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Catholic Church at its BEST
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Monday, October 17 2005, 1:53:03 (CEST)
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Angry and blaming themselves, many of the ex-altar boys feel alienated from their loved ones.

By Nita Lelyveld and Jean Guccione, Times Staff Writers


Steve Sanchez used to get so jealous of his brother Billy.

Billy was only two years older, but he got to do everything first.

At Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Billy was an altar boy, and Father Clinton Hagenbach treated him like a prince. He bought Billy ice cream after church. He drove him to the desert to ride motorcycles.

Nearly every Friday night, Hagenbach would drive to the Sanchez house in Atwater Village to take Billy to the go-cart track. Steve would look longingly at the car full of older boys as it pulled away from the curb. He told his father, a teacher at a Catholic school, that he wanted to "be a part of Hagenbach's club."

"And my dad said, 'Just be a good altar boy and someday you'll be a part of that club,' " he said.

Steve was so excited, he felt sick on the day he first stood at Mass, alongside the priest, his brother and his father, who was a church lector.

He was thrilled the night not long after when the priest held the car door open and told him to hop in too.

Today, Hagenbach is dead, and Steve, 45, is one of 14 men suing the Los Angeles Archdiocese for failing to protect them from the priest. He is also a vocal victims' advocate who broke the ice for others when he told his story publicly in December 2002. But although he acts like a big brother to many, he no longer speaks to his own big brother.

Steve says he never wanted to go public. For this, too, he blames Billy.

*

Asked if his two eldest sons were ever close, Bill Sanchez Sr. said, "Oh, yes, yes, yes, they were close. They were very close." But by the time they were adults, they saw each other mostly at big family events when all five siblings — three sons, two daughters — came together with their own children in tow.

So in 2001, when Billy said he urgently needed to speak to Steve, the younger brother knew something was up.

Billy was very unhappy. He had a beautiful wife, beautiful kids. He had a good job teaching at a Catholic school. But his marriage was rocky, and he'd come to see that he was to blame. He couldn't connect with his wife. He couldn't just pick up the phone and chat with one of his brothers. He couldn't tell his parents he loved them. He couldn't sleep. He'd been in therapy for months, just treading water.

He kept running through the important figures in his life. Did his mother do something? No. His father? No. Then one day, as he drove on the Pasadena Freeway, a group of memories stuck deep within him surfaced in vivid detail, he said.

Right then, without even pulling over, he picked up his cellphone and asked his therapist: "Do you think being abused by a Catholic priest when you are about 10 years old might have something to do with it?"

That same day, he told his wife. He told his father that he thought that Hagenbach had abused him from when he was 10 to just before he learned to drive, when he was maybe 16. He couldn't stop sobbing. His father held him and said, "I'd kill the bastard if he was alive."

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"This is an adult, but he was a little kid. That day he was a little kid," Bill Sanchez Sr. said. "I can't imagine anything being worse than something happening to your child."

But soon he had to. His youngest son had been too young to be an altar boy during Hagenbach's time, but Steve had been one. Billy asked his father to call him.

On the phone, his father was elliptical. Still, standing in his Glendale home, Steve knew.

"I was in the kitchen just thinking, what was it about? And then, just like a pit in my stomach, I'm like 'Oh crap,' " Steve said.



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