ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Magazine
By Jeannette Cooperman June 20, 2014
They set up a counseling practice together, fell in love, married. Both had treated victims of sexual abuse. Then Patrick Fleming, a former priest himself, began treating priests who’d been perpetrators, and he asked his wife, Sue Lauber-Fleming, to help him run a therapy group at the residential facility just outside St. Louis where these men now live. Sue shook the day that she told them her own story, of being abused by her pastor, a monsignor, when she was 4 years old. But since then, the Flemings have met hundreds of times, in groups and individually, with dozens of priests convicted of sexual abuse. In one of their books, Broken Trust, they note that in the media, “each priest appears as a sad news photo of a man in black and in trouble.” There’s no clue as to why they did what they did or whether they realize the damage. After counseling these priests for 12 years, the Flemings have some insight.
PF: We have worked with victims of all kinds of abuse, and we know how horrible the acts are and what damaging effects they have. So none of what I’m going to say about perpetrators is to excuse what they have done. But what we have seen is that this is clearly a sickness. These men have been scorned, vilified, raked through the coals, and really judged to be evil in some way. But pretty often, they have been sexually abused themselves—[about two-thirds] of the time—and nearly all of them experienced some other kind of trauma when they were growing up. As they start to recover, they start—in most cases, not all—to have deep remorse about what they have done and deep shame. Their level of pain is often as intense as, or greater than, their victims’. SL: As intense. I would not say greater.
How long can their denial last? SL: One priest, in group, kept saying, “But I didn’t abuse them. I just was loving them.” He’d spent time in prison already. This went on and on. PF: We challenged him regularly. We can tell these stories really directly: “This is what your victim experienced. This is the pain; this is the emotional damage; this is the sexual damage; this is the spiritual damage. Does that sound like love to you?” SL: Three years later, it finally clicked: “Oh! I was needing love, and I used them to fulfill my need for love.”
It took three years? SL: Yeah. And insurance says see somebody for six months.
So what worked? PF: I think it was the honesty of other people in the group, and gradually working his denial down—by this time, Sue had shared her own story. Rarely, actually, is it time and distance.
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