Ex-Hattiesburg Resident Shares Her Story of Abuse in Book

By Robyn Jackson
Hattiesburg American
November 25, 2012

www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20121125/NEWS01/311250025/Ex-Hattiesburg-resident-shares-her-story-abuse-book

When Beth Taylor decided to tell the story of her childhood sexual abuse, she knew she had to be brutally honest, but that didn’t make it any easier to bare her soul in writing for the world to read.

“As the author, I could not be honest about some parts and dishonest about others,” Taylor said. “The reader deserves to know the accurate story, or not be told the story. As a journalist, I was always honest with my viewers and readers. If a journalist is not honest, then she or he has no business being a journalist. The same was true in writing the book, honesty was a given.”

Taylor, a former Hattiesburg resident, business owner and WDAM sports reporter, shares the story of her abuse by a priest — and the lasting repercussions of the abuse in her life — in “Bless Them Father, For They Have Sinned.” She will speak about the book at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Oak Grove Public Library.

Taylor was 5 years old when she says a Catholic priest first molested her at St. Anthony of Padua Church and School in New Orleans, and was 12 years old when she says it ended.

“I don’t know what took place that day,” she writes of the first molestation. “I go straight from being in our classroom that morning to being at home. I don’t remember recess, classroom moments, lunchtime or even walking home from school with my mother and Mike and Timmy (her brothers).”

Taylor says that she blocked out all memories of the abuse for many years, as a way of coping with it, but it manifested itself in other ways when she became an adult, from problems with depression, anger, alcohol and pain medications and casual sex to several suicide attempts.

When flashbacks started of a black and white tile floor and a man’s red flannel slippers under a cot, she thought she was losing her mind. She finally started seeing a therapist who helped her bring those repressed memories to the surface.

“The sexual abuse has a way of bruising and scaring the body and the soul,” Taylor said. “Consequently, the ‘injuries’ play themselves out in the life of the individual. It’s not something you put a Band-Aid on and it heals. It is much more complicated. I didn’t know this as I was growing up, starting a career and living my life.

“It took years and years of therapy and my therapist pounding it into my thick head that I wasn’t a ‘bad person,’ that there were reasons for some of the choices I made, and that I now have the understanding and opportunity to make positive changes in my life, if I wanted.”

Writing the memoir was somewhat cathartic, she said, even though it forced her to relive some traumatic experiences, which she describes in graphic detail.

“From the time the flashbacks began and I went into therapy, until we dealt with the church, until the book came out, was close to 20 years,” Taylor said. “It has been a very long process. And as hard as it is to believe, I occasionally still have flashbacks of an event or a place in the building where the abuse took place. The difference now is that — thanks to my therapist — the flashbacks don’t send me into a tailspin.

“I’m now able to ‘watch’ the flashback and deal with the ‘brain pictures’ and the feelings they provoke. If I could rewrite my life history, I would eliminate the sexual abuse, but I can’t. Therefore, I have learned how to deal with the events and move forward. It never goes away, but the pain and shame gets reduced.”

Part of the book deals with the years she has sought answers and restitution from the Catholic Church, specifically the Dominican Order, which she says has made things difficult.

“I still have questions, the church has answers, but they will not share those answers with me,” Taylor said. “Until they share the answers, the final chapter of this story cannot be written. I want the Catholic faithful to know their church is not fully helping survivors. I want the Catholic faithful to speak up on behalf of survivors. Please don’t sweep this under the rug.”

The priest Taylor accuses of raping her died in 1984.

Taylor, who now lives in New Orleans, said she has been surprised by the reaction to her book since it was published this summer.

“I’ve been surprised to hear others tell of their cases of abuse or the abuse of a family member, and to hear that I’m the first person to whom they have revealed their secret,” she said.

“In writing the book, I never thought of it being a tool to help others. I thought about it as a means to inform about Catholic clergy sex abuse and how the church has treated its survivors. But I never thought of it as a means to help other survivors ... to help them have a better understanding of themselves, or for their family members and friends to use it as a tool to better understand their loved one. Consequently, maybe it has become a conduit to help ‘the greater good,’ as grandiose as that may seem.

“But if anything good comes of the book,” Taylor said, “then the years of pain and torment will have served a purpose.”