UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
This week, National Catholic Reporter is publishing a week-long series of articles looking back at the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church. I highly recommend this series to you. I was particularly moved by hearing Barbara Blaine’s story of how she (and others) came to found the group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. I’m not sure I had ever heard all the details of her own painful, liberating story — certainly not in her first-person narrative.
What stands out for me in this account:
1. After she was repeatedly sexually abused by her parish priest Father Chet Warren (who violated at least 21 other girls, to Blaine’s knowledge) from her early adolescence up to her graduation from high school, when she went to confession and told a priest about all of this on a senior retreat, the priest told her,
“Jesus could forgive anything,” instead of, “You did nothing wrong. We have to call the police and your parents.”
2. Reading an NCR article by Jason Berry in the summer of 1985 when she was working at a Catholic Worker house in Chicago, which told of Father Gilbert Gauthe’s sexual abuse of altar boys, was a triggering experience for Blaine. She had a panic attack as she read the article, and then entered a state of personal crisis from which she emerged as she began to share her story of abuse by Father Warren with others.
3. Repeatedly and naively (and like me, when Belmont Abbey College ended my career as a Catholic theologian for never-explained reasons in 1993 and I turned to the bishop of Charlotte, North Carolina, for assistance and pastoral counsel), Blaine naively trusted the pastoral officials of the Catholic church to do something to assist her and other victims of childhood and adolescent sexual violation by priests. But this is what she experienced over and over again, instead:
While claiming they would, church officials refused to help me.
4. And so this led her to begin networking with, listening to, reaching out to connect with other victims of abuse, whose stories were painfully similar to her own. And SNAP was born . . . . As Blaine says, while church officials have been, for the most part, an unyielding obstacle to victims of abuse seeking justice and healing, thousands of lay Catholics who care about victims have rallied to their cause, and have assisted with supporting SNAP and other survivor groups.
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