FACE OF A MONSTER Anthony O’BRIEN. You might want to skip this story about an abusive priest from my past, it’s a downer…some lighter fare if you scroll down..

Story 1 Evil intent

God, I hate writing this story. Maybe that’s why it took me over half a century to do so. As a writer of facts, not fiction, I’m disappointed in myself. Disappointed for keeping quiet about something in my past that should have been out there long ago. 

His name was Anthony O’Brien. Some called him Father O’Brien. Father? What a joke. He was a father to no one. O’Brien was a priest in our Catholic church when I was a kid. He arrived in my hometown when I was eight years old and he left when I was ten, in 1963…a lifetime ago. In the 1980’s an unidentified man, from my parish, St Joseph’s in Sydney, Nova Scotia, accused O’Brien of sexual abuse from incidents that occurred when he was a boy my age in 63, but nothing came from it.

1963 was a difficult year for me as a ten year old. O’Brien had been stalking me since I was eight. Our family home was his refuge almost every week when he showed up for Sunday dinner. Sunday became a hated day of the week for me. A very shy kid, O’brien paid attention to me from the get go. He was insidious, sneaky in his intent. He would call me ‘his girl’, and give me money, away from my parents watchful eyes. I remember that he wrote a poem and left it in an envelope for me, in it he said that I was ‘his mostest’ and of course the envelope included cash. I would take the notes and the money he gave me, run through the woods behind our house to the brook and throw it all away.  His actions seemed innocent to my parents, but not to me. 

“Fr. O’Brien really likes you, Sha”, Mom would say. 

“I hate him” was my reply. Mom and Dad were amused by that, knowing that I didn’t like attention anyway. I remember every Sunday evening sitting on the curb down the street from our house, watching his car in our driveway, and willing, praying even, that it would drive off and it would be safe for me to come home. But no such luck. O’Brien was never going to leave before he saw his girl. Soon, my mother would be calling me in for dinner and once inside, my tormentor, who had invaded my safe space, my home, would have me on his lap in no time, making a big fuss over me. 

By 1963 when I was 10, O’Brien upped the ante, I remember him coming to my grade 5 classroom, and telling my teacher, Mother St. Jude, that he needed to take me. She took a long look at me, I’m sure that she saw the terror in my eyes, and she told him, in no uncertain terms, that she was not allowing me to leave with him. They had a bit of an argument at the door, a priest definitely trumped a nun, but she was tough and he left without me. I knew that I was safe, at least while in her classroom. But he would come to the school yard at recess and try to get me into his car. My schoolmates, mostly the altar boys, would warn me, “Sharon, O’Brien’s looking for you”. Our house was close by so I would run through the school yard, into my own backyard and hide until I saw his car leave. 

In the Kiwanis speech festival that year, I confidently trod onto the stage and turned to the audience to present my speech. There in the back row was O’brien, leering at me. I could barely speak and ran off the stage without delivering my words. My sympathetic mother was in the audience and told me not to worry, there was always next year. She assumed that it was stage fright. “Fr. O’brien offered to drive us home”, she said.

I had to get in the middle of the front seat next to O’brien, my mother on the other side. When he started the car, I jumped across my mother’s lap before she closed the door and out I went, running all the way home. Mom arrived home shortly after that, I watched as she got out of O’brien’s car and he drove off. 

“Sha, why did you do that?”, Mom asked me, concerned. 

“Because I hate Fr. O’brien”, I told her. I heard Mom and Dad talking later that night. It wasn’t like me, they said. 

FInally, a frustrated O’brien got his chance.  A party at our house. I was in bed, in my pajamas reading my latest Nancy Drew mystery book. The door was slightly ajar, I didn’t like closing it tightly. I would hear guests coming up to the washroom at the top of the stairs, enter the washroom, and go back down again. But one heavy set of footprints came up the stairs and walked past the washroom to the bedrooms. I turned towards the door and there was O’brien eyeing me, he came in and sat on the bed. Quickly, he was lying on top of me, full weight, his tongue deep down my throat. He was a tall and big man, I was a tiny child, I was suffocating. I tried to move my head. I couldn’t move at all.. or even breathe because of his heavy weight on my chest. I knew that I was dying. The next thing I remember I was in the living room, beside my mother. “Father O’brien, Sharon’s afraid of you”, Mom was saying and I turned to see him coming down the stairs. I waited until he was in conversation with others, before running back up the stairs. I spent the night hiding under the bed, since there were no locks on any of the doors in our house. 

I didn’t see O’Brien after that, he had been sent to another parish in another city. I had my idyllic life back, but the trauma remained. By the time I was a teen, whenever I waltzed with a boy at a dance, I’d get physically ill. My best friend Val and I could not understand why slow dancing was making me sick. It was the same if a guy tried to kiss me. By the time I was in grade 12, I had an ulcer. In university I had my first lover, a serious boyfriend who was a medical student and he was getting vomited on a lot. “Why do you vomit on me when we’re making love?”, he asked, “do you hate me that much?”. “No, I love you”, I told him. He started researching the possible causes in the medical school library, and also confided to a couple of his professors about what would happen when he got close to me, but no one could come up with an answer.

Home from grad school in Montreal a few years later, at the cottage in Cape Breton, my sister said, “Guess who was here yesterday? Fr. O’brien”. I felt dizzy and nauseous, I hadn’t seen O’Brien for ten years. “He asked about you and someone told him that you were coming home today”, she said. 

“Oh god, no”, I replied, “I’m going back to Montreal”. That was the evening that it all came out. I told my story, but only after a relative talked about how Obrien had tied his friend to a tree when they were 13, and told the other boy they should have a go at him. I told a watered down version about how Obrien had come into my bedroom when I was ten and tried to “kiss” me.  

“Don’t you remember what happened?”, my father asked. 

“No, I don’t”, I told him, “it’s a black out”. Dad went on to tell me that he had seen O’Brien come upstairs and when he didn’t come back down, Dad came up to investigate. “I got him out of there”, he told me. 

“Why didn’t you discuss it with me later”? I asked.

“Did you notice that he wasn’t in the parish or back to our house after that?” Yes I did notice. Dad obviously hadn’t seen what really happened, O’brien must have heard him coming and jumped up. I still kept silent, it was too embarrassing to tell everything.

The next day, after Dad left for work. Mom, my little sister and I, were at the cottage, when a car came down the path. “It’s father”, said Lorraine. “That’s not Dad’s car”. 

“Father O’Brien”, she said. With that, the room started to spin. I got up, dizzy, but made it to the bedroom. I heard O’brien say, “where’s my girl?”, as he stomped into the house. I opened the window and vomited outside. My mother told him that I was sleeping, and that he should go for a swim and see me later. She managed to keep him out of my room, while I lay on the bed, in the fetal position. When he left for the beach and I came out, she said to me, “do what you have to do when he comes back, I support you.” 

I was drying the dishes, my back to the door, when he lumbered back in. “There’s my girl”, O’brien bellowed. I spun around and I’m sure I looked like Linda Blair from the Exorcist. One thing for certain, I wasn’t 8 or 10 years old anymore, I was now 21. And I was mad as hell. His eyes widened and he was quickly on the move. I chased him outside. He raced to the car,  in his wet bathing suit, with me in dogged pursuit. He jumped in the car, as I swore at him. He started the ignition and I threw the plate that was still in my hand at his windshield. It broke into a million pieces. He kept driving. And after 11 years, I finally stopped vomiting. O’brien never dared darken our door again.

Around 2002, I was a columnist with the National Post and home in Cape Breton with my children during the summer, as usual. In my parents living room, I watched a news item on tv where the local bishop was being interviewed about a sexual abuse case against a priest. The victim was a ten year old boy. The bishop was saying that the incident was, “the boy’s fault, that he ‘came on’ to the priest”. I was furious and felt that this was the time to tell my story. But when I discussed it with a few friends, their responses went from “priests only abuse boys” to “he’s a good looking man” to “people will blame you”. And I backed down. You know, some ‘friends just need to be cancelled.

Eventually, going through another trauma in my life, I tried therapy. The Fr. O’brien situation was brought up and finally dealt with, the psychologist telling me that the vomiting was because of the abuse by the priest. “Why don’t I remember?”

 “Because you were too traumatized”, she said. 

“But I wasn’t raped, others have gone through much worse”. 

“It doesn’t matter”, she told me, “with his actions, the overpowering attack, the power and control, even the loss of memory, the resulting damage was as devastating to you as though it was a full rape.” 

Sylvia’s Site was a blog about accused Catholic priests. Once on there, several years ago, I typed in the name Anthony O’brien. A woman wrote that her cousin had been abused by him. I got a phone number from her and spoke with Donald Cashin, the victim, even visiting him at his home in Nova Scotia. Donald is a family man with a wife and son, but his past still colours his life. He tells me that he was violently raped by Anthony O’Brien, at knifepoint around 1968. I was shocked at the depth of the violence. Donald said that the night of the repeated rapes, he managed to escape, even with O’brien threatening to kill him. He ran home, bleeding profusely, and told his mother, who said, ‘dont tell Dad’. 

“My father was a hunter, he had a gun and Mom was afraid he’d go up and shoot O’Brien, and end up in prison”, says Cashin, “Back then in the 60’s, the priest wouldn’t be blamed”. He added, “and Mom told me that she couldn’t raise her seven kids without Dad’s help”. 

Cashin had told me a few years ago that he was suing the church. So I called him yesterday in preparation for this story. 

“What happened?” I wanted to know. 

“Nothing”, he said, “I had to back down because the church council did a discovery and they told me that if I took them to court and I lost, that I would have to pay their fees. They scared me”. He says that their lawyer told him that ‘30 people and counting’ have accused O’brien’. He went on to say, “they asked me if I was gay, I told them, ‘no, and for god’s sake I was just 12 years old when it happened’. No sympathy at all”, he adds. Even odder, he tells me, is that his former lawyer is now working as the church’s lawyer. “He told me not to pursue anything”, he says. 

Cashin is still torn up this many years later. “I can’t move on”, he said, “how can the church get away with this, and O’brien dying an innocent man?” Cashin gave me the name of a psychologist who he had been seeing for years on this issue. I called the doctor, who is furious. He asked me to not identify him because he’s afraid of repercussions. He told me that he has stopped going to church over the way it mishandled Donald’s case. Donald asks, “why is there so much of this on the east coast? Maybe because these communities are religious, my mother used to think of priests as god”, he adds. What really upsets Cashin is that the church refuses to acknowledge the havoc that O’brien has caused. “They say they don’t believe me..”, he says. 

“I believe you”, I tell him, ‘and so do the 30 or possibly many more victims of O’brien from across the country. You are not alone”. 

The church says that it’s researching whether ‘would be’ priests’ might be gay before entering the fold. Cashin laughs at that. “My now deceased brother became a priest, first week, he was raped by another priest, his superior. He left the church and they paid him to keep quiet”, Cashin says.

According to Sylvia’s Site, ‘Anthony O’Brien was a Priest in the Diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  Went to Southdown in 1975 (seems to be on heels of complaint of diocese re sexual abuse of 11-year-old boy in Sydney Nova Scotia in 1963).  After release from Southdown, transferred to Diocese of Hamilton, Ontario.  The chancellor of  Diocese of Hamilton, Father Gerard Bergie, is quoted as saying he thought O’Brien was in Southdown for treatment of alcoholism and was unaware of any sex abuse allegation.’

Sylvia MacEachern shut down Sylvia’s Site in 2022. A practising Catholic, she said to the Ottawa Citizen that she will no longer update or allow people to post, as she has been deeply pained to see “diocese after diocese” forced to sell off churches to settle victims’ damage claims”. 

I was sorry to hear that, as Sylvia’s Site seemed a safe place for victims to discuss what they had been through. And it’s where I found Donald Cashin. If the church hadn’t let the abuse go on forever, then maybe they wouldn’t have had to close so many of their doors and sell off. It’s not the victim’s fault, that’s for sure. The church is no different than any other business, they break the law enough, they lose their business. Even if they had to sell off every single one of their churches, and have the devout start up in people’s basements, that would be much more honourable than turning their backs on so many victims. I find it hard to feel sorry for an institution that turned a blind eye for decades and is still doing so…

And in regards to O’brien? There are many of us who knew him personally…and we, the victims, all know the truth – that he was a life ruiner for many – one sick, demented, twisted pedophile.  And, he’s as guilty as sin…. 

Sharon Dunn, Toronto Writer

email me at sharondunncom@gmail.com