Screaming Into the Void

What happens when no one listens?

I’m having one of those evenings. I was just at the stove, making pasta because our oven is broken and well there’s not much that children eat that you can quickly prepare on the stovetop, so noodles it was.

And I’m thinking about my alma mater again. I can’t help it, really, it just boggles my brain. Days might go by where I don’t give it a moment’s thought, but for reasons I won’t bother elucidating here, I was struck by a flashback to a night not unlike this one where I was at the stove, cooking for my family.

March 11, 2022.

That was the day that Father David Morrier, TOR, pled guilty to sexual battery. That was the day that a woman stood in front of a judge and delivered her victim impact statement, recounting in grueling detail what Morrier did to her with the assistance of so many in the Franciscan University family.

That was also the day we discussed telling her story.

We had been in touch before then. The first time she contacted me was after I wrote a story about FUS, about women who had filed complaints of alleged sexual assault by other students. She messaged me and said that she had been harmed by a priest on campus. The one who allegedly told a woman to confess her own sin in being raped.

After Morrier pled guilty to his crimes, she and I spoke on the phone multiple times, and while I had heard bits and pieces of what she had endured for those several years, I hadn’t heard the lion’s share of it. For those next few weeks, I listened and typed and stifled my own gasps at the evil these people committed in the name of Jesus. I choked down my own vomit and brushed away tears as I bore cold and silent witness to all of it.

But I’m just a freelance writer. I’m no Ronan Farrow. I secured a home for the story, but it was killed.

Then the emails started.

Someone who wished only to be identified as being “implicated in the lawsuit” shared with me copies of the police report. The proposed lawsuit against the many participants in bizarre deliverance rituals. Copious therapy notes. Emails between employees of Franciscan University.

They said they failed her. All of them.

I published the documents. (Others who would have had zero issue sharing them unredacted also received them, and I wanted to beat them to it)

In spite of trying many outlets as one does, no one else was able to take on the story. You see, there’s no longer anything shocking about priests sexually assaulting people. That’s the despicable truth of the matter. Editors are apologetic for their callous bluntness, but that’s just reality.

Of course none of what I’m saying is new information. But every now and again I catch myself thinking about all the people still in my Facebook feed who continue to support Franciscan University.

Who are preparing to speak at their conferences.

Who send them money.

Who serve on their alumni boards. Their advisory boards.

Who send their children to school there.

Who work there.

Do they care? Do they walk by Finnegan Fieldhouse and say a prayer for the young woman who was raped repeatedly in the basement? Do they kneel in the Eucharistic Chapel and ask God to forgive Father Scanlan for not helping Morrier’s rape victim and instead counseling her to practice “emotional chastity?”

Do they run into the President, Father Pivonka on campus and ask him what on earth was he thinking when he didn’t intervene as this woman pleaded with him to help her?

Or maybe they see Father Shawn Roberson and ask him why he called a rape victim a gossip and told her to be quiet instead of stopping his brother friar from assaulting her.

Perhaps they do. I have no idea. I hope maybe they do.

All I know is I see their smiling faces, their delight at the home they have found on campus, and I wonder: how is any of this okay?

I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

I’m not sure how anyone could.