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Re: Catholic Church at its BEST
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Monday, October 17 2005, 1:56:13 (CEST)
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For two months, Jimmy didn't broach the subject with his wife.

Billy has a theory now about people who have been abused in childhood. Put an abused man at a bus stop with a stranger, and the stranger will come away thinking he is friendly, even charming. Put the same man in his own home with a loved one and he will retreat like a turtle tucked into its shell.

Billy sees that now. He didn't see it then. He reunited Steve and Jimmy. He took them to their first support group meetings and to his therapist. But he didn't see that they weren't really there, that they were in shock, he said.

People often don't understand why victims of abuse don't speak out much sooner. The Hagenbach men don't understand completely either. But they say they know that from the first moment they were abused as boys, something inside them broke.

The men's lawsuits state that they have been "prevented from … obtaining the full enjoyment of life." This is what those words mean:

Cisco can't change his daughters' diapers. He's terrified to be around a naked child. He won't let anyone baby-sit his children. He can't hug his father because he can't bear a bristly male cheek against his own. In bed, if his wife reaches out to touch him, he flinches. He hates being touched.

One minute, Steve and his wife are driving about happily, running errands. The next minute, when she suggests an impromptu stop, he snaps. It took him years, he said, to see why.

Once, when Steve was 13 or 14, the priest came to pick him up. Steve was the first boy that night. He was happy to get a chance to sit up front.

Then Hagenbach said that he'd forgotten something at the rectory, that they'd have to swing by there quickly before the next stop.

"So we went back to the rectory, upstairs, and that just turned into — he just raped me," Steve said recently, voice flat.

*

Jimmy was going home from work each night and dragging himself straight to bed. Steve was having horrible nightmares.

Billy was busy.

That had always been his way, his father said. From boyhood, Steve had proceeded at his own deliberate pace. Billy had raced.

He hounded church officials, asking for Hagenbach's full history. He showed up unannounced at the homes of retired priests from Hagenbach's old parishes. To priests who weren't retired he offered a choice: talk to him or he'd be at their Mass the next day.

Jimmy, 44, says Billy updated Steve and him constantly, suggesting strategies they were far too numb to act upon.

Then one day Billy landed an appointment with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

The meeting took place on April 19, 2002. Billy will not discuss its details. But two months later, a church lawyer wrote him a check for $1.5 million.

The archdiocese has disclosed only four such settlements. The one paid to Billy was the most recent.

Jimmy says Billy's plan was to bring Steve and him to the meeting. But they weren't ready.



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