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The
Church That Forgot Christ by Jimmy Breslin Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Stories Jimmy Breslin’s ability
to tell a memorable story shines on the pages of his latest book, The
Church That Forgot Christ. His ability to create a memorable phrase reveals
itself in his moniker for one of the New York Catholic bishops: “Mansion
Murphy,” a reference to the palace the bishop created for himself after
throwing a group of nuns out of a building in Rockville Center. Breslin’s personal anger with the pedophile scandal in
the Catholic Church fuels the pages of this book, and makes the stories come
alive. That same anger distracts from any key points readers might take away from
this book. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter
Eleven, pp. 139-145: The pigeons of Seventh
Avenue at noon of this day were dirty and brazen and accompanists to the
start of a day of more cold distressing stories of the church. I wanted to
duck them, but I could not. Father Frank Pizzarelli,
who was in from Port Jefferson, out on Long Island, got off the train across
the street at Penn Station and we went into a place for a hamburger and
coffee. We talked about the death of Raymond Trypuc
at age twenty-eight, and the reasons for his dying. The body should have been
thrown onto the steps of St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre, the home of
the Catholic church’s “He
showed up in my teenage homeless shelter,” Pizzarelli
was saying. “I never knew him until I saw him. I don’t know if we could have
saved him. But the diocese committed the crime of giving him money when he
was alone and had nobody to counsel him. It was like giving the poor guy a
loaded gun to put in his mouth.” The
wounding and eventual killing of Ray Trypuc started
in 1978 when the parish priest, James Bergin of St. Francis de Sales in
Patchogue, became what seemed to be a close, close friend of Trypuc’s father, Raymond Trypuc,
Sr. Trypuc was a telephone company lineman from
eight to five and afterwards, he went right to a counterman’s job in a
delicatessen, where he finished at eleven at night. The priest slipped into
his son’s life in the hours when he was away. He took Raymond off on ski
trips. “I’m working twojobs,” the father said. “I
can’t do that for him.” On the ski trips, the priest and Raymond were in one
room. Certainly, the priest molested him. ‘When a neighbor called the father
and said he suspected Father Bergin, Trypuc made
the priest come over to the house, where he admitted it. The next day, a nun
called Trypuc and said the priest was off in
therapy. At eighteen, Trypuc joined the army. He
came home and money immediately was missing in the house, a sharper warning
than lights at a railroad grade crossing. He tried drug rehabilitation on
Long Island. Then he went to Father Pizzarelli’s
shelter, Hope House. ‘When we finally found out a priest had put this kid
into trouble, we called the diocese. Placa was in
charge.” Monsignor Alan Placa was a beefy, duplicitous man who was the vice
chancellor of the diocese, putting him one step under a bishop. He was
advertised as the closest friend, the spiritual adviser to Rudolph Giuliani
and held himself out as a protector of children. He was also a lawyer who
bought silence from victims in sexual abuse cases in the Long Island diocese. The only person he
couldn’t save was himself. Placa came to the job
with complaints of his sexual abuse of young men that went back to the steam
engine, though he has denied all these accusations and has never been
criminally charged. According to a grand jury report in one case, the young
man helped Placa make banners for a parade
protesting the Roe v. Wade decision and with the banner covering him, Placa fondled the boy’s
genitals. The report also stated that he tried to grope a young man in front
of the casket at his father’s wake. Placa, a priest
named John Alesandro, and a third, Frank Caldwell,
had a diocese intervention team, which meant they interviewed priests and
victims and their families and settled the cases secretly with the victim’s
family and in many cases, priests were shuffled to another parish without a
thought about the priest’s next victims. What makes them so important all of
a sudden? We don’t even know who they are. Placa had priests on his staff go to Pizzarelli’s Hope House and remove Trypuc
without Pizzarelli knowing it. Trypuc
vanished into the sky and off to a rehabilitation facility in Arizona. He was
in two facilities and then payments from the diocese ran out. He called Placa on Long Island. Placa
sent him $25,000 to sign a release saying he would not sue. The money did not
last long in the sun and drugs. Neither did Trypuc. Placa tried to say that he had done the
proper thing. “That was it for you?” Pizzarelli was
asked. “No. I said the funeral
mass.” The molesting complaints
about Placa caused his suspension as a priest. He
went to work for Rudolph Giuliani’s new company in Manhattan. He was allowed
to say mass twice, and that was over the casket of Giuliani’s mother and his
own. After seeing Pizzarelli, I had to go only a few blocks downtown to
meet Tom Faye, who was in the Triple Crown Bar on Seventh Avenue. He was on
his lunch break from working in the carpet business. He was there to talk
about his son, who commited suicide on Long Island
after being molested by a priest, he said. “How did you lose the
kid?” I said. “I live in Holbrook,”
Faye said. “My wife and I were out buying patio furniture and when we got
back to the house there was a police car in front. I figure, What are they
here for? The kids broke somebody’s window No, around here,
they won’t call if that’s all that happened. They know me and they know
they’d get paid and the kids kept in the house.’” “You didn’t think of
anything worse?” “I just stopped thinking.
I saw a neighbor standing outside his house and looking. I didn’t like that,
I guess. My wife was different. She gets out of the car and runs into the
house screaming.” “She knew” “I guess women do. I went
to the neighbor and I said, ‘Joe, what happened?’ He said my kid fell. That’s
all he said. I went inside and he was on the floor. He died suddenly.” He put
his head down and said no more. He didn’t have to. “We went to the
hospital,” Faye said, “and they had him up on this stainless steel table. He
was blue. I kissed him and left. You lose a son, fifteen years three months.” A priest, Father Brian
McKeon, who was a very close friend of the young man’s—”You’d like this
priest as soon as he walks into the room”—had been out of town when Faye
died, but he returned and served the mass and gave the eulogy. ‘All I know is that he
was there, our favorite priest, Father Brian McKeon, on March 2, 1987, says
mass for my dead son. He immediately came around to comfort the youngest
brother. He always was with us so much. Barbecues, golf, family outings. Then
grieving. Once, I had this thought. He never hung out with a family where
there was just a daughter.” One day, a little over
two years ago, young men in the neighborhood fought over a priest’s
affections. Then some of the neighbors talked about McKeon, who has been
identified in lawsuits as an abuser and has previously admitted to engaging
in “inappropriate” conduct with young boys. After which a family friend, Bob
Fernandez, a retired New York detective, called Faye’s wife. “Bob said to me, ‘I
wanted to tell you myself before you hear this from anybody else,’ “she
recalls. He told her that the priest McKeon had molested the dead son. Then
the priest molested the second son. Trypuc and his wife went to the Long Island
diocese headquarters in Rockville Centre. They saw Monsignor Alan Placa, who did abuse complaints precisely as expected. He
promised to investigate and report to the bishop. On St. Patrick’s Day
2001, Faye remembered, he and his wife were in Faye had to go back to
work. I started to go home, but a note scrawled on my notebook caused me to
walk two blocks to Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street, where a dull red awning at
number 332 West 23rd gave the name of Leo House. It is an eight-story stone
building whose brochure notes, “is a safe, quiet guest house with a Christian
atmosphere, centrally located within New York City, and is staffed by the
Sisters of St. Agnes and lay persons.” There he was, in these
years from 1995 to 1997, leaning over the front desk and greeting and booking
all guests, most prominently the young: the Reverend Paul Shanley.
All he had to do was step outside to be on the streets of the Chelsea
neighborhood, teeming with young. There can be no realistic estimate of the
number of young people he had attacked and abused in Boston. They stopped
counting at only sixteen of his stadium full of victims. He seduced a fifth-grade
boy and kept abusing him for four years. The archdiocese paid $100,000. It
was one of several settlements. The archbishop, Medeiros, did nothing. Shanley had a street mission, with the homeless young and
drug addicts. He dressed counterculture style, with no collar and long hair.
He ran schools and dances and special clubhouses. His life was an aberration,
and nobody stopped it. In 1978, at a conference, he said that sex with
children hurt nobody. He said the same thing in a magazine called Gaysweek. He extolled man—boy love.
Medeiros received so many complaints that he had to revoke Shanley’s street ministry. Shanley
then made it known he had enough on Medeiros to turn the diocese upside down.
In some sort of compromise, Shanley was transferred
to a money parish in Newton, where nobody young was safe. He had no way of
controlling himself and he went everywhere, walking into wards of hospitals,
prison hospitals, a home for children. He was
Catholicism’s busiest pedophile. He had Bishops Daily and Murphy supposedly
monitoring him. They did nothing but write letters praising him. Finally, with too many
complaints coming in, he moved, or fled, to California, where he ran a hotel
for gay nudists in Palm Springs. He came back east and followed his close
friend, Frank Pilecki, who had been the president
of Westfield State College in Massachusetts until he went openly mad over
young boys and got himself busted. Pilecki came
down to run Leo House on 23rd Street. He went off to die, but left his gay
connections to Leo House open for Shanley, who
arrived in 1995 as a priest and assistant director. It was a marvelous
position. There were seven floors of rooms renting from sixty-five dollars to
eighty-six dollars a night. The place is known everywhere in the world as
fine lodgings for decent Catholics who need no bar in the lobby or ornate
bedrooms. His background was known.
Neither the Boston nor NewYork archdiocese
complained. There was an indictment looming in Boston. Shanley
was still all right at Leo House. And then somehow John
O’Connor, archbishop of New York, happened to look at the Shanley
file and saw the address of Leo House. West Twenty-third. That was right in
the middle of Chelsea. In the political district of Tom Duane, then in the
City Council. Tom Duane was gay and not reticent about it. And he was not
quiet about O’Connor, who preached that being gay was to attempt to leap
over the pit of the flames of hell and survive if you can. Why, if this Duane
ever finds out about this Shanley! “Get him out of this
archdiocese now!” O’Connor thundered. Never mind about all
these hundreds of young people abused by Shanley,
and as a result grew up with minds in pieces. After me, they come
first. Shanley was gone to his fates with the Boston
prosecutors and courts. He is in his early seventies so the flaming part of
his life is over. His playing field is a cell with big thick bars. But it is
an example, perhaps the most telling of all, as to the regard the church has
for the helpless. We
look to journalists like Breslin to uncover stories
and present them to readers. Breslin accomplishes
that in The
Church That Forgot Christ. Clearly, the stories Breslin
selects present what he wants to convey to readers. The stories in this book
describe behavior that will sadden all readers, discourage many, and leave
too many questions unanswered. Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Church That Forgot Christ.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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