WISCONSIN
SNAP Wisconsin
For the church to truly face its system of sexual trauma, it must embrace the sacred trauma of human sexuality
Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director
Acceptance Speech, 2012 Public Service Award
National Association of Social Workers (NASW)
Brookfield, Wisconsin
October 31, 2012
There is a story I recently heard, it may be apocryphal, but even it is, it happens to be true.
When Napoleon was trying to humiliate the Pope by forcing him to crown him and even taking the crown from him, the Pope told Napoleon: “I know you are trying to destroy Christianity. But you will fail. We the church have been trying this for almost 2,000 years and we have failed.”
We survivors spend a lot of time witnessing on church steps, at legislative hearings, and inside courtrooms about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. We’ve made our point, I think, that these terrible crimes have wounded many, many lives. And they have seriously damaged and eroded the public trust citizens once had in an important social institution which is responsible every day for safeguarding the lives of millions of our children in schools and churches.
This afternoon, however, by way of this wonderful public recognition, I want instead to honor and defend what it was that the clerical sex offender attacked in me and my fellow survivors, not only as youngsters, but whenever we speak out about what happened to us; what the official church opposes, even hates and despises; what is, apparently, the chief enemy of the hierarchy and, as I heard it recently put, the church’s “greatest competitor”: sex and human sexuality.
What I am about to say is not novel, but we need to remind ourselves, after so many years of struggle, what exactly it is we are fighting for. To paraphrase our possibly apocryphal Pope from earlier: the church has tried to destroy human sexuality for 2,000 years, and even with a world-wide system of clerical sexual violence and cover up it has failed.
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