Teaming up to help survivors
of abuse
By David Reich
On January 14, in his first public appearance
on campus since his installation as archbishop of Boston last July,
Sean O'Malley, OFM, welcomed participants to a conference on clergy
sexual abuse of children, cosponsored by the archdiocese and Boston
College's Graduate School of Social Work.
As the opening speaker at the daylong conference,
which focused on the treatment of victims, O'Malley related his
own encounters with abuse survivors, beginning in the diocese of Fall
River, Massachusetts, where he served as bishop during the 1990s. Early
on, O'Malley said, he learned that the survivors, by then grown
men and women, came from deeply religious homes where priests were seen
as "icons of the transcendent." Thus, he continued, "the
abuse had consequences that went beyond the damage caused by similar
cases of abuse which did not involve clergy."
Unlike many victims of abuse by laypersons, victims
of clergy sexual abuse need spiritual as well as emotional healing,
O'Malley said, a point echoed by several other speakers at the
conference, which drew about 150 people, mostly mental health professionals,
on a morning when the mercury was hovering around zero. Wearing a hooded
brown cassock and speaking slowly and distinctly in a soothing baritone,
O'Malley, a thin man with wispy, slightly unruly hair, said that
many victims have left the Church. Many other survivors "have
sought help from their parishes but have found priests unwilling or
ill-equipped to respond," he said. The archdiocese and the University
will soon cosponsor a second conference, O'Malley announced, aimed
at educating priests and deacons in ministering to survivors.
O'Malley, who since his arrival in Boston
has been meeting with survivors regularly, both in groups and one-on-one,
said the encounters have "given me the opportunity to thank them
for coming forward to help create a Church and society with heightened
awareness of the evils of child abuse."
The morning's next speaker, Barbara Thorp,
a clinical social worker, gave a brief history of the sexual abuse crisis
in the archdiocese. Thorp, who directs the archdiocesan office of pastoral
support and outreach, which works with survivors and funds their therapy,
said that an early milestone in the archdiocese's response came
two years ago, when the archdiocese agreed to pay for therapy for all
survivors who requested it, including those who were suing for damages.
Around the same time, Thorp said, the archdiocese decided to locate
her office in a secular office building "devoid of any religious
symbols that might trigger re-traumatization" of survivors. Since
then, the office has filled a wide variety of needs. As part of treatment,
for example, one survivor wanted to return to the site of her abuse.
The office helped arrange the visit, and a staff social worker accompanied
the survivor and her therapist. Other survivors, Thorp said, "had
been given religious objects by their abusers and didn't know
what to do with these terrible symbols [of their abuse], so they returned
them to us."
Another milestone, a sort of crisis within the
crisis, said Thorp, came near the beginning of 2003, when lawyers defending
the archdiocese in the survivors' lawsuit asked to depose a survivor's
therapist. "This was a truly horrific moment for those of us in
the office," Thorp recalled. "Early in the process of establishing
trust, [it] set us reeling." Thorp revealed at the conference
that, at the urging of her office, the archdiocese in the end agreed
not to depose any therapists.
Since September, when the lawsuits were settled,
Thorp said, her office had seen a marked increase in requests for therapy.
To date, some 400 abuse survivors and family members have had therapy
paid for through the office. Thorp said she suspects that more will
come forward after the abuse crisis moves out of the media spotlight.
Between that and the fact that many survivors need years of treatment,
she said her office's work is still in its "very early phase."
IN HIS opening remarks, O'Malley, like other conference speakers
who followed, invoked the need to listen to survivors' stories
as a crucial part of learning how to help them heal, and in keeping
with this view, the conference featured two survivor panels. One panel
included Bill Cratty, a longtime member of St. Francis Xavier Church
in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, whose daughter Jeanne was sexually
abused by a parish priest from age six to age 11, during the 1970s.
Years later, said Cratty, when his daughter's memories of the
abuse emerged in therapy, his and her mother's "first reaction
was guilt. How could we not have known? How could we have trusted [the
abuser] with our little daughter?" After the abuse was brought
to light, the priest, a close family friend, told the media that Jeanne
Cratty was unstable and not credible. "Jeanne felt re-victimized,"
her father said. "After that, she could no longer go to church."
Bill Cratty is now on medication for anxiety himself, he said.
Jeanne Cratty, who also appeared on the panel,
reeled off a list of her symptoms, including attention deficit disorder,
suicidal tendencies, compulsive and self-hating tendencies, and severe
nightmares. For a period, she said, she was unable to work. Survivors
on a second panel also spoke of difficulties working, along with broken
families, psychiatric hospitalizations, and struggles with addiction.
Survivors "deal with issues of control,"
said Jeanne Cratty. Memories of abuse, she said, bring back not only
the abuse itself but the loss of control that accompanied it.
Cratty described her reaction to a chance encounter
with her abuser at a Wal-Mart store. She fled to her car, but then,
she recalled, "I forgot how to drive. I sat in the driver's
seat, but my feet weren't reaching the pedals." To the therapists
in the room, she said, "You're treating adults, but you're
treating really more than one person. You're treating their child,
or their adolescent. Their emotional life stops" at the age when
the abuse begins.
AT NOON the conference, which took place in McGuinn 121, broke for an
hour, during which O'Malley repaired to an upstairs lounge to meet the
press. Television cameras and still photographers crowded in as he told
reporters that when it came to helping abuse survivors heal, the archdiocese
was in it for the long haul. He challenged the view that now that most
of the lawsuits have been settled, the crisis is over. "The trauma
and the effects are long-range," he said. "There is a need
to try to continue services and to address the problems and suffering
that is ongoing in people's lives."
When a local TV reporter asked why the conference
had focused on survivor treatment and given no attention to the causes
of abuse, an unruffled O'Malley said the National Conference of
Catholic Bishops is sponsoring research into the causes. Also, because
seminaries now do psychological screening of candidates for the priesthood,
"the situation has been vastly improved," he said. Most
abusive priests, he said, were admitted when little was known about
pedophilia, and when "those kinds of tests were not routinely
given, the way they . . . have been now for several years."
Another reporter, a well-coiffed man in a navy
blazer and striped necktie, drew some chuckles from his colleagues when
he asked whether O'Malley's presence at the conference signaled
"a rapprochement between the archdiocese and Boston College, which
from time to time has been viewed as a cauldron of dissent."
O'Malley, refusing to take the bait, said
only that BC "has always been very welcoming to me, and we're
happy to be able to work together with a Catholic institution on issues
like this that we all share an interest in."
David Reich is a freelance writer based in
the Boston area.
Photo: Archbishop O'Malley with Sr. Mary
L. Walsh of Worcester, Massachusetts (left), and GSSW conference coordinator
Vincent J. Lynch. By Lee Pellegrini
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