Hurting in the Church. Fr. Thomas Berg
assaults, I asked why she hadn’t quit her job. After all, it was the job that occasioned the abuse. Her answer, in part, was quite simple: she loved her job.
But to understand what she meant, you have to understand that it wasn’t a job for her, even though she was paid a dollar an hour—for the times, a considerable amount of money for a teenager. And while that was undoubtedly important to her, in the long run it didn’t matter in comparison to the connection with God that she found in the parish church, and particularly at the Marian shrine:
My faith grew there. I absolutely fell in love with God. And I really felt how much he loved me. I mean, he loved us so much.… And he sent his Son … and Jesus was God! And he died. And he would have died just for me. And he would have died just for you.… He loved each one of us that much. So, religion wasn’t something I just knew; it became something very internal with me. And there was nothing Father Bill could do to take that away.
Another question I posed to her—as anyone might be tempted to ask—was why she didn’t seek help. Here the answer is a bit more complex, and here is where those of us who have not been victims of sexual abuse must set aside our “logic” and “common sense,” and try to enter the mind and heart of a person who has lived in the grip of paralyzing fear, a fear which began as a child and persisted into adulthood.
Jean’s was the fear that her parents would find out about the abuse, and what the consequences might be, not only for her family but also for the tiny close-knit community in which they lived. In particular, she feared that Father Bill’s guilt would get the better of him, and he would one day go to her parents (he had retired only blocks from them) and confess the whole thing to them.
Jean explained that on one occasion news had gotten around town about a teenage girl in a neighboring town who had become pregnant out of wedlock. Her parents had “sent her away.” Jean asked her mother if she thought that had been the right thing to do, and her mother responded affirmatively without hesitation. That response was like pouring gasoline onto the fire of a fear that was already raging inside Jean:
And I really thought they would send me away too. And where would I go? What would happen to me? I could be wrong … but in my opinion I believe [my parents] would have blamed me completely. Everything was kind of black and white [for them] and they followed the rules, and that would not have been allowed. Looking back, I maybe could’ve talked to my dad. But I think it would have torn our family apart.
This fear engulfed Jean well into her adult life until Father Bill’s death. As for her husband, whom she adored and with whom she shared forty years of marriage until his death, she could only tell him a little. Her husband adored Father Bill. “My husband knew a little bit, and he did not want to know more,” Jean explained. “And I respected that.”
But there were other attempts to get help. She would sometimes confide to a priest in confession—because this was the only place she felt halfway safe and confident mentioning it. Yet, she was often sorely disappointed:
Most priests aren’t good there. They say, “Get over it” and “You need to forgive him” and “What’s wrong with you?” And what happens is you just don’t go back. They don’t say, “I’m sorry it happened.” But what they say most often is, “Get over it.” No one says it nicely. My pain is not with what happened—I mean, it was ugly and it hurt me—but my biggest complaint is with how the clergy handles it … because they don’t know what to do with me.
As the abuse went on through the 1960s, Jean got another idea:
I got to the point where I was going to call the bishop. I thought that would work. But I didn’t have the bishop’s phone number. And if I went home and dialed and tried to get the number, there would be a charge on our phone bill. And Mom knew every bill. And then I got to thinking that I couldn’t call him anyway because we were on a party line. And everybody would listen [to each other’s calls]. You would hear this click when they picked up the phone.
Once when Jean was fifteen, she did reach out to a priest in a nearby town. But consistent with the times, this priest, though very kind, did nothing more than encourage Jean to “protect” herself, to “stay close to the doors” so she could avoid or escape Father Bill. It never crossed his mind to report Jean’s abuse to the police. For all Jean knows, he never confronted Father Bill. His words were kind, but he did nothing to prevent further abuse. “He didn’t know any better,” Jean reflected. “The world was different.”
There is a part of Jean’s story that in many ways struck me as more painful to listen to than the details of her abuse—because it is a part of her hurting that was needless, impossibly callous, and mindlessly inflicted upon her by yet another priest to whom she first turned, well over thirty years after she was abused, in a first moment of vulnerability as she sought compassion and understanding.
As Dr. Applewhite explains, when an abuse victim first opens up and is vulnerable with another person about the fact of the abuse, the reaction the victim receives is of critical importance—and positive or negative, it imprints on the psyche of the victim.
When, as an adult woman well into her fifties, Jean first opened up to a priest outside of confession—one of her own parish priests—about her abuse, after going into some detail about Father Bill’s assaults on her, the priest became visibly agitated and finally blurted out: “You scare me.… You scare me!”
Jean was nonplussed.
“I know what people like you do to priests,” he snapped, “you make wild accusations and pretty soon we’re all suspect. So you can just stay away. I don’t want to have anything to do with you!”
Jean attempted to explain that she was not accusing him or much less all priests, but he cut her off. What then followed, in Jean’s state of defenseless vulnerability, was unimaginably insensitive, and would leave her tender conscience needlessly engulfed in turmoil for a long time to come. “And by the way,” the priest retorted, “supposing what you’re saying is true, what was your part in this?”
Jean shared her story with me for a number of reasons, but principal among them was that she wanted me to be able to communicate to priests—and seminarians—how not to treat a victim of sexual abuse who opens up to them in counseling or the confessional.
I asked Jean what she would say to other victims of sexual abuse:
Number one: what he did to you was not your fault. And I’m sorry it happened. That was all I wanted to hear. Rather than being told, “You scare me, and you’re a liar.”
Jean did not report her abuse to the diocese until well after Father Bill had died. She recalled how, when the diocesan review board was going to examine her accusation, she sought to speak to them in person. This was vitally important to her:
I wanted to be there when that panel met … I wanted them to know that what they were doing was valid and important in the Church.
Today, Jean continues to heal. The abundant spiritual healing she has already received, she acknowledges, came not without setbacks, periods of discouragement, and struggles. She shared that eventually it was after fervent prayer to the Holy Spirit that she finally received relief: she was able to forgive Father Bill, and the nightmares abruptly ended.
When I interviewed Jean, she made it clear that her ability to forgive her perpetrator was a gift that was nearly forty years in coming, something superhuman, something she could not do on her own. She had only very recently gotten to that place. “I want him to be in heaven,” she insisted, referring to Father Bill. And she hopes to see him there one day.
What is