We begin this week with stories of trust betrayed, of the abuse ofrelationships between pastoral counselors and those who came to themwillingly seeking guidance and comfort. In our Cover Story, we hearpersonal tales of the sexual relationship that can develop between someclergymen and some women in their congregations. This is a complexworld in which the male pastor is often found guilty of abusing hispower and the woman is usually, but not always, the innocent victim.Our correspondent, Mary Alice Williams, begins her report with onewoman's story of her relationship with her counselor.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Barbara Colarelli was to learn just howwrong. When she was most vulnerable, after her oldest daughter ran awayfrom home, she turned to the one authority to whom she's given lifelongobedience and devotion, the Catholic Church, in the person of aBenedictine monk named Joseph Chang.

WILLIAMS: It was the beginning of an abusive sexual and spiritual bond Barbara could neither break nor reveal.
Ms. COLARELLI: The pain was, you know, not having control of my own life, going back like a puppet.
WILLIAMS (To Ms. Colarelli): You were protecting him?
Ms. COLARELLI: I was going to save his soul.
WILLIAMS: Laura McAlpine was her therapist.

WILLIAMS: When Barbara learned that she was not the only womanthat Chang was involved with, she reported him to his superior, who shesaid mocked her and told her to get herself together.
Ms. COLARELLI:It was more excruciating than what Chang did, because now it had abigger representation. Now this just wasn't a man, now this was theChurch turning their back on me.

WILLIAMS: Mark Laaser, ordained in the United Church of Christ, knows just how damaging. He was an abuser.
Mr. LAASER:I was a sexual addict and involved in pornography and other kinds ofthings, and gradually that addiction crept into my counseling practice.I became sexual with a number of the women that I was working with.

Mr. LAASER:I knew that I was committing sin in my own theological definition, butI had justified it. I had gone through really sophisticated,complicated rationalizations that the relationships that I was havingwere loving, were mutual.
WILLIAMS: As Laaser learned in recovering, cases like this --the betrayal of a sacred trust -- happen, experts say, more than werealize, and they are never consensual.
Mr. LAASER:They may appear to be consenting, they may appear to do behaviors thatseem consenting, but we believe that emotionally and even spiritually,they're not consenting. They don't have the power really to consentmutually in these kinds of situations.
