MINNESOTA
Owatonna.com
By JEFFREY JACKSON jjackson@owatonna.com
OWATONNA — Despite all that has happened, Gerald Lynch still wears a cross around his neck.
“I still believe in Jesus,” said the 64-year-old Owatonnan.
And Lynch still considers himself a practicing Catholic, though he admits that it’s not always easy to go to Mass, to be around priests or even to face Sunday mornings. Those things — “triggers,” he calls them — bring back memories he’d rather not face.
“I want to be involved. I want to go to Mass on Sunday,” he said. “But there are circumstances within myself that make it difficult.”
He paused.
“I feel dirty,” he added
Now, if there is anything Lynch is seeking in life, for himself and others like him, it’s reconciliation — reconciliation with the Catholic church, with the priest who sexually abused him as a young man, and, yes, with God.
But Lynch realizes that the healing process for a person like himself who was abused by a priest can be a long journey: In his case, a journey of more than 40 years. And for Lynch, that journey began by admitting what happened to him.
“The first thing I wanted to do was to deny it,” Lynch said. “But what you bury alive, stays alive.”
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