Bless Me Father For I Have Sinned

Bless Me Father For They Have Sinned is a must read for anyone who wants to catch a more intimate look at the infrastructure of the Catholic Church. Father Paul Roberts offers us a historically relevant, yet compassionate and humorous, account of the inner workings of the oldest corporation in the world. This memoir introduces us to a man's life journey, from childhood, through the preparations for the seminary, the pitfalls on the spiritual path, to his maturation and commitment to entering the ancient order of priests. Bless Me Father For They Have Sinned does not shy away from the day-to-day encounters with sensual temptations, boundary violations, and alcohol abuse. The reader has a ringside seat as these men and women grapple with mental health issues, struggle with questioning power structures, instigate changes to training and rehabilitation protocols, and try to bring their venerable church into alignment with a contemporary modus operandi.

In a series of recollections, writer Wilfred Arvizu, an original member of the young mariachi group, tears back the curtain and provides an inside look on how he and others dealt with a pedophile priest who was at once a self-confessed agnostic and not-so-self-confessed alcoholic and possible bi-sexual.

Although there is a great deal of attention given – quite rightly so – to pedophile priests, my experience with clergy sexual abuse was also a nightmare. It started out by my being raped as a teenager by a priest who I thought I could trust and then being coerced into having an affair with him for fear of losing my children. A skilled manipulator, especially of vulnerable teenagers and young women who had challenges in their lives, we all thought a priest could help us overcome our particular situations. Once he gained my trust and pretended to be a friend, he set about a path to manipulate me toward a path to a living hell that put my spiritual health and soul in danger. I saw him as a man of the cloth, a man of God who would help me and my children without expecting anything in return. Little did I know I was not his fi rst victim, nor would I be his last, lured by his promises to leave the church for me, and by his word that God himself had sent him to save us.

A tremendous amount of media attention has been devoted to revealing sexual abuse perpetrated by Roman Catholic priests. These essays outline a clinical and research agenda for professionals dealing with clergy sexual abuse. They should enable research clinical professionals, and clergy to identify the relevant issues in the identification, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of child and adolescent sexual abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests. Leading experts in the field from the United States and Canada have offered their different perspectives on this compelling problem including victim profiles for determining who is at risk.

A boy is murdered inexplicably by someone he should have been able to trust, his parish priest. In a small town with a police force run by a veteran from the hard streets of a big city, this should have been an open-and-shut case. Everything pointed to the priest as the killer. The investigation revealed something very disturbing about the priest and his relationship to the boy, something unholy. But the power of the church intervened to thwart the investigation. Would justice prevail? How far would the church go to save its image? What happens when a person holds the ultimate power over another in their hands? Do they use it for good or to further their own needs? How can a group that purports to be the representative of the ultimate good harbor such evil? Frank Slater, the Chief of Police in a small western Massachusetts town, is pitted against the Archdiocese of Boston, whose tentacles of control reach all over New England and beyond. He is a savvy cop who, in his twenty years as a detective in Boston, thought he had seen everything. He was wrong. The evil that he uncovers shakes him to the very core, but it also furthers his resolve to bring this murderer to justice. The priest is transferred from parish to parish by the diocese in order to hide him. This provides him access to more soon-to-be victims. With the protection of the church, the priest felt invincible. Sprinkled with local color and stories, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned provides the reader with a critical examination of the church's role in child abuse in the form of a story that will keep the pages turning only to pause to laugh, cry, to be enraged, or to reflect.

Our story chronicles the lives of three women from their childhood through adulthood. From the priest who told battered women to go home and satisfy their husbands to the one who embezzled church funds, our heroines struggle to find the honorable ministers and vanquish the demons posing as righteous clergy. Though their faith is tested, they end up finding not only those ministers they are seeking, but much more through their friendship.

It is not only young boys that Roman Catholic priests abuse; these dysfunctional, deceitful predators, who use God as an excuse for their behavior, emotionally damage many unsuspecting adult women. Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned: Confessions of a Priest’s Mistress is the story of one woman’s involvement with a Roman Catholic priest and how it changed her life. Just as the male victims are coming forward to tell their stories, there can be no closure for Maggie Renaldi until this story is told. During a vulnerable period in her life, Maggie meets Father Brendan O'Reilly and embarks upon a clandestine affair. Father O'Reilly's fear of commitment and his "I love you, go away" behavior threaten to destroy their friendship and their love, until Maggie intervenes and O'Reilly seeks therapy to save himself. Unfortunately, he chooses a priest-psychotherapist who adds more guilt and shame. From seminaries that require young men to beat themselves bloody to bring the flesh into subjection to bishops who play politics, from power-hungry nuns to superiors who profess "the party line," Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned is also a graphic picture of church politics and hypocrisy. Maggie Renaldi is not her real name. All the names as well as the places have been changed to protect the innocent (as well as the guilty).