She Was Haunted by a Bloody Priest, Part 1
The penultimate episode of the Unholy Fathers podcast details a disturbing series of sexual assaults of a 12-year-old girl by a then-45-year-old Catholic priest from Springfield, Massachusetts.
Many thanks to the bride (pictured above) who has graciously allowed me use of this photo from her wedding in the early 1980s at St. Matthew’s Church in the Indian Orchard neighborhood of Springfield, Mass. Pictured, facing the camera (from left) is 13-year-old me, Father Charles Sullivan and my childhood pal Keith. This image was taken within a couple weeks of some of the incidents featured in the second-to-last episode of Unholy Fathers, which details a series of crimes against a young girl by the Roman Catholic priest, Charles Sullivan, in the photo above.
Also, the crucifixion mural on the wall, “high above the altar” is mentioned in this episode.
As you can hear in Episode 16, (link below) we delve deep into the vulnerable and disturbing experiences of a woman I’m calling “Cee.” We hear, in her own words, what happened to her when she was targeted and assaulted by a priest while in the seventh grade at St. Matthew’s School. And we also learn how the trauma lingered and manifested in her life for decades after the incidents.
In Episode 17 (coming out next week) you’ll hear how Cee and I became pals and how, together, we teamed up and were able to get Cee long-delayed justice AND a financial settlement PLUS an apology from the Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield. All due to the sick actions of the now-dead Charles Sullivan, whom I profiled in episode four of Unholy Fathers.
For the Crash Report readers who aren’t into listening to podcasts, I’ve included a complete transcript below — proofread by humans — of the entire episode, which is not suitable for kids or sensitive adults.
Also, this episode includes references to Sister Ruth O’Connor, pictured here (L) with Father Charles Sullivan, presenting me with my 8th grade diploma in 1982.
First to set this horrible scene. We go back in time to 1981 to when Cee was a seventh grader at St. Matthew’s School in the Indian Orchard neighborhood of Springfield, Massachusetts. At the time, I was in the eighth grade at St. Matthew’s, and while I wasn’t friends with Cee, I was aware of her. Relatively speaking, she was the new girl, this being only her second year at the school.
[[transcript of Unholy Fathers, Episode 16 “She was Haunted by a Bloody Priest.”
Cee:
I’m in class. I’m told by another student that I’m bleeding onto my skirt. I get up. I realize that that is what’s happening. I asked to go to the bathroom. I realized I have nothing to help myself with, so I think I go directly to the office. Sister Ruth is there, and she does say that she’s going to give me a pad in an envelope. And she said, you know, just go wait in that room and I’m going to look around to see if I can find a skirt. But she did hand me the envelope with the pad in it.
So I’m in the room and the door is open, and I don’t really want to sit down, because I don’t want to get anything on any of the chairs that are in that room. And the next thing I know, he’s in the room, and he’s close, he’s I mean, it’s only a few steps from the door to where I’m standing, but there’s not a ton of room because there’s things behind me. So he shuts the door, and he’s got me by the shoulders. Yet again.
He’s asking me if I’m as big of a slut as my friend. He’s got me up against the wall. He’s got his knee in my crotch, and his knee is pinching the skin of my leg up to that wall. I mean, it hurt. I couldn’t imagine what other kind of hurt was going to happen, but he’s talking at me between his teeth, but he’s still managing to sweat and spit and have a red face and reek of limes and booze of some sort, but the sweat smell is far more disturbing than even the alcohol on his breath. But his hand reaches down in between my legs, and he’s squeezing in between my legs, and then he realizes that his hand is wet.
He sees it and is continuing to say that hopefully I’m not as big of a slut as my friend is and he wipes his hand down the front of my shirt, which is a thin cotton round neck shirt, like a blouse. So now the front of my shirt is streaked. I mean, you could not not notice that. I don’t know if he hears something or he hears people talking. I’m not really quite sure what makes him turn his head, but he turns his head and he lets go of me. He leaves the room, and I leave the room.
I go directly to the bathroom, because now not only is my skirt covered in a big circle of blood, but now my shirt, my thin shirt, has got blood down the front. And I’m pretty sure that Sister Mona comes in and she’s asking me what I’m doing, and I said I got blood on my shirt. She doesn’t ask me, why do I have a bloody shirt, no. She doesn’t say any of that, and I’m furiously trying to scrub it out, although now my shirt is “see through,” which is even more horrifying to a seventh grade girl, really, than anything else. So I’m using those stupid brown paper towels to try to dry it. It comes out, but like I said, My shirt has got some really see through streaks in it. So I’m crying. I go back to class. It would seem to me that I would have tied something around my waist, either my navy blue sweater, or put my coat on. I would have done something to hide myself from what was going on. I don’t know how long I was in the bathroom, but no one ever questioned how long I was gone.
Crash Barry:
The image of the priest rubbing the 12-year-old girl between the legs, then rubbing her menstrual blood on her Catholic school girl blouse is horrifying. And the worst of the four instances of Father Charles Sullivan grabbing Cee. All the incidents, though, were traumatizing, and all of them had a lasting impact that has stained her life for over 45 years.
Cee:
I’m sure people noticed, but whomever pointed out to me that I had the blood on my skirt probably told other people my shirt smelled bad. I smelled bad, I felt bad, I felt ill. I felt ill and stunned and embarrassed for so many reasons, on so many levels, there was no way I was bringing this up to anybody. I just wanted it to go away. I just wanted the whole incident to go away. And weirdly, oddly enough, you know, the blood on your skirt thing happened to other people, I was so impervious to even mentioning it to other people that I was like the last person in that room probably to have gotten their period, because everybody was older than me in that room. I’m pretty sure I was 12 and a half, and so I was on the older end of most of those people who had gotten it when they were 12.
Crash Barry:
Her troubles with the priest, however, had started a couple months before the bloody incident. One afternoon, Cee was part of a group of seventh graders gathered around two classmates who had just been riding their bikes and almost got run down by Father Sullivan. The kids were grabbed and yelled at by the almost-always-drunk priest.
Cee:
I remember hearing about students from our school narrowly escaping being killed by him and his Cadillac and him getting out of the car, grabbing them, screaming and yelling at them. They were really taken aback by that kind of behavior. I think they thought he was going to get out of the car and say, oh my god, I’m so sorry. He just hit you, but he literally roughed them up. I don’t think that was the expectation of those students. I think they were very taken aback by his behavior. And he was clearly drunk. I mean, they said that he was drunk. He reeked of alcohol, which, at the time meant nothing to me, because I hadn’t encountered a ton of drunk people growing up. I was shocked as well.
Crash Barry:
I’ll talk about this in part two, but I’ve spoken to one of the fellows who almost got run over by the priest that day, and he corroborated Cee’s account of what happened. Also the entire almost-bike accident was witnessed by another student at St. Matthew’s.
Cee:
Her name was Brandy, and she was very small, and she had long brown hair, same as me.
Crash Barry:
A couple of days later, Cee found herself in a hallway down from the office alone with Father Sullivan.
Cee:
I believe he mistook me for her.
Crash Barry:
He called out “Brandy.” And Cee could tell that the priest was angry.
Cee:
He grabbed me. He grabbed me by the shoulder. It was so fast and bizarre. He was so close to me. It’s almost indescribable, because it was almost like it wasn’t really happening. I couldn’t even, I mean, he called me “Brandy” twice. In my mind, I’m thinking to myself, What is he talking about? You know, it’s you’re just trying to figure out what someone is talking about. I think I was so young again and so stunned that my mind was so focused on challenging him by saying, I’m not her. Who do you think I am? I couldn’t even get those words out to say it and would have gone against everything that I’d ever been taught.
You know, when an adult talks to you, or when you’re being disciplined, you’re not really supposed to question anything. It was stunning. It’s the only word I can use. It was absolutely stunning. And yes, he kind of jacked me up against the wall, pushed me, had me by the shoulder. It was bizarre. It was scary. He thought that I’d seen this accident, and wanted to ensure that I wasn’t going to repeat what happened.
I had never encountered any sort of corporal punishment or fear. I never had anyone act in such a way, and took me a little bit to realize that he was not in his right mind. It was that whole gin and tonic type smell, alcoholic type smell. It’d be something that would make you think that this person had had a couple drinks with lunch. His face was red. He was spitting. He was sweating. The whole thing happened so fast I couldn’t even speak. This was such a contradiction to any way I’d ever really been treated, although I will say this: I mean, my parents fought. My father was physical to my mother. They were young, and so it’s not as though I’d been sheltered from any sort of violence, but because it never happened to me, and I only heard about it outside the door, it silenced me in a way that was physical.
Crash Barry:
Shocked and frightened by his behavior, Cee didn’t tell anyone what happened. Up to this point in her Catholic school experience, she’d only dealt with nuns, but like all Catholic school kids of that era, she had been brainwashed into thinking that priests were special sorts of holy men, earthly representatives of God in heaven above who could turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and were empowered to listen to the confessions of sinners.
Now we’re returning to the aforementioned incident when the priest smeared Cee’s blood on her white blouse. The day before that attack, Cee and the rest of her class had gone down to St. Matthew’s church, about a half mile walk from school to confess their sins to Father Sullivan.
Now I don’t want to go too far afield here, but for the non-Catholic listener, confession, also known as penance, also known as the act of reconciliation, is one of the seven sacraments and a bizarre ritual when good Catholics tell the priest all the bad things they have done, which is even creepier knowing there are so many priests sitting in the confessionals that lead far more sinful lives than any normal person could even imagine.
So Cee and her classmates were sitting there in St. Matthew’s church, sitting in the pews facing the giant and grisly and colorful and ultra realistic mural high above the altar. You can see a photo of this bloody rendition of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, surrounded by mourners.
You can see that photo over at CrashBarry.com. That photo, by the way, is from a wedding around the same time Father Sullivan assaulted Cee. In that photo, I’m standing on the priest’s right hand side. I’m a little bit taller than the priest at age 13. My childhood pal Keith stood on his left hand side, and high above us is the mural of the bloody crucifixion.
Anyways, back to the seventh graders sitting there waiting to spill their guts to Father Sullivan. One by one, one at a time, each kid made their way into the dark and creepy confessional booth to kneel before a tiny sliding window and ask the pastor to forgive them of their sins.
Then it was the turn of a girl named Kim. I remember Kim from boyhood because she was very pretty and, as Cee explained, physically developed beyond her years. And Kim was sexually experienced due to an ongoing relationship with a boy who attended John F Kennedy Jr High School just down the road from St. Matthew’s.
Cee:
And not only was she physically mature, I don’t know what else had gone on in her home that had made her aware of these things. I don’t know if this boy taught her everything he knew or she already knew these things. I don’t know. She was a kind, nice girl. No boys really talked to her, because I think they were intimidated by her. Frankly, I don’t think that she was teasing them. I don’t think that she was being suggestive towards them. There were other girls who are getting far more attention than her, who were far less developed.
Crash Barry:
And there in St. Matthew’s Church, seventh grader Kim stood. Ready to reveal her sins to the drunken priest.
Cee:
She went into the confessional and told him about her relationship with a boy that went to to Kennedy Junior High School, very close to St. Matthew’s, and she confessed to numerous sex acts with this person. And when Father Sullivan came out of the confessional, she came out crying. He came out in a rage. She confessed later to us about the name calling. I mean, he said horrendous things to her. I think he threatened to hurt this young man, or hurt both of them.
I mean, her hands were shaking, her voice was shaking. I couldn’t have imagined at that moment, when we were in the church, what she could have possibly said to make him that mad. And it wasn’t until later that she told us everything that happened. She was using words that I had never heard before. I mean, it was completely foreign to me, because I didn’t have any older brothers and sisters. I suppose if you had older brothers and sisters, you would know exactly what she was talking about, but I had no clue.
It wasn’t until other people explained to me what those things meant that I grasped the depth of what had gone on and what she confessed to. I don’t know what part of it was willing, if she was coerced. How he got her to do those things… I couldn’t tell you. But when she came out of there and came back to the pew and was crying, of course, not only was it my inclination, but it was the inclination of the other girls in that pew to console her.
Crash Barry:
The very next day, Sullivan cornered Cee and sexually assaulted her and bloodied her blouse.
Crash Barry:
Before hearing Cee’s story for the first time in September 2020, my view of Father Sullivan had been that he was an asshole and a drunken oaf and slightly psycho. As I reported in Episode Four of Unholy Fathers, he’d been arrested back in 1989 in downtown Springfield after crashing his car drunk a couple of miles from the Bishop’s mansion, with a loaded shotgun in the front seat and a plan to shoot the bishop. But since learning what he did to Cee, I only view the dead man as an angry predator who got away with many crimes.
There were two other incidents where Sullivan inappropriately touched Cee. First, it was a school event one evening before Christmas, with the entire student body and their parents in attendance.
Cee:
Everyone was there for the winter assembly. There was singing. The whole school was going to be on stage. I was the last in line going into that auditorium where everybody was. He came up behind me, and he had hold of my chest, said it was going to be a great night, and proceeded to lead the congregation of people that were there that evening in Edelweiss, which was bizarre, and he was again, drunk and sweating. I don’t know how the man breathed. His collar was choke tight all the time. It was almost as if that collar was choking him. It was, that’s what was turning his face so red, is that the collar was so tight, almost like the drinking bloated him, like he must have woke up thin, and by the end of the day, got bloated, because it was a bizarre, bizarre appearance, and the hair oil he wore, some sort of hair oil.
Crash Barry:
Edelweiss was the big hit of a song from the musical Sound of Music, which I classify as a show tune, not a traditional Christmas song.
Cee:
And I remember my mother on the way home in the car asking me, you know, did I enjoy the show? She thought it was odd that he wanted all of us to sing Eidelweiss, but but she did love the song. I remember just thinking to myself, why are we talking about this? I just want to go home.
Crash Barry:
The next occasion was a couple of months later.
Cee:
The fourth time was during a school wide production of Peter Pan, to which I was given the job of taking care of the costumes. That was my job. God, I have no idea why anyone would give me that job, because I had no idea how to iron anything. But I was to take them home and iron them. I took them home and pretended to iron them, but I did not.
I was in the eighth grade room and there were costumes in that room, and I had my back to the door, and the door behind me closed, and I turned, and it was him, and I turned back to whatever it was that I was doing, and he came up behind me, and he had his hand up my skirt, and he was touching my behind. And it probably went on for about a minute, maybe two, and there was activity outside the door.
Crash Barry:
Then the hall door opened, and one of the nuns, Sister Susan Swasey came into the room to scold Cee for a slammed door, but the priest had already quickly exited, leaving through a second door that connected the eighth grade classroom to the seventh grade classroom, and that was the last time Father Sullivan ever touched her.
Cee:
I was frozen. I did not move. I did not say anything. I don’t even think I breathed during that interaction, because I was so afraid of it becoming something so much more frightening or that someone would see. I mean, I was paralyzed. I did not move. I turned my head to see what the noise was, but that was really it. I thought for sure whoever was coming was going to see everything, but that didn’t happen. I don’t know how or why, but it didn’t.
Crash Barry:
Cee never told anyone what happened at the hands of Father Sullivan, not even her mom, with whom Cee had a great but complicated relationship. It is a long and sad story, but her mother has had a very tough life. Growing up in the 1960s, she became pregnant while still in high school, and kept her baby, which was seriously frowned upon at the time, but Cee’s mom was determined to get her diploma, even though the principal, a very angry man, made it hell for her to graduate. After she was born, her mom vowed that her little girl would never go to a public school in that town, which I’m not going to name, but it’s just right outside Springfield, because She didn’t want her daughter to ever be in a district where that dude was employed. So Cee was enrolled in a nearby Catholic school.
Then after fifth grade, Cee and her mom moved to Springfield, to a neighborhood near Cathedral High School. In theory that would have meant she’d attend Holy Cross School. Unfortunately, Holy Cross was so popular, there was a waiting list. Instead, her mother enrolled her at St. Matthew’s, where there was never a waiting list, but would require Cee to make a couple long bus rides to Indian Orchard every day. All that to say Cee knew that revealing Sullivan’s actions would have devastated her mom, who would have felt responsible for enrolling her daughter at St. Matthew’s.
Cee:
My mother, to this day, does not know any of this happened. I would never want my mother to feel guilty about any of the decisions that she made, and only because I know how hard it is to be a mother now and to have guilt about certain things that you choose or you think are going to protect your kids, ultimately, from anyone or anything that could possibly hurt them.
Crash Barry:
She didn’t hate St. Matthew’s, and she made some friends, but felt behind sometimes, both socially and physically, compared to her classmates. And then there was the unspoken damage from the traumas that lasted a lifetime, with a monthly reminder. There’s really no other way to say it. The bloody assault was forever linked to her period and the scent of her own menstrual blood had the ability to trigger all sorts of negative effects.
Cee:
No girl loves to get their period. It’s not a fun time. You feel miserable. There were times in my life where I did find that debilitating. I did find it triggering, but it wasn’t right away. I feel like it happened to be more when I was older and more aware of possibly I wasn’t the only one that this happened to. You know, I couldn’t define triggering then, like you can now. Couldn’t define why you wanted to shower twice a day during your period. Couldn’t define why you wanted to change your pad every single time you peed. You can’t find those things when you’re a young person. Now that I’m older and I look back on them, yeah, I probably was having much more triggering than I could even identify.
Crash Barry:
Not all her triggers were physical.
Cee:
First time I saw Sister Ruth at Cathedral High School was rough because I thought, ‘Oh, my God, if she’s here, he could be here.’
Crash Barry:
Here’s a brief aside about Sister Ruth O’Connor. She was the principal at St. Matthew’s who gave Cee the pad and envelope and told her to wait in the room where the priest assaulted her. I had a longer and far more personal relationship with Sister Ruth, as I explained in episode four of Unholy Fathers. Sister Ruth was my arch enemy. Not only was she my school principal, she was also my mother’s best friend, a relationship that started when I was in the second grade. My mom, a very talented seamstress, taught Sister Ruth how to sew, which somehow morphed into the nun coming to our house every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. For what I don’t know. My parents gave her gifts, money and even brought her on many vacations. And this friendship lasted forever, until my mother’s death.
I cringe, remembering from childhood when school chums would ask if Sister Ruth was home before deciding whether or not we’d play basketball at my house. And then when I graduated eighth grade and enrolled at Cathedral High School, Sister Ruth left the top job at St. Matthew’s and became a lowly math teacher at Cathedral. I’m not being paranoid when I say this, but Sister Ruth followed me to high school to spy on me for my mom.
After episode four, when I explained my dislike for Sister Ruth, I heard from a whole bunch of listeners, former students of Sister Ruth, all expressing their hatred for the now dead nun. Several use phrases like ‘ruined my life’ and ‘made me hate school’, among many other complaints. I’ve put a photo up over at crashbarry.com, of the dour Sister Ruth and the angry drunkard Father Sullivan, presenting me with my diploma for graduating from the eighth grade.
Anyways, back to my friend Cee. After graduating St. Matthew’s the year after me, she was surprised to see Sister Ruth, her former principal, wandering her high school halls, because Sister Ruth would always be a woman whose mere presence reminded Cee of the incident with the bad priest. Luckily, Father Sullivan never showed up at Cathedral. His impact on Cee lingered, even though he wasn’t physically present, because of the priest’s assault. She thinks she probably waited a little longer than some of her classmates in becoming sexually active. And then when she did, she pursued for a little while what she describes as, quote, “limited promiscuity.”
Cee:
It definitely led to some limited sort of promiscuity. And when I say limited, I mean more so than some and less than others. I think that’s where it put me.
Crash Barry:
It was at Cathedral High School, though, that she met the love of her life, her eventual husband and the father of her two beautiful daughters. And she also realized, after a period of denial, that others found her to be very beautiful.
Cee:
I don’t mean this to be a jerk, but I don’t think that for a long time, I thought I was attractive, and it turns out that I was, and it turns out that I was more attractive to other people than I think I even realized for a while. Then when you realize that you are and you realize that you can get people to do things that you want them to do, or get them to like you, even if you don’t like them. I think some girls come into that power earlier than others. Did I hurt anybody with it? No. Did I take advantage of anybody? No, but I think it blunted some of the trauma that could have been happening because my attention was wasn’t positive in a real way, but positive in an imaginary way. People like me. People think I’m beautiful, people want to be with me. So this person couldn’t possibly have hurt me as bad as he did, because I’m still desirable. I’m still okay.
Crash Barry:
She got a job right after graduating from Cathedral in corrections as a secretary, and she credits her career behind bars as the main reason she was able to not let the trauma destroy her life.
Cee:
I think it’s because I started working at a correction facility, where I was exposed to women who’d taken another path, women who’d been far more abused than me, I mean, including my mother, who suffered abuse as a child and rose above it to become who she is now, some good, some bad. But I was exposed to people who took that path of self destruction. And in a wide and all encompassing manner, and I was frightened by that. I’d seen it up close and personal. I’d smelled it. It’s up close and in your face. But I consider myself exceedingly lucky that I got a bird’s eye view into what letting yourself go into some of that can look like when you don’t understand anything other than pain.
Crash Barry:
While her job in corrections made Cee thank her lucky stars that her abuse and trauma hadn’t been worse, on one occasion, while at work, she spotted Sullivan. At the time, he was allegedly sober, serving as a chaplain at a correctional alcohol center in Springfield.
Cee:
I saw Father Sullivan at work. That was very frightening for me, and he was working there. I suppose he was sober. He was helping people, and I came out into the lobby wearing my favorite pink dress, and he was there, and I was physically shaken. He saw me. I saw him. I don’t know that he recognized me. I recognized him immediately. I was shaken up. I don’t believe he lasted long there. I didn’t go there every day, thankfully. I just happened to be in the reception area, which was quite a large room. It ran the whole length of the building, so it was very big. But I had a series of anxiety attacks after that that were pretty marked over the years.
Crash Barry:
She had multiple bouts with both depression and anxiety, but she toiled on both because she knew others had it way worse, and she had a family to take care of.
Cee:
There are so many more of those other people who are so broken, so so broken by what happened to them that they don’t see any progress for themselves again. The things that trigger me, it’s not that they don’t happen. I really have been able to not give them power over me. It’s a mantra that I say all the time, ‘give this no power over you. Give this no power over you. This has no power over you.’ This cannot hurt you, because the feelings that you have when you’re younger, you think that they have the power to hurt you, and you think that those feelings are right or wrong, they’re not right or wrong, they just are. They have no power over you. You just have to let them wash over you and try to start over. And have there been times when I’ve not been as successful? Absolutely, there have been times where I have spent a whole day in bed having the chills, feeling as though I’m not going to feel good ever again. But you do. You do, and the joy of your life does come back to you, your children, your husband, your family, if you’re that lucky to have made a few good decisions amongst mistakes, those things do come back to you and you are able to stamp them out. I mean, for me anyway, I have been able to do that.
Crash Barry:
Except for the “smell of blood” trigger, and as she found out, the night before her wedding, the smell of gin and limes, the smell of the priest, was enough to send her into a frenzy and almost cancel the marriage ceremony.
Cee:
My rehearsal dinner, in fact, was ruined by a horrible trigger, a huge incident where I was smelling the gin and tonic. It was that gin and tonic smell that got me. It was ugly, and I had to talk myself out of, you know, other people were like, you know, you’re being dramatic. You’re not really this nervous. It was just a whole series of things. And not to mention it was also a point where there had been all kinds of drinking and partying going on for, you know, days ahead of that. Not to say that maybe this trigger wouldn’t have happened, but it was ugly. I mean, there was shaking, there was crying. You feel like you can hold yourself together? Will I be able to hold myself together and never let anybody know what’s happened to me? Because I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t. Wouldn’t want my kids to know. Your mind goes into all kinds of projecting about what is going to happen, even though you have no control over that.
Crash Barry:
As previously mentioned, her monthly periods were very tough to handle. Even a worse trigger, in a way, was the months postpartum following the births of her two kids, especially after her second baby.
Cee:
After, you know, you have a baby, there’s a whole point where you bleed for a long time. And that was very uncomfortable for me. Everyone’s used to it a couple of days, you know, you have your period, you get through it the best you can. After you have a baby, it’s not like that. That was a very difficult period for me. I couldn’t get clean enough. I couldn’t get that smell off of me fast enough.
Everybody has postpartum either zero to 100. I wouldn’t say, with my first baby, it was nearly as bad as it was the second time. I had terrible postpartum. The second time I bled a lot longer and it was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t stand the smell of that, because it triggered me, for sure, which plays terrible tricks on the woman’s mind.
Being anemic does very bad things to a woman, especially postpartum. And for me, I had a baby that had colic. She was not comforted by me. The only reason I was able to get through the first time as easily as I was is that I had a tiny, perfect baby who did nothing but eat and sleep. She was very bonded to me, and the triggering part of it, I was able to keep to a minimum, because she was just this wonderful, beautiful infant.
I had a beautiful infant the second time. She was huge, it took a lot more out of me, and it was physically draining. She didn’t sleep, and I was bleeding really badly, really anemic. It was just harder. It was much harder. And it took longer for me to heal the second time, for sure.
And the excessive showering was a thing, and it was partly because I needed to get away from her crying. And the second part of it is I could not stand the smell of that postpartum blood. It was hideous. That part of it was really hideous. I’m sure there were smaller things here and there. Those things happened after I saw Father Sullivan at work.
Crash Barry:
And her anxiety flared in other ways.
Cee:
I’m not a big fan of having the door closed.
Crash Barry:
Or when there was a head lice outbreak at her daughter’s school and she went into panic mode, which had a dramatic impact on her mental health.
Cee:
I feel like sometimes would you have anxiety about things that you know can’t hurt you. It shifts from things that are also slightly irrational that can’t hurt you. I had horrible anxiety during a very horrible summer where my kids had head lice off and on. And I don’t know if it’s because of the cleanliness thing. I don’t know if it’s because it was out of my control, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t seem to get it to stop. And every time I thought that we were done with the lice, my kids would come in contact with someone else who was in that room that also had it. I could not gather myself to help my children and not feel upset by this. I was upset, and in turn, they were upset, and I did not do a good job of being confident in what was going on. I can’t explain it to you any other way. It was probably the most irrational I had been in a long time.
Crash Barry:
Luckily, as Cee entered menopause and her period ceased, one of her major triggers disappeared as she entered into crone-hood.
Cee:
Now that I’m older and I’m in menopause and I no longer get my period, I think some of that anxiety has left me. I don’t have to have it come up to me every single time. I don’t have to scrub myself raw because it doesn’t happen. So that is a relief. I think there are things that I’m able to let go of more easily, because I’m not traumatized on a regular basis, having to be mad at myself because I’ve scrubbed myself raw, or feel like I’ve taken three steps back because I want to do that. It is weird, but time and your physical being does have a way of changing in such a way that you’re able to let go of certain things. I don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but it has been true for me in that way.
Crash Barry:
But her aversion to gin and limes still exists.
Cee:
My husband and I go to Ireland with the Elks every year. You know, mixed drinks are not a big deal in Ireland. People drink a lot of beer. They drink a lot of Guinness. I don’t drink beer. I typically drink Jameson and ginger ale. Every single time I’m there, they ask me if I want a lime, and if they bring a lime in my drink, I will not drink it. I cannot stand the smell. I cannot stand the taste. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. Luckily for me, no one really drinks gin and tonics in Ireland, but you know, there are things that come up.
Crash Barry:
Which brings us to the summer of 2020, during the pandemic. Cee was on Facebook and a classmate from St. Matthew’s school invited her to join the St. Matthew’s alumni Facebook group. After perusing the pages, she declined to join, but then the all knowing algorithm kicked in and sent her an ad for a law firm with the question, “Were you abused by a Catholic priest?” She clicked the ad and answered some questions. Soon after, the law firm reached out to her.
Cee:
They’d asked me some questions about where, when, how, but not really any specifics. At that point, they asked me, Did I know anybody else who knew him, or had any interaction with him? What had happened to him, what his first name was? And it occurred to me that I didn’t know that. It occurred to me that I didn’t know his first name.
Crash Barry:
Google wasn’t helpful. But then eventually, a woman in the records department at the Our Lady of Sacred Heart parish, where all St. Matthew’s records are stashed, was able to see that Sullivan’s first name was Charles. So she returned to Google, and that’s when she found my podcast about Father Charles Sullivan. On September 2, 2020 she emailed me for the first time:
“I was a student at St. Matthew’s. I have contacted a lawyer about several incidents involving myself and Father Sullivan. The lawyer is having issues finding information about Father Sullivan’s time at the school. I am hoping, if at all possible, you might be able to help.”
Two days later, we spoke for the first time, the first of many calls, which would start an over two year journey to right the wrongs she experienced at the hands of an angry drunkard of a priest.
Next time on Unholy Fathers, we get into the Catholic Church complaint process, the investigation, the stalling by the church and the bishop, and the settlement paid out to Cee and what she did with the money.