Pedophile Priest Adopts Rural Family

In 15 years of trying to write this story inevitably it turns into a listing: first this happened then this happened then this happened. That’s in part because there is so much that happens in the story, but it’s also due to how difficult I’m finding it is to write your own story.

So here is a short list of what is going to be in the story:

1930s Chicago ambitious law student works at Hardings Restaurant in the Loop where he meets the former art student now waitress thanks to the Depression who becomes his wife. He’s an ardent Catholic, her family are atheist activists from Poland, but she promises to raise the kids in the Catholic church, anything to land this catch. A law student husband was a big accomplishment for a girl in 1930s Chicago.

1949, they now have three children, three girls age 11, six, and a newborn, me, Kathryn. Family moves from Chicago to the rural area along Route 20 on the way to Elgin. The young criminal lawyer invests in 20 acres of farmland surrounded by woods. The house on the land may have been a mansion. It was huge. It had a ballroom and a tower. It was in the woods between Bartlett and the country club. We saw sheep on the other side of our fence.

Family became active in the new little Catholic Church in Bartlett, where Father Thomas Berry Horne, the pastor who came with the new church from Chicago singled them out quickly as friends. Dad became an usher, mom played the organ during Mass, and priest made visits to the family home several times a week. Dad traveled a lot for work, mom was bored and alone on 20 acres with a newborn and two older girls.

Father Horne was soon diddling the mom and the six year old. Eleven year old was painfully humiliated at being ignored by the pedophile priest and kept running away from home, for reasons no one understood. Mom carried on shamefully with the priest, but it was rural Illinois cloistered in wealth, plus she was an atheist at heart, and grew up in the Roaring Twenties.

Father Horne lost interest in Patsy, as she grew older and by the time she was 10, he had dumped the plumping awkward little girl in favor of Kathy who had just turned five.

Kathy was an enthusiastic participant with the pedophile priest. Out there on the ground in the woods he lit fires in her with the cloudy Illinois sunshine in the trees behind him. After Father Horne’s visits Kathy would run around the house panting with excitement, out of control energy. On other occasions when mom was practicing her organ music for the upcoming Sunday Mass, little Kathy would go off to the rectory behind the church with Father Horne, playing with him on his little mattress on the floor in his room. There was wine. There was some strange thing we smoked in a pipe. Kathy could hear her mother’s organ music coming from the church, the discordant clang of her hitting the wrong keys as she practiced a Mozart sonata.

My family was a pedophile priest’s dream come true: wealth, reverent Catholic dad who was never home, atheist mom who was bored and neglected her kids, plus we weren’t just rural we were out in the woods. But then we upset his applecart so to speak. My dad ever the real estate investor sold the house in the woods and we built a beautiful new home from scratch, right in the town of Bartlett (now Village of Bartlett in the middle of a mass of suburbs, but then a sleepy town about 8 square blocks with a train station and. . .)

The brand new house was a bike ride away from the church and soon little Kathy was showing up at all times of day, panting with excitement as she knocked on the rectory door, chasing around looking for Father Horne because she wanted to do it some more. Father Horne would be embarrassed when she’d track him down. A couple times he acted like they hardly knew each other. Kathy was getting confused.

But ever enthused about all the things the pedophile priest had showed her, Kathy started to tell it to the world. She’d babble about sexy things she did with Father Horne at the dinner table embarrassing her parents and their guests. She talked about it at school, at church. One time she even took a few kids from the neighborhood in Bartlett up to a tree house where she led them in self-touching techniques, showed them all how to masturbate, not even knowing that’s what it was called. She had a tree house full of boys and girls touching themselves all just because she was so excited about what the priest had shown her and she wanted to share it with all her friends so they could feel all that excitement too.

People were starting to talk.

So one day Kathy and her dad piled into the 1953 Plymouth, an exciting day, Kathy got to go all the way to Chicago with her dad and nobody else. They went to a cathedral like building. Kathy was taken into a big dark room with large office furniture, high ceilings, and wall-length windows, but it was dark -- Chicago skies. Out of the dark came the face of a man, the bishop they called him, and he looked down at the little girl and spoke with a brogue. “You’ve been doing a great deal of talking about you and Father Horne haven’t you, my dear?” Kathy nodded. Cardinal Stritch then put his face down very close to hers and said in a very stern voice but it still lilted in an almost melodic way. “Sometimes even if something is true, you shouldn't repeat it to anybody. Sometimes it’s better not to tell the truth, to tell a small lie, if the small lie helps to protect a greater good.” Kathy knew what he was talking about and she kept her mouth shut. She never mentioned what the priest did to her again, for 40 years.

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In 1979, 25 years later, little Kathy was now Kay and living in Texas. One thing led to another and she had a degree in Journalism from UT Austin and landed the job of a lifetime. NASA created a position for her in the public affairs office at LBJ space center in Houston. Kay was sharp. She handled news media queries and wrote press releases for the astronauts and the space shuttle.

A couple reporters were grilling her one day, saying, come on, you know there’s a lot of danger with the tiles the way they are now on the shuttle. Don’t they need to be redesigned? Kay, in her early 30s now, was very adept at adopting personae, and now she turned, stared the reporter straight in the eye, and adopted the persona of Cardinal Stritch in that Chicago archdiocese office in 1955. She took on the expression of the cardinal’s face, even the melodic lilt of his voice, as she affirmed to the reporter, “There’s not a problem with the space shuttle tiles any more. Those stories of how a small hole could cause the whole shuttle to burn up on re-entry are totally exaggerated.” She was a 30 year old dressed for success young upstart sharp chick to the reporter, but inside her head she saw herself totally as Cardinal Stritch.

That job did not last three years. Once stories started to get back to her bosses about the way she pursued astronauts at parties and the pilot types and flight engineers who stayed around them, NASA officials probably all the way to Washington were saying get her out of there. She pursued them with a compulsion she could not understand. They were like men connected to God. . .

Another reason she couldn’t keep the job at NASA was the 15 page security form they gave her to fill out. But see, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Little Kathy and Dad came home from their day trip to Chicago and the family suddenly had even more money than it had before. Plus dad had a new job in corporate law so we had to move to California. The brand new beautiful house in Bartlett went up for sale and we drove out Highway 66 and bought a home in San Marino, south of Pasadena. We just all of a sudden had so much more money but no one talked a lot about where it came from or why my dad changed his job so quickly.

Somewhere along the way we stopped going to church at all.

To be continued. . .