This is a story about the kids in our parish, and the parish family who nurtures them. We are in a parish church of about 35 to 45 families, in a diocese in which the Catholics represent 2% of the total population. One of the first Sundays we were here, we got lost on the hilltop streets overlooking the church. They held Mass for us while some of the folks stood outside "waving us in". Poor dumb nuns...

There is only room up there for two or three streets and the Catholic church was right in plain sight, seemingly straight down the side of a mountain. It should not be possible to see one's destination and still be lost, but other than careening down over the mountainside as though the little station wagon were a Hummer, being lost was our best option.

As we keep telling folks, we might have to change our names to "Dumb Nuns Inc.".... As we also keep telling them, they could disagree with us.....At any rate, we did get to Mass, Father did not fuss that we'd made him late, and our beautiful life here began.

Sometime in the months after we were "flagged in" to Mass that first October, folks told us about the wonderful nuns who had been coming to teach their kids summer CCD every year since forever. They were not going to be able to come that summer. We explained that we were not teachers (lots of the moms are professional, real, experienced, teachers). But they said (inaccurately), "Nuns are better, Sister," so we said we would do a program there at the church for the kids that summer. (And we could barely learn our way to church, much less teach...)

We taught the kids each summer from 1993 until the early March date of 2002 when we saw our founding and ever-so-beloved bishop anthony o'connell on TV hedgingly admitting in as no-self-fault a manner as possible that he had "maybe accidentally", "thinking it was therapy", "touched one boy", "one time", "maybe", "sort of", etc etc etc, in the yada-yada-yada that has come to symbolize the self-serving and self-saving spin of the hierarchy of the once majestic Holy Roman Catholic Church we love so devotedly.

On "o'connell day", as we call it, we quit teaching CCD. We still really do not know if the parishioners understand our explanation of why that is.

We quit teaching summer CCD because we would have failed to keep safe those children whom we love. A predator could have gotten them. Easily. Sound paranoid? Overly scrupulous? Nunny? Overly protective? Not at all. We would have handed those kids over to the predators.

In the very few years that this monastery has stood on this little hill of a mountain-top, we have (unknowingly) welcomed-like-Christ, sexual repeat predators of little boys and sexual serial predators of little girls.

bishop anthony o'connell has many court cases pending against him. One of his victims has said publicly that the number could easily approach one hundred. That is in keeping with what i was taught about, and by, pedophiles over two decades ago. It's been known that long and far longer. For a pedophile, there is always one more kid.

According to "O'C's" victim, who said it publicly, the same father manus daley, whom we are told sculpted the bust of o'connell that still sits or did sit in our chancery, is the father manus, with whom o'connell divvied up the classes of little 12 and 13 year old boys at the minor seminary they were "in charge of".

If what we read is accurate, apparently each "man", o'connell and manus, had the integrity of friendship such that they did not transgress the line and sexually use each others' boys, the other guy's boys, his best buddy's boys. There's spiritual friendship to emulate....

father clarence biggers came to visit us from Holy Spirit Abbey in Conyers more than once, welcomed, again like-Christ. Welcomed and pampered and cooked for and maternally spoiled for the day. We even elevated his post-op knee on pillows and sheepskin, so he would be oh-so-comfy while he sat at our refectory table and talked and ate, this "wonderful priest and monk and brother of ours", we thought.

Even when we saw a write-up in the newspaper about father clarence being accused by way more than one person, we just couldn't believe it was our sweet, fun clarence. We are now friends with some of the women who were little girls when "fun sweet clarence" didn't know the difference, apparently, between fasting and feasting... or what not to feed upon....

These three sexual predators of children were invited here. By us. They came here. Two were here repeatedly. There are three other priests whom we suspect, in the hindsight we are unfortunate enough to have now, are likely predators. But there is nothing concrete on which to base or with which to prove it, and so we do not put their names here. Two of those would have molested our little summer CCD boys and one would have gotten our little girls.

Somewhere between three and six known child sexual predators, that we know of.. They were our heros, our priests, bishop, monk-brothers, church leaders. We were teaching the kids their faith, their religion, to follow their/our beloved church leaders. We would have urged any one of those kids, every one of those kids, to "Go off and talk with Father alone", "Go ahead and go hike with Father", "Listen to Father", "Do what the Bishop says." We would have said that as automatically as we say, "Trust your heavenly Father".

We have told folks that prior to entering the monastery, i was the Public Health Nurse assigned to our Child Abuse Task Force, along with the commonwealth's attorney, a social worker, and some wonderfully tough cops. i was hard to fool. To this day i sometimes spot a pedophile, when an uncomfortable intuition alerts me and i then see how his eyes caress and then follow some little boy or girl in a not-normal manner.

To be clear: i do not mean, here, the way a grandmother's eyes will caress and follow someone else's little toddler up the aisle or the way a grampa's eyes will smile and follow another's little grandson as he jumps off the retaining wall. i do mean here: lustful, abnormal predatory sexual arousal, dangerous to the prey, especially when the prey is a kid.

The point is that, despite being pretty quick to spot it, and pretty hard to fool, i was totally fooled and would have handed over James, Michael, Andrew, Christopher, Thomas, Eugene, Matthew, AJ, Anthony, Elliott, Greg, Luke, Chris, or David to the bishop, the priest, or the monk.

We would have delivered over Annie, Leslie, Cindy, Katie, Christie, Heather, Mae, Jessica, Lisa, or Elizabeth to the bishop, the priest, or the monk.

Only by some "twist of fate", never once was a child here at the same time those three men were here. Neither were our kids ever here when those other three of whom we spoke, were here. We know our kids never got hurt here. But they could have. And it seems arrogant to glibly think, "Well, God protected them. God was with our kids." What, like he wouldn't have protected all the kids who were raped? Like he wasn't with them?

Our kids didn't get hurt here, but they could have, and we would never have suspected. Nobody would have, till some twenty or thirty years hence, when one of them would have killed himself or herself. So we quit teaching summer CCD. At least one parent seemed angry, indicating accurately, that the child loses doubly that way.

But we would much rather a child be deprived of a bit of our non-teacher teaching, than to set that child up to trust the very criminals, primarily priests and nuns, who are sexually abusing them, and the non-perps who are nevertheless still not taking steps to prevent their abuse or standing up for them when they are victimized in this crisis of sexual-predation-upon-kids in our church. The Church Jesus founded, for heaven’s sake! Excuse the unintended pun and inaccurate theology.

Instead of summer CCD we arranged that we would design a day-long or overnight retreat for any CCD student AND his/her parent/relative/family. They could come to the monastery and use the little guest cottage without charge. We would lock the entry gate, give them a key, and schedule no other visitors, clergy or otherwise, that day. The parents and kids would have the place to themselves. The kids would be guaranteed to be safe from clergy predation that way. Nobody can be more trusted to keep a child safe than the child's parent or family.

God is smart and he designed it that way. Even that is not foolproof, but it is the best there is. It is my opinion of certainty that it will have to be the parents who make our church truly safe for our children. Nobody else will care enough or dare enough.

When they asked me to, and despite the fact that Father told me that little girl altar servers prevent little boys from wanting to be altar servers, and thus do these altar server girls decrease the numbers of altar-boy-vocations-to-the-priesthood, i used to teach the kids to be altar servers. No longer do i do so, at risk of setting them up for the slaughter in some sacristy in the future. i do not worry that our parish priest will molest them, but i will not put any child at risk for experiencing, in "another priest's sacristy", the evil horrors i have heard from hundreds of men and women, that happened to them, when they were hundreds of unsuspecting little kids.

There have been a couple of times that the CCD kids wanted to have an outdoor Mass in the outdoor, open-air chapel that our beloved Knights of Columbus Queen of Heaven Council # 4572 built for us. We were fortunate enough to have a compassionate young priest agree to drive over five hours one way to say Mass for the kids and their families. We have hope in men like Father Chris. But how does one teach the kids to spot the difference between him and our former bishop?

Now we are almost in the present, almost in "real time": Last summer one of our two mowers broke. It spent the whole summer breaking and one of the Saints of our parish spent the whole summer re-fixing it for us. He would drive a long ways here, pulling a trailer behind him, load up the mower, take it away, have it fixed, and then reverse the trip to bring it back.

He's a devout Baptist who comes to Mass with his family almost every week, and who's got it way over a lot of us who do get to go up to Communion. Actually we have two Saints like that in our parish. They vie with each other, though, for who’s the best Saint.... But then Peter and Paul might just do that too, for all we know.

So when the elder of the two mowers died in one final greasy-looking-smoke-of-an-explosion, late last summer, we grieved its passing. And we dreaded this year's mowing season. One time we'd actually been dumb enough to mow the garden field and the retreat field, with a little bitty push mower. Nobody ever told us how very completely you wear them out that way... But we knew this time that it was not an option. Like little "Anne-with-an-e" of Green Gables, we make lots of mistakes, but they are not usually repeats. Far too creative for that, our mistakes are usually "first-timers", as we ruefully call them.

Anyway, enough about mowing. The CCD teachers have been "after us" since last year to let them bring the kids and do, first our "autumn clean-up" and then our "spring spruce up". But we keep explaining that we don't want to use the kids for labor. We don't want to exploit them and benefit from their giving up time to come help the old nunnies. Finally we had it worked out that the kids were going to come and dig us a fire pit that would henceforth be a proper hot-dog-roasting fire pit, after we all tested it out together. But we got rained out.

Then one week, after Sunday Mass, the CCD teachers asked if we could stay for CCD after next week's Mass. i tried to talk Mother Veronica out of it, pointing out to her that we were about to be talked-to again about this spring-spruce-up thing that they wanted to do to help us. Mother never listens to me and she always listens to other people. It is one of the crosses i have to bear. So when Mother indicated we would deal with that next week, i knew her Irish mind was made up.

After Mass someone was pointing out to me that i'd left a bluntly-messaged paper plate in the church fellowship hall. And i was busy, first apologizing, and when that didn't seem to help, i was busy explaining why i'd written such a blunt, "don’t move this" message on the paper plate. It also didn’t seem to help, and i didn’t know what else to do, than to apologize and explain and apologize again. Poor dumb nun, it was hard for me to even remember, because it was left over from last year or the year before when the kids had made their First Holy Communions and Confirmations. At any rate, i went into the CCD class rather distracted by the paper-plate-note thing and was not prepared for being ambushed by this spring-spruce-up thing.

The CCD kids were sitting around looking secretive, and hungry for breakfast. The CCD teachers were looking pretty suspicious and sneaky, but then we were used to that from those two....

And then we were told that all those fund raisers and all those home-cooked breakfasts for the parish, that the kids had been doing since last November, were for the Sisters, just in time for an early mowing season, to get a mower.

They did not know, those CCD kids or their sneaky CCD teachers, that the day they presented us with that gift, was the twelfth year anniversary of when we'd left the Va monastery, headed, without yet knowing it at that time, to this little parish church where the kids and their teachers prove their nuns are in the Clueless Class.....