The Silent Survivors: Cases against the Catholic Church may end, but the struggles of the abuse victims go on
The Register Guard
Op-Ed
April 29, 2007
Amidst all the congratulations going around these last days concerning the long-awaited resolution of the Archdiocese Bankruptcy, I have noticed a particular tendency among nearly all involved to want to move on and put the past behind us. At one level, I wholeheartedly agree with those sentiments. It is time for this Archdiocese to heal. As a lawyer who has represented over one hundred individuals with claims against the Catholic Church, including forty-one in this Bankruptcy, I have pledged my assistance to the Archbishop, and to his lawyers, in doing whatever I can do to facilitate that healing. The Archdiocese needs it, the larger faith community needs it and our city and state need it.
At the same time, however, the duty I have to the courageous men and women I have represented requires me to remind the community that, while it is all well and good to say let us move on, it is not that simple for the abuse survivors. Between the long delays of the bankruptcy, the breathtakingly broad gag orders, and the natural tendency of child abuse survivors to stay silent, their voices have not been heard in many, many months. As I have listened over the last fifteen years to the stories of boys and girls now men and women who were abused by priests, teachers, nuns, and others they trusted from a Church they loved, and then as I have heard comments from the community these past days and months, I am reminded that there is still much misunderstanding about the nature of priest sexual abuse and its impact. The people who came forward to name their abuse have struggled too hard, for too long, too courageously, to let any misconceptions about what happened to them go unanswered. The misunderstandings and myths we have often heard about child abuse and its survivors in the past years need to be corrected.
