Mark Rozzi
Faith Betrayed
“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different. It’s accepting the past for what it was and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.”
—Oprah Winfrey
Mark Rozzi grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. He went to a private Catholic school attended mostly by children from his Italian-American neighborhood. When he was in seventh grade, he remembers hearing that his school would be welcoming a charismatic new priest, Father Graff. Mark knew that once he entered eighth grade, he would serve under Father Graff at the church. He vividly remembers the first interaction he had with the priest. He was sitting in the church with his classmates one Friday morning as Father Graff said mass. In the middle of the service, Mark remembers the priest walking down the aisle and suddenly screaming at someone. He sat in shock, thinking that whoever the priest was yelling at must have done something terribly wrong. Then Father Graff turned, walked over to Mark’s row, and began yelling at him. He felt humiliated and dumbfounded as to what he could have possibly done to deserve that kind of treatment. He had been sitting quietly throughout the church service.
After the service ended, Mark remembers his teacher telling him that he should stay to talk to Father Graff about what he had done. “I can remember going up. He put his arm around me and said that everything was going to be all right. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Father Graff told Mark that he would help him get on the right path—he only had to listen to what the priest told him to do and everything would be okay. “I didn’t want to disappoint him. I wanted to make sure that I showed him that I was this good kid. But I tell everybody—that’s the day he had me. That’s the day my grooming started.” Mark soon began serving under Father Graff. He recalls being taken to various places with him. Since Graff was a big horse gambler, sometimes he would take Mark to buy horse racing magazines, other times to Penn National racetrack, where the priest “would take his collar out and turn into Uncle Eddie.”
He remembers the first time the priest turned from church elder into full-blown predator. Father Graff was driving Mark back after one of their outings, and he invited him up to his residence, located on the second floor of the rectory. Father Graff sat Mark down on a couch and asked him if he wanted a beer, promising not to say a word. The beer led to videos containing pornography, which eventually led the priest to take Mark into a back room where he showed him more pornography. Then he removed Mark’s pants, measured his penis, and took naked photographs of him. “He was keeping statistics so he could chart my growth. Of course, he would start to fondle me and play with me. And that happened a couple of times, under the guise of ‘education.’” Shortly after, Mark discovered a dresser drawer in Graff’s room filled with “Polaroids of a lot of my friends—tons of pictures of naked boys.”
Mark vividly remembers his final episode with Father Graff. One Saturday, he and his friend Tom were serving mass. Afterward, Graff told the two boys to go back to his private room. They did as they were told. Father Graff handed them both beers, played pornographic movies, and then took each of them to the adjoining bedroom—first one at a time, and then together—to photograph them nude. Then Graff kept Mark in the bedroom and sent Tom back to the front room. Mark recalls, “I can remember him asking me what I knew about sex positions. He started putting me in these different sexual positions, and he ended by putting me in the sixty-nine position. Then he started performing oral sex on me and wanted me to reciprocate.” When Mark declined, the priest became aggressive. He grabbed him and put him in the shower. He began touching Mark, then raping him. “I can remember focusing on a little tile on the wall, and I was just staring at this tile, and I just knew that I had one of two choices: I can either stand here and take this, or I’m going to run right now. And within that split second, I was like, I’m out of here.” Mark and Tom ran out of the room, sprinting for their lives. As they fled, Father Graff yelled after them, warning them to keep their mouths shut.
Mark arrived home, breathless and terrified. His mother questioned him, but he refused to say anything. His mother took him to the principal’s office the following Monday, trying to discover what was troubling her son from the Saturday mass. Mark told the principal only that Father Graff had exposed himself. The police were never called. “And from that point on, I just prayed to God that nobody would talk about it. I was humiliated. I didn’t understand what the hell even happened. All I know is that, every night that I lay down to go to bed after that, all I did was think about it. Every single detail, over and over and over.” In 1988, three years after the final assault, Father Graff was sent to a sexual abuse rehab clinic in New Mexico that had been set up by the Church. From there, he went to another diocese, where he continued to abuse children until he was finally arrested and put in jail. The priest later died in jail due to an accident.
Mark kept quiet about his experience that Saturday afternoon until March 26, 2009, when Artie, his second childhood friend abused by Father Graff, committed suicide. Mark entered a dark depression, barely able to get out of bed. He even contemplated suicide himself. His then wife saw what he was going through and told him, “You have a choice to make. You’re either going to die or you’re going to fight.” So Mark went to the local newspaper to tell his story.
When his story was published in the local newspaper, he was amazed by the reaction: dozens of former students from his school came forward and admitted that they, too, had been similarly abused. “By the end of the third article, we had over forty kids just from my parochial school who had come forward to me with some type of abuse, whether from Father Graff or Father Shigo.” He realized that, by coming out, he was not only helping himself heal, he was also helping others who had endured similar abuse. “For me, it was a healing process where I felt that I was worthy again. That I really could help people heal. I wasn’t concerned about healing myself anymore. I put myself on the back burner.” Seeing this reaction from his fellow classmates inspired Mark to call his representative in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Dante Santoni. He wanted to get involved in making a difference. Representative Santoni then scheduled an appointment for Mark with his colleague, Representative Tom Caltagirone, the Democratic chair of the Judiciary Committee at the time. Entering the representative’s office, Mark saw pictures of popes and bishops hanging on the wall. He felt then that the conversation might not go well, and he was right. “I remember leaving and going down the elevator from his office. Representative Santoni was physically holding me up, with my wife on my other side. To hear that there was no chance—because the criminal statute of limitations had expired five years after the rape, and there was no recourse through the civil court, believing that nothing would ever be done—was just devastating.”
The process of forgiveness took a long time. Mark can recall vividly the moment he forgave Father Graff for what he had done. “I can remember my daughter playing a lot of travel softball up and down the East Coast, and my sister had given me a book called The Shack.” (The Shack, by William P. Young, is a novel about the abduction and murder of a young girl, and her father’s struggles to understand her death.) “I was just struggling at the time. I can remember sitting in the outfield, by myself, and I just started bawling. I was like, ‘You know what? I can forgive Father Graff.’” By releasing the anger he was carrying around, Mark was given a sense of hope that life could, in fact, get better. It was then that he allowed himself to move from a place of anger to a place of compassion for the priest. “I was hating God and hating religion and hating everything about the Church. I tried to take a step back and think about what happened to him. Maybe he was abused when he was young. Maybe he was abused in the Church, for all I know. He abused me, yes, but the only reason he was able to abuse me is because the bishops allowed this to happen.” Mark looked at the full picture of the abuse that Graff had committed. Then he took the blame and anger that he had directed at the priest for so long and redirected it at the larger system that had allowed the abuse to take place. It was then that Mark decided to forgive. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to hold this anger and pain.’ I looked again at the bishops, the hierarchy at the Church, and that’s where I diverted all my anger. Because they were the ones who allowed it to happen, and I will never forgive them for what they knew, for what they did.” Still unable to forgive the higher-ups in the Catholic Church, Mark uses his anger as fuel for his fight for victims of sexual abuse.
The moment that Mark experienced on the field at his daughter’s softball game was the moment of forgiveness that saved him. “I had no choice, because my family was suffering. We’re driving and out of the blue I start bawling, and my daughter’s wondering what’s wrong with me. Why is Dad upset? I was going through so many problems and struggling, and it was eating me alive.” After finishing the book his sister had given him, the forgiveness overflowed, not only for Father Graff, but also for the anger he had toward God. “God wasn’t responsible for what happened to me. God is not the Church and the Church is not God. I don’t know what this man’s situation was. Maybe he got caught up in something and was never able to get away from it, and he ended up having problems.” After his piece came out in the local paper, Mark remembers heading to church one morning when the monsignor stopped him and his family at the door, putting his arm across the entryway, and told them not to bother coming in. Since then, the only two times Mark has entered a Catholic church have been to bury two of his childhood friends, both of whom had been abused by Father Graff and later ended their own lives.
Releasing his anger toward Father Graff left Mark feeling lighter. “It was a huge weight off my shoulders, because I was so driven, trying to look for articles and trying to read everything I could, spending hours at night, reliving things in my head. It was just about letting it go. And understanding it wasn’t my fault and I had nothing to do with it. It was all him.” Being able to take his control back from Father Graff was the true act of forgiveness for Mark. “True forgiveness for me is, of course, not just words, but looking into my heart and having that feeling of being able to truly say, ‘It’s okay.’ That whatever you did to me doesn’t define me.” He says the forgiveness was not just for his present self, but also for his younger self. He was finally able to set himself free. He was at last able to hold himself accountable for his own actions, and no longer blame his choices or his experiences in the present on the abuse he had suffered so long ago.
In 2011, Mark received a call from Representative Dante Santoni, who told him that he was planning on retiring, and he knew how important all the work was for Mark. The legislator told him that if he wanted an opportunity to enter politics, this would be the time. So Mark decided to run in the 2012 primary for Santoni’s seat representing the 126th District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. During his campaign, Mark went door-to-door, trying to get people to support his campaign. “I would start telling my story, and I had so many people breaking down on the other side of that door. Women and men who would tell me for the first time what they’d never told anybody else. It was unbelievable. And even some of the men who wouldn’t talk about it would be like, ‘Please fight this. I’m not as strong as you. I can never talk about it, but you have my vote no matter what.’” Hearing that kind of feedback from his community fueled Mark in his fight. He learned that, in the state of Pennsylvania, “one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before the age of eighteen. And the worst part about it is, only one in nine will ever tell.” Mark’s campaign gained momentum, and he won the Democratic primary with close to 70 percent of the vote. He went on to win the general election in November 2012, and he was seated on January 1, 2013.
In 2016, Mark stood on the chamber floor of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and made a heartfelt speech, pleading to his colleagues to support a bill that would eliminate the statute of limitations on childhood sex abuse cases. House representatives passed the bill with overwhelming support, and then sent it to the Senate, where the retroactive provision was stripped out, ultimately killing the bill. Similar legislation was again passed by the House in 2018, but as of this writing Republican senators continue to block the passage of the bill. At issue is the constitutionality of retroactively lifting the statute of limitations on childhood sex abuse crimes. Fortunately, there seems to be broad support for eliminating the statute of limitations for future child abuse victims.
For Mark, fighting for the rights of victims of sexual abuse will never be far from his mind. “It’s almost part of my identity, and I think it is going to be a lifelong fight. It doesn’t stop with this legislation. Even if we pass legislation, kids will continue to be abused. We need to have policies in place for those children, so that hopefully we have the right tools to help them heal at an earlier age and identify the abuser to prevent further abuse.” Mark will never be able to erase the memories of the abuse he suffered, but he has found a way to forgive his abuser and restore his inner peace. And the anger that he still feels toward the Church continues to inspire his crusade to assure that no such abuse will ever be tolerated again.
I come from a large family of practicing Catholics. When the abuse stories came out in the news, I needed to take some time to process them and figure out how I felt about being a part of the Catholic Church moving forward. As a Catholic, and as a human being, I never want to be part of anything that condones the abuse of anyone, especially young children. The monsignor of the church I attend in Santa Monica addressed this issue in a sermon one day. He talked about the struggle to understand the reports coming out of so many churches, and he made it clear that neither he nor his parish tolerated any form of abuse. For me personally, when I think of being a part of the Catholic Church, I think specifically of my parish, the one that I grew up in, was baptized in, and attended and continue to attend. It is open, accepting, does great work for the community, and is a good place. That being said, even in good organizations terrible deeds can happen, and the perpetrators should be held accountable for their actions. I am hopeful that the Catholic Church will do better to change and grow, especially regarding topics like expanded roles for women, acceptance of divorce and homosexuality, and the elimination of abuse.
I knew that hearing Mark’s story would be difficult. But I believe that those of us who are a part of the Catholic Church have a special duty to hear these stories, to bear witness to them so that they never happen again. Mark Rozzi is not an enemy of the Church—he is a crusader, and he deserves the gratitude and support of all those who believe in the sanctity of the Catholic faith.