I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself. My hands were still trembling.
”It’s ok, it’s okayyy…..” I murmured softly in between breaths. In the backseat of the van, the kids shifted restlessly. “Why aren’t we moving, mom?” my son asked. The baby was beginning to make pre-fussy noises and squirm. I needed to get moving. It was a long drive home. If I didn’t get moving soon, there would be a riot. In my current state of mind, I couldn’t handle that.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and blew out slowly through pursed lips. Maybe I would feel better once I started driving.
I carefully backed out of the parking spot, and we left the parish fall festival behind. On the drive home, as my heart rate settled, I berated myself. It wasn’t as if anything had actually happened. Yes, there were certain things I’d seen there that reminded me of my college years, but why should I be reacting as strongly as I was? It had only been a couple hours or so and the kids had had a lot of fun; why had I overwhelmingly felt as if I were in danger? Was the memory of those things really that strong?
Nine years earlier, I had learned that I couldn’t trust my intuition: the darn thing was broken.
Scruples had always plagued me, but during my college years they had ballooned to the point that they eclipsed everything else. I had attended a Catholic college and joined a ministry group that led retreats for high schoolers and events for the other students on campus. The group was organized and run by a layman and the university chaplain, a monk from the monastery just off campus. The leaders both prided themselves on making a safe space for the ‘conservative homeschooled’ students, and boasted about how the prayers we led and the speakers we brought in, men like Dale Ahlquist, Scott Hahn, and Peter Kreeft, were indicative of the ‘orthodox, conservative’ Catholic culture of the group. 1
The lay minister, Marvin, had insisted on having one on one meetings with all of us, under the pretense of giving us feedback on talks for the retreats. Those meetings soon turned into in depth discussions of our personal lives. Anxieties that had more or less been background noise began to take over my life as they were coaxed out of me in these meetings, analyzed, poked, and prodded at in the name of “mentorship.” I went from being occasionally anxious to almost completely convinced that I was actively offending God and pursuing the wrong vocation. One of the other monks in the monastery once found me eating every bit of white lint I could find on the chapel floor, convinced I had dropped a crumb from the Eucharistic host at mass. At another point, I tried to break off my engagement with my now husband2, convinced I was supposed to be pursuing a religious life, simply because that seemed to my mind to be the objectively holier path.
It all culminated in an intense, all night panic attack that left me begging Marvin for a ride to the hospital. He instead directed me to the campus chaplain. Under the chaplain’s direction, I learned to ignore what my brain was trying to tell me. It wasn’t until I chose to ignore my thoughts and anxiety and stop considering them at all that I was able to return to a semblance of basic function, albeit one that was a state of near constant stress. Looking back, it was a miracle that I was able to finish my classes and graduate.
I later found out that Marvin seduced a member of our group and carried on a sexual affair with her, effectively ending his marriage, and that two female college students from my university were suing the school for failing to remove the university3 chaplain from campus after they reported they were sexually assaulted by him. After reading their account of what they went through, I realized I recognized the behavior they were describing and that I’d been assaulted too4.
It had been years since all that had happened. I was happily married, had children, received diagnosis and treatment for Obsession Compulsion Disorder, and my life was more or less stable. Why was it still haunting me?
The parish festival had been at the parish of a friend, Brittany5, who’d moved to the area for a fresh start after a long and arduous ordeal with her physical and mental health. I hadn’t attended mass there, but several families I knew did. It had a reputation of being the “conservative homeschool” parish; lots of big families with small children. It was the only church in our diocese that offered the Traditional Latin Mass, and everyone there was thankful to have a priest who was willing to go against the grain and offer it.
Yes, several of the exterior trappings, how people were dressed and how they spoke, reminded me of that group in college. But surely, that alone didn’t warrant a reaction like that, did it? The pastor was supposedly a good man; Brittany spoke very highly of him and I knew she trusted him.
My relationship with Brittany fell apart that winter. One night, she came over for dinner. While I was walking her out to her car afterwards, she mentioned that she and her pastor had been spending a lot of time together; walking their dog, shopping, and going to movies.
“You sure he’s not going to pull anything?” I asked. “I’ve had some bad experience with a priest lacking boundaries before.” She knew my story, we’d talked about it at some length in the past.
”No.” She said. “We’re just two single people with some free time, doing stuff together. We both want someone to do something with.”
Later on, she texted me and asked if she and this priest could light fireworks on our property for New Year’s since we were outside the city limits. I’d had some time to think about what she had told me by this point and felt disturbed. I wrote her an email in response, saying I couldn’t do that and I thought what she was doing was dangerous to both herself and to the priest. “You’re putting your safety and his vocation in danger. I can’t enable that.” I said.
She stopped speaking to me shortly afterwards, only texting to inform me that she had accepted a work promotion and moved to a different city that spring. Two weeks later, the pastor of that parish suddenly resigned without explanation, received laicization, and moved to the same city my friend had.
I’ve since become more involved with a few of the people who still attend that parish6, though mass attendance there is now much less than it was.7 I sometimes come across something that unpleasantly reminds me of my past, but I have yet to feel that overwhelming sense of anxiety.
I often don’t understand it, but I no longer believe my intuition is broken.
We were long distance at the time, but he was able to figure out a bit of what was really happening and told me to stop listening to the lay leader. Thank God, I listened to him enough that our relationship was able to survive.
The only reason I’m not mentioning the name of the school is because it has shut down due to lack of funding. The chaplain has also since passed away.
Given the state my mental health was in at the time, I’m convinced that it was a grace from God that I only realized this after the fact. I honestly think I may have killed myself if I had realized what was going on while it was happening.
Not her real name.
Turns out that when you homeschool, your children’s socialization opportunities expand radically when you have access to other homeschoolers.
The parish was no longer able to offer the TLM. Several families left and joined the local chapter of the SSPX.
As a fellow survivor of clergy abuse and the victim of inscrutable injustice by the Church, I applaud your transparency and courage. You have the heart and soul of a writer Emily and the tenacity to be the voice for the silent. Thank you.
Emily, thank you for this. While I never suffered from scrupulosity as you have (I'm so, so very sorry, by the way), I did have intense and chronic anxiety for most of my life. One of the worst side effects of my anxiety was that I learned/taught myself to *not* listen to my intuition/gut, because I felt like I couldn't trust my own mind or thoughts. The truth was that a big part of my anxiety was that my body was screaming one thing at me while my mind tried to explain it away. When I finally--finally!--got a therapist who actually taught me to calm my nervous system, I was able to actually listen to my Holy Spirit-infused intuition (and pray/go to mass without having a panic attack about my vocation). It was life-changing. And becoming a mother has been an even deeper healing in that regard. Now, when my body says "something is off", I LISTEN. I wish that it hadn't taken me 30 some years to get to this point, but I'm so grateful that I'm here.