Five years after her complaints of sexual misconduct against two Catholic priests were upheld, a woman who had intended to become a nun is alarmed they continue to practise and fears other women may be at risk.
As a teenager, all Annie Benefield wanted was to become a nun. This was surprising. Benefield’s family was Catholic, but their faith was quiet. Through most of her childhood in Whanganui, it meant regular Mass at St Anne’s Church, which was exciting not on its own terms but for what it preceded: weekly trips to her grandparents’ apple orchard, where she and her siblings ate golden syrup on toast and followed her grandfather as he gathered fruit.
Benefield did not match society’s hazy stereotype of nuns. Active, with dark blonde hair and a ready smile, she played netball, rugby, hockey, football, badminton, volleyball, squash, tennis and athletics. “I didn’t have a relax mode,” she says. “I just wanted to please people.” But from the age of 15, something stirred. “I couldn’t walk past a church without going inside. It just drew me in. It was like this magnetic connection.”
When Benefield was 15, she attended a conference in Rotorua for Catholic youth. After several days of worship, a chaplain asked everyone considering life as a priest or nun to stand. “I felt very strongly that I ought to stand up,” she recalls. “From then on, it was just something I always knew was going to happen.” She began attending regular Mass every day. It wasn’t something she understood. “It was just a miracle.”
In 2011, she was named head prefect of Whanganui’s Cullinane College. Soon after, a teacher asked whether she would represent her school at Palmerston North’s Chrism Mass, an annual celebration where the area’s clergy renew their vows. There, she watched with heady joy as the bishop mixed jars of scented oil and blew upon the blend: every parish would use the combination in their ceremonies over the ensuing year.
Afterwards, as the 17-year-old waited outside the cathedral with her priest, a 51-year-old man with a dusting of light hair and thin black-rimmed glasses appeared in the dusk. This, Benefield’s priest explained, was Charles Drennan. He had just been named Palmerston North’s incoming bishop. They exchanged a brief greeting before her transport home arrived.
She had no idea the fleeting exchange was the beginning of an ordeal with successive priests that would span nearly a decade and become the New Zealand Catholic Church’s worst confirmed sexual misconduct scandal involving a bishop.
The abuse of children by clergy has been recognised as a global epidemic, but Benefield’s experiences demonstrate another problem: sexual relationships between priests and their congregants. These are plagued by power disparities, frequently amount to exploitation and often cause intense emotional damage. In the case of Benefield, it has brought her close to collapse and helped uproot the calling that once defined her life.
Her case also reveals that despite the New Zealand church’s repeated promises of change, in recent years it has once again shuffled a priest accused of sexual misconduct from parish to parish, while the Vatican has failed to impose penalties that local officials acknowledge are warranted, demonstrating persistent issues in the church’s handling of clerical misconduct.
Special treatment
Several weeks after meeting Drennan, according to Benefield, she was called into her school office, where she found the director of religious studies waiting for her. “We’ve just heard from the bishop,” Benefield recalls the teacher saying. She had been invited to read from Corinthians at the ceremony in which Drennan would take office. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude,” she recited to the crowd gathered at Palmerston North’s Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. “It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
For several months, she barely saw Drennan. Then, after celebrating her 18th birthday and finishing high school, she decided to attend Hearts Aflame, a 10-day summer camp that immerses attendees in the rituals of Catholicism. One lunchtime, as she waited for food with her parish priest, she bumped into Drennan. Over the meal, Drennan asked what her plans were. A gap year, she explained, then university. He pressed further: what about in 10 years’ time? Benefield eventually said she felt called to become a nun.
From then on, Drennan seemed to always be around. When he learnt she was saving for a trip to Europe, he offered her a job as a youth co-ordinator. Afterwards, he invited her to dinner at Barista Cafe in Palmerston North, where she recalls him noting she seemed different from other people her age. She found herself explaining that by the end of high school, she was sure she was the only virgin in her class. Clearly interested, Drennan pressed her on why. “I don’t know,” she remembered stammering. “It’s just, Jesus.”
Asked by the Listener about this interaction, Drennan wrote: “I disclaim entirely what is purported to have been discussed.”
From there, Benefield recalls, Drennan began inviting her for dinner at local cafes every Friday, when she would travel to Palmerston North as part of her job. One night, he invited her home for tea. They gossiped for a while, until she stood to leave. He told her to give him a hug goodbye, she says, then pulled her close to his body and slowly kissed her forehead. “It didn’t click to me that this was a bad thing,” she says. “I felt special.”
It started a pattern. She came for tea, after which she says he would suggest a movie. At first, they sat beside each other on his couch. Eventually, she says, he started hugging her, or telling her to sit between his legs, or to lie beside him. One evening, Benefield says, he jumped on top of her and began kissing her.
“I only remember thinking that’s not how a first kiss is meant to be.” Next, he suggested occasional day trips: a drive to Castlepoint or a swim in a nearby river. He kept inviting her for dinner, which led to tea, which led to kisses. Each evening was an escalation: he would touch her breasts, or tell her to sleep in his bed, or take off her clothes, or kiss her, or put his penis in her mouth.
He arranged for her to work as a cleaner in his parish. Multiple times a week, she says, they met for sex.
Later, Drennan told church investigators that Benefield initiated their relationship. Interview records show he described her as having an “obsessive possessive characteristic” and said she was “headstrong, pestering and always got her way.”
Their alleged correspondence, however, points to a dynamic where Drennan inundated Benefield with professions of love and tied their relationship to God. In one text message Benefield provided to investigators, which Drennan later said he did not recall sending, he allegedly told her that during prayer, “I was asking Him if He could help us to channel our love towards Him to grow in love for Jesus and combine it so that others might experience His great love through us”.
“[T]hat’s the reason I loved/love you so much. You are so Christ like to me,” he told Benefield in another text he later acknowledged he had sent. “You say that I have to be prepared for you, say, to go off to the Vatican again and perhaps even for me to go off and do my own thing. But I don’t think He is going to let that happen. God is perfection and strives for that in us – through us,” he added. “That is why I’m so attached, God wants it like that. He wants us to be tog[ether] and achieve greatness for Him and his church.”
The relationship continued for months and involved sex every week, says Benefield. At just 18, it was overwhelming. She decided she enjoyed it. “I remember thinking at one point, if someone complained about Charles, I’d lie to the police,” she says. “We felt like our paths were kind of – like God had intended for us to be together.”
After six months, Benefield had saved enough for her OE. Drennan, it turned out, was planning to visit the Vatican at the same time. His travel agent booked their flights together. They flew to Geneva, where they stayed for a few days in his brother’s house. Then, after Benefield travelled around the continent, they met again in Rome.
Benefield says they toured through the Vatican and watched the Swiss Guard in their elaborate uniforms, then went to Drennan’s room at a guest house for clergy, in which Pope Francis now lives. They kissed, she recalls, then he rubbed against her until he ejaculated, at which point he collapsed on the bed. Then he told her, “I just wanted to be good for you here.”
Drennan denies that this occurred.
Power disparities
The relationship was an abuse of authority: more than three decades older than Benefield, Drennan was her employer, her spiritual guide, and her religious superior. Relationships between priests and congregants are not new – despite the expectation that Catholic priests practise celibacy – but it is only recently that experts have emphasised that the power disparities involved – especially priests’ perceived role as agents of God – make them a form of exploitation.
Stephen de Weger, an Australian expert on clerical sexual misconduct, has written of the relationship between priests and congregants that, “For clergy to allow sex to enter this special relationship is a clear breach of ethical and moral boundaries, fiduciary duty, and even a criminal act now in many jurisdictions. There is no grey area here.”
In the United States, 13 states have criminalised sexual relationships between priests and parishioners to whom they are providing pastoral care, in the same way that sexual relationships between doctors or therapists and their patients are often prohibited. Sexual relationships between priests and their parishioners are not illegal in New Zealand, but they are a breach of church policies. Those policies are set out in the NZ Catholic Church’s document, A Path to Healing, which sets out principles for dealing with complaints of sexual misconduct. “Any attempt to sexualise a pastoral relationship is a betrayal of trust, an abuse of authority, and professional misconduct.”
At the time, Benefield saw no problem with the relationship. That began to change once she returned from her OE. At one point, she recalls, her mother told her, “I get that your relationship is what it is because he’s immature, and you’re so mature, and you’re both crazy religious. I don’t really want to tell other people, because it’s so complicated, but I trust you.”
The interactions now seemed like a betrayal of her mother. Benefield decided to confess what she felt were her sins: an essential element of Catholicism. But saying anything to another priest, she realised, might jeopardise Drennan. The bishop, meanwhile, grew angry. “I realise now it was because he was worried I was going to tell someone,” she says. To reassure him, she says she asked him to hear her confession. He put on his stole and sat on the end of his bed, she says, while she knelt on the ground before him as he purported to wash away her sins.
Any attempt to sexualise a pastoral relationship is an abuse of authority.
“I have never heard the confession of Ms Benefield,” Drennan later wrote.
Despite it all, Benefield’s doubt over her perceived sins strengthened her desire to live a religious life. She would become a nun, she decided, move to a new city and taper off the relationship with Drennan. In 2015, she moved to Auckland to study at Good Shepherd Theological College, now known as Te Kupenga – Catholic Theological College. She and Drennan continued to call, but eventually the physical contact stopped.
In Auckland, she was determined to take every opportunity to build a new life. One day, she received an invitation from a young priest she’d met a handful of times, Larry Rustia, a short man with a black pompadour who had emigrated from the Philippines in 2009 to serve as a priest in New Zealand. He was celebrating the anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. Would she like to come? An aspiring priest she knew was also going. When she walked in, Rustia insisted they take a photo. As they posed, she says, she felt his hand rest on her backside. She assumed it was a mistake.
Soon after, he began texting to organise coffees or dinners after Mass. One night, they went back to the presbytery, where the priests who worked at Auckland’s St Patrick’s Cathedral lived. They sat together in the lounge and discussed Spotlight, the cinematic retelling of the Boston Globe’s investigation into priestly sexual abuse, which several of Benefield’s friends aspiring to the priesthood had watched as part of their training.
She was talking about how outrageous it was that priests still perpetrated such abuse when Rustia began nuzzling his face against her cheek, she says. She froze. “I just couldn’t compute [the interaction].” Several days later, she and Rustia met in the cathedral’s carpark. As they sat in her car, she says, he began kissing her again. She watched him pull down his pants and gesture at his genitalia. “Suck it,” she recalls him saying.
It felt like time had spun backwards. “I’ve been here before,” she remembered thinking. Perhaps she had “missed a memo”, she thought. Maybe this was what friendship meant. She obeyed the instruction. “It’s just trauma brain,” she says. “I was just checked out.”
Rustia denies this occurred.
Wine and chocolates
For a year, she and Rustia spent much of their time together. He took on a new role as a priest at Devonport and arranged for her to work as a cleaner in his parish and she began attending his services. Multiple times a week, she says, they met for sex. The relationship was marked by the same power disparities as those with Drennan: Rustia was her priest and her employer.
Another interest for Benefield was the choir she’d joined at St Patrick’s Cathedral. Around 2017, a new musical director arrived. After rehearsals, he and Benefield began getting drinks, which turned into dates. It was her first romantic connection with someone who wasn’t a priest. As they spent more time together, she had an excuse to reduce her contact with Rustia, until finally they stopped having sex. Eventually, she travelled to Christchurch to visit the musical director’s friends. But Benefield was caught between her faith and the man. She still wanted to be a nun, she told him. She had to try to follow that calling before she could continue the relationship.
As she left Christchurch, Benefield felt bereft. She called Rustia, whom she felt she could confide in. He told her he would pick her up at Auckland Airport, but instead of taking her into the city, he drove her to a nearby hotel. “Get out,” she recalls him saying. “We’re staying here.” He took her up to a room with one bed, on which sat a basket of chocolates and wine.
Rustia and Benefield have starkly different views on what came next. She says she accepted several glasses of wine while Rustia asked what happened in Christchurch. She began to cry, she says, while he muttered with frustration. Eventually, she says, he interrupted her and said he had been thinking of leaving the priesthood. He then began kissing her. She says she told him to stop, but subsequently went silent. They then had sex. Her lasting memory, she says, was that he was angry.
Rustia later admitted to church investigators the two had sex, but when approached by the Listener about the interaction, he denied Benefield’s characterisation of the night. “I acknowledge that I failed to live up to the standards and expectations of a priest by engaging in what I maintain was a consenting relationship,” he wrote. He added that her recent characterisation of the hotel interaction “does not align with statements that the woman and I have previously made with external investigators”.
Misconduct widespread
It took years for Benefield to make sense of her experiences. “It’s pretty fucked up,” she says of Drennan. “I was completely emotionally and mentally manipulated by him to be some sort of sexual service dog. Whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it.” Of Rustia, she says, “I was so well trained that it was just so easy for him to take advantage of me.”
Benefield’s experience is not uncommon. Although research is scarce, a landmark 2004 report commissioned by the Catholic Church in the US said studies indicate up to 40% of clergy engage in sexual misconduct with adults.
The emotional harm that can result is significant. According to forthcoming research from Baylor University in Texas, reported in Christianity Today, survivors of clergy sexual abuse of adults are traumatised at rates higher than soldiers who have gone to war. The study found 39% of adult survivors were experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, compared to just over a quarter of US veterans.
Representatives of the Catholic Church here did not answer questions about the number of complaints they have received alleging sexual misconduct by priests with adults.
I was so well trained that it was just so easy for him to take advantage of me.
Clerical exploitation is a particular problem for nuns, for whom obedience is a prime virtue. In 2019, an Associated Press investigation found dozens of nuns who had been abused by priests across Europe, Africa, South America and Asia. Pope Francis referred to one case as “sexual slavery” and acknowledged the Vatican was struggling to stamp out such abuse.
Eventually, Benefield mentioned her experiences to a friend from Whanganui, who urged her to complain. In early 2019, she went to the National Office for Professional Standards (Nops) – the church’s complaints authority.
Nops commissioned an investigator, who trawled through messages Benefield provided, interviewed Benefield, Drennan, and Rustia, and spoke to several of her family and friends. In mid-2019, the investigator submitted reports that supported her complaints and emphasised she “presented as a very truthful and reliable witness”.
According to one report, Drennan “admitted some of the sexual activity” but insisted Benefield “was the instigator of the sexual relationship”. When the Listener approached Drennan with detailed questions, he wrote, “My acknowledgement of facts and my refutation of falsehoods and fantasies were both noted” during the Nops investigation, that the report “contain[ed] multiple falsehoods”, and that “Subsequent repetition of falsehoods, refuted and rejected elsewhere, only serves to promote fantasy over reality.”
The Nops investigator concluded that, given repeated contradictions in Drennan’s testimony, “There are concerns as to the honesty of Bishop Charles Drennan regarding aspects of the complaints made by [Benefield].”
In his report about Rustia, the Nops investigator noted that in Benefield’s description of the evening in the hotel, “She had little memory of the night due to the alcohol consumption and rang Fr Larry days later who said they had sex.” Her recent account is more extensive than the one Nops presented to Rustia, which he largely accepted.
As a church, we need to be honest, and this is bad.
In September 2019, Benefield was informed by Nops and then Bishop of Auckland Patrick Dunn that her complaints had been upheld. The notes of a subsequent meeting between Benefield and Nops concerning Drennan emphasised she wanted to remain anonymous and that “the message from church [should] be that the process worked – that this is a success for the church, not a failure”. Benefield made one “non-negotiable” request: that both men should be “laicised”, or removed from the priesthood.
That October, Drennan resigned as Palmerston North’s bishop and was ordered to avoid public work as a priest. It was the New Zealand Catholic Church’s highest-ranking resignation related to sexual misconduct. Benefield’s initial view that the process had worked seemed to be borne out.
Then the process froze. Despite Drennan’s resignation, he remained a priest and retained his title of bishop. In a statement, Stephen Lowe, president of the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference, wrote that New Zealand officials believe “Drennan’s actions, reported by a number of complainants, were wholly unacceptable” and “rise to the level of seriousness that warrants his removal from the priesthood”.
The Vatican, however, appears to disagree. Lowe wrote that multiple bishops have repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked the Vatican to laicise Drennan. Lowe did not answer questions about why the Vatican had not done so. “We will continue to make the case at every opportunity,” wrote Lowe.
Archbishop Gábor Pintér, the Vatican’s representative in New Zealand, says the Vatican has a policy of not commenting on open cases and he declined to answer questions.
After Benefield’s complaint against Rustia was upheld, she says Dunn approached her and asked whether her complaint needed to be made public. “Larry is not really that type of person,” she says Dunn told her. She says she responded: “As a church, we need to be honest, and this is bad.” Nonetheless, the church did not publicly disclose the complaint against Rustia.
Dunn, who retired in December 2021, did not respond to a request for comment.
Rustia was briefly suspended from ministry and sent to Australia for psychological therapy. But then, according to Lowe, multiple psychologists reviewed his case and recommended he return to ministry under supervision.
Around 2020, Rustia was assigned a new role as a parish priest in Kaitaia. The movement resembled a common church tactic in which misbehaving priests are shifted between parishes. Survivors and their advocates have dubbed the tactic “the geographic cure”. According to Lowe, the church has not received any further complaints concerning Rustia.
“I made a serious mistake, and I deeply regret it,” Rustia told the Listener. “But I love my vocation and I wished to continue it. I was permitted to do so, but with a safety plan. That includes regular engagement with a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a spiritual director, an external supervisor and senior clergy. I have followed that plan for five years.”
Benefield, however, could not understand it. The church rarely updated her about her complaint and only after she pressed them to do so, she says. She was anxious that by remaining priests, Drennan and Rustia would be able to exploit other women. As five years dragged by without any further action, it seemed to her the church was more focused on the wellbeing of Drennan and Rustia than on preventing further misconduct.
At one point, she says, she spoke to Bishop Peter Cullinane, the long-serving Bishop of Palmerston North before Drennan and namesake of her high school, about the men. Benefield says Cullinane asked her, “What about forgiveness?” She says she responded, “What about justice?”
Bishop Cullinane did not respond to requests for comment.
Leaving the church
After the process froze, the church felt dangerous for Benefield. When she attended Mass, her heart began beating wildly and her body flushed with heat. Each element of ceremony reminded her of the men who manipulated her.
“I really wanted to keep going to church, because it was such a large part of my life and being, and I didn’t want them to be the cause of me not going,” she says. But after the exploitation, her resilience disappeared. “All the time, I’m on the edge,” she says. Her relationship with the musical director fell apart. Most mornings, she woke up in despair. At random intervals, she was struck by bouts of nausea. “I’m operating at full capacity all the time emotionally.”
She began having panic attacks upon entering chapels. Eventually, she felt she had no choice but to leave the church. Her parents wrestled with similar difficulties. Today, both remain faithful but only her mother still attends church: her father refuses to.
Benefield’s calling to become a nun also fell away. “I had no access to anything spiritual,” she said. The religious mission that once felt so urgent no longer gripped her. Today, the change is a relief. “If I’d continued down that path to becoming a nun, I think that the cycle of abuse might have continued.”
Five years on, the 31-year-old Benefield lives with a new partner in a small home near the centre of Wellington. She was recently formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed antidepressants that help her handle much of the pain. She spends much of her spare time practising with the choir at the Anglican Cathedral of St Paul, where she has found a way to indulge her faith outside Catholicism.
Instead of becoming a nun, she has become a lawyer – a choice inspired by her dealings with the church. “None of it was easy and all of it felt geared against me,” she says. “They were super lovely people, but one of my motivations for studying law was: I could do that job better.”
Drennan, meanwhile, continues to attract complaints. When he resigned in 2019, church officials revealed he had already been the subject of one complaint beyond the one made by Benefield. Now, the church confirmed to the Listener that multiple other people have made allegations of misconduct concerning Drennan.
According to Lowe, Drennan has recently been travelling overseas, where he has dressed as a bishop and presented himself as a priest in violation of the restrictions placed on him. After being notified of Drennan’s behaviour, Lowe says “we alerted the Holy See [the governing body of the church] immediately”. But given the Vatican’s failure to progress his laicisation, it remains unclear whether he will ever be removed from the priesthood.
As for Rustia, after his stint in Northland, he was appointed at the start of this year as an assistant priest in the Auckland suburb of Flat Bush. Benefield was unaware he had returned to ministry in Auckland until the Listener told her. After the Listener approached the church with questions about Benefield’s experiences, Rustia messaged her with several photos of them together. “Please provide the media decent photos when you talk to them,” he told her.
Soon after, as a result of our inquiries, Lowe suspended Rustia from ministry. Lowe wrote that the church would engage in further investigation and emphasised Rustia “has not had the opportunity of a formal process in which to respond to new information”.
For her part, Benefield is insistent that Rustia and Drennan should no longer be priests. “They have such power and they have such a gift in what they can do,” she says. “Speaking as a Catholic, it’s so special and so holy.”
Benefield still feels loyal to the church and says that’s what drove her to share her story publicly for the first time. Although she harbours some scepticism towards the church’s latest promises, she is still hopeful the men who took advantage of her will finally lose the spiritual authority they still wield.
The church “did the wrong thing for a long time, but it seems like they’re trying to do the right thing now,” she insists, despite all the pain, the delays and the secrets. If they do, it would prove “It wasn’t the church who had done this. It was those men.”