UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Michelle Boorstein
Friday, March 1
The last time a pope was picked, Ann Hagan Webb was one of the best-known faces of the demand for church reform. After surviving sexual abuse for years by her childhood priest, the Massachusetts therapist’s life in the mid-2000s was consumed by rallying at parishes around New England and tracking priest court cases.
Today, as cardinals gather in Rome to select the next pope, the 60-year-old catches updates on the news — and feels ambivalent even about that. “I shouldn’t watch, but I do.”
Webb now limits her activism to working with clients — some Catholic, some not — who suffered child sexual abuse. Her choice is emblematic of a community of survivors who have largely given up on changing the church.
“I went from trying to change the church to accepting the fact that they won’t [change], and anyone that’s still in the church has blinders on,” she said this week. “At this point, my opinion is they are corrupt to the core and there’s not a single cardinal we can find who would be a good pope because there’s no such animal.” …
Terry McKiernan, head of the largest research database on clergy and abuse, said of the survivor community: “For a lot of people, it’s not a community anymore…. I think a lot of people who were involved in the early days, they’ve run out of steam.”
Survivors who are confronting the topic now face a very different culture than even a decade ago, when victims were accused of lying and scandals in other places such as Penn State and the Boy Scouts hadn’t surfaced. Fixing religious institutions isn’t as central to a society that has less faith in them.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.