I Made It My Mission To Find The Priest Who Molested My Brother. Here's What Happened When I Finally Did.
"I learned that he’d be starting a new position at a school in a little farming community I knew well."
The author in her third-grade school photo/Courtesy Nancy Brier
HuffPost
March 27, 2025
By Nancy Brier
My fingers trembled when I dialed the phone. It was the early ’90s, back before texting or email. In fact, I’d just replaced my beige wall phone with a chunky wireless. Four rings in, I was about to hang up when my brother’s voice finally answered. I sputtered out what I needed to say: When I was a little girl, one of our family members sexually molested me. The abuse went on for years.
My therapist thought it would be healing for me to tell my family. She warned me that sometimes families can react in unpredictable ways. They might call me a liar, say that I’m crazy or sever the relationship. She told me that in her practice, she’d seen people written out of inheritances, banished from their homes and blamed for having been victims. I guess she just wanted me to be prepared.
On a wooden chair under a dim overhead light, I stared at the burn mark on my dining room table. I was 28 years old and struggling. I’d already told my two sisters about what happened, but opening up to the guys in my family was harder. After I gushed out my news, there was silence. At first, I wondered if we’d been disconnected, but I could feel my brother’s attention on the other end of the line. I could picture him taking in the secret I’d kept all my life. My fingers were white from clutching the phone, and I waited for him to say something.
“Just like me,” he said, finally. “Just like what Father Sean did to me.”
The phone fell from my grip, clattered on the hardwood floor. I picked it up, my breath gone.
“Oh,” I said, the sound barely coming out.
From the shakiness in his voice, I could tell he’d never told anyone, even though he was 34 years old. I slipped from the chair to the floor and listened to the details unfold: the shotgun he bought with money he’d saved from his paper route; how he positioned himself in the juniper bushes just outside the rectory and waited for Father Sean to give him a clean shot. I could see him — my big brother when he was only 12 years old — crouched in the shrubbery with a trembling finger on the trigger.
He never went through with his plan.
My mind flashed back to seeing that gun in the basement — how scary it was and how I hoped it would never be aimed at me. My attention returned to the shaky voice on the phone.
“I thought I must be gay,” he said. “I thought since he picked me, it must have meant I was gay.”
When we hung up, I retched into the toilet and then wept as my rage and sadness swelled. At 4 a.m., Father Sean was still haunting me. Two hours later, I got up and got ready for work. Snippets of the conversation floated around my head, and I had a million questions.
My response to that phone call was oversized. I began to obsess about where that priest was — and about taking him down. I was enraged at him and at all the people who protected him. I was furious that the church I loved betrayed me.
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