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OK, it’s not the best angle, but here is a picture of me being baptized:

baptism
My aunt Joan holding me as I was baptized

This is by itself unremarkable (except maybe for those who didn’t know that I was born into a Catholic family), but yesterday I learned something about the priest: Augustine Giella. It turns out that he was one of the priests named in the recent Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. According to this article:

New Jersey court records indicate Giella confessed to fondling one of the girls and taking photos of her unclothed. Giella was facing sexual assault, child endangerment and child pornography charges in Ocean County, New Jersey, when he died in 1993 at about age 72.

giella in court
Augustine Giella in court

I was raised Catholic, until about age 13 when I realized that all that supernatural stuff was so much nonsense. But until then, I was a good Catholic boy, and was actually an altar boy for several years. I remember Giella and a few of the other priests who had been at that church since I was little. This was years before the reality of child abuse and the coverup by the church, but back then we all thought that anyone who wanted to be a priest had to be weird. So no, I don’t have a personal sordid tale of abuse. I’m lucky in that regard. They never did anything to me worse than feeding me the bullshit they fed every other kid. It’s just a very odd feeling to realize that that the monsters I have been reading about now that the cover-up by the Catholic Church is being unraveled are no longer abstract “others”, but that one of them was part of my life, and that perhaps some of my classmates at the time could have also been among his victims.