EVANSVILLE (IN)
WTHR TV
February 26, 2019
By Jennie Runevitch
Just a few days ago, the Diocese of Evansville released the names of a dozen Indiana priests with credible accusations of sex abuse against children, spanning decades.
One of the victims only shared his story of abuse after years of silence. And it took his talent for poetry to start healing those old wounds.
“It really was a cathartic process,” said poet Norbert Krapf. “When I moved back to Indiana, it brought all of it back up and that’s when I started to write. I knew that I had to tell my story because I knew it would tell a lot of other stories, too.”
Krapf read to us some of his poetry from “Catholic Boy Blues”, that weaves honesty about the scars with hope for change.
“Nobody in any of these stories, wherever they take place, will live happily ever after,” Krapf read. “But if people can summon what it takes to tell the truth, they can live together and help others find their voice. One voice singing by itself can sound awfully small, but several voices lifting as one can make a chorus that sings a mighty song.”
Norbert Krapf turned to writing to ease the pain of sex abuse he suffered from a priest in southwest Indiana as a child.
It took 50 years for this former Indiana Poet Laureate to find his voice. Fifty years to publicly reveal his secret of being sexual abused by a priest. Krapf says the abuse happened between sixth and eighth grade.
“Abusers prey on trust and they betray trust. And I was not nearly the only person abused by our pastor. We could not tell our parents who would have been so shocked that it would have just destroyed them almost,” Krapf said.
He says the abuse ended in 1957. He started writing in 2007.
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