"An attitude of prudent reserve is customary"
On Thursday, after Cardinal Keeler declared blogger Gerard Serafin Bugge to be a (former) priest accused of "sexual abuse" - a charge Gerard denies - writer Mark Sullivan posted this cautionary tale to remind us that you never really can know somebody from his media image alone, and that applies to people we meet through the Internet.
Sullivan's example is the true story of Tommy Speers, in real life a con man who allegedly was friendly with the Mob, but on the air a truly funny guy whose take on sports stars gave him plenty of fans among New England radio listeners. No harm done there - at least to the listeners.
Some readers reacted to Mark's cautionary tale as if he were accusing Gerard of being a monster or a mobster; of course he wasn't. Mark was simply right: meeting someone through the Internet or through a broadcast just isn't quite real life, and it only makes sense to maintain an attitude of prudent reserve: "trust but verify".
On the Internet, I've met a few secret and even shady identities too. I run a mailing-list server with Catholic-themed e-mail discussion groups, and I've seen people taken in by phonies pretending to be priests. Some are clergy from small sects who call themselves Catholic but don't let on that they're not in the same Church as we're in; they peddle their doctrines and try to lure people into involvement with their heretical groups. Maybe they hope for donations.
The last time this issue came up, a priest in some fringe sect asked to subscribe to a mailing list I operate. He claimed to be a Benedictine abbot, and I checked him out: the web revealed that he had a history of name changes, bad checks, and tricks like changing his address while remaining in the same building (a fund-raising scam, maybe?). And in the past he had run some 'gay'-oriented religious group. Yuck.
This sort of thing gives me good reason to encourage an approach of prudent reserve.
My favorite case was that of "fr. Bob Roberts, i.n.d.c.", a guy who, in the mid-'90s, used to post on several Internet forums claiming to be a Catholic monk in Montreal. There were signs that not everything was on the level.
For Catholic lists, he sent in flowery spiritual meditations -- though the spelling of his "meditations" was much better than that of his ordinary writing. He invited people to send him their e-mail addresses and sign up for his daily messages.
On FELINE-L, he wrote about how he and his "Notre-Dame de la Confiance" monastery were (get ready for this!) training domestic cats to be assistants for abused senior citizens. Not just regular seniors, but abused seniors -- get the violins out, please!
On a cancer patients' mailing list, he wrote about his own hard struggle with the disease and the grueling treatment he was undergoing. (How low can you go?)
And while some people smelled a rat, some believed him: there are plenty of too-trusting people out there. They liked the saccharine articles, which I presume he was copying from some source. People wrote to him asking for prayers, and he assured everyone of his prayers during his daily Mass; he also encouraged people to write and tell him about whatever was on their hearts. He would write back, oozing sympathy and calling everyone "my son" or "my daughter".
To tie it all together, he posted a web site about the "Fathers' Cattery" where the charitable pet-training all went on, and about his monastic life; he even included a couple of photos of "fr. Bob" wearing some '60s-style polyester chasuble. But alas, the monastery was "under renovations", so you couldn't visit. Some mailing-list moderators banned "fr. Bob" from their groups, 'cause they didn't believe him.
Eventually he even got his 15 minutes of minor fame: some innocent soul out in the Mountain time zone suggested to CBC Radio that they interview this interesting monk, and the CBC fell for him too, talking with him on the air for about ten minutes one day. But that's as far as he got.
Not too long after that, an e-mail appeared from "fr. Bob's" account, supposedly written by his personal attendant, telling that "Father" was out of action with a heart attack, and wouldn't be heard from for a while.
Some skeptical folks on the FELINE-L mailing list eventually posted the story of his exposure: according to them, an ex-priest on the staff of the CBC had heard the radio interview and started checking. The Archdiocese of Montreal denied knowledge of any such priest or any such monastery - though they had been getting inquiries about him for some time. The staffer went to Roberts' paper-mail address in Montreal and found no monastery or church; just an apartment building, and a paunchy creepy middle-aged guy sitting in an apartment in his shorts with a computer and a couple of cats. So the CBC aired a retraction.
The fans of "fr. Bob", this confidence man from "Our Lady of Confidence Monastery", found it all to be, well, a learning experience.
