Christopher “Kit” Bateman was about an hour late to his second oldest brother’s birthday lunch. His two brothers weren’t upset. Bateman had told them that a meeting he would be attending that morning might run longer than planned. He hadn’t told them, however, that the meeting was with Maryland’s attorney general or that it was about a secret he’d kept for decades.

Now, the secret was out, and Bateman wanted to tell them before they read about it in the newspaper or saw him on TV.

Fifty years ago, when Bateman was a sophomore at Calvert Hall College High School in Towson — the school all three of them attended — his religion teacher, the Rev. Laurence Brett, sexually assaulted him in a small room next to the chapel,he said. Bateman, a 1976 Calvert Hall graduate, is now 64 years old, but he still shakes all over when he talks about it.

Until April 5 — when the Maryland Attorney General’s Office released a nearly 500-page report detailing the scope of child sex abuse and torture that took place in Baltimore’s Catholic archdiocese over 80 years — Bateman had told few people about being violated when he was a boy.Research shows that when a child experiences sexual abuse, it’s more common for them to stay silent than to report it.

A study of more than 1,000 survivors of child sexual abuse found that the average age at which survivors disclose what happened is 52. Data from the U.S. Department of Justice suggests that 86% of child sexual abuse is never reported.

That statistic is heartbreaking, considering the attorney general’s report includes accounts from more than 600 children and young adults, said Amanda Ruzicka, deputy director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The hundreds of stories captured in the document “likely only represent a fraction of survivors,” Ruzicka said.

At Calvert Hall alone, more than a dozen students said Brett — who died in 2010, four years after being removed from the priesthood — sexually assaulted or violated them, according to the attorney general’s report.

Christian Kendzierski, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, offered an apology Wednesday to Bateman and other survivors in an email. The archdiocese is “ever aware” of the pain endured by victims of child sex abuse, he said.

“The archdiocese also recognizes the lifelong impact this horrific abuse has on victim-survivors,” he said. “The courage of the victim-survivors who have come forward has led to important change that has occurred over the last several decades within the archdiocese.”

In an email Wednesday to about 13,330 Calvert Hall parents, faculty, staff and alumni, Brother John Kane, the school’s president, called the actions detailed in the report “reprehensible, horrifying, and evil.”

“We are deeply saddened and sorry that in the past young men at Calvert Hall were victims of this abuse,” Kane wrote. “Their suffering and pain are real and remains with them today. Our prayers and thoughts go out to all victims, and we pray for God’s healing grace on them and their families.”

Kane said the school maintains policies, procedures, background checks and training protocols to ensure students’ welfare, which he called the order’s No. 1 priority.

A school spokesperson referred a reporter to Kane’s email when asked for comment.

On Tuesday, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore signed into law the Child Victims Act, which will allow more survivors of child sexual abuse to sue their abusers when they’re ready to face them in court.

While the law directs the Maryland Supreme Court to rule on its constitutionality, which the Maryland Catholic Conference has questioned, Ruzicka called the bill’s passage an exciting win for survivors that was long overdue.

But at Nautilus Diner in Timonium the day the report came out, Bateman’s brothers weren’t celebrating.

One put his head on the table and began to cry, holding onto Bateman with one arm.

The other, 12 years older than Bateman, was shocked. He had been an English teacher at Calvert Hall. He left the school for another job just weeks before Bateman said Brett violated him.

“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” they both asked their little brother.

Why kids don’t tell

While the Justice Department believes child sexual abuse is underreported overall, there are factors that can make disclosure even harder.

Research shows that people who are abused when they are very young are more likely to wait a long time before telling anybody about the abuse or not to tell at all.

Men also are more reluctant to disclose abuse.

More severe abuse, abuse that takes place over a long time and abuse that is perpetuated by multiple people also are related to a greater hesitancy to disclose.

Very young children — and even teenagers and adults — can blame themselves for the abuse, said Kay Connors, a social worker specializing in trauma at the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital.

They may think it happened because they messed up in some way.

As children grow up, shame and embarrassment often keep them quiet about the abuse, said Connors, who is also an instructor in the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry.

Gaslighting — a form of psychological manipulation in which someone attempts to confuse a victim of abuse and make them doubt the legitimacy of their experiences — can dissuade survivors from coming forward, Connors said.

So can a fear of not being believed.

The context in which children are abused also is important. In 91% of child sexual abuse cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the victimization happens at the hands of someone known and trusted by the child or the child’s family.

In the case of clergy sexual abuse, the perpetrators are people highly respected in the church. It can be hard for people — including those who were victimized — to believe that a priest violated a child in such a horrific way.

“How do you find the words for that?” Connors said. “Who is going to believe you?”

Trying to escape

From the time Bateman was a young boy, he was told that the closest thing on Earth to God, besides the pope, was a priest.

So when Brett put a chair against the doorknob in his makeshift confessional one afternoon in 1973 and asked Bateman what he thought of having sex with men, the 14-year-old was confused.

“I looked at him and I said, ‘Well, I never really thought about it,’ ” Bateman recalled. He spoke with the The Baltimore Sun in the days following the release of the attorney general’s report.

Brett then began to touch him. As the priest became increasingly aggressive, moving his hand up his leg, something Bateman’s mother had told him came to mind: “If you’re ever in a position where somebody gets funny with you, scream.”

They were almost nose-to-nose. Bateman looked Brett in the eye and told him, “Father, if you go any further, I’m going to scream.”

The priest stared back at Bateman. Then, he stood up, removed the chair from the door, and told the 14-year-old boy to get out.

Bateman ran out of the room, sat down in his next class, and — for 50 years — told almost nobody about what had happened.

He felt ashamed. Even though he tried not to, he blamed himself. He also felt crushed by the guilt of not reporting his experience. He was president of his sophomore class and took that responsibility seriously. Even today, he feels he let his classmates down.

The next year, he was elected student body president, a position he’d wanted since seventh grade. But instead of celebrating, Bateman was miserable. He contemplated suicide — thoughts that plagued him for years and eventually led him to get counseling.

He begged his mother to let him switch schools to no avail. He wanted to go to The Park School, which was founded by Jewish families. There, he thought, nobody would know who he was. Nobody would guess what had happened to him.

“It’s a ridiculous thought, but it’s trying to escape what you can’t tell an adult — what you can’t deal with what happened to you,” he said.

‘We thought everybody knew’

Bateman remembers abusive and other violating behavior by clergy seeming like an open secret at Calvert Hall and the broader Baltimore Catholic community when he and his brothers were growing up. Students had been told to swim naked at Calvert Hall, Bateman said, and some of the school’s priests and brothers would read their newspapers by the pool in the morning.

Brett was just one of six predators from Calvert Hall named in the attorney general’s report.

“It was always an undercurrent,” Bateman said of the abuse. “We thought everybody knew.”

Years before Brett assaulted Bateman, a teenage boy accused the priest of orally raping him at Sacred Heart University in Bridgeport, Connecticut, according to the report. Brett admitted the accusation was true, but the Diocese of Bridgeport sent him to treatment in New Mexico. The priest was accused of sexual abuse by another child in 1965.

Brett was hired as a chaplain at Calvert Hall in 1969.

Four years later,according to the report,Charles LoPresto, a biology teacher at the school who had heard stories about Brett from multiple students, told an administrator that he’d quit if the priest wasn’t fired.

Brett was gone the next day. He was never prosecuted for a crime.

It wasn’t until Bateman spoke with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office in 2019 that he knew the priest was dead. He didn’t care what had happened to him. The damage already was done.

Before Brett assaulted him, Bateman was at his family’s parish, the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, almost every day. He attended its elementary and middle school. He was an altar boy, a choir boy. He played ball on the cathedral’s steps.

He stopped going to church shortly after the abuse.

“It was my life. I loved it,” he said. “He killed that. He killed that for me.”

Coming home

When Bateman spoke to the attorney general’s office, he wanted to tell his story to someone who could make a difference. And he needed to get it off his chest.

But after meeting with the attorney general and other survivors of clergy sex abuse, he felt another wave of guilt when he didn’t talk to the reporters outside.

While driving to meet his brothers in Timonium, Bateman prayed the whole time.

“Why would you do that again?” he asked himself. “Your whole point of saying something was because you were trying to help somebody else. There you got a chance — all that media there for you — and you walked away and said nothing.”

Though Bateman lost faith in organized religion after Brett assaulted him, he never lost faith in Jesus. He recently found support in an unexpected place: a men’s prayer group at Grace Fellowship Church in Timonium.

He’s been reading a book with his prayer group to deepen his relationship with God. The chapter he read on the morning of the report’s release was on the importance of testimony: Sharing painful experiences helps you heal, and it helps others do the same.

Later that day, Bateman attended another news conference at the Jenner Law office in Hampden. And for the first time, he talked openly about what his religion teacher did to him 50 years ago.

Since then, he’s experienced a flood of emotions. But in the immediate aftermath of going public, he had a message for survivors who have not told anybody about the abuse they suffered as children.

“Do yourself a favor. Free yourself and get it out,” he said, growing emotional. “Because it wasn’t you. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything to make somebody a pedophile.”