Purple Reign: Sexual Abuse and Abuse of Power in the Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey

On a summer's day in 1977, Bruce Novozinsky found himself alone in a rest stop off Interstate 95 in Connecticut, clad only in a dress shirt, shorts, and dress shoes after escaping from a Howard Johnson's hotel where his parish priest tried to sexually assault him. Though it would take him a few decades to make the connection, the circumstances of Novozinsky's journey home to Jackson, New Jersey, and the Catholic Church's cover-up of the clergy child sexual abuse scandal made manifest in Boston in 2002, would lead this former altar boy and seminarian to revelations, some difficult to accept, about himself, his faith, and the moral failure of the Church hierarchy he once so loved and trusted. As the world reeled, the author was drawn back to not only his own brushes with opportunistic clergy, but also the schoolmates and friends who fell prey to these predators. The victims, now middle age men who bear the scars of traumatic sexual abuse share their stories, past and present, and the stories of other victims, too, are deftly interwoven in this honest and unpretentious treatment of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in New Jersey's Diocese of Trenton. Novozinsky's unvarnished look at the clerical culture reveals pedophilia as but one facet of the larger crisis - sexually active priests breaking their vows of celibacy with each other; the shielding of clergy through transfers, forced resignations, legal technicalities and prosecutorial deals; the Church's attempted blame shift to homosexuality and society's sexual degeneracy; and the silence of victims, secured through the politics of power and intimidation. The legacy of a succession of local bishops is that they acted first to protect the institution over the victim and employed every means to spare the realm, demonstrating that the crisis played out no differently in the idyllic New Jersey suburbs than it did anywhere else. A story of ecclesiastic corruption punctuated by first-hand accounts, clergy journals, taped conversations, and the author's personal narrative, Purple Reign evokes the 1970's of a Catholic schoolboy as rich and vividly as a memoir should. Novozinsky's emotional tether to the community he grew up in and in which his family is still an active part of resonates in this heartfelt but no nonsense, practical approach for moving the Diocese of Trenton, and indeed the Church as whole, though this crisis collaboratively - with transparency, accountability, and the abundant grace of God - to a place of renewed faith, hope and healing for its victims.

Bruce Novozinsky lives in Upper Freehold Township, New Jersey with his wife, Maureen and four children.