STOLEN MOMENTS

Over the Christmas break, as I was rummaging through a walk-in closet used for storage space and overdue for clearing out, I came across a stack of old letters and one Christmas card. Post-marked December 21, 2000, from Erie Pennsylvania, it was from a former teacher who became a close friend, Father Michael Barletta. He was, at the time, a priest at St. Patrick's Church in Erie. Inside the card, he had written:

Dear Jim,

Hope you’re doing well. Haven’t been to Chicago for a while but when I do, I’ll be sure to call. Have a blessed year.

Love,
Fr. Barts

He occasionally visited one of his brothers who lived in Chicago where I have also lived for many years. On several such trips, we got in touch and would meet for dinner to reminisce and catch up whenever he was in town. The Christmas card was one of the last times I had any communication with him. There might have been a few brief phone calls afterward, but I don’t well remember. Last year, I learned Father Barletta had passed away in August 2022.

I became aware of his passing when the Erie-Times News broke the story in September of that same year. The article was not so much an obituary as it was a recounting of Father Barletta’s years of sexual predation on the adolescent boys for whom he was entrusted with teaching and providing spiritual guidance. His story is one that, unfortunately, had become too commonplace once the revelations of other priests’ similar predations and the Catholic Church’s cover-up came to light and then snowballed when the press revealed the full extent of both. In this instance, the difference for me was that I was once a student and close friend of Father Barletta’s. Even though I was one of the fortunate ones who was never sexually victimized, I still contend with emotional scars from what I will always view as a horrible betrayal. I can’t imagine the continuing suffering and difficulty of those who were among the reported 25 victims (but likely more) of Father Barletta’s sexual abuse. But I also believe the victims of his crimes and selfishness extend beyond those he sexually abused.

I first met Father Barletta when I attended Kennedy Christian (now Kennedy Catholic) High School in Hermitage Pennsylvania, which I attended as a senior from 1972-1973. Although I did not think of it this way at the time, I very much needed and was searching for a kind, loving father figure. My own father was a cad in his younger years and struggled with alcoholism for many years. When he became increasingly and physically threatening towards my mother over imagined infidelities, she divorced him and we moved from Miami back to her parents’ home in New Castle, PA. I was in the first grade and 5 years old. To avoid child-support payments, my father left Pennsylvania when I was 11, moved to Florida, and then moved again to South Carolina. At that point, my mother gave up legally chasing him for child support. The fragmentary laws at the time required a new case to be filed in the state of residence with no enforcement possible across state lines. I would not have much contact with him until I was in my early 30s when we reconciled and thereafter had a close though sometimes still bumpy relationship until he passed away in 2013.

My mother remarried when I was about 11 years old, but that marriage was also unhappy, marked by frequent arguments that were so common my sister and I became numb to them; just another evening of yelling, slammed doors, and pouting. For added drama, our stepfather inexplicably packed his clothes in paper shopping bags instead of suitcases and left the house for an hour or two, only to return for the inevitable if short-lived reconciliation. Within a few weeks, there would be a new argument. On such evenings, my sister and I knew we would be eating at our choice of McDonalds or Burger King. On some evenings we had the more dreaded option of eating a much-loathed “Spanish rice” concoction my mother threw together. On the fast-food fight nights, our mother would leave money on the kitchen counter for us while she holed up in her bedroom to continue the argument over whatever issue had sparked the latest domestic maelstrom.

Over the 7 years before I left for college, I never had a close relationship with my stepfather. He and I also argued over petty things like cutting the lawn or if I could drive the “nice” family car to the prom (I had to take the beater). Years later, my sister and I would darkly joke we had not won the parental sweepstakes. He and my mother later divorced but they maintained an oddly symbiotic relationship until his death whereby he would move for work and she would move where he was located but maintain a separate residence. I was glad not to be a part of that drama anymore.

At the same time, though lacking a happy family life, I fondly remember much of my childhood and adolescence as not unhappy and recall many happy moments. I was fortunate to always have had kind, caring friends. And I knew that both my parents, in spite of their emotional and psychological limitations, as well as my grandparents, always loved me as much as they were able. I will always remember Grandma and Grandpa Chiurazzi with great affection. Their home was warm and filled with love. Grandma Chiurazzi was a great cook, housekeeper, and grandmother.

Grandpa Chiurazzi was very much a surrogate father to me during the 4 to 5 years we lived with my grandparents after my parents’ divorce and before my mother’s remarriage. He was a retired Harlem detective, devout Catholic, and a true family man. We spent a lot of time together tending his garden and beloved rose bushes. Every night after dinner we would water the roses and pick off by hand the Japanese beetles that returned daily to infest them. We faithfully watched the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball games and Steelers, and Notre Dame football games together. The day I was admitted to Notre Dame, the only college I ever wanted to attend, my thoughts were very much of him. I often wished he could have visited the campus, and we could have gone to a Notre Dame football game together. Sadly, we never had that chance. He died when I was only 12 years old, a year after my father began his tour of the East Coast and my mother had remarried.

I was also fortunate to have excelled as a student and to have been decent at athletics. Somehow, school, success at outside interests like sports, and close friendships were nearly adequate as social and emotional counterbalances to my unfortunate family life. Still, there was a deep void after my grandfather died owing to the lack of a loving, kind, caring father who could provide emotional support, guidance, and mentoring. In an important way, Father Barletta stepped into that breach. Although the stories might differ in the particulars, I would guess he fulfilled similar needs for other boys who like me came from unhappy homes and needed a father figure.

As the school guidance counselor and a psychology teacher at Kennedy Christian, Father Barletta made himself available in supportive ways that other teachers did not. You could always walk into his office and talk with him about almost anything. I quickly took advantage of this and would often stop by to chat, eventually opening up and confiding more and more in him as the senior year went by. Father Barletta was funny, intelligent, and empathetic. He did something that was rather unusual among faculty; he listened, and he did so carefully and thoughtfully without judging. He made you feel he was on your side, joining in making fun of the other teachers who could seem more concerned with being disciplinarians (“shave the lip Swartz”) than mentors or who treated students as curious annoyances. Many times, he was just one of the guys, a big kid. I still remember him advising me on affairs of the heart and listening patiently to my endless stories of unrequited love, filled with all the emotional drama a teenage boy could muster. Perhaps most importantly, he made me feel good about being me. He very much embodied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Jay Gatsby’s smile:

“[His smile] understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

He would tell those of us who had grown close to him that we were the “good” ones, the best of the best who had an emotional openness that allowed for our relationships with him. As to the students who did not care to associate with Father Barletta – there were a fair number who deeply disliked and distrusted him – they were characterized as “defensive” and too emotionally stunted to “get” him. Those of us in his inner circle – the ones who hung out with him most often and of whom I was one – came to be known derisively by other students as “Barts farts”. We came to appropriate this appellation as a self-referential badge of honor. In retrospect, it all seems mildly cultish though there was never any coercion to give up outside activities or denounce our families or the students who did not like Father Barletta.

Instead, the compulsion to remain close to Father Barletta was the feeling of specialness and being cared for when you were part of his inner circle. At the time, it was compelling and brought a comforting certainty to a fraught, inchoate time in life; by virtue of being close to Father Barletta, we were also provided with a sense of better knowing who we were, where we belonged, that we were good and valued for our goodness and, above all, that we were loved. We had a sense of emotional and spiritual certainty. Adding to the closeness and sense of belonging, we who were in Bart’s inner circle all hung out together, often doing nothing more than going after school with Barts for coffee at the local Denny’s or Friendly’s where we talked about anything and everything and enjoyed our friendships. It really didn’t matter what we did together socially. It could be something as silly as miniature golf. Father Barletta made just hanging out together fun. I often had the deep feeling that no matter what we were doing, I was just where I was supposed to be, desiring to be nowhere else and with no one else. It was in important ways, the warm, loving home I never had except for the few years living with my grandparents.

As mentioned, I was never sexually victimized by Barletta, but I can see how it happened to others. The long talks and emotional closeness could easily have led to discussions of sexuality and sometimes to questioning one’s sexual identity and proclivities; adolescence can be fraught with uncertainties around self-worth and around forming an identity including one’s sexual identity. That he was a priest and also heard confessions, often outside a church confessional in his private office or car, thereby adding to the sense of intimacy. These confessions led to candid discussions of deeply personal topics, including sexual ones, with vulnerable youth who, like me, had grown to completely trust him. Catholicism’s emphasis on sexual behavior outside of marriage as sinful further encouraged discussions of sexual topics such as masturbation during confession. Whether he chose those he sexually victimized because they opened up to him about their sexuality during confession or counseling or whether it was simply more about whom he was most attracted to, I can’t say and suppose will never be known. But I believe that such intimate conversations as occurred while Father Barletta counseled students or heard their confessions provided him with opportunities he might not have had otherwise and allowed him to target those likely to be more receptive to his sexual overtures.

His penchant for vacationing exclusively with teenage boys also afforded him opportunities for sexual predation and probably intentionally so. As described in the original Erie Times-News article on Barletta’s victimizations and the subsequent piece on the occasion of his death, he would take the boys he was closest to on “vacations” to Niagara Falls, a getaway home his family owned in rural Pennsylvania, to Bermuda, or to other locations such as San Francisco where another of his brothers lived. Noticing that he exclusively took such trips with and “counseled” only adolescent boys, I once asked him why he did not “counsel” girls. His response, now dripping with irony, is that he did not want to give even the impression of taking sexual advantage of the students he counseled. He said it would be inappropriate for him to be alone with teenage girls. It made good sense at the time and further cast him as someone who could be trusted completely. I fully believed, as did others, that Father Barletta did everything for our benefit because he cared about us. I never suspected his motive was sexual interest.

I went on multiple such trips with him and friends who were also close to Father Barletta, but I never went on any trip where I was alone with him. Nothing overtly sexual ever occurred on any of these trips save for one incident that I can recall. While staying at a hotel in Niagara Falls, on a trip that four of us went on during our senior year at Kennedy High School, Father Barletta exposed himself by pulling out his penis and putting it near the face of one of my friends who was still lying in bed while others were showering or getting dressed. When the friend later recounted the event to those of us on that particular trip, we dismissed it as a frat-boy-type prank at the time and laughed it off; it was just Fr. Barts clowning much like you might in a locker room. There was no further discussion about his exposing himself, but it is obvious now how bizarre and inappropriate his behavior was. I suspect these sexual gestures disguised as mere pranks might have been another way he tested to see who would be most responsive to outright sexual overtures.

Using these tactics and his joint role as a priest/counselor/confidante/friend, he was able to avoid being revealed as a sexual predator for many years. He carefully selected the places, times, and victims. If ever questioned, it could all be laughed off as a prank until a few of the boys he molested finally came forward to tell their stories. There were, however, early warning signs and a few voices that were ignored including one incident where another priest caught Father Barletta in his office with a student who had his pants down. Upon reporting this early incident, the reporting priest was told to “go home and be a good priest”.

A high school friend of mine with whom I am friends to this day and who happens to be gay said he suspected Father Barletta of being gay because Father Barletta surrounded himself almost exclusively with many of the same boys to whom my friend was attracted. Father Barletta surrounding himself with attractive teen boys did not go unnoticed by others. The revelatory Times News article included a description of Father Barletta’s favorite boys as “Barts’ pretty people”. This same friend also reported a friend of his brother’s, who was several years ahead of us in school, had complained about Father Barletta giving him an inappropriate “massage” in the high school locker room. That complaint went nowhere until it resurfaced years later in the grand jury report that detailed Barletta’s transgressions.

These few incidents aside, I never experienced or heard from friends of any other such overtly sexual or suspicious events. As the Christmas card from 2000 conveys, I remained friends with Father Barletta for many years after high school and had many warm memories of the times I had spent with him. Whenever I went home for a visit to Pennsylvania, usually at Christmas, I would call Father Barletta and arrange to drive to Erie from Sharpsville to see him. I made a number of such visits over the years and once even brought along a woman I thought I would become engaged to (never happened) after which I wanted to ask Father Barletta if he would perform the ceremony. I was proud she was my girlfriend and proud of my relationship with Father Barletta. I wanted Father Barletta to see that after all the romantic tribulations I had conveyed to him over the years, I had finally found a great girlfriend and future wife. I wanted her to see what a great mentor and friend I had.

It was not until November 2003, that his history of sexual predation became public knowledge through the article that appeared in the Erie Times-News under the relatively mild title, Ex-Prep Priest Accused. The story under that title, however, was much less unassuming and detailed the accusations of three of Barletta’s former students at Erie Cathedral Preparatory High School. Barletta had transferred to “Prep” from Kennedy Christian in 1977 where he remained on faculty until 1994 when the allegations of sexual abuse were first brought to the attention of the Erie Diocesan Bishop, Donald Trautman. I was completely unaware of all of this until the Erie Times-News article was published and some hometown friends alerted me via text messages and a link to the article.

The three accusers described how Barletta had sexually molested them in the late 1970s and 1980s when they were 15 to 17 years old. Trautman relieved Barletta of his ministerial and teaching responsibilities placing him as a chaplain in an Erie monastery. It was an ironically fitting if perhaps unintentional punishment – the statute of limitations for his crimes had passed – as Barletta loathed nuns. He would often say “nuns are weird” and his relationships with the sisters at Kennedy Christian were strained at best. Eventually, a damning grand jury report was published in August 2018 (https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/report/). It provided the many ugly details on how Father Barletta and other priests in the Pennsylvania diocese had victimized children and adolescents. While the report notes Barletta admitted to as many as 25 such victims, in recent conversations with Kennedy Christian friends, I have learned some were also sexually victimized but never reported it. The true count of Barletta’s victims is something that is also unlikely to be ever known.

Although not sexually abused by Barletta, I could relate to many of the details in the Erie Times-News story as recounted by the three victims who bravely came forward: how Barletta was like a “big kid”, how he made “being Catholic fun”, the aforementioned vacations and trips, his use of confession as part of a slow seduction, and so on. Everything rang true to my own experiences. As difficult as the news was to hear and accept, I have never doubted the grand jury report or the Erie newspaper story. Although Barletta would deny the accusations in the grand jury report, he convinced no one. A life that had seemed so promising and which had the potential to benefit others and to bring goodness into the world ended tragically not only for his victims but also for him, though I suspect few would feel much pity for him. Father Barletta died a pariah. To the best of my knowledge, his hometown paper in Ellwood City Pennsylvania did not even publish an obituary. I imagine his family and few remaining friends wanted it so.

My heart goes out to each and every person sexually abused by Father Barletta. I hope they somehow find peace and are able to move emotionally and psychologically past their horrible experiences. But I think it is important to recognize that Barletta also damaged the lives of those he did not sexually victimize. The lingering aftereffect for me and probably for many others who had similar experiences short of sexual victimization is that the memories of what had been an important relationship that pulled me (us) through a socially and emotionally fraught period of our lives – all the good times, the laughter, the comradery, friendship, sense of wellbeing and closeness – have been irreparably tarnished. As I have grown older and reminisced more often, I have fondly recalled the times spent with Father Barletta and my Kennedy Christian friends. Now, those memories are no longer happy ones and are at best conflicted. They will never again be sources of comfort.

There were times after the story of his abuse was publicized that I wanted to call him and talk. But I chose not to because I couldn’t imagine he would want to discuss any of it. I didn’t think I could trust whatever he would have said even if we did have a conversation. And I wasn’t sure how I would ask the questions for which I wanted answers. The most important question I wanted to ask was whether any part of our relationship or the relationships he had with other boys were ever sincere. Did he ever really care? Or was it one big Machiavellian act in service of his sexual gratification even if he was “playing the long game” in some instances? I doubt I would have believed him no matter what he said. I am left to wonder how much of the kindness he showed over the years was a mirage, only intended to identify me and others as potential sexual victims and to preserve the wider misperception of him as a good, caring priest who was living, as he once said, “a life of love following Christ”. It’s obvious now that he was doing nothing of the kind and he had to know that.

On the occasion of his ordination in 1966, Father Barletta wrote a short summation of his (purported) philosophy around which he intended to base his ensuing priesthood and ministry. Printed on a small bright yellow cloth card, the prose indented to appear poetic, it read:

“If I will recognize,
and know the good and the bad
in myself and others,
strive to increase the good in both,
then I will have loved. Even then,
I will be but a reflection of God,
who is perfect love.”

He gave copies of this lovely sentiment to those with whom he was close or to whom he had ministered in some way; if only he had been able and willing to live up to that ideal. I carried a copy in my wallet for many years. A few months after the story of his predations broke, revealing his true motivations and misdeeds, and I had processed my emotions and shock, I removed the card from my wallet, tore it into small pieces, and placed it in the garbage can beside my desk. Those now empty words no longer provided solace or guidance.

James Swartz is a Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Research in the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois Chicago. His area of study is substance use and misuse and he has published over 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals as well as a book and multiple book chapters. This is his first non-fiction essay. His College web page is at: https://socialwork.uic.edu/profiles/james-a-swartz/