Robert Craig was a known threat even before he was ordained. The minutes of a meeting of the Diocesan Clergy Personnel Board from February 19, 1974 included the following note about Craig:

Robert Craig is a hard worker; must have someone working with him; will need a pastor who can tolerate non-clerical dress; very smart. He wants to be in the City where he can continue his work at the Audy Home. He would tend to move free and independent. Tom’s advice: be concerned.

The “Tom” in this case was Father Thomas Murphy, then rector at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary. The Audy Home was Chicago’s facility for juvenile offenders. What did seminary administrators know about Robert Craig, and why did they allow him to be sent to his first parish where he almost immediately began molesting and abusing boys?

From 1974 through 1990, Craig spent time as an Associate Pastor in four parishes and was ultimately accused of sexual abuse, molestation, attempted rape and rape, including incidents during his first parish assignment at St. Aloysius on the city’s west side.

In 1990, Craig provided Vicar for Priests, Bishop Raymond Goedert, with a list of “more than five” boys he had abused. The Archdiocese kept the list secret.

Craig resigned from the priesthood in 1993 and was laicized in 2009. He was never charged with a crime.

“Move on.” Essentially, “Forget about it.” And analogizing being a victim of clergy abuse to being a cancer patient? This from a man who was considered one of leading progressive lights of the Catholic Church during this period.

Hagan resigned from the priesthood in April 1997 and was laicized in 2010. He was never charged with a crime.

“Put it behind you.” “We must forgive.”

Echoes of what I was told by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in the summer and fall of 1992.

But let me start at the beginning…

I was raised Catholic and attended Ascension Church and School in west suburban Oak Park. It was a great community. My friends, my siblings’ friends and my parents’ friends were nearly all from families in the parish. That’s what growing up in a strong parish was like.

My parents weren’t particularly religious. We went to church every Sunday. My dad belonged to the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society. The groups did good works in the parish, but they also served as fraternal drinking organizations. My mom helped out in the school and in the Altar and Rosary Society. We knew the priests, of course, but we weren’t one of the families that had priests over for dinner.

After graduating from Ascension School, I went to Oak Park and River Forest High School instead of Fenwick, the local all-boys Catholic high school. Many of the Ascension kids who moved on to the public high school, including me, would attend CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) religious classes once a week, typically on a Wednesday evening at someone’s home.

A group of us became friends with a young priest assigned to our parish. He had been ordained in 1970 and Ascension was his first assignment. He was funny, thoughtful and kind. We liked him. I remained friends with him well into adulthood. My wife got to know him. We shared meals and stories. Although I have lost touch with him in recent years, he figures prominently in the story I am about to tell. (I am not naming him here because there is no reason to drag his name into this.)

A new priest, Fr. Richard Barry “Doc” Bartz, joined our parish during the summer of 1974 between my junior and senior years of high school. I didn’t really like Fr. Bartz, but I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why. A group of us would occasionally do something with the two young priests — bowling, lunch, skiing. I never heard of anything untoward happening nor did I witness anything.

My friends and I all went off to college.

I was home for winter break during my freshman year. It was early January 1977. I was 18, turning 19 in March. Bartz called on a Monday evening and said, “We’re going skiing tomorrow morning, coming back Wednesday night. Do you want to go?” I love to ski and didn’t get many opportunities in pan-flat Champaign, Illinois, home of the University of Illinois. I said yes, figuring there were a group of us going.

Bartz shows up to my house the next morning. I run out with my bag and he pulls away from the curb, heading for the highway. I ask, “What about the other guys?” “They can’t make it,” he replies. That was a tell. I should have told him to turn around, but, frankly, I wanted to go skiing. (I found out later that he had never asked anyone else to go.)

We’re staying overnight at the resort. (I think it was Alpine Valley in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, but I’m not certain.) After dinner, we head to the room (two beds) we’re sharing. I fall asleep.

In the middle of the night, I am awakened by someone fiddling with my shorts. The zipper has been pulled down and the front of my shorts has been opened. I wake up, startled. “What the fuck...”

Bartz immediately jumps up from beside my bed and goes to the thermostat on the wall, pretending he’s adjusting the temperature. “It’s hot in here,” he says. He climbs back into his own bed as if nothing happened.

Now I’m lying in bed wondering what I should do. I am silent. My heart is racing a thousand miles a second. I’m thinking, “If I kill this guy, how do I get out of that one? A guy killing a priest in a resort hotel room?”

I grab one of my ski poles which are standing in the corner next to my bed and place it next to me on top of the covers, figuring if he comes near me again, I’ll ram the ski pole right through his gut. I’ll deal with the fallout.

I lie awake for the rest of the night, staring at the ceiling.

In the morning, Bartz pretends nothing happened. He suggests we get breakfast and go skiing. I tell him I want to go home. Now. He offers a mild protest. “Now,” I say.

The ride home is dead silent. I pretend I’m asleep. He drops me off.

I immediately tell my mother what happened. She’s shocked. She says, “You should have called us!” When my dad gets home that evening, I tell him. He says, “You should have called me! I would’ve come and picked you up!”

(I’m one of the lucky ones. My parents believed me. Immediately. Many abuse survivors are not so lucky.)

I tell my parents, “Well, I figured I could handle it. I was ready to ram him with a ski pole if he tried anything else.”

We discuss what to do next. Do we report it? To who? What would we say? We finally agree that my parents should tell all of their friends in the parish to keep their boys away from Bartz. And I would definitely tell all of my friends. (I know it may sound strange now, but in those days, these assaults were typically not reported to either the church or the authorities. The belief was that they would be swept under the rug, anyway.)

The following Sunday, I’m in church seated in a pew with friends. Bartz makes his way down the aisle to where we are seated. He is, again, acting as if nothing happened. He leans in to say hello to us, and I tell him in a low whisper, “Get the fuck away from me or I’ll crack you right here in church.” My friends know I’m serious. He slinks away.

I never spoke to Bartz again, though I did run into him twice in later years, once in passing on a sidewalk on Chicago Avenue near Rush Street where I glared at him and spit on his shoe, and once at a gas station where we both happened to be filling our tanks. I stared at him. He looked terrified and and quickly looked down, avoiding my gaze.

At some point during 1990, I told my priest friend what had happened with Bartz in 1976. He was not surprised. He informed me that Bartz had additional cases in his file at the Archdiocese.

In February 1992, Cardinal Bernardin announced, to much fanfare, that the Archdiocese of Chicago would appoint a commission to look into clergy sexual abuse.

Bernardin was viewed as being among the most progressive and liberal leaders in the U.S. Catholic Church at the time.

“The introduction of a review board with lay people on it will change things,” Cardinal Bernardin said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “Up until now we have been dealing with these problems on an in-house basis.”

I had absolutely no faith that the findings of this commission would amount to anything positive for those who had been abused. There was simply too much at stake for the Church. Nevertheless, in June 1992, I had lunch with my priest friend and he told me that the Archdiocese was making a serious effort to look into past abuses. My friend asked me to make an appointment to talk with the person assigned to look into the cases.

I was skeptical. “Is it another priest?”

“Yes,” he replied, “but the Cardinal is serious about looking into these cases. You should go talk to this guy.” He gave me the priest’s contact information.

A couple of days later, I called the number and made an appointment to meet the investigating priest. The Archdiocese had set him up in an office in a dingy third-floor walk-up at 800 N. Clark Street, kiddy-corner from Holy Name Cathedral, the Cardinal’s home church. It was a short walk from my office.

On July 8, 1992, I met with Fr. Patrick O’Malley, then Vicar for Priests, in a poorly-lit, dusty, sparsely-furnished office. Fr. O’Malley was pasty-white, late middle-aged, with thinning white hair. We shook hands, sat down facing one another and he told me a little bit about his mission. Cardinal Bernardin had tasked him with speaking to people who claimed to have been abused by priests, get their stories and then bring these accusations to the priests in question. He told me how painful these events have been for the priests involved. He also said the Archdiocese was offering free counseling to those who had been abused.

It all sounded like a tragically bad idea to me — a thought that was quickly confirmed when, after telling O’Malley my story, his first question was:

“Had Father Bartz been drinking?”

“What?”

As if to explain, he said, “Well, you know, sometimes after someone’s been drinking…”

I was incredulous. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes people do things after they’ve been drinking that they— ”

I cut him off, my anger rising. “Look, Father, I like women. I like to have a few beers. Do you know what would happen to me if I tried to pull a woman’s pants down against her will while she was sleeping?”

Silence.

“I would go to jail. Do you know where Bartz would be if he were a Boy Scout leader who did what he did?”

Silence.

“He’d be in prison.”

I asked the priest if he had any credentials or any training in dealing with victims of sexual abuse.

“Are you a psychologist?”

“No.”

“Psychiatrist?”

“No.”

“Social worker?”

“No.”

“Do you have any training whatsoever in dealing with people who have been sexually abused?”

“No.”

End of interview. I was livid.

I told Father O’Malley that he was in way over his head. That, generally speaking, I was all right with my experience, but that many others were not all right, and that these experiences were likely the most traumatic events of their lives. I told him he was playing with fire. That people who had been abused had committed suicide or turned to alcohol or drugs or other self-destructive behavior to deal with their pain, and that his uninformed questioning could trigger events for which he was wholly unprepared and untrained and could put people at risk.

I concluded by telling him that the last thing someone who has been victimized by a priest wants to hear is how painful these events have been for the priest.

To illustrate just how tone-deaf the Vicar for Priests was about all of this, he sought to reassure me before I left by telling me that he would “confront Father Bartz with this information and let him know that he had to be alert to his problem and his tendencies.”

I went back to my office and called my priest friend and yelled at him for 20 minutes. To his credit, he listened patiently and when I was done venting, he said, “You should write all of this down and send it to the Cardinal.”

Which I did.

My three-page, single-spaced letter to the Cardinal dated July 11, 1992 detailed all that I thought was wrong with the process. I received a brief response from the Cardinal, dated July 15, promising a longer response once he returned from vacation. He included a copy of “The Cardinal’s Commission on Sexual Misconduct with Minors” report that had been published in June.

The Cardinal sent a more detailed response to my letter on August 18. He explained that Bartz had been removed from parish ministry and that he was “reassigned to a setting where he would not be in contact with young people.”

Where Bartz actually was remained a mystery.

[Note: When Bartz’s file was finally released by the Archdiocese in 2014, I found that the letter the Cardinal had sent me had been dictated by Father O’Malley (pp. 76–79 in Bartz’s file).]

I wrote a follow-up letter to the Cardinal on September 14, 1992 with a series of questions and comments on his Commission report, as well as specific questions about Bartz’s status. Cardinal Bernardin responded on October 22. In that letter, Bernardin wrote:

The pain of the victims is real and lasting. That is something I have come to appreciate more and more.

Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, as you will sadly see.

At the end of his letter, Bernardin suggested that we meet to discuss these matters. On November 25, 1992, I went to the Archdiocese offices on East Superior Street.

His office was what one would expect for a Cardinal of one of the largest dioceses in the country: dark wood, rich fabrics, warm light. We sat in beautifully upholstered chairs. He was an exceptionally soft-spoken man, a holy man in many regards. He had a bandage on his forehead, the result of walking into an unexpectedly open closet door in the middle of the night, he told me. We ended up talking for a little over an hour.

We discussed his new policy and what I found to be the most glaring omission in his report: that there was not a single mention of turning over all files on accused priests to relevant police departments and the state’s attorney’s office. He said that his new Review Board was the appropriate starting point for allegations of abuse.

I asked him where Bartz was now. I told him how I felt guilty for not reporting Bartz to the Church or to authorities in 1976 because I was certain Bartz had gone on to abuse others. (He did.) The Cardinal would only tell me that Bartz was not in parish ministry and that he was being monitored. I reminded the Cardinal that were he not a priest, Bartz would likely be in prison.

I asked the Cardinal why his report was limited to sexual misconduct with minors. I wasn’t, legally, a minor when Bartz attempted to molest me, but the impact and the criminal nature of Bartz’s actions were just as valid. He reiterated that his policy was a starting point and that protecting children was the number one priority.

I asked why priests with multiple abuse cases in their files, priests such as Bartz, were still being allowed to minister, given that page 47 of the Cardinal’s commission report states:

“If a priest is convicted of sexual abuse, has abused multiple victims, has committed multiple offenses, has abused a single victim over a long period of time, has become a public scandal, or is a poor risk for change, he should not be allowed to return to any kind of ministry.”

Hadn’t these priests, at the very least, forfeited the privilege of ministering in God’s name? And haven’t you ignored the policy set forth by your own commission?

And this is where the Cardinal transitioned into “forgiveness.”

He talked eloquently about forgiveness and the need to move on, just as he had in his response to the letter from the man who had been abused by James Hagan.

I reminded him that before forgiveness, there must be justice, and that without justice, there can be no forgiveness.

I walked out of the meeting hoping I had made an impact, that I had helped the Cardinal see these offenses through the eyes of those who had been assaulted, abused and molested.

When Bartz’s file was made public in 2014, I found I had made no impact at all.

The file reveals that almost exactly one year after our meeting, Bernardin was seeking to overrule the recommendations of his own Review Board, headed by Steven Sidlowski, and ease monitoring protocols on Bartz who was then working as a chaplain at Columbus Hospital in Chicago:

Fast forward to January 2002. The dam was bursting in Boston, thanks to the relentless work of the Spotlight investigative team at The Boston Globe. All across the country, survivors of priest sexual abuse were stepping forward with their horror stories. Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals were under fire. Lawsuits were being filed. For the Church hierarchy, there was nowhere to hide.

All of it made me physically sick. It brought the whole sordid experience back, from the incident itself, to the unsatisfying and, at times, infuriating interactions with O’Malley and Bernardin.

My priest friend called me in April and said, “This time, they’re really looking into it. A friend of mine is running it.”

“Is he a priest?”

“Yes.”

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“Please. Just give him a call.”

“Okay, I’ll call him. For you. But this is not a route I think I’m going to take.”

I hung up the phone. I sat at my desk with my head in my hands. There was simply no way I would subject myself to dealing with the Church again.

I called the priest in charge of this latest investigation. I asked him a list of questions, including where Bartz was now. He wouldn’t answer. I told him I was going to do this my way, and it didn’t involve the Church. He asked me what I was going to do. “I’m going to the Tribune,” I told him. He stammered and muttered and slammed the phone down.

The Chicago Tribune had been producing its own pieces on the Chicago Archdiocese that mirrored what was happening in Boston. I sent an email to a reporter at the Tribune who had been working the story, Todd Lighty. I told Todd my story and that I had correspondence with the late Cardinal Bernardin and notes from my meeting with the Cardinal. Todd responded quickly, asked me where my office was and when he could come talk to me.

Todd walked through the door later that afternoon. I told him my story, handed him my letters and the letters from the Cardinal, my original notes on the Cardinal’s commission report and other notes I had made in 1992. I added that there was one enduring mystery: Where was Bartz now?

I had tracked Bartz online to Columbus Hospital, but Columbus closed in September 2001 and now Bartz was nowhere to be found. Todd told me that it had been hard to locate a number of the accused priests as the Archdiocese wasn’t very forthcoming. We agreed to stay in touch.

Todd called a few days later and asked if I would like to add a quote to the story he was preparing about Bartz and two other priests. “That would be great,” I said, “but let me think about it. I’ll write something and email it to you.” He asked if I wanted my quote to be anonymous or if I wanted to use my name. “Use my name,” I said.

Before he hung up, he added, “Oh, I found Bartz. He’s a chaplain at Ravenswood Hospital.”

Ravenswood was owned at the time by Advocate Health Care, a large, regional health care organization. (Unknown to me at the time, Bartz was actually serving as chaplain for a separate entity within the hospital, the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch.) I looked up the email addresses of Advocate’s CEO and its head of communications and sent them a short note explaining that they had a chaplain on staff at Ravenswood with at last three documented cases of sexual abuse in his files at the Archdiocese.

Todd called me the next day and said that Bartz was gone from Ravenswood.

The story broke in the Tribune on June 20, 2002 under the headline:

2 at Desk Jobs on Archdiocese Abuse Case List

The story included this:

One of Bartz’s alleged victims, Pat Navin, said the archdiocese should have acted a decade ago when he first reported his complaint.

“He should have been removed then,” said Navin, who was 18 when Bartz allegedly abused him in 1976 during a Wisconsin ski trip. “He had another allegation involving a minor. He had multiple cases in his file. Hadn’t he at least forfeited his privileges to administer the sacraments?”

Four days later on June 24, Todd Lighty and Monica Davey bylined this piece in the Tribune:

Archdiocese Removes 8 Priests

Bartz and seven other priests, including his 1974 classmate, John Calicott, had been removed from ministry.

Bartz resigned from the priesthood.

When attorney Jeff Anderson finally succeeded in forcing the Archdiocese to release the files of Bartz and 35 other priests on November 6, 2014, Todd Lighty sent me a quick note alerting me to the release.

Todd and two other reporters filed a piece that day documenting victims’ responses to what was in the files. He asked if I would like to offer a comment for the piece after reading through Bartz’s stomach-churning file and I did:

Victims get look at archdiocese’s newly released priest sex abuse files

After the archdiocese made the documents public Thursday morning, Pat Navin pored over the 362 pages in the file of Richard Bartz. Navin was 18 when Bartz allegedly abused him in 1976 during a Wisconsin ski trip. At the time, Bartz was associate pastor at Ascension Catholic Church in Oak Park.

Bartz was removed from public ministry and resigned as a priest in 2002. He could not be reached for comment.

“What is astounding about the file, in its entirety, is the amount of concern for the priest and the lack of concern for the victims,” said Navin, 57. “Not surprising, really, but a sad commentary on the priorities of the church hierarchy. … Reading this file was sickening. I feel physically ill.

“I never wanted to sue these people. … But now I’m regretting my decision not to sue them. The only thing they seem to have understood from the very beginning is losing money.”

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the story of clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Concern for the priest — and for the institution of the Church — were always paramount. Concern for those who were abused was a distant third. In most instances, survivors rated nary a mention in these files, save for the sanitized and summarized descriptions of abuse and assault, or in the plaudits to those who kept these criminal acts from authorities.