27/07/2025
A message from Bob McCabe, founder of RSI.
!!! WARNING !!!: Please be advised that the following content discusses s*xual abuse, which may be triggering or disturbing to some readers.
FORGIVENESS - The Vital Component
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know that place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot Four Quartets – Little Gidding
I first read the Little Gidding while in high school and the above quote has stayed with me since I first read it. The wording has always fascinated me and yet my experiences in life have made the meaning of this section of the Little Gidding to be true.
Depths of hell, lies, deceit, guilt, shame – the complete inability to trust anyone on this planet except for alcohol. The elixir that was my solution – until it wasn’t when I was to recover the innocence and the love of life that was lost and then buried under years of denial and false bravado.
One of the biggest lessons I have learned in the experience I shall share with you is the power of forgiveness.
The summer of 1963 should have been a time of wonder, discovery and simple pleasures for this naïve eleven-year-old lad from Scarborough, Ontario. However, that was not to be the case.
That summer Fr. Alphonse Robert, an associate pastor at St. Lawrence parish in Scarborough Ontario s*xually abused me in a motel in Cornwall Ontario. The abuse took place after a year of grooming by Fr. Robert in the church hall, the sacristy and the main body of the church. A year in which Fr. Robert visited our home on numerous occasions and had tea with my mother and chatted about religion for hours. An activity I now see that was aimed in whole or in part but definitely to some degree to gain the trust of my mother.
So, in the summer of 1963 when he suggested to my mother that it would be good for “Little Bobby” to go to Montreal to serve mass in the Notre Dame Basilica (Cathedral at the time) my Mother readily agreed. I was of mixed feelings because the “grooming” was uncomfortable and I did not like the long hugs or kisses to the cheek or the way he held his cheek next to mine as he knelt down to hug me for prolonged periods, and yet he was a priest, maybe this is what is suppose to happen, I have always been told that we are to trust the priest implicitly without question. These are things I learned from my mother, from priests, from nuns and from my teachers. With mild nervousness and yet a feeling of being special because the priest had picked me, we left that sunny summer day and set off from Scarborough to Montreal.
We stopped at Cornwall to stay overnight at a motel. When he went to register, he made sure I waited in the car and once he had the room rented, we went to the room and he opened the door. From the doorway I looked in and noticed it had only one bed. I said to him “Father, there is only one bed” to which he responded “That is all we will need.”
The abuse took place in that room that night. An eleven-year-old naïve boy in a strange city, in a motel with a man who represented God who started to touch and perform acts unknown to me and I did not know what to do. I just pretended to remain asleep as he continued to perform s*x acts on me, I tried not to move, or to breathe too loud and I experienced a level of fear and impending doom as I had never felt or experienced it before. I played Possum. At some point I moved and he pulled away and I had the chance to go to the bathroom where I stood at the sink in all consuming fear and confusion. When I looked up in the mirror the door was open and he was standing in the doorway naked with an er****on. I said nothing and after a few moments he made the comment, referring to his er****on, “It’s a big one isn’t it?”. Fear was paralyzing me and I could not answer.
The next thing I remember was that I was sitting in a chair similar to what I would now call a wing back chair today curled into a ball, confused terrified disgusted and angry and yet I could say nothing. The predator priest kept asking me to return to the bed, cajoling me, promising me nothing would happen that he would not touch me again. I refused on all counts. I never did get back into bed that night.
I have no recollection of the morning nor the drive from Cornwall to Montreal. The next memory I have is in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal standing in front of one of the side altars where visiting priests say mass. I remember speaking with him and this abuser, this predator asked me if I wanted him to hear my confession. I was going crazy in my mind, the anger and rage boiling inside of me and yet I still could not bring it to the surface. The best I could do was a sneer and disgusted sounding “NO.” It was killing me inside. I wanted to scream and yet I couldn’t. I remember while I was serving mass kneeling behind him the hate, anger and rage I felt toward this priest and yet still unable to stand up for myself.
There is much that even to this day I can not remember of the abuse and the day after. Even with years of counseling and in fact returning to the basilica for a healing process just before my trial, I am unable to bring back those memories that are so deeply buried.
The next thing I do recall is driving home and I was very quiet and unresponsive to any of his questions except when he asked me if I wanted to stay over at a “Priest House” to which I flatly responded no.
When we got back to my home in Scarborough, I remember running up the driveway, along the front walkway and up the 4 or 5 stairs to our front door. I remember starting to open the door and there it goes black. I have no memory of entering the house, I have no memory of speaking with my mother or my father or any of my siblings. I have no memory of even being in the house or going to my room or eating dinner later that night or ever speaking to anyone at any time about anything related to that trip to Montreal. I do recall however as I ran up the driveway saying to myself, I can never tell Mom and Dad about this they will never believe me. He is a priest, he is next to God – who are they going to believe, me or God. And for the next 50 years, with a minor exception in 1991, that was the one promise I did keep; I never told a soul of my abuse.
By the age of twenty-two I was drinking alcoholically but still working and able to pull off life. I met and married my first wife in 1978. We had three children and that marriage ended in separation and then divorce. I then had two other common law relationships that fell apart because of my addiction and the lies and financial irresponsibility that goes along with an addiction. By 2009 my life was an absolute mess, I was irresponsible, drinking daily, I had not seen my children or had any communication with my ex-wife since 1994, and they lived forty-five minutes away from where I was living. I was still employed but barely, unable to eat. All of these are signs of deep alcohol addiction that I still thought I had a handle on. Then I was fired from my job in August 2010 and my drinking became my sole career. By this time, I had no one left in my life. I had drunk them all away. If I would have died in this period in my life, they would have had to cremate me because there were not six people on the planet who would have carried a casket let alone attend a funeral.
I weighed approximately 80 pounds, I had open sores all over my body, I was behind in rent so many nights I slept in doorways and under bridges, I dove in garbage bins for food behind restaurants and all I wanted to do was die. I wanted to commit su***de and I did not even have the guts to do that – A loser in Life and A loser in Death! I could not even do death right. So, I would just drink myself to death. This was now October 2010.
By December I was well on my way to meeting my goal of death. My nightly prayer was “God if you exist don’t let me wake up” and my morning prayer was “You bastard I woke up”. On December 4,2010 at approximately 2AM I awoke from an alcohol induced deep sleep groggy and hung over. I had no booze left and only one cigarette and so I cursed myself and got myself dressed to walk the 20 minutes to the closest all-night variety store to get some smokes. On that walk I was thinking of what kind of booze I would get and actually reminisced on the drinking days when it was fun. Alcohol at that time was my solution, it probably prevented me from committing su***de long ago and yet now it was the very tool I was using to kill myself.
Then it happened at the corner of Bristol and Wellington Roads in Guelph Ontario at precisely 2:46 am – I had a moment of clarity – an awakening if you will – and I saw how pitiful a human being I had become and it was in that moment that I surrendered to alcoholism – I hit my bottom. It was in that instant – in hindsight – that I became teachable and open to whatever it would take to enter into a better life. I no longer wanted to die, I wanted to live. So, what was it that was that moment of clarity? While I personally do not know, the best I have read is a writing from Carl Jung who called it a vital spiritual experience. He described it as an alcoholic who experiences a phenomena in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements, Ideas ( My Thinking), emotions ( My feelings), and attitudes ( My basic belief structures), which were once the guiding forces of the alcoholic are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate that same alcoholic. That has been my experience.
I entered into twelve step recovery and became very teachable and did what other alcoholics told me they had done and in doing that the obsession to drink left me. Three years into the program of recovery I am now working with other alcoholics, visiting treatment centers several times a week doing some work to bring in some money and I had started to rebuild the destruction I called a previous life. I certainly did not have much materially but I had a peace and a serenity I had never before experienced. Life was good. On Christmas morning of 2013, I was in my apartment in Guelph Ontario and I was at the end of the morning prayer and meditation discipline that I did each day, and continue to this day. In the meditation I started to recall the s*xual abuse by Fr. Robert and then I relived every aspect of every detail of the drives: the motel room, the actual abuse, the Basilica/ Cathedral and the drive home. The entire recall of all details took approximately an hour. As a result of this re-living of the events of 1963 and the “out of the blue” phone call from Mr. Rob Talach a lawyer with Beckett Lawyers in London I commenced legal action against the archdiocese of Toronto. This legal action took many twists and turns and many emotional dark places and lasted from 2013 to 2019. Approximately a year into the proceeding I made a change of legal counsel to Mr. Paul Ledroit of Ledroit Sabo Law in London Ontario. This is a story of synchronicity in itself and there is not enough space to tell the story here, suffice it to say I remain good friends with both lawyers to this day however the lawyer change was absolutely the right move for so many reasons.
For anyone who has not experienced preparing for a trial it is an experience that is very humbling, and emotionally exhausting. The intensity is mind burning and never ending, and that is just the procedural part of the process. The emotional, trauma reenactment, night terrors and nightmares, absolute ranges of extreme doubt, moments of calm then flipping into fits of full body “Red Rage”, not to mention sleepless nights- lack of appetite and fear full body on fear. I repeated and repeated and repeated the story over and over and over to my legal team. At the same time, I was seeing a counsellor, Elizabeth who was my guardian angel keeping me grounded as best she could in weekly and sometimes twice a week meetings. All the while during this process I was deeply entrenched in 12 step recovery and there was where the dichotomy of my case and the principle of the 12-step program collided.
The legal system is telling me and preparing me for the victim role and searching for the very intrinsic details to show how deeply and profoundly this priest had harmed me and therefore justice is measured in dollars and the more broken I can look before the jury the better for my case.
On the other hand the 12 step program is my lifeline to the recovered state I found myself blessed with in 2015 – five years into recovery and two years into the legal battle – is directly telling me I can not live with any resentment for they are futile and fatal for an alcoholic of my type. These were momentary thoughts, fleeting feelings without substance or form however in hindsight they were there traversing through my conscious and unconscious selves.
In the evening of September 23,2015 these worlds came together and the moment of clarity laid before me in full view of what I needed to do. I was doing some step work with a sponsee in my apartment and we were in the fourth step and the resentment inventory. It was an intense and prolonged discussion as I recall and it concluded with a discussion of how alcoholics in a general sense see themselves as the victims of their lives and all of the perceived negative events feed themselves into the alcoholic behaviours. I continued to ponder on this thought after my sponsee had left my apartment. That thinking led me to think of my children and all the harms and in fact the trauma I had caused in their lives. Guilt and shame started to pour over me and the pity party was on until just a mere few moments into that party I recalled what I had been taught, Selfishness and self-centeredness that was the root of my problem. What is self-pity I asked myself but just another form of self-centeredness and selfishness - Me thinking about Me and playing the role I knew so well the victim. In that moment something that had never happened before occurred. I looked at the trauma, I had caused my children and compared it to the trauma that Fr. Robert had inflicted on me in the summer of 1963. Well mine was worse because it was s*xual, I was violated s*xually and certainly that has a higher trauma rating than abandoning your children – and I stopped …… for the first time I had heard what I had just thought….and I said it out loud as I sat alone in my apartment……” I was violated s*xually and certainly that has a higher trauma rating than abandoning your children.” I sat in that moment and those words lingered over me like a bright light. I really had no idea how long I sat in that stunned state however the moment was profound. I saw the similarities between myself and my abuser. Never, and I mean never did I ever consciously want to harm my children and yet so many times, and sometimes so many times daily I harmed them deeply. The young son expects Dad to show up week after week and it is no show and no call. How deep is that – how hurtful is that – how traumatic is that – when the man who should be there for you, supports you, loves you, teaches you, just vanishes. How traumatic is that? Yet these very children had forgiven me and welcomed me back into their lives and in fact invited me back into their lives. It was not perfect and there was a long period of reconstruction ahead of us, but when they opened the door they reached out – even the last one who had once said “The next time I see that bastard I will be pi***ng on his grave.”
I then started thinking of Fr. Robert and while his actions were atrocious, was he not like me a sick man? I struggled hard with that given the s*xual violation, but each time I saw in my mind the hurt on my children’s faces the disappointment, fear and anger and especially the look that says what did I do? Why does daddy hate me – what is wrong with me? Yet these children, now adults have forgiven me – who am I to not forgive? The words of the Lord's Prayer then came to my mind as I sat at the dining room table in that one-bedroom apartment, “Forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who have trespassed against me”. If I was to be truly forgiven, I had to forgive. It was clear.
That night I wrote a seven-page letter of forgiveness to Fr, Alphonse Robert. I also wrote a three page amends letter to Fr. Alphonse Robert.
A recent article in Psychology Today Canada stated that Forgiveness does not mean reconciliation. One doesn’t have to return to the same relationship or accept the same harmful behaviors from an offender. Forgiveness is vitally important for the mental health of those who have been victimized.
This statement has become my truth with one addition. It is not only for the mental health but just as important in my experience forgiveness is as vitally important for the spiritual condition.
On Monday November 2, 2015 with my 12-step sponsor I went to the gravesite of my abuser Fr. Alphonse Robert, in St Francis Xavier Cemetery in Tilbury Ontario.
With my sponsor at my side I read the letter of forgiveness and the letter of my amends out loud. The experience that day, which is a story in itself, allowed me to finally be free of the bo***ge that the memories, the trauma, the nightmares, the night terrors and the incredibly loud voices in the very early morning hours that robbed me of sleep. I entered the gravesite with incredible fear and anxiety but with a definite sense of purpose and when I left the gravesite the sense of purpose remained but the anxiety and the fear were gone. The story no longer owned me, no longer possessed me and for the very first time in my life I felt free and I could breathe again.
The action of forgiveness and I believe that forgiveness is an action has allowed me to go through the riggers and humiliation of an 18-day jury trial, and appeal process which we won with a decision by the Ontario court of appeal in a ruling handed down on March 19, 2019.
Forgiveness has allowed me to move from Victim to survivor and now to warrior. I can have a voice that can turn the worse two experiences in my life, my s*xual abuse by Fr. Alphonse Robert and my alcoholism into my biggest assets in my life by working with other trauma victims and alcoholics and drug addicts to simply share hope, through my experience.
Through forgiveness I arrived at that place where I started, the pre-abuse Bobby and I brought him home and I was free to face and deal with life on life’s terms without the need for external mood- or mind-altering substances. I truly now know that place for the first time.
