NEW YORK
National Catholic Reporter – Global Sisters Report
by Dan Stockman Jul. 17, 2017
Brooklyn, New York
It’s a gorgeous spring day, and the sunshine is pouring into the bedroom of Dominican Sr. Sally Butler’s apartment in the Fort Greene neighborhood, brightening the already cheery lavender-painted walls.
Butler’s eyes are bright, especially when she talks about how Jesus was a poor working man who lived among the outcasts, a model she has tried to live since moving to the neighborhood in 1968.
“That’s what keeps me going,” Butler says. “You can meet Christ in many ways. And if that’s what a sacrament is — meeting with Christ — then I’m OK. I’ve never felt deprived. Whatever my faith is, it’s very simple.”
Butler, 86, can’t get out of bed because of spinal stenosis and arthritis. And even if she could, for the past 24 years, she says, she has had to find her connection to Christ outside the church.
Though she has been in religious life for nearly 70 years, Butler is unable to believe in the institutional church anymore. But her faith in God, she says, has never been stronger.
‘We were betrayed’
Butler’s faith in the church began to crack in 1993.
She was walking through one of the many public-housing projects in Fort Greene when she realized she hadn’t seen a woman she knew in church lately, so she stopped in. The woman told Butler she had recently learned that one of the priests at St. Michael-St. Edward parish nearby had molested her son 20 years before.
Butler and two other sisters lived in the parish rectory, where they worked with three priests. The priests had lived there before moving to the rectory at nearby St. Boniface parish, six blocks away, and were still frequent visitors, often staying the night when they were working in that neighborhood.
“I rejected it. It was incomprehensible in 1993,” Butler says. “I thought I knew these men so well. I thought only monsters did that sort of thing.”
The revelation came with another, even more frightening one: The woman’s son, Jerry, had been best friends with Carlos Cruz, who Butler had raised as a son after his mother died in 1973. If the priests had sexually abused Jerry, what might have happened to Cruz, who had lived with Butler in the rectory?
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.