What Can We Do About Abuse?

His Reverence is tired from preaching

To the halt, and the lame, and the blind.

Their spiritual needs are unsubtle,

Their notions of God unrefined.

The Lord washed the feet of his servants.

‘The first shall be last,’ he advised.

The Archbishop’s edition of Matthew

Has that troublesome passage revised.

In the crypt of the limestone cathderal

A friar recopies St. Mark,

A nun serves stew to a novice,

A choirboy sobs in the dark.

—Dana Gioia, The Archbishop

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The devastating contents of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on Catholic sexual abuse concealment have elicited a collective roar of wrath from the laity. The response from high-ranking bishops like Wuerl, Lori, and DiNardo has been tepid, and most of the reactions that I’ve seen have been angry and contemptuous of them. Cardinal Wuerl in particular, a former Bishop of Pittsburgh, was named in the report more than two hundred times. Calls for his resignation, or failing that his degradation, have been pouring out from every source.

What is less forthcoming, though by no means entirely absent, is active compassion for the victims. There are a few possible reasons for this. One quite cynical reason could be that it’s more fun to be angry and demand that somebody else be punished—‘It is always agreeable to hold someone responsible,’ as Charles Williams pointed out in his history of witchcraft—than it is to do the work of intelligent, active compassion toward those who are suffering the aftermath of abuse. But even those whose intentions are of the best don’t necessarily know how to support victims. I’m a survivor of molestation myself (though not at the hands of a priest or minister), and, aside from a listening ear, I wasn’t sure what else to offer fellow victims—particularly those whose experiences had been more traumatic than mine. Based on a conversation with a friend who was abused by a clergyman, I put forward the following.

1. Listen to those who report abuse.

One of the biggest barriers to dealing with abuse well is that victims are so frequently dismissed and disbelieved. This trend is improving, but it’s still uphill work. The cowardly motive (namely, that white people tend to believe there is literally nothing worse than Making A Scene) and the self-interested motive (usually phrased as ‘the desire not to give scandal’ in polite Catholic circles) are factors in this. So too is the fact that, yes, sometimes children make things up to get attention; but this is a reason to investigate, not to ignore. Better to exonerate an innocent man the hard way than to condemn a child to continued predation.

Listening can be extraordinarily hard. What you have to listen to may be terribly ugly; it may make you feel sick, enraged, helpless. And certainly, most cases of abuse call for the services of a qualified psychotherapist at the very least. But this doesn’t eliminate the need for the victim to be able to talk about it with family and friends: the abused person needs to know by experience that their loved ones cherish them-as-abuse-victim, because that’s part of their story now.

We may also be inclined to dismiss a story because it doesn’t fit the abuse narratives we are accustomed to (dear God, what an awful sentence). For example, a lot of Catholics have been calling for the expulsion of all gay or same-sex attracted men from the priesthood, and a rigorous application of Pope Benedict XVI’s canon that established ‘deep seated homosexual tendencies’ as an impediment to ordination. A number of female abuse victims have, rightly, complained that this shutters their experiences, which if anything can be even more horrific, like that of the girl who was not only raped and impregnated by a priest, but forced to get an abortion. Similarly, we are in the habit of thinking of abuse and pædophilia as nearly synonymous; but ephebophilia (attraction to adolescents) and sexual harassment of adults by adults (such as McCarrick’s ‘career’ seems principally to have consisted in) are major factors here too. Hearing what is there, as distinct from what we expect, can require deliberate and sustained attention.

Note: listen to, not talk to. We often want to find the perfect words that will make this better. There aren’t any. What we generally fall into instead are clichés, which are either pathetic or monstrous in this context. And we rarely want to admit ignorance, because it feels like defeat, for them and for us. But one thing that survivors frequently need the most is somebody who will tell the truth. Abuse almost invariably depends on manipulation, gaslighting, and lies; a person who will say ‘I don’t know’ just because it’s true can be incredibly healing.

2. Realize that abuse can affect your loved ones.

I’m not recommending paranoia here. But there are parents who won’t or can’t believe that their child could ever be targeted, whether because of the normal human irrationality that thinks of that as something that only happens to other people, or due to a clericalist attitude toward their own priests. Anxiety, that is, worrying over things simply because they could happen, isn’t helpful or productive; attentiveness to things that do happen is. (I’ll talk about spotting abuse a little later on.)

3. Pray for all victims.

There are far more victims than any one person could hope to meet, let alone minister to, even if they were all still alive. Given the time scale involved, some have passed away; others, sadly, have committed suicide. And then there are the legions who even now do not feel able to come forward. Speaking up about abuse can be horribly painful and frightening.

What we can do is pray for the living and the dead. It is difficult for most of us to feel like we’re doing anything important by praying: it’s so easy (even though somehow we rarely get around to it). And of course, the trite, lazy I’ll pray for you that means I want to escape this discussion but look more spiritual than you while doing so is justly pilloried, but it’s easy to slide into the opposite error of scorning prayer altogether.

Prayer is very subtle; it is also very simple. Its simplicity is that, as his children and heirs, we ask God to do something and (provided it isn’t bad for us or wouldn’t spoil something else he has for us) he does it. Its subtlety is that we don’t know the mind of God, nor can we plumb the total operations of cause and effect—even the physical world that the sciences study largely eludes our comprehension, and examining the spiritual is a more delicate work still. But one of the things that sincere prayer does is prepare us to act and to be still. We are all responsible for one another; all of us are limited, both by our finitude and by preëxisting obligations; thus, knowing how to act, and when, and for whom, can be challenging. Prayer illuminates us because in it we turn ourselves deliberately to the God who is light and who exists in trinitarian relationship, and so we receive the light of relationship to guide us. The problem with I’ll pray for you as described above, is that there is no authentic opening of the self: the point of that phrase is to close oneself to others.

4. Hold the perpetrators, and those who enable them, responsible.

I’ve seen a good deal of scapegoating over the last week or so. The scandal is the fault of clerical celibacy, or homosexuals, or the male-only priesthood, or American cultural license, or Satan. Any or all of those explanations may have some weight, but all of them (with the probable exception of the last) are in my view negligible. Whatever else is true, and whatever the cultural context in which the offenses took place, this is true: the deacons, priests, and bishops who abused either adults or children are responsible for their behavior, and the clerics who concealed it are responsible for both that behavior and its concealment. While exceptions could conceivably be made (though I certainly can’t think of any that should be), these individuals should be degraded or laicized, handed over to civil authorities for legal penalties, and—if they will not confess, repent, and do penance—excommunicated.

Holding the perpetrators responsible is not a substitute for confronting the cultural and systemic problems in the Catholic Church that made these decades of open-secret abuse possible. The abuse certainly did not happen in a vacuum: the last several years have been an avalanche of disclosures about sexual abuse in the entertainment industry, in politics, in college and professional athletics, everywhere. But every system is composed of individual people, and holding them responsible for their actions is accordingly the starting point for systemic reform.

It may be a difficult task for lay Catholics to hold our clerics responsible. Demonstrations on the sidewalks of cathedrals, while possibly a good thing, are only a token. A radical restructuring of ecclesiastical governance may be needed. A lot of long-term measures, like imposing poverty on bishops (to help curb the image-consciousness that fosters silence), or having diocesan priests formed in monastic institutions (which statistically have a much lower rate of abuse than diocesans do, according to the John Jay Report),* may be prudent or even necessary. But the place to start—though not to remain—is in confronting the specific people responsible for the specific offenses under consideration. Go general too quickly, and the trees will be lost in the forest.

*EDIT: I'm given to understand that, due partly to the practice of taking a new name when entering a religious institute, abuse by religious priests may go even more seriously underreported than abuse by diocesan priests. To the extent that that's the case, obviously there would be no benefit to training diocesan clergy in religious houses.

5. Educate yourself on the nature, effects, and symptoms of abuse.

This is not a comprehensive list of those things by any means, but I want to hit on some important aspects of the problem.

Since most people, thank God, don’t experience sexual abuse, most people don’t necessarily understand it very well. The archetype most of us have from the Very Special Episode—in which a stranger with sunglasses and a greased smile appears from nowhere, holding something forbidden in arms posed like a mantis and addressing Our Hero as ‘Hey kid! Wanna see something cool?’—has approximately no relation to reality. Most victims are abused by someone they know, not infrequently by a relative or a friend of the family. And abusers themselves show a variety of psychological profiles. Some act out as a response to stress combined with personality problems or affective immaturity, and tend to resort to whomever is available; others are premeditating predators who are specifically fixated on a particular type of victim, and for whom the power dynamic or sadism is a key aspect.

A common thread in the experience of nearly all victims is secrecy. The number of the abused who report the abuse within a year of its occurring (or beginning) is relatively small; it’s quite common for victims to wait years, even decades, before disclosing their experiences, and for them to deny the truth if asked directly. This is true for a number of reasons. Many victims, and especially children, are dismissed by the people they confide in as making things up, even reprimanded or punished. Many children, who are often cannier than we give them credit for, can anticipate that they won’t be believed if they do speak up. Many abusers groom and manipulate their victims emotionally in a variety of ways: forming a rewarding attachment to the abuser, persuading the victim that they wanted or even initiated the abuse, and threatening the victim or the victim’s loved ones are all standard tactics. This is why, although we certainly should enact the best policies we can in safeguarding children and teens and in dealing with sexual misconduct among adults, it’s hard to tell whether current policies are working. The fact that a lot of current accusations pertain to offenses from decades ago has no relevance; we probably aren’t going to have useful data on whether, e.g., the Dallas Charter is doing its job for another twenty years—one of the many reasons why it is indecent to rehearse how well the Church is supposedly doing now, or that the bulk of the accusations are old.

Because of this long-term secrecy, detecting abuse can be difficult. It’s typical for abused children and adults to exhibit symptoms of PTSD, such as feelings of worthlessness, nightmares, depression, disturbed sleeping patterns, aversion to church, poor body image, self-harm, self-isolation, and anxiety. Though I don’t want to encourage armchair psychiatry in the least, the appearance of symptoms like this—the more so the more there are, and especially if they emerge suddenly or in uncharacteristic ways—justifies gently approaching someone and asking them if something has happened or if they need help.

The first thing a survivor of abuse needs is to both be safe, and feel safe. If these conditions aren’t both meet, it is exceedingly unlikely that they will ever process or recover from their experience. Accordingly, the first necessity for each of us in supporting victims is patient receptivity. Patient, because you cannot extract the truth without committing another boundary violation against the victim, one less heinous but possibly worse in its effects, since it’s apt to make the victim less willing and less able to trust those who would help him or her to recover; receptivity, because so many victims, especially children, are disbelieved and dismissed. No claim of having been abused should be discounted without looking into it.

Encouraging and validating survivors is vital as well: their sense of self-worth has been damaged by someone else, and, while there are probably people who can restore that sense of self-worth without much direct help from others, they are vanishingly rare. We were made to understand both others and ourselves in terms of relationships.

Lastly, a word on sex education. Explaining to young children that their bodies are their own, that certain parts of their bodies are special and private, and that not everything authority figures like priests, teachers, or babysitters say has to be obeyed, is a crucial task; so too is both telling them they can speak up and be believed if something should happen, and following through on that promise. I don’t envy the parents who have to figure out how to explain these things to a child without coming to pieces. But sex education of this kind cannot be shirked. Many parents worry that the more they explain to their child, the more curious the child will be about such matters, and thus the more prone to sin. That concern has some weight, but not much: it’s a little like thinking that it is kinder not to evangelize, because people who are less informed about God will be judged more gently. Curiosity and sinfulness are going to emerge anyway, and children are not known for their discretion in sharing information with each other. Better to be sure they get healthy, age-appropriate information from you than to leave them to their own guesses and schoolyard gossip.

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