Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

While I was keeping a genuinely loving secret between me and my Grandma, it never occurred to me that my big brother was keeping a dark and ugly secret—a secret between him, several boys at our Catholic school, and the priest who arrived at St. John’s in 1962, when I was going into fifth and my brother into sixth grade. Father Kelly, just out of Quigley Seminary, almost immediately started inviting boys to the rectory on weekend evenings and overnights, and my brother started coming home very late, sometimes not until morning, and sometimes smelled very strongly of alcohol. Since he was with a priest, it seemed obvious to all of us that everything was hunky dory, even after he started relaying that Father Kelly was teaching the boys sex education, and even after major changes in his behavior suggested that something was just not right. My mother said it was a phase that all boys went through, but considering she grew up in a home of horrible abuse, in retrospect she couldn’t be expected to realize that the sudden changes, in my brother or hers, were not normal in a healthy environment. Reading Virginia Giuffre’s memoir about her abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislane Maxwell, the former Prince Andrew, and a powerful person she was still too scared to name, I could see how easy it is to groom neglected and abused children, and how easy it is to get them to keep secrets. Worse, the ways we teach people, in the workplace and in social settings, to keep secrets develops an insidious “us vs. them” mentality that may help sports teams but can be untenable in a just society or a functioning democracy. Hazing, secret rituals, and covering for one another’s unethical or illegal behaviors in order to stay included—to be an insider rather than an outsider—becomes embedded in many college fraternities and sororities, membership in which is often a stepping stone to a prestigious post-college position. Right now the Epstein files include the names of hundreds of prominent people, some of whom certainly didn’t themselves abuse children or young women. But a great many of those supposedly “innocent” people were aware of what was happening, yet even today will not speak out—as that childish secret club note in my own house laid out, people in tight little groups feel a sense of some nebulous “supreme penalty” if they expose what they know. It took one brave little boy whose parents believed him to send Father Kelly away in 1968. The Bishops’ Accountability website files about Father Kelly (https://www.bishop-accountability.org/accused/kelly-thomas-francis-1962/ ) include a lot of testimony from children who came forward from my parish and the other parishes where he was sent, along with his own tearful letters to someone at the Archdiocese of Chicago in which there is also mention about correspondence with the Vatican—this was not a case of children making up unfounded charges. Yet when he died in 1990 (the only file mentioning a cause of death was redacted) at the age of 53, his obituary made no mention of the five parishes he was transferred from after abuse charges, and talked glowingly of his training altar boys. The forces that protected Father Kelly until his dying day—the two or more priests living with him in each rectory where he was committing his crimes who did nothing, the housekeepers and secretaries who kept the secrets, the people in high positions in the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Vatican, the lawyers and bureaucrats who read and redacted all his files, the parents who saw what he did to their own children but said nothing when he simply got shuffled to yet another parish to continue his criminal pattern—all these people drawn into the web of secrecy were complicit. No crime was involved when I got my job as a teller for Michigan National Bank to work my way through college, but I was explicitly told during teller training that we were absolutely not to divulge our salaries to any other person except our spouse, and that discussing our wages or showing our checks or check stubs to another employee except the one specifically charged with doing our payday transactions was a firing offense. I didn’t understand why they had that rule, but I of course went along with it—what choice did I have? What choice do people have if they’re desperate for a job that requires them to sign an NDA? So I guess I can sort of understand why the city councilors and other people involved in the rezoning of Hermantown, just outside Duluth, so Google could build an enormous data center there, went along and signed the NDAs Google demanded. No one else even knew that Goodle was the company involved even as the city held hearings about the project. Apparently elected officials cherish their feeling of belonging in the small circle of power brokers than of belonging to the community that elected them, despite the fact that their community will be facing increased energy and water prices, rising local temperatures because of all the heat generated at these centers, noise pollution, and a very heavy carbon imprint contributing to ever hastening climate change. Why think of any of that when Google and its shareholders could be reaping huge profits? Duluth closed a 27-hole public golf course on my side of town a few years ago—property that is zoned as public parkland. Now a developer wants to put in upscale housing and restore a pricey private golf course. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Chicago which, well over a century ago, set aside a huge swath of city land as forest preserves and protected almost its entire lakeshore as public land that I see squandering public land here in Duluth as a mortal sin. And not only would we be losing some of the most scenic property in the city—the people running things have a horrible track record of selecting developers who live up to their promises. We’d be losing a full quarter of Duluth’s public park land, increasing pesticide runoff into the Lester River and Lake Superior, sacrificing valuable bird habitat, putting in yet more huge bird-killing windows right along our migration pathway, and for what? Our secretive mayor and the secretive developer aren’t quite saying. The secret between me and my grandma hurt no one at all and gave both of us a treasure beyond words. Those little boys and their secret club in my upstairs crawlspace probably weren’t hurting anyone. But companies and elected officials excluding from the decision-making process the very citizens who will be most directly impacted by their projects are profoundly undemocratic. If a company or developer cannot make its case openly in front of the public and let the voters decide, it should have no standing to do anything. Democracy dies in darkness. And sunlight really is the best disinfectant.