For some, Catholic church's victim program made priest abuse trauma even worse

By Brandie Kessler
York Daily Record
December 10, 2018

https://www.ydr.com/story/news/2018/12/10/clergy-abuse-victims-say-catholic-victim-assistance-did-not-help-them-pa-priest-abuse-child-sexual/2213026002/

Robert Hoatson, co-founder and president of Road to Recovery and a survivor of clergy abuse and also a former priest talks during the demonstration for statute of limitations reform to the state's childhood sexual abuse laws at the state capitol in Harrisburg Monday October, 15, 2018. Photo by Paul Kuehnel

Mary Handler remembers some of the details so vividly that it’s like it happened yesterday instead of decades ago. 

She was 5-½ years old, sitting in the backseat of her family’s car.

Family cars in the 1950s were big -- and felt exceptionally so to a child. Handler remembers it was dark out, her mother was in the front seat holding a baby and her father was driving.

Handler was wearing a dress. It was summertime.

Next to her sat the priest her family was taking to the bus station.

He was an Irishman, born in the same town as Handler’s father. On this night he was visiting from an assignment in New Jersey to have dinner with her family at their home in Yonkers, New York.

Handler fell asleep.

She remembers waking to a feeling she described as an explosion that had erupted inside her.

She wanted to scream. She tried to, but she couldn’t.

She didn’t know then that what had happened to her should never happen to a child.

Her young body had been violated.

The priest had sexually abused her.

Years later, Handler would disclose this abuse in therapy.

Even later, in 2003, she would go to the Diocese of Camden and tell them, too, of the sexual abuse.

She called the victim assistance coordinator in Camden, expecting she would be helped since the name of the office indicates such.

But the reception Handler got was callous, she said.

She didn’t get an offer of help.

The response instead blindsided her. It set her back.

Handler’s experience is not unique, say advocates and survivors of clergy sexual abuse. It represents a risk posed by the church's longtime practice of handling abuse cases internally and privately. It illustrates the compounded harm that can be inflicted when victims of such trauma feel disrespected or doubted. 

When a survivor of clergy sexual abuse calls Robert Hoatson for help, he aims to be as supportive as possible, especially during the first interaction.

“Usually I say to them, ‘Listen, I’m sorry for what happened to you. I believe you.’ And hopefully that will start a good rapport, relationship with the person,” said Hoatson, the co-founder and president of Road To Recovery counseling services based in New Jersey.

Hoatson, himself a victim of clergy sexual abuse and a former priest in the Archdiocese of New York, has worked with thousands of childhood sexual abuse victims and their family members over the past 15 years.

Hoatson said people sometimes wait decades to disclose the abuse they suffered. When they finally are ready to tell, or when they disclose to someone new for the first time, it’s important that they feel supported, he said.

“If they don’t get a good response from that person,” Hoatson said, “it could put them back into silence forever. Or it could re-trigger them, it could re-traumatize them.”

Hoatson served as an advocate for Mary Handler about 13 years ago. Back then, before she had married, her last name was Donaghy. He remembered how Handler didn’t feel supported when she reached out to the Camden diocese.

When the diocese was resisting paying for Handler’s therapy in 2005, Hoatson wrote to the diocese on Handler’s behalf. He pointed out that the diocese had previously agreed to help pay for her counseling.

In the letter, Hoatson referenced the “style” of the victim assistance coordinator, a woman named Barbara Gondek. He said she used a tone in written correspondence that Hoatson said was “arrogant, officious, and curt.”

Gondek referred questions from the York Daily Record to the Camden diocese director of communications, Michael Walsh.

Walsh said by email that "as a victim assistance counselor, Ms. Gondek feels it would be inappropriate for her to discuss in the media matters related to the health treatments of specific abuse survivors."

He said that though Handler’s case “did not involve a priest of the Diocese of Camden, the diocese has contributed $23,000 to her counseling fees. This was done out of charity, as we take very seriously the trauma of any person who has been victimized by a priest.”

Walsh went on to say “victims assistance coordinators exist in dioceses across the country and strive to help survivors of abuse find peace and relief from their trauma, which is often a difficult and a long-term journey. Sometimes the work is fruitful for victims and other times, painfully, it is not.”

Handler said Gondek was the first person she encountered when she called the victim assistance office at the diocese.

“It was supposed to be victim’s assistance,” Handler said. “Little did I know that she was a monster.”

Handler remembers Gondek asking her, in an aggressive manner, what she wanted from the diocese.

“I said I needed decency,” Handler said. “And she said ‘What does that mean?’”

Handler said she was taken aback by Gondek’s tone.

“I felt like they would rather have me be dead” than to help me, Handler said. “I felt like I was treated like a criminal.”

She said Gondek denied that the priest who abused her was ever in the local parish. Gondek was also involved in arranging therapy for Handler, after Handler said she didn’t want Gondek to have anything to do with that.

“They didn’t honor that,” Handler said.

Eventually, Handler saw her own therapist, and the diocese indicated it would pay for some of the therapy. But then the diocese resisted making those payments, according to letters from Handler’s therapist and Hoatson.

When Hoatson wrote to the diocese in 2005, he said it needed to fulfill its promise to ensure Handler’s recovery “from the ravages of her abuse. To do less would be unjust and unacceptable.”

While the way Handler was treated is unacceptable, Hoatson said, it is an all-too-frequent occurrence for victims across many dioceses.

“We’ve had all kinds of issues with victim’s assistance, victims calling in and not getting anybody who really cares about them,” Hoatson said. “In many cases, you never knew to whom you were speaking.”

In the cases Hoatson is aware of, the person answering the phone at the victim assistance office sometimes was a priest, sometimes a bishop, sometimes a social worker.

Hoatson said he knows of one diocese where, years ago, the victim assistance coordinator was also the communications director. He said he called the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to report that because, in his opinion, it’s a bad idea for the person responsible for the image of a diocese to also be responsible for helping people who call to report they were sexually abused by a priest.

Hoatson is unsure of what happened as a result of his complaint.

Sometimes, even when victims got help from a victim assistance coordinator, the help came with conditions, Hoatson said.

“Very often, the dioceses, before they would agree to pay for therapy, they sometimes would say, ‘We need reports from therapists,’” Hoatson said. “And sometimes those reports were kind of intrusive, according to some of the people I spoke to. So therapists sometimes refused to do the therapy if it meant they had to break the therapist-client relationship, the confidentiality.”

For that reason, Hoatson and other advocates for clergy abuse victims have long advised against calling the church for help and calling law enforcement or a lawyer instead.

In 2016, the Diocese of Harrisburg said it had spent roughly $3.4 million since 1950, including on settlement agreements and therapy, to help victims of clergy sexual abuse.

Mark Totaro, who until this week was the victim assistance coordinator and the CEO of Catholic Charities for the diocese, said then that he authorized payments for victims’ services. He said he had no budget and didn’t need to get authorization from the bishop or anyone else to provide that help to victims. 

Totaro said then that counseling was “always” offered to victims. “How can we heal you?” Totaro said. “And then I try to do what I can for the victim to assess their need.”

But this fall, in the wake of a landmark state grand jury report, Totaro was not available to provide an update on how many people he authorized to help, how much money he authorized to spend on victim assistance, and whether he still handles cases the same way he did in 2016.

The grand jury report detailed abuse by 301 priests in six Catholic dioceses against at least a thousand children since the 1940s, including 45 clergy with ties to the Harrisburg diocese.

Totaro referred a request for an interview to other diocese employees in October, saying he could not talk with the media. 

On Wednesday, Rachel Bryson, a spokeswoman for the diocese, said via email that between July 2017 and June 2018, the diocese spent "$207,901 on payments to survivors for therapy and other expenses as well as for all background checks and training programs."

Bryson said the diocese and Bishop Ronald Gainer "strongly encourage survivors of sexual abuse to take advantage of the counseling services that are provided. Those services are open to anyone regardless of where or when the abuse occurred or if they have received a settlement from the Church."

 But that doesn't appear to have always been the case. 

In a July 2014 letter written to the mother of a victim of clergy sexual abuse, Gainer referenced the settlement the woman’s daughter received. While he was not bishop at the time of the settlement, Gainer said he had reviewed the documentation from the settlement, which was clear it would “‘fully and forever’ complete the diocese’s obligation toward your daughter.”

He said he appreciated and shared the mother’s concern for her daughter, but he “must abide by the terms of the settlement” reached years earlier. He did not offer therapy to the woman’s daughter.

Joey Behe, raped by a priest in the Allentown diocese when he was a teenager in the 1980s, wrote to the diocese in 2007 about the treatment he received from the diocese’s victim assistance coordinator and to ask for “commutative justice” for the sexual abuse he suffered.

Behe had received several payments from the diocese between February 2007 and May 2007, some of which were reimbursement for medical costs. Behe’s spine had been injured when he was raped by the priest decades earlier, and he needed ongoing medical attention. The payments ranged from less than $100 to $2,000, and totaled less than $5,000. The payment came in the form of a check, mailed to him. Some of the checks came with no letter of explanation.

The check that Behe received in May 2007 came with a letter from the victim assistance coordinator at the time, Barbara W. Murphy.

Murphy wrote that Behe had received the payments from “Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Allentown, acting in the spirit of the Catholic tradition of works of charity to those in need.”

But, Murphy also wrote, the diocese did not make financial settlements since the statute of limitations for Behe to make a claim for compensation had expired.

Murphy noted that Behe told the diocese that he could not pay his rent. So, Murphy wrote, based on that “emergency need” the diocese gave him another $1,500 check.

She said Behe would not receive further direct monetary payments from the diocese, but the diocese would continue to pay for his health care insurance for psychological/psychiatric treatment needed “as a result of the alleged abuse.” She said that offer, as was the diocese’s policy, would be periodically reviewed.

When Behe wrote to the diocese about this letter from Murphy, he referenced the church’s own law, Canon Law, passages of which said Christian faithful are free to make known to their church their needs. Behe pointed out that he was not asking for charity, and that he was not seeking compensation from a lawsuit; he was seeking “reparation after so long a period of personal agony, justice in accordance with the norms of the Church and the mind of The Holy Father.”

Behe said the tone of Murphy’s letter was “so clipped … that page two might well have been a template: ‘Since you allege that you are a victim of sexual abuse as a minor by a priest or deacon …’”

Matthew T. Kerr, spokesman for the Diocese of Allentown, said Murphy hasn’t been with the diocese since she retired in 2008.

“To anyone who has perceived negatively any contact with a victim assistance coordinator of the past, I apologize,” Kerr said by email. “The Diocese of Allentown is extremely focused on treating victims and survivors with the utmost compassion and respect. Our victim assistance coordinator, Wendy Krisak, plays a key role in those interactions.”

Among the strongest feelings victims of sexual abuse carry with them is the belief that no one else knows or understands how they feel and a fear they won’t be believed, said Deborah Harrison, executive director of the York County Children’s Advocacy Center.

So when a victim reaches out for help, it’s important that whoever they reach first start “from a place of belief,” Harrison said.

When the first person contacted by a victim doesn’t have the right training, and a victim isn’t treated in a supportive way, the victim “can just opt to never get help because they’ve decided that nobody can be trusted,” Harrison said. “The harm, in a nutshell, is retraumatization.”

Someone questioning them or treating them in a manner that could be interpreted as challenging their account or treating them as though they did something wrong, “that’s horribly traumatic,” Harrison said.

Even the person who answers the phone at an agency or organization, but who doesn’t do any of the therapeutic work with a victim, needs a degree of empathy, Harrison said.

That’s where a conflict could arise when the church is hiring its own staff, like victim assistance coordinators, to handle victims.

“You’re beginning from a place of protecting the institution as opposed to providing services for the victim,” Harrison said.

Harrison said Catholic parishes in York County have been offered free training through a county-wide prevention initiative, but they have declined.

One church responded that it was not interested in the training, saying it has a training process in place through the Diocese of Harrisburg, Harrison said.

She said that if an agency, such as the Catholic church, is going to try to correct its past mistakes without outside help, it needs to be transparent.

“I think they need to be open about what they’re putting in place and their protocols of standards and practice,” she said. “I think on a general level, there’s just been so much trust destroyed that it’s really tough to have the church say, ‘We’re going to take care of this, and it’s all going to be done in-house.’”

But for victims who want to go to the church for help, Harrison suggested they ask a victim assistance coordinator about what training they have, what their focus is and what they understand about trauma-informed care.

The trauma of the abuse that Mary Handler suffered as a little girl, damaging and confusing, has rippled throughout her life. At times, it has manifested in her physical body, causing her a variety of pain.

She reached a settlement with the Diocese of Camden and received a payment that went toward medical bills associated with the lasting trauma of her abuse, she said.

The abuse has continued to haunt her thoughts and her dreams.

But, she believes, the crime was compounded when the church and the victims assistance office hurt her further. That’s why she wants to speak out and take back some of her truth.

Pedophiles do harm, “but it seems to be not very conscious, or it seems to not be very controlled ... like an addiction,” Handler said. “What Barbara Gondek did seems very purposeful, and how the church handles it is very purposeful.”

Handler wants people to know the truth about how the church has handled survivors like her.

“I want the simple truth, genuine truth” to come out, Handler said “The hierarchy of the church speaks pretty, but if there’s nothing to uphold what they say, there’s no value.”

ChildLine is a toll-free intake line available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to receive reports of suspected child abuse. Someone who suspects abuse may call ChildLine at 1-800-932-0313.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's office recently opened a hotline following the presentment of the grand jury report in August for those who want to report suspected abuse related to the grand jury investigation. That number is 1-888-538-8541.

The Harrisburg diocese’s toll-free hotline is 1-800-626-1608.