As You Were Saying: Clergy Sex Abuse in ‘spotlight’

By M.j. Doherty
Boston Herald
October 10, 2015

https://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2015/10/as_you_were_saying_clergy_sex_abuse_in_spotlight

Through the film “Spotlight,” Boston will soon re-live the discovery here of clerical sexual abuse in 2001-2002. The movie opens in the wake of Pope Francis’ meeting with survivors of such abuse during his visit to Philadelphia and his promise to give careful oversight to child protection and to hold all responsible accountable.

The question remains whether, as a community of faith, a society, a world, we can articulate a new human story regarding child abuse, and how the global Catholic Church can help that happen.

The whole community of faith has been wounded — the child victims first, but also parents, families, neighborhoods, women religious, faithful pastors and bishops. Those layers of victims have all needed to be healed.

Abuse belongs to the abuser and the enabler — let that justice be served. But victims themselves know that the shadows abuse imposes, unjustly making victims complicit, often become our own, and we ourselves have to work to dissolve them. The task of the victim of abuse, psychoanalyst Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea pointed out in 2007, is to leave off being a victim by surviving and, then, most of all, to become a person again.

One must escape the bounds of one’s painful story — “I am a victim struggling to survive” — and say “I am a survivor who used to be a victim.” Better yet, one must become able to say, “I am a person, and my choices support my human identity and dignity; my freedom is able now to help bring about constructive change.”

On such a journey of personal change, the victim-survivor-person often feels the loneliness of the long-distance runner. By continuing to frame the story of victimization only as a call for punishment — the operative action on which the social movement for accountability now seems to ride — the story of victimization has been allowed merely to repeat, and the cause of victim advocacy has become stuck. Its boxed-in discourse merely enforces revictimization. Weary of the rhetoric of blame, shame and what sociologist Nancy Whittier called “therapeutic politics,” people too often shut the victims and victim advocates out.

Yet society has learned something about failed accountability; the complexity of causes and contexts; the inadequacy of canon law to solve a global crisis; the social distortions brought by trying to fix the human problem of child abuse through the court and financial settlements alone; and the unfinished story of human affliction in the victim.

Stories of the behavior of men covering up and of actual, incurable pedophiles are likely to continue, and monitoring is simply prudent. It is also good that an international papal Commission for the Protection of Children chaired by Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley and aimed at organizational and institutional change on a global scale now and in the future will help ensure that such a travesty will not happen again in the church — anywhere.

And it is important for survivors whose stories can change to finish their stories of affliction, to reframe them, and to write a new story.

M.J. Doherty is a former member and chair of the Implementation and Oversight Advisory Committee (2003-2009) and former chair of the review board for the Archdiocese of Boston (2010-2013). “As You Were Saying” is a regular Herald feature. We invite readers to submit guest columns of no more than 600 words. Email to oped@bostonherald.com. Columns are subject to editing and become Herald property.