Afterword | The Holy Hugs of Father S.

Afterword

The Holy Hugs of Father S. is a fictional exploration of a real person—a notorious predator priest—and real events.

The person in question is the Rev. Thomas S. Schaefer (1926-2009), my parish priest and confessor from 1961 to 1966 at St. Andrew the Apostle Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. St. Andrew’s was a new parish carved out from two others in the fast-growing suburbs of Washington, D.C. Its school opened in 1960 with grades 1 through 3; it added a grade every year until its first 8th-grade class graduated. I entered that first 3rd grade and graduated with that first class.

Our founding pastor was Monsignor Joseph B. Coyne (1919-1999)—highly respected, energetic and well liked, a splendid preacher (if grating singer) and a personal friend of Washington’s Archbishop (later Cardinal) Patrick O’Boyle. Everybody expected Monsignor to be a bishop someday. He took a daily personal interest in the school, often throwing a ball at recess. I remember vividly the day he came around to all the classrooms to tell us President Kennedy had been shot, then came around again to tell us he was dead.

left,
Rev. Thomas S. Schaefer in 1966

right,
The Right Rev. Joseph B. Coyne in 1964

After being ordained in 1953, Father Schaefer taught at a school in Washington, until he sexually assaulted a male student. He was promptly reassigned to a girls school. When he was named St. Andrew’s auxiliary priest he was in his mid-30s, of middling size and looks. He wore black-framed glasses and, usually bearing a humorous, self-deprecating, even apologetic expression, seemed uncomfortable in his own skin.

He made himself useful to Msgr. Coyne, taking early Mass, hearing confessions, undertaking endless chores around church and school. Sometimes he taught music classes, leading us in Gregorian chant, and also he ran the Teen Club. He, too, was popular. I certainly liked his lenient penances and the way he tore through Mass.

Father Schaefer’s special preserve was his choir. He formed and conducted a choir made up of boys from St. Andrew’s School, plus several adult male parishioners, that gained wide recognition. It often performed at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and every year sang at the J.F.K. birthday memorial mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. His choir helped make High Mass at St. Andrew’s a beautiful spectacle. Midnight Mass was sublime.

Then in 1966 (memory says in late spring, but the Internet tells me in late summer) Father Schaefer was abruptly reassigned—flung from cushy St. Andrew’s, then finishing a handsome new rectory, to the archdiocese’s farthest-flung, poverty-stricken outpost in southern Maryland.

His sudden departure and the comedown it represented confused us. No one I knew had any idea why Father Schaefer had been knocked off the priestly tenure track, as it were. If there was gossip (and surely there was) I wasn’t privy to it. The only possibly scandalous thing I knew about him was that in saying goodbye to his choristers—my younger brother among them—he kissed each boy full on the lips. But they seemed to take it in stride, and I doubt any adult knew of it. (Incidentally, it was that brother who—like “Jeff” in the book—fell into an open grave at Father Schaefer’s new parish and fainted at Mass.)

So Father Schaefer was exiled, and for 30 years we remained unenlightened as to why, until the first of more than 20 of his victims courageously came forward. In February 1995, the Washington Post reported that he’d been arrested for sexually abusing boys for years past. Moreover, one victim was revealed to be an unidentified classmate of mine at St. Andrew’s. His mugshot a stark portrait of shame and fear, Father Schaefer was tried, convicted, sentenced to 16 years, imprisoned, and four months later freed to live out his life at a Catholic facility in Missouri.

The news of his arrest brought to mind the sole occasion on which I’d seen him without his customary pleasant expression. One afternoon in that same spring of 1966 I was walking through Kemp Mill Estates, across from St. Andrew’s, to visit a friend, when Father Schaefer happened to drive past in his Plymouth Fury. Apparently he didn’t notice me, for as he passed I saw his features working with discontent, anger, even disgust.

That glimpse of something more real than what he usually presented, chiming with the later news, made writing this novel possible. In it I’ve re-created the facts of Father Schaefer’s life as best I can, but substituted facts of my own life for those of my victimized classmate’s. An odd result is that nostalgia takes its place alongside moral outrage.

But why not? Montgomery County, Maryland in the Sixties—that exciting decade of J.F.K. and the Second Vatican Council—was a happening place and St. Andrew’s a happening parish. Its school was excellent. The teachers were remarkable nuns from the Sisters of St. Francis of Rochester, Minnesota. Highly intelligent and fully committed, they were the best teachers I ever encountered (and I’ve had some great ones). Each could dexterously handle a classroom of 50 students—count ’em, 50—keeping everybody engaged and learning, never resorting to the corporal punishments then prevalent in other local Catholic schools. A shout-out to Sisters Madonna, Briana, Nona, Irene, Nathaniel, Jessica, Franchon and Medard!

And they practiced what they preached. As in the book, school indeed opened late the morning after the nuns spent the night in jail, arrested while demonstrating for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They also attended the March on Washington. It’s unfortunate that the priestly focus of The Holy Hugs of Father S. means giving such short shrift to the marvelous sisters.

Incidentally, the movie We Are Christ that figures in the book is a real television film produced by the then National Liturgical Council and filmed at St. Andrew’s in 1966. I wish it were uploaded to YouTube so I could see myself and my friends again.

In following “Jeff” after Father Schmidt’s assault and exile, The Holy Hugs of Father S. again substitutes my experiences for my classmate’s. In 9th grade I attended Georgetown Preparatory School as a day student. I hope it’s better now than it was then. I remember its basement classrooms as being like dungeons, and the pervasive atmosphere of boys wanting nothing other than to be their successful Dads as dreary and oppressive. Of course it’s now famous as the alma mater of such Trump Administration luminaries as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jerome Powell, Douglas Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh. That tells you the kind of school it is.

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were after my time, but Powell and R.F.K, Jr. were in 8th grade there when I was in 9th.

I’d bump into R.F.K., Jr. in the library after classes, where we sought to escape sports, but whence we were frequently shanghaied for intramural basketball games. I never tried to strike up an acquaintance, for all that our fathers happened to be friends in the way politicians can be with journalists: Dad had done several Time magazine cover stories on R.F.K. (and his older brother) and attended parties at Hickory Hill, including the one my parents called the best of their lives, where Ethel Kennedy started pushing people into the swimming pool (for a fictionalized account see chapter 6 of my novel A Family Romance). R.F.K., Jr.’s older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy II, attended Prep’s 7th and 8th grades, but was said not to have been invited back for 9th; my classmates’ stories about him were legion. I remember the excitement over at R.F.K., Jr.’s table one lunchtime when the radio loudspeaker played the 1967 hit Wild Thing by “Senator Bobby.”

Jay Powell was a compact, dark-haired kid with enviable cheekbones, four months younger than myself. We rode the same school bus, where he made a daily pest of himself blaming me for its new schedule that required that he leave home earlier and get home later than the year before. I patiently tried to explain that I had nothing to do with it, but his resentment festered all year long.

The fact was that, though two boys from my neighborhood had attended Prep the past two years, the bus route hadn’t been extended to accommodate them; parents drove them to school. But with my admission we three apparently constituted in someone’s eyes a sufficient mass to justify adding a stop on Georgia Avenue in Wheaton. This rerouting meant earlier pickups and later drop-offs for all the other boys.

But if that seemed unfair to Powell, he should have complained to our headmaster, the Rev. Joseph Doty, S.J. I did that myself on a different matter, engineering a delegation to see him after our Latin teacher, Father Theodore E.A. Brady, S.J. (1930-2015), assigned punitively heavy homework over Easter. Father Doty made him reduce the assignment by 90%, which, gratifyingly, made me quite popular.

But Powell didn’t go to the headmaster. Instead he addressed his complaints to me (not to my two fellow riders from Georgia Avenue), bouncing indignantly up and down the aisle. Woe betide me on those days when I had to sit next to him! He’d seethe and complain the whole way.

(So strange is life that only a year or two later Headmaster Doty fell in love with an Englishwoman—Joy Billington—married her, was excommunicated, became an Episcopal priest, and eventually held three livings in the gift of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s father.)

Two of my teachers at Prep—Mr. John Edward Joyce (c.1915-2002) in English (“Mr. Finian”) and Father Brady in Latin (“Father Brody”)—indeed groped boys in the classroom. They did it every day, both generally targeting the same boys, too. It was awful to sit there while whichever one it was animatedly addressed the rest of us while moving his hand inside a boy’s shirt. And no one said anything about it—not ever; so when I say the rest of us sat there glad it wasn’t us but apprehensive we might be next I’m guessing others felt the way I did. We supposed Mr. Joyce to be gay—he was said to live with a man—and no one expressed any bother about that. But also no one ever remarked on how he would stand over a boy (just barely—he was very short) and, with the thumb and fingers of one hand—the other holding open a book—unbutton the boy’s top shirt buttons and plunge in his hand. (Tall Father Brady had a less comfortable time bending in order to work his hand into a boy’s shirt.)

No, there was never a complaint, much less an outcry. I never heard the groping so much as mentioned, never brought it up myself (and could never understand what gratification it might have given, either). The sight simply didn’t compute; it went straight into a memory sink. But the victims? We saw their ears go scarlet as they sat frozen. What price in shame and loss of self-esteem have they paid? A boy who partly inspired “Henry Keating” came of a distinguished professional lineage; he retired a few years ago as a municipal bus driver.

My religion teacher, a Jesuit priest, indeed opened his upstairs apartment door to me fresh from the shower and wearing only a bathrobe (although I remember his name, curiously I cannot confirm it, so won’t give it). He’d asked me up not to discuss religious vocations, but the results of the comprehensive scholastic tests given the student body some weeks earlier. My “You’re putting me on!” uttered in extreme discomfort is quite genuine, as is his telling me how “cosmopolitan” I was. Fortunately, even 14-year-olds can sometimes hear alarm bells.

It was disappointing to learn only a few years ago that Monsignor Coyne, too, had been defrocked (in 1995) for child sexual abuse, apparently as the result of what he did to a girl in 1962. I immediately think of the pretty little girl next door who used to come to my birthday parties and at whose house Monsignor dined frequently, his Pontiac Grand Prix parked at the curb.

I’m proud to be, since 1967, a former Catholic.