Guilty Priests and Dismissive Witnesses
I heard on NPR this morning about the Pennsylvania’s Grand Jurors’ report of over 70 years of more than a 1000 child and teenage rape victims of 301 clergy in the Catholic Church. It is always reprehensible when even one kid is sexually assaulted. However, think how horrific it is that more than 1,000 kids were assaulted in Pennsylvania alone.
Magnify that number by 50 states or more even by countries all over the world where the Catholic Church is spread and has indulged and spread child rapists. That is a lot of physical and emotional pain.
We Americans are justified in our grief over the thousands lost to 9–11, whether at home in NYC or abroad in war, and I will never forget my grief of that day. Imagine, though, that those in the Towers and in the war were all kids. Whether they died or lived, they and the people around them were affected. Now imagine if the Towers didn’t represent people dying and losing family but it represented whole buildings of rooms where that number of kids were and are being raped.
Yes, I mean rape. The labels child abuse and child molestation, which was the legal term for what I could admit at the time happened to me, or any of the other many terms we label these experiences just boil down to rape, whatever the experience. It is adults raping children. Period.
However, it is not enough to know how many or how or by whom at what time in the significance of child rape. It is not enough to be outraged by a single or a world of child rapes and rapists. Pope Frances can find it “criminally and morally reprehensible,” have “feelings of shame and sorrow,” and want “to root out the tragic horror,” but we need to see terrifying action.
Believe me when I say that shows like Law and Order’s SVU appeal to me because show after show I see, if only fictionally, what would have strengthened me in my own case — outraged people who sometimes even risk their own career, taking immediate action to apprehend and punish the guilty and advocate for the victim.
Mine is an example of what just one of those children or teenagers may experience not just by the rapist but from someone satisfied with “suspecting” and “forgetting.”
When my sister and I were teenagers, my sister told my mother outright that she had been sexually abused by our father. My mother, first, accepted just my “yes” in admitting it happened to me, second, accusingly repeated to me my father’s excuse that I was “a willing participant,” and, third, said my sister and I needed to “forgive and forget.” Being emotionally manipulated all my life by my parents and feeling ashamed of what, if I was not guilty of then felt a part of, it was just what I wanted to do — never think or speak of it again.
It was over five years before I was forced to admit that I had been abused and pressed charges, and it was another five years before I started what has been now over ten years of treatment of one kind or another for all that my parents did to and cultured in me.
My own mother was never outraged, never my advocate. Not only did she abuse us mentally, emotionally, and physically herself, but when the jury asked my mother “didn’t you suspect something,” she said “yes, I suspected.” Not only did she know when my sister told her, but before that she suspected. She did nothing ever to help us.
In the Catholic Church, it is not only the priests who are guilty. The guilty in child and teenage rape also include all those people who “suspect” and do nothing. The guilty include those clergy who just want to “forgive and forget” in moving guilty clergy to other feeding grounds within the church. The guilty include those who guilt and shame the victims for accusing the “sacred” priest. The guilty include the popes before and, if something drastic is not done to root out the guilty and help the survivors, Pope Francis now.
If you suspect, report, and in as much as you can do, advocate. The damage may be done, but it is always time for help.
