Survivors share harrowing stories of abuse and cover-up

February 28, 2019
Junno Arocho Esteves
Catholic News Service
 
VATICAN CITY – “Every time I refused to have sex with him, he would beat me,” an abuse survivor from Africa told Pope Francis and bishops attending the Vatican summit on child protection and the abuse crisis.
 
The meeting began Feb. 21 with the harrowing stories of survivors of sexual abuse, cover-up and rejection by church officials.
 
The pre-recorded testimonies of five survivors were broadcast in the synod hall; the Vatican did not disclose their names, but only whether they were male or female and their country of origin.
 
In the first testimony, a man from Chile expressed the pain he felt when, after reporting his abuse to the church, he was treated “as a liar” and told that “I and others were enemies of the church.”
 
“You are physicians of the soul and yet, with rare exceptions, you have been transformed – in some cases – into murderers of the soul, into murderers of the faith,” he said.
 
Comparing the abuse crisis to a cancer in the church, the survivor said that “it is not enough to remove the tumor and that’s it,” but there must be measures to “treat the whole cancer.”
 
He said he prayed that those who “want to continue to cover up” would leave the church, giving greater space “to those who want to a create a new church, a renewed church and a church absolutely free from sexual abuse.”
 
A woman from Africa recalled the humiliation and suffering she endured when she was sexually and physically abused by a priest beginning when she was 15; he made her pregnant three times and each time forced her to have an abortion.
 
“At first, I trusted him so much that I did not know he could abuse me. I was afraid of him and every time I refused to have sex with him, he would beat me,” she said. “And since I was completely dependent on him economically, I suffered all the humiliations he inflicted on me.”
 
“It must be said that priests and religious have a way of helping and at the same time also destroying,” she said. “They have to behave like leaders, wise people.”
 
A U.S. survivor told the bishops that what wounded him the most “was the total loss of the innocence of my youth and how that has affected me today.”
 
“There’s still pain in my family relationships,” he said. “There’s still pain with my siblings. I still carry pain. My parents still carry pain at the dysfunction, the betrayal, the manipulation that this bad man, who was our Catholic priest at the time, wrought upon my family and myself.”
 
The church, he added, needs leadership, vision and courage from bishops to fight the scourge of abuse and “to work for resolution, and work for healing and work for a better church.”
 
The final testimony was delivered by man from Asia who said he was “abused over 100 times” and continues to endure “traumas and flashbacks” that have caused him difficulty in living his life and connecting with other people.
 
Another survivor of clerical sexual said “a priest from my parish destroyed my life,” Vatican News reported. “Since then, I, who loved coloring books and doing somersaults on the grass, have not existed,” the survivor said.
 
She spoke about how “no one noticed” as the abuse continued for five years and how she desensitized herself, trying to escape what was happening to her. She spoke about the confusion she felt as a child, how she questioned herself and blamed herself.
 
She said the church can be proud that it is capable of dealing with abuse despite the legal statute of limitations, but said that a long time between the offense and the accusation should not be seen as a mitigating factor in favor of the accuser. “Victims are not guilty of their silence … Wounds can never be the subject of a statute of limitations,” she said.
 
At a briefing with journalists Feb. 21, Australian Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane said that although he had listened to many survivors and their stories of abuse, he was nevertheless “surprised at the way tears, as it were, welled up.”
 
“I had never heard them in the extraordinary context of this gathering and, frankly, in the presence of the pope,” Archbishop Coleridge said. “So, the setting itself added a whole new power and, in a sense, another dimension to hearing these voices that spoke very briefly, but very powerfully and very deeply and struck just the right note on the first morning of – not just a meeting – this journey of exploration.”