UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald
By FRANCIS PHILLIPS on Tuesday, 18 March 2014
Last week I met an inspirational Catholic: Dawn Eden, an American survivor of sexual abuse as a child who has turned this trauma into an apostolate to bring hope to others who have experienced similar abuse. Dawn is a convert from Judaism; her abuse happened at the hands of an adult at her local synagogue and from her mother’s boyfriend after her parents split up.
I asked her what led her into the very Church which the media has been delighted to portray as the villain of the piece regarding the abuse of children. Her reply surprises me. She admits that at first she was put off by news of the scandals besetting the Church; but that she then witnessed the grief that ordinary Catholics, as well as members of the hierarchy, showed when they learnt of the crimes and cover-ups. Above all, she was moved by the compassion for the victims that she saw in the Church. Here was a Church that acknowledged its wounds but which also knew that only the light of Christ could transform the darkness within.
This is the point of my blog: instead of focusing on the obvious and negative aspects of this shameful episode in the Church’s recent history, Dawn witnessed to the deeper wellsprings of the Church’s sacramental charity and was thus able to distinguish between the appalling sins of individual members and the loving compassion of the Church as the “mystical body of Christ”. This was the Church she has chosen to join.
In his blog for 7th March, William Oddie did a fine job of defending the Church’s record in rooting out paedophilia within her ranks (and showing how it has been unfairly been made a scapegoat by the media). Dawn’s apostolate, eloquently argued in her book “My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints”, complements Oddie’s robust defence. Instead of fixating on the past she wants her audiences and readers to understand the theological virtue of hope. “People keep repeating that abuse is soul-destroying” she said to me, “but Christianity is about hope. The temptation is to continue to live in past pain – but this accentuates it; it doesn’t bring about healing.”
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.