UNITED KINGDOM
National Secular Society
A personal testimony of child abuse in the Catholic Church from Sue Cox of Survivors Voice Europe
A fate worse than death. When I was younger, this is the phrase people used when they referred to being raped. Adults would give each other knowing looks when talking about someone “if she is not careful she’ll end up murdered – or worse” I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being murdered, but it seemed there was something even worse.
It wasn’t terribly long before I found out what they meant, and indeed they were right. My abuses at the hands of a priest are well documented, and I have talked about how my life started to go downhill from the moment I was raped. What was hard to understand was: why, if I had suffered “a fate worse than death” no one did anything about it! Had I been murdered perhaps they would have cared.
I was brought up with all the horrific fear stories of hell fire and damnation. In that Catholic world everything, apart from breathing, was sinful. Aged five I was told to pray for a cousin to die because he was about to marry a divorcee; his mother’s priest told her that he would be better off dead than living in sin, so we should all pray for him to have a “happy death”.
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