Survivors' Voices: Vulnerability, Part 2
These reflections from abuse survivors are gut-wrenching, but so important for us to hear. (If you missed part one on this topic, you can read that here.)
The pattern I’ve seen when talking with other survivors is that vulnerability is what the predator priests look for when searching for grooming opportunities. In my case, my mother took me to our parish priest (a Monsignor) after she caught my uncle raping me in the middle of the night in our home. I was only seven. My mother immediately kicked my uncle out of the house, but she didn’t know how to help me, so she brought me to the Monsignor. She placed her trust in him to take care of her little girl to get her through the trauma. That reaching out, unbeknownst to my mother, put a target on my back. The Monsignor used my vulnerable state to groom me. His initial kindness and attention hooked me. As things progressed to more invasive touching and worse, I remember telling my mom that I didn’t like seeing the Monsignor. She told me to trust him, as God was guiding his actions. It never entered her mind that he was capable of hurting me, and I didn’t know that what was being done to me was criminal. The Monsignor told me I was special, that Jesus chose me for special treatment. I was sworn to secrecy, then threatened into silence, so nothing was ever shared. A vulnerable child with no knowledge of what is OK and not OK has no frame of reference, therefore no recourse. The groomer gets free rein. The rapes went on for many years, until I graduated from eighth grade and left town for a minor novitiate, where my vulnerability invited new levels of abuse, much more extreme. After all, it’s all I knew.
I'm the sort of person who isn't content to stay surface-level with people, so I've had to find ways to go deep and be vulnerable in a healthy way, without letting my boundaries be violated. I have found that sometimes when I share about my own wounds, others feel that they have space to share about their wounds and hurts as well. I'm grateful to be able to provide that space for others' woundedness, even if I would never wish the wounds on anyone else.
I feel more vulnerable since reporting. I am targeted by the bishop and his immediate staff as a "problem," so any good I do or attempt is tagged as "suspect." If anything goes wrong at an event that I happen to be at - I will be blamed for the problem. At one point, at a priest ordination (that I was invited to), the Chancellor came up behind me (standing less than a foot away) and held a rosary over my right shoulder. Dangling it in my face as he prayed it, as if I were something evil to be warded off. I tried to move and he blocked me in the side room I tried to escape to. At another event, I have been screamed at and questioned about my intentions by the bishop. The harm has changed from the actions of one priest to an organized effort of the Chancery.
Vulnerability occurs when one gives their personal power over to another human being. There is a trust between the two people, regardless of age. When the Catholic Church says there is protection for vulnerable adults, perhaps the definition is for persons who are neuro-diverse or disabled. Perhaps the term is used for the elderly or physically disabled. For me, vulnerable adults are anyone who places trust in another person such as a priest or bishop.
My father died when I was sixteen. The pastor of my parish asked me to work in the rectory to help me financially but also spiritually. He was a wonderful, loving priest who cared deeply for me. When he was transferred to another parish, a new priest was assigned and this is when being a vulnerable teenager was a recipe for abuse. He would ask me to work late, which resulted in going out to dinner with him and driving him home because he was too drunk. He would deny anything happen since he lived in a blackout state of mind. Lawyers later would tell me that there’s no case since what he did to me was not sexual. The vulnerable teenager later grew into a vulnerable adult, always being susceptible to emotional abuse among clergy. The emotionally abusive behavior thrust upon me was seen as “normal.” It caused post traumatic stress disorder that manifested itself in an eating disorder and alcohol abuse. Decades later, I know I am too vulnerable and hurt to trust clergy. I am only to place my trust in Jesus.
Recently I wrote a letter to a state legislature in support of a bill establishing criminal statutes and eliminating consent as a defense for sexual exploitation of adults by clergy. The laws against professionals like doctors and social workers using their positions to sexually abuse clients must be extended to clergy in their relationships with parishioners. It is about time.
For years I suffered psychologically and spiritually from the priest sexual abuse I experienced when I was 19 and again at 30. Both times the priest came into contact with me while performing church work. It took me twenty years to tell the Church what happened and forty years to get the appropriate help which allowed me to finally put it all in a perspective that I could live with. The Catholic Church's "vulnerable adult" language rather enraged me. I interpreted it to mean that any woman or man over the age of 18 who a Catholic priest was sexually active toward or with was equally responsible with the priest, unless he or she was mentally incompetent. Was I, as a naive older teenager, "vulnerable"? Or, was I "vulnerable" as an unwed mother seeking to get my new baby baptized? Why was I for years agonizing over the degree of my complicity and guilt in relationships I said "NO!" to originally and I never wanted. Why was it not from the beginning clear that these priests selfishly used their positions of power and trust to take advantage of a young woman who was not raised to see this sort of exploitation coming or know how to properly respond to it? In that sense all church members are "vulnerable," but the focus of responsibility has to be on the professional and not on the victim. Clergy members must follow a professional code of ethics in their relationships with everyone they serve, period.
After decades of therapy, I can now understand why I was vulnerable to abuse by a priest. I have been in treatment for Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), a survival reaction to serial child abuse starting at birth and continuing until I ultimately broke contact with my parents. My primary survival strategy, one that I learned in "battle" as a child, was to "fawn." That means when faced with a threat, my automatic response is to accommodate the person who is threatening me. In my childhood, this strategy was effective to avoid escalation of the abuse. In my adulthood, after the "love bombing" phase of being groomed, when my priest abuser started to become abusive, I fawned. In the case with the priest, I believe Father understood my docility as approval or consent. I continued to be available to him because of the grooming; I knew and trusted him, and I was deeply involved in my parish where I felt loved and accepted. When I reported to the diocese, they did not consider me a "vulnerable adult" because I don't have any diagnosed physical or developmental disabilities.
Having participated in support groups for survivors of abuse by priests for several years, I know that many of us are survivors of other abuse as children. The survival techniques we employ when threatened, particularly freezing or fawning (accommodating to avoid escalation), make us critically vulnerable to being abused by a priest. Survivors of child abuse have shame issues associated with the betrayal we experienced in our intimate relationships as children. The grooming process by an abusive priest or minister, followed by abuse and exploitation, very closely parallels the continual cycle we experienced as children. Our abusive pasts create a wound that cries out for a nurturing parental figure. Our survival strategies make us vulnerable to escalating abuse. The shame we learned as children being betrayed by those we must trust the most makes us vulnerable because the shame is a built-in deterrent to survivors' using our voices to report abuse. Survivors are emotionally and psychologically naked and suffering a mortal wound by the time we report. Many of us do not have the strength to report. How can we be more vulnerable? The Church must recognize this dynamic and receive reports of abuse as truth and a sacred trust.
I don’t want to spend too long looking back at my own vulnerability. I know it was there. There’s nothing I can do now to tell my childhood self how he could have protected himself from sexual abuse. There’s nothing I can do to protect the slightly younger adult me from abuse either. My vulnerability is not the important issue. I was vulnerable because I was human, and alive, and proximate to people who should have acted better. When, out of cowardice, people ignored my cries for help, it was not my vulnerability that was the problem. It was a lack of love. I would much rather spend my time thinking of the overwhelming love and empathy of God for me and the whole world, the God who makes himself vulnerable to us — in coming to us as a baby, in “hiding not his face from shame and spitting,” in desiring our love, and in freely giving his life for us. I love that when we meet the resurrected Jesus in the gospels, he still bears the wounds he received in his passion. What a transcendent display of empathy God shows us, that wounds aren’t an illusion, that they have lasting effects. And yet in God’s power, the wounds do not define our risen Lord. And this is an amazing, powerful thing: God’s vulnerability never comes at the cost of God’s agency. Jesus said about , “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” (John 10:18). To me, the whole of scripture and the whole of the gospel — if indeed it is supposed to be good news — shows this: that God’s tender love for all of us will outlast every evil action and inaction.
I struggle with my being framed as vulnerable. When a Church leader refers to victims as vulnerable adults/people, it often feels like a distraction from systemic insufficiencies at best, and victim-blaming at worst. But I was vulnerable, and that's why I was abused - because the minister recognized the places where I was vulnerable and exploited them for his own gain. In his humanity, Jesus became vulnerable for each of us; how could it be so terrible of me to have vulnerabilities, if the Lord deigned them necessary for his own humanity to be fully realized? It was my abuser's responsibility, as the adult who held authority, not to prey on me. Where has the Church acknowledged this truth with the same strength that they proclaim my insufficiencies?
Thank you for listening to these voices and stories.
Stay tuned for the March Reading Roundup later this week, and please pray for all people who have been targeted for abuse by someone they trusted.
~ Sara