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 one or two who were dismissed from the priesthood, and one who stood on the right side of history but whose ministry was nonetheless ended..

I was a Catholic seminarian in Boston when the pedophile priest scandal was brewing. I use the term brewing because the whole 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. Apparently 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 who had been incensed by his willful blindness. It inflamed those who had actually been injured by the abuse.

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 Planning Office for Urban Affairs for the Archdiocese. 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 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 that 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. This 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, who 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 was also a reflection of 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 administered by a cohort of bright young people who were 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 1960's a million dollars was a lot of money. He had identified a low income Italian community in East Boston who were 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. After one dinner in the rectory of Holy Redeemer Church I had no doubt who was in charge, but I was also very impressed by his careful listening to the needs of his community and commitment to help. I joked with Mike that Mimi seemed like a Don who actually took care of his folk. Mike agreed that I was not far off.

In my role as Mike’s deputy community organizer, I told Mimi that the development corporation could engage in a variety of 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 as well as The Office for Urban Planning for years beyond that first summer. My job was to write the proposal tor HUD. In real terms, dollar and sense terms, I’ve ever had a more productive 2 or 3 months. I didn’t write the founding documents for a community development organization but my proposal did secure 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 parishes of the archdiocese over the next decades.

We secured the money within weeks of submitting our 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, 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, but 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 1980’s he was made pastor of a church in Boston’s Back Bay, Saint Cecila, a cavernous building whose old time parishioners had mostly feld 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 the 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 to Mike. Apparently doing two jobs does not allow a priest to collect two salaries that amount to not much more than $40,000 together. 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. It was clearly retribution. He moved to his family home in Scituate Massachusetts where he lived out 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. In 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 that 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 there was any regret on Mike’s part, it might have been that the church he loved and served had taken away the possibility of 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 effected 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 spent her long life working and advocating for the poor and disenfranchised. She lived to be 101 years old.

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

Am I Magu?

Case 31: Magu Circles the Chan Seat 

Magu went to Changqing* and, holding his staff, walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Changqing said, “Right, right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu then went to Nanquan and walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Nanquan said, “Not right, not right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu said, “Changqing said ‘Right, right!’ and you said, ‘Not right, not right!’ Why is that?” 

Nanquan said, “Changqing is right, but you are not right. Your action is the movement of the wind. In the end it will perish.”

*Chenzhou is the name of a place.

Philip asks me to find him a shakujō!

This is a real story, not a made up story that sings its own song into the wind.

In preparation for his Mountain Seat, Philip called me to his room and pointed me to the third drawer down in a small Japanese cabinet. 

He asked, “See that funny thing with all rings? It’s meant to sit on the top of a pole. Find me a pole. It has to fit on tight so that it won’t fall off.”

I picked up an odd looking thing, wondering what it was actually. About six rings held together by another brass ring right at the bottom of which was a kind of oversized thimble shape. It seemed to be about 2 inches in diameter but it was obviously Japanese and so it would be an odd metric size. 

Off I went around the corner to Cliffs Hardware with the funny brass thimble thing in my pocket to examine what poles they had in stock. I tried them all, and finally found a broom with a handle probably 56 inches long, but the top had been carefully rounded off so that hard edges didn’t cut the hard working hands of an overburdened housewife. It actually accepted the convex female shape of the jingle jangle thing perfectly. The broom part was detachable. It screwed otf.

I paid 15 dollars and ran back to Hartford Street. I showed Phil, actually I handed it to him so that he could examine it with his fingers, blind as a bat. He liked the way the pole met the ring that corralled the rest of the rings. Then I unscrewed the brush and handed him the pole as he stood up. He bashed it to the floor and shouted “Too short. Taller, kid, taller. I need to hold it about here and walk in a measured pace.” He put out his arm and I could see that the top of the pole was below his shoulder. It needed another foot.

I had kept the sales slip so I screwed the broom back on the handle and rushed back to Cliffs. But I couldn’t find another broom with a tapered stick that was long enough. So I looked at the long poles. I would have to take a chance and have one cut. The problem was that they were either way too thick and would never accept the jingle jangle thimble or way too thin and just didn’t have the substantial feel of a walking stick. There was a deadline. I had to choose and put my money down. Cut it to 72 inches at 3 bucks a foot. I took a chance. It offended my aesthetic sense though. A straight cut at the top of the thin pole set the jingle jangle thimble askew, but I could get some thin nails long enough to keep it from popping off.

Phil grabbed the stick and hit the ground. The rings were near enough to his ear to make the proper sound and he smiled. He draped some ribbons through the rings, and banged what was now his shakujō on each step as he descended the stairs into the zendo where inherited the Mountain Seat from Steve. 

Later though the stick did not support when it would all end. Blind as a bat he reached back for the chair that wasn’t there and fell, breaking his assbone, never to take a seat ever again. 

That is also true. The whole thing is True oh so true right to the metric size of the Jingle Jangle Rings and the Fall ass backwards which turned out Wrong oh so wrong. Right right.

The Verse

For each of us there is a place 

Wherein we will tolerate no disorder. 

We habitually clean and reorder it, 

But we allow many other surfaces and regions 

To grow dusty, rank and wild. 

So I walk as far as a clump of bay trees 

Beside the creek’s milky sunshine 

To hunt for words under the stones 

Blessing the demons also that they may be freed 

From Hell and demonic being 

As I might be a cop, “Awright, move it along, folks, 

It’s all over, now, nothing more to see, just keep 

Moving right along” 

I can move along also 

“Bring your little self and come on” 

What I wanted to see was a section of creek 

Where the west bank is a smooth basalt cliff 

Huge tilted slab sticking out of the mountain 

Rocks on the opposite side channel all the water 

Which moves fast, not more than a foot deep, 

Without sloshing or foaming. 

“The Bay Trees Were About to Bloom"

Tassajara, 11:II:79 

Philip Whalen

A Song for the Wind

Jingle Jangle

Bingle Bangle

Bingo Bango

Trimble Tangle

Tinkle Tango

Oh oh oh

No no no

Too short, too tall

Too thick, too thin

Too heavy, just right

Curmudgeon, 

Superlative Mudgeon 

Ah

Fly away

Spingle Spangle

Humpty Dumpty

Crummy Bunny

Tangle untangle

Bing Bang

Walla walla

Bang bang

Thump thud

The end

Good bye dear Phillip.

I am in tears.

Heels Outside The Door

“I gave up the heels but kept the skirt.”--Issan “Tommy” Dorsey Roshi, The Boy as Pretty as the Girl Next Door

My friend the Zen teacher Roshi Susan Murphy verbally sketched the opening shot for a movie that she was thinking about doing. I titled it for her--“Issan, The Movie.” The camera focuses on the zendo porch and where people have neatly, almost formally, arranged the shoes they shed before entering the meditation hall. The camera zooms in and scans the sneakers, Birkenstocks, flip flops and a lone pair of high heels. 

I’ve always liked that visual. There’s a whole story in those few fleeting images. In my mind the slippers had to be red, perhaps even some rhinestones for dual use on stage.

But there was also reference to Michael Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door, though the title seemed to suggest, unfairly in my view, an attractive woman and a sexual tryst outside the Buddhist Precepts. The door in question was not the formal entrance to the zendo, but the door of Richard Baker’s private cabin at Tassajara where the discovery of a woman’s shoes was the beginning of the unraveling of Baker Roshi’s tenure as abbot. Though Downing claimed to stick to an objective rendition of a major rupture in history of an important Western Zen temple, the story that the title references belies that it includes a bit of muckraking. It was a scandal that keeps reappearing like a bad dream in the history of the San Francisco Zen Center. 

How do we exorcize or excise a nightmare? Is it even possible? Can we just forget it, or in a more Buddhist sounding directive, lay it aside?

This question has troubled the humans who practice since Lord Buddha himself walked out of his father’s palace. How do we carry the past? How do we deal with the results of our actions? When I first encountered this notion in my own practice, it reactivated memories of the darker aspects of my own life. In the old story we hear that the Buddha was troubled by the sight of sick people, desperate people, and dead bodies. I actually think that there’s a lot of philosophical thinking involved in that presentation as if an abstract notion of impermanence and suffering presented itself for inspection and reflection. What if Siddhartha himself had visceral emotional human responses that included all the gray shades of hesitancy, infantile and magical thinking, bargaining, even second guessing and mistakes? These are the kind of human reactions that we have to deal with.

Issan, Phil Whalen and a few others were at the center of the San Francisco Zen Center storm as people who did not turn against Richard Baker. Issan would not have blushed at the real or imagined nubile figure in his teacher’s life, and did he abandon his teacher.  His own life had more than its share of dark and loving moments. He did not shun, renounce, ostracize, vilify, or denounce though I’m sure that many longtime friends encouraged, perhaps even nudged him in that direction. This does not imply that he tolerated or excused whatever behaviors might have occurred. Rather, his own experience of human frailty or suffering allowed him a kind of generous and compassionate understanding that we are all human. 

This history of the planting Zen practice in the West is filled to overflowing with stories of men and women who came to Zen after deeply troubling personal experiences. Buddhism is not a religion invented to steer sinners towards repentance nor is it a religion that requires sainthood. Practice allows each one of us a certain degree of freedom from being attached to the past.  

Issan became Richard Baker’s first dharma heir. For me there is no mystery or magical thinking in that.

There was a choice in the matter, but he touched as little as possible. “I gave up the heels but I kept the skirt.”

Sweeping darkness

into a corner

only makes the room 

unbearably bright. 

Better for the defilements 

to be left undisturbed. 

Let them glow like embers 

drift away like ash.

Verse by Richard von Sturmer

Did Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan actually exist?

Syncretism, Syncretic Occultism, Carlos Castaneda and the Monetization of the Occult

When asked by an interviewer if don Juan Matus actually existed (as well as straightening out some inconsistencies in his personal biography), Carlos Castaneda replied, "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics ... is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."

What I take this to mean is that the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan was a convenient fiction made up by an anthropology student with a vivid imagination and a few too many peyote buttons. But Castaneda was a compelling story teller and we all believed it---and bought his books. It is not surprising that he and Naranjo became friends. He visited the early SAT groups, and perhaps used Naranjo’s group process to create his own Tensegrity, “the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indigenous shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest."

One very deep root of the modern Western Enneagram teaching is the small world of Latin American esotericism and its deep, though convoluted connection with native shamanism. Naranjo’s own story is tied up with that of Ichazo who was never very clear about his sources--usually some version of the story of stopping for lunch at an ordinary wayside ristorante in Argentina and the waiter handing him a note from a group of ordinary-looking men sipping afternoon aperitifs while exchanging the latest in their research of the inner workings of the human psyche. Another partially verified story is Naranjo’s journey to Arica Chile where, after some vague initiation into a mystery cult, receiving instructions from a Bolivian esotericist named Oscar Ichazo who by the way was guided by his spiritual guide, the highest Archangel Metatron, Naranjo went out into the Atacama Desert for 40 days, the driest place on the face of the earth (drier than the place where Jesus stood down the devil in his 40 day retreat). There he told us that he went through a rebirth experience, and that having been trained as a medical doctor, he could recognize all the stages of the embryo being formed, the organs beginning to function, etc. I remember at the time wondering how high he was when he told that tale, something about his intonation, and phrasing.

But I did believe that Don Juan was real until the raccoon encounter.

Naranjo’s house was down on the Berkeley flatlands. I can see the house clearly in my memory and almost remember the exact address--14 hundred something Alston Way. It was not in those days all gentrified but a modest, even run down neighborhood of California bungalows. There was a small creek that ran at the back of the property, and Claudio had thrown up a shack, his study house, on its edge. Carlos and Claudio were doing some kind of drugs, and a raccoon came and sat by the screen door watching them in a rather intense way, or so they said. Castaneda was sure that the raccoon had been taken over by a spirit being to deliver a message.

Guys, you were high and tripping out on a raccoon looking for a yummy garbage dinner. I'm not using science to validate sorcery, but I am suspicious of the drugs.