Articles for Healthcare Practitioners

As the Catholic Church scandal continues to unfold and the stigma is lifted, more of us will find ourselves working with clients who were sexually abused as children by their parish priests. The numbers are staggering. Almost 2,000 priests nationwide have been involved in criminal and civil sexual abuse litigation. Church experts estimate that 6 to 12% of the 50,000 priests in the U.S. engage in illegal sex with children under the age of 16. Psychological experts indicate that most pedophiles will abuse 30 to 260 victims over the course of their lives and that only 16% of victims ever report the crime. This means that hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. may have been violated by Catholic priests. Despite the fact that child sexual abuse by members of the clergy is not just a Catholic problem, we as therapists need to understand the unique spiritual trauma that the Catholic Church has perpetrated on its child victims, their families and all Catholics. In order for us to help them recover and heal we must understand the multiple levels of abuse, betrayal, and shame forced on these victims by a spiritually abusive system that harbored and fostered criminals.

As if the sexual trauma isn’t devastating enough Catholic victims must deal not only with the betrayal of individual priests but the systematic betrayal of an institution that preaches adherence to the strictest of moral values, yet chose to defy those values in order to protect itself. Virtually every diocese in the country dealt with victims the same way. When victims and their families went to the Church for help they were told to "pray" and "trust the Church to take care of it." As victims are now finding out, clergy, on the other hand were accommodated and even rewarded with job security and benefits including vacations, sick leaves, multiple sex offender treatment programs, numerous job transfers, promotions and, worst of all, continued access to new child victims with each job placement.

If a victim and his family took their case to court, the Church did everything in its power to betray the victim once again by denying the charges, blaming the victim and their parents, stonewalling court proceedings, and concealing evidence. When settlements were made victims were forced to keep their pain and the Church’s culpability a secret.

For these victims and those who were too ashamed to come forward each new revelation of how Church leaders systematically engaged in a cover-up to safeguard priest pedophiles, as well as their own power and authority at the expense of innocent children exacerbates their wounds. Father Thomas Doyle explains how "religious duress" puts Catholic children and their families at risk for this kind of abuse: "Many victims come from devout Catholic families. These families believe that the priest holds an exalted position in their lives. They have been taught that the priest occupied a position between them and salvation, between them and the spiritual security offered by the church to those who remain loyal and obedient to its way of life. Such people are taught not to question the wisdom and decisions of a priest, not to question his lifestyle and to presume only the purest motives of his actions. In many cases, Catholics also believed it a serious sin to question the authority of a priest or to speak ill or gossip about a priest. The idea of a priest sexually abusing or otherwise harming a child would have been… totally alien."

In working with clients who have been sexually abused by priest it is important to consider the incest wounds that this form of abuse brings with it. In her book, Resolving Sexual Abuse, psychotherapist Yvonne Dolan defines incestuous sexual abuse as "sexual contact with anyone who could be considered an inappropriate sexual partner because of blood ties or social ties to the individual and her family... sexual involvement between a child or adolescent and an individual who is in a position of power over them and from whom the child would traditionally expect protection and affection." Given this definition, combined with how Catholics are programmed to view priests, this form of child sexual abuse clearly qualifies as incest.

We as therapists know that the sexual victimization of children can be extremely psychologically destructive and quite often leads to a myriad of challenging symptoms as well as post traumatic stress disorder. For child victims of clergy sexual abuse there is even more damage. When a priest violates children, their young minds think that God is involved. They have no ability to process it any other way. The priest’s robe, his collar, the cross are all sacred images, all representing God. Many young children cannot separate these images of God from the horrible things the priest has done to them, and made them do.

Leslie Lothstein is director of psychology at the Institute of Living mental health center in Hartford, Connecticut and has worked with many victims of clergy abuse. He explains that: "Parishioners know that a priest has these magical functions to bring Christ's presence to them. When you're abused by someone like that, it's not just abuse of the body, it's abuse of the soul. Victims live a life of tremendous shame, thinking that they've had sex with God."

Laurie Pearlman, a psychologist at the Traumatic Stress Institute in South Windsor, Connecticut says such abuse is not only "a betrayal by a parent figure," but a robbery of "the spiritual security that another child might be able to find in a belief in God." Even years later, as adults, few victims of clergy sexual abuse are able to reclaim their faith. "Many of the patients I've seen in therapy talked about ‘soul murder,’" says Lothstein of the Institute of Living. "They felt as if something had been taken deeply inside of them in which the body wasn't hurt as much as the soul."

Our task in helping these victims goes beyond treating the agonizing emotional and physical wounds of sexual abuse. True healing for these victims will only come when they are able to separate their belief in God from flawed religious institutions and discover that authentic spirituality is not bestowed upon us by religious leaders but rather discovered right in our own hearts and minds.

Here are some obvious and perhaps, not so obvious, points to consider when developing a treatment plan for victims of clergy sexual abuse:

1. Establishing a sense of mental, emotional, physical safety.
2. Encouraging open expression of feelings.
3. Seeking compassion and empathy from fellow victims, family and supporters.
4. Healthy guidance through the stages of grief including: denial/shock, anger, mourning, acceptance.
5. Healthy guidance through guilt, shame and stigma.
6. Healthy reconnection with sexuality.
7. Healthy reconnection with everyday life.
8. Healthy reconnection with spirituality.
9. Fostering hope and a vision for the future.
10. Opening avenues for resolution, reconciliation and forgiveness as appropriate to the individual, including:

• Confronting abusers.
• Pursuing legal and moral justice.
• Pursuing systemic changes to prevent future violations.
• Participating in therapeutic approaches for nurturing healthy spiritual development.
• Participating in programs and services for victims to re-enter reformed religious system.