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.
I don’t know how she manages to do it. I tell Rachel that if it happened to my family, I’m not sure I’d be able to talk about it with anyone, much less invite a stranger into my home and pour coffee, and then sit down and pour out my pain.
I tell her I don’t think I’d be strong enough.
But Rachel insists this is also the story of a faithful God, who loves her family beyond measure. Rachel is talking about it, she tells me, because she does love the Church. And she does love her family. And she knows the Lord is calling her to speak.
The family met the charming, talented “Father Bobby” when he was a seminarian and the grooming of their sons for abuse appears to have started immediately, when he was assigned to their rural parish outside of Cleveland for internship work. The homeschool families loved him.
From the start, he stressed that he felt called to work with boys who were struggling with online porn issues and the depression that can be linked to that. The future Father Bobby plunged into the intimate details of young boys’ lives, offering his help as a counselor and, eventually, as a spiritual father. He began to communicate with boys directly, online and through texting.
That sets up another long, essential passage near the start of the feature.
One day in that autumn, a girl sent Joseph a text message. She said she knew him from school.
She was flirtatious and flattering. She seemed to like Joseph, and she seemed to understand him. She asked him to send her indecent, sexual, images of himself — it’s pretty common among kids nowadays, the statistics show.
So he did it.
Joseph told me that he isn’t sure why he sent the first photos. In part, he said, he thought the attention — from a girl he thought he knew from school — might help him with fitting in.
“Obviously I was homeschooled my entire life and was not fitting in at school. And I knew everyone [texted nude photos and videos]. And I got that text, and I was like, ‘Oh, I can fit in.’”
Rachel put it directly:
“Joseph fell,” she said.
“From the point that he fell, he was in Fr. Bobby’s snare.”
For about a week, Joseph and the girl traded indecent photos.
“She would have her face cut out of the pictures,” Joseph wrote last month, in an account of his experience which he shared with The Pillar.
The girl also asked him to call and “talk dirty” to her, saying that she couldn’t respond because she would be in front of her parents.
Joseph did.
Of course, she never spoke on those calls. If she had, Joseph would have heard the voice of his priest.
Joseph had no idea — no one did — that the “girl” texting him was actually Fr. Robert McWilliams.
After a week of trading photos with the “girl,” Joseph got a text from a phone number he didn’t recognize.
Joseph remembers the text verbatim: “Hey this is her best friend, her dad walked in on her and took her phone away. You are a horrible person for doing this.”
He was confused, and afraid. Especially because for the next four weeks, he got texts from the same number, with the girl saying she would send the indecent pictures to Joseph’s father if he didn’t send more photos, and videos. He did what he was asked.
The person behind that character, just like the first “girl,” was McWilliams. Joseph had no idea.
At that point, the priest could — as the feature puts it — “to enter the drama he had created.” Joseph went to Father Bobby for confession. He poured out his pain and the details of his life, including thoughts about suicide. The priest offered to support him. They would need to spend more time together.
How about baseball games? Maybe a few sips of alcoholic beverages?
Meanwhile, there were more texts, from someone with all of the earlier nude pics, flirtatious texts from the girl who had started all of this.
One more passage:
Things came to a head on September 29, 2019, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel.
Fr. Bobby was at the Christopher’s house to watch a Cleveland Browns game. The Browns were playing the Ravens. They’d win the game.
McWilliams sat in the living room with most of the family. Joseph sat at the kitchen table, doing homework. Rachel remembers that her son got up a few times, holding his phone and he seemed irritated. And she remembers that Fr. Bobby kept looking back toward the table, toward Joseph — but she didn’t think much of that — yet.
Rachel didn’t know that Joseph was getting texts during the game from his blackmailer, making demands of him. Rachel still didn’t know about the blackmailer at all. And no one — not Rachel, nor Joseph — knew that the blackmailer was the priest in their living room, who was tormenting their son, and watching their television.
Joseph initially complied with the demands, getting up to take pictures in the bathroom.
But then he stopped. It was too much. He said he wouldn’t send any more. A few minutes later, McWilliams got up from the football game, and said he needed to make a phone call. He asked to use the family’s prayer room.
Rachel remembers where she was.
“I was sitting on the couch facing the TV. And I heard [McWilliams] talking in that room as if he’s doing a phone call, and then I kind of saw him peering out a little bit, looking at us.”
“I remember now, I could see him just kind of...peering.”
Rachel’s phone started buzzing.
“I looked down at my phone and I could see that I had a text. And it was all these horrible images.”
One by one, photos and videos of her son started pouring across her screen. There was a message too: “Tell your man-whore of a son to stop harassing my underage daughter.”
“It was horrible,” Rachel told me. “I had no warning.”
At the time, Rachel didn’t know the texts were from McWilliams. But looking back, she says what happened was sick.
The priest was, of course, stalking others — including other sons in this same family.
What was the fallout? How did this all affect the boys?
What did this fallen priest’s seminary say?
It’s a long story. Read it all.
FIRST IMAGE: Photo from the Meme-arsenal website.