Back in the days when I was digging around after rumors about former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s rumored sexual predations, I’d run into priests and laity who told me about all of the dark secrets that they knew. But they didn’t want to go public because, for the priests, it was a career-ender to spill the church’s dirty secrets.

Most, like Robert Hoatson, a New Jersey priest, were simply pushed out. Only now is he being vindicated.

But some even told me they were afraid of being killed. One former employee for the Archdiocese of Washington said that if she told me everything she knew, she’d end up at the bottom of the Potomac attached to some concrete blocks.

She insisted that she wasn’t joking.

Back in 2004, I wrote in the Washington Times of the fate of whistleblower Father James Haley, who went public with some really nasty goings-on in the Diocese of Arlington, Va. Haley was kicked out of the diocese and to this day lives in ecclesiastical exile. No other bishop would touch him. I wrote about him and another whistleblower, Father Joseph Clark in 2008. Clark, who was forced into retirement, gave me this haunting quote:

"The political reality is that Rome doesn't like to go against its bishops. If there is some question as to the virtue of your bishops, the whole house crumbles. The local 7-Eleven clerk has gotten more protection than I receive. Justice in the church is supposed to supersede that in the civil quarter, but that didn't happen."

So I was glad to see how the Washington Post recently ran this story about whistleblower seminarians and how — despite all the recent headlines about corruption among U.S. bishops — they are often forced out the door.

As the GetReligion team has stressed for several years now, everything begins with this word — seminary.

The text from Stephen Parisi’s fellow seminarian was ominous: Watch your back.