There are facts and truths that "sexual libertarians" don't want society or public opinion to know, that even they don't want to know. To sum up those facts - accumulated in different human cultures and societies - we don't need sex to live a full life and be content. To define one's identity on the basis of our sexuality alone is to reduce our human value and dignity. I am a lot more than just my genitalia, and so are you. G.S.
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My purpose in these posts is to bring together significant and, where possible, representative echoes of our best human efforts to make sense of our lives - and of our human sexuality in particular - also including the voice of Jesus Christ, the one Saviour of the world, and testimonies from his Church, such as through her teaching voice, the Magisterium. The Church has been accumulating much valuable wisdom granted her by Almighty God since her foundation at Pentecost. In this way, wherever there is darkness in our human understanding, it will serve to highlight the bright and radiant truth, which is Jesus Christ: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also." John's Gospel 14:6-7
Father Gilles Surprenant, priest & poustinik
Sexual abuse is a wound in the side of the Church until every survivor has found personal healing 2014-07-08 L’Osservatore Romano
“In these days we have come together to hear success stories of progress that has been made worldwide. We are pleased to hear from those working in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about the standards of good practice that are now rightly being demanded throughout the entire Church.” This was stated Monday by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin in his address inaugurating the Anglophone Conference 2014, which is taking place from 7-11 July in Rome at the Pontifical Irish College. “Today we have moved beyond any climate of suspicion,” he said, “to one of cooperation and we thank God for the progress that has been made on all sides. We also thank God for our ability to recognise that the road that we all still have to travel is long. The greatest harm that we could do to the progress that has been made right across the Church is to slip back into a false assurance that the crisis is a thing of the past.... Abuse can and does still take place. Abuse will remain a wound in the side of the Church until the day on which every single survivor of abuse has achieved the personal healing he or she deserves.”
The Archbishop continued, “what happened should
never have happened in the Church of Jesus Christ. We can argue that the
sexual abuse of children takes place right across society and that it is unfair
to single out the Catholic Church. We can regurgitate statistics which will
tell us that the incidence of such abuse is not significantly higher within the
Catholic clergy than in society. But if we come back and repeat to ourselves
that what happened should never have happened in the Church of Jesus Christ then
we have to put all the comforting statistics to one side and begin to think in
a different light.
“We need to develop a new awareness that what has
happened has wounded the entire Church and that now the entire Church is called
to put right what has happened. The entire Church is called to put itself right
in its relations with the kingdom and with Jesus Christ. Healing is not just a
question for the counsellors; it is a theological and ecclesiological
necessity.
“The only Church response must be one which
attempts to bring healing to a wounded Church through robustly responding to
all those who have been wounded by abuse. The healing of the Church comes
through how the Church works to heal survivors.
“The Church must not just be transformed into a
place where children are safe. It must also be transformed into a privileged
place of healing for survivors. It must be transformed into a place where survivors,
with all their reticence and with all their repeated anger towards the Church,
can genuinely come to feel that the Church is a place where they will encounter
healing.”
Archbishop
Martin: abuse will remain a wound in the side of the Church until every single
survivor has achieved the personal healing he or she deserves
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the sexual abuse crisis in the Church
was not a chapter of past history as abuse “can and does still take place”.
He was addressing the “Anglophone Conference” in Rome, which brings
together child safeguarding experts and representatives from the
English-speaking Church, on the same day that Pope Francis met abuse victims
for three hours in the Domus Sanctae Marthae.
In his speech the archbishop referred to the review findings of the
National Board for Safeguarding in the Irish Church, which showed that there
are still dioceses or religious congregations that opt out of national norms.
He said the Conference was a pioneer in looking for coherent
international norms on safeguarding but had at times faced “negative reactions
even within the Holy See”.
The Church, he stated, “must show unflinchingly a preferential
option for those who have been victims of abuse within its fold” and must
be a place where survivors, with all their anger, can feel they will encounter
healing. “We are not that kind of Church yet: and by far,” the archbishop said.
Read the full address below:
The Anglophone
Conference is a unique gathering. It is unique in the first place in that it
does not have a website, almost a mortal sin of omission by today’s Conference
standards! The Anglophone Conference is an informal gathering, by its nature
unstructured or at least under-structured. And indeed that may well be its
advantage.
The origins of the
Anglophone Conference lie in an interest which arose among bishops from a
number of English-speaking countries to come together informally to share
experiences about how to address the problem of the sexual abuse of children by
priests and religious. It was an attempt to take a more coherent look at a
phenomenon which, because it was an unspeakably dark part of the life of the
Church, inevitably gave rise to the temptation that it be kept out of the
limelight. The result was often that the challenge of abuse was not addressed
or was addressed in different ways in different parts of the word. In the
Anglophone Conference, Bishops came together to begin to trace a different
path.
The Anglophone
Conference may well have been from the start under-structured, but in time it
became a real workshop of best practice, in which Episcopal Conferences could
come together and explore what were the best ways of breaking taboos about the
subject of child abuse by clergy and of developing solid norms of pastoral
practice which could be addressed by Bishops’ Conferences in different cultural
and juridical situations.
The Anglophone
Conference was pioneering and trend-setting. In these days we have come
together to hear success stories of progress that has been made worldwide. We
are pleased to hear from those working in the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith about the standards of good practice that are now rightly being demanded
throughout the entire Church.
But it is important
to remember that the Anglophone Conference was a pioneer in looking for
coherent international norms and in anticipating much that has now become
commonplace, at times facing negative reactions even within the Holy See. Today
we have moved beyond any climate of suspicion to one of cooperation and we
thank God for the progress that has been made on all sides. We also thank God
for our ability to recognise that the road that we all still have to travel is
long. The greatest harm that we could do to the progress that has been made
right across the Church is to slip back into a false assurance that the crisis
is a thing of the past.
The Anglophone
Conference is a unique event. It is not a conference of canonists or survivors,
of psychologists or criminologists; it is not a simply gathering of bishops. It
is a forum for creative pastoral reflection, it is a gathering in which a wide
ranging group of men and women from different backgrounds and countries try to
draw conclusions regarding our responsibilities in addressing what has been a
major crisis and stumbling block for the Catholic Church.
The crisis of the
sexual abuse of children in the Church is not a chapter of the past history of
the Church. Abuse can and does still take place. Abuse will remain a wound in
the side of the Church until the day on which every single survivor of abuse
has achieved the personal healing he or she deserves.
My starting point
in any personal reflection on the scandal of sexual abuse is always that what
happened should never have happened in the Church of Jesus Christ. We can argue
that the sexual abuse of children takes place right across society and that it
is unfair to single out the Catholic Church. We can regurgitate statistics
which will tell us that the incidence of such abuse is not significantly higher
within the Catholic clergy than in society. But if we come back and repeat to
ourselves that what happened should never have happened in the Church of Jesus
Christ then we have to put all the comforting statistics to one side and begin
to think in a different light.
The sexual abuse of
children on the scale in which it happened should never have occurred in the
Catholic Church because Jesus himself tells us that children are a sign of the
kingdom of God. This means that our understanding of faith and of the kingdom
is somehow measured in the manner in which we protect and respect and cherish
children or in which we fail children. We know well the strong words of Jesus
about those who would injure or harm children.
We need to develop
a new awareness that what has happened has wounded the entire Church and that
now the entire Church is called to put right what has happened. The entire
Church is called to put itself right in its relations with the kingdom and with
Jesus Christ. Healing is not just a question for the counsellors; it is a
theological and ecclesiological necessity.
The only Church
response must be one which attempts to bring healing to a wounded Church
through robustly responding to all those who have been wounded by abuse. The
healing of the Church comes through how the Church works to heal survivors.
The Church must not
just be transformed into a place where children are safe. It must also be
transformed into a privileged place of healing for survivors. It must be
transformed into a place where survivors, with all their reticence and with all
their repeated anger towards the Church, can genuinely come to feel that the
Church is a place where they will encounter healing. We are not that kind of
Church yet: and by far.
The Church which
talks abut a preferential option for the poor must show unflinchingly a
preferential option for those who have been victims of abuse within its fold.
There are still within the Church some who play down the realities of abuse, or
who take short cuts with regard to established norms and guidelines. In doing
so, they damage the Church’s witness to the healing power of Jesus Christ.
There is nothing more hurtful to survivors than to find the Church proclaiming
norms and then to find that they are not being followed. I was struck to read
in some of the National Reports for this Conference that there are still
dioceses or Religious Congregations which opt out of National norms.
The Church can and
should ensure adequate counselling for victims and their families. But it must
do more. Healing cannot be delegated. The Church must become the bosom of
Christ which lovingly embraces wounded men and women, with all the brutality
and unattractiveness of wounds. Wounds cannot be sanitised from a distance. The
Good Samaritan is the one who carries the wounded man in his own arms.
Bishops and
superiors have to ensure that survivors are made feel truly welcome when they
turn to Church authorities. One survivor told me that while she was received by
her local priest correctly, in the sense that all the boxes of the norms were
correctly ticked, she still had the enduring impression that the priest would
have much preferred that she had not come to him and that she we would go away
as quickly as possible and that the counsellors would take over.
The words of Jesus
about leaving the ninety-nine to go out to find the one who is lost, refers
also to our attitude to victims. To some it might seem less than prudent to
think that the Church would go out of its way to seek out even more victims and
survivors. There are those who say that that would only create more anguish and
litigation and that it would be asking for trouble and would be more than a
little ingenuous. The problem is that what Jesus says about leaving the ninety
and going out after the one who is lost is in itself unreasonable and
imprudent, but, like it or not, that it precisely what Jesus asks us to do.
Jesus teaches us
through parables that are all marked by exaggeration. They are all about
something that we can never figure out within our own human categories: the
gratuitousness and superabundance of God’s love which always requires us to go
the extra mile beyond what is humanly considered as prudent or appropriate or
even the best. It is however when we reflect that superabundant love of God in
the way we live in the Church that we also see fruits produced which go beyond
human expectation. Remember those twelve baskets of food which remain after Jesus
had undertaken the humanly unreasonable task of feeding a large crowd with
meagre means. Jesus’ generosity goes way beyond human prudence.
We have to reach
out to all those who are involved in abuse. We have a responsibility towards
perpetrators to bring them to a realisation of what they have done and to make
reparation through living a different life. Jesus is the one who shows mercy,
but not cheap forgiveness. Careful monitoring and support of perpetrators is a
contribution to creating a safe environment for children within the Church as
well as helping perpetrators to lead more healthy lives.
Our care must also
reach out to the many who may seem only to have been marginally touched by
abuse. I think of parish communities. I spent an evening only last week with a
small parish community whose priest had recently been imprisoned for serious
abuse. It was a community whose trust in themselves and in the Church had been
deeply wounded.
Our care must reach
out in a special way to our young people who are hyper-sensitive to any
contrast between what the Church preaches and what is done within its walls.
Many young people have been wounded in their ability to come to know Jesus
because of their disgust at what has happened to children in the Church.
The answers to all
these multiple wounds will not come from slick public relations gestures or
even from repeated words of apology. They will come from creating a new vision
of a healing Church. A healing Church will not be from the outset a perfect
Church. The Church must first of all recognise within her own life how
compromise and insensitivity and wrong decisions have damaged the witness of
Church. The art of healing is learned only in humility. Arrogance is never the
road towards healing. Healing is not something we can package and hand over
safe and sound to someone else and then we can go off safely and happily on our
own way. Healing involves journeying together. The healer needs humility and
personal healing if he or she is to journey really with those who are wounded.
The duration of the process of healing is not measured by the time on our
watch, but by the watch and the time of the other.
The crisis of the
sexual abuse of children over these past decades has wounded the Church of
Jesus Christ. The response must come from the entire Church which will only
attain the healing it desires when it welcomes our brothers and sisters who
have survived abuse as Jesus would have welcomed them. We are not there to tell
the survivors what they have to do, but together to find new ways of
interacting with respect and care. I can say that I have never gone away from a
conversation with a survivor of child sexual abuse without having learned
something new, even if our encounter may have been marked by anger and
aggression towards the Church. My ministry has greatly benefited from what I
have learned – and at times learned in a hard way – from survivors. That is why
I ask not just their forgiveness for what happened to them, but I am grateful
to them for what they have done for me.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin gave the above introductory address
at the “Anglophone Conference” at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome on 7
July 2014
© 2006-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2006-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC
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