"Why don’t/can’t they just let go of it when we are so tired of hearing about it all the time?"

A:  Part of the answer came about when our friend Susan mentioned that even her son, who is proud of her efforts to help victims, said that he is just so tired of hearing about it all the time. As I was thinking of a gentle way in which I might point out that the victims have to LIVE it absolutely every minute of their lives, without hope of no longer hearing about it, I realized something. I realized how completely totally a gazillion-percent I agree with Timmy. I am so incredibly tired of always thinking about and praying about the various aspects and sequellae of it all. I am so tired of worrying about the wee hours of the nights of those poor boys/men/women survivors who agonize more than we could ever imagine if we wanted to and we don’t. I am so tired of being embarrassed by what my beloved Church is continuing to do to these little ones of God in relating to them in a manner that assigns them the label of Adversary. Indeed, surely all of us must be unGodly tired of the whole filthy demoralizing thing.

Then it occurred to me that that frequently-occurring statement alone, WE’RE TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME, is loaded for this reason: If, over the past eighteen months, the right people had HEARD what is being said, we would not still be saying it. The very fact that everyone is tired of hearing it is indicative of the fact that the people with the power are still not listening.

A: Sister Veronica has never been sexually abused by any nun or priest or anyone else.  Although Catholic-school-educated from the age of ten onward, she is one of the incredibly lucky ones who remembers her nuns and priests fondly, never having experienced any abuse .

      Sister Angela, along with four or five other young and naive New York postulants, were being "groomed" by their novice directress, for sexual exploitation by herself and her "groupies". Sister did not realize what was being set up,  but she intuited "something dangerous", and left within twelve weeks of entering that community, without yet realizing what that danger was. Fortunately, that was before they could get their hands on her. 

     A sister-member of that community had tried to deter her from entering the community with the statement, "The novice director likes nurses," but Sister did not understand what that meant. After leaving that community, when Sister returned to her monsignor spiritual director (Confessor A), and discussed her brief stay, he said, "Oh that stuff's been going on there for years." She still did not know what the "that stuff" was, to which he referred.

     That same novice directress who was grooming some of the postulants, regularly received verbal reports, including the specific details, of the postulants' Confessions from the young priest who heard them, Confessor B.

     Nearly two decades later, Sister told her Confessor C in conversation about the tamper-proof and fool-proof test that she and two other postulants had executed in order to verify their dreaded suspicion that the young priest was  breaking the seal of the confessional. This confessor C became agitated and defensively twitchy, repeating vociferously to Sister that she had desecrated the Sacrament by testing out her (test-proven) suspicions.

    One and a half decades after the idiocy of that confessor, another confessor D, became similarly twitchily defensive in his desperate vociferations to convince Sister that she had sinned grievously in testing out the integrity of the seal of that priest's confessional.

    Yes, even if the seal of the Confessional was being quite routinely broken by the priest in his phone reports to the novice director immediately following his hearing of Confessions, before the young postulants even had time to get back to their convent rooms.

     Three years previously,  a kind nun from a different community than that above, had invited Sister Angela, then a secular freshman in nursing school, along with two other secular girls, to join her community of nursing/teaching sisters for a special week-end seminar. It  was being presented by two priests who had co-authored a popular spiritual direction book. 

    The week-end of that seminar consisted of lecture and discussion periods throughout the day. After the evening sessions, the priests,  three of them, would retire to their rooms, the sisters to their convent living quarters, and the three secular nursing students (from not only two different nursing schools, but also two different countries) would retire to nursing school dorm rooms to confide and trade their naive-girl-life-dreams.

     On the last evening of the seminar, everyone stayed awhile after the summarizing lecture, for a singalong. One of the priests played the piano in the common room where the seminar had been held, while the sisters and three girls lounged on sofas and chairs singing and laughing. The piano-playing priest played "You Are My Sunshine", dedicating it to  Sr. Angela, saying he did so to give a  girl from the States an American song. Then it was time to say last good-byes, for those who would be leaving,would be doing so early the next morning.

     The piano priest called Sister Angela discreetly aside and suggested that she come to his room before leaving. When Sister shook her head no and backed away shyly, the priest confided earnestly that this confidence he was about to entrust to her must remain just their secret: that though he was only in his thirties and looked quite healthy, he indeed had terminal stomach cancer, and probably he would not live much longer.

     And so, couldn't "his little American girl" just come give a suffering priest a backrub, like a compassionate little Catholic nursing school student? The little nursing student told the priest she would go to her room and then return to give him a backrub, but she was too shy to do so. She did not ever see him again, but for over three decades felt terribly guilty that she had failed that poor dying priest, who needed her for a comforting backrub.  Sister Angela wonders now, precisely what portion of his anatomy he would have defined as his back, in need of rubbing....

Q: Is this the reason that you two Sisters became advocates for those abused by nuns, priests, and other clergy?

A: No. Oddly, both memories were conscious,  but Sister Angela did not consciously put them in the context of abuse, since no hands were placed upon her. Only after hearing hundreds of stories from victims of sexual abuse by nuns and priests, did those stories have a context in which they finally made sense.

     But, regarding our taking a stand for victims , those two anecdotes mattered quite "after the fact" rather than before the fact or as a motivating factor in our creating this web-site for the victims. Those victims and survivors, who were not, like Sister Angela, fortunate enough by a chance twist of fate, to have escaped the predators.