MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Herald
Saturday, October 10, 2015 P
By: M.j. Doherty
Through the film “Spotlight,” Boston will soon re-live the discovery here of clerical sexual abuse in 2001-2002. The movie opens in the wake of Pope Francis’ meeting with survivors of such abuse during his visit to Philadelphia and his promise to give careful oversight to child protection and to hold all responsible accountable.
The question remains whether, as a community of faith, a society, a world, we can articulate a new human story regarding child abuse, and how the global Catholic Church can help that happen.
The whole community of faith has been wounded — the child victims first, but also parents, families, neighborhoods, women religious, faithful pastors and bishops. Those layers of victims have all needed to be healed.
Abuse belongs to the abuser and the enabler — let that justice be served. But victims themselves know that the shadows abuse imposes, unjustly making victims complicit, often become our own, and we ourselves have to work to dissolve them. The task of the victim of abuse, psychoanalyst Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea pointed out in 2007, is to leave off being a victim by surviving and, then, most of all, to become a person again.
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