MINNESOTA
National Catholic Reporter
Brian Roewe | Jul. 18, 2017
An “uncommon conversation” is on hold in Minnesota.
After meeting a decade ago at a sex abuse treatment conference, Gil Gustafson and Susan Pavlak each came to see in their pasts a possible way forward for their home archdiocese, St. Paul-Minneapolis, as it struggled to deal with the scandal of clergy sexual abuse.
Pavlak, now 62, was sexually abused as a child by a teacher who was a former nun at a Catholic school. Gustafson, now 66, pleaded guilty in 1983 to sexually abusing a teenage boy, and has since admitted to abuse of three other male minors. By coming to know each other, each had grown personally. They wondered if they could duplicate that experience for other victims and abusers.
In November 2012, the two held their first Uncommon Conversation event, an effort to bring together the local Catholic community — abuse survivors, parishioners, church staff, clergy and also the abusers themselves — to begin a conversation about the abuse crisis, how it has personally affected a multitude of people and how they together might move beyond the scandal.
“This is an opportunity for people to speak and be heard about a traumatic event in their life, in their family life, in their spiritual life, in their community life. And listen to others’ experience of that, move forward and through and out of that trauma into recovery, whatever that may look like for them,” Pavlak told NCR.
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