Priests use moms to get to kids. Philly trial sparks memories

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One time I walked in on Father Horne with my mom sitting on his lap. Her blouse was open and he had his hand flat firm right smack in the middle of her large naked breast, it's not an image you easily forget.

So when I read about testimony last week in the Philadelphia Clergy Abuse trial, that image of Father Horne with my mom erupted in my head. The testimony concerned the acts of Rev. Sylwester Wiejata, who in at least one of his endeavors, took up with the mom then progressed on to her pre-pubescent daughter From Philly Dot Com article*:

In August 2000, Monsignor Lynn received an anonymous call from a woman who said she knew of Wiejata’s history because she had had an affair with him. She said that she came home and discovered Wiejata fondling and kissing her 13-year-old daughter.

None of this abuse had to happen, you realize, as you read and watch coverage of the Monsignor Lynn trial in Philadelphia. A hundred thousand kids in the U.S. would not have been sexualized by Catholic priests, if decades ago these monsignors and higher had shown some basic human instincts of protection and concern.

More from news of last week’s testimony by the Monsignor:

"How about asking Wiejata? You didn't even ask Wiejata, did you?" DA Patrick Blessington said. He did not, Lynn testified. He said he assumed Wiejata would lie to him.

"You had a girl who was molested, and you did nothing?" Blessington pressed on.

Lynn paused, then said: "I did my best for the people that were injured by priests."

"So by your standard," the prosecutor retorted, "your best is nothing?" 

I've never forgotten walking in on my mom and Father Horne in flagrante with her bare breast in his hands.  That memory has always lurked in my brain. Who knows who else Father Horne got to from the early 1950s to 1985 when he left the planet.

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Here is the story that triggered the memory back into front and center in my brain with their headline

* Philly Dot Com story from May 1, 2012:
Story of ‘ladies man’ priest turned molester unfolds in court

By Joseph A. Slobodzian and John P. Martin

Just four years out of the seminary, the Rev. Sylwester Wiejata was rapidly making a name for himself. Unfortunately for officials of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the reputation of the young, darkly handsome Wiejata was as a ladies man — and one with an eye for married women. On Tuesday, a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury listened to the grand jury testimony of Msgr. William J. Lynn as he tried to explain his alleged failure to act as Wiejata’s sexual overtures went from married women to single women in their 20s and, ultimately in August 2000, allegations that he had fondled the 13-year-old daughter of a woman with whom he had an affair. Wiejata’s sexual overtures went from married women to single women in their 20s and, ultimately in August 2000, allegations that he had fondled the 13-year-old daughter of a woman with whom he had an affair.... Wiejata was allowed to attend a retreat house in Larchmont, N.Y. The archdiocese paid the bills. ( http://articles.philly.com/2012-05-01/news/31519789_1_grand-jury-sexual-abuse-priests )

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Posted by Kay Ebeling

Father Horne Notes

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Father Thomas Barry Horne, perpetrator in my story, held retreats for children and priests "in every state of the union" says this news article from 1949, announcing the founding of St. Peter Damian Church, with the handsome traveling "Chicago Archdiocese Missionary Band" member now was now moving permanently to Bartlett, Illinois, to start a parish. (Article is from Aug. 5, 1949, Daily Herald of Chicago. Eternal thanks to Terry McKiernan at Bishop Accountability and Janet Patterson of Kansas for helping me find info on the priest who perpetrated my sister and me.)

According to a 1939 article in Kerrville TX Mountain Sun, the Missionary Band of Chicago Archdiocese was housed in the former home of Mayor Ed Kelly, as he had donated the real estate to Cardinal Mundelein.

"Headquarters of the Chicago Mission Band is the former home of Mayor Ed Kelly which he donated fully equipped to His Emminence." Mundelien was about to start a mission trip which included San Antonio, but he died, so trip cancelled, is what the story in the Texas paper says...

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In 1964, Horne was "guest speaker" at the Ladies Sodality of Hanover (outside Bartlett) at a meeting announcing their new officers.

Father Horne was always around the ladies, decades after we left Bartlett in 1955. Article was in April 23, 1964, Hanover Park Events column by Jean Wiley...

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My sister has a vivid memory of Father Horne in our lives in Bartlett. When he dropped her for me, it created a strange dynamic of jealousy and protection inside her. She went to my father and told him what the priest had been doing to her and was now starting with me. I stood outside a dark wooden closed door in a hall, listening.

Trish later told me, and I remember hearing it: My dad took off his belt and beat my sister for saying such a horrible thing about a man of God....

I was standing outside the door, absorbing it.

Don't be judgemental, in the 1950s people still walloped their kids as a teaching technique. My dad was always a heavy drinker, high achiever, Germanic-Irishman...

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In 1997, at my dad's funeral my mom giggled, squirmed, got that icky way it is when old women act sexy, and in a flirtatious voice, she referred to her new freedom now that George was gone. My mom cracked, "Hmm, wonder where Father Horne is today." And she squirmed.

I went beat red and left the room.

I never told my parents what I discovered about Father Horne when I was 45 years old. Actually, once I went public in 1995 or so about Father Horne, other members of my family kept me from ever being able to talk to my parents, probably to keep me from telling them.

Ah, how humans try to evade the real wounds...

Especially Catholics....

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Truth is I respected my father's feebleness by 1995 and would never have mentioned IT to him. Just out of an instinctive respect, and that frightening Germanic presence, the same man who walloped my sister with a belt for saying out loud what Father Horne was doing to us back in 1953 or so....

He died in 1997.

And my oversexed ex-flapper mom's first thoughts were, wonder where that Father Horne is today. He was so "Ha-a-a-aynd-some..."


I used to hear that a lot in the 1950s around the yard in Bartlett.

"Father Horne is so HANDSOME."
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Kay Ebeling, producer of this blog, is seeking other victims of Father Thoomas Barry Horne, who sexualized my sister and me in this parish church, when we were pre-school aged children in the early 1950s. Email cityofangelslady@yahoo.com

The Big Thud

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I never bring up pedophile priests in public as there's no better way to bring a social situation to a Big Thud than to mention the topic on which I write.

I learned it over a three-year period from just before I started this blog in 2007.  A party can be going fine, everyone happy enjoying themselves, until someone asks me, so what do you write about and my voice would chime in, Oh, I'm a pedophile priest victim and I started this blog...

THUD

The energy in the room comes to a slammed down stop.  It's more than conversation stopping, it's THUD on several different levels.  And I can never back up and get things the way they used to be.  Once the words are out of your mouth, the situation is ruined.  Half the people step away and surreptiously throw out the phone number they got from you earlier.  A few will feel compassion and commisserate, then you find yourself having to be an encyclopedia telling the story from back in 1985...

It just does not work, but I kept bringing it up and bringing rooms to Thuds for a few more years.  The topic of Catholic priests raping children just makes too many people angry, panicked, freaked, it's an experience without precedent in recent human history, to be truthful...

Now I've finally learned to tell people, "I'm a crime victim.  It's not a topic for casual conversation but if you are looking for material on the subject, you'll find me online."

I never asked for the karma of being both a journalist and a pedo-priest victim, it just landed in my lap, and to be honest, I'd rather be swimming...
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-ke

Life Among Pedophiles, Priests, New Book by New Mexico Author-Activist, Hank Estrada

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I've learned a bit about life in Catholic seminaries, which in the USA produced seven thousand pedophile priests in the last fifty years*, from the book “Unholy Communion: Lessons Learned from Life among Pedophiles, Predators, and Priests." As an 18 year old seminarian, New Mexico writer Hank Estrada found himself naked in bed with an older priest. The series of molestations, related in the book, led to Estrada abandoning his lifelong ambition to become a priest. Unholy Communion** left this reader seeing seminaries as environments where covert sexual activity is almost inevitable.

“On one occasion, Father John rubbed himself up against me so much that he climaxed right in his walking shorts. I eventually came to realize that Father John believed that as long as he did not physically expose himself or masturbate, he wasn’t really engaging in a sexual act or breaking his celibacy vow.” (From page 26)

Soon after Estrada joined the Western Province of the Claretian Missionary Order in Los Angeles, Father John Raab spotted him as an easy target.

The young seminarian was vulnerable, tormented by the experience of being regularly molested by his uncle as a child (some of which is described graphically in the book). Within weeks the priest has the seminarian in bed, which is also described vividly in the book.

Estrada may have had to abandon his life dream of becoming a priest, mainly because of the sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of Father John Raab, but he maintained a kind of freelance pastoring career, by founding “non-offending adult male survivors” groups in the 1980s.

Estrada made two attempts at forming local SNAP groups in Albuquerque, and established himself in a survivor community by attending seminars and conferences, both as a participant and as a speaker.

Currently he is developing an online support group for survivors at hopehealhelp.net.

Priests in training are cloistered in seminaries, at the same time they are pampered and treated to vacation jaunts, as Estrada describes in this scan from Unholy Communion, which is available for purchase at hankestrada.com :

They go to retreats in secluded places where a hunky new recruit is in the unlocked room right across the hall- what else can you expect but development of deviant sexual behaviors. Seminary practices put post pubescent men in cloistered places where there is no other person for miles around but other young men trying to be celibate.

They live in close quarters, drink, eat, mingle, and discover that each of them is trying and failing to overcome a normal human sex drive.

The atmosphere of seminaries as described in Unholy Communion seems almost like it was set up to encourage secret gay sex and predatory activity, in a culture where suppressed instincts get expressed in deformed, outright depraved acts.

Everything Estrada went through is topical today with the gay marriage debate going on around the world. Nobody should have to resort to back street connections, and surreptitious sex acts, when what they want is a normal loving sexual relationship, whether in the priesthood or in ordinary life.

In Unholy Communion, Estrada comes part way out of the closet as a gay man in the 1980s, after leaving the seminary. He ends up entrapped in a “public exposure” charge and spends years in confused relationships.  


Estrada spent years after leaving seminary trying to warn Church hierarchy as Father John continued to prey upon young men in seminary.

Letting priests live normal sex lives, including marriage to another man, would probably put an end to the confusion in seminary that led to the pedophile priest epidemic in the Catholic Church.

Estrada's life was derailed by the dishonesty of Catholic bishops, both in operating sexually charged seminaries for "celibate priests" and in continuing to criminalize and denounce homosexuality. Can Catholic bishops stop protecting their bank accounts and their newfound positions of power among neoconservative right wing politicians long enough to notice the dysfunction their religious sexual policies perpetuate?

Keep Reading.

-Kay Ebeling

*Almost seven thousand priests are in the database at Bishop Accountability and more predators are being added regularly.

**Unholy Communion is available for purchase at hankestrada.com
. NOTE: Hank Estrada wrote this to me after reading this post: There is a difference between pedophile priests, who prey on children, and predators like Fr. Raab, who target young men. Fr. Raab is a gay man who preys on young men under his supervision. As far as I know, Fr. Raab is not a pedophile who preyed on children.

Is the Church f---ing with me again?

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Coincidence? 2 days before going to Chicago in 2008 to work on my case, my bank account closed and I could not access my money. Now in 2012, one week before going to Chicago to continue working on my story, my "bank account has been compromised" and the ATM card retained. So once again I can't access my money.

Is the Catholic Church once again f---ing with me?

Feels like it...

In both instances I was pretty public about my plans to go to Chicago, as to me, it's safer to let people know.

Is it?
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Just found these notes, mysteriously intriguing

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Back around March 2010, I wrote these notes down while talking on the phone to a former nun who was part of the L.A. Clergy Cases that settled in 2007.  Just came across these notes now, as I was working to update my email list, in anticipation of three posts I'm launching before the end of this month.

Here is what I found in the middle of a completely unrelated file:

Lived with nun who was stationed in New Mexico, I said, those stupid Servants [of the Paraclete], everyone said it was for alcohol, but actually it was for the perverts.  The sister said, when I was in New Mexico, it was just horrible, they had free range on weekends and they would cause all kinds of problems.

A pastor in a small poor parish, there was a suspicious fire in rectory and priest died, and she felt that people from ...

Michael Baker was a fixture at my parish, Pastor Hanson had been at the seminary with him summer of '71 when seminarians were there, 8 known pedophiles were in my parish. 

Hanson had two accidents in company of married women.

It was St. Anthony of Padua of Gardena, California. among the perpetrator priests in that one parish were:

Baker

Cafoe

Gerald Fessard,

Lyn Cafoe is on the lam

Used to be at st. James in Torrance

There were eight predator priests who were at that parish all at the same time, one who’s not attached George Rand chaplain at USC,

These were sixth grade kids, the seminarians came to run vacation bible school and [got] too familiar with them, making friends, rocking them.  I went to the pastor and a boy from the parish, but Tony could not find him.  

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More to come soon as I finish updating my email list -Kay E

Catholics, Go to a Different Church, Please

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I wish federal prosecutors would appear at Archdiocese offices around the country with warrants to search for and seize all documents from "secret archives" in a coordinated effort in cities nationwide. Imagine what they would find, unless the bishops and monsignors have already shredded everything, not just to do with pedophile priests, but all the other crimes being committed in this church.  

How can Catholic bishops continue to have ANY influence or power in lo cal communities and politics after this decades long crime spree where a hundred thousand American kids got sexualized by at least six thousand priests in the last fifty years?  

How can people keep going to this church after so many lives have been destroyed by these greedy false representations of God.... Really, Catholics, next time you feel you have to go to that church and that church only to learn Scripture, look around you at all the other denominations where there is oversight, where parishioners have a voice. 

The Gospel exists in plenty of other places besides Catholic pulpits, in fact a neighborhood Bible study is probably more like the original Christians worshiped than is your Sunday Catholic Mass. 

Next time you must go into a Catholic Church instead of another church, think of the hundred thousand wounded persons struggling through life in the USA right now because these pedophile priests got to us as children. 

Think about US!!!!

(And I've been working on my anger issues... )

City of Angels Blog is at http://cityofangels12.blogspot.com by the way.


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Comment Posted at Philadelphia Priest Abuse Trial Blog today... 

Joke that lost me friends on Facebook

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I hardly ever feel sexy anymore. Maybe I should get myself to Catholic Mass so I can be triggered / aroused- 
(Ouch, bad joke, I know, bad joke, but it's what came out of me.)
That joke lost me a bunch of "friends" on Facebook last week, even though it is based painfully on the truth.  I get aroused around Catholic Churches.  The idea of guys in cossacks heading into the Confessional with a line of ladies waiting...
Turns me On.  How sick is that?  
No wonder I've turned to ice last few years.  
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ke
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Still Here, Me and CofA Blog are Reviving

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Just so people don't forget. I started City of Angels Blog at CityofAngels3 in Jan. 2007 and every year since I've used this platform to write stories and post documents about Catholic pedophile priests that have not been published anywhere else. Things have been slow this past year, I've been recovering from dealing with Archdiocese of Chicago lawyers and friends who turned out not to be friends. I have a feeling once I get moved and away from this situation June 1st,, the blog will come back to life as well as me. So stay tuned, Facebook and other online friends, who can sometimes be more reliable than human contact. More to Come... -Kay Ebeling, May 10, 2012

A Spiritual Battle Follows Me Around: Update on Kay Ebeling Today

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OK. I write about pedophile priests and I also have this bubble of CHAOS that goes with me everywhere I go. Stuff happens so weird there is no way to hold a human accountable. Makes me wonder could there be a spiritual battle going on right over me, like over my head and it just falls down onto me and causes eruptions of chaos? Just bk of what I write about? I mean, I'm not the Church lady from early SNL saying, "Could it be... Satan," but sometimes nothing else explains it... Every day I wish none of this stuff ever happened, that the church was really this wonderful trusting thing and a hundred thousand kids didn't get raped in the USA in the last 50 years by Catholic priests. But we did. And it just does not go away, no matter what you do.