UNITED STATES
KUAC
[with audio]
Transcript
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Later this week, Pope Francis heads across the Atlantic – first to Cuba and then on to the United States. Such enormous crowds are expected in this country that authorities are still calculating how to handle them. One group, though, has mixed feelings about this hugely popular pope – they are people who, as children, were sexually abused by their priests. Many feel the church still has not entirely faced up to the problem. Here’s NPR’s Tom Gjelten.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: The abuse of children by people they think are good leaves deep emotional scars. Becky Ianni of Alexandria, Va., was sexually violated over and over when she was 9 years old by a priest who was a family friend, a man she believed was God’s representative on Earth, someone she saw every Sunday when her parents took her to church.
BECKY IANNI: He would be saying mass and he’d hold up the chalice and all’s I could think about – those hands hurt me and I’m an evil person. I was a dirty little girl. It wasn’t his fault. It was mine. And he told me, if I ever told on him, I’d go to hell.
GJELTEN: Ianni related her abuse experience last year in a session with the StoryCorps project. She said the thought that she was a bad person and that God didn’t like her was so traumatic that she literally buried the memory, until 40 years later, when she came across a picture of herself with the abusive priest. Slowly, all the old feelings of shame and guilt that she had as a 9-year-old girl returned.
IANNI: So I went to the church and asked them, I really needed reassurance that it wasn’t my fault and that I wasn’t going to hell. They didn’t give me any reassurances. They said, oh, you have a complicated case. We’ll have to see what we’re going to do. And so they didn’t tell me and I wrote them and I said I need – I need to know from a priest that I’m not going to hell. And they never answered.
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