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...additions and excerpts from a letter to a priest i've never met...
Dear Father,
Our priest's "good stuff" is really good, and in those areas he is love-able and loved by most, and probably all, of us in the parish.
But when i saw "Father" in your name, i felt tears start in my eyes unwanted. i so need to know of priests who are advocates for victims/survivors and those who love them. How then, i wonder, must the victims and their families themselves feel...
Gee, how good it feels just to say "Father" to a priest whom i know cares about the victims first and himself second.
Although we are a monastery, we don't have a chaplain and are blessed to have Mass available just 6 miles away at our local parish church. It's a tiny southern parish of about 35-40 families. i think we don't have a total of 10 children between birth-college age in our tiny, mostly older and devout parish. Really really good people, whom we have greatly loved for over a decade now
i don't know how i'll make it there to Mass tomorrow. If i do, it'll be only so the parishioners don't feel abandoned by the nuns. Probably i'll just go elsewhere. i think of it as "fast food Catholocism"--go get the Sacraments wherever it's least dangerous or offensive.
Just recently, i heard a priest, who is not himself a sexual abuser, preach a homily in which he started out stating his "empathy for victims". He said that abusers had done wrong, that bishops had done poorly. This was the most hopeful thing i'd heard there and so i sat up straight, looked closely at him so as not to miss one jot or tittle, and listened acutely. i literally held my breath in hope.
Just in time to hear him explain, in his homily where he stood as Teacher and in moral leadership over us: that the children are partly responsible--these victims of sexual predation, because they did participate..... That their parents are partly responsible--they must "teach their children right from wrong", and to struggle to the death like little Maria Goretti to guard their purity..... That the laity are partly responsible--if only they had prayed more for their priests.....
i did not stand up and scream "idiot" at him, nor did i correct him when, at the door after the recessional, he shook my hand and asked, "How are you, Sister?".
He did not say those words above verbatim; they are not all a direct quote. But they are the message conveyed, not just to me. Folks who spoke of it afterwards, and since, heard the same message. We heard the same message.
It was especially disappointing, according to one person who said on the exhale of a sigh: "Same ol', same ol', Sister: never blame the priests, it must be us laity's fault, always has been..."
i can't go to Mass and keep my mouth shut at such harm and unTruth as his words perpetuated, nor can i go and interrupt Holy Mass. If i'm torn like this, what does the poor laity go through? Father, i wonder if there is to be help for it all. You are only the second priest whom i have personally heard from who cares for the vicitms. i know of only one or two other nuns who care about them.
Why?
Sr. angela
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