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7 reviews for:
Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary
Tom Rastrelli
4.02 AVERAGE
7 reviews for:
Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary
Tom Rastrelli
4.02 AVERAGE
dark
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Oof. This was a particularly tough one to read, and even more difficult to review. Tom Rastrelli, a former Catholic priest, discusses exactly what is promised in the title: sex, love, abuse, and scandal in the church.
Tom was repeatedly sexually abused as an adolescent by his pediatrician, an odious man named Dr. Lauz. In his teenage years, Tom realizes that he is gay through experimentation with one of his friends, who engages sexually with Tom but is still deeply homophobic. When Tom goes to college, a sexually and vocationally confused musical theatre aficionado, his family guilts him into going back to church, expecting him to be the good Catholic boy they raised. He meets Father Scott Bell, a cheerful and youth-friendly priest who welcomes Tom back into the church.
During one of Father Scott's sermons on a gospel reading about Jesus healing a deaf man, Tom is awakened. He suddenly and powerfully feels the calling - Ephphatha! - to become a priest.
Thus begins Tom's arduous journey to priesthood. Father Scott takes him under his wing and has him do chores around the church, but the relationship is a mixed one, often emotionally manipulative. Tom continues to struggle with his sexuality, understanding the vow of celibacy to mean that he must curb his homosexual desires. He seeks therapy to do this, and needs many years of counseling to work through his abuse as a child. However, he still "acts out" many, many times - including with other priests.
It's difficult to know what is consensual or what is coerced in this book, as there is a massive gray area for the kinds of power dynamics between a priest and a seminarian. But more than anything, the lesson you take away from this book is that the institution of the Catholic Church - the hierarchy, the lack of transparency, the righteousness of priests, the constant sinning - is deplorable. Many of the priests in this book are clearly functioning alcoholics, and many have homosexual desires (while not calling themselves gay) that they act on despite the vow of celibacy. The abuse that Tom suffered was not really prosecutable in civil law, but certainly should have been in clerical law, but when Tom tried to report it, he was silenced, shut down, and summarily dismissed. Tom even found hard, cold proof that an associate pastor he replaced was viewing child porn and potentially participating in it himself, and his efforts to report it to the diocese were not only brushed off, but the diocese sent a representative to erase the proof on the hard drive.
It's frankly sad that the institution of the Church is so corrupt, because Tom genuinely seemed like a good person and a good priest, someone who cared about his parishioners and felt the vocation to help others find solace in Catholic teachings in the way he did. Yet the institution of the church and its patriarchic, hierarchic, iron-fist rule is what ultimately destroyed Tom's relationship with the priesthood and frankly led to Tom's general downfall.
This is a fascinating book and a great insider look into the Church from someone who saw it intimately. Thank you to University of Iowa Press for the ARC.
Tom was repeatedly sexually abused as an adolescent by his pediatrician, an odious man named Dr. Lauz. In his teenage years, Tom realizes that he is gay through experimentation with one of his friends, who engages sexually with Tom but is still deeply homophobic. When Tom goes to college, a sexually and vocationally confused musical theatre aficionado, his family guilts him into going back to church, expecting him to be the good Catholic boy they raised. He meets Father Scott Bell, a cheerful and youth-friendly priest who welcomes Tom back into the church.
During one of Father Scott's sermons on a gospel reading about Jesus healing a deaf man, Tom is awakened. He suddenly and powerfully feels the calling - Ephphatha! - to become a priest.
Thus begins Tom's arduous journey to priesthood. Father Scott takes him under his wing and has him do chores around the church, but the relationship is a mixed one, often emotionally manipulative. Tom continues to struggle with his sexuality, understanding the vow of celibacy to mean that he must curb his homosexual desires. He seeks therapy to do this, and needs many years of counseling to work through his abuse as a child. However, he still "acts out" many, many times - including with other priests.
It's difficult to know what is consensual or what is coerced in this book, as there is a massive gray area for the kinds of power dynamics between a priest and a seminarian. But more than anything, the lesson you take away from this book is that the institution of the Catholic Church - the hierarchy, the lack of transparency, the righteousness of priests, the constant sinning - is deplorable. Many of the priests in this book are clearly functioning alcoholics, and many have homosexual desires (while not calling themselves gay) that they act on despite the vow of celibacy. The abuse that Tom suffered was not really prosecutable in civil law, but certainly should have been in clerical law, but when Tom tried to report it, he was silenced, shut down, and summarily dismissed. Tom even found hard, cold proof that an associate pastor he replaced was viewing child porn and potentially participating in it himself, and his efforts to report it to the diocese were not only brushed off, but the diocese sent a representative to erase the proof on the hard drive.
It's frankly sad that the institution of the Church is so corrupt, because Tom genuinely seemed like a good person and a good priest, someone who cared about his parishioners and felt the vocation to help others find solace in Catholic teachings in the way he did. Yet the institution of the church and its patriarchic, hierarchic, iron-fist rule is what ultimately destroyed Tom's relationship with the priesthood and frankly led to Tom's general downfall.
This is a fascinating book and a great insider look into the Church from someone who saw it intimately. Thank you to University of Iowa Press for the ARC.
Memoirs are read because you know of the person or event. Memoirs are read because of interesting titles and covers. After a brief moment on discerning why I requested this title, I am still unsure why I opened its pages.
The scandals of the Catholic Church are well-known, almost overly so. The institution serves both as the butt of jokes and as a highlighted example of abuse of power. Tom Rastrelli experienced an interesting life on the inside as a seminarian and as a minister. He lived through ups and downs of the church’s reputation with his own mental health on the line. I admire that he was able to keep his faith through it all, despite his disappointment with the events within his archdiocese. By the end of the book, I was so relieved that he was able to find peace and happiness in his life.
I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
The scandals of the Catholic Church are well-known, almost overly so. The institution serves both as the butt of jokes and as a highlighted example of abuse of power. Tom Rastrelli experienced an interesting life on the inside as a seminarian and as a minister. He lived through ups and downs of the church’s reputation with his own mental health on the line. I admire that he was able to keep his faith through it all, despite his disappointment with the events within his archdiocese. By the end of the book, I was so relieved that he was able to find peace and happiness in his life.
I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
This is one of the most devastating books I have ever read.
Tom Rastrelli has literally put his heart and soul into this memoir. The writing was impeccable and provided in-depth details of his life before and during the time of his studies to become a priest. To get a personable glimpse behind the scenes to the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the power-plays and cover-ups of sexual abuse was both fascinating and horrifying. This is an essential and important read.
The courage that Rastrelli displayed while writing his memoir and publishing it is phenomenal. The sheer amount of dreadful and nauseating things that he has gone through in his life is unimaginable and his ability to fight and come through on the other side as a happy, proud, openly gay man is inspiring. I sincerely wish the absolute best to Tom and hope he has a wonderful life full of happiness, love, and peace.
Tom Rastrelli has literally put his heart and soul into this memoir. The writing was impeccable and provided in-depth details of his life before and during the time of his studies to become a priest. To get a personable glimpse behind the scenes to the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the power-plays and cover-ups of sexual abuse was both fascinating and horrifying. This is an essential and important read.
The courage that Rastrelli displayed while writing his memoir and publishing it is phenomenal. The sheer amount of dreadful and nauseating things that he has gone through in his life is unimaginable and his ability to fight and come through on the other side as a happy, proud, openly gay man is inspiring. I sincerely wish the absolute best to Tom and hope he has a wonderful life full of happiness, love, and peace.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Tom Rastrelli’s Confessions of a Gay Priest might just be the most painfully difficult book to read that I’ve finished in my entire life. I realize that sounds like an exaggeration, but believe me, it’s not. And it’s not Rastrelli’s style or writing ability that made this one so hard for me to stomach, it’s what the book is about. The book’s subtitle (A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary) accurately warns readers of what’s inside, but even then I thought I could maintain an emotional detachment while reading it. That did not happen. Instead, I found myself growing angrier and angrier at the Church hierarchy that allowed the things described in Confessions of a Gay Priest to go on for decade after decade. And not only did those at the top, the only people who could have possibly stopped the kind of abuse described by Rastrelli, allow it to continue, they covered up for the criminals in their midst by transferring them from parish to parish or seminary to seminary every time it appeared that the truth was in any danger of being exposed.
This is Tom Rastrelli’s personal story, the story of a rather naïve gay teenager who felt a calling to the priesthood. Rastrelli is a handsome man, and as a young man he was eagerly targeted by an authority figure in his parish church eager to take advantage of his confusion about his sexuality and the role of gay men in the Church. Then, having survived (for the time being at least) that relationship, Rastrelli was immediately targeted by a mentor-priest of authority at the seminary in which he would spend the next four years of his life. These would be four years during which Rastrelli would struggle to live up to the Church’s celibacy requirement while being sexually abused and exploited by some of the very people responsible for his physical and mental well-being as a seminarian.
But somehow, Rastrelli did manage to survive the seminary experience and become a Catholic priest. Probably because he was older and a bit wiser, the new Father Rastrelli began to question the hypocrisy of the church elders and came to the realization that the corruption and cover-up of the predatory sexual nature of some of his fellow priests went all the way to the top – all the way, in fact, to Rome. The lack of support he received from his Archbishop when he exposed what he had witnessed and what happened to him personally, Rastrelli’s desperate cry for help, left him suicidal and on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Tom Rastrelli’s story is a sad one, and it does not really end well for Rastrelli or the Church even though Rastrelli has now found a second career for himself. Rastrelli ended up a disillusioned man and the Church lost a talented priest. That’s a lose-lose proposition. The thing that still infuriates me (as a lifelong Catholic who has come to feel cheated of his faith in the Church) is the way that the church hierarchy continued/continues to hide the sexual abusers in its ranks, in effect creating thousands of new victims year after year of the kind of abuse that should have been stopped decades and decades ago.
Bottom Line: Nothing in Confessions of a Gay Priest particularly surprised me. What the book did do, is confirm my worst fears and, as a consequence, I sometimes found myself struggling to begin the next chapter. Rastrelli is a frank writer who does not pull any punches here. I hope that the right people read this book and that they are moved to help make sure that this kind of thing is not allowed to happen anymore. But somehow, I doubt that that will happen.
This is Tom Rastrelli’s personal story, the story of a rather naïve gay teenager who felt a calling to the priesthood. Rastrelli is a handsome man, and as a young man he was eagerly targeted by an authority figure in his parish church eager to take advantage of his confusion about his sexuality and the role of gay men in the Church. Then, having survived (for the time being at least) that relationship, Rastrelli was immediately targeted by a mentor-priest of authority at the seminary in which he would spend the next four years of his life. These would be four years during which Rastrelli would struggle to live up to the Church’s celibacy requirement while being sexually abused and exploited by some of the very people responsible for his physical and mental well-being as a seminarian.
But somehow, Rastrelli did manage to survive the seminary experience and become a Catholic priest. Probably because he was older and a bit wiser, the new Father Rastrelli began to question the hypocrisy of the church elders and came to the realization that the corruption and cover-up of the predatory sexual nature of some of his fellow priests went all the way to the top – all the way, in fact, to Rome. The lack of support he received from his Archbishop when he exposed what he had witnessed and what happened to him personally, Rastrelli’s desperate cry for help, left him suicidal and on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Tom Rastrelli’s story is a sad one, and it does not really end well for Rastrelli or the Church even though Rastrelli has now found a second career for himself. Rastrelli ended up a disillusioned man and the Church lost a talented priest. That’s a lose-lose proposition. The thing that still infuriates me (as a lifelong Catholic who has come to feel cheated of his faith in the Church) is the way that the church hierarchy continued/continues to hide the sexual abusers in its ranks, in effect creating thousands of new victims year after year of the kind of abuse that should have been stopped decades and decades ago.
Bottom Line: Nothing in Confessions of a Gay Priest particularly surprised me. What the book did do, is confirm my worst fears and, as a consequence, I sometimes found myself struggling to begin the next chapter. Rastrelli is a frank writer who does not pull any punches here. I hope that the right people read this book and that they are moved to help make sure that this kind of thing is not allowed to happen anymore. But somehow, I doubt that that will happen.