BURLINGTON (NC)
The Times-News
April 5, 2019
Joan Sullivan raises her hand.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I’m very well into years and I have found, this last 10 years in my life, I have lost my faith and it’s been based on this.”
The “this” she refers to is sexual abuse by clergymen in the Roman Catholic Church, and she’s addressing Robert Orsi, a prominent historian of U.S. Catholicism who’s just delivered a lecture titled, “Violence, Memory and Religion among Survivors of Clerical Sexual Abuse” in Elon University’s LaRose Digital Theatre Wednesday, April 3.
“I for so long tried to put it aside,” Sullivan continues, “because it’s not all priests, it’s not all nuns, but it is so prevalent and it’s been kept under wraps and ignored to the extent that people with whom I was going to church said, ‘Why are people bringing this up? It’s 30 years old.’ I mean how could they think these things? I am disappointed in the congregation. I am disappointed in those who are supposed to be keeping my faith.”
Orsi says, “I understand when you say you have lost your faith. I think I’m in a similar situation, to tell you the truth. And so, this is part of the incredible damage that those men did to the world of Catholicism. There’s no doubt about that.”
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