Former Community Of Jesus Members Recall Experiences In Performance Groups

ORLEANS – On tour with the Community of Jesus’ Spirit of America Marching Band several years ago, Ruth Penna remembers looking for a band member before that night’s performance.

 “I said, ‘Where’s Brian?’ And someone said, ‘Oh, Rick pulled him out. He’s doing something for Rick.’”

 Penna, who at the time served as one of the band’s directors, talked to Rick Pugsley, who is now the Community’s subprior. Pugsley confirmed what she’d been told, that the band member would not be available to perform that night, and that Penna “was going to have to do without him.”

 After some further searching, Penna said she eventually found Brian in the back of a food truck, where he was washing the floor with a toothbrush. 

 Penna said Brian was the grandson of Betty Pugsley, the Community’s former prioress who led the Orleans-based religious outfit for many years. She said she believed that Brian was punished for seeking to leave the Community to serve in the military and for refusing to “pledge” to become a fulltime community member.

 “He was going through some struggles,” said Penna, who now lives in Washington, D.C. “I want to say he was 16, 17 at the time. He was a really intelligent kid.”

 The Chronicle talked with former Community members about their experiences performing in the Community’s various groups and ensembles following a civil lawsuit that was filed against the Community in U.S. District Court in Boston in July. The suit alleges that the Community built its performing arts center in Brewster using unpaid child labor. It also alleges violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Actions Act (RICO), and “unjust enrichment” by the defendants.

 One former member, Elizabeth Alina, said she was “not surprised” by the allegations made by the suit’s plaintiff, Oliver Ortolani.

 “I looked at all that and thought, ‘Wow. Not only has this place not gotten any better, it’s gotten worse’,” she said.

 Penna and other former band, orchestra and choir members The Chronicle spoke with said disciplinary actions were not uncommon for those in the Community’s various performance groups. In keeping with the Community’s highly-controlled culture, they said the music groups operated in a similarly strict fashion. Those who disobeyed or failed to perform up to the leaders’ high standards were often shamed and punished, they alleged.

 “There was just this feeling of helplessness,” said Alina, who was brought into the Community at the age of 2 and left just shy of her 23rd birthday. “It didn’t matter how hard you tried, what musicality or heart you put into the music. You were going to be screamed at.”

 And yet despite the harsh treatment many say they endured performing in the community, former members said there was joy to be had in performing in the various ensembles. Some, including Benjamin Bott, say they still look back fondly at their time with the band and choir.

 “Honestly, I loved the music there,” said Bott, who left the Community in 1999 at the age of 19. “I’m not gonna lie. I grew up playing piano and violin, and my best friend played piano and violin. We were competitive with each other and we would play together. Honestly, it was my outlet. It was where I could go and kind of zone out.”

 Will Farnsworth, formerly known as Brother Simon, left the Community in 2001. He said his time performing in various groups and ensembles, including his 15 years as a choir member, challenged him for the good in some ways.

 “Those were great experiences,” he said. “They stretched me in that regard.”

 Alina also spoke of the joy that came from performing, especially when she first started playing in the Community. She started playing cello in the orchestra when she was 12 and also underwent choral training, she said. At the time, she and others were taken by what she called the beauty of the music and were inspired to be the best they could be.

 “They were so enthusiastic about what they were doing,” Penna recalled. “The kids always wanted to be better and they always wanted to learn. They really were like sponges.”

 But Alina said things changed upon her return to Orleans after time spent at Grenville Christian College in Canada. She returned when she was 17, at which point she was moved into the Community’s convent. Betty Pugsley had become prioress, she said, and with that came many changes in the Community, including in the way the performance groups were run. The pieces became “much more technical” and “intellectually driven,” she recalled, adding that they lacked the “same quality of feeling.”

“There was this focus on perfection, not in service to the music but some kind of Godly perfection,” she said.

 Penna, who spent about five years working with the Spirit of America Marching Band in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, came into the Community from the outside. 

 “There was nobody to teach the majorettes on Cape Cod, so they knew that I had a background in that,” she said. “They called me up and said, ‘Would you be interested?’ I said, ‘Sure.’”

 Penna said it was not unusual for the band to rehearse between eight and 10 hours on a Saturday, which she said was typical of a structured drum corps. But there were other elements of the band’s culture that weren’t as typical, she said, such as the close watch that Community leaders kept over the musical instructors.

 “They followed us around,” she said. “We were practicing marching in the street, and someone was in my hearing range the entire time.”

 Former members who spoke for this story identified Rick Pugsley as one of the drivers behind the militaristic operation of the Community’s performance groups. 

 “He was so power hungry,” said Alina. “There were just people screaming at you all the time. It kind of brought out the worst in me.”

 Alina said the verbal abuse was so routine within the groups that it created a culture where “perfection is wound with shame.”

 “And we were good,” she said. “We were really good. If you listened now, you’d think ‘Wow, they have years of musical experience under their belt.’ But we didn’t hear that.”

 Pugsley’s authority rarely was challenged, but Bott recalled one instance in which it was. Eric Sorenson, the son of the Community’s co-founder Judy Sorenson, allegedly took Pugsley to task for keeping the band at “parade rest,” a stance where members stood with legs shoulder-width apart with their heads down and their hands held behind them, for close to an hour in the snow.

 “He just gave Rick hell right in front of us,” Bott recalled. “He was like, ‘You do not do this to people. You don’t have them standing out here in the snow. This is ridiculous. This is not how you treat your band.’”

 But those instances were rare, former members said. Those who disobeyed or spoke out did so at their own risk.

 “You don’t push back,” Alina said. “You never push back. If you do, you’re going to be punished beyond imagination.”

 Reached for comment, the Community’s attorney, Jeffrey Robbins, called the allegations “transparently vague,” adding that the alleged instances detailed in this story date back 25 or 35 years.

 “It is therefore literally impossible to test these allegations, which are the kind of allegations that have tended to be pretty loose factually when it comes to accusations against the Community,” he said. Robbins added that others who were part of the Community at the time say that the allegations are “nonsense, whether fabrications or the kinds of exaggerations that morph over time as the decades pass.”

 For Farnsworth, performing needed to be balanced with his other work obligations. That included his duties as a brother as well as his responsibilities as a tradesman tasked with doing various jobs around the Community.

 “You had to write all of your responsibilities down on a sheet or paper and delegate all of your responsibilities for the next three weeks because you had to go to Boston, hop on a plane and go to Rome,” he said.

 Farnsworth, Alina and Bott each had the opportunity to tour the world in their respective groups. But even those experiences, while fun, were tempered, they said. As a brother, Farnsworth took a vow of poverty, which he said served to dull the experience of seeing the world.

 “Even to this day, I mourn the loss of my youth in that regard,” he said. “I wish that I could have experienced social freedoms. Traveling around the world for 11 years and not having money to do anything fun…Every once in a while there would be a little treat where everyone could go do something fun, but the people who were not monastics went off and did a lot of stuff.”

 It’s been 24 years since Farnsworth left the Community, but he still remembers receiving his first paycheck, money he earned working and living on his own for the first time. He went to Walmart, he said, where he bought two pairs of jeans.

 “I picked up two pairs, bought them and walked out,” he said. “I stood there and held them in my arms and cried for about 15 minutes.”

 Farnsworth said he made the most of his newfound freedom. But others, including Bott, said that freedom was initially hard to grapple with after years spent living under the Community’s culture of control. The hardest part, he said, came from realizing that the relationships he’d spent his life building with his closest friends were now gone.

 “I knew that was going to happen I guess on some level, but in my 19-year-old immature brain, I didn’t realize how difficult that was going to be,” he said. “Just to be sitting alone in an apartment with no one telling me to go to orchestra class, none of my friends around and wondering what the hell to do with myself.”

 Today Bott lives in Newton, where he teaches English for a nonprofit in Boston. After a difficult journey through his 20s, a period he said was plagued by a brief period of homelessness, he’s settled into his new life with his family.

 “I have a daughter who’s 16 and she’s getting into her junior year,” he said. “She’s doing so well. I kind of see the natural progression of sort of getting ready to live in the world.”

 Alina, who now lives in North Carolina, put herself through college and graduate school after leaving the Community and later started a business mentoring high school students. She no longer performs music, she said.

 In his response, Robbins noted the national and international acclaim the Community’s music programs have received over the years, and credited members of those programs for their “esprit de corp, professionalism, good humor and, of course, musical excellence.”

“There are always people who have personality or other issues, and who may nurse grievances over time, but those you have quoted do not at all seem to reflect the general experience of people who participate in these programs, to put it mildly,” he said.