In secretive enclave, roots of trauma
Airman who self-immolated in protest grew up in Cape Cod compound
ORLEANS — For more than 50 years the Community of Jesus has been a persistent, if littleknown, fixture on the shores of Cape Cod Bay.
The Christian enclave casts itself as a haven for roughly 200 members who choose to live a monastic life, following Benedictine traditions of worship. They interact rarely with the public, save for occasional open services at their church or performances held by their community arts groups.
From the outside, the Community of Jesus seems a peaceful place, unmistakably centered on faith: a cluster of white Capestyle houses, many sporting Biblical names — Gethsemane, Jerusalem, Nazareth — with a soaring bell tower behind. On the lawn spelled out in large white capital letters, like a sort of corporate logo, is the word “covenant.”
It is a community that firmly stands apart from the seasonal bustle of Cape culture, but has a considerable history, not all of it comfortable to recall. Since the 1960s, the group has grown to encompass roughly 60 acres of family homes and church buildings — including a stone basilica — all assessed at more than $60 million. Its influence has spread from the Cape compound to a Christian boarding school with which it was informally associated that operated for more than 30 years in Ontario, Canada.
But many former members say that behind the group’s seemingly peaceful exterior is something else: a history of practices which the former members brand as abusive that have been going on for decades.
Though defectors have raised these concerns over many years, the allegations have mounted in the last decade, particularly after
the Canadian boarding school was shuttered, then found liable in 2020 for abusing students in a class-action lawsuit. The Community of Jesus itself was not named as a defendant in those allegations.
The community has also faced renewed scrutiny after the February death of Airman Aaron Bushnell, who lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest the killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Bushnell, who was 25, grew up in the Cape enclave but left near the end of 2019 without taking vows to become a member.
Bushnell’s death has also spurred soul-searching among some former members over the community’s impact on their lives and its legacy as a whole. More than a dozen former members shared their painful stories with the Globe.
“It’s that intensely emotionally destructive,” said Bryan Catlin, 37, who grew up there and left in 2004 and is a grandson of one of the community’s longtime leaders. “It was a way of life.”
The community’s leaders did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for the community has publicly declined to answer questions but said Bushnell was never a member.
The group’s roots go back to the 1960s when two women, Cay Andersen and Judy Sorensen, began holding Bible study sessions out of a small building in Orleans. They quickly found a following and incorporated the Community of Jesus in 1970.
A few members became several dozen, until by the late 1990s the flock had grown to more than 300, according to news reports at the time. Some early members included the scions of wellconnected and wealthy families — a Rockefeller heiress, the former chair of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Though nondenominational, the community took up Benedictine traditions, including Gregorian chants at services, and a hierarchy of brothers and sisters taking a series of vows. As new members bought up more houses surrounding the church, they began giving each a Biblical name.
More than a dozen homes still bear the Biblical monikers and a small cadre of brothers and sisters form the spine of the community, former members said. The group also includes several families that have lived on the site for four generations, though many longtime households have splintered after relatives left over the years.
For some former members, childhood in the community was reclusive but did have its high points: strawberry picking in the summer, apple picking and leaf watching in the fall.
“We rode bikes and drank out of the hose like other kids,” said one former member who left in the early ‘90s when she was 21 to try life outside the community. “We [girls] just had to wear skirts all the time.”
But the member — who asked her name not be used because she still knows people inside the community — acknowledged growing up there was “a weird environment.” “People call it a cult, and I’m pretty sure if you looked up the definition it was one,” she said.
“Some people definitely feel they were picked on or they were mentally abused,” she said. “I’m not going to discount it because I don’t know. I can say it didn’t happen to me and I did not witness it happening to others.”
Other former members described destructive policies, such as an informal “boys club” led by adults that included boxing matches that felt like punishment to some of the children. Multiple ex-members also described a practice of verbal assaults, ranging from private confrontations to group sessions during which adults screamed at other members for hours to force them to confess certain sins.
In one instance, former member Ewan Whyte said, adults in the community forced him to eat his own vomit as a child when he was sick during a meal. Whyte, now 56 and a poet and critic in Toronto, said he was also abused at the Canadian boarding school, which he attended after four years on the Cape.
Catlin said he was regularly punished when he misbehaved as a child, including being put “on discipline,” which meant being grounded and forbidden from speaking out loud for weeks.
It was all he knew, he said. He’d been raised inside the community, and his maternal grandmother, Betty Pugsley — otherwise known as Mother Betty — was then a prioress, leading the group.
“Several adults would surround you and all take turns screaming at you, telling you how you’re stupid or self centered or not listening to God,” he said.
Catlin, now 37, attempted to leave several times as a teenager, sometimes biking away only to return when he realized he had nowhere to go. Catlin did leave permanently in 2004, he said, escaping in a stolen truck three weeks after his 18th birthday.
In the process, he said, he panicked and attacked a stranger who was trying to offer him help. He was later found guilty of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. After he was evaluated at a mental hospital, he was sentenced to probation, according to Catlin and court records.
Benjamin Bott, another former member, said similar harsh group meetings — called “light sessions” because they were meant to help community members “live in the light” of God — were also a fixture of his childhood. For a year, Bott was homeschooled and forced to undergo daily light sessions, he said. The community, he said, tried to cast the practice as a way of spiritually improving its members through brutal honesty.
Bott said leaders also used threats to discourage people from leaving. “‘If you leave, you’re going to hell. You’re going to get cancer, you’re going to get AIDS. If you leave, you’ll never talk to your family again,’” he recalled being told.
Young children, multiple members said, were regularly separated from their parents and sent to live in other houses in the community to break down family relationships, which community leaders cast as “idolatrous,” they said. Families, often living two or three to one house, were told to move regularly.
Carrie Buddington, a former head sister and longtime critic of the enclave, said her youngest daughter was taken away from her a year and a half after she was born.
“When they returned her to me, she didn’t know I was her mom,” said Buddington, who left in 2010 after 40 years in the group.
Such practices are meant to cement control in such authoritarian groups, said Rick Ross, who has studied cults and authoritarian groups since 1982.
“The group today would have to admit they have a deeply troubled history,” said Ross, who runs the New Jerseybased Cult Education Institute and wrote a book on leaving cults. “They are given to using coercive persuasion techniques.”
The community’s practices were not limited to Cape Cod. Hundreds of miles away in Brockville, Ontario, the Grenville Christian College operated for more than 30 years. When it shuttered in 2007, more than 1,300 students sued over allegations of physical and emotional abuse. The class-action lawsuit led to an $8 million settlement.
The community has denied any association with the Canadian school in the past, but former members point to clear interconnections. Multiple former members said both of Grenville’s headmasters were close with leaders of the Cape enclave. One of those headmasters, J. Alastair Haig, first met Sorensen and Andersen in 1961, according to Haig’s memoir, and invited them both to the school in its first year to advise him on shaping its early growth.
Community children also regularly attended school in Grenville and viceversa, according to half a dozen former members of the Cape enclave who also attended the school.
Sorensen and Andersen, the Cape enclave’s original founders, were listed as corporate directors of the college at one point, according to a 2021 CBC investigation. And in the class-action lawsuit, the son of one of the headmasters testified that the school donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the community.
In a 2020 decision, the Canadian judge overseeing the suit called the two groups “interwoven.” The community has continued to deny any association with the abuse that took place there.
It was into this insular environment that Bushnell was born.
Even before his birth, his family had deep roots in the community and in Grenville. Multiple former members confirmed Bushnell’s grandparents were once staffers at the Canadian school, and his parents, Dave and Danielle, married in 1996 at the community’s old chapel.
Some members remembered Bushnell as a red-haired, chubby-cheeked kid playing in the community’s percussion ensemble with his younger brother, or working on video and IT as a teenager at the community’s publishing arm Paraclete Press.
“He was always kind of quiet, reserved, but when you had a conversation with him, he could be spunky,” said one former member who worked with him at Paraclete and spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation. Bushnell, the former co-worker said, loved playing around with computer animations with Adobe programs. “He would always choose his words wisely, but you knew there was something bubbling underneath.”
He spent most of his years being homeschooled, aside from a few years at Orleans Elementary School and his sophomore year at Nauset Regional High School. After Bushnell finished his high school studies in 2016, he was part of a trip the Community of Jesus took to Israel and the West Bank meant to show them historic locations in the Bible, The New York Times reported.
But Bushnell, like many other community children, reportedly struggled with the strict limitations. The former member said the community had continued to conduct light sessions during their time there. Bushnell left near the end of 2019, and eventually moved to San Antonio to begin active duty in the Air Force in May 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile.
It’s unclear what, if any, connection Bushnell’s upbringing had on his final protest. After leaving the Community of Jesus, and before joining the Air Force, he turned to a network of friends in socialist and anarchist groups, a far cry from his conservative upbringing.
Multiple former people said Bushnell’s parents still belong to the community, along with some extended relatives. A woman who answered a call to Bushnell’s parents hung up on a reporter.
While in the Air Force, Bushnell made it a point to reach out to other community members who had also left. When his former co-worker left the group, Bushnell sent her a message to say he’d heard the news and to offer help.
“I’m sorry, that must have been … really hard,” he wrote in the message, which was viewed by the Globe. “I hope you’ve been able to find the support you need. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s ever anything I can do.”