Kentucky State Rep. Tom Burch Claims Sex Abuse in Criticism of Vatican

By Mike Wynn and Peter Smith
Indianapolis Star
June 9, 2012

http://www.indystar.com/article/B2/20120608/NEWS01/306080100/Kentucky-state-Rep-Tom-Burch-claims-sex-abuse-criticism-Vatican?odyssey=nav|head


State Rep. Tom Burch said Friday he stepped forward with his story of alleged sexual abuse as a child at the hands of a Roman Catholic priest to defend nuns from Vatican criticism.

Burch, D-Louisville, first publicly claimed that he suffered the abuse as a sixth- and seventh-grader in a letter last month to The Courier-Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader that questions the Vatican’s assertion of control over an umbrella organization for most American Catholic women’s religious orders.

A Vatican report earlier this spring criticized the Leadership Conference of Women Religious over challenges to church doctrines and male church leadership that speakers had made at its meetings. It put an American archbishop in charge of making changes in the organization’s structure.

Burch said the nuns deserved better treatment.

“They are doing the job the church should be doing,” he said. “Yet the pope is choosing to attack the nuns in America, and they are not doing anything to clean up the pedophiles in the priesthood.”

Lawsuits and other claims have shown that Catholic bishops for decades knowingly kept abusive priests in ministry and often reassigned them to parishes and other settings where they preyed on children whose families knew nothing of their records.

Ten years ago this month, when devastating revelations of abuse reached a peak, bishops adopted a policy banning any priest from ministry for any confirmed instances of abuse. The church also has adopted more extensive screening of seminarians and training of church leaders to detect and respond to abuse.

Advocates for victims say the church still has a way to go and have criticized it for failing to discipline bishops who kept abusers in ministry.

Burch said nuns were instrumental in his education and care as a boy — including one who stood up to a priest who had abused him for about 18 months in the 1940s.

“At no time was I ever sexually abused by a nun, but I was abused by a priest,” he said. “That’s the point I was trying to make.”

Burch, 80, said the abuse started when he was about 13 years old.

He said a priest began visiting his home to take him out driving and talk about movie stars — part of what he described as a subtle seduction that he didn’t comprehend at the time.

Burch said living with an alcoholic and abusive father made him seem vulnerable. But when the priest tried to take him out of class one day in the seventh grade, his teacher, a nun, refused to let Burch leave, he said.

Burch believes the nun sensed something was wrong, and the abuse stopped after the incident. He never told his parents, reasoning that they wouldn’t believe him.

“You have to understand the times,” he said. “If a priest told you something, it was like the pope telling you something.”

Burch said the abuse occurred in the Archdiocese of Louisville but has declined to name the priest or parish.

He said he discussed the matter with the director of the priest’s order decades later and requested that the church pay for counseling but didn’t “make a big deal out of it.”

By then the priest had died, he said, and Burch isn’t sure if the church investigated the claims. But the church agreed to pay for counseling, which he attended.

He did not identify the order, and there is no indication the order ever informed the archdiocese of the claim.

Burch said he would visit the priest’s grave in anger but eventually decided to forgive him.

“It felt like a cross had been lifted off me because I think I was carrying his guilt,” he said.

Louisville Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz said he did not know the name of the priest involved or whether he had been disciplined for the abuse.

“We regret and abhor any instance of sexual abuse, including abuse in decades past,” he said in an interview. “While we respect the confidentiality of particular people, our victim assistance coordinator stands ready to reach out if anyone within the community would have the sense that there has been abuse in their lives.”

Burch said the reality of the abuse didn’t hit him until he was driving to Frankfort one day.

“It took time for it to actually come out in my conscious mind,” he said. “Something was gnawing at me and it became visible right there in the car coming up here. It made me very angry.”

Burch, who went on serve in the Navy and earned a bachelor’s degree at what was then Bellarmine College, said he considered entering the priesthood in his 20s but took a job with General Electric instead.

He has been chairman of the House Health and Welfare Committee since 1986 and said his experiences in his youth have made him a better legislator, particularly in regard to spousal or child abuse.

“I think sometimes if it happens to someone in public life, it pays to let this be known — that fact that it did happen, and it happens to a lot of people,” he said.

The archdiocese has paid nearly $30 million in settlements, legal fees and other costs over abuse by dozens of priests and others associated with the church over several decades.

Studies have found that about 6 percent of Louisville priests and 4 percent of American priests were accused of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002. Several Louisville priests have been removed from ministry, and some have been criminally convicted.

Burch chose not to join a lawsuit because as a Catholic, he said suing the church would be like suing himself. He said he is proud of his religion and plans to always remain a Catholic.

“It’s not the church. It’s the individuals in the church that pull the church down,” he said.