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
Violent marriages: A woman's quest to help synod bishops grasp the issue By Elise Harris
Vatican
City, Oct 13, 2015 / 03:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Christauria Welland is a clinical psychologist
who's worked with both victims and perpetrators of domestic violence – and with
one in three women worldwide suffering from abuse at the hands of a partner,
her goal is to make sure bishops know about the problem. Often kept secret
through shame or fear of stigma, the scourge of physical and emotional violence
between couples is something the Catholics are anything but immune from, and
Welland says she hopes to bring about healing and change through awareness and
education.
After
raising the issue with Vatican officials during last year's extraordinary synod
of bishops on the family, she's seeking to push the issue even further onto
radar of this month's event by distributing booklets to all of the synod
participants. This year's Synod on the Family runs from Oct. 4-25, is the
second and larger of two such gatherings to take place in the course of a year.
Like its 2014 precursor, the focus of this year's synod is the family, this
time with the theme: “The vocation and mission of the family in the Church and
the modern world.”
A
professor and author, Welland began working in the field of domestic violence
45 years ago, and has extensive experience working in Catholic communities. She
works in private practice in Solana Beach, Calif., with a hospital practice in
the rehabilitation unit at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas and Paradise
Valley Hospital in National City. She is also an adjunct faculty member at
Alliant International University in San Diego, where she teaches a licensure
course on domestic violence. For the first 25 years of her career, Welland
focused on victims of domestic violence, however, for the past 20 years she has
concentrated on abusive men.
She was
in Rome during last year’s extraordinary synod of bishops on the family, where
she met for the second time with the secretary of the Pontifical Council for
the Family, Archbishop Jean Laffitte, to discuss possible initiatives designed
to bring greater attention to the issue of domestic violence. At the council’s
request, Welland drafted a 100-page booklet titled “How Can We Help to End
Violence in Catholic Families: A Guide for Clergy, Religious and Laity,” for
the Philadelphia World Meeting of Families, where she was the only speaker to
present on violence inside the home. Addressing ways in which Catholics can
both respond to and prevent domestic violence, as well as how to educate
Catholic youth and couples on how to avoid it, the booklet is available in six
languages and as of last week was distributed to all synod participants.
In an
Oct. 13 interview with CNA, Welland said that domestic violence is “such a
common problem that there’s probably at least one person in every extended
family who’s gone through that experience.” Although she said the issue has
been gaining greater awareness in the public eye, it’s still a major problem,
and that the numbers tend to be higher “in countries where women have fewer
rights, where their legal rights are not equal to men’s rights.” In terms of
statistics, Welland said that worldwide one in three women are effected by some
sort of physical or sexual abuse from their partners, while the number effected
by emotional or other types of abuse could be higher.
While
most countries don’t have stats on men, in the U.S. 28 percent are affected. So
it’s “a very big problem worldwide,” she said, noting that, depending on the
country, the lowest statistics read one in five women, whereas the highest are
one in two. She defined domestic violence – frequently referred to by research
professionals as “Intimate Partner Violence” (IPV) to distinguish from other
types of domestic abuse – as any “physical, sexual, emotional, economic abuse,
isolation” and in general “the kind of control that one partner exerts over the
other.” Even though there are no specific studies exploring the frequency of
IPV within Catholic families, Welland said that it still happens, and that
Catholics “aren’t immune” from the phenomenon.
“I hear
it every single day, from my Catholic and my non-Catholic patients, so I think
it’s something we need to be really aware of,” she said. Welland said she
intentionally made her booklet short and easy to read so that people would
actually take an interest, and expressed her hope that synod would “focus on
this issue because it is so common in Catholic families.” A recent example can
be seen in a heart-wrenching open letter one Catholic woman wrote to the
synod fathers, in which she tells the story of her husband’s dramatic anger
problems and the failure of those around her – priests included – to provide
adequate help.
One of
the synod participants, Archbishop John Baptist Odama of Gulu and president of
the Ugandan Episcopal Conference, has already spoken up about the issue. Archbishop
Odama told CNA that in his intervention during last week’s first round of
general congregation discussions, he “defended the rights of women against
violence whether it be in their homes or in society in general.”
“Violence
done to women, or done to children or to anybody is a violence done to the
family,” he said, adding that he knows well the toll that violence can take,
since his area for 20 years was “bedeviled by internal insecurity and
insurgency.” What he saw during that time was “children suffering, but more the
mothers who had given life to these children being put in a situation of stress
and of pain.” “I lived with it and I wouldn’t wish it to happen again, not only
in our area but it shouldn’t happen again in any part of the world, in a
society of humanity as a whole,” the archbishop said.
Archbishop
Odama explained that his intervention at the synod was aimed not just at
changing the situation in the specific context of Africa, but of humanity as a
whole. “In other parts (of the world), wherever it may be women suffer. So I’m
addressing with a small local experience, but with a global issue…we live local
but our vision of life should be global.”
Before
speaking at the World Meeting of Families Welland spent a month in Africa
promoting her booklet and other information surrounding IPV. She said that
after presenting information to various priests, religious, catechists and
several bishops in Kampala, Uganda, she got “a very positive response,” and
published the booklet there in both English and French.
In terms
of African “there’s a very great interest,” she said. “I would say priests and
bishops, sisters, anybody who is a pastoral worker is really looking for
answers.” “How do I deal with this, because it is so common and it does show up
in your parish office, it shows up in the confessional, it shows up in your
school, in your Catechism class.”
In terms
of best practices in handling situations of violence in the home, even from a
pastoral standpoint, the most important things are not to blame victim and to
focus on the person who needs help. “The first thing is don’t blame the victim.
You don’t want to make trite comments, cliché’s like ‘you have to forgive and
forget,’” Welland said, because when those comments are made “you can really
put someone in danger and you don’t really help them process…you’re kind of
discounting what their issue is.”
On the
other hand, working with the person who is violent is crucial, because “that’s
the person who has the power to change. He or she is the one who needs to make
changes so the family will change.” If a person has any sort of desire to
change then the change is possible, she said, noting that the percentage of
people who want no change at all is normally very low.
Welland
said that while she's not working with the Church directly, she leads a program
in Latin America in Spanish that she developed while working with abusers in
San Diego, and that most men have found her program “very effective.” She
voiced her hope that the synod fathers would give the issue the attention it
needs and deserves during the synod, and that they would find her booklet
helpful in terms of knowing how to handle situations of IPV on a pastoral
level.
“If we
want to have good marriages in the Church and happy families, if you take that
through domestic violence you’re not going to get that goal, that’s never going
to happen,” she said. “So it’s really important to know how to be aware of it
and help people prevent it, and if it shows up to know how to treat it and how
to respond to it.”
© 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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