DENVER (CO)
Colorado Public Radio
Dec. 31, 2019
By Andrew Kenney
Jacque and Terry Schippers with their daughter in a photo from the family scrapbook.
Pat Wilcox’s younger brother arrived at her Greeley home with rain-drenched, moldy clothing and a dilapidated pickup truck. She welcomed him that day in 2015, thinking she could help the man she knew as “Shug.”
But the next few months would bewilder her.
How had her charming, successful brother gotten so lost in middle age? One evening, after she found him drinking again, the siblings sat down to talk.
“I know how you were raised,” she told him. “I know the people you were around, and how you were loved. You are on such a self-destructive path. Something is wrong.”
Then she asked the question that surprised them both: “Were you sexually abused?”
“As a matter of fact, I was,” Terry Schippers responded. Then he crumpled.
Soon afterward, Schippers joined more than 160 other Coloradans who alleged they were sexually abused by Catholic priests. Yet this reckoning has offered little resolution, legally or emotionally, for Shug Schippers. Three years later, he’s stuck in a strange stalemate with the church and with himself.
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