This week’s think piece is more than think piece. It’s more like a shudder, shake your head and even weep piece. Then you can think about it.
I am referring to a long, first-person piece that ran the other day at The Pillar and it’s causing lots of buzz in Catholic online life, for good reason. The headline doesn’t really tell you what is coming: “Cleveland priest gets life. Victims’ mother: ‘God is with us'.”
The first-person voice is essential and steers this away from hard-news territory — even though there are facts and news hooks buried inside the narrative. That’s the “thinking about it later” or thinking about it on the re-read side of this piece.
It’s really long, but you have to start at the beginning, with this editorial note:
Cleveland priest Fr. Robert McWilliams was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday, after the priest pled guilty to federal child trafficking, child abuse, and child exploitation charges.
McWilliams, 41, was ordained a priest in 2017. He was arrested in 2019, and pled guilty to federal charges in July of this year.
At his Nov. 9 sentencing hearing, the mother of four boys preyed upon by McWilliams urged a life sentence. That mother and her family told The Pillar their story.
The Pillar team also made the editorial team to change the name of the family and the victims, in order to protect their privacy.
In terms of the story itself, here are three moments — starting at the beginning:
“Ok. I love my Church, I love my family. I want my Church to be healed. Ok.”
When Rachel Christopher … begins to tell her family’s story, she usually starts with a few phrases — a litany, really — that remind her who she is, and what really matters.
This time, I think, she’s using them to remember why she is sitting down with a stranger — sitting down with me — to share the kind of painful memories that no parent wants even to imagine.
Rachel is telling the story of the priest who hurt her children.
