HEALDSBURG, Calif., April 26, 2002 — The Catholics of the Diocese of Santa Rosa are only too well acquainted with scandal. Since the diocese was founded in 1962, they have learned time and again to separate bad deeds from enduring belief. As Catholics across the United States face tough choices about their church, the experiences of Santa Rosa’s faithful offer valuable lessons in hurt and healing.

The diocese history extends back 40 years, and John Crevelli has witnessed it all. A lifelong Catholic, he was baptized in Santa Rosa and chaired the diocese’s first pastoral council in the early 1960s.

When his oldest daughter got married, she insisted the ceremony be performed by the Rev. Don Kimball, whom Crevelli considered a “close friend” — the same Don Kimball convicted in April of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in St. John the Baptist Church, the parish just down the hill from Crevelli’s home.

“We missed some signals that we should have picked up,” says Crevelli — when, for example, one of their sons saw Kimball, who had counseled the boy in the past, go into a local spa with a woman and rent a hot tub.

Crevelli, a retired high school and junior college history instructor, and his wife, Debra, make clear they are people of faith. John Crevelli still attends Mass at St. John’s, drawn by the power of the ceremony. “It’s my church. ... It represents my God,” he says. “I’m not going to be driven out, because somebody’s got to be fighting from inside to change it.”

But Debra no longer attends services, and all but one of their children have walked away from the church. Debra, who still occasionally teaches third grade, is too worn out by scandal and disappointment to still participate in what she once considered a second family.

“I think we are knocked windless,” she says. “All of our lives, we were born into the Catholic faith. And here we are at the end. And to think it was all this big caustic conspiracy.”

Waves of scandal
The Crevellis’ personal hurt and confusion, and the struggle to find a workable relationship with their church, echoes throughout this stretch of northern California, where the successor of Father Junipero Serra ended the fabled Mission Trail and some of the nation’s most exclusive vineyards kick off their fall harvests by asking priests to bless the grapes. Catholics here have watched their church wither under a seemingly endless series of crises. Within the past decade alone, a half-dozen priests have admitted sexual misconduct, including Bishop Patrick Ziemann, who resigned in 1999 after he admitted having sex with a diocese priest. Just as devastating for some, Ziemann left the diocese millions of dollars in debt after a series of financial misdeeds, including abuse of a common checking account that pooled the money of all the parishes. Parish priests and Catholic school officials suddenly found their savings drained.

Most recently, Kimball was convicted of two counts of lewd conduct for having sex with a girl during his time at St. John’s, but acquitted of the rape of a 14-year-old girl at a Santa Rosa parish. Then, just a week later, Bishop Daniel Walsh suspended the Rev. Anthony Ross, a Santa Rosa jail minister, for sex with a young man 20 years ago in Joliet, Ill. But Father Tony, as parishioners call him, has wide support in the community — in part because unlike with Kimball, “There’s not a hint of self-pity. There’s not a hint of denial,” says Jennifer Roback Morse, an economist at the Hoover Institution who attends St. Eugene’s Church in Santa Rosa.

Almost anyone in this solidly Catholic swath of the West Coast will offer unblinking criticism about the church and its human failings. And although they are quick to defend their beliefs and point out they remain faithful Catholics, their relationship to their church has changed in demonstrable ways.

Many no longer give money to their parishes — even fewer give to the diocese — and some who do write checks directly to creditors, hoping to keep church officials away from their cash.

“We get through it because our faith is not in the man, our faith is in God,” says Morse.

Morse, who moved up from Silicon Valley two months before Ziemann resigned, considers herself a traditional Catholic but won’t send her children to Catholic schools because, she says, they have moved away from the church’s purpose. “In this diocese, and in a lot of dioceses, we haven’t been following Jesus that closely,” she says. “We’ve been having a sort of social club with a school attached.”

Learning to heal
Many Catholics here reveal a surprising frankness in their approach to the larger church crisis. It may be because their own diocese has so much experience in facing hardship that there is a broad desire to confront problems as they appear, to root out bad priests and corrupt decisions — as, they point out, would any solid organization.

“It’s about a community of people who have come together to love and be loved, and do good,” says JoAnn Consigliere, a Santa Rosa therapist who has treated seven patients sexually abused by priests, including five in the diocese. “I think there’s the sweet with the bitter. The part that is of woundedness needs to come out, to get healed.”

Part of that healing process, she says, must be an opening of church policy to the people in the pews. It is a common refrain among many here who watched as their diocese all but collapsed from the top down, and then took part in rebuilding it.

“If the church continues as it has with its power structure, it’s going to crumble,” Consigliere says.

The healing also must include, she says, the need to confront “the shadow side, the dark side of the church”: sexual issues on which the Vatican has so long been resolute — whether it be optional celibacy for priests or the ethics of birth control.

Conversations here about healing the church turn to often frank talk about the church’s role in Catholics’ intimate lives, a role that resonated harshly when well-liked and respected clergy revealed unseemly and sometimes criminal sexual acts. It angered parishioners who have long adhered to the church’s guidelines on sex, including strict limits on birth control and celibacy before marriage.

“I think the extreme reaction from the Catholic community on the sexual abuse in some way stems from how intrusive the church has been in the sexual lives of the laity,” John Crevelli says. “And then all of a sudden we discover, after a lifetime, here are these priests who are getting their sexual jollies in every way. That really infuriates me.”

But the lust isn’t just for sex — it’s also for power. Many parishioners, and even some church officials, made clear their distinction between the need for selflessness in the priesthood and a political, ambition-filled clergy. “A priest is ordained to minister, and to minister is to give service,” says one diocese priest. “It means giving. It does not mean taking. ... If they need to be a priest in order to be somebody, get ’em out. Boot ’em.”

Many also echo the difference underscored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops between pedophilic priests, who prey upon young children, and those drawn to maturing teens.

‘A very lonely feeling'
As much as various scandals forced the Catholic community to open a public dialogue, the pain throughout the Santa Rosa diocese remains largely personal. And while some parishes have vocally addressed both the local and national problems in the church, others skirt the issues entirely. Even when Catholic friends talk, the subject may remain awkward.

“The pain is so horrific. And it is only normal that people feel so different about this issue, and we are all surfacing at different levels,” says Debra Crevelli. “It’s a very lonely feeling.”

Perhaps that is why solutions to the various problems in the diocese — and the whole church — are met with little consensus. Certain things, the faithful of Santa Rosa make clear, are a sure bet: bringing laypeople into the process, forcing accountability, overhauling the seminaries. As for those priests who break the law, they must face their punishment like anyone else, parishioners say.