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=> Re: Catholic Church at its BEST

Re: Catholic Church at its BEST
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Monday, October 17 2005, 1:58:04 (CEST)
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"I remember climbing into the backseat of Hagenbach's car at 11 years old, saying, 'I want to go home.' There were bullets flying all over the place. There was drinking and shooting guns," said Billy.

But even scared boys stuck around — for the perks.

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Hagenbach taught them to shave. He gave them their first (used) cars and taught them to drive. He took them out of school to do funerals, at which they got big tips.

He gave them cash — $60, $80, $100 — straight from the collection plates in which their parents had just placed their earnings. "I felt like a paid whore," said Jimmy, who described a "robotic routine": "We'd eat. We'd play cards. We'd drink. Molest Jim. Jim, go home." He balled up the money in his tight fists, he said. But then he put it in a savings account. Over more than eight years of abuse, the cache grew large enough for most of the down payment on his first home.

One of the firefighters said he grew up in a very poor home in Silver Lake, where he slept on a sliver of a fold-out couch — horizontally, under the feet of three sisters. He was the second-youngest of nine and, by the time Hagenbach showed up at St. Teresa of Avila in 1974, the only son. His older brother had been killed in Vietnam, leaving his father, a tailor for 40 years at Bullocks Wilshire, a hollow shell.

Hagenbach bought him a shiny silver 10-speed bike, which his family still has. He took him on his first vacation — to the priest's sister's house in Bend, Ore., which had an indoor pool. "To me it was like, wow, Trump Plaza," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Hagenbach also let him eat more than his fill, which may have been the biggest draw.

"I'll never forget. I used to get a Big Mac, two large fries and a Coke," he said.

The men are big now — brawny, wide-shouldered, strong. But sometimes they forget that they weren't big then. They had seen so little — and the priest seemed to offer them so much.

*

On his "mission to get better," Billy said, the biggest hurdle was to let go of blame, to accept that as a boy up against a priest, he was powerless.

"I always say that for him to abuse me, all he had to do was get me up to his room, the game's over," he said.

The settlement helped him too, he says, but not for the reason people assume. "The money — it's very, very hard to even say it and think that people will believe it, but I can't worry about it. The money doesn't mean jack," he said. "It's the fact that I have something tangible in my hands and the fact that I looked in Mahony's eyes and he knew I wasn't messing around."

Now, he says, he has achieved a modicum of peace, and obsession with the priest and church no longer drives his daily life.

The 14 men in the lawsuits have received no such satisfaction. They may never get it. And even after countless hours of therapy, some still beat themselves up for being victims, for not fighting back.

Over and over again, they push rewind, playing over possibilities. They think about how they might have saved the day. They think about others who also failed to be heroes. The different pastors who saw the boys stomp up and down the rectory stairs, who heard the clank of the hallway refrigerators as they fetched beer. The housekeeper who saw them too, who cleaned Hagenbach's room, who must have known about the nudie glasses. They wonder when the church first heard about Hagenbach and if they'll ever be told.

Their heads are full of trails to chase. They remember the priest being moved from parishes midweek, without enough time for goodbye parties. They remember the strict pastor whom Hagenbach seemed to hate, who warned him sternly: No boys in the rectory. They try to sew these scraps together into something substantial. They often fail.

So do the parents, when they try to read the past like tea leaves, for signs.

Barbara Sanchez said she drove a carpool of altar boys, but they never said anything. And when the priest, riding his motorcycle, was hit by a car and rushed to the hospital, boys rushed there too. She saw it. "I mean it was a waiting room of kids," she said. So, too, when she took the priest into her home to recuperate, even though he was no longer assigned to her parish.

"It wasn't that I had the burden of taking care of him. No. It was amazing how the boys, they all did it. They all wanted to do it. It was amazing."



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