He still prays.
Still finds solace in the liturgy, still finds peace in the rites of the Catholic Mass.
It’s possible to love something even if you’ve spent much of your life exposing its darkest secrets, its deepest shames. It’s possible if you have faith. But faith doesn’t just permanently arrange itself to thrive in the human heart and mind — it has to be tended.
And so it is that many a Sunday, Jason Berry kneels to pray in the pews at Mater Dolorosa, the sturdy Catholic church planted heavily among the spiraling oaks, hard by the streetcar tracks, in the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans.
Mater Dolorosa. Sorrowful Mother.
It seems fitting that Berry, a prolific freelance author and journalist, would attend Mass at a church that takes its name from a mother’s sorrows, for he’s trudged and grinded and blasted through the sorrows and pain of his church for more than a quarter-century now. Since encountering the sins of a Catholic priest in Louisiana Cajun country in the mid-1980s, Berry says, he’s interviewed more than 60 victims of sexually abusive priests; he’s spoken casually to and received letters and phone calls from dozens more.
As he burrowed deeper and deeper, he sought guidance from a therapist to cope with “periods of intense rage.” But it took understanding priests and nuns to quietly help him find a way to reconcile his spiritual life with a professional vocation that made him a target of scorn among many in the Catholic Church and its defenders. He’s been called a “yellow journalist” and a “sensationalist,” a spreader of “malicious gossip,” yet he keeps writing, and he keeps praying.
“I had to cut a distance between my own idea of faith and the pronouncements of the institution,” Berry says over lunch one afternoon before a speech at Georgetown University, his alma mater. “I began to redefine my identity as a Catholic as one much closer to the parish, to the Mass, to the liturgy.”
Berry’s tenacity has produced an array of work on clerical sexual abuse and questionable church financing — dozens of newspaper and magazine articles and three books, including the recently published “Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.” As Berry has traveled the country for book readings this month, the church has been pressed to relive its anguish anew; barely a week ago, victims of clergy sex abuse asked the International Criminal Court at the Hague to prosecute Pope Benedict XVI for crimes against humanity for allegedly shielding abusive priests. The Vatican’s U.S. attorney called the request a “ludicrous publicity stunt.”
Countless enterprising journalists have probed the church abuse scandals — including a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Boston Globe — but few American writers have been more closely identified with the scandals or have been delving into them longer than Berry. His faith also can give him a kind of credibility with some.
“He’s a devout Catholic, so he’s family, so to speak,” says Peter Borre, an organizer of vigils aimed at preventing the closure of Catholic parishes in Boston and other cities.
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