SHEDDING LIGHT ON A DARK PAST
Decades later, victim shares story of abuse at hands of Peoria priest
The memories of what happened to him more than 60 years ago are somewhat hazy. But the shock, trauma and emotional scars are as clear today as they were then. He was 6 years old when he says he was sexually abused by a group of men that included Father Patrick Brennan, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Peoria. The abuse decades ago has shaped the rest of his life in grueling ways. Isolation from other children, suicidal thoughts, marital problems and emotional trauma embedded in his psyche. Too ashamed and confused by what happened to him, he kept it a secret from his friends and family for decades. Only much later in life, did he tearfully confide in his wife.
Now, more than six decades after the alleged abuse, the 71-year-old has decided to share his story publicly in the wake of an Illinois Attorney General’s report that pulled back the curtain on decades of Catholic abuse in Illinois. The victim wants the public to know, according to his allegation, Brennan is an abuser.
The Journal Star, which does not identify victims of sexual abuse, granted him anonymity, to speak about his experience.
The Catholic Diocese of Peoria said in a statement that Brennan was a priest with a “good reputation” and denied that Brennan ever sexually abused anyone.
The man’s account was not included in the sweeping report by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office that detailed abuses by 451 clerics in Catholic churches across the state, including 51 in the Catholic Diocese of Peoria.
Brennan’s accuser said he was interviewed by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office during its investigation.
He told the Journal Star he was shocked that Brennan did not make the list of clerics identified as substantiated abusers.
The Attorney General’s Office would not comment on the man’s case specifically, but in a statement to the Journal Star said, “There were, however, occasions when a claim of abuse was not ultimately substantiated by a Catholic source or by a criminal conviction or guilty plea, resulting in the accused cleric not being listed as a substantiated abuser in the Attorney General’s report.”
‘Wrong place, wrong time’
The man, now living with his wife in the Peoria area, does not remember what he was doing at the house down the street from his childhood home on East Frye Avenue in Peoria. How he got there or why he was there are details that have long since faded from memory.
But, without a doubt, he remembers being inside the home. He was 6 and there with a group of grown men. Even at a young age, he says he knew he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The memories of what happened to him in that house are “more like photographs” in his head, he says. But those photographs still haunt him.
While in the home, something scared the child. He doesn’t remember what, but something frightened him enough to send him running out of the house, down East Frye Avenue. Unfortunately, he ran the opposite direction from his family home.
As he ran down the street, a car pulled up alongside him. One of the men from the house got out of the car, picked him up and put him in the vehicle. He was then driven back to the house. There, he was sexually abused by the group of men, he said. They touched him, crowded him and watched as he says he was abused.
He remembers standing in the living room surrounded by a group of men, all of them strangers except one — Father Patrick Brennan of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria.
Brennan died in 1995. He served at St. Bernard Catholic Church in Peoria beginning in 1955. He also served at churches in Brimfield, Williamsfield and Cullom in his career.
The boy, whose family sometimes attended church at St. Bernard, was attacked from behind, he believes, by Brennan. He was then sexually abused by the group.
When it was over, he hid under a bed upstairs in the house. How long he hid, he doesn’t remember. But he remembers being found by a “fat, angry, sweaty and red-faced” Brennan.
What happened to him that day began to impact him immediately. His life was changed forever.
‘I hated myself’
Immediately, he began to act out. He isolated himself from other children. He remembers watching a group of kids play at the park across the street from his house, too confused, too scarred to go play with them.
While the children played, he watched from the window of his parents’ home. He wanted to go play but didn’t feel like he could fit in with other children any longer.
While it was difficult to fully comprehend what had happened to him, he knew it is was something wrong — something other children hadn’t experienced.
“I always knew I was different. It’s hard to explain,” he said. “It affected everything I did.”
For the rest of his childhood, he carried the weight of what happened with him. Too ashamed to tell his parents, friends or teachers, it was a weight he carried by himself.
Professor Joseph Cohen, a child clinical psychologist at the University of Illinois, said the man’s reaction is common among what psychologists see in young children who are sexually abused.
Cohen said instances of sexual abuse are among “the most potent” of traumas someone can experience. Cohen said the younger the victim, the more severe the trauma and coping mechanisms become.
“The earlier you experience any trauma, including sexual abuse, the more problematic it becomes,” Cohen said. “We think of building a human is kind of like building a house. The earlier stages of building a human or house, the more vulnerable a human or house is.”
In this case, the coping and trauma would play out harshly.
He would grow angrier as a child. Sometimes he would black out and find himself sprinting out of school, hiding from the world. Rather than attend class, he would stroll aimlessly up and down the alleys of Peoria’s East Bluff.
Eventually, he would grow into a young man. He’d meet his wife, get married and have four children of his own. But he was emotionally scarred because of what happened.
He says it affected his ability to be a husband and a father. All his relationships in life were strained because of the anger he harbored from the injustice that happened to him as a child.
“I hated myself,” he said. “And I hated other victims.”
Cohen says the man’s reaction is not uncommon. At each stage of development in life, the unaddressed trauma can compound on itself and impact development. Cohen says this is called a “developmental cascade.”
“Problems at 5 or 6 as a result of trauma exposure, you don’t just have problems at that age but those problems will develop into the next period in which it will cause problems at the foundation of the next developmental period,” Cohen said.
His wife of 44 years, who has also been granted anonymity to speak about what happened to her husband, said she went into “shock” when he first told her what happened. She had heard of this kind of thing happening to other people, but to hear it had happened to her husband was devastating.
“As he was telling me his story, it’s like ... how you can trust people like priests, you’re supposed to be able to trust them but how could they do this to such a young person?” she said. “I was angry. I felt bad for him, and I was very angry at the church.”
As an adult, the man was mugged and beaten up. Another time after trying to break up a fight, a man held a knife to his neck. The violence traumatized an already angry person.
He decided he needed counseling. His wife says as time went on, she noticed “more depression” coming from her husband as he had to relive what happened to him as a boy. He said it strained their marriage.
“He didn’t want to talk about it for a long time, and the times he would bring it up ... I was just afraid to say anything because it might throw him back into a state of depression,” his wife said. “We got through it, he talked about it, then he didn’t talk about it.”
In counseling, the devastation of what happened resurfaced. Buried wounds were reopened. His therapists knew there was a long road ahead in recovery.
He began seeing a therapist in 1990 and began visiting another in 1992. The victim still sees a specialist in posttraumatic stress disorder to this day.
The man kept his abuse a secret from everyone for four decades. This is something not uncommon among victims of childhood sexual abuse, Cohen said.
“Certainly with him identifying as a male, we know there are specific barriers to males coming forward discussing sexual abuse they experience,” Cohen said. “There might be a lot of internal reasons someone might not want to disclose it, and there might be a lot of external reasons that might make someone not want to disclose it.”
One day while driving home from work in 1993, the man heard an advertisement on the radio by the Catholic Diocese of Peoria. It was inviting any victims of sexual abuse to come forward to the church for help.
He was still an active member of the Catholic church and thought this would be a perfect opportunity for healing.
Instead, a new nightmare began and a battle with the Catholic Diocese of Peoria ensued. What he thought was an effort by the church to aid victims, was what he calls a “fishing expedition” designed by the church to find and silence victims.
“I fell for it hook, line and sinker,” he said.
Battle with Catholic Diocese of Peoria begins
In early 1993, he first met with Monsignor James Campbell, the vicar general of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria, detailing what he said happened to him.
Campbell died in 2005 at 79. He began serving in the Peoria diocese in 1957.
The Journal Star reviewed letters sent between the man and the diocese in 1993. At the time of the first meeting, he says he had no lawyer retained and had no desire for any legal action against the diocese.
Campbell told him the diocese was there to help and would pay for his counseling. After that initial conversation, he says months went by and he heard nothing from the diocese.
On June 1, 1993, he wrote a letter to Campbell in which he said, “You mentioned in our first phone conversation that the diocese will pay for my counseling. What are the procedures and protocols for this?”
He received a letter from Campbell on June 3, 1993. It said, in part, “In working out the funding of your counseling, the process is as follows. Application is first made to the priest involved. If he is unable to pay, the matter comes back to us. Contact with the priest will be confidential and will not mention your name.”
The diocese gave him a list of nine pieces of information he would need to provide:
1 Name of counselor
2 How long in counseling
3 Goals and objectives in counseling 4 Anticipated length of counseling 5 Treatment method used
6 A letter from you to the counselor advising her that she can release confidential information to me
7 Regular progress reports to me
8 If counseling is needed on life issues not directly connected with the difficulty you explained to me, the above will enable us to help you with that issue and free you to pursue additional directions
9 Credentials of the counselor (psychologist, social worker, MD, etc.)
The man had two of his counselors send letters to the diocese answering the questions above. One was Peoriaarea psychotherapist Elizabeth J. Pollack, M.S. and the other was Gregory E. Gullet, a licensed clinical social worker.
In both of their letters, the counselors detailed that he had been receiving counseling for sexual trauma experienced as a child. Both counselors identified Father Brennan in their letters as the person he had talked about in treatment.
Pollack said in her letter that “years of psychotherapy are necessary.”
The letters from the counselors were sent to the diocese on July 22, 1993. Two months passed and he heard nothing.
On Oct. 1, 1993, he sent another letter to Campbell asking why he hadn’t received a response from the diocese.
The diocese responded on Oct. 6, 1993, telling him the letters from the counselors had never been received and that had caused the delay.
He sent another letter on Oct. 26. In that letter he raised concern with the diocese that the July 22 letter containing the information written by his counselors had not been received by the church. In that letter he said, “There is no way you could have received the July 22 letter without also receiving the above described paperwork. Needless to say, there is highly concerning confidential paperwork which is ‘lost’ somewhere.”
On Nov. 3, 1993, Campbell responded that he had now received the letters from the counselors. The reply was shocking.
“I noticed that one of your treatment people mentioned that you had been abused by several adults while a boy. If you will supply me with the names of these individuals, I will ask them to share in the cost of your counseling. It seems inappropriate that the total cost be undertaken by Father Brennan since he was not the only person who abused you when you were young.”
He responded to the diocese in a letter on Nov. 3, 1993: “You will have to ask Father Brennan himself, they were with him at the time of the perpetration. I did not know who they were then, and I do not know now.”
The man firmly believes the Catholic Diocese of Peoria was following a pattern of behavior in handling his case that they showed in so many other instances — “delude and dissuade to get me to run away.”
On Nov. 5, 1993, Campbell sent another letter, stating that Father Brennan had denied the allegation and contacted a lawyer. Campbell also told the man he would need to meet with Brennan.
“It was wrong,” he said. “I’m like, ‘what the hell are you trying to do to me?’”
His wife said she had previously known Campbell in a “different light.” But when she saw how he treated her husband, her trust in the diocese and Campbell was shattered.
“You were further concerned about healing for you. The present interaction with Father Brennan is a first step in that direction. I pray that your healing goes apace,” the Nov. 5 letter said.
The man then consulted with Peoria attorneys Hugh Toner and Art Greenberg. Yet, no case was ever pursued.
As the course of the battle with the diocese played out, the victim says he became too scared to continue.
In the late hours of the night, while his wife and kids slept, he says people would call his home anonymously and denigrate him for accusing Father Brennan of sexual abuse. How anyone outside of the diocese could have known about his claims, he was unsure. He believes now the phone calls were a part of a coordinated scare tactic by the church to discourage him from pursuing the case. His wife said the experience was an “emotional roller coaster.”
The scare tactic worked. He decided to not pursue legal action or counseling payments.
“I had my strongest case when I quit,” he says now with regret.
He and his wife’s children attended Catholic school during this time. His wife said the couple also worried if they continued to pursue action against the Peoria diocese, retaliation could be taken against their children.
“We were afraid they would retaliate on our kids and our family. It was kind of scary,” she said. “And so we just kind of let it go.”
His wife stopped going to church. She believed the diocese operated as hypocrites.
“I didn’t trust priests. To me, it was kind of a personal thing, too,” she said. “How could they do this and stand up there and preach every Sunday and say ‘love your neighbor, love yourself’ and all this ... Well, how can you? How can you believe what they say?”