ABOUT two years ago I had a conversation with Toronto priest Tom Brennan.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It came not long after a notorious Hunter paedophile priest, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was in the news.
I introduced myself, said I was aware he had cancer and asked about how it was affecting him. We had a not unpleasant chat for a short while, in which he hinted that his condition was serious.
I said I'd been raised a Catholic and suggested that death wasn't supposed to be as much of an issue for priests as it is for a lot of people.
"Priests are human too, you know," he said.
I rang him because someone associated with the diocese had indicated Father Brennan might have been considering an apology to the victims of the notorious priest.
A year earlier Father Brennan had lost an appeal against his conviction for making a false statement to police that no one had ever told him they'd been sexually abused by the priest.
The church's decision not to remove Father Brennan from his position as Toronto parish priest was devastating to the notorious paedophile priest's victims.
Their trust had been betrayed when they were sexually abused as children and again when they reported the abuse and nothing happened. Their trust in church hierarchy was destroyed when nothing was done despite Father Brennan's conviction, apparently accepting Father Brennan's statement that he didn't remember.
I rang Father Brennan to see if he had reconsidered and told him an article in which he apologised, or acknowledged the hurt experienced by the priest's victims, would go a long way to help them.
I referred to the number of suicides and attempted suicides that had occurred. He did not disagree and said he would like time to consider it.
I agreed. I phoned again a few months later. He wanted more time to think. When I rang again a few months after that it was not a chatty call because he wasn't happy. I had interrupted his breakfast, he said.
He died on September 30, within weeks of being charged with concealing the crimes of the paedophile priest. He had also been charged with sexually assaulting a boy, and with assault.
At his funeral I spoke with several men who had been at St Pius X school at Adamstown in the 1970s when Father Brennan was principal and the notorious priest was a teacher.
They remembered Father Brennan as a good man and weren't impressed with the lone former St Pius student who held a sign talking about the church's shame.
"I only knew him as an outstanding individual," said one of the men.
I said I didn't doubt that, and clearly a lot of people felt the same. But as he expected me to accept his experiences of Father Brennan were only positive, I asked if he would accept that for other people like the lone protester, their reality was extremely negative, proven in a court and just as valid.
Tom Brennan was right in that phone conversation two years ago. Priests are human too. And it's the human failings that have caused so much grief.
I spoke with another Tom last week, who has had his own struggles for the past two months since the suicide of former St Pius student John Pirona, who was a victim of the paedophile priest and whose trust in the world and people was eroded to the point where he couldn't take the pain any more.
The second Tom has always been a staunch Catholic, but after a public meeting at Newcastle Panthers on September 16, at which John Pirona's widow Tracey and father Lou spoke, Tom has not been able to go to church, despite the pain that causes his wife. He doesn't know what he will do now, or whether he will go to church again.
At Tom Brennan's funeral on Friday, his friend and priest Jim Saunders called Brennan "one of the most honourable and upright men I've known", while the protester, who was one of many who attended John Pirona's funeral in July, stood in silence with his back to the service.
The church on Friday was filled to overflowing . It was a largely elderly crowd. The very human failings of the church are a kind of cancer, slowly eating it away from within.