By Patricia Zapor
Catholic News Service
June 3, 2011
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1102214.htm
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| Norm Riggins participates in programs of the Diocese of Arlington, Va., to provide various kinds of assistance to survivors of abuse. (CNS/Leslie E. Kossoff) |
It was 1995 and Norm Riggins and his wife were driving along the interstate, listening to a National Public Radio report about how cases of sexual abuse by priests were being handled by the Archdiocese of Chicago.
As if a switch had flipped, half-remembered events from nearly 40 years earlier came flooding back. Riggins began telling his wife about his own experiences of being abused by a parish priest when he was 11 and 12 years old. She was the first person he'd ever told about the young priest who supervised the altar boys and gave Norm the special attention he craved at first, but that ultimately went way too far.
As the 10-year anniversary approaches of a major upheaval over the handling of sexual abuse in the U.S. church, Riggins and another survivor of abuse spoke with Catholic News Service in May, talking about how they have pursued peace for themselves and sought to ensure their abusers were no longer able to hurt people.
After that first revelation, Riggins' wife, a teacher with training in how to help abuse victims, advised him to seek counseling. He started by talking to a couple of different priests. The first priest "didn't know what to do," Riggins said, and the second referred him to a psychologist whose approach was to prescribe antidepressants.
As a result, "I just kept it canned up," Riggins told CNS in an interview in a northern Virginia parish library. "I used pills, booze, TV, all to get away from it."
It took a couple more tries before he found a counselor, a Franciscan nun, who helped him. "She knew how to let me talk, to vent."
He told her, and eventually told participants in survivors' meetings and retreats, about being subjected to what he learned is called "grooming behavior," as the priest preyed upon the young boy's need for affection. He remembered late or overnight trips to visit a seminary, and time spent in the priest's big, black Chrysler Imperial.
Eventually, Riggins worked up his courage and made an appointment to talk to the bishop who heads the New Jersey diocese where his abuser was still working. That bishop, who'd only been on the job a short time, reacted by saying: "Thank God. I just canned him a week ago."
That was in 2007. Riggins, a military veteran who retired recently from a career in training with the federal government, researched the priest's assignments and tracked him across multiple dioceses, where he rarely stayed long in one place.
Fifteen years after he started trying to come to terms with it, Riggins still doesn't remember all the details of what happened to him, he said. He frankly acknowledges that he's unsure whether it's good or bad for his healing process to not be entirely clear about what the priest did.
Nevertheless, Riggins has tried to understand how being abused has affected his life. He has worked hard to overcome the worst effects, particularly depression that once prompted him to call the police to ask them to remove a gun he had in the house because he was contemplating suicide. Other effects are more subtle, such as the panic that sets in if he must sit in the middle of a church pew or his aversion to participating in the Stations of the Cross, which he connects to one of the shreds of memory about a particular incident with the priest he calls "my offender."
Riggins has worked through many of his struggles with help from a program of the Diocese of Arlington, Va., which provides various types of assistance to victims of abuse including support groups, retreats, counseling and regular meetings with Bishop Paul S. Loverde.
Another regular participant in Arlington programs, who asked to be identified only as Robert, was abused in the early 1960s by a charismatic young priest in charge of the altar boys. Unlike Riggins, Robert promptly told his parents what happened. They went to the pastor and the priest was quickly sent away. Yet he also remained in ministry a long time, before his death a few years ago.
Robert told CNS in an interview at the diocese's headquarters that he didn't repress the memory, but it wasn't something anyone discussed. For Robert, the memory of what happened was "just there." But the experience had done its damage.
As a university student, he tried talking about it with someone whose help he sought for depression, he said, but was told "get on with your life." Robert said his complicated feelings related to being abused came out in stress on his marriage and difficulty finishing projects; in how he relates to other people and in a long-lingering sense of guilt.
Like Riggins, who spent eight years in the seminary, including four years with the Benedictines, Robert remained an active Catholic. Aware that his assault by the priest was affecting him spiritually and emotionally, he pursued various types of prayer and self-help programs. He spoke about being abused in confession and originally met with unhelpful responses.
In fact, he said, it was the changes in the church after the Second Vatican Council that he credits with making it possible for him to remain in the church after his abuse experience.
"I probably would not be a Catholic today if not for Vatican II," he said. "It reinforced my ability to see the church not as a mediator between me and God." He explained that in the pre-Vatican II church of his childhood, he would never have felt he could speak directly to God in prayer, which was a key to being able to stay active in the church that failed to meet his needs for assistance until he hit on the Arlington diocesan programs.
Robert said the turning point in addressing his psychological wounds came when someone asked him why he felt so guilty. A counselor in Seattle helped him recognize that he'd done nothing shameful and had no reason to feel guilt.
"Within a year I went from having my dissertation stalled to finishing my Ph.D., defending it and I had a job back here" in the Washington area, he said.
Also essential to healing, he said, was recognizing that "I'm truly a child of God," and that he'd been allowing his sense of guilt to be a barrier in accepting that.
Both Robert and Riggins said they were willing to talk to a reporter because they feel strongly that other victims of clergy sexual abuse need examples and encouragement to seek out the kind of assistance they found in the diocesan support program.
"Whatever it is that makes a big cloud between you and your creator," said Robert, "it's a shadow that shouldn't be there."
For too long, he said, he had the equation backward. "You are the victim, yet you have the shame."
He said that for him, it was essential to have found a good counselor -- which took several attempts -- and to have "a circle of trust, where survivors/victims can come together and tell their stories and create healing out of those stories."
Patricia Mudd, victim assistance coordinator for the Diocese of Arlington, said everyone's path toward healing is necessarily different, which is why programs like hers offer a variety of services.
One friend of Riggins doesn't ever speak up in the sessions he attends, but he writes about his feelings. "He writes beautifully and has inspired me to try writing. And I'm not a writer," Riggins said.
"We all have different gifts and everyone has to participate on their own terms," he said.
Riggins noted that particularly in his generation -- he's in his mid-'60s -- society taught men, especially, to "don't tell, don't cry," no matter what the injury.
"After I told my wife, it was the most freeing feeling," he said. "It was like opening the floodgates on the Mississippi."
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