“Pedophile priests ruined many lives.”

Many people have asked me about how I reacted to the ongoing scandal of priests sexually abusing children in their care. I knew three dismissed from the priesthood and one who stood on the right side of history but whose ministry nonetheless ended.

I was a Catholic seminarian in Boston when the pedophile priest scandal was brewing. I use the term brewing because the stinky mess was happening in the dark. I had no inkling that anything was amiss. When I saw Todd McCarthy’s film “Spotlight” 50 years later, I wondered how I could have missed it. The priestly caste loves dark rumors, but the priestly veil of secrecy is also thick. We all missed it. Of the 2,324 priests who served in Boston during the last half of the 20th century, 162 were credibly accused of abusing more than 800 children and minors. Those numbers are staggering. I remember reading the original stories in the Boston Globe in 2002 and then Cardinal Law’s quick removal to Rome, where John Paul II promoted him to the cushy sinecure as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore with a stipend of $12,000 a month, a substantial raise above his salary as the Archbishop of Boston. That seemed like a reward and left a terrible taste in the mouth of everyone incensed by his willful blindness. It inflamed those whom the abuse had injured.

Although I was a Jesuit scholastic, I had strong connections with Boston’s regular clergy. In the summer of 1969, the final year of Cardinal Cushing’s era, I started working for a young diocesan priest. Mike Groden had started the Archdiocese's Planning Office for Urban Affairs. This was a very unreligious designation for an official arm of the Catholic Church because Mike set it up to do some very innovative work outside ordinary parish life. I liked that. 

Father Mike was only a few years older than me. He was boyishly good-looking with a great Irish smile. He was very much a priest but also a social activist with the sharp political instincts of a Democratic ward boss. After the Boston race riots in the summer of 1967, he became committed to racial equality. He did Saul Alinsky’s training for community organizers. 

I had finished my two years as a Jesuit novice, completed an abridged philosophy requirement at Boston College, and had just been accepted into The Graduate School of Design at Harvard for a degree in architecture and planning. My mentors at the Boston Architectural Center told me a young priest was looking for an intern to work on a low-income housing project. I had the summer off. Several other young Jesuits and I had rented a small house on Oak Street off Inman Square. We were all grad students at Harvard. I called Mike, and he hired me immediately. It was a great match. 

Every morning, I rode my bicycle from Cambridge down Massachusetts Avenue to an office in a small, older building near The Old State House. Sister Faine McMullen, a sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was also a lawyer whom Mike had met during the Alsinky training, and I shared two small rooms in the back. The office administrator was the daughter of one of the wealthiest Jewish developers in Boston. A conscientious objector, Mosik Hagobian, worked under the auspices of the Office, although he spent most of his time in a young architectural office on the floor below. Our small team seemed perfect for a liberally educated anti-Vietnam War activist post-Vatican 2. It also reflected Father Mike’s instinctive ability to assemble an effective team.

I mentioned that Mike was politically well-connected. Lyndon Johnson’s HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) was flush with cash and administered by a cohort of bright young people convinced that the change promised by the War on Poverty was possible. Mike had secured a promise for a million-dollar grant, seed money for a community development corporation with a program that Mike designed. In the 1960s, a million dollars was a lot of money. He had identified a low-income Italian community in East Boston that was fighting the encroachment of Logan International Airport into their community. I never asked and was never told the way that he had secured the HUD money or picked East Boston, whose leader was a fiery Sicilian priest, Monsieur Mimi Pitaro, but after one dinner in the rectory of Holy Redeemer Church, I had no doubt who was in charge. I was also very impressed by his careful listening to the needs of his community and his commitment to help. I joked with Mike that Mimi seemed like a Mafia Don who took care of his folk. Mike agreed that I was not far off. 

As Mike’s deputy community organizer, I told Mimi that the development corporation could engage in various businesses to alleviate the impact of the airport’s rapid expansion. Mimi was insistent: Thank you very much, but we need housing. This single-mindedness was to shape the future of the East Boston Community Development Corporation and The Office for Urban Planning for years beyond that first summer. My job was to write the proposal for HUD. I’ve never had a more productive 2 or 3 months in real terms, dollar, and sense terms. I didn’t write the founding documents for a community development organization, but my proposal secured seed money for an agency that would develop 600 units of low-income housing over the years. It also set Mike on course to develop three thousand units of low-income housing working with archdiocese parishes over the following decades.

We secured the money within weeks of submitting the proposal, and The Planning Office had an MOU with HUD to establish the agency. We immediately began looking for an Executive Director. Mike told me that if I wanted to submit my name, I would get “favorable consideration.” I loved the work, and I considered it. Briefly. This was the summer of 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King, followed by that of Bobby Kennedy, and the disruption and protest against the War in Vietnam had radicalized me, and rather than disrupt the long course of Jesuit studies, I decided that I would apply to begin the last part of a Jesuit’s training before ordination. 

I moved to Woodstock College in New York City for my first year of theology and then onto the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. I would call Mike from time to time. The work of the Planning Office was thriving; he loved being a priest, and sometime in the 1980s, he was made pastor of a church in Boston’s Back Bay, Saint Cecilia, a cavernous building whose old-time parishioners had mostly fled downtown Boston. Mike set about reviving the parish through music. Of course, he could raise funds to restore its three organs, organize choirs, and hire choirmasters, but knowing Mike, it was also an opportunity to engage a community in conversation about things that mattered. He reached out to the LGBT community in a way that circumvented the official stance of the Church. Back Bay was one of Boston’s gay neighborhoods. Mike himself was also gay. He succeeded brilliantly.  

Then came the investigation of the Boston Globe's “Spotlight” and calls for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Francis Law. Of the hundreds of priests and religious in Boston, only about 70 signed the petition demanding that Law be fired for the coverup. And Mike’s name was there, the highest-ranking priest on the list. He was on the right side of history.

Richard Gerard Lennon, Law’s auxiliary bishop and the placeholder after public pressure forced Law out of Boston, put the screws on Mike. Doing two jobs does not allow priests to collect two salaries that are not much more than $40,000. Mike had not collected any salary as pastor of Saint Celia, but for two years after the church could afford to pay him, he was still compensated for his work as the director of the Planning Office. There was some barrier in Canon Law prohibiting priests from being excessively paid. In 2003, Mike resigned rather than fight. He was just 63. It was retribution. He moved to his family home in Scituate, Massachusetts, where he lived for the rest of his life. I have no idea how much money he had for retirement, but certainly, Cardinal Law’s $144,000 per year was considerably more. About 2010, I called for the last time, and we had a long conversation. I could not find a trace of resentment in the hour we spent looking over the years.

Cardinal Law died in 2017 in the embrace of one of the oldest of Rome’s churches dedicated to the memory of the Virgin Mary. Though he had been removed from the Archdiocese of Boston, people who had petitioned for his removal did not see any real progress in addressing the scandal. The Church of Benedict had shielded him. Father Mike died in 2018 on the shores of a windswept beach town south of Boston. His supporters and admirers who had protested his removal gathered in Saint Cecilia to say goodbye. They felt no satisfaction either.

If Mike regretted anything, it might have been that the church he loved and served had prevented him from pursuing official ministry, but I am sure that he found a way—he always did.

Mike was certainly not involved in any sexual abuse, but his life as a priest was deeply affected by it. 

Mimi Pitaro became the first priest elected to the Massachusetts Assembly shortly after we set up the East Boston Community Development Corporation. https://archivesspace.library.northeastern.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/307157

Sister Faine McMullen RSCJ

https://www.cny.org/stories/sister-faine-moira-mcmullen-rscj,13533?

East Boston Community Development 

https://www.ebcdc.com/

Priest Who Spoke against Law Resigns

https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2003_01_06/2003_05_15_Paulson_PriestWho.htm

Msgr. Michael F. Groden

https://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.php?ID=181182

Eucharistic Flop, a lifeless, bloodless sacrilege

Why the Eucharistic Congress was not just a costly, meaningless show but a sacrilege: many of my ex-Jesuit friends fault it for being an anachronistic diversion from the nuts and bolts, tedious work of Tikkun, repairing our torn and frayed world with poverty, migrants, homeless people, misfits, fundamentalist racists, children murdered in Gaza and Ukraine, conscripted soldiers slaughtered, terrorists assassinated by high tech missiles that can find your bedroom window. The list seems endless. Worse for the activists is the fact that it seemed to be orchestrated by an increasingly right-wing leadership in the American Church as a counter punch for what they see as the activist agenda of the liberal Jesuit Pope. 

All those cogent reasons are, well, very cogent and appropriately political. What better way to shore up the memory of our forgotten religious life, where the priest was god's representative, and we faithful cowered in pews on the designated night and sang “Tantum ergo Sacramentum,” not having a clue that Thomas wrote those words after he had the experience of seeing all the hundreds of thousand words of very cogent theology disappear like so much straw and less idea of what any of it meant. I loved singing genitori genitoque, especially when we got to procedenti ab utroque, meaning that any meaning came from somewhere else, and I had no idea where although that was bad translation. But in general, now that my Latin is better than before a Jesuit education, I find the whole affair poorly conceived from somewhere else.

I was saddened by the silly parades, with thousands of altar boys in black and white, priests in white and gold, and bishops in lots of gold and big hats, stumbling along with no sense of what a religious procession might look like. They might have been trying to be regal and dignified, but actually, the volunteer fire department does a better job marching behind their red trucks on the 4th of July than these school boys could muster behind the crudely decorated trailers that were being dragged by the best trucks that the diocese could borrow from the Knight of Columbus who had a concrete company. Firefighters have a purpose. A New Orleans funeral marching band has a purpose. These jokers were doing something that they had been ordered to do. That seemed to be their only purpose.

The problem for me, however, goes beyond the aesthetics of mounting a religious festival with the obvious political agenda of lending support to an anachronistic, monarchial church of yesteryear. It is in the trivialization and even commercialization of God’s Presence. If I can be bold, even Thomas missed this. We are not worshipping a thing, a piece of flat, tasteless bread that has been magically changed by uttering magic words. When I bow before the Great Sacrament, I bow to the Presence of God. It is present, it is immediate, it is transformative. Instead of a flat, lifeless speck of white carbohydrate, it is love, intimacy, and mystery. All that got lost, not just lost in the sense that there was a piece missing and we knew that something was missing. It was lost in the sense that the ceremony didn’t even point to that Great Presence that is with us but invisible to our ordinary senses. Maybe Thomas, you did get it--Sensuum defectui..

And how much money did this farce cost?

The Road to Rohatsu

Ryutan’s Candle and Kenosha

Mumonkan Case 28

The original Chinese Goang

Longtan Chongxin (Dragon-Lake): Because Deshan Xuanjian asked more and more and night arrived, Tan said, "The night is deep. Sir, why don’t you go to lie down?"

Shan thereupon gathered his precious baggage, hoisted the [door] blind, and then exited. He saw the outside was pitch dark, withdrew, turned around, and said, "Outside is pitch dark."

Tan then lit a paper measuring candle and gave it to him.

Shan intended to accept it, but Tan then blew it out.

I was driving from Santa Fe to Crestone with Baker Roshi for my first Rohatsu sesshin. It was going to be just Baker and me for the four-hour drive. I was assigned a lot of packing tasks; his instructions were very exacting. I remember quite clearly that I had to fit the large densho bell into the trunk of the car. There were other bells and zendo items that were needed to keep the schedule and turn the Wheel of the Dharma. 

It was probably between 4 and 5, and already getting dark when we drove out Cerro Gordo Road. We were due by 9 to formally open the sesshin; I thought that we might have been late, but Baker Roshi knew the route very well and had the trip planned to the second. I’d heard about his legendary fast driving but felt reasonably comfortable.

We talked about Phil Whalen, Issan, the Hospice, and food. Then the conversation turned to losing normal mental ability, Alzheimers, and AIDS dementia. I was somewhat concerned about Issan’s losing his faculties during the last phase of his disease and asked about the effect of meditation and the blurring of our normal sense of time. I spoke of one guy in the Hospice who couldn’t even remember the past of 5 minutes ago and was completely unable to foresee any future. Given that he was a dying man, it actually seemed to be a blessing.

Baker told me that I probably shouldn’t worry too much. He mentioned something one of his old friends in Japan, Nanao Sakaki, the godfather of Japanese hippies, said when his memory was fading after he crossed 80 years, “I can’t remember what I didn’t need to know anyway.” 

I asked David Chadwick if he remembered if he had any more details about Nanao's condition. David pointed me to a conversation he had with Nanao before he died. David talked about a mutual friend who had colon cancer. Nanao seemed to follow the conversation but asked the same question several times, “What did he have?” "Shiri," David repeated, patting his butt, but said that he’d already answered the question.

Nanao wasn't fazed. "Kenbosho," he said. "I have kenbosho." David asked if that meant senility or Alzheimer's. Nanao wasn't exactly sure. But he was quite cheerful about it.

"Ah, kenbosho is very good," he said. "No need to remember anything anyway. My mind is becoming more empty and free every day! This is a very good thing. I like kenbosho very much."

After crossing Four Corners, the last 40 miles north up Highway 17 from Amoroso to Crestone, the road becomes totally flat, level, and straight for as far as my eye could take it to the edge of the car’s headlights. The night was very dark, with no light for miles; the sky seemed to be painted a deep penetrating purple that went all the way to the moon, but I didn’t really notice. I thought that we must have been late, and Baker Roshi might have been driving even faster, but it also might have just been my fear. I think we were riding in a BMW, but it might have been a Mercedes. I am not interested in cars; however Roshi's love of fast cars is legendary and actually got him into some trouble. He turned the conversation towards how German engineers make sure that the mechanics of the automobile are tip top because driving on the autobahn was very fast, and Germans demanded strict safety protocols and no speed limits. He joked, they at least needed the assurance of safety even if a ruse.

Suddenly the Roshi turned off the car’s headlights. It took a few seconds before my eyes adjusted. I was afraid. We were bolting up the highway at what seemed to be breakneck speed. After a few seconds, perhaps a minute, but certainly far too long in my judgment, Richard turned on the headlights again, and said with a little chuckle that we were lucky that no other driver had decided to turn out the headlights on their car to experience the beauty and depth of the dark night.  

I gradually regained my composure, but my perception of the night had changed. It opened up and I was so aware of the beauty of the night above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I was just part of a vast universe beyond any explanation. 

The Diamond Sutra says, “If there is even a bit of difference, it is the distance between heaven and earth.” If Deshan (Tokusan) had been a better student and actually understood before he went all out with his over-the-top melodramatic burning of the scripture, he would have saved generations of Zen students a lot of pain. But perhaps he thought that Longtan (Ryûtan) was equally dense, and the enthusiasm of a teaching moment simply overwhelmed him. It was I who needed to shed my unsentimental Jesuit training in order to catch the beauty of fire.

Within 25 minutes, we arrived on time to a waiting hall of people all sitting in good posture. I found my seat. The days rolled on; the sun came up; the stars appeared again. I heard the Temple bell ring, and I woke up.

I returned to Santa Fe with some other friends and quickly fell into a round of gatherings and holiday parties. I called Southwest Airlines and postponed my departure several times. I was having fun. 

Then, just after dinner at Robert Winson’s house, someone handed me the phone. It was Issan. He’d tracked me down. He asked how I was doing and how my sesshin had been. I told him that I thought Sante Fe was beautiful and just amazing with all the luminaria and snow.

“Oh yes,” he said; I remember his words exactly, “all those cute little mud houses. You know that the effect of sesshin can be like a drug trip, and it’s wonderful, but we need you here. Why don’t you come home?”

I called the airport and booked the next flight to San Francisco. It was time to return to my immediate experience of day-to-day life at Maitri Hospice where the moment of living life was always in the shadow of knowing that it will end sooner than we might have dreamed..

  

Daido Loori’s verse:

Within darkness there is light;

within light there is darkness.

If you really see it,

you will go blind.

Tarrant Roshi concurs.

"The Three Key B’s of Buddhism: Bowing, Boring and Bliss," by Phil Whalen & Ken Ireland

 

Phil with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa

Bowing, Boring, and Bliss

I recall a talk about “Bowing” by Zenshin Phil Whalen at the Hartford Street Zen Center. Damn, I loved his talks. He was, without a doubt, one of the most literate men ever to don the robes of a Zen priest anywhere, at any time. And if you want to challenge me, I’ll be suiting up on the Dalai Lama’s debate ground up here in McLeod Ganj. 

But first things first—I was going to try to record the talk, but I was my usual bumbling self with electronic equipment, and I couldn’t get the machine working in good time. Being his usual patient self, he yelled at me, saying that we didn’t have all day and, anyway, some things were just not meant to be recorded. Sometimes, words are purposefully impermanent. It was not like he was going to recite some goddamn hidden, secret sutra for the last time before he croaked.

So I lost the talk, but I am going to do my best to reconstruct it from the basic “B’s” as I remember them.

He began by saying that if he really wanted to write a bestseller, his publisher would insist that he come up with a title like the “The 10 Recondite Rules for Clean Buddhist Living” or something like that. So let’s give it a try: “The Three Key B’s of Buddhism, Bowing Boredom and Bliss.”  Perhaps Phil’s publisher was onto something. More than 20 years have passed, and I still remember long sections of his talk (it’s also true that, as with many teachers, he returned again and again to his favorite topics, like an old horse headed back to the barn).

When he was in Japan, in the monasteries and temples there, everyone bowed three times. People just always bowed three times. But for those who couldn’t count, he said, before he just sat down to begin his talk, he bowed nine times. We all bow nine times at Zen Center; why is that? Well, he said, when the first students gathered around Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco, they went to him one day and complained, “Roshi, we love you, but we’re Americans, and we don’t like all this bowing. We don’t understand it. So why are we doing it?” And the Roshi said with a smile, “Oh, so you don't like bowing three times? Good. Perfect. I think we should bow nine times. Better that way, More practice.”

So we bow nine times. Better that way. Practice.

Phil then told an anecdotal story about some legendary old Japanese teacher way out in the middle-of-nowhere backcountry who was revered for the callous on his forehead. He explained himself: one of his first teachers had scolded him for being stubborn and told him bowing would be a good practice. So he began bowing. He never stopped. He discovered that the body is stubborn and the mind is stubborn. He said that he would stop when he stopped being stubborn. So he just kept bowing and thus the calloused forehead. In one way or another, we’re all like that.

Then he said that Zen students actually have it very easy. In Tibet, all the new monks bow 100,000 times before they do anything. It’s called Ngondro, and it involves the whole body, not just your forehead, hands, arms, knees and feet touching the floor but your whole body flat out, like you were a swimming fish, and it’s so strenuous that it takes a lot of effort to reel back and bounce back up. Do that a hundred thousand times. I’m told that it’s a purifying exercise. But it’s not done with some idea of repentance like Christian pilgrims bowing every three feet along the Camino de Santiago. It’s done because we practice meditation with every bit of ourselves wholeheartedly, fully, without reservation, holding nothing back. 

And then he said that anyone who’s lived in Asia knows that bowing is just good manners. It’s a sign of respect. You tilt your body down, your eyes are not focused on the face of the person you’re greeting, and your whole body is lower. Of course, you’re going to bow lower to a king or abbot. There’s a whole book of bowing etiquette: you bow very slightly to someone who’s your equal, but your bow is lower when you greet your parent or someone who’s older out of respect. That’s why we bow to our teachers in a formal situation. We’re showing respect and love. And we show it by using our whole body and mind. Our mind bows down, and for maybe an instant, we’re slightly less arrogant. We have to throw every bit of being into the bow.

But the most important thing, and here is a place where I actually have Phil’s own words, from his notebooks from Tassajara, we have to make it our own. In the rule-infested monastery or practice center, we ask ourselves, are we “bowing to rules rather than using them? We must contrive to be Buddhas & patriarchs rather than students who are good at following schedules (and bowing).”

But you’ll notice, he said, we follow a certain order in the zendo—we bow to the cushion, then everyone else in the room, and we sit. How strange, bowing to the cushion. We’re not bowing to a Buddha or a person. You can think of it any way you want to. Sometimes, I like to think that I am bowing to the practice, but that is really way too abstract. Sometimes, I do it just automatically, without thinking much of anything. But in any case, we just do it. What you think about is probably not important.

Now we get to the B for boring.

We sit, and almost immediately after, we learn to sit with only slight discomfort. Our bodies become both more relaxed and more alert, and we get bored. We all have our own experiences, but I’ll tell the world I get bored.

But then the mind, it’s like fiddling with a bungled up ball of twine, if you try to untangle it when you’re frustrated or angry, the knots are just going to get tighter. You’ll be looking for a knife (He laughed). I’ve pictured the mind as a bag of worms or a net of living anchovies. But you get the point; it’s a conundrum, it’s a mess. It may be filled with ghosts or paranoia or algebraic equations. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it’s just there, all tangled up. 

So there’s this big mess of thread sitting in your mind, and you just begin to play with it without much purpose, no rhyme or reason. You tug a bit here and notice that’s a bit looser over there, but you’re relaxed, and maybe you follow the thread to a knot that looks tight, but on closer inspection, it loosens up and falls away. And maybe after a while, there’s just a whole mess of lovely threads in front of you, and though you really don’t fully grasp how it happened, there it is.

Then the bell rings. 

I’ll end by quoting Mr. Robert Bly, who tells us to follow our bliss. Of course, Mr. Joseph Campbell has also told us to follow our bliss, and he did it on the Public Television Station, so it must be something worth doing. But I was watching Bly talk about it on the TV and found him quite interesting, if not persuasive—because bliss is not something I can buy, like the gummy bears I get at Walgreens. It’s just there. 

Some very fussy Buddhists might describe it as a fruit of meditation. If you hang out long enough, it’s just there because it’s always been there, but you wake up, or you open your eyes, or you open your heart. I’ll agree that it’s just there, and it really doesn’t matter how it got there. But this is something it shares with gummy bears: when you taste it, you know that it’s a gummy bear.

Sometimes, it might feel like something is lost in the process. Bly quoted a poem by Antonio Machado, which I quite like.

The wind one brilliant day called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

The wind said, “In return for the odor of my jasmine, I’d like all the odor of your roses. ”

[Machado said,] “I have no roses; all the flowers in my garden are dead … ”

The wind said, “Then, I’ll take the withered petals, and the yellow leaves, ”

and the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself, “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

I think that’s enough for today. Keep bowing. Thank you.