression, affective disorder, rage attacks, sleep apnea…
attention/concentration deficit… is unable to hold a job or even at this point
work… has a poor self-image, and has been through three divorces,” according to
a Sept. 22, 1994, letter by the law firm of Eckert Seamans Cherin &
Mellott, which represented victims of Porter and Shanley.
From the 1969 St. John's Prep yearbook |
Did Kerressey have more victims? The letter, available on bishopaccountability.org, states: “Mr. [redacted] informs us that it was well known among the students at St. John’s that Br. Ricardo favored certain people. Br. Ricardo’s favoritism was based upon the student’s availability to be sexually abused by Br. Ricardo. If one succumbed to Br. Ricardo’s abuses, one was more successful at St. John’s.”
I look very differently now at Brother Ricardo’s smiling face in my Prep yearbooks.
As with other cases, we likely will never know the
full truth, since some of an abuser’s victims take their secrets with them to
the grave. Indeed, it is possible that some of my childhood friends and
classmates were abused but have never disclosed it. If so, I hope they, together
with all victims, can find peace in their later years, and if their healing
involves reporting long-ago abuse to law enforcement, I encourage them to do
so. It is never too late.
The record is unclear on what action, if any, was taken against Kerressey, who left St. John’s in 1971 after my junior year and died 26 years later. To its credit, St. John’s in a more recent time moved responsibly against another brother and a priest chaplain who were accused of abusing students. And the Archdiocese of Boston -- headed now by a holy man, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who succeeded the unholy and unrepentant Cardinal Bernard Law, in charge when many of the more than 800 known victims allege they were abused -- has apologized, paid damages, sought justice and enacted real protections.
The record is unclear on what action, if any, was taken against Kerressey, who left St. John’s in 1971 after my junior year and died 26 years later. To its credit, St. John’s in a more recent time moved responsibly against another brother and a priest chaplain who were accused of abusing students. And the Archdiocese of Boston -- headed now by a holy man, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who succeeded the unholy and unrepentant Cardinal Bernard Law, in charge when many of the more than 800 known victims allege they were abused -- has apologized, paid damages, sought justice and enacted real protections.
We say this must never happen again. One way
toward that goal is never forgetting what happened, and what didn’t. Luck is
not enough to protect children.
POSTSCRIPT: In August 2018, Xaverian Brother Robert Flaherty was placed on indefinite administrative leave from St. John's after allegations he abused a child in Baltimore years ago. This follows the release of the grand jury report showing the horrific abuse in Pennsylvania of more than 1,000 victims by more than 300 priests and the church-wide cover up for decades.
UPDATE, July 19, 2019:
The late Brother Rudolph, born Thomas Holihan, is the person
I referred to without name in my original essay. Among my classmates, he was
held to be “creepy,” in the way adolescents describe someone they do not trust
and who they suspect -- with a child's sixth sense of such things -- might use adult authority for ill purpose. Inviting boys
to come up to his residential suite for an illicit cigarette, which Holihan might
follow with a request to get naked and shower with him, for example.
Brother Rudolph, born Thomas Holihan. |
I was a day student, not a resident, but I did once visit in
his room. In 1971-72, Holihan was the faculty adviser for a small group of
seniors, including me, who would be spending the spring semester off-campus (I
as an intern in a microbiology lab near Harvard Medical School). In the late
fall of 1971, I, like the others, had to meet with him to go over my spring
plans.
He could have conducted this session in an office, but he
did not; he told me to meet him in his suite, in Ryken Hall, which, according
to the prep history, “housed 150 students both in private rooms and in an open
dormitory.” A paradise for a predator such as him.
I remember vividly being anxious climbing the stairs to his
suite, being let in, and then sitting facing him, the smell of old cigarettes
filling the room. I had already formulated a plan were he to try to touch me or
more: I would run for the door, hoping he could not stop me and that the door
did not have a double lock.
And of course, this being almost a half century ago, I would
have told no one but perhaps a close friend. I certainly would have told no school
official, nor made a report to police.
I can only imagine the horror of those boys who were
sexually molested. I hope now, as always, that they have been able to heal and
find peace. And I believe naming this monster may help in that regard, if only
to confirm what they could not then tell the authorities. For Brother Rudolph, superficially,
was revered: a so-called man of the cloth and longtime legendary campus figure,
at St. John’s already some three decades when I arrived.
And in that, lay the sick power of these despicable people.
In a posting long before the Xaverian Brothers last week to
their credit publicized Thomas Holihan’s true nature, St. John’s quoted him
from his own writing:
“I tried to remember, sometimes desperately, that the boy is
more important than the student; learned to realize that most college
professors of adolescent psychology never had to teach adolescents; felt
compensated for all teaching traumas by the glimmer of wonder I was lucky
enough to awaken in a few students’ eyes; fell in love with most of the poetry
I taught, both English and Latin; reached a point as the years went by when the
sound of the bell in September that signaled the beginning of another school
year was a joyous sound that spoke of happy hours and happy days to come.”
I have read and re-read that passage, taking in every
word. They speak, hypocritically and diabolically, of evil.
To its credit, St. John’s with the revelation of Holihan and
others at the school in years past, sent a message to the large and far-flung
prep community. Below is what headmaster Ed Hardiman, a good man with whom I
have an acquaintance, wrote. My hope is that opening the windows and letting in
the fresh air will be cleansing, so that in the future, other children will not
be victimized at any school, church, or anywhere.
I was one of the lucky ones: I received a wonderful
education at St. John’s, and it instilled values I still hold and launched me
to a long and successful career. My life would have been very different had I been
unlucky.
"As a school community, we humbly acknowledge the pain
this information may cause for victims of abuse as well as for the larger Prep
community as we continue to grapple with feelings of betrayal, anger, and grief
about the suffering of victims of sexual abuse and the cover-up by members of
the church hierarchy, clergy, and religious orders," Ed Hardiman wrote.
"We are grateful for the transparency and efforts to promote healing by
the Xaverian Brothers."
The Boston Globe published a story listing Holihan and other
brothers at Xaverian Brothers schools in Massachusetts: http://bit.ly/2XZOYwJ
Providence
Journal staff writer and author G. Wayne Miller graduated from St. John’s Prep
in 1972 and Harvard College in 1976.
Read Horror at St. Georges, a Providence journal editorial on the unfolding scandal at that school.
Read Horror at St. Georges, a Providence journal editorial on the unfolding scandal at that school.