149: What if you committed child sexual abuse? 01:05:35

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First, a warning. Often on this show, we feature guests who have been the victims of abuse and violent acts. However, today our guest will be an offender who engaged in the sexual abuse of children. I wrestled with whether or not I should have this man on the show, but I decided ultimately that to tell the full story of the human experience, there is value in hearing the stories of offenders as well.

My intent is not to provide a platform for forgiveness or justification for his behavior, but to raise questions and gain insights about the nature of abuse, how we view and treat perpetrators in our society, and what both survivors and perpetrators can do to heal. All that being said, if you are sensitive to material involving sexual violence, abuse, and childhood trauma, please skip this episode.

This episode is also a special co-production with a podcast called Reckonings. Produced by Stephanie Lepp, Reckonings tells the stories of people who've revolutionized their political worldviews, transcended extremism, and made other kinds of transformative change. Today's guest, Gil Gustafson, originally appeared on Reckonings, and that episode has been adapted for This Is Actually Happening. So a big thanks to Stephanie and the wonderful work that she does. You can find Reckonings wherever you listen to podcasts and at www.reckonings.show.

We also have another big announcement today. We're excited to be launching the first ever Facebook group for This Is Actually Happening listeners to build community around the show, provide a forum for you all to discuss episodes, and widen the conversations that are sparked by featured guests. So if you'd like to join us on Facebook, search for This Is Actually Happening podcast discussion group. Thanks for listening, and I hope you join the conversation. I misused my position of power to get my needs met.

The whole orientation of your life is to do God's will and call others to do the same. How is it that if we're called by God to this ministry, we could possibly do such a destructive thing? Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation, a presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 149, What If You Committed Child Sexual Abuse?

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and the next something goes wrong but with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring you still feel safe because when every second counts count on ADT visit ADT.com today my family was pretty strongly religious my mom and dad were very involved in our church i grew up as a catholic

So we became friends, both with the pastor and other priests, as well as the nuns who taught in the school. So in a certain sense, religion for me wasn't just church. It was an extended community. It was people who came into my house, people I got to know. For me, at least, I was swimming in the religion of Catholicism and along with it, the faith. I'm the youngest of four.

And I think my two older sisters were pretty neutral about religion. But I believe in a certain sense, my brother always resisted it, kind of pushed against it. And so he was pushing against it and I was reaching for it, particularly the liturgy, the worship. I liked being in church. I didn't mind being in church.

I attended a Catholic grade school from first to eighth grade. I became an altar boy when I was like nine or ten. Eventually I trained altar boys. Church felt comfortable to me. Kind of the nice thing about the Catholic system was, in a way, you didn't have to do it on your own. You just joined, showed up, and there was prayer for you. When I was six years old, a neighborhood boy about three years older than me

whom I didn't play with all that much. I wasn't that well connected to his family or to him. In a certain sense, I think I was probably honored that he would ask me to play with him. Kind of like, oh, an older boy wants to play with me. And what he suggested we do is we kind of went out for a walk, and there was a little spur line of a railroad track near our neighborhood.

And it led into an area that was kind of secluded. And I'm not exactly sure how he framed our doing this, but what he invited me to do was that we would pull down our pants and spank each other. And I don't remember if he spanked me first or I spanked him first, but we spanked each other. And

I don't specifically remember him, say, touching me in my genitalia or asking me to do that to him. But since we were naked, he kind of draped me over his knee, so to speak, and then spanked me. And then he invited me to do the same thing to him. So I'm now sitting on the side of the railroad tracks and he's draped across my knee and I spank him. So that was the behavior.

It didn't feel like a really hard spanking, you know, it wasn't like brutality that way. And I don't know that it lasted a real long time, a few minutes, and then we put on our pants and kind of walked back into the neighborhood. I don't know what happened after the spanking incident, but it did happen a couple of different times. I felt ashamed because...

The idea of taking clothes off in front of somebody else felt really strange. And I felt like I was being a bad boy. I wasn't supposed to do this. There was an inherent sense that this isn't right. And yet, I don't know that I could have articulated that. But I didn't feel right. I didn't feel right about doing it. And yet, I did. I went along with it. Because this older boy was saying this is what he wanted to do.

I was six years old at the time, and the other boy was nine years old at the time. Sometime after the spanking ritual had begun, I remember getting a bath, and my mother was giving me a bath, and I told her about it. And she said to me, well, the other boy was older than you. He should have known better.

So I just took that in. But I also remember asking her to not tell my dad about it. I think I was afraid of how he might react to my having done this bad thing. I was a super good boy. And all of a sudden, I felt like I had been a bad boy. So I'm six years old, which means I'm like in first grade, probably, at school. And this might have happened over the summer.

But now when I was back in school, I was looking at other kids. I remember there was a boy in my class and before I would go to sleep at night, a little fantasy began in which I would spank him. And at first it was with all of his clothes on and then it was just him in his underwear and then without any clothes on at all. You know, somehow it felt good. And yet I was also ashamed of the fantasy at the same time.

I don't know that "enjoyed" is the right word. I think in some ways I was excited by it. This was doing something, breaking the rules, so it was kind of exciting to be doing it. I just kind of felt compelled to do it, I guess. When I was about nine or ten years old, I became an altar boy. And as an altar boy, what I did was to help the priests say Mass,

I remember thinking that the priest was the guy who was able to, that he really had all the talking parts. And he spoke and people listened. And I think at a certain level, that was really attractive to me. The church meant a lot to me. And I would say about the time I was maybe nine years old, the Erebus, fourth grade, I started articulating that I thought I wanted to be a priest.

I started my seminary career as a ninth grader. So I'm 14 years old. I'm a freshman in high school, and I go to this school. It's a boarding school, so I lived away from home. So those early years, those first four years, the high school years, I believe was where I learned how to be a friend. But it was also a period where I was exposed to

some very, very bright teachers, both priests and non-priests. And they had a deep commitment to social justice, especially in that era. This is 65 to 69. And that's lived in me for the rest of my life as a deep core passion of who I am and what I'm about. I went on to college seminary, and that was a relatively new invention at the time.

Now I was meeting people from all around the region. So I was like, wow, this was kind of a broadening of a social network. And now this is 1969 to 73 while I'm in college seminary. The Vietnam War is in the center of the plate. And so I got involved in anti-war activity as much as was feasible at a private Catholic college.

Again, this idea of what's important about my life is interacting with society and taking on societal issues. That was absolutely integral to how I saw priesthood, how I saw myself. I was a sociology major because I was curious about how can you make social change.

The last four years of my formation was a far more theological education graduate school, and it was much more regimented. And I felt like I was being squeezed into their model and their mode rather than really being able to be who I was. I'm ordained in 1977. I'm assigned to a parish in a suburb in the northern part of the Twin Cities. The pastor was a great guy. I showed up in mid-June.

And on the 4th of July, he had a massive heart attack, which incapacitated him for several months. And for whatever reason, the diocese didn't send in a temporary administrator. I mean, I marvel at it today that they would think this 26-year-old kid, a month ordained, is capable of running a parish of a thousand families. But they did. And so I did. And it was kind of a whirlwind of activity.

There was an 8 a.m. mass every day at the parish, so I was probably getting up around 7. And I was taking appointments until like 10 o'clock at night, even later. So it was really kind of 14-hour days, and not a lot of it was spent on kind of personal time or downtime. But I loved it. Being with the people was everything I wanted it to be.

When I was ordained, my image of priesthood was kind of a community organizer in a church setting. I embraced the Vatican II theology that said, in churches where the people of God, the parishioners, are nourished and fed and maybe given some direction, in order for them to go out into the world and do the work of the church and the world, bringing the message of love and compassion out into the world,

So my job was to equip them to do their job. And I loved it. The churchy part wasn't what attracted me to priesthood. It seemed like kind of pious bullshit to me. You know, it was I can make a difference in people's lives. And that's what nourished me.

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There was a point, I don't know, a couple years into it all,

And a member of my staff, a faith formation person who was a very wise woman, she kind of screwed up her face a little bit and looked at me and said, you know, Gil, you are never more yourself than when you're saying mass. And I thought, wow, that really nails it.

And by nature, I'm sort of a chameleon. I can be whatever it was I wanted to be. And that's true all the way from my childhood. I could be the teacher's pet and the kid with every good answer in the classroom and swear like a sailor on the playground. The same thing happened in the parish. And what my friend was saying to me was, you can be anything you want to be. You can present yourself. It's kind of like I had any persona I wanted I could put out there.

But you're never more yourself than when you're at the altar and you're saying the prayers of the Mass. But it was exhausting. I was getting worn down without even knowing it. And after a period of time, it becomes routine. And for me, routine is boring. And even though I liked it,

It was like, okay, here I am, another couple to get ready for marriage. Oh, here we are, another couple that's struggling with their marriage. Oh, here we are, I'm doing baptism preparation. So it was like a lot of things to do, constant stream of things to do. And at a certain level, I just felt like, you know, what could recharge me? And in a sense,

I went to what I had gone to when I was a little boy, a sexualized fantasy, a sexual fantasy. Pretty compulsive masturbation and the sexual fantasy focused on boys in the parish. Early teenage boys, 10, 12 to 15, somewhere in that range. And I would feel like, you know, it's okay. I'm doing all this hard work, so it's okay if I...

do this fantasy, or if I masturbate to this fantasy. At the time it was not that linear, but that's what was going on. I think when I was about 21 and senior in college was when I realized that I had this sexual attraction to boys 12, 13, 14 years old. And so that had been going on before I got ordained. In some ways I didn't know what to think of it. I didn't have language for it. You know, this is 1973.

In some ways, I suppose it was kind of confusing because all sexual attraction really was kind of clouded in shame in that era. As a Catholic, it would kind of come and I would try to push it away, I think. It's hard to remember 40 years later what exactly I was doing. It wasn't

It wasn't so much in the forefront of my consciousness as it was a kind of a haunted feeling. I'm haunted by this attraction and eventually feeling kind of chased by it in a way. I didn't want it and I was trying to get rid of it and I was trying to push it down, which just kept feeding it. Compulsion pushes away cognitive process. When you're compelled to do something, when you feel a compulsion to do something, you just do it.

I think that's true of violence in any form, and certainly sexual violence is part of it. It feels like something takes over. I was on a field trip with a group of the altar boys at the parish, and we went to a local amusement park. And there was, oh, I don't know, 20, 25 boys and probably two or three adults and myself as the chaperones.

And there was this one boy and he was one of the altar service. These were all altar service. And he was cute and he was kind of a clinger, a needy kid in a way. And so he was hanging out with me the whole day. And what happened was on one of the rides, we were in a car together or whatever, and

And I slipped my hand between his legs and, you know, he didn't object to it. So as the day went on, we're on these various rides and more often than not, they're two person rides. So I kept doing it. These were rides on a, um, in an amusement park. So you're kind of like one behind the other. So he'd be in front of me and he'd be pushed up against me. And my hand is, uh, rubbing him in his groin, uh,

But I don't remember there being words. I don't remember him saying anything one way or the other. But as the day went on, he certainly kind of was attached to the hip to me. And the fact that he didn't seem to respond negatively said to me that he must be okay with it. I knew it was wrong to do that, that I was taking advantage. If I was going to do this to this kid, I was taking advantage and

There's a certain sense of danger, too. Well, what if he reacts negatively? What if he tells one of the adults? Oh, my God, then what? So there was a bit of danger to it as well as desire. This is probably like 1979 or something like that. So I'd been in the parish two years. This kid had served mass. It was pretty clear. You know, he liked me, looked up to me. I don't know why. What said to me that it would be okay to try it with this kid? I don't know. But it did seem okay.

The takeaway emotion far more profoundly for me was a sickened, shamed sort of feeling about myself. There was some of it during it. I'm like, you know, I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be doing this. And afterwards, you know, when I got home that night, it was like, oh, my God, what have I done? This is awful.

And yet my experience when I was abusing the boys was both this mixture of kind of compulsed desire to do it as well as feeling terrible shame that I had done it. This interaction with this boy at the amusement park is what I remember as the initial instance of abuse with a boy that would become my primary victim. There was a day when

I went for a bike ride with my victim and we stopped at a park. And part of the pattern of behavior was sort of wrestling. And so we're both fully clothed, but we're at this park and we start wrestling. And I said something along the lines of, you know, is this what you want? Do you realize what this is? This is gay behavior. And I don't remember what his response was exactly.

We got back on our bikes and rode and I dropped him off at his house. And I remember his mom looking at him and saying, you look really tired. And I said, well, it was a good long bike ride. Then I pedaled off to get back to my rectory. So I think he was feeling emotionally spent, maybe. I don't know what he was feeling. But he later sent me a note in which he said, I don't care if that's gay behavior or not.

I'll never forget the day. I can't know what he meant by that. I wasn't inside his head, but I wanted to be explicit that what we're doing is sexual. It's not just playing around wrestling. It's sexual. And that because we're two males, it's gay. But I don't know exactly what I was trying to do with that. It was kind of like, it just came out of me to say it. And I,

And then eventually he responded to it, saying pretty clearly he didn't want to lose the relationship. I think he felt dependent on me. I was fulfilling something for him. The last time that I sexually abused my victim was the summer. And I had already finished my assignment in the parish. And I had come back up to the town to be with some other people.

It was nighttime, it's summer, so it was probably like nine o'clock at night. And I drove over to his house and his parents were there. And so I chatted with his parents and he was sleeping out on a porch, or at least that's kind of claimed that space as a place for him to sleep. And he was already out there. I think he had come into the house at some point, knew I was there. And he said to me, I want, you know, come on, see me before you go.

So now it's literally, it's probably about 9:30, 10 o'clock at night. And so I go onto the porch and he had a little cot on the porch, like touched me in my groin. He asked me if I would lie down with him on this cot. And I said, no, I can't do that. I was terribly afraid of, you know, what would happen if his parents came out and the two of us are lying on his cot. So I was at that point, I just need to get out of here. And I think I offered to give him a blow job.

but he said he wanted to give me a blow job and i'm like oh my god this is craziness but he did i was holding his head and i know in a testimony later he said that he felt i was pushing his head down on me but i didn't feel like i was forcing him to do this but as he recounted it he felt that he had been forced to do it you know i thought man i got to get out of here and and i left i thought this is very dangerous you know this is

I could easily get caught doing this. So there was fear. It was excitement, I suppose. I mean, this is what I fantasized about regularly, was having sex with a boy. But there was also a certain fear of being kind of controlled by him, that he could blow the whistle on me. So it was complex. There was a lot of stuff mixed together. I think I had...

in which I would try to stop fantasizing and stop masturbating to the fantasies. And the inappropriate behavior also sort of waxed and waned. Some of it was dependent on...

availability, you know, would I be with a boy where I could, you know, give him a hug and maybe kind of sneak a, you know, squeeze in or touch his butt or whatever. Either I would push against it or not, but the urge was constant. The acting on the urge was more sporadic, but frequent enough, not your, you know, it happened. There certainly wasn't a month that went by that I didn't have two, maybe three

instances of some kind of inappropriate touch of boys. I felt awful that I was doing this. I didn't delude myself into thinking I'm teaching this boy about sex or even necessarily that this is something he likes. And yet I felt like I couldn't stop. I was compulsed. As much as I would want to stop doing it, and I tried to stop, it just felt like I can't stop.

Part of the rhythm for me in my life as a priest was to go to confession with some regularity. So I had a priest, another priest, who was my confessor. I mean, I heard other people's sins and this priest heard mine. He was a trained spiritual director. Somebody had said to me, you should talk to this priest. He's really good, you know, in terms of spiritual direction and confession and all that. And I thought, okay. And

So it was my first session with him. And all of a sudden, I thought, I'm just going to put it all out there. It was kind of like I wanted to be unburdened. I didn't have my confession heard in a confessional. I met with this priest, my confessor, in his office. And so I would go into his office and sit in one chair, and he would be at his desk chair or maybe in another chair in the office. And essentially, I would tell him what was going on.

So I'm sitting in his office with him and we're in two chairs. And this is my first meeting with him. So he doesn't know me. He's kind of getting to know me. And he says, so tell me a little bit about yourself. And I literally just dived right in and said, well, this is what I'm doing. I'm attracted to these young teenage boys and I've been touching them inappropriately. And so, you know, he listened very carefully.

carefully to it and his response to me wasn't shaming or condemnatory. It wasn't tolerant either. I had somebody with whom I could confide my secret, the secret of my worst behavior, that which I felt awful about, that which I felt, you know, would earn me condemnation. And to be able to say it out loud to somebody was enormously helpful.

in terms of my own psychic distress. Unfortunately, it didn't intervene on the behavior. The behavior did continue. In the summer of 1982, I'd finished my assignment at the parish in June, and I was scheduled to go away to school in September in Washington, D.C. And I was doing kind of varieties of things, ministries for the diocese that summer.

And I got a letter from the vicar general for the archdiocese. And a vicar general is a person who's kind of like a second in command to the bishop. I get a letter. He invites me to meet with him at the chancery. And the chancery, it's where the archbishop has his office and his kind of key staff members. It's headquarters for a diocese.

I arrive, and when I go into his office, there's another priest there, and he was the chancellor. I wasn't sure what the agenda might be, so I walked in to his office, and when I saw the other priest there, the chancellor, I thought to myself, this is going to be about abuse. The other priest wouldn't be there unless it was about abuse.

The vicar general hands to me a letter and he says, I'd like you to read this. And the letter was written by my primary victim. And in it, he described some of the sexual behavior we had engaged in. And this would be like a month or so, maybe no more than a month since the incident on the porch. I think what he was saying, I recall it was, don't forget me.

Because I was scheduled to go away to school, and I think he was afraid that I would just forget him. I felt like, oh my God, this is going to be the end of my career. I'm done. I'm going to get thrown out of priesthood. And so there was a great sense of threat and loss, a feeling of I'm being outed, so to speak, or having my behavior made known to these people who are in authority over me.

It was a feeling in which everything that matters to me could go away. So the feeling of dread, I guess, is part of it. I do a calculation as I read it about, am I going to deny this letter or am I going to acknowledge that what this boy is saying is true? And I hand the letter back to the vicar general and he pauses. And then he says, well, what do you have to say?

There's a moment in this where I really think it's a moment of the Holy Spirit where I decided just to not run away from what I had done, that I thought I could deny this. I'm a very believable, credible person, and this 15, 16-year-old boy could be disbelieved. I could say, oh, no, no, I have no idea what he's talking about. But what was going on inside me at that very second then was,

I don't want to keep running away from this. It's time to turn and face what I have done, no matter what the consequences are. I'm tired of running from this. I'm tired of engaging in this behavior. I'm tired of being chased by it. I said to him, it's true. I don't think they ever expected me, no matter if they thought I was doing it or not,

I don't think they ever expected me to acknowledge that easily or that immediately that it was true. And so then they were kind of stymied. And they kind of said, well, you're going to need to probably talk to the archbishop about this. And there'll be some steps we'll have to take. And I don't think the conversation was any more than a half an hour. So I walked out of the chancery.

and got into my car, which was a tiny little Dodge Colt, a little tin can of a car. And I got on Interstate 94 heading east out of St. Paul and was driving at 70 miles an hour. And I thought to myself, I could just turn this car into a bridge abutment and it would seem like an accident and I'd be dead. So I contemplated killing myself because I thought everything that mattered to me mattered.

priesthood that I love so much was going to be gone. I couldn't imagine that anyone, my family or friends, anyone could hear of this behavior and think of me as anything but a piece of shit. Think of me as anything but despicable. What if I just put it into it? And again, you know, maybe it's the Holy Spirit or God's love or whatever.

I kept driving and driving and driving and 15, 20 miles later I was at the Wisconsin border. And by now the impetus to kill myself had quieted. And I turned around and drove back to the place where I was living and tried to figure out what's next. The vicar general said to me that the parents of my victim had intercepted this letter and

They brought it to the Chancery to say, you've got to do something about this. And that's what led to this confrontation, that they confronted me with the letter. The day of meeting with the Vicar General and that, in some ways, was the lowest day in my life, hardest day. But it was also the beginning of a liberation. You know, when you think of a trajectory of life, I think my entire life

led to that and then led away from it.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Over the winter in early 1983, I was back in town. I had gone on a ski trip and I remember the chancellor tracking me down at the airport and

And he said, police have been contacted about your abusive behavior. This is a Friday and I was scheduled to go back to Washington. He says, you better stay in town and meet with a lawyer on Monday. So that's what I did. What had happened, as I understand it, is my victim had gotten counseling and they

The counselor he was seeing would be, under Minnesota state law, a mandated reporter who, hearing of the behavior, said, I've got to report this to the police. And his family got involved with that, too, of course. And so I was told I was going to need to meet with the police. So this is like maybe February of 1983, maybe.

So somewhere in late February, early March, I meet with a couple of police officers in my lawyer's office. And that led to the creation of a charge, a felony level sexual misconduct charge, third degree sexual conduct. And it's a felony. I knew that my story was going to become publicly known at some level. And I thought, I've got to tell my parents before that happens.

So I caught a flight from Washington, D.C., where I was in school, didn't tell them I was coming, took a chance on them being home, got a cab to their house, their apartment, knocked on the door, and they answered the door, and I said, I need to tell you something. And we sat down, and I laid out for them what I had done, that I had sexually abused this boy and a handful of boys, and that the police were involved, and that it was going to go to court.

and I was going to plead guilty. You know, I kind of just laid out all the stuff. And my dad said to me, well, your mother and I just want you to know we love you, and we're behind you 110%. Much to my amazement, they met me with unqualified love. I started to cry, and they started to cry, and we just cried together for a few minutes, composed ourselves, and my dad said to me, what did you think we were going to say?

And I said, I thought you were going to disown me. When you tell the truth to people who love you, they will still love you. And it made all the difference in the world. I think what stopped me from killing myself that day was the fact that my parents had already said they still love me. And friends, priest friends in particular, that I told what was going on, and they pretty much said the same thing. They said, look, we're your friends. I wasn't rejected. I wasn't despised.

The charges came forward. I was in front of a judge in early April. The charges were read out and he said, how do you plead? And I said, I plead guilty. My sentencing hearing was scheduled for the Friday of Memorial Day weekend that year. In the courtroom, again, the charges were laid out and he said, well, the sentence is 18 months in Stillwater Prison State Penitentiary.

I thought, "Oh my God." And he said, "I will stay that sentence and instead I am imposing six months in the Ramsey County Workhouse, 10 years probation and mandated therapy." All of a sudden that's when I realized, "Oh my God, I'm going to jail." I'm sentenced on Friday, a Memorial Day weekend. The major TV stations carried the story.

So I go into jail or into the workhouse feeling like, oh man, everybody in the world knows my worst secret. In a certain sense, having an impartial entity, the court of law, judge my behavior was liberating. While it was painful to be in jail, it too became a gift because I could say to the world, a penalty was imposed and I fulfilled that penalty.

I didn't go off scot-free. There was a penalty. You may disagree with the length of it, etc., but there was a penalty that an impartial court imposed. So in that sense, I was judged, the penalty was imposed, I fulfilled the penalty. Once I finished with the workhouse with jail time, the archbishop said, "Well, why don't you continue on at Catholic Charities?" So I continued on there as my ministry.

I wasn't doing anything that was parish level or certainly not with kids. And so I asked, could there be some place in which I could say Mass? And this community of contemplative sisters happened to need a chaplain. And they said, well, you could talk to them. And I did. And they accepted me as their chaplain.

I remember early on telling this story to the whole community. I'd done two levels, kind of just a basic introductory thing. And then I asked the sister who was the abbess, could I have another meeting with the community? I really need to talk about what's happened to me and the abuse of behavior and all this. And the sisters listened very quietly and very patiently and kindly.

When all of a sudden they were breaking, kind of they were going back to the inside the monastery into the cloister. And one of the sisters stopped and tugged on my arm and said, thank you for sharing all that and being so honest and so straightforward. You probably look at us and think, here's this bunch of holy ladies. Well, we all have stories too. And I thought, wow. She said, we all have a story. And so to be able to minister to that community became incredibly life-giving to me.

Mass was a huge, huge part of my spirituality. And I found that my preaching and my therapeutic work very much aligned to each other because I was dealing with my own shit. I preached out of that, you know. It wasn't like I'm preaching from a point of view of here I am this beautifully made perfect person. No. I would look at a piece of scripture to preach it and I would say, so what is this saying to me with all of my brokenness?

So spirituality and faith was an enormously important part of my recovery process. There's no question about it. It wasn't a word coming down from on high. It was a word coming from another person struggling to be okay, struggling to heal. Who I knew myself to be prior to August of 1982 was this talented, up-and-coming, bright boy priest who could do anything and proved it by running a parish two weeks ordained.

All that was gone, and now it's, who the hell am I? The process of therapy helped me to start to understand more deeply who I really am and why I was acting out sexually, abusively. And I was getting a new foundation for how to live a healthy life. I started what became a 30-year process of therapy in the fall of 1983. While I was still in the workhouse, I started therapy.

And so I meet with this guy and we sit down and a few little niceties, kind of some background. And so he pauses and he said, could you tell me why it is you were so angry at those boys you abused? And I said, I wasn't angry at them. I did a terrible thing to them. I was shameful. I was lust or, you know, sexual desire run amok. And he said, oh, yeah.

So then can you explain to me how anything other than anger or rage could lead you to violate all of your values and your principles for life? And I thought to myself, this is my therapist, somebody that can ask me that question.

I said something along the lines of, listen, I'll do whatever it takes for me to be healthy and safe again. And if that means I've got to leave priesthood, well, then so be it. Whatever the hell I've got to do, I don't intend to ever abuse a kid again. Because I'm thinking, you know, celibacy, maybe that's part of the problem, right? And he said, well, he said, actually, I don't think you have to leave priesthood. He said, you can be a healthy celibate or you can be a healthy non-celibate. The point is, you've got to be healthy.

I didn't understand. Well, it took me a while to understand that what I had done was an act of rage. You know, that period, there was a lot of stuff around clergy sexual abuse starting to emerge. And so I was reading kind of Catholic press and other press accounts to start to get ways to help me understand how much harm I had caused, how painful it had to have been for my victims too. Summer of 1988, probably June or July, something like that,

I moved to another parish, again, that, you know, I had no assignment, no ministry there, but the pastor was willing to have me live there and be the eyes and ears of the diocese on me while I was in residence. By the same token, my day job at Catholic Charities, the monsignor who was in charge of it, part of his responsibility was to make sure I was behaving appropriately. In a way, the system was to have eyes on me 24-7.

So while I'm there, you know, I've moved in and one day the rectory phone rings. And so it could be for me, could be for somebody else, you know, so I pick it up and I say, you know, hello, St. Peter's. And on the other end is my primary victim. And I said, oh, I kind of froze. It was like, oh, my God, what do I do here?

I'm sure part of my order from the court, although I don't remember it explicitly, but certainly my probation officer would have made clear to me, you know, under no circumstance do you have contact with your victim. And all of a sudden, here's my victim on the phone, and he wants to talk to me. My recollection in the course of that conversation was that he said, I forgive you, wanting to assure me that he wasn't there to talk.

Castigate me or it was kind of like saying, you know, I've forgiven you It was amazing to me that that he could say I forgive you and at the same time I didn't know what I could do and he said but I want I want to get together with you I want you to see me and I said well, you know, I don't know that I can do that my therapist when I told him I

He said, well, I could foresee a way in which you would meet with him in a supervised fashion, like have my therapist there or somebody else's therapist or advocates or whatever. But he said, if you did have a meeting like that, really, the only thing you're there to tell him is that you're sorry and that it's your responsibility. It was your fault. It wasn't his fault. I was willing to do that.

But then my probation officer, when I told him about what had happened, pretty quickly he got back to me and said, there's no way. Part of me was frightened about what it would be like to meet with him. It's hard to face someone whom you've harmed. Yet I was ready to. I mean, if I thought it would do something to help him, then I would want to do it. I think the fear flows from shame.

Just like I expected my parents to disown me, I would expect this now young man to condemn me. What has always stuck in me and haunted me in that exchange, like the incident on the porch, was his repeated request that I lie down with him, that I be in bed with him. And I think what he was really asking was to be connected.

Which kind of aligns to this desire a few years later to say, I want you to see me. To see that he's a real person and not an object of my sexual lust, attraction, abuse. In other words, to be seen as a real human being. His desire for connection is what I had betrayed before.

One of the things that was happening in the local church was the victim's advocate for the archdiocese and another woman who worked with victims, I think for the state of Minnesota, teamed up to do some training for victim's advocates. These advocates would hear from someone who had been a victim of abuse and whether it was a man or a woman would speak and tell their story and tell them how they'd been affected.

And then I would have a chance to speak with the group and tell them about, you know, from an offender's point of view, what had happened. And to share with them these same kind of wisdoms about offenders need to be held accountable. And it's never the victim's fault. Offenders are the ones in charge. Offenders have to take responsibility because they did this.

This one session, I was scheduled, I think, to speak right after their lunch break, like at about one o'clock or whenever it was. And I got a call from one of the two facilitators. And she said that when they had announced probably in the morning that I would be coming that afternoon, this fellow who was an ordained deacon stood up and said, I don't know that I can be in the room with him. He couldn't be in the room with me because he had been in a role of being a support person for

for my victim, my primary victim. At the time, my victim was dying of AIDS. And so this deacon was providing pastoral ministry to him, companionship, and support him. My primary victim had died of AIDS. Died in 1995. I remember it was in the evening. I'd gotten home from something, and I was reading through the paper, and I saw his obituary. I thought, "Oh my."

Because he was 28 years old, I think, something like that. I was just very, very sad. You know, I don't know a lot about his life as a young adult. I can't remember who told me, but somebody had told me that apparently he had contracted the AIDS from a sexual relationship with a woman who had been an intravenous drug user. And that's how he contracted it.

To the degree that perhaps a kind of confused life or a life seeking relief from the pain within him, to the degree I caused that, then I feel very badly about that. So this deacon was there and he didn't want to be in the room with me because he had been a significant support person to my primary victim. He just didn't want to know me.

So he was given the option by the facilitators of the training that he could either sit out the session where I would be presenting or he could meet with me ahead of time with one of the facilitators present. So we sat down. I said to him what I said in conferences, etc., that I felt so badly for the harm I had caused and that.

that I knew it was my responsibility and I felt badly about it. And I can't remember what all we said. I think what the deacon saw was the genuine remorse that I had for what I had done. And it allowed him to say, I can be in the room with you. It'll be okay. I was very grateful to know that my primary victim had that kind of support going on for him.

This man clearly invested himself in my victim, in friendship, you know, really cared about him. What I've come to learn is by my putting my need for sexual release in the center of the interaction, I led them to have a hard time trusting people. In the case of my primary victim, you know, I think he went into a spin and that's the harm I caused.

I don't know what that did to him in terms of his sexual relations. I don't know that for a fact, but I suspect I put a confusion into him. Victims of abuse speak of trying to drown their pain with drugs or alcohol, that they can't hold jobs, they deal with depression. There's this whole range of effects, consequences of the behavior on the victim. And

While I don't know specifically all of that landscape for my victims, I can imagine that some part of it is at work, at least in some of them. I never hid. I never lied. I never denied. I accepted it. I was honest about my behavior. I accepted the legal consequence. And the jail time was the living out of that. And the 10 years probation was the living out of that.

Similarly, the consequence of the publicity in the press then, in a sense, forced me to be transparent about this history of mine. I can't hide from it. I can't pretend somebody won't be able to easily discover what I did before 1982. And so it shapes me. I accepted the accountability from an external source, and I internalized responsibility.

I did this. It is my fault. It's nobody's fault but mine. I did this. And however my life story came to play, including having been abused myself, I still must accept responsibility. And I must do that for my own sake as well as for the sake of others. Shame is rooted in anger itself. It's global. In other words, I am bad. That's the message of shame.

And there's really, it's relentless. There's no way back from it. It just is. It's like you are a bad person. And I would think of myself, I am a bad person. Guilt, on the other hand, authentic guilt, remorse, people use different language, is rooted in sadness. And it's sadness about the harm I've caused. It's sadness about harm that was living on inside of me. I've been abused too. And I didn't really realize it had been there for a long time, but...

It's sadness. I feel guilt for my behavior and the harm that I caused. I feel sad about that. That's the guilt. I feel existentially sad. Sadness in the deepest part of my bones. Shame, unacknowledged anger, a sense of entitlement. That constellation of factors and many more.

led me to think, I'm going to do something that makes me feel good. And in my case, it was sexually abusing young teenage boys. I do remember articulating at some point, particularly around the press, if I were a plumber and I had sexually abused a boy, would I have been a front page story in both of the papers and on the evening news? What I wasn't taking into account at that time, but later did, was that

It made it to the press precisely because I was a priest. I was a public figure. I was a figure in a position of trust. And that is a big deal. It is different than the plumber sexually abusing the neighborhood kid. That's bad too. But the fact that it became such a public event, publicized so much, is precisely because of who I was and the role I had.

You know, I could use my position to have contact with them, groom them, so that what I thought at the time was they wouldn't even know what I was doing. I misused my position of power to get my needs met. The whole orientation of your life is to do God's will and call others to do the same. How is it that if we're called by God to this ministry, we could possibly do such a destructive thing?

One of the things we say about priesthood in the Catholic Church is that it represents a change of being, an ontological change. That when you are ordained, your very being is changed. When I look back over my years, 25 years I functioned as a priest for 25 years, what my friend had said to me at the parish, that you are never more yourself than when you're at Eucharist, was really true.

And so to be able to minister to these sisters, particularly presiding at Mass, you know, the sacramental change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, to preach the living word of God, there was nothing I did on any given day that was more important than that.

I had had parish ministry gone because of, as a rightful consequence of my bad behavior. And I was given this second chance to be able to be a pastor of sorts to this community of sisters and the guests that would come there.

It was everything I could hope for. It was this vibrant, alive group of people who believed so deeply and understood what their brokenness was. And they said to me, another broken human being, a very publicly broken, sinful man, we want you to lead us in prayer. In June of 2002, I was in St. Paul. It was near a little lake in St. Paul for some reason.

And I got in my car and I turned on the radio and I think they made some reference about the Dallas bishops meeting in Dallas and that they had proclaimed a zero tolerance policy. And I thought, I'm done. That's it. The Dallas Charter is named the Dallas Charter because the meeting took place in Dallas, Texas. Kind of the centerpiece of it was a declaration of zero tolerance of any priest who is credibly accused of the sexual abuse of a minor.

in the church. I thought, "Oh my God, this is it." I couldn't tell you what the scripture was that day, but I preached. And then after Communion, I got up and said, "You know, my presumption is that this will be my last Sunday with you because of the Dallas Charter." By then, of course, I was all choked up. And I just said, "You know, it's been such a gift for me to be able to be here with you." I never said a public Mass again.

As of June 2002, I was told I could no longer in any way function as a Catholic priest. So I couldn't say Mass, I couldn't provide other sacraments, nor could I wear the attire of a Catholic priest, the Roman collar, nor could I use the title Father or Reverend.

Those were all conditions for me that I said yes to, that I would abide by. I did not choose, nor was I required, to leave this clerical state, the state of being a priest. In Catholic theology, ordination is seen as an eternal reality. And so once you become a priest, your being has changed. And not even the Church can undo that.

And the reason I did not request it is because I do understand myself to be a priest. It's who I am. It is my being. My very being, the ontological change did happen. And so for me to request a removal from that felt like I'd be violating my own sense of self.

I now could no longer do the most important thing in my life, which was to preside at Mass and to preach to a congregation. I lost what was most important to me. Over time, I've come to be able to say that this is another consequence of my behavior. And so I accept it as such, but it's still a very painful consequence. Because it's such a complete denial of ability

Now that it's all taken away from me, it maybe is in some deepest of ways that I'm not terribly aware of yet, helping me to really do what it is God wants me to do. I do some justice advocacy work around criminal justice reform. And in a certain sense, I can say to somebody who's been in prison for decades or had all sorts of horrible consequences themselves and say,

I know what you're, I have a sense of what you're going through. I have a consequence that will last for the rest of my life. I know what it feels like. It gives me a pathway to be empathetic, not sympathetic, but to be empathetic with people who have all sorts of things taken away from them. And I think that's, that's the fruit of it. That's the fruit of this consequence.

Today's episode featured Gil Gustafson. This episode was originally produced by Stephanie Lep at Reckonings and adapted for This Is Actually Happening. You can find Reckonings wherever you listen and at www.reckonings.show. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein. If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at Actually Happening.

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