I finally googled the prisoner's name, nervously, wondering if I should do it, because I just, well, had this hunch -- any Catholics or ex-Catholics reading this will probably know what I'm talking about. I wanted to know. But I also didn't, because I didn't want my compassion for this man to be lessened, because prisoners are people too, and why should it matter? Maybe the reason he is in prison is simply none of my business. But I did look, and my hunch was right: he's serving a long sentence for many counts of child sexual abuse, including child porn with a kid he adopted from Romania.

Clergy abuse of children is something that shakes me up. I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, first off, so information about adults abusing children in general tends to squick me. (I'm sure it would even if I wasn't a survivor, but it hits particularly close to home because of my history.) But clergy abuse has a particular effect on me.

While I'm not a survivor of clergy abuse (my perpetrator was a stranger to me), I am not at all exaggerating when I say it was a rampant problem in the Catholic churches and schools I grew up. Everyone talked about it, within the community -- Dangerous Molesting Priests were an open secret. Everyone's parents knew not send their kids to this or that parish school, because of the "Funny Priest" there, who the kids had been "having problems" with.

Yes, those were real euphemisms we used.

I heard my parents and parents' friends and grandmother and aunts say things like that frequently growing up. Everyone was sad about it, but what else could you do but have a network of gossip and prayers? Only the bravest people went to the police, and it's not like they helped most of the time. The priests were never arrested. They were just sent off to other parishes to do it all over again.

The fact that faggots who have sex in parks are still getting arrested and called sex offenders for engaging in a public consensual sexual culture, while priests who abuse are shuffled from church to church -- it just disgusts me to no end. I was so relieved when all the "Catholic sex scandals" started surfacing -- duh, this has been happening for years, guys, let's talk about it, please!

I wasn't happy with the ways that both the Church and mainstream media too often conflated queerness with being a child molester. I wasn't happy that both the Church and mainstream media painted the abuse as particularly terrible and tragic because the majority of the survivors were boys and not girls. The message was clear: girls should basically expect sexual abuse; but when it happens to boys, it strips them of their masculinity, and that's the real crime. The sexism, misogyny, and homophobia in the uncovering of all the scandals disgusted me almost as much as the actual abuse cases.

But I was also just so glad that the secrets and lies were finally ending. You pigs, your smugness and piety do not protect you. Confession does not protect you. The Big Names and Titles shuffling you around from parish to parish to hurt more people -- they do not protect you. Your religion of lies does not protect you. Fucking finally.

And yet -- and saying this does not discount my rage -- I don't believe, intellectually, that abusers and rapists deserve any less compassion than I do. As much as what he and other people have done turns my stomach, I fundamentally don't believe that the man who wrote to my organization deserves to be abused in turn. I don't believe prison, which is a fucking terrible place for anyone to be, is really the answer -- I don't know what the answer is, frankly, but prison isn't it. The whole system is a bloody mess, and I don't believe that two wrongs make a right.

As much as reading the articles about what this guy did disgusted me, as I put together a manila envelope of brochures and pamphlets for him, I prayed: Let this help him find a way to make amends. Let this help him do no more harm. And let me be compassionate to all of God's people, even if I hate what some of them have done.