80 Years Under the Cross

By Thomas Walsh

Retired FBI agent Tom Walsh grows almonds in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California. He reads in the paper of disturbing sexual corruption within the Fresno Diocese. Badly shaken, he writes the Bishop for guidance...and is rebuked for his curiositiy. As a life-long Catholic, age 80, he employs his FBI training to investigate the rumors himself. He is shocked to discover that the charges are true, and then some, and that the Church is engaged in a coverup, with law enforcement complicitly unwilling to prosecute. He digs further into the basic tenets of the church, the history of religion itself, and, finally, into the core his own now unsettled faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Walsh
• Release date: Oct 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466117686

Thomas Walsh

FBI agent 25 years, from 1950 to 1975 Private Investigator 15 years, 1976 to 1991 Almond Farmer Apostate Catholic--renounced faith after 80 years

Book preview

EIGHTY YEARS UNDER THE CROSS

A MEMOIR/MANIFESTO OF A RECOVERING CATHOLIC

The author meeting Pope John Paul II

Published by Thomas H. Walsh at Smashwords

By Thomas H. Walsh,

With Steve Cassady

Copyright 2011, Thomas H. Walsh

Author’s Note

Born and raised in Chicago during the Great Depression, I was a Cradle Catholic for eight decades prior to leaving the Church. I am the father of nine, grandfather of thirteen, and great grandfather of three. I served in the Marines during World War II from 1943 to 1946 and in the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Special Agent from 1950 to 1978. I was an active Private Investigator from 1980 to 1995 and still hold a license. Currently, I own and operate a 25-acre almond orchard in Merced, California. Eighty Years Under the Cross is an account of my life’s experiences focusing upon my thoughtful departure from the Catholic Church.

Only with the friendship and generosity of my longtime friend, Dorothy Penner, could I have completed this memoir/manifesto. She labored long and hard transcribing handwritten notes and translating a difficult writing style. As a new FBI agent in 1950, I found the Bureau’s instructors in report writing very particular. They demanded thoroughness and correctness. They emphasized facts exclusively. Never, under any circumstances, would they allow on an official report any reflections of the writer’s undocumented opinion, his conjectures, or his conclusions. As TV’s Jack Webb would say, The facts, just the facts.

Over the next quarter century, my writing was developed with Bureau discipline in mind, only factual information furnished by the evidence or by the transcribed words from an interview. I adopted a format from The Three Little Bears: Papa Bear said, Momma Bear said, Baby Bear said. After finishing the initial draft of this memoir/manifesto, I consulted long-time friend and writer, Steve Cassady. He said the draft read like a Bureau report. He suggested it would generate more reader interest if it were written in the first person and included the context of my career as an investigator, FBI and private. Thus, the manuscript was refined into its current narrative form. For Steve’s friendship and advice, I thank him sincerely.

Throughout construction of the project, fear, or uncertainty, not of a spiritual consequence, but of reaction from family and friends would often come to mind. Experiences from a long life have taught me, however, that one must overcome the fear of being seen as different, unusual, even heretical, in order to arrive at the truth. I found that curiosity—something discouraged by the Catholic Church—proved stronger in the end than fear, a reward of a life-long contention that time always exists to review past beliefs and change as necessary.

Along the way, a Catholic friend of long standing politely intimated that at my advanced age—80 at the time—it might be well to consider very carefully the current opinions on God, Church, and religion. The friend recommended reading Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, offered that the odds of God’s existence were long, but the penalty for guessing wrong would be severe. Pascal theorized as follows:

If one believes in God and he does not exist, no loss.

If one does not believe in God and he does not exist, no loss.

If one believes in God and he does exist, one stands to win.

If one does not believe in God and he does exist, one stands to lose all.

Upon first review, Pascal’s Wager appears reasonable, especially if one is agnostic or a developing atheist. But Pascal failed to include in his theory the equation of reasonable certainty acquired by affirmation on long years of experience; in other words, the accumulated wisdom of a man’s life. Today, I am in my later 80’s, a widowed almond farmer, a recovering Catholic, secure in my revised ideas about, God, Church, and religion. I will remain a secular conservative and a modernist, free at last from all religious nonsense.

Eighty Years Under the Cross is my story truthfully told as I lived it.

Foreword—

By Steve Cassady

Atwater, 2011

One morning in the spring of 1981, Tom Walsh pushed through the door of Harry’s Pastries on Main Street in Merced. Harry’s is gone now. In its time, Harry’s was classic pre-Starbucks, a narrow downtown donut shop: stool seating at a Formica counter; Farmers Brothers grind poured into plastic mugs; sweet rolls and sinkers displayed in glass cases, tonged onto wax paper squares, served in red baskets. Harry catered to habituals—farmers, downtowners, and retired guys. Tom Walsh’s penetrating eyes quartered the room as he entered. Habit. I watched him a minute before signaling. At 56, he had a full head of hair turned grey. He was short, about 5-8, and stocky, but not fat. He wore a coat and tie for the meeting, arranged by the football coach of Tom’s youngest son Dan. Dan had been an undersized JC All-America linebacker at Merced College who went on to play with distinction at Hayward State. The coach, Roger Imbrogno, was cryptic. All he had said: Tom Walsh was ex-FBI with a story to tell.

Over coffee and crullers he outlined it. He said in his 27 years with the Bureau it was the most interesting case he ever was involved in. He said it started as the largest bank holdup in US History at the time, $1,000,044 in negotiable currency taken at gunpoint in September, 1974, from the First National Bank of Nevada in downtown Reno. He said three masked bandits dressed in coveralls and desert boots escaped clean, the money stuffed in duffle bags. He said they were all in custody six months later. He said one of them, a strong-arm man from Oregon named Floyd Forsberg escaped the Washoe County jail in May of 1975. He said Forsberg was broken out by a Southern California thug named Clark Timmons who occasionally ran drugs through Merced. He said the driver of Timmon’s escape vehicle was a 20 year-old girl named Denise Catlin. Denise Catlin was from nearby Atwater, which is how Tom connected to the case. He was the Senior Resident Agent of the Merced office called in to investigate local known associates for information leading to Forsberg, Timmons and Denise Catlin.

He said the case ended badly—all bad news and loose ends. The wrong person died, the Atwater girl, Denise. Except for Forsberg, the six or seven conspirators to her murder either walked or were charged for lesser crimes. In FBI files, it was coded, RENROB. Tom wanted to reopen RENROB on his own. He wanted to re-investigate and put it to rest. He thought it might be a book. He was looking for a writer. I said, Let’s go. We went. Tom had palmed some key files before he retired, including Timmons’ 12-page confession. We back tracked the scenes of the crimes. We located case agents, most like him, retired. We telephoned two of them in Oregon. We drove to Carmel and Reno to interview the lead agents from the original bank job investigation. In Reno, we found a deputy that had worked at the Washoe County jail. We found the court reporter for the robbery trial. He directed us to public records. For 75 dollars (5 cents a copy) I walked away with a 1500 page trial transcript. I received permission from Denise Catlin’s father Frank to impersonate him while requesting from the Freedom of Information Act headquarters in Washington any documents related to his daughter. FOIA sent another thick document to my home address. We ended up with the whole story, which Tom tells in Chapter Two of Eighty Years Under the Cross, and I cover extensively in my book, Bouncing Outside.

A year later, I called on him. I vaguely knew a Kirby vacuum franchise owner in Merced named Jim Churan. Churan needed help. He had just made headlines in the Merced Sun-Star by barely escaping assassination. Churan had been home asleep just before daybreak when the phone woke him. The voice on the other end said he was a truck driver from Southern California delivering a load of tires to Grand Auto near the Merced Mall. He said he wanted to surprise his wife with a new vacuum cleaner, wondered if Churan could pick him up while his truck was off-loading. He said Churan could drive him to the Kirby store and transact. Churan jumped at it. He lived two minutes drive from Grand Auto. That time of day, another six minutes to his downtown store. Transaction time: 20 minutes. Eight minutes back home. A fast profit before he sat down to his morning coffee and bowl of Wheaties. He didn’t think to question how the fortuitous customer had obtained his home phone number.

Churan drove a conspicuous car, a pale red Coupe de Ville convertible with a white top. He told the truck driver to watch for his car, he’d be there in a second. He spotted the guy as he drove into the parking lot. The guy had his shirttail out and was carrying a briefcase. The guy slid into the passenger seat of Churan’s Cadillac and pulled a .22 with a suppressor barrel from under his shirt. He told Churan to drive to his house. Churan instead grabbed the door handle with both hands and hit the door with his shoulder. The man pulled the trigger and sent a slug through Churan’s wrist. Churan rolled out of the car, gained his footing and chugged for cover. Even this early, traffic was building for the day. The man panicked. He slid behind the wheel of Churan’s car and peeled from the lot. Churan found a phone and dialed 911. Merced PD had the shooter in custody within two miles. His briefcase held all the exhibits necessary for conviction on attempted murder: extra 22 ammo, short ropes, bandannas, plastic hand ties.

The case was clear except for who had ordered the hit. Law enforcement statistics say most frequently it is domestic. Local police ran the wife through a cursory investigation but failed to find any cause to continue. Fanciful theories followed, one in particular. This was around the time that Joseph Bonanno had moved his mafia crime headquarters from New York to Tuscon, AZ. Somebody local had reported seeing a red Caddy similar to Cheran’s but with AZ license plates and suggested an organized crime connection—laundering, loan sharking, or drug trafficking through Kirby sales and accounts. That one went nowhere. The cops and the DA weren’t motivated to pursue. They had their guy cold, and he wasn’t talking beyond what the evidence already had proved: that he did it. Churan was scared out his wits. I connected him with Tom Walsh. Walsh was occupied at the time investigating video piracy for the Motion Picture Association. He subbed out the leg work to his former FBI partner, Mel Shannon. It didn’t take Mel Shannon and Tom too long to figure out the truth. Churan had blocked an attempt from another vacuum dealer to franchise the Kirby vacuums in nearby Atwater. Nothing could be proved, but the animus of the dealership rivalry was real. It played out as a territorial dustup over the rights to sell top-of-the-line suction floor cleaners. The hit man was whisked away to prison, his stand-up reputation still solid. Whoever hired him was dissuaded by the contract’s failure. No further attempts on Churan’s life. Interest fizzled fast.

I hadn’t seen Tom for some time when he called in the fall of spring of 2009. I tallied in my head. He had to be 84 years old. Once again, he was making a case. This was during an interlude—happily over—when my wife and I owned a retail teacher’s store a half a block around the corner from where Harry once served sinkers and Joe to habituals. We met at the store. Tom had just lost his wife of 65 years, Sarah Lu. He had slowed a bit, and his hearing was shot, but age otherwise had treated him well. He was still sharp, still had penetrating eyes, still had a mind that processed information quickly. I thought then as I had the first time we met: I was happy I was never an object of his investigation. He had a way. He laughed a little too long at things that weren’t all that funny. He wouldn’t be dissuaded from a conviction. He grabbed things and didn’t let go. He worked assiduously in that gray area between determination and obsession. He walked in with a shoebox under his arm that contained 252 pages of a single-spaced manuscript, the account of his personal apostasy after a lifetime of Catholic obeisance.

It needed work, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it on. I was busy. I had my own stuff to write. But the tableau touched me: widower with his life story in a cardboard shoebox looking for assistance from the one person he knew in the business. I said okay. I said I’d charge him $150, the expense of a new tape recorder, and there I was, looking at 100 plus hours pro bono work. When he left, I tugged at my earlobe and stared at the shoe box. The store was empty. I said out loud, why the hell not. I read the full manuscript three times over a period of months before it grabbed. I had to wade through some issues with formatting, chronology, continuity and general story-telling convention. But finally I saw it for what it was: a protracted but thematically plotted FBI report. It lacked only the superimposition of a first-person narrative structure—what would be my role in delivering the goods. When I realized it, I was hooked to a remarkable tale: a career investigator in his 80’s conducting a Bureau-trained inquiry into a local Diocese, followed by a deeper excavation into his own religious beliefs. As I worked with the narrative, it became personal. My father and grandfather both were strident anti-Catholics. I had always admired their convictions, though seldom joined their causes. I went along without plumbing deep. Never cared that much. I left it at that—unadopted ancestral bias, such as despising FDR for being too liberal, boycotting Robert Mitchum movies because Robert Mitchum did 60 days at Wayside Honor Rancho in the 1940’s on a reefer bust, and not voting for Adlai Stevenson because Stevenson was divorced. It came close only once. My first year out of high school I had a Catholic girl friend insistent on the role of religion in her life. She urged me to attend her church. I didn’t want to, hers or mine. I deflected, looking for a reason to watch NFL football on Sundays instead. I said if she would attend mine. She said she was forbidden. I felt a visceral jolt. Forbidden? One religion restricting attendance at the Sunday services of another? Preposterous in a free world. This is 20th century America, not England in the Puritan age or Eastern Europe under a Soviet thumb.

I saw the enormity of his undertaking, the importance of his apostasy. I connected with my deceased forbearers in their attitudes. My father and grandfather both were fiercely independent. They were intellectually curious and possessive of their freedoms. Submerged into Tom’s manifesto, I saw Catholic dogma as stifling and unreasonable. As Tom would explain it: "The Church doesn’t mind you asking a question, but you are expected to obey their answer." I always had considered disobedience an American right and a particular gift from my own DNA. Tom accounts for his lost obedience in the pages of Eighty Years Under the Cross. I started the editing one day almost on impulse, and the momentum caught. Tom grabs hold of his inquiry in his manuscript pages and doesn’t let go. He tells it as he would have filed it with the Bureau. I had to rush to keep up. Tom tells the story with obsession, and I reworked it the same way. I obliterated the notion of free time. Stole from leisure hours on evenings and weekends. Pushed aside salaried work to return to my laptop on week days until it was done.

Eighty Years Under the Cross is more than an apostate’s tale. It is an overdue reckoning—an old man of conviction pursuing his own truth, unyielding in the face of pressure to bend. It is a story of an octogenarian confronting a faith his God-given reason and native intellect could no longer sustain. I am proud to say I have played a small part in its delivery.

News Item—

From the San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 20ll:

Bishop Charged with Failing

To Report Priest’s Child Porn

By Bill Draper

ASSOCIATED PRESS

KANSAS CITY, Mo—

Kansas City’s Catholic Bishop has become the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official indicted on a charge of failing to protect children after he and his diocese waited five months to tell police about hundreds of images of child pornography discovered on a priest’s computer, officials said Friday.

Bishop Robert Finn, the first U.S. bishop criminally charged with sheltering an abusive clergyman, and the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese pleaded not guilty on one count each of failing to report suspected child abuse.

Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said Finn and the diocese were required under state law to report the discovery to police because the images gave them reason to believe a child had been abused.

The indictment says the bishop failed to report suspicions against the priest from Dec. 16, 2010, when the photos were discovered, to May 11, 2011, when the diocese turned them over to police.

The priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, was charged in May with three state child pornography counts, and in June with 13 federal counts of producing, possessing and attempting to produce child porn. He has pleaded not guilty and remains jailed.

Finn, who officials said was not under arrest, denied any wrongdoing in a statement Friday and said he had begun work to overhaul the diocese’s reporting policies and act on key findings of a diocese-commissioned investigation into its practices.

Finn faces a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted of the misdemeanor. The diocese also faces a $1,000 fine.

Until Finn was indicted, no U.S Catholic bishop had been criminally charged over how he responded to abuse claims, although some bishops had struck deals with local authorities to avoid prosecution against their dioceses.

Prologue

In retirement I planned to work my farm. My last posting with the FBI was Merced, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. In the mid-1970’s, turning 50 after 25 years on the job, I was thinking about the next phase, specifically about sources for bolstering retirement income. Sarah Lu and I liked Merced and wanted to stay. A friend of mine, Ezio Sansoni—we both sang in the Catholic Church choir at Our Lady of Mercy on 21st and L (now called Canal) Streets in downtown Merced—was an almond farmer. Talking to him gave me the general idea. I shopped aroufnd and found 25 acres of bare land with a 100 year old house that might be available near Ezio’s place. The acreage was located five miles west of town on Highway 140, the road to Gustine. The land was owned by the same family for generations, the Ivers. I dealt with Vern Ivers, the local undertaker. His mother was an obstacle. She was 97 years old living in the Tioga hotel downtown. The deed was in her name, and she wouldn’t talk to me about selling. She eventually died, though, and Vern arranged the transaction the estate.

Another guy I knew from the Catholic Church--Bill Hoffknect—had a farm about ten miles away. I worked a deal with him. He would plant the same thing on my land that he was growing on his, mostly Mexican wheat. I would buy the seed and fertilizer, and I would irrigate. He would plant and advise. Early on, I had no idea what I was doing. The first time I irrigated the fields—it was on an Easter Sunday—I didn’t even know where the water came out of the valve. I never made it to church that day. I dragged my son Bob—he was 12 at the time—to help. My neighbor, Ezio Sansoni, was spending Easter with his extended family in Los Banos. He couldn’t make it, but his uncle showed up. Bill Hoffknect came by. They all offered advice and gave me watering tips I didn’t really understand. It was a zoo.

At first, I tried emulating the way Bill farmed his land. I tried the Mexican wheat. I tried barley. Both crops were a pain in the neck and not very profitable. I got smarter. I asked around. My barber, Baxter Johnson, suggested almonds. He said he owned some almond land in LeGrand he was leasing for a profit. I appointed Ezio Sansoni my consigliore for the almond farming business. He guided me through the purchase and planting of an orchard. I hired a contractor to clear the land. I did a little tractor work myself, some spraying and disking. I oversaw the irrigation—it took time, but I finally was getting the hang of it. I don’t give up easily. Now it’s all underground and automated. Then it was a lot of shovel work and manual operation. I went through trial and error with emphasis on the error. For most everything at first I paid Ezio for time and service. He brought out the crews for pruning, weeding, and harvesting. I managed the business end. I had my own accounts for fertilizer and spray. Things smoothed out eventually. When I retired from in 1978, we had an actual, functioning farm. For the next 15 years, I worked double duty—growing almonds on my 25 acres, and handling private investigations, mostly for the Motion Picture Association tracking video piracy.

By the turn of the 21st century, the orchard had worn out—they do that after about 25 years, especially when begun haphazardly—and so had my heart. I had already had one heart attack. I was in Chicago visiting my brother while I was negotiating long distance by telephone for a new orchard. My brother and I spent one day touring Ronald Reagan’s childhood residence in the Hyde Park section of town. That night my aorta blew out, and I was transported by ambulance to the hospital for a replacement. Ezio called while I was recuperating, and I made the decision. I had him arrange a deal for ripping out the old orchard and planting a new one. I survived the aortic procedure. I spent 30 days recuperating with a new pig-valve aorta.

The new orchard grew to maturity. I saw the latest heart attack as a warning. I phased out of private detection. I settled in with the seasons, blooms in the spring, bud growth through the summer, ripened nuts shaken to earth, crated, and shipped to the processors in the fall. Sarah Lu and I attended church every day. Our children prospered and grew. Our nest emptied. The kids married. Most of them stayed around the area and started their own families. We delighted in our grandchildren, 13 of them. I was secure in my beliefs, heading into old age, a contented man in his sunset years, an almond farmer of leisurely and orderly habits.

On a mild Sunday early in June, 2002, Sarah Lu and I had returned from seven a.m. mass at Immaculate Conception on Buhach Road near Highway 99. I sat at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and the Sunday Fresno Bee. I was struck by a headline for what turned out to be a long article written by Doug Hoagland titled Serving in the Shadows. Mostly I scan long articles in the Sunday paper. This one I couldn’t put down. Hoagland wrote:

The Catholic sex scandal is forcing at least one gay Valley priest to fear for his future.

Father Henry, a Catholic priest, is gay. He has spent his adult life ministering in the Valley, but few people know about his sexual orientation. For that reason, and because he struggled for years to ignore his homosexuality and then worked for the past decade to make sense of it, he discusses his secret with a tentative edge to his voice. Fear laces his words.

Another reason prompts his caution. A sex scandal has engulfed the Roman Catholic Church since January, implicating scores of priests in the sexual abuse of children and teenagers. In addition to producing a barrage of disturbing headlines, the scandal has spawned a major side issue about gay clerics in America’s Catholic parishes.

Published reports estimate homosexual priests make up anywhere from 15% to 50% of the total of the American priesthood, although no one can pinpoint an exact number. Father Henry says there are other gay priests in the Diocese of Fresno, but he could not provide a number.

In the current atmosphere, especially in this conservative valley, he fears that some in the Church would try to force him from the priesthood if he publically declared his homosexuality. So he asked to be identified as Henry, which is not his first name.

Father Henry says he has never been sexually attracted to children or teen-agers and has never abused either.

Experts say this is not surprising. They report no scientific data that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to molest children. Yet top church leaders, both at the Vatican and in the United States have made public statements linking the scandal to gay priests. Some observers point out that many of the sexually abused were teen-age boys and that suggests homosexual activity by priests.

The Rev. Larry Toschi, a priest in Madera, sees it in spiritual terms. Priests who abuse teen-aged boys are engaging in homosexual behavior, and he declares that morally wrong. The problem is that society is denying the reality of sin. We consider homosexuality to be a type of aberration, and our society does not want to accept that.

Neither does Father Henry. He loves much of what the Catholic Church stands for: A moral anchor in a world adrift and confused. A proponent of every individual’s uniqueness. A defender of the sanctity of life. But no, he says, exasperation in his voice, he does not support the church’s teaching that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered. I’m sorry. I can’t relate to that, he says. "A homosexual person can’t relate to that.

Does that mean they can never have a sexual relationship with someone? Can’t we on a pastoral level say, ‘OK, homosexuality is outside the norm, but we’re all human beings.’ Are they deprived forever of any sexual relationship? I don’t think so.

The Rev. Robert Silva, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils in Chicago, says priests fear they are being unfairly targeted in the sex abuse scandal. The question of homosexual orientation isn’t an issue that should play in the resolution of the child sexual abuse problem, Silva says. They are two separate issues.

Recent comments by Joaquin Navarro-Valls, chief spokesman for Pope Paul II, alarmed many homosexual priests, Silva says. In March, Navarro-Valls said in the New York Times that people with these inclinations just cannot be ordained. He also suggested that ordination of gay priests might be invalid.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia declared after he and other American Church leaders met with the Pope it was decided that homosexuals aren’t suitable candidates for the priesthood because they are at a higher risk for becoming sexually active. Heterosexual priests give up a good thing—family and children—while homosexual priests give up what the church considers an Aberration, a moral evil, Bevilacqua was quoted as saying.

Catholics have taken note of the strong words. No one knows where it is going to lead, Silva says. No one can agree either on how much to blame gay priests for the current scandal.

No evidence suggests that a homosexual male is any more a risk to a boy than a heterosexual male is to a girl, says Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention, and Treatment Sexual Trauma and an associate professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. I’m not suggesting a man can’t misbehave and engage in child sexual abuse, Berlin says, but the same is true of heterosexual males as well. To argue that gay men do so more than heterosexual men, there is no data to support that conclusion.

[Sylvia] Demarest, the Texas lawyer who won a $119 million jury award for the abused altar boys, says homosexuality is a natural condition; the problem is how society responds to homosexuals. She adds society’s response is a double problem in a Catholic priesthood that has long been homosexual oriented and today is attracting increasing numbers of gay men:

There’s no problem with homosexual priests. There may be a problem that homosexuals are found in the priesthood in numbers that far outweigh any place other than a gay bar. The church does not want to be held accountable for that fact that [Gay priests] belong to an institution that professes to hate them and is totally screwed up about sex and won’t allow them to mature.

Toschi, the Madera cleric, has been a priest for 26 years, and he disputes that gay priests make up as much as 50% of the American church. He says, however, he has no way of knowing that for sure. Toschi criticizes the media for lumping all sexual abuse by priests under the term pedophilia, which technically refers only to sexual activity between an adult and a prepubescent child.

A large amount of the cases being reported are, in fact, homosexual cases of abuse, but the media is de-emphasizing that, Toschi says.

The reason? Society exhibits a ‘great hesitancy’ to say homosexuality is ‘an aberration and psychological lack of development,’ Toschi says. "That’s what we believe. Of course, we don’t hold it against people. People suffer from all kinds of temptations and inclinations for different reasons of psychological development.

As heterosexual priests must do, homosexual priests are expected to resist their temptations and remain celibate and chaste, Toschi says.

When Father Henry fails to resist his temptations and he has sex with an adult partner, he feels sorrowful. He continues, though, to view celibacy as an ideal that priests should strive to achieve. OK, I’ve compromised that, he says. And I’m sorry, but I want to do better. I want to move forward. I don’t want to stay stuck in that. It’s like in a marriage.

The Rev. Jerry Amerando, a Fresno priest, says all the talk about gay clerics often fails to make an important distinction: the issue isn’t orientation. It’s whether the priest will be celibate, as he promised to be.

Amerando adds: Most people think if you’re gay that you’re really sexually active, and that’s certainly not true. There a good gay priests who are celibate and chaste.

Some priests may be able to do that, but it is very difficult, says Sari Dworkin, a Fresno expert on gay issues. Dworkin is a professor of counselor education at California State University, Fresno, and also president of a division in the American Pyschological Association that studies lesbian, gay, and bi-sexual issues. She identifies herself as a bi-sexual lesbian.

Sex is one of a human being’s most powerful needs and to ask people to remain celibate is ‘asking them to attempt the impossible,’ Dworkin says.

Amerando says he wonders whether church leaders consider the impact of their statements linking sexual abuse to homosexual priests: I don’t know if anyone realizes how difficult it is for gay clergy to be reading that they’re put into the same category as pedophiles.

I have no desire to be involved with a child, Father Henry says. Oh, my God, that’s sick. That’s totally different from gay relationships.

Father Henry knows about those relationships, saying he sometimes breaks the celibacy rule and has sex with men 18 or older. I’ve slipped a few times, he says matter-of-factly, adding that it usually happens when he succumbs to stress, ignore spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation, or isolates himself from family and friends.

Candid he may be, but candor does not give this priest the conviction to step fully into the spotlight of the current scandal. He remains in the shadows—as do most gay priests in America.

The contrast to popular culture is striking. Consider Rosie O’Donnell, TV’s Queen of Nice, who recently talked in prime time about being gay and having a partner. O’Donnell scored big ratings even as the Catholic Church was trying to explain the difference between homosexual feelings (considered a temptation) and homosexual activity (considered a sin) while sorting through theories on what made some priests behave so badly and cause so much trouble for their church.

Views differ about how the issue of homosexual priests fits the current sex-abuse scandal.

Demarest [the lawyer who won a multimillion-dollar case in 1977 for altar boys abused by a priest] says, And now you take a person who is homosexual and you put them in this organization, and you wonder why we’re having problems.

Russell Hittinger, a professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, says the scandal springs from the sexual revolution of the 1960s that for decades has been chipping away at once sacred boundaries in relationships.

The Catholic Church today is forcing back in the face of society all of the dirty sexual laundry of the society, Hittinger says. It is primarily a cultural, not a medical issue. He says some bishops are homophobic and that’s why they make such statements. He believes, however, that many church leaders, including Fresno Bishop John Steinbock, would defend their gay priests if any effort were made to remove them.

Our bishop doesn’t consider this an issue, Amerando says.

Steinbock says a priest’s behavior, not his sexual orientation, matters to him as bishop: "A