UNITED STATES
Room with a Pew
“It is difficult to imagine that individuals and societies governed by the seeking
of pleasure–as much as or more than by the avoidance of pain–can survive at all.”
–Antonio Damasio, from his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
Back in 2004, the mother of a boy who had been abused while a student at Saint Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara in the eighties, contacted me through SafeNet out of concern for her son’s mental health. His condition worsened after he began menacing a local parish priest (unrelated to his abuse) with veiled threats. Upon meeting with the family at their home in Northern California, immediate care for the son was obtained with the help of county health officials and professional evaluations. At the mother’s insistence, the Franciscans were never formally notified of the abuse. But it was the emotional state of another family member, an older cousin who had also attended Saint Anthony’s at the same time, that helped me realize how deeply the wounds of clergy sexual abuse had affected other former students who were secondary survivors.
The son first revealed the details of his abuse through family interventions and later in sessions with his therapist. It was during his freshman year at the seminary that his family learned how a Franciscan friar, who would later be implicated in a number of alleged assaults of minors, had sexually molested him on several occasions in a music room on campus and in the friar’s bedroom. The survivor’s mother, a devout Catholic, immediately began offering up her son’s pain (and her own) with daily intentions for the promise of deliverance.
The older cousin, Raymond (not his real name) had long since rejected the Catholic faith and dismissed any belief in the church’s teaching on suffering and redemption. He no longer felt any connection to the man on the cross who suffered and died for the sins of others. For years he wrestled with guilt and remorse as he watched his younger cousin slip slowly into mental illness. He had been a couple of classes ahead of him at Saint Anthony’s and, while he himself had not been molested during his time at the school, had come to blame himself for what had happened to his cousin.
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