Denial in the pews perpetuates abuse crisis

Awhile back the Des Moines Register published an article entitled "Americans switch religions early and often, survey finds." The article is based on interviews with 2,800 people from a Pew survey. According to the survey, the Catholic church has experienced the greatest net loss. Their reasons for leaving: six in 10 left because of disssatisfaction with Catholic teachings on abortion and homosexuality. Half left because of concerns over teachings on birth control, and 4 in 10 left because of Catholicism's treatment of women. Fewer than three in 10 left because of the clergy sexual assault crisis.

I really don't understand this mindset, but it's consistent with what I've seen. There are grumblings, there are jokes, there are a few nasty e-mails fired off to the bishops' offices now and then, but I've only met one person, other than survivors and our families, who have left because of the sexual abuse. And those who've stayed seem equally untouched by the abuse, if you'll pardon the terrible pun.

As one of the many survivors of sexual assault by Patrick McElliott of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, I received through litigation the right to speak at the place I was assaulted, The American Martyrs Retreat House by Cedar Falls. I chose to speak on a weekend they were holding a meeting of archdiocesan lay leaders. I wanted them to know the impact of the assault and how the complicity of the community directly led to my assault. My husband and I drove over there, a ninety minute drive, and met with Iowa SNAP leader, Steve Theissen. (SNAP is Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests: it's a support group for people who were abused by any religious leader.) We sat in a waiting room while the people were in Mass. Archbishop Jerome Hanus announced to the people a survivor was going to speak immediately following the service. People filed out and into the waiting room to get a cup of coffee. A few smiled at us, some glared, but most acted as if we were not there.

When I went into the chapel to speak, the six or seven nuns in attendance stayed to hear me, along with the Archbishop and Vicar General. One lay person stayed. One. The rest went off to their meetings, presumably some of which touched on social justice ministries. At the time I was focused on telling my story and reclaiming my voice, which I literally lost during and on occassion after the assault. But as time moved on, I was increasingly aware of how detached most Catholic people seem from the abuse crisis. This disconnect has been a factor in the clergy abuse crisis all along.

During my years in Catholic high school in the 70s, there was a priest whom other priests warned the girls to stay away from. He later moved to another town where he was charged with assaulting a 13-year-old girl. Her parents ended up dropping the charges because they didn't want her to have to go to court. A woman in this same town filed a civil suit against the priest for assaulting her; the suit was dropped on a technicality. My friend was assaulted by a priest at Dowling who was a well-known abuser of boys. The priest went on to serve in other communities, in spite of the fact that my friend was awarded a settlement and received a letter of apology. The priest is retired and living in Des Moines.

I could go on ad nauseum about case after case after case. My question is why? Why the disconnect, this apparent lack of compassion or even concern among the Catholic people? I'm reminded of a section in the Steven King novel Firestarter, where the main character has the ability to "push" people to believe whatever he wants them to believe. He's at a gas station where he had to kill rogue CIA agents who were trying to capture him and study his psychic power, and a group of people were looking on, horrified. He told them, "This doesn't concern you. Nothing happened," and gave a mental push, and the people all went back to what they were doing, oblivious to the dead bodies in their midst.

That is what the average Catholic's response to the clergy abuse crisis looks like. There are hundreds of thousands of victims in the United States alone, from virtually every diocese, children and young people who were raped, sodomized and sexually assaulted, whose lives were cruelly altered by the abuse, and yet the average Catholic doesn't seem to think it concerns them in the slightest. "Nothing happened." I am not expecting everybody to leave the Church, but I would have thought more of those who did, would have done so at least partially because of the organized pedophilia.