Patheos blog
July 7, 2019
By Mary Pezzulo
It’s been a rough twenty-four hours on the internet.
It started Friday evening, with a man drunk-friending me on facebook so that he could tag me in a post bragging about how much tequila he’d had and how much he’d enjoyed watching a fight between me and somebody I’d blocked. Yes, he tagged the blocked person as well. The next thing I knew, someone who has screenshotted my friends-only posts to bully me before was on the thread accusing me of all kinds of nasty things. I blocked the drunk and tried to go back to my writing.
Moments later, a woman who apparently founded a site called “Roaming Catholics” was calling me stupid, telling me I needed an exorcism and that I was in mortal sin; she then tried to give me a grammar lesson:
For those of my readers who are visually impaired, that’s a screenshot of a woman with an American flag for a profile picture saying “exorcism is a verb, not a noun, and you have a blog? lol.” And for those of you who are unsure, “exorcism” is definitely a noun. Yes, she got blocked too.
Then it was Saint Maria Goretti’s feast day, a difficult day for rape survivors. I re-shared an old blog post where I explained what the saint’s virtues were and clarified the Church’s teaching on rape. I always re-share this post on her feast, because a surprising number of people like to go around claiming that rape victims “take the easy way out” and we should all be saintly and just get stabbed to death instead– never mind that that has never been Church teaching, and that many of us rape survivors didn’t have that choice. Some catechists hold up Maria Goretti as a martyr for purity not because she valued her and Alessandro’s chastity and forgave her attacker, but because he managed to fatally stab her before he got his wish of molesting a twelve-year-old girl.
As if Saint Maria would somehow be less virtuous if Alessandro had just gone ahead and raped her after she was stabbed. I think it’s very important that we be clear that that’s wrong, especially in this day and age. Victims of sexual assault and abuse are not the ones who sin. Their attackers are. To say a victim incurs guilt for having something done to them against their will, is heresy. It’s not just me, a hysterical woman blogger saying that; St. Thomas and St. Augustine also stated that a virgin who is raped remains a virgin. No one can sin against their will. And hijacking a saint’s hagiography to shame victims is just one more way to exploit an abused child.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.