September 9, 2004

Former priest speaks out about clergy sexual abuse scandal
Almaden man was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1981

By Sheila Sanchez
Staff Writer

Thomas McMahon left the Roman Catholic priesthood more than two decades ago, ousted for violating strict celibacy vows—a sexual relationship with a woman—he says he never promised to keep.

Yet, in his retirement years, the 75-year-old McMahon is consumed with the welfare of the dwindling number of men who enter the seminary to study theology and dedicate their lives to the church.

He’s a strong proponent of the abolishment of celibacy, which he says may be at the root of the sweeping clergy sexual abuse scandal, which began more than two years ago.

His home office is packed with documents he’s accumulated on priestly sexual abuse over the years. He knows some priests who are being accused of sexual crimes against children allegedly committed decades ago. He also knows victims who are now active members of the national nonprofit Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

He’s the topic of Tim Unsworth’s 13th chapter of “Catholics on the Edge,” a compilation of 16 stories of Catholics with a genuine love for the church who contend they were pushed to their spiritual and intellectual limits and were ostracized by the church’s hierarchy in a power struggle.

‘Father Tom’
A third-generation San Franciscan, he was born in Nov. 16, 1928 and was raised by a loyal Catholic woman, widowed early and left to care for four children. She instilled in her children, including McMahon, a love to serve God and his creation. Such teachings made McMahon and his sister choose to dedicate their lives to the church.

From 1942 to 1948, McMahon attended the now destroyed St. Joseph College Minor Seminary, close to the Maryknoll retirement home in Los Altos, and then moved to St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park being ordained a priest in 1954. He calls himself a “12-year-man” because he was a 13-year-old boy when he entered the seminary during World War II and was ordained a priest when he was 25, undergoing 12 years of rigorous training for the priesthood, a requirement that no longer exists for priests, which dates back to the 1600s.

Those experiences are some of the most dear and memorable to McMahon. “I hold dear those seminary days of youthful dreams and friends who thought alike. I treasure the people with whom I lived and worked as a priest,” he writes in an essay.

After his ordination, he served as a priest at St. Leo the Great Church in San Jose, at St. Francis Cabrini Church, at Holy Spirit Church on Redmond Avenue for seven years and was the founding pastor of the Community of Christ our Lord and Brother, today called St. Anthony’s Church, where he worked for five years.

He was instrumental in beginning the St. Anthony parish in 1975 and renovating the old church building built 1898. He remembers saying Mass by the oak tree where the new church now stands on McKean Road.
Ousted from the priesthood

While working as a priest, McMahon organized parish teen clubs for 26 years. The groups would travel to Europe with him, sometimes for 42 days, giving him the opportunity to reach young people with the message of Christ. On one of those trips, Elaine, his wife, then a student 17 years younger than McMahon, struck up a friendship with the priest, who says their friendship at the beginning was purely platonic, and didn’t became romantic until 20 years later.

In 1980 he was ousted from the church, when he divulged he had been living with Elaine, who had given birth to two children by McMahon.

McMahon was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic priesthood in January of 1981. There was no formal dismissal even though he had served for 26 years as a priest. He recalled going to his ecclesiastical leaders four years before his formal departure to reveal that he had a relationship with a woman and they had a child.

He wasn’t alone. Bishops have admitted to having affairs with adult women while others, like McMahon, have led double lives—one at the rectory playing the celibate role, another at home with a woman and children.

Finally, when his second son was born, then San Francisco Diocese Bishop Francis Quinn, under Archbishop John Quinn, asked him to officially leave the parish he had come to love. Frank Quinn is now retired and works with Yaquis Indians in Tucson, Ariz., and remains a friend to this day.

Initially, church leaders wanted McMahon to leave the parish quickly, but when he threatened to go the media to expose priests he knew who were also violating celibacy vows, and were active homosexuals and pedophiles, they left him alone.

“The priesthood was never mentioned. I just drifted away. It was a terrible disappointment for me, not for my own ego, but for the people of the parish,” he remembers. “I knew I could never last in the very strict Roman Catholic priesthood.”

His withdrawal from the priesthood, however, began in 1966 with his reading of Pope Paul the 6th encyclical on celibacy. He was then told to promote the pope’s birth control stand; instead he admitted to his parish that he had never seen a contraceptive, never slept with or sexually touched a woman and was not going to tell them that limiting a family by using birth control was sinful. He recalls the congregation clapped loudly.

That same year, he says he was fired from Notre Dame High School for teaching that Jesus Christ was human and divine. He was then expelled from two parishes in six months for protecting minority children and speaking about women’s rights.

After seven years at Holy Spirit, he was sent to pastor the small mission in New Almaden, now St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. By this time, however, McMahon had a son. He visited the late archbishop Joe McGucken with a letter of resignation to confess the violation of his celibacy vows. Three years passed and he had a second son.
“In a remote area of the archdiocese of San Francisco a family pastor had entered a time capsule, bringing the church back to 1139, when married priesthood was functioning again,” he writes of his experience.

Looking back he believes he was influenced by his maternal uncle, Thomas I. Bresnahan, who was an ordained Catholic priest in 1922 and who became his family’s surrogate father. His father died in 1931 and his mother and uncle had a special bond after surviving the San Francisco fire and earthquake and losing everything to the devastating tragedy.

Forming a new church
After being expelled from the Catholic priesthood, McMahon went home to his family and was surprised by a group of parishioners who still wanted to study religion with him. It was then that he formed the nonprofit “Community of Jesus our Brother.”

McMahon says for incorporation purposes he was listed as the group’s pastor, but he says he merely serves as facilitator for the study groups that the organization puts together to read and ponder the mission of Jesus Christ. The group, at one point, had about 20 families. Today, only six families remain due to death or relocation.

He says many of his former priest friends and the bishop criticized him for organizing the group and harming the church, but he dismissed their concerns. He also says many of his former parishioners ridiculed him and the group.

Since the beginning the group has celebrated its own version of the Eucharist, meeting in different homes. While he receives no salary from organization members, participants make contributions that allow McMahon to buy books to do theological research and reach out to the poor.

Concerns over the priesthood
Most priests of the San Francisco Bay Area were Depression children from the Mission District. Today, however, with a shortage of priests nationwide, most come from different countries.

Some priests come from Ireland, which in the 1920s was affected by the potato famine, which left many with a tremendous burden of guilt in regard to the Roman Catholic Church.

Those priests are plagued by an unhealthy fear of women, McMahon says, because they were trained in a puritanical atmosphere that denied them their human sexuality. He point out that the vows of celibacy are now being questioned and many theologians are studying whether there’s a link between rigorous sexual abstinence and pedophilia.

Roberta Ward, a spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Jose, argues that there’s no scientific link between celibacy and pedophilia. “The church has really looked at this,” she says, while admitting that the seminary culture in the 50s was repressive.

McMahon believes to correct the problem the church needs to reform the priesthood.

He says a catholic priest in the year 900 was a family man training one of his male sons to be the priest of a small Christian community. “It was feather in a man’s hat to be married.”

“I’m not saying that the priesthood is an illegitimate experience. It’s an experience sanctioned by people that I believe we can change and we can move the customs by those around. There’s nothing in the scriptures that says a man has to be a celibate priest.”

In 1967, he says he tried to turn in a priest to the bishop’s office who was sexually abusing a teenager. He almost lost his job for doing so.

He explains the clergy sexual abuse scandal that rocked the church at the beginning of 2002 was caused when the Roman Catholic Cardinal Bernard Law refused to deal with hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse against priests who were allowed to remain on active church duty for years. Law has since apologized and resigned for his handling of the abusive priests and has met with members of a lay Catholic group he had previously shunned.

Today, there are some priests in the Bay Area, intimate friends of McMahon, who are being accused of sexual abuse that allegedly occurred 40 years ago. He doesn’t know if the allegations are true and is mystified by the scandal.

“Whether the sex abuse problem will be solved because all of us die and a new generation of priests don’t have a problem, the church [still] has to deal with this issue,” he says.

Ward says the church is working aggressively to deal with the issue citing the creation of the National Review Board study, a Vatican-mandated inspection of U.S. seminaries to review what priest-candidates are taught about celibacy and American cardinals have denounced the abuse calling it evil and giving priests strict standards to work with for reporting and exposing perpetrators. The April 2002 emergency Vatican summit on abuse reaffirmed the value of priestly celibacy as a gift of God to the church.

“The bishops are saying that clergy sexual abuse is an evil all the way around. It’s an evil that has hurt young people who are now adults and it’s an evil that has hurt the church,” Ward says, adding that priests have suffered tremendously because of the scandal. “People have been awful to priests. On their day off, they don’t dare wear their Roman collar when they shop because people have spit on them. Damage has been done to priests who haven’t even thought of doing these things. We need to look at the big picture. It’s a relatively small number of priests who have been involved in this. Not every priest should be looked at as being a child molester. I know priests who don’t even pat a kid on the head anymore, they’re so conscious of these things. It takes a toll.”

He stresses the church must give men considering the priesthood the freedom to marry and explore their God-given right to have a family and experience sexual relations. Ward, however, says there’s no chance that Pope John Paul II will lift the celibacy mandate.

“People say to me I broke my vows,” said McMahon. “But, I never took a vow. Religious order priests take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. As secular priests, we never took those vows.”

Ward says that while secular priests may not specifically vow to stay chaste, they accepted holy orders, which required mandatory celibacy. “They knew what they were getting into,” she says, of priests ordained in the 50s. “Diocesan priests take a vow of obedience. They’re accountable to the bishop and to stay celibate.”

Documentary and lectures
McMahon has teamed up with a well-known freelance video-photographer in the Bay Area to produce a documentary on clergy sexual abuse and the priesthood. As part of the documentary, he’s begun giving presentations on the topic to educate people about the issue. He’s hoping to raise enough funds to travel to Ireland, Europe and the East Coast to interview and meet victims, perpetrators and key ecclesiastical leaders.

McMahon will present lectures Sept. 14, Sept. 19, Oct. 12, Nov. 16 and Nov. 21, at the Almaden Community Center, 21727 Bertram Rd., on 21st century spirituality in a technological age and ancient priesthoods and the Roman Catholic priesthood in light of the clerical sexual crisis and its future. A question and answer period will be allowed after the free presentations. For more information call (408) 266-8482 or e-mail McMahon at tmc@earthlink.net.