Patheos blog
April 4, 2019
By Mary Pezzulo
I want to open by mentioning that I asked one of my friends who was raped by a priest if she wanted to write this article for me as a guest post, and she asked me to write it instead. That’s why I’m presuming to talk about it. I’ve taken my own medicine.
I’ve just been shown a sample chapter from a book called “Healing Our Church.” The author of this book doesn’t seem to be listed in the sample or the website, but it comes from the “Renew International” organization, with which I’m not familiar. This book is really a set of readings and instructions for the “Healing our Church” program, which is apparently a series of seminars being practiced in some parishes across the country and marketed to many more. The seminars are meant to “minister to hurting parishioners,” so that they might “start on the path to healing and renewed discipleship.”
The sample session provided is Chapter Three, “Rebuilding Our Church.” And if it’s an indicator of the thinking behind the whole of the book and the whole of the program, then I can safely say that both are worse than useless.
Let me walk you through the session as it’s written in the sample chapter. I’ll point out my objections as I go along.
It starts out with a hymn that sounds unbelievably sketchy in context. “O Jesus Healer of Wounded Souls” contains a line asking Jesus to “touch us” which I would leave out of any discussion of sexual abuse at all costs. There are better, non-triggering ways to say the same thing.
Then there’s a prayer, the Prayer of Saint Francis, which includes the line “O Divine Master, grant that I may never seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.” This is an excellent prayer for many occasions. I like to pray it myself. But as far as a meeting addressing sexual abuse, it’s toxic. Abuse survivors very often find themselves in an agonizing vortex of self-blame. What they need is consolation, love and understanding, but they have been denied it and told that they don’t need it– indeed, oftentimes they’re told by their abusers that their natural longing for understanding is the victim being selfish. I have known emotionally abusive priests to quote prayers by Saint Francis in order to paint victims demanding redress as self-centered, in fact, and I don’t think I’m the only one. This particular prayer is a shockingly imprudent choice in any context to do with abuse.
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