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Bishop Gregory and Oklahoma's Governor Frank Keating at a news conference in Dallas at the conclusion of the conference of bishops. (Reuters Photo)

The bishop's quandary | Continued

f you want to see the breadth of the scandal, get out of the church and get out of the city. Go out past the strip malls and the truck stops. Go down off the interstate and down the county roads that wind through the corn and the bean fields and past the old coal mines where the tourists now go. Go out there by Sesser and talk to the farmer, if you want to see the great reach of the thing.

"It's something you don't expect to see, here in this part of America," says Jeff Kiselewski. "We're rural America. You hear about this in Chicago, in St. Louis. Every place but here."

Kiselewski's grandfather came to Sesser to mine coal so he could work his farm. Kiselewski labors as a master electrician so he can work his. He's also president of the parish council at St. Mary's, the church that serves some 200 people spread out over Franklin County. On Wednesday, May 1, Kiselewski was driving to a parish council meeting when he heard on his car radio that the Rev. Edward Baliestieri, the popular 71-year-old acting pastor of St. Mary's, had been removed over allegations that he had molested a boy in 1975 while working at a parish in New Jersey. The next day, he got a letter from Bishop Gregory that said that the bishop would be coming to Sesser on Saturday to meet with the parishioners.

"He spent a little over an hour with us at the church," Kiselewski says. "He made sure to point out what the process was, and exactly what was going on, and he made sure that we knew he takes this kind of thing very seriously. Any rumors. Anything. He came down personally, and that makes a big difference."

Kiselewski saw that the process in place depended vitally upon acting on every allegation swiftly and transparently. Whereas in the past, charges of this sort would stay and fester within a community, now Gregory had moved so quickly that Kiselewski was a little disoriented by the trajectory of events, so much so that he's still worrying about Father Ed and about people "jumping on the bandwagon." He and the rest of the parish council now have to arrange to have a priest come to Sesser every Sunday to say Mass. "We got a circuit priest now," he says. But he believes that Gregory handled the situation in the only way possible.

"If guys are really doing wrong, they need to be pulled out of there," he says, walking down a driveway to where the road bends through the silence of the fields. "I really respect him for the stand he's taken, which a lot of bishops have not done. They kind of pushed it to the side. But if it can go on here, it can go on anywhere."