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"A Q&amp;amp;A with Thomas Roberts, a survivor of the Catholic Church\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe past few weeks, news coming from Rome has illuminated something many have suspected for awhile: that the Catholic Church\u2014its management, its priests, its priorities\u2014are in deep, deep crisis. We&amp;amp;#x2019;ve heard a lot from Vatican officials. Now hear from someone who was affected firsthand.\n\nAt the age of 14, Thomas Roberts was sexually abused by Father Jerome Toohey, a popular, respected priest who was chaplain of Roberts's prestigious Maryland Catholic high school, Calvert Hall. The abuse would go on until Roberts graduated.\n\nHere, Roberts, a former CNN anchor, speaks candidly about his struggles with the abuse, how his life has changed since taking his abuser to court, and what it would take for the Catholic Church to made amends.\n\nA few weeks ago on Larry King you were part of a roundtable on the Catholic Church. Before he began his rant on priests being attracted to post-pubescent victims and therefore not being pedophiles, Bill Donohue from the Catholic League tried to make a pretty strong connection between being gay and being a predator. He basically said what they needed to do to solve the problem was hunt down all of the gay priests.\n\n That statement was inflammatory and just not accurate. The situation with pedophilia and the Church is not a heterosexual or homosexual problem; it&amp;amp;#x2019;s a criminal problem. A collar shouldn&amp;amp;#x2019;t protect a priest, and it certainly shouldn&amp;amp;#x2019;t protect criminal behavior. For Bill to try to fearmonger and recite facts that aren&amp;amp;#x2019;t relevant or true is just as disturbing.\n\nOne of the priests on the panel also mentioned that there are efforts to train folks in seminary to recognize potential predators. Do you think if there had been more measures like that at Calvert Hall that it would&amp;amp;#x2019;ve made a difference? Were there signs people could&amp;amp;#x2019;ve recognized?\n\n If they ever had suspicions of anything going on, I don't think they would have felt confident enough to do anything about it. Father Toohey's authority within the school really gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted. Growing up Catholic, priests are celebrities. These are people who are feared, revered, and respected.\n\nAbout three years after Toohey pled guilty in court, he was defrocked by Pope Benedict. How did you feel when that finally happened? \n\n For me, the closure I received was in court with his admission of guilt. But when someone admits to committing a crime and goes to jail and serves their time, I&amp;amp;#x2019;d think the Vatican would take a more rubber-stamp approach.\n\nWhat would you ask Pope Benedict if you had a chance to sit down with him?\n\n I think I would ask why a man in his position doesn&amp;amp;#x2019;t feel a greater sense of compassion for the victims\u2026why he doesn&amp;amp;#x2019;t just be like, The buck stops here. This is unacceptable.  People are watching and do care about how [the Church] reacts, so I&amp;amp;#x2019;d think they&amp;amp;#x2019;d want to act with more swift justice so they can provide the confidence people need to still want to be Catholic.\n\nAre you still Catholic?\n\n I do still consider myself to be Catholic.\n\nEven after everything? \n\n Yeah, I still consider myself Catholic, but I&amp;amp;#x2019;m not practicing. I'm still a guy of faith. I think that Catholics are very loving and very faith-oriented.\n\nOne of many excuses the Vatican gave in the case of the priest who molested 200 deaf boys was that the incidents exceeded the church's statute of limitations. As someone who waited almost 20 years to come forward, how do you feel about this? Were you in denial?\n\n Oh, I was in complete denial. I considered myself to be a strong and intelligent person, and to place yourself in the \"victim\" category is very hard to do. I thought that I had been able to deal with what life had dealt me. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I&amp;amp;#x2019;m happy that I was able to confront these demons that had been chasing me for a really long time and extinguish them.\n\nSo you came out to your family when you were 27. Later, when you were 33 you began opening up about the abuse. Some people see a causal relationship between abuse and sexuality. Did you worry that people would try and draw those lines?\n\n For me these are two very separate, distinct issues, and I don&amp;amp;#x2019;t want them to ever be confused. No one ever asks a woman who was abused as a young girl if she grew up and decided she was straight. I had the complete love and support of my family though, and that was most important thing.\n\nIn a special you did for CNN, you said that the abuse had left you &amp;amp;#x201C;emotionally frozen.&amp;amp;#x201D; How did finally telling people affect your relationships?\n\n Well, my partner of the last ten years is the first person I ever told about it. It had always been a big, scary secret, and I think it allowed me to be more vulnerable and honest in that relationship. We walked through all of this together.\n\nThe other day in Maureen Dowd's New York Times column, her brother suggested that the pedophilia issue in the Catholic Church had largely to do with the celibacy vow\u2014that it draws &amp;amp;#x201C;men confused about their sexuality who put our children in harm&amp;amp;#x2019;s way.&amp;amp;#x201D; Do you think that's true?\n\n I don't really know why the problem exists. People who take on a role as a leader within the Church though would be much more human and approachable if they were allowed to have a loved one, a partner, someone to share their life with, so that they can actually relate to people on a human level. We&amp;amp;#x2019;ve put many priests on pedestals. They&amp;amp;#x2019;re supposed to be infallible, and it&amp;amp;#x2019;s simply not true. They&amp;amp;#x2019;re just human beings."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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