Survivors of clergy sex abuse absent from debate about new pope

GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES - Members of the US-based international support group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), victims outreach director Barbara Dorris (R) and executive director David Clohessy pose with pictures of them as children prior to a press conference two days before Pope Benedict XVI's resignation on Feb. 26 at a hotel in Rome.

 

By Michelle Boorstein, Friday, March 1, 7:24 AM

The last time a pope was picked, Ann Hagan Webb was one of the best-known faces of the demand for church reform. After surviving sexual abuse for years by her childhood priest, the Massachusetts therapist’s life in the mid-2000s was consumed by rallying at parishes around New England and tracking priest court cases.

Today, as cardinals gather in Rome to select the next pope, the 60-year-old catches updates on the news — and feels ambivalent even about that. “I shouldn’t watch, but I do.”

Webb now limits her activism to working with clients — some Catholic, some not — who suffered child sexual abuse. Her choice is emblematic of a community of survivors who have largely given up on changing the church.

“I went from trying to change the church to accepting the fact that they won’t [change], and anyone that’s still in the church has blinders on,” she said this week. “At this point, my opinion is they are corrupt to the core and there’s not a single cardinal we can find who would be a good pope because there’s no such animal.”

Ten years after the abuse scandal exploded, creating a passionate reform movement, the U.S. victims behind it have largely turned their attention away from trying to reform the Catholic Church. Survivors who picketed cathedrals and priest court appearances or launched write-in campaigns in 2005, the last time a pope was picked, say they have grown discouraged by a perceived lack of tough punishment and exhausted by the emotional toll the subject takes on them. Their efforts have shifted to changing civil laws or to general support for abuse survivors within and outside Catholicism. Or, in some cases, to simply functioning.

Ironically, this shift is happening as the topic of clergy sex abuse — once U.S.-centered — is bursting into the open in countries around the world and taking center stage in the conversation about Benedict XVI’s successor. The senior cardinal in Britain, Keith O’Brien of Scotland, resigned earlier this week — less than two days after allegations surfaced that he had had inappropriate contact with three priests and a former seminarian.

Many of the groups that appeared during the early and mid-2000s have shrunk or disappeared, and even groups whose purpose remains church reform are debating what that means: Holding individual clergy accountable? Focusing on more dramatic structural changes such as electing bishops and allowing priests to marry?

Bill Casey, a longtime national leader of Voice of the Faithful, once one of the leading reform groups dealing with survivors’ concerns, said the energy level “has diminished quite a bit.’’

“There has been a broad diminishment of expectations that these efforts will prove anything in our lifetime,” Casey said. Attendance at group events has plummeted, as have donations, he said. “The average age is gray-haired folks. And they’re 10 years grayer.”

Survivors have criticized the group because “it has had an interest in working within the structure,” Casey said. “Many people say, ‘You’re just dreaming; it’s a lost cause.’ ”

Terry McKiernan, head of the largest research database on clergy and abuse, said of the survivor community: “For a lot of people, it’s not a community anymore. . . . I think a lot of people who were involved in the early days, they’ve run out of steam.”

Survivors who are confronting the topic now face a very different culture than even a decade ago, when victims were accused of lying and scandals in other places such as Penn State and the Boy Scouts hadn’t surfaced. Fixing religious institutions isn’t as central to a society that has less faith in them.

And the epicenter of the crisis has moved from scandal-hit dioceses such as Boston, Philadelphia and Houston to places like Ireland, Germany and Australia. Some think that will pump energy into the movement and help yet-unknown victims, while others fear that some of those nations have limitations in dealing with the issue.

“I’ve never heard someone say: ‘Wow, I wish I’d been abused in Argentina or Ghana or India because there’s such a vibrant civil justice system there,’” said David Clohessy, executive director of the St. Louis -based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, the world’s largest support group for survivors of clergy sex abuse, with thousands of members. SNAP will hold its first world conference in April in Dublin. “I’m not saying we’re perfect, but we have our things going for us.”

Each survivor grapples the trauma in his or her own way. Many can’t set foot in a church, and even hearing a rush of news about Rome triggers waves of traumatic memories. Others still worship at Catholic parishes and send their children to Catholic schools — even as they describe obsessively keeping adults from being alone with them. Even many who say they have zero expectation for institutional reform often admit, as they talk, that they can’t completely extinguish their concern about the church.

Richard Jangula, a carpenter from Bismarck, N.D., who was raped by a priest as a teenager, attended church and sent his three children to Catholic school even as he kept the crime a secret and was hospitalized twice for related breakdowns. It was only after his parents died and he went public about four years ago that he felt dismissed by the church’s response and stopped attending.

Now on Sundays, the 55-year-old grandfather watches church on television. He remains close with a priest friend and prays. “Oh yeah, I pray, every hour.”

At the time of the last conclave, “I thought if I went public, the church would help me, would say:

‘We did Richard wrong.’ Now I don’t think the next pope will be any different. Do I hope so? God, you have no idea how much I hope so. I know this sounds dumb, but I’ll always love my church because my church is what made me. It gave me — how should I say? — a foundation. That foundation was cracked, but that doesn’t mean it’s broke.”

In 2005, David Lorenz, a 54-year-old NASA engineer and survivor who lives in Bowie, participated in a write-in campaign to the Archdiocese of Washington to remind then-Archbishop Theodore McCarrick to focus on helping abuse victims. He says he had a couple meetings at the archdiocesan offices, but Lorenz gave up on reform after a church official told him “not to come back until I was sacramentally healed.” Now he leads a small, monthly group of survivors and focuses on that.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese declined to comment.

For years, Lorenz said he felt the church needed to change but that “nothing was severely wrong.

There was more good than bad. Then people started getting hurt.”

“In 2005 I thought there might be some change. Now I’m hopeless.” Four years ago he left his parish, and now he worships with a breakaway independent group. His wife has become active in ending celibacy. With the church in the news, Lorenz said five survivors called just this week for the first time, seeking help.

Gary Bergeron represents a different point of view. The Massachusetts antique dealer dealt with his anger — over being abused by a priest who abused dozens of other boys — by becoming convinced that transparency can happen only in conversation with the church. He has met with the last two popes, founded an international group for survivors and sees hope in the fast resignation of O’Brien and the recent admonishment of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony by his successor. Mahony protected priests accused of sexually abusing minors, recently released documents show.

“I think most of the groups have fallen by the wayside because it’s a long road to walk, it’s very tiring, and the public tunes out,” he said. “But right now is another perfect storm for us to again raise the level of awareness of child abuse. Ten years later, survivors have been able to open the door on a topic that’s been closed since the beginning of time.”

Even SNAP, the survivors’ group, had no events scheduled related to the conclave until Monday, when two SNAP leaders made a last-minute decision to fly to Rome to protest.

“Regardless of what church officials do or don’t do,” Clohessy wrote in an e-mail from Rome, “we’ve always felt duty-bound to reach out to survivors who are suffering in silence, and one way we do that is by speaking out at key moments. . . . We’re not confident [about] changing the church, but one never knows.”

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