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=> Re: Catholic Church at its BEST

Re: Catholic Church at its BEST
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Monday, October 17 2005, 1:54:36 (CEST)
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It was the year before the Boston church scandal broke. Steve had never spoken about the abuse, which lasted nearly a decade.

"This is a secret I was taking to the grave," he said.

Billy barged in. That's how Steve sees it. Billy returned Hagenbach uninvited into Steve's life. Anger at that intrusion has shaped Steve's activism.

Steve is a married financial advisor, a father, a USC graduate. He likes to say that he went public to show others that victims don't fit cliches — that they don't all live under freeways or look like "Pee-wee Herman, the mug shot." But he also has another point to make. On many a Sunday, Steve stands outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, directing protests against the church's treatment of victims. He is a Southern California leader in the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. But he says he doesn't barge in on victims. He lets them come to him. And they have.

Francisco Malo saw Hagenbach's craggy face and thick black-rimmed glasses on the TV news one night and fell sobbing to his living room floor.

"I felt like I'd been shot," said the 34-year-old aircraft mechanic, who served as an altar boy for Hagenbach in the mid-1980s at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Hawthorne.

Francisco, known as Cisco, saw Steve being interviewed about the priest, and he called him. Soon he met Steve and other men, including a bail bondsman and three firefighters. All had the priest — and so much more — in common.

They had grown up in crowded little houses in Catholic neighborhoods. They had attended Catholic schools. They had been taught that priests were sacred, chosen by God to represent Christ on Earth. Catholicism had been the center of their family lives.

They embraced Cisco and gave him the courage to tell his story to his parents, who were immigrants from Ecuador and devout. His father had worked nights and his mother days to send their son to Catholic school. Hagenbach had taken their confessions. Cisco's mother refused to believe him.

"She said, 'I know it couldn't have happened. No. No. No,' " Cisco said.

The other men had had experiences like this too. They knew how pain radiates across families.

Cisco, who served in the Army in Operation Desert Storm, calls the other Hagenbach men his "war buddies."

"They have been my lifeline. They have been my brothers," he said.

He said he feels especially close to Steve, who is 11 years older and who always apologizes to him for not stopping the priest before he got to Cisco. Cisco says he doesn't understand the apologies. It's not Steve's fault.

*

When his father asked him, Steve said yes, something had happened with Hagenbach, but he had been dealing with it — on his own.

Right away, Billy seemed to want to deal with nothing else. He was on sabbatical from his teaching job. He had time. He used it to trace Hagenbach's steps, from the priests he worked with to his former altar boys.

He even tracked down Steve's childhood friend Jimmy Baldridge, leaving him repeated messages at the firehouse where he worked. Jimmy assumed Billy wanted to catch up, but when they finally talked on the phone, he clearly didn't, Jimmy says. He cut right to the chase and asked about Hagenbach.

"And that whole Pandora's box just came wide open," Jimmy said, like a "clown in a music box jumping out at me."



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