30 Mar 2011

Jesuit leaders concealed 40 years of warnings about pedophile priest who became spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa





New York Times - March 28, 2011

Suit Says Jesuits Ignored Warnings About Priest

By ERIK ECKHOLM


Jesuit leaders in Chicago largely ignored or kept secret numerous reports, spanning four decades, that a prominent priest was sexually abusing teenage boys, lawyers for victims charged on Monday in a motion for punitive damages in a Chicago court.

Included in the motion were more than 65 recently obtained church documents and depositions that, the lawyers said, demonstrated “a reckless disregard for the safety of others in the face of repeated reports of sexual misconduct” on the part of Chicago Jesuit leaders.

The former priest, Donald J. McGuire, now 80, was convicted on several counts of sex abuse in state and federal courts in 2006 and 2008, and is serving a 25-year federal sentence.

The newly public documents date from the early 1960s, when a concerned Austrian priest, in imperfect English, first observed in a letter to Chicago Jesuits that Father McGuire, newly ordained and studying in Europe, had “much relations with several boys.” The reports extend into the last decade, when Father McGuire reportedly ignored admonitions to stop traveling with young assistants, molesting one as late as 2003, as law enforcement was closing in. The legal motion argues that Father McGuire’s superiors in Chicago turned “a blind eye to his criminal actions.”

The current case started with a civil suit brought by six men who say they were victims. Three have since settled with the Jesuits, but three others, identified as John Doe 117, John Doe 118 and John Doe 129, are still pursuing the suit against the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus and Mr. McGuire. Most of the newly released documents were obtained in the discovery process for the suit: letters and memos the church was required to produce from its files, and transcripts of depositions.

The motion filed on Monday asks the Cook County Circuit Court to take the unusual step of considering additional, punitive damages, given what the motion says is the evidence of a long trail of credible warnings about the priest’s behavior and ineffective responses by church officials.

Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, a victim advocacy group that has long monitored the church’s response to sexual abuse charges, said that the series of warnings given to Jesuit leaders by parents and fellow priests was unusually long and clear.

“I have never seen such detailed and frequent notice received by the priest’s superiors, so many ‘directives’ regarding the priest’s future behavior, and so much evidence presented to his superiors that those directives were being violated, without the priest being removed from ministry,” Mr. McKiernan said.

His group has posted a history of the case and many of the key documents.

Mariah E. Moran, a lawyer for the Chicago Province, said she could not comment on the motion because she had not had a chance to study it, and a spokesman for the province did not respond to requests for comment. In depositions and settlement meetings over the last three years, senior Jesuit officials have said that until recent years they had not heard firm-enough evidence of sexual abuse to justify stronger action against Father McGuire.

Last week, the Jesuits’ Oregon Province agreed to pay $166 million to hundreds of victims of sexual abuse, which occurred decades ago at remote Indian boarding schools. The two cases shed rare light on how religious orders have dealt with charges of sexual abuse, as opposed to the Catholic dioceses and bishops at the center of most recent scandals. The Jesuits are the world’s largest Roman Catholic religious order.

The motion filed on Monday charges that the church misled prosecutors in 2006, with its lawyers claiming that they had little information about the priest — despite the lengthy record of complaints.

The case has been acutely troublesome for the Jesuits, an order known for its scholarship and its elite high schools and universities. Father McGuire was by all accounts a mesmerizing teacher, and after he was barred by some Jesuit schools in the 1960s and 1970s for suspicious behavior, including having students share his bedroom, he went on to became a popular leader of eight-day spiritual retreats around the country and the world.

For about two decades, starting in the early 1980s, he was a spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa, who put him in charge of retreats for the nuns in her worldwide order, Missionaries of Charity. Several times each year, in India, the United States, Russia and other countries, he led retreats for the sisters.

In these travels he routinely took along a teenage boy as an assistant, saying he needed help administering his diabetes treatment. In complaints voiced by some parents and priests at the time, and in later depositions, those assistants said their duties often included sleeping in the same bed as Father McGuire, showering and reading pornography together, providing intimate massages and watching him masturbate.

The Jesuits have their own administrative structure, with a leader in Rome and regional provinces in the United States, although they also operate with permission from local bishops.

On his return from Europe in the 1960s, Father McGuire was assigned to live and teach at Loyola Academy, a high school in Wilmette, Ill. Two boys stayed with him in his room for about two years each, where he constantly abused them, according to the 2006 trial.

In 1969 the second of those boys, then 15, ran away and described the abuse to his parish priest, who contacted the Jesuit president of the academy. The school responded by removing Father McGuire, but, according to a letter released on Monday, publicly described his departure as a “sabbatical.”

In 1991, in another of the many warnings revealed on Monday, the director of a retreat house in California reported to the Chicago Province’s leader that Father McGuire was traveling with a teenage boy from Alaska and sharing a bed with him, and that the boy’s mother had expressed her concern that “her son has in some way changed.”

That year, the Chicago Province’s leader, the Rev. Robert A. Wild, imposed the first set of “guidelines” on Father McGuire. In written instructions he said: “I ask that you not travel on any overnight trip with any boy or girl under the age of 18 and preferably even under the age of 21.” But Father McGuire was left to police himself, and Father Wild said in a 2009 deposition that he had regarded the case as “a serious matter” but also “ambiguous.”

The province sent Father McGuire in 1993 for a psychiatric examination and six months at a treatment center — but in the week before he was to report for the evaluation, he was allowed to conduct a retreat in Phoenix, where he molested another boy, the documents indicate.

As late as 1998, the new documents show, the Chicago provincial wrote a letter of “good standing” for Father McGuire to allow him to minister in a diocese, stating that “there is nothing to our knowledge in his background which would restrict any ministry with minors.”

As the reports of abuse accumulated, the Chicago leaders issued one set of restrictions after another on Father McGuire, finally, in 2002, saying he could minister only to nuns in the Chicago region. But none of these directives were enforced, the court motion asserts.

Father McGuire was formally removed from the priesthood in February 2008 after a conviction in Wisconsin and after a federal indictment had been issued in Illinois.


This article was found at:



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13 comments:

  1. Perry Bulwer13 January 2012 at 14:56

    Dark times with nuns of Mother Teresa: a memoir

    National Post - Charles Lewis

    There’s an episode in Mary Johnson’s An Unquenchable Thirst that seems to epitomize the painful years she spent in Mother Teresa’s religious order.

    It is just one of dozens of uncomfortable moments the former nun recalls as a member of the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Charity, but it exemplifies the degree to which she saw life around her as one of repression, repercussions and guilt — the things that drove her out of the order in 1997.

    At one of the order’s homes in Rome, a supervisor, Sister Dolorosa, began shouting in her sleep, “I need a man! I need a man!”

    The sister was faithful to her vows, but the evidence of her subconscious desire sent shock waves through the other nuns.

    Sister Dolorosa’s words “reverberated in my brain, my gut, my bones,” Ms. Johnson writes.

    One sister said, “It’s only normal. We are all human.”

    “But she’s our mistress,” said another. “We’re supposed to learn from her.”

    When Sister Dolorosa found out what she had said, she hid in shame from the others.

    Ms. Johnson, who was in Toronto this week to promote An Unquenchable Thirst, said no one reading her book should think life in the Missionaries of Charity was typical of that in other women’s religious orders.

    Other orders, she said, allow their members to have some semblance of a normal life: to engage with friends outside; to keep up with current events; and to stay in close contact with their families.

    “We weren’t even allowed to be friends with each other,” she said. “All our contacts were cut off.”
    ...

    Still, reading it is hard to fathom why anyone who would have lasted 20 years. But Ms. Johnson explained the conviction you have been called by God to do something is far stronger than anything that could be imagined in a secular pursuit.

    “We’d always been told you are here because God has called you, so the worst thing you could do is leave.”

    During her time with the sisters she broke her vows with chastity with another nun and later with a priest. She believes now if the order allowed more humane relationships she would never have broken her vows.

    “I think if I hadn’t been that lonely it would have been a whole lot easier to keep my vows. I’m not making excuses. I know I violated my vows and that was something very complicated for me and that I felt guilty about for a very long time. But at the same time I found myself unable to resist having a relationship.”

    The book tells of superiors who became drunk with power, whose normal mode of communication was to shout and invent irrational accusations against those below them.

    Because arguing back was considered a sin against humility, even the most irrational charges could not be countered properly for fear of appearing to be proud or arrogant. Self-flagellation with a rope or a chain was used as a means to conquer pride.

    “As I lived it out, I realized that sort of radical draw also brought these drawbacks where people didn’t have any way of pursuing any form of pleasure or relaxation,” she said.

    “The food was bad, living conditions were difficult, and we didn’t mind that, because we had signed up for that. But what happens is some of the people get their only pleasure in the exercise of power. And this part of what happened in the Missionaries of Charity.”

    read full article at:

    http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/09/23/dark-times-with-nuns-of-mother-teresa-a-memoir/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perry Bulwer13 January 2012 at 14:57

    Tainted Saint: Mother Teresa Defended Pedophile Priest

    By Peter Jamison, San Francisco Weekly January 11 2012

    The death of journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens last month gave those familiar with his work a chance to revisit one of his more controversial subjects: the Albanian nun Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known to the world as Mother Teresa. In his 1997 book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens argued that the "Saint of Calcutta," who founded and headed the international Missionaries of Charity order, enjoyed undeserved esteem.

    Despite her humanitarian reputation and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa had set up a worldwide system of "homes for the dying" that routinely failed to provide adequate care to patients, Hitchens argued — an appraisal shared by The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Mother Teresa also associated with, and took large sums of money from, disreputable figures such as American savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating and the dictatorial Duvalier family of Haiti.

    Notwithstanding these black marks on an otherwise sterling reputation, Mother Teresa — who died in 1997 and is now on the fast track to a formal proclamation of sainthood by the Vatican — was never known to have been touched by the scandal that would rock the Roman Catholic Church in the decade after her death: the systematic protection of child-molesting priests by church officials.

    Yet documents obtained by SF Weekly suggest that Mother Teresa knew one of her favorite priests was removed from ministry for sexually abusing a Bay Area boy in 1993, and that she nevertheless urged his bosses to return him to work as soon as possible. The priest resumed active ministry, as well as his predatory habits. Eight additional complaints were lodged against him in the coming years by various families, leading to his eventual arrest on sex-abuse charges in 2005.

    The priest was Donald McGuire, a former Jesuit who has been convicted of molesting boys in federal and state courts and is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence. McGuire, now 81 years old, taught at the University of San Francisco in the late 1970s, and held frequent spiritual retreats for families in San Francisco and Walnut Creek throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He also ministered extensively to the Missionaries of Charity during that time.

    In a 1994 letter to McGuire's Jesuit superior in Chicago, it appears that Mother Teresa acknowledged she had learned of the "sad events which took [McGuire] from his priestly ministry these past seven months," and that McGuire "admitted imprudence in his behavior," but she wished to see him put back on the job. The letter was written after McGuire had been sent to a psychiatric hospital following an abuse complaint to the Jesuits by a family in Walnut Creek.

    "I understand how grave is the scandal touching the priesthood in the U.S.A. and how careful we must be to guard the purity and reputation of that priesthood," the letter states. "I must say, however, that I have confidence and trust in Fr. McGuire and wish to see his vital ministry resume as soon as possible."

    The one-page letter comes from thousands of pages of church records that have been shared with plaintiffs' attorneys in ongoing litigation against the Jesuits involving McGuire. (The documents were also shared with prosecutors who worked on his criminal cases.) It is printed on Missionaries of Charity letterhead but is unsigned, and thus cannot be verified absolutely as having been written by Mother Teresa. Officials in the Missionaries of Charity and the Jesuits did not respond to requests for comment on its provenance.

    continued in next comment:

    http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-01-11/news/mother-teresa-catholic-church-john-hardon-donald-mcguire-child-abuse-jesuits/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Perry Bulwer13 January 2012 at 14:57

    continued from previous comment:

    Yet statements throughout the letter point to Mother Teresa as the author. The writer speaks of "my communities throughout the world" and refers by name to Mother Teresa's four top deputies, calling them "my four assistants." Rev. Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit and former University of San Francisco professor who knew Mother Teresa, said the reference to her assistants is an "authentic" aspect of the letter.

    The letter could have an impact on the near-complete process of canonizing Mother Teresa. In 2003 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II, the penultimate step to full sainthood.

    "What we see here is the same thing we see over and over in regard to the [priest pedophilia] scandal — the complete lack of empathy for, or interest in, possible victims of these accused priests," said Anne Rice, the bestselling author of novels including Interview with the Vampire and a former Catholic who has been outspoken in her criticism of the church's handling of the sex-abuse scandal. "In this letter the concern is for the reputation of the priesthood. This is as disappointing as it is shocking."

    Other documents that have emerged in the criminal and civil cases involving McGuire could affect the sainthood prospects of another deceased religious leader eyed by the Vatican for sainthood. Among the newly uncovered church records are letters by Rev. John Hardon, a Jesuit who also worked extensively with Mother Teresa and died in 2000. He collaborated with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a landmark summation of contemporary church doctrine. In 2005, the Vatican opened a formal inquiry into whether Hardon should be made a saint.

    But statements by Hardon in his letters could complicate that process. The documents reveal McGuire admitted to Hardon that he was taking showers with the teenage boy from Walnut Creek whose complaint led to McGuire's psychiatric treatment. He also acknowledged soliciting body massages from the boy and letting him read pornography in the room they shared on trips together.

    Despite these admissions, Hardon concluded that his fellow Jesuit's actions were "objectively defensible," albeit "highly imprudent," and told McGuire's bosses that he "should be prudently allowed to engage in priestly ministry."

    The postulators, or Vatican-appointed researchers and advocates for sainthood, assigned to investigate Mother Teresa and Hardon did not respond to repeated requestsfor comment.

    While it is unclear exactly what impact the new documents will have on the evaluation of both figures for sainthood, the evidence of involvement by two prominent and internationally respected Catholics in the McGuire sex-abuse scandal is likely to cause consternation among critics of the church's handling of predator priests. The situation is aggravated since McGuire went on to abuse more children after suggestions to return him to ministry were heeded.

    "We're talking about extremely powerful people who could have gotten Father McGuire off the streets in 1994," said Patrick Wall, a lawyer and former Benedictine monk who performs investigations on behalf of abuse victims suing the Catholic Church. "I'm thinking of all those post-'94 kids who could have been saved."

    [...]

    read the rest of the article at:

    http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-01-11/news/mother-teresa-catholic-church-john-hardon-donald-mcguire-child-abuse-jesuits/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Perry Bulwer13 January 2012 at 15:04

    The Jesuits and Donald McGuire SJ - A Management History

    The website BishopAccountability.org provides a user-friendly version of the most significant document on religious orders yet to emerge from the Catholic abuse crisis. It is a motion, filed on March 28, 2011 in two Chicago court cases, that analyses and documents in shocking detail the Jesuits' 50-year history of concealing and enabling sexual abuse by Donald McGuire SJ – scholar, retreat leader, high school teacher, and confessor to Mother Teresa and the nuns of her international order.

    The Jesuits are the largest Catholic religious order in the world, and their high schools and universities in the United States are elite institutions in the country's educational system. They have a massive missionary presence in the developing world, and especially since Vatican II and the demise of confession, their Ignatian spirituality has been a dominant approach in Catholic spiritual direction and retreats. The Donald McGuire case offers insight into abuse within Jesuit education and spiritual practice, and is a highly significant window into the way abuse cases are managed within the system of Jesuit provinces. It also reveals the lengths to which the provincials of the order will go to defend the Jesuit brand and the fund-raising that depends on it.

    The 180 pages of Jesuit documents that accompany this motion also offer unique insight into abuse within the far-flung orthodox Catholic community, providing a case history of vulnerability and resourcefulness among devout Catholics. McGuire is a shocking example of the ways in which confession and spiritual practice can be perverted. His method of obtaining total control over his victims – as high-school boarders, live-in-assistants during his retreats, even in one case as a ward with McGuire as guardian – show the dark side of a strong Jesuit culture, whose leaders showed consistent and thorough neglect of the parents and victims who approached them over the years.

    In the Catholic abuse crisis, attention has focused on the perpetrator priests and to some extent on the bishops who tolerated the abuse and their staffs. But sexual abuse in the religious orders, which often concentrated their efforts on children in schools, has not received as much attention. As the largest religious order in the United States, numbering 2,795 priests, brothers, and scholastics in 2010, the Jesuits have access to minors in their high schools, their colleges and universities, their parish ministries, and their domestic missionary work among Native Americans in Alaska and the West. The results have sometimes been horrifying for the children involved.

    BishopAccountability.org has been able to identify 127 Jesuit clerics in the United States who have been accused of sexually abusing minors. That number is certainly a fraction of the true total. The management practices and arrogant disregard revealed in these McGuire documents are part of the reason a full account has not been given.

    See:

    http://www.bishop-accountability.org/docs/jesuits/McGuire_Donald/Punitive_Damages_Motion/

    ReplyDelete
  5. Perry Bulwer28 February 2024 at 14:00

    ‘Being a nun was the great love story of my life’: Catherine Coldstream on why she joined – then fled – a convent

    by Kate Kellaway, The Guardian February 25, 2024

    Why would a privileged, educated 27-year-old turn her back on life to join a silent order of nuns in remote Northumberland? Catherine Coldstream on a spiritual journey that turned into an abusive nightmare she had to escape

    Catherine Coldstream seems, on the face of it, an unlikely person to have become a nun. She grew up in a bohemian household in north London, daughter of the distinguished painter William Coldstream, who was, for 26 years, head of the Slade School of Fine Art. And when we meet on a February afternoon in Oxford, in the university rooms of a friend of hers, it is easy to picture her in a younger version, because she still, in a sense, resembles an arty north Londoner.

    In her early 60s now, she has a keen, bright, boyish face, glasses with fashionable blue frames and neat beige boots with little heels. Her blouse is quirkily patterned with capering bears and antique gramophones. She comes across as a free spirit, which makes it all the more unfathomable that in 1989, aged 27, she should have joined Akenside Priory (not its real name) in Northumberland and remained there for more than a decade. In addition, she is so animated that it seems inexplicably punitive that she should have chosen to join a silent Carmelite order where conversation was permitted only once a day, confidences frowned upon and enthusiasm discouraged. I admire her blouse. “Do you like it?” she exclaims, delighted. What is missing in her is any obstructive piety. I feel she is someone I could have been friends with for years – I am no longer sure who it was I expected to meet.

    The overarching question, though, still holds: how did Coldstream – who spent her youth reading Russian novels, lived in Paris, worked for a modern music publisher, fell in love with “unsuitable propositions in dark polo necks” and discussed Sartre and Stockhausen in French – turn into someone willing to sacrifice her life to God? It is a question answered in her beautifully written memoir, Cloistered, which one reads with fascination, empathy and mounting alarm. The book surprises because, while it describes stillness, silence and contemplation, it evolves into a spiritual thriller in which the experience of being a nun unravels into a nightmare as the monastery’s internal politics sour. An unseemly power struggle ensues, a schism between two prioresses and their followers. Good behaviour turns bad and Coldstream, violently turned upon and against, eventually takes flight. Unsparingly, she asks herself many of the questions we might pose ourselves. But what needs emphasising – in case I have given any misleading impression of her as fickle – is that when she flees the monastery, she is not in flight from God. This is a devotional memoir about two fathers, the heavenly one and her own.

    She describes her childhood as “very dysfunctional”. Her mother, Monica, was “a beauty”, an actor and singer who turned up in her father’s life as his model. Her father was 28 years older and this was his second marriage. He and Monica had three children (he had older children from a first marriage). But her parents were soon to prove incompatible. “We grew up in a beautiful Georgian home in Canonbury – tall and stucco-fronted. It would be seen as terribly posh and gentrified now but it was shabby then. There were no carpets but it was airy and there were lovely wooden floors and rugs.” It was a house “bursting with character and bristling with tension”.

    continued below

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  6. Perry Bulwer28 February 2024 at 14:01

    As a child, she thought of her mother as a “frightening, volatile person we needed to please and cheer up and comfort all the time. I had to manage her moods. My father felt very bad that his first marriage didn’t last, he wanted another go at family life.” Her parents had “separate bedrooms and led separate lives”. Catherine, the eldest child, became the peace-maker.

    She describes her father as “adorable – everyone loved him. He was charming and funny. He was not an argumentative person – he was conciliatory. My mother probably resented that he got recognition as a painter while she was at the kitchen sink – and I understand that.” Monica seems, however, not to have lingered at the kitchen sink. She was often away on tour and permanently on the edge of career breakthroughs. Aunt Winnie, her father’s sister, was imported to look after the children. A wearer of cornflower-blue cardigans, Winnie is affectionately described in the memoir and seems to have been an influence because, although not a Catholic, she was an “incredibly devout” Protestant, modelling the consolations of religion. And one can imagine how religion for Coldstream must have come to equal security.

    In the memoir, she alludes to her mother having childhood traumas and refers, without elaboration, to “parental abandonment”. What happened? “It was monstrous – she was given away by her own mother to an orphanage when she was only two, which is worse psychologically than being given away as a baby because you would feel the rejection. I don’t think she ever got over that.” Coldstream spent the last year of her mother’s life “very close” to her but her mother had become “very difficult to read”. She hoped to have conversations that made sense of their past but: “My mother couldn’t wrestle with her inner world, it was too painful.”

    I suggest that her mother did not know how to be a mother and Coldstream agrees. She evidently lived her life through beauty – even in extreme old age, she would be reaching for her scarlet “lippy”. The orphanage into which her mother was cast had been a Catholic one – and Coldstream sometimes wonders about the significance of that for her own story. How did her mother react to her converting to Catholicism? She said: “You do know it is strict, don’t you?” That sounds slightly indifferent I suggest, as if she were not interested in what you were doing. “She wasn’t,” Coldstream replies.

    Her father moved out of the family home three years before he died. “That was a terrible time. He lived with older relatives and was in the neurological ward at UCL for months and ended up in a home. There had been a decline and he had got into a depression – we had already, in a sense, lost our wonderful, lively, charismatic Dad.” She was 24 when he died and it was at her father’s deathbed that she had a visitation that would change the course of her life: “I’ll never forget it. When I got to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital in Queen’s Square, I went up to the top floor where there was a chapel where they put people when they’ve died. A nice nurse opened the door. I hardly dared look down. Seeing my father’s vacant body was a huge jolt. I thought: he’s not there any more, it’s not him. And then he was just present in the room. It was a classic religious experience, there was a massive sense of presence which I associated with him but I immediately started praying the Our Father and the experience became transcendent, a godly thing.” Before her father’s death, she had experienced “no glimmers of God” except in music (she sang in a choir, played the viola) but she took this new faith with her when she left the chapel. “It’s never gone away,” she says.

    continued below

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  7. Perry Bulwer28 February 2024 at 14:02

    What would her father have made of the decision to become a nun? “I used to ask myself that when I was inside,” she says and tears come to her eyes. “I got this sense he was somehow smiling down on me. He’d have been pleased to see me dedicating myself to something in a demanding way – the discipline of The Life was good for me because I was very highly strung and emotional and devastated after he died and the family disintegrated.” She conveys, in the memoir, the austere rapture of the place. She fell in love with the beauty of the grounds, the patchwork fields, the mere, the birdsong – it was a setting for a romantic poet. And her cell was filled with light: “There was tremendous beauty in this shifting brightness,” she writes. At the start, her expectation seems to have been that the nuns would be saintly types. But this gets challenged right away. “Jen” [not her real name], the novice who joins at the same time as Coldstream, is instantly jarring. In a Jungle Book top, she joshes raucously about how she and Coldstream are going to be the “terrible twins”. It is an early warning of unsisterly sisters ahead – or at least not soulmates under the same roof.

    Early on, did she harbour any doubts or fears about her calling? “Only that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to bear it because of the sheer endurance involved. The other fear was that they would not accept me because, at every stage, you have to be voted through.” Her story makes one wonder: what is the ideal temperament for a nun? “You need to be robust because The Life can be bruising. The people who survived best were grounded, practical, with a little worldliness. I was utterly idealistic in the aftermath of my father’s death and yearned for too much reclusion.”

    I enquire about the oddity of being cooped up with other women while not being permitted to be on close terms with any of them. How did she subdue her curiosity? “I had to work hard at it. Part of the ethos was that you silenced your mind. Your memory had to be cleansed, put aside. You were not supposed to have judgment about your sisters. You got to know one another in a very surface way.” Coldstream was equipped, she feels, for the “extremity of solitude in the cell” having developed “self-reliance from my dysfunctional background”. She embraced the “not leaning on others” because it “fuelled my drive for prayer. I went back to prayer with that great need for God, which opens you up to a deep experience that is incredible and has changed who I am. I have a strong sense of being loved by God. That’s what contemplative prayer is.”

    As she is talking, it occurs to me that the earlier description of her childhood home as “bursting with character and bristling with tensions” could equally be applied to Akenside Priory. And Coldstream is, in the book’s most horrifying chapter, beaten by one of the prioresses. She is abused for being the devoted person she is and for expressing her opinion, when asked, about the community’s need for reform. Would she now say that “Irene”, the prioress aggressor – supposedly a progressive – had become unhinged? “Irene was pushed too far. She assumed everyone would go with her and there was a mutiny. She became a jelly and spineless and started trying to please everyone. I think she lost her moral compass… I’ve never known why she beat me. We didn’t have conversations about it.” And, unexpectedly, Coldstream now returns to the question of what her father would have made of her story, admitting that he would have been “horrified later on when I was having suicidal thoughts. He’d have said: ‘Get out.’”

    continued below

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  8. Perry Bulwer28 February 2024 at 14:04

    For anyone with a fragile psyche, the severity of The Life could prove a tipping point: “A lot of people were sitting on mental disorders. There were a lot of breakdowns but you often didn’t know until it had gone too far. It was a hothouse and tensions festered. For everybody, there was a danger of breakdown. It was not a balanced life.” What’s more, emotions were not confined to the monastery’s occupants. A fraught chapter describes the fateful day upon which Coldstream, after five-and-a half years of training, took her vows at a point where she had reason to doubt the wisdom of going ahead. Friends and family turned up to witness the ceremony and she was shocked to see her sister, Frankie, a reserved person who had seemed “nonchalant” about her decision to become a nun, “in torrents of tears along with everybody else I knew – they all seemed to be crying”.

    She had no idea her sister would react this way. They were used to speaking four times a year in the formal setting of the parlour “on either side of a grille”. It was only later that Frankie was able to explain how, when she entered the chapel, there had been “piles of what looked like funeral leaflets. The symbolism of taking vows is that you move from a white veil to a black to show you have died to the world.” To her sister, it felt like a funeral.

    “I’ve had a huge amount to process over the past 20 years,” Coldstream reflects. She has been writing about her experiences, on and off, ever since. “For the first few years, I was thinking about it all the time.” A first draft, straight out of the cloister, in biro and on A4, was “cathartic”. Then she had an attempt at turning her experiences into a novel. It has been a “relief” to complete the memoir. Although it took her three years to write, it is only now that it is being published that she feels there can be a “letting go”.

    The return to “ordinary” life seems to have been at once a blessing and a challenge: “The thing I found most difficult was the noise. I love the quiet. The Life makes you hypersensitive – it makes you a very good listener to birdsong.” She found “the mess, dirt and feeling of being in a chaotic place” difficult. “I still miss things like knowing exactly which drawer my shoe-cleaning kit is in – in the monastery, everything had its place and you hardly owned anything, it was an ordered life. Part of me likes that.” But she loves no longer having to get up with the lark and the “lie-ins” and the “long baths”.

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  9. Perry Bulwer28 February 2024 at 14:05

    The amount of choice, though, remains problematic – including her decisions about what to wear – and after leaving the monastery she took matters into her own hands: “I found a huge bit of material in the loft at Akenside which I dyed with Dylon and made myself a green habit. I had the idea that I was going to go to a remote bit of France and start a new community there.” That sounds wonderfully eccentric, I say. What stopped her? She says she went to Oxford and took a degree in theology instead.

    She explains that although the “feeling of freedom” has been a “great relief”, it has been mixed with misgivings because her identity is tied up with having being a nun. And there was guilt too: “It was very painful – for a long time, I felt I’d made a huge mistake but couldn’t go back because of those people who had made me feel so rejected.” She maintains that her “faith in the institutional side of religion has taken a massive denting but I make a distinction between my faith in the Catholic religion and my faith in God. The worst transition was when I felt he was angry with me and I was going to be punished. That was during my last few years inside when I was feeling conflicted over the vows. I started losing the joy, started to feel I was failing in my vocation.”

    Today, Akenside Priory still exists but as a “much reduced group of women trying to live the Carmelite life together. Many of the sisters I knew have died and quite a few have left since my time. The remnant now lives in a new, purpose-built monastery – they sold the old house years ago.” And has there ever been any apology for their mistreatment of her? “Nothing like that seems to have been offered. No acknowledgment of dysfunction or harm. I used to talk a bit with ‘Fr Gregory’ (a benign but infrequent visitor at Akenside) about the old days but he just used to say things like ‘We’re only human’ and ‘That was a long time ago’… a typical response in the Catholic church.”

    Sometimes, she wonders about a parallel universe in which she might have opted to stay on in Paris: “I’d be completely naturalised by now and three times divorced,” she laughs. Nowadays, she is married, lives in east Oxford, sings in a choir and is working on a family memoir – and she marvels at a life in which she has found “happiness in a domesticated relationship”. But does she feel any regret for the way her youth vanished and for those years out of the slipstream? “Absolutely none. It’s the great love story of my life. It was the great event.” And we walk out of the college together and continue to chat on the street corner until she pulls on a peaked cap and, like a blameless version of the artful dodger, vanishes from sight.

    Cloistered: My Years As a Nun by Catherine Coldstream is published by Chatto & Windus

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/25/catherine-coldstream-cloistered-my-years-as-a-nun-god-interview

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  10. Perry Bulwer30 March 2024 at 14:11

    Convent was run like a cult

    by Sarah Meyrick, Church Times March 28, 2024

    Catherine Coldstream found joy when she joined a Carmelite order, but also abuse, she tells Sarah Meyrick

    CATHERINE COLDSTREAM says that she is staggered by the media interest in her memoir, Cloistered: My years as a nun. “People used to glaze over when I said I’m writing about my time as a nun,” she says. But the book is barely out, and several of the broadsheets, as well as the Church Times (Books, 8 March), have run reviews and interviews. There are speaking engagements in the diary.

    The bones of her story are these. She grew up in a bohemian home in north London, the daughter of Sir William Coldstream, a painter and professor of fine art, and his much younger second wife, an opera singer. The marriage was stormy, and her upbringing was dysfunctional and marred by conflict.

    On the death of her father, Catherine experienced an overwhelming religious conversion. Three years later, aged 27, she joined a silent Carmelite order in Northumberland: Akenside (a pseudonym). At first, she embraced the life of a nun wholeheartedly, finding it “a kind of heaven”; over time, the dream morphed into a nightmare. A toxic power struggle — entailing emotional abuse, forced confessions, even physical violence — ensued. Twelve years after entering the monastery, she left.

    Her departure took place 22 years ago: in other words, she has spent almost twice as many years out as in. “It has taken me this long to process it,” she says. “Until recently, I didn’t think I’d ever process it, because there are such deep attachments within your heart and soul to that way of life. The level of formation that you go through is so deep, you can’t just shake it off.”

    Two decades on, how confident is she in the accuracy of her memory? “I did actually write an early draft, just after I left,” she says. That early “big cathartic draft” is written in Biro, in very neat handwriting — the monastery had taught her “to do everything really perfectly and slowly” — and, on re-reading, she found that it was written “in a much more pious tone [than Cloistered], although you can sense the anger in there as well”.

    The draft stayed in a box file for many years. But, when she returned to her notebooks, and showed what she’d written to a relative who is a published writer, she was sufficiently encouraged to undertake an MA, and later a Ph.D., in creative writing. She began by writing about the story of her upbringing; later, some of the Akenside material made it into a dark novella. “So there were quite a few drafts and quite a few distillations, but those memories were caught early,” she says.

    The end of her time in the monastery was acutely painful, and is poignant to read about. Yet she goes to some lengths — both in the book and in conversation — to emphasise the enormous joy that she found as a nun. It was, she says, “the great love story of my life”.

    The early days were “a honeymoon”, full of bliss and rapture. “I think, probably, it was all to do with prayer. Prayer just started happening for me after my dad died.” She hadn’t been much of a churchgoer before his death, although she sometimes attended Sunday services because of her love of music. “I really only went for the singing, you know; I wasn’t even listening to the rest of it. Now, I’m amazed that people can do that. But, after my dad died, suddenly it all seemed incredibly important.”

    In the memoir, she describes becoming aware of “a presence” when she saw his dead body. “I had an overwhelming and lasting sense of God’s presence; that’s been constant ever since,” she says. “So, for me, prayer started as just reaching out instinctively to this presence that I sensed was God. And then I followed that up by going to church much more seriously.”

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  11. Perry Bulwer30 March 2024 at 14:12

    BY NATURE, she tends to pursue things “quite energetically”, she adds (there’s a hint that this is something of an understatement). “I started praying in my room at night, and I think I was given some sort of grace or gift of prayer.”

    She found herself savouring the words of the Bible, and dwelling on the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “it was a contemplative thing.” Having grown up “vaguely Anglican”, she found herself drawn to Roman Catholicism. An intensive period of exploration and instruction followed before she entered Akenside.

    “All I wanted to do was pray,” she says. “All I wanted to do was give my life to God. It was totally all-consuming. And when I got to Carmel, I just fell in love with it: the silence, the space. I loved the fact that there were no distractions at all. It still moves me very deeply to think of that. It felt so right to me.”

    The regime was punishingly austere. “The weird thing was, I took to it quite easily, because I think, temperamentally, I’m suited to doing things in an extreme way. Some of the other novices had difficulties with things like the food — things that I didn’t even notice.”

    The early years “really nourished me”, she says. “The liturgy, getting to know the Psalms really well, the Bible study . . . it was wonderful. It meant I got to know the traditions so deeply. It’s just totally part of the fibre of my being now. And I loved the beauty of that rural environment, away from London.”

    After a chaotic childhood, the monastery offered a whole new way of life. “I think I was looking for an eternal, divine, completely reliable, father and mother, and I found that in God. It was a refuge on many levels, and it gave me a sense of purpose as well. It wasn’t just an escape: it was also a vocation.”

    There’s mystique around vocation, she says; a nun might leave the monastery after decades, and those left behind would conclude that the departing Sister hadn’t had a real vocation. “But she obviously had discerned a vocation at some point. So, there was this slight feeling that a real, pure vocation was something incredibly rare.”

    Today, Catherine believes that writing is her vocation, alongside making music. “I find these things are absolute central to my life now, and I find God speaks through them. I can explore things deeply in my writing that I couldn’t really do in a very authoritarian community. Once you’re in that sort of community, you can’t think outside the box.”

    IN HER memoir, she recounts the doubts that she experienced before taking her final vows. Was this a warning sign? She shakes her head: even Thérèse of Lisieux was in turmoil the night before her profession. “She said something like ‘There’s only one thing that was clear to me and that was that I absolutely didn’t have a vocation.’” Such doubts are no more than “pre-wedding nerves”, she insists.

    “The thing is, when you had doubts [at Akenside], you were strongly exhorted to squash them, to counter any doubt, which was seen as a temptation. There was a real sense that it was a battle with the devil, which meant there wasn’t a real, free discernment process, because any thought that the life was not for you was seen as a temptation you had to fight. And I really, desperately, wanted to please God.”

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  12. Perry Bulwer30 March 2024 at 14:14

    She believes that Akenside was particularly crushing; there was “an emotional coldness” there. She has found that other Carmelite monasteries have a better understanding of psychology. And, at Akenside, she became increasingly aware of a disturbing power-play between the Superior — she calls her Elizabeth — and anyone who disagreed with her. “Elizabeth was magnetic and lovable, but she was also incredibly authoritarian. She had a steely core. She would brook no opposition, and you couldn’t have a discussion with her.”

    The community was deeply fractured; there was no external accountability or support. Elizabeth, as described, was a classic bully, creating a coterie of the favoured while ostracising others. “It caused me acute inner pain, for many, many years. The kind of pain that can make you just want to run away,” Catherine says. “We were all slightly in love with her, probably. And she was playing people off and stirring up jealousies and antipathy. I’m sure there were all sorts of undercurrents of infantilism and something slightly erotic. It was all very toxic.”

    Was she just unlucky, in choosing Akenside? She mentions a more liberal Carmelite monastery that she visits today. “They’re lovely. And, humanly speaking, I’d have fitted in there much better. I didn’t know about that community beforehand. But I wanted the hard route: I was a new convert, and I was ‘It’s the stony path, it’s the narrow gate.’ I think, unconsciously, I chose something quite punitive.”

    As a young woman, she had been passionate about her music, and now she was just as passionate about her calling. She went to Akenside “blinded by my love affair with the divine”. Were her expectations simply too high? “Oh, yes,” she says. “I wasn’t realistic at all. Now I’m 60, I see everyone much more mercifully.”

    She knows now that she was also vulnerable. “And I really wanted a meaningful life. I wanted something that was ultimate and absolute and all-consuming to which to dedicate myself.” This, she points out, is how cults work. Catherine wasn’t the only one to suffer: a number of Sisters suffered mental-health crises, and one never recovered. “I’m sure their breakdowns were triggered by the psychologically extreme nature of the life.”

    THERE is a pivotal moment in the memoir when Catherine takes flight in the middle of the night, finding her way to her sister’s house, only to return a fortnight later. Her absence is kept secret from the community: Elizabeth puts it about that she is in the infirmary. I tell her I found it heartbreaking when she returned to a clearly abusive relationship.

    “I just thought I had to go back,” she says now. “My sister couldn’t believe I wanted to. But the thing is, you’ve been formed in this, at such deep level, that it’s familiar and it’s protective. It’s home. The outside world — laughing with my sister and wearing her jeans — it just didn’t feel like it was me. I was terrified that I was displeasing God, and I’d done something terrible in running away.”

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  13. Perry Bulwer30 March 2024 at 14:15

    At the time, she was unable to recognise the toxicity of the community. “I still feel some conflict over that, because there was a lot that I really loved. I still miss it. And if you walk away from that, you don’t know who you are and what your purpose in life is at all. Leaving is a very big deal.”

    She left feeling upset and angry. “You really feel you’ve failed,” she said. She was also thoroughly institutionalised: her entire identity was tied up with being a nun. “I think when people leave the army, they often find it very difficult to adjust, and it’s the same with cults.”

    Was it a second bereavement? “It’s a horrible, horrible rupture, and part of you is torn away. I guess divorce might be the nearest analogy. There’s this awful rift, that you feel going right down the middle of you, because part of you is still in that world and always will be.”

    What would she say now to someone in their twenties, considering a vocation? “That’s tricky, because I’ve got a friend who’s got a daughter of that age who is very drawn to nuns and convents . . . and I have some trepidation in saying, ‘Oh, go for it’ — partly because, whatever I went through, I’m grateful for it. I feel what I experienced in Carmel, although it was tough, it was the most precious thing.

    “I think it would be great if monastic communities could start [discussing] how to adapt in a way that could keep that lifestyle going for new generations, because people are not going to go into that life unless they make some quite big changes.”

    Surprisingly, perhaps, she has no regrets about becoming a nun. “It’s a beautiful, wonderful way of life, and I wish, in a way, I could have stayed there, but I would have been completely crushed by now. There must be some way of living a monastic life that doesn’t crush people completely; there must be a way of keeping the good things of monasticism. I would encourage people who are interested to explore that dedication to prayer and community, but maybe to seek new ways of incarnating that.”

    On leaving Akenside, Catherine moved to Oxford to study for a theology degree; she still lives in the city today. She became a teacher of religious studies and philosophy. Through her music, she met the man who is now her husband. Six years ago, she gave up teaching to care for her dying mother. She is now concentrating on her writing.

    Her relationship with God remains. “My faith in God has never left me, but I don’t have such a formal relationship with religion now,” she says. “I am not a fully signed-up weekly, churchgoing, Christian. Much more, I carry with me the faith that I developed in Carmel, and it’s with me wherever I go.”

    She regularly seeks out periods of solitude. But nothing can quite replace Carmel. “I pray every morning, and I always dedicate the day to God and I love reading the Psalms, but I don’t do it formally every day according to any sort of pattern. I’m still on a pilgrimage.”

    see the links and photos embedded in this article at:

    https://archive.is/2024.03.28-093119/https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/28-march/features/features/convent-was-run-like-a-cult#selection-1233.0-1277.272

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