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Chuck Lovett grew up in a very Catholic family in Altoona, Pennsylvania. His uncle had two pictures hanging in his house: one of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States, and another of James Hogan, bishop of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.
Lovett met Hogan when he was around 12. He and other boys visited a seminary in nearby Loretto to learn about life in the clergy. As part of the introduction, they swam with priests in the seminary’s pool. In the locker room, Father Francis McCaa molested him.
“While that was happening, Bishop Hogan was sitting there pleasuring himself,” Lovett says.
Now 63, Lovett has been grappling with that trauma ever since. In 2019, the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese offered him $10,000 to be used for therapy within 10 years. Lovett had an inventive notion for spending that restitution. Psilocybin, he learned, had potential to help victims like him. It took some persuasion, but he got the diocese to pay $6,000 for a four-day visit to Oregon, where he took psychedelic mushrooms, twice.
Lovett knows of no other abuse victims who have tried psilocybin therapy, but he thinks many of them should because it lightened the load he’s been carrying for decades.
“It was a beautiful, warm experience,” Lovett says. “It felt like the universe had me in its hands.”
In addition to helping thousands of people who were abused by Catholic priests, getting the word out about psilocybin’s potential could create a new market for Oregon’s legal trip sitters and psilocybin service centers, many of which are struggling to stay in business. State licenses are expensive—$2,000 per year for facilitators and $10,000 for service centers—and other costs, including insurance, security systems and rent, add up. High costs, in turn, force practitioners to charge prices that are out of reach for many potential clients.
But Lovett’s success may not open the Catholic Church’s purse for others. He had to fight for months to get his diocese to cover the cost of psilocybin therapy.
Lovett’s journey to Oregon began around 2015, when he visited bishop-accountability.org and looked up Father McCaa. He found a picture of his abuser in his prime.
“His eyes gave it away,” Lovett says. “He looked like a rabid animal that day in the locker room.”
Pull up McCaa’s entry today, and you’ll learn that McCaa had abused at least 15 victims and maybe hundreds. At least two died by suicide. Much of the data for McCaa’s entry came from a 2016 Pennsylvania grand jury report on the state’s decadeslong epidemic of Catholic abuse. The authors called McCaa “a monster” who instructed altar boys to take their pants off under their cassocks so he could reach underneath and squeeze their genitals or press a finger into their anuses before sending them off to church functions. He died in 2007.
Lovett dodged his demons for years, taking occasional runs at them through talk therapy and acupuncture. Shortly after it was published in 2018, Lovett read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In it, he saw another path forward.
Last year, Lovett started pressing his case in earnest, determined to get the Catholic Church to cover psilocybin therapy. The diocese told him he needed a referral from a licensed therapist in Pennsylvania, where psilocybin remains illegal. He tried two therapists, then sent an exasperated email to the victim assistance coordinator.
“If I cannot get the proper endorsement from a licensed therapist in the state of Pennsylvania, as required by you and the Church, I am going to pay for everything myself and I will take my story public,” Lovett wrote. “I did not choose to be sexually abused within the Catholic Church but I am choosing to receive this therapy to heal from it.”
A half hour later, he had permission to use the money for a mushroom trip.
“Please know that this was a one-time exception made for Chuck,” Jean Johnstone, victim assistance coordinator for the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, said in an email to WW. “We continue to support traditional counseling therapy as a first response when victims come forward to report their trauma/abuse.”
Lovett began researching psilocybin retreats in Oregon, and found Nitai Aleksiewicz, a state-licensed facilitator in Eugene. Aleksiewicz was raised Hare Krishna in Florida and left the faith at 16. Her father retired to an ashram in India, where he became ill with cancer. She flew to India and stayed with him for the last two months of his life, which changed hers.
“What was profound was not the pain, but the beauty,” Aleksiewicz says.
The experience set her off on a lifelong quest to understand grief and trauma. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Aleksiewicz did mushrooms and saw their value for inner exploration. Fast forward, and she moved to Eugene and took a facilitator training course through Subtle Winds, a program there. She began leading psilocybin journeys through Confluence Retreats in Ashland before setting off on her own.
Aleksiewicz was nothing if not careful. Before Lovett came to Oregon, she pushed him to line up post-trip support back in Pennsylvania because results of the psilocybin journey were likely to linger long after he returned home. Ever persistent, Lovett helped start a monthly group for adult male survivors of sexual abuse, and he agreed to increase visits to his local therapist. He and Aleksiewicz did four preparation sessions by Zoom. Six months after their first contact, Lovett flew to Oregon for a five-day, one-on-one retreat.
On the evening he arrived, Aleksiewicz cooked dinner at an Airbnb she had arranged and led Lovett through a meditation. The next day, he did a lower-dose journey, taking about 1.5 grams, to make sure psilocybin wouldn’t send him into any kind of tailspin.
“You don’t want to blast through protective mechanisms,” Aleksiewicz says. “Those things are there for a reason.”
They drove to the coast the next day because Lovett had never seen the Pacific Ocean, then returned to Eugene to prepare for a higher-dose journey the next day. What’s the worst thing that could happen, Aleksiewicz asked. “I could relive the trauma,” Lovett said.
And he did.
“The second trip started out like the first, but I heard these voices saying, ‘Something’s wrong,’” Lovett says. He got distressing feelings in his scrotum and anus.
Sitting beside him, Aleksiewicz saw that Lovett hadn’t moved at all since the experience began. Motionlessness, she knew, was a high-level response to trauma. When fight or flight isn’t available, trauma victims will often freeze, immobilized by their nervous system.
“I can feel when my clients are having a hard time,” Aleksiewicz says.
She moved closer to Lovett and put her hand on his. At some point in the journey, the voices that had warned Lovett of trouble changed.
“A voice said, ‘It’s going to be all right,’” Lovett says. “And I saw myself as a feather, floating through the air. The weight was off my shoulders.”
The next day, Lovett flew home. Friends noticed a difference, Lovett says, as did fellow employees at Gettysburg College, where he has worked for more than 30 years. Years ago, after a conflict with a colleague, he had to take anger management classes to keep his job. Now, anger was a thing of the past.
A month later, an old pal came to visit. “As soon I saw you in the backyard,” the friend told him, “I could tell you were a changed person.”
