‘Discretion not deception’: Woman says Raleigh diocese mishandled spiritual manipulation

Can a spiritual director have a ‘consensual’ relationship?

A Catholic woman says a North Carolina diocese did not sufficiently address a priest’s alleged pattern of sexual and spiritual manipulation in the context of spiritual direction.

And while the priest has been banned from a Catholic university in Virginia over the allegations against him, he became last month a parish administrator in the Diocese of Raleigh.

Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral, Raleigh, North Carolina. Credit: Farragutful/wikimedia. CC BY SA 4.0

The Diocese of Raleigh says the priest engaged in a consensual relationship between adults, but the woman says that Raleigh’s Bishop Luis Zarama has not taken seriously a very different account of the relationship.

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Fr. Steven Costello was ordained a priest as a member of the Legionaries of Christ in 2011. He was assigned to graduate work in the theology of the body at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC, and was eventually appointed a professor of theological anthropology at Divine Mercy University, a Virginia graduate school of psychology sponsored by the Legionaries of Christ.

In late 2019, the priest was both teaching and serving as a chaplain at the university, when he became the spiritual director of a woman who had previously taken his course.

Costello also became friendly with the woman’s family, she said, in a relationship that slowly built trust. In the summer of 2020, the woman said, she and Costello began texting regularly, and their relationship grew closer.

In late 2020, Costello left Divine Mercy University, for an assignment with his community in the Diocese of Raleigh. That move later saw him taking a parish assignment in the diocese, and seeking to incardinate there — he has been thus far accepted conditionally, and has not yet been incardinated.

The woman said that soon after he left for North Carolina, Costello said that it would be better for them to think of themselves as friends — he said that “spiritual direction can take on different roles,” she recalled, but that a friendship would involve “reciprocity.”

The friendship grew close, mostly by text. Soon, in early 2021, the women said, Costello began to talk about changes to their friendship — about experiencing a deeper kind of intimacy, which he framed in the context of “givenness” — a sense that God had given them a unique relationship, which he allegedly characterized as “spousal friendship.”

He told her, she said, that their friendship represented “Christ the bridegroom and his bride and beloved” — and was uniquely given to them by God. He referenced erotic portions of Song of Songs to describe how God had united them.

Costello told her often that he loved her, she said, adding that when they saw each other, he’d hold her hand, and comment on the aroma of her perfume. When she was uncomfortable, she said, he’d tell her how common it was in foreign cultures for close friends to hold hands or embrace.

When she was uncomfortable, the woman said, the priest emphasized that God had given them a unique spiritual closeness to support them in their own vocations. He explained that others would be unlikely to understand that.

In fact, she said, he frequently urged “discretion” in their relationship.

He would tell her, she alleged: “Let’s be discretionary in who sees [physical contact], because others would not understand it.”

“The anthem was ‘discretion versus deception,’” she told The Pillar.

Under Costello’s guidance, the woman said, she believed that she “was being discretionary, because the spirituality we both subscribed to was something that [my husband] would not understand, and would actually hurt him.”

The woman said she now believes the priest took advantage of his knowledge of her interior vulnerabilities, past traumas, and insecurities — all learned from spiritual direction — in order to shape the relationship.

“I was vulnerable,” she told The Pillar. “I was at the beginning of a [graduate] program that by its very nature breaks you down. He knew everything I was struggling with. He knew the father wounds that I was carrying,” she recalled.

“It's almost as if … he provided an answer to a deep insecurity I had,” she said.

When the relationship was ongoing, she said, Costello’s status in her life — as a spiritual director, and as a priest, allayed her doubts.

She believed his sense of a call to intimate friendship, she told The Pillar, “because he is a priest, and in persona Christi.”

Eventually, the priest began to approach her physically, on visits to her home, and at other times when they were together. He would initiate “cuddling” sessions, she said, and touched her chest, under her shirt, without her permission, and his hand grazed her posterior. He talked about his sexual desire for her. He would text her erotically about Song of Songs, she said, or turn a FaceTime call toward the erotic, and then tell her that he had ejaculated during its course.

When things got physical or overtly sexual in conversation, she began to think she had done something wrong, she told The Pillar, or to believe that she had an obligation “to support him.”

When they crossed physical lines, she said, she would try to encourage the priest, or tell him things weren’t his fault.

His response, she said, was “very nuanced … it almost made it seem like this was my idea,” she said, or diminished the sexual component of their conversation.

Costello would make analogies between their friendship and the mysticism of St. Theresa of Avila, the woman said: “That she would have these spiritual experiences where she would be praying and … be sexually stimulated, so to speak.”

After one incident of sexual impropriety, he emailed her, explaining that “Woman arouses masculinity. Man bestows it. My experience of your love and loveliness awakens (arouses) my masculine heart.”

“The further I get from this, the more I see the manipulation,” she told The Pillar.

“I see the grooming and the small shifting of boundaries,” the woman added. “As I look back, I’m like, ‘a priest should have never told a married woman about that.’”

But the priest was careful about some aspects of their relationship, she said, and careful about how he engaged with her husband.

“He called [my husband] after a conversation with me, in which I was concerned about our friendship and the nature of it.”

“He called [my husband] to affirm that he was ok with us being friends. [My husband] affirmed that he was — but he was not privy to the nature of what he was saying he was ok with. Just the general idea that we were sharing back-and-forth and in conversation.”

In an eventual email to diocesan officials, the woman’s husband recalled that before visits to the family, “he would call a couple weeks ahead of time and ask me permission to stay with us. Doing so conveyed a sense of respect for me as head of the household and as [her] husband. I drew from that conversation a desire for boundaries. It feels now like a big setup.”

“The faux-respect was shown only to get me to put down my guard and trust,” he wrote.

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Even as her spiritual director, Costello did not hear the woman’s confessions, she said.

And “when things would happen between us, he told me it would be best for me to go to somebody else for confession, because he couldn't ever absolve me of anything that if it had to do with us.”

Absolving an “accomplice” in a sin against chastity is classified as a major crime in canon law.

Costello “would often [express] fear of disobeying the sixth commandment … but he was never conclusive” about whether they had done so.

“It was kind of left up to me.”

Still, the priest reportedly told the woman that she had helped him with a struggle for purity. That gave her the sense that their friendship was important.

“I felt meaning and purpose,” she recalled, “like I was called to keep him pure and holy.”

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The relationship continued until January 2024, when the woman’s husband became aware of it. When he began asking questions, she told him about the relationship. They discussed it. Given that the relationship began in spiritual direction, and seemed to them to have been predicated on her vulnerable disclosures to Costello, they contacted ecclesiastical authorities in Raleigh.

The woman said she was at first uncertain how to characterize the relationship, reluctant to call it grooming or to frame it as coercive. But she and her husband spoke with a clinical psychologist who has worked with dioceses for decades on cases of abuse.

The psychologist “was extremely direct with us,” the woman said. “She said ‘This was not an affair, this was an abuse. This is not what you think it is. This is an abuse, and this needs to be dealt with and treated as such.’”

They consulted another clinical psychologist, a long time instructor of both spiritual directors and psychologists, who reportedly called the relationship a “textbook” pattern of coercion and manipulation.

“And that’s when I started to feel like: ‘What the hell just happened?’ I was shell-shocked by everything.”

“The narrative that had been played out for the previous three years was that this was a God-given, holy, unique special, relationship, spousal, in which we both needed support and gave life spiritual life to the other.”

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The woman told The Pillar that it’s taken her a while to reframe her relationship with Costello, which she had believed for years was a gift from God.

She said that while she continues to process her experiences, she’s placed trust in the assessment of her therapists — experts in relationship dynamics, she said — as she sorts out for herself what was true, and what wasn’t.

But she said she’s come to see manipulative patterns in the priest’s relationship with her, and to be concerned about patterns in Costello’s life.

During the course of their relationship, she said, Costello had told her about several other women with whom he had also had intimately close relationships during his priesthood. Now, she said, she worries those relationships were likely manipulated, as hers was.

The woman and her husband reported Costello in January 2024 to the Diocese of Raleigh, giving an account of their experience, and including a recording in which the priest admitted to much of the alleged conduct, in a phone call with the woman’s husband, which took place the day after he first became aware of the relationship.

In that recording, heard by The Pillar, Costello conceded that he had “touched” the woman’s chest “more than once,” embraced her closely, and said that “my hand might have gone to her backside.” He conceded that he had talked about “entering” her and discussed a desire for sexual intimacy, sent sexual texts using language from Song of Songs, discussed her breasts and genitalia, and ejaculated while texting her.

While the priest insisted there was a “context” to those admissions which was not being understood, he also conceded that their engagement was “wrong,” and that it was a part of “certain patterns of my whole life, certain themes.”

He insisted that his relationship with the woman was not for the purpose of sexual gratification, and that he “wasn’t preying upon her.”

Diocesan officials interviewed the woman, and in February, the diocesan safe environment coordinator told the woman’s husband that the situation “compels action,” in an email seen by The Pillar.

The next month, Costello was placed on leave, to address in a treatment program “issues regarding boundaries and inappropriate behaviors that are counter to the vows of priestly chastity.” the diocese explained to priests in a March 9, 2024 email obtained by The Pillar.

The Raleigh diocese said in the email that Costello’s actions were “consensual” and between adults.

The woman disagreed with that characterization. And less than six months after he had been pulled from ministry, she learned that he would soon return to the parish where he had been serving before he was put on leave.

Both the woman and her psychologist expressed concern that Costello — who reportedly had inappropriate relationships with four different women — likely posed ongoing concern for Catholics under his spiritual care.

The woman’s psychologist met with Raleigh’s Bishop Luis Zarama in September 2024, expressing concern that the priest had exhibited a pattern of behavior which had not been sufficiently investigated by the diocese, and that was likely to repeat itself again.

In a summary of that meeting mailed to Zarama, the psychologist wrote that “since past behavior is often the best predictor for future behavior … [Costello] very likely continues to pose a serious spiritual and sexual threat to parishioners and the diocese.”

The psychologist expressed concern that if the priest were returned to parish ministry, he would not be sufficiently supervised “to protect other potential victims or Fr. Costello from himself, without the parishioners being notified of the exact nature of his victimization of multiple women and at least one known family.”

Zarama, for his part, did not agree.

In a brief October 10 letter to the psychologist, he told her that “your summary includes statements … about which we disagree.”

Costello was returned to ministry October 6, appointed as a parochial vicar to a parish in New Bern, North Carolina, with the bishop indicating that he would be supervised closely by the parish pastor.

The woman, her husband, and her psychologist continued to raise concern. And in February of this year, four months after his return to ministry in Raleigh, the priest was banned from Divine Mercy University.

“Given the unique role and authority that comes with the priesthood, inappropriate sexual behavior with another person has an aggravated degree of gravity for a priest,” wrote Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC, Divine Mercy University’s president, in an internal email obtained by The Pillar.

“In this case, the severity was further compounded by the power differential stemming from having been a spiritual director and professor of the student.”

Zarama, for his part, seemingly did not agree with the university’s conclusions.

In April 2025, the bishop appointed Costello as the administrator of St. Paul Parish in New Bern, where he had been serving as parochial vicar. The priest took charge of the parish June 24, nine months after the Raleigh diocese had told the woman’s psychologist that Costello would be carefully supervised by his parish pastor.

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The Diocese of Raleigh, for its part, has not yet responded to numerous interview requests from The Pillar .

Costello has not responded to emails requesting an interview.

But abuse advocates have warned for years about the problem of manipulation and coercion of adults in the Church.

Teresa Pitt Green is an advocate for abuse survivors, and co-founder of Spirit Fire, “a fellowship of survivors of abuse within the Church,” according to the group’s website.

Pitt Green told The Pillar that boundary violations in the context of spiritual direction are “not uncommon” — she noted that she has worked with a “significant number of religious sisters and seminarians who have faced this.”

“Sometimes they involve actual groomers, where it’s a pattern in an individual’s life that they move from one person they’re caring for to the next. Other times it’s a really serious problem with keeping emotional — and then physical — boundaries.”

Pitt Green told The Pillar that because of the often vulnerable nature of spiritual direction, she does not believe that a director can have an actually “consensual” relationship with a directee or former directee.

“When you are the person with the privilege of helping someone who's going through a really rough time and trusting you, you really are the person who has to maintain the boundaries, [even] if that person becomes confused,” Pitt Green said.

“I don't think it can be really consensual when you have had someone in your care, any more than if a therapist started to carry on with someone. The therapist would lose their license,” she added.

Pitt Green said that in the Church, there is often a “serious underestimation of the power of somebody in the clerical state who’s helping someone who’s been wounded — we underestimate the power they have over the person they’re helping.”

“And actually, that goes for lay ministers, too,” she added.

Pitt Green is not alone in her view.

Cardinal Victor Fernandez, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has urged in recent months the prospect of criminalizing “spiritual abuse” in the Church’s canon law — noting last year a joint working group on the subject between the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Legislative Texts.

“Today we are more attentive than before to the possibility of mystical or spiritual elements being used to take advantage of people and even abuse them,” the cardinal told OSV News last year.

And in January, Fernandez explained that “we have frequently received reports of situations where spiritual elements are misused as a pretext for sexual relationships.”

“It involves the manipulation of both the people who entrust themselves to a spiritual guide and the beauty of our faith itself, distorted for personal gain,” the cardinal added.

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The woman told The Pillar that she’s raised concerns publicly because both she and her therapists have exhausted their options within the Church. She’s aimed to speak to Zarama about the severity of her experience, she said, and she believes that her concerns have gone unheard.

For now, she said, her aim is to protect other women who might find themselves in similar situations, she said.

“This isn't about me. This isn’t about my story.” the woman told The Pillar.

But “if he is in public ministry where he is responsible for the spiritual care of others, then they have the right to know the facts.”