Free When Satan Wore a Cross by Fred Rosen Page B

Damien, but they were still thought of as men of God who simply repress their emotions in order to do God’s work.
    As for pedophilia, most Americans in 1980 had never even heard of the word, let alone understood its meaning. Even if they had, no one could imagine Crosby or Fitzgerald sodomizing a little altar boy. Priests being involved in ritualized murder? That was film and fiction. To believe anything else would make you insane. Inside the Diocese of Toledo, it was another matter entirely.
    No priest alive believed in any of that crap, least of all Mercy Hospital’s second chaplain, Father Jerome Swiatecki. Swiatecki might have been destroying his liver with all the booze he drank, but his commitment to the Church was unwavering, and more so to his parishioners. He didn’t countenance sexual abuse, by anybody. But he was realist enough to know exactly how the Church dealt with such matters.
    Inside the Church, priestly pedophilia was old news. It could be an altar boy, the young daughter of a parishioner, anyone they had power over. Some priests sexually abused those in their charge. That was a fact. As for protection, in the true sense of the word, the Diocese of Toledo had struck deals with the go-to guys within the TPD as far back as 1959. To call the agreement between the Diocese of Toledo and the TPD a conspiracy, though, would be giving it more merit than it deserves.
    This wasn’t a conspiracy in the classic sense of the word. It wasn’t as if the diocese and the cops had regular meetings to decide what to do, just in case. It was more an irregular policy that developed along the way, based upon the movie premise that a Catholic priest could never commit a felony.
    If a priest got caught sodomizing an altar boy, every effort was made to stop charges from being pressed and to keep the police out of it. To protect the sodomizer, the diocese would reassign him to the next parish…and the next…and the next. If he actually got caught doing something publicly, like soliciting homosexual sex, the diocese called the go-to guys and the priest was released into the custody of the diocese, which reassigned him to the next parish…and the next…and the next.
    Both institutions, the TPD and the diocese, feared their waning influence. Perhaps it was New Age philosophies; perhaps it was the lure of other religions, or simply assimilation by Polish Catholics. Whatever it was, fewer people were being raised like Margaret Pahl to regularly take the sacraments. It was easy for souls to be corrupted.
    The TPD cops took their lives in their hands every time they went out on the street. Bulletproof vests were not common street equipment, but were usually reserved for SWAT teams, making beat cops like Dave Davison that much more vulnerable to a bullet to the torso. In such an environment, the Church was looked at as the ultimate stabilizing influence.
    Instead, what had really occurred was that the souls of the Toledo Diocese and the TPD had been corrupted enough that it wasn’t too far of a stretch to cover up a murder next. Covering up a murder, though, was truly unknown territory, even for a diocese skilled at manipulating civil authority, and a police department more than willing to acquiesce. In the diocese’s favor was that the media had done part of their job—the very idea of a priest killing a nun was odious, let alone the way it was done.
    Aware it was a high-profile case, the TPD invited Father Gerald Robinson in for a little chat. On April 18, 1980, at 8 P.M ., Father Robinson showed up at police headquarters to be interviewed by Art Marx and his lieutenant, Bill Kina. Accompanying Father Robinson was Father Swiatecki, who was functioning under diocese orders as the former’s escort. While Swiatecki stayed outside in a waiting area, Father Robinson was ushered into an interrogation room with institutional furniture. It smelled like most interrogation rooms from stale cigarette smoke, coffee, sweat, and something