WISCONSIN
National Catholic Reporter
Jan. 31, 2012
By Jason Berry
Steeped in the writings of Camus, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Emerson, Peter Isely put his career as a therapist on the line in 1993 when he identified himself as a victim of clerical sex abuse and criticized Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, who at the time was lionized by NCR, Commonweal and The New Yorker as a progressive leader of a post-Vatican II church. Weakland had a victim assistance program, Project Benjamin, of which Isely was deeply suspicious.
Born in Fond du Lac, Wis., Isley and a twin brother — the youngest of eight siblings — were 9 months old when their father, a realtor and contractor, died in a 1961 automobile accident. The family moved into a smaller house and struggled financially. Daily Mass at St. Joseph Parish School shaped his boyhood. “The community at St. Joe’s raised me,” he told writer Marie Rohde for a recent Milwaukee Magazine profile. On scholarship at the Capuchin-run St. Lawrence Seminary High School, he was popular with peers, an academic star and a sexual target of the principal: Fr. Gale Leifeld sexually assaulted Isely and 38 other boys Isely has spoken with. All thought they were alone. Two committed suicide.
After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Isely won a scholarship to Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. As he wrestled with meanings of the Holocaust, a course on the psychology of secrecy spurred him to confront Leifeld’s weight upon his past. Back in Milwaukee, after another degree and establishing a therapy practice, he bristled as Weakland responded to early news coverage of clergy abuse cover-ups by promoting Project Benjamin, a therapy program to reconcile victims and church.
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