CHEYENNE (WY)
Casper Star-Tribune [Casper WY]
September 25, 2022
By Seth Klamann
A priest stood up and asked Ed Gavagan how he found hope after all that he’s endured. As a room full of Catholic clergy looked on, Ed told the priest that he had none. None at all.
Gavagan had been shaken when he walked into the community room attached to Sheridan’s Holy Name Catholic Church on Monday. The seats were filled by 50-some priests, plus a half-dozen nuns, all gathered to watch a documentary that follows Gavagan and five other men as they work to heal from the trauma they say they suffered at the hands of priests decades ago. He’d done this before, mostly: He and two of the other men from the film had attended two screenings in the preceding days, and they’d held Q&As after both. He’s talked about the film to reporters and audiences and critics for a year.
This was different. He hadn’t been in a room full of priests in a long time, and he and the other men struggled with the sights and emotions and triggers. Gavagan had been trying to get his alleged abuser, retired Wyoming Bishop Joseph Hart, to be held accountable for 20 years. Two police investigations had ended without charges, despite investigators and prosecutors in 2020 writing that they thought Hart had abused Gavagan. The Vatican had exonerated Hart and told Gavagan they couldn’t find, to a moral certainty, that he was telling the truth.
So no, he told the priest. He did not have hope.
“I have none,” he described telling the priest. “The civil side, law enforcement, has completely let me down. I’ve been trying for 20 years. The only reason I keep going is because I don’t know how to quit. I just—I will not quit. But I can tell you that I have no hope.”
The response from the room, Gavagan said, “was just total silence.”
He’d traveled back to his native state of Wyoming from his home in New York to attend three screenings of the Netflix documentary “Procession,” held in Cheyenne, Laramie and, finally, Sheridan. He’d come with two of the other men in the film, Michael Sandridge and Dan Laurine, both from Kansas City, Missouri. The film depicts them engaging in “drama therapy” to attempt to process their trauma, and it includes Gavagan directing a scene based on the first time he was abused in Cheyenne as a teenager.
The events were hosted by the Diocese of Cheyenne, attended by the Catholic faithful and the men and women who preached to them, and the question-and-answer sessions after each screening featured Wyoming’s highest-ranking Catholic cleric, Steven Biegler, the man who holds the office Hart once held.
It was surreal, Gavagan said: Nearly 50 years have passed since Hart allegedly abused Gavagan at the bishop’s residence in Cheyenne, and two decades have come and gone since Hart retired. In the years since, more than a dozen men in Missouri and Wyoming have accused him of sexual abuse, and the church has spent millions fighting and then settling with those victims. Hart has consistently denied the allegations against him. A priest and bishop for 46 years, Hart will turn 91 this week.
After all of that, here Gavagan was, telling crowds of Catholics about the abuse with the encouragement and support of a new bishop.
Gavagan – and the filmmakers – had been trying to host a screening in Wyoming for months, ever since “Procession” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2021. It was shortlisted for an Oscar and nominated for a Peabody Award. He said he wanted people to know what Hart, well-known and recognizable to many Wyoming Catholics, had done to him. Many had their own personal stories about the old bishop, and Gavagan wanted them to know his.
“My first goal would be to make people realize that whatever you think about Hart, you have to know this other stuff about him as well,” Gavagan said. “He’s a monster in sheep’s clothing.”
Biegler, who since he became bishop has worked to have Hart removed from the priesthood, agreed to host the films and privately advertise them to parishioners. The screenings were closed to the press, and a spokeswoman for the diocese said Biegler was too busy to speak to a reporter last week. She said in a statement that the screenings were meant to give Catholics “an opportunity to process concerns and questions around the historic sexual abuse scandals in the church.”
“The focus of these gatherings was to help victims/survivors to heal, protect the children, and continue transparency in the church,” the spokeswoman wrote, “as well as to discuss sexual abuse within the context of the whole society, as a human problem.”
One of the other priests at the Sheridan screening stood up and made a similar point: This isn’t isolated to the church. Gavagan, Sandridge and Laurine “tensed up,” Gavagan said. As they told the priest that his point didn’t change the church’s history, a nun spoke up, too. She had been at a parish in South Dakota where a priest had been accused of abuse, she said, and the trauma had ruined the lives of the children and their families.
“She said, ‘We don’t need any excuses from you,’” Gavagan recounted. “She rebuked him in full voice, right there.”
By and large, Gavagan and the other two men said, the screenings went well. There were tears shed in every audience. He was asked repeatedly if he had lost his faith. (Gavagan said he “has no faith” but is searching. That seemed to crush the women asking, he said.) Older men in “cowboy boots and trucker hats” would approach the men afterward, offering crushing handshakes before taking them by the elbow and telling them they were sorry for what happened.
“Then they’d choke up and turn away,” Gavagan said. “They don’t want to talk about your emotions, don’t want to hear about your sex life … they don’t want to know about any of that. For them to absorb what we put out there, and then to come up to me afterwards, it meant a lot. It really meant a lot.”
There was another intention behind the screenings, beyond raising awareness of Gavagan’s allegations against Hart, the men said. Cheyenne Police conducted a 16-month investigation into Hart in 2018 and 2019, and investigators recommended he be charged. They interviewed several men, including Gavagan, who said Hart abused them in the 1970s and 1980s. Because Wyoming has no statute of limitations, Hart could still be prosecuted, even though the allegations were decades old.
But 10 months after Cheyenne Police announced they were recommending charges, prosecutors in Natrona County declined to charge Hart. They told Gavagan in a letter that they thought he had been victimized by Hart but that they did not think a prosecution would be successful. Documents indicate prosecutors and police investigators were repeatedly at odds over the case and that communication repeatedly broke down; Natrona County prosecutors had not fully read the case reports, which span more than 100 pages, before deciding not to charge Hart, police said.
Gavagan is still furious about how the investigation ended. But he’s hoping the screenings will galvanize new leadership in Cheyenne – the police department has a new chief, and a new district attorney will take office in January – to give the case another look. He met with the new police chief before he left town Wednesday, he said. (A Cheyenne Police spokeswoman did not return an email seeking comment.)
He won’t quit, Gavagan repeated. Sandridge later said that Hart’s prosecution would mean that justice will catch up to anybody, even a bishop, even decades later.
But whatever happens with the case, Gavagan said, he felt the screenings had an impact on the people who watched them. Several people asked them what they could do to help. One woman was “practically pounding on the table” as she asked what she could do.
He said he told them to encourage others to watch the film, too. He told them to thank Biegler for hosting the screening, to support those in the church who are working toward solutions and healing, and he told them to call out those who aren’t.
“I’m in a pretty good place in my life now,” Gavagan said. “Between the film and the guys and Biegler—I still have residual suffering from everything, but compared to other people, I’m in a pretty good place. And I need to take that energy and that wherewithal. That’s what I’m doing.”