Priest, Beast

Father Earl Bierman was an energetic young priest, popular with teenage boys and their families. But behind his charm lay a menace. For three decades, across the country, Bierman seduced students, sexually abused them, arranged trysts between them, offered young boys in sexual service to future priests. And he didn't act alone. Catholic bishops knew about Bierman's crimes and enabled him to find new victims.

One of Bierman's former students, a newspaper reporter, wrote a story that led to the arrest of a priest in Cincinnati. Then he remembered rumors he had heard for years about his former teacher, Father Earl Bierman. He set out to expose the priest. The priest tried to kill the reporter. Then dark secrets from high places came into the light. Bierman's fellow priests and his bishops had kept secret files, detailing his crimes - and their collaboration. This was more than a case of a prolific sex offender. This was an organized conspiracy, conducted and sanctioned by bishops of the Catholic Church.

Police and prosecutors believe Earl Bierman sexually abused hundreds of children during his career as a priest and teacher. His superiors in the church privately identified 73 different boys he had victimized.

Earl Bierman's ministry led to depression, shame, divorce, suicide and murder. He used sacraments as recruiting tools to find new victims. He taught idealistic young boys to plot against teachers, helped seminarians mislead their bishops and persuaded his own victims to cover up for him.

Sexual abuse is a multi-faceted pathology. But a greater sickness, an institutional cancer, is at play here. The crimes of Earl Bierman and the bishops of Covington were in sync with events across the river in Cincinnati, Ohio - and 30 years later, around the world.

The author, Gregory Flannery, entered a seminary to study for the priesthood, indirectly as a result of Bierman's influence. Events there revealed a culture of depravity that manifested itself in ways that would rock the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and sink the prospects of the man who seemed destined to be the first American pope.

What happened in the small dioceses of Covington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, occurred before "clerical sexual abuse" was a common phrase, as familiar now as "chemical disaster" and "school shooting." But the methodology of Bierman's crimes, the elaborate efforts to keep them hidden and the shameful response of the hierarchy presaged what is happening in pews and cathedrals around the world today.

The sexual abuse of children in any form has devastating and sometimes lifelong consequences. When the abuse is perpetrated by an agent of God, promising that what he is doing is good, even holy, the damage is more than physical and psychological. Earl Bierman committed spiritual abuse against his victims. Theirs was a suffering of body, mind and soul.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy has covered up, enabled and in some cases participated in the widespread sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests. The result is an exodus from the pews as parents realize that they have entrusted their little lambs to the care of wolves. Across the world, priests, bishops and even cardinals have been convicted in criminal courts. Across the world, dioceses have gone bankrupt paying for their sins against children.

This book is meant to memorialize the suffering of Earl Bierman's and his bishops' victims, and to honor it, even as we must memorialize and honor the suffering of such great crimes as the "Holy" Inquisition, the slaughter of American Indigenous Peoples and the Nazi Holocaust. Great crimes must be remembered. Victims deserve the justice of memory, and humanity requires the opportunity to learn from their suffering, perhaps to take steps to end it.

Gregory Flannery is a former reporter for the Mount Washington Press and the Journal-News, former news editor of CityBeat and former editor of Streetvibes and Article 25. His work has also been published in St. Anthony Messenger, Sojourners, In These Times, The New Republic and Newsweek.