That priest lied to me last July in Chicago, saying no one else had reported my perp as a molester. It took me until last week to realize the truth

*****
By Kay Ebeling

He must have been lying, because I know for a fact there had been a previous report of child abuse about Father Thomas Barry Horne.

Sitting here thinking about why am I so angry, at one point last week even scared this anger would give me a heart attack, in the middle of writing about something else, some other lies some other criminal priest or bishop told a different survivor -- it just came out of me. I wrote it down, repeated it to a person or two, cogitated on it --

Then this morning it SLAMMED into my head as I was adjusting the caption under my picture from age five that is at the top of this blog. Just typing away I was on a new caption and then SLAM into my head.

HE WAS OUTRIGHT LYING
He must have been.

Last July I got myself to Chicago, hauled my suitcases out to Bartlett to go to my perpetrator church, and ran into the current pastor there, Rev. Thomas Hoffman. He freaked me out on contact, because he looks almost exactly like my perp, the pastor who founded St. Peter Damian Church, Father Thomas Barry Horne.

When I told him my mission, the current Father Tom said something like, "I'm astonished. No one has ever mentioned Father Horne around here in a way that has anything at all to do with child sex abuse."

I reeled, stopped functioning for what I thought was just a few days, missed out on a chance to have lunch with Barbara Blaine even. Flew home, and just destroyed a few things, raging at odd moments, throwing objects across the room so hard they'd splatter to pieces against the wall, sending out snarling emails globally so I could destroy a few new friendships. Pain. So much pain I told everyone the Lyrica had stopped working.

It did not even dawn on me until three days ago.

OF COURSE

There had been a report about Thomas Barry Horne as a pedophile priest at St. Peter Damian Church in Bartlett, Illinois, in the 1950s.

I MADE THE REPORT

TWICE
Once in 2006 and again in 2007

TO THE CHICAGO ARCHDIOCESE

Their Victim Assistance office assured

INSISTED

Cardinal George's victim assistance office did a thorough investigation, they said, and they also said, "There have been no other allegations against Father Horne. Here is the phone number of a psychiatrist near you."

If the Chicago Archdiocese did investigate, they must have made at least one phone call to Father Tom Hoffman out there in Bartlett to say, hey, Father Tom, have any little old ladies come forward and mentioned to you they used to bounce on the knees of good old Father Horne, founder of that parish?

If the Chicago Archdiocese did any investigation, they must have contacted Father Hoffman.

So how could Father Tom Hoffman now in July 2008 tell me that no one had ever filed a complaint against Father Tom Horne?

When I had filed a complaint myself in 2006 and again in 2007?

As I stood there on the church grounds last summer, the current Father Tom at St. Peter Damian Church in Bartlett, looked at me with that intellectual quizzical face arrogant intellectuals use to make people around them feel stupid, and said,

"No one has ever said anything at all before about Father Horne doing anything at all like molesting a child."

Yes someone had.

I had.

So between the Chicago Archdiocese and the Current Father Tom, one of them was lying.

Probably both of them.

This story is not over.

OH

Another sign that nothing happens in God's world by mistake: Last Thursday we mentioned Monsignor Richard Loomis alias Brother Beckett is the pastor at a church in San Marino, Calif. Beckett/Loomis is the perpetrator in two cases of child molest that were part of the LA Clergy Cases that settled July 2007.

Just to make sure he is still listed as pastor, I clicked over to the church website, St. Felicitas and Perpetua, an oddly familiar name for me, as my family, during a period of greater prosperity, actually lived in San Marino, it was when I was in junior high and my dad was this corporate exec and --

At St. Felicitas and Perpetua church website is a picture of the church and nearby school and --

SLAM!@!

It was THAT church. All this time I thought it had been a church in Temple City, when I was older, but

NO. It was that church in San Marino!

Where I totally trashed the girls bathroom one Sunday in the early 1960s when I was 12-13 years old

In a fit of uncontrollable rage.

You can almost see the entrance to the girls room in the back of the church in the picture at the website. Age 13, I tore the towel rack down, scrawled "Hypocrites, Catholics are Hypocrites" on all the walls with lipstick.

(See http://cityofangels1.blogspot.com to see what I am talking about.)

That story is not over yet either.

ONWARD