UNITED STATES
A Room with A Pew
Paul Fericano
“Irreverence is our only sacred cow.”
— Paul Krassner
Ever since I began to read, study and compose words as a young boy, poetry has spoken to me in a language as clear as anything in my life. It’s been a vital part of my personal healing and a great reconciler during times of distress. My first published writing was a four-line, rhyming poem that appeared in a national scholastic magazine when I was nine years old. Two brothers who lived up the street from me burned their house down after playing with matches in their basement. No one was hurt in the blaze, but I can remember watching the flames as the family huddled under blankets on the sidewalk. For several nights I had terrible dreams about what I had witnessed. Writing a poem about it helped me express my fears.
Like humor, which I’ve learned to use during times of emotional turmoil, poetry has encouraged me to grow into pain and suffering with perception and acceptance, even when explanations are difficult to grasp. Learning to mix satire with sentiment has gotten me in and out of trouble, some of it of my own making, but most of it the result of what often comes with the territory. Learning to decode the beginnings has helped me understand what the late poet and educator John Ciardi hinted at when he asked: “How does a poem mean?” …
Something That Required Subterfuge
In the fall of 1966, I returned as a sophomore to Saint Anthony’s, a Franciscan minor seminary in Santa Barbara, California. The year before, and all during the first half of my freshman year, I had been sexually assaulted by Mario Cimmarrusti, a priest on the faculty who served as the prefect of discipline. Mario was short in stature, gruff in manner, and had a quick temper. He was a feared and formidable presence on the campus with the authority to make life miserable for any boy he chose– and he usually did. His power and influence over decisions that shaped the lives of those under his control could never be underestimated. He was the only Franciscan in the school whom every student had to answer to on a daily basis.
During this period, many boys in my class were also being molested by Mario. No one ever spoke about it, at least not directly, and certainly not in a way we could understand and explain today. For me and a lot of others, the term, “sexual abuse” was as unfamiliar as sex itself. And yet, those of us who were being traumatized knew, instinctively, that things were bad in our world and in the world around us. It wasn’t until years later that many of us learned, some for the first time, how similar our fates had been.
In the evening, students would be summoned to Mario’s room from study hall, choir practice or the dormitories. During the day we might be yanked from class, football practice or other school activities. With no name for what I was experiencing, my anxiety and confusion only increased. The dreading was more than I cared to admit. It was not difficult to recognize in the faces of my classmates the same pain I saw in my own. The abuse made me feel humiliated, alone and isolated—something it was intended to do. And yet, in the middle of all this dismay I still looked for ways to cope.
One such way was with acts of rebellion.
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