Over the last day or so I posted the comments that follow below, here, and when I awakened this morning and checked in with Dr. Blosser, he referred me to a wonderful post from Father Zuhlsdorf here that has all kinds of good data and links that help to redress the excessively deceitful spin of the secular media concerning the sexual predations of members of the Catholic clergy.
The post below this one is the Zenit article here which calls for healing and truth, and not just the truth concerning abuse but also truth concerning the internal realities of the ones tampered with, raped and reduced to victim status in their own minds.
This, naturally, means that there needs to be an outlet for these victim voices so that reality replaces the lie and half-truth, and morality serves as part of the healing process, and not just a hammer with which to beat those who do not accept secular norms of behavior as inherently more good or more just that those morals and principles of Catholic tradition and faith.
To a victim of sexual predation, alienation is the scourge of their lives, and to have the national and international media sources encourage further alienation is hate speech and should be called precisely what it is.
The fact that people who are inherently charged with an especial call to be moral, no more negates the substance of the morality, than a corrupt government official, negates the principles which constitute a nation.
Healing comes first and foremost from within and for Catholics and Orthodox and other Christians, it comes by grace, and grace is mediated by all of us as the Body of Christ. You cannot wish that away or order it away. It is greater than the law of any land, and as broad and deep as the heavens. To attack the Church does nothing but attack the very means and source for spiritual and psychological healing available to those who are so deeply wounded.
When young children, and youthful men and women are sexually awakened by sexual predators there is a radical change in the life course of those children and youths. There is no doubt of that. The memories and automatic responses to certain stimuli are with that person for life. So to pound the drums of destruction and retribution does NOTHING to help that person and actually does a great deal to slow that healing process and can in some cases insure that the healing never takes place, due to continued alienation from the very source of that healing.
Lady of the Sign, pray for us!
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Comments: For some of us, what is going on in the media, and the tendency to partial truth and outright lie, is extremely damaging and hits several old triggers that are common to many who have survived abuse, and done so reasonably well.
It is not necessary to say much but I do think the voices of some of the survivors need to be heard as well as those whose outrage is many times removed from the actual experience.
It has been my experience that personal guilt is far more devastating than any reserved rage against the perpetrator. I am sure there is rage in some, but I'd not believe a report that said that was the most debilitating response.
http://irenikontheskete.blogspot.com/2010/04/faith-foul-deeds-and-falsehoods.html
Indeed! For Catholics, in particular, we can say forthrightly that compassion and forgiveness and empathy is the Truth. It is part of the Great Command, and it is not well known to the exclusively secular segment of any and all peoples.
It is part of the reason that there was victim-related complicity in the disposition of sexual predators,in the days when it was believed that these men and women could be released from that particular bondage to sensual degradation.
Catholics have good hearts and minds and they were willing to give a fellow human being another chance. They were also caught up in the guilt that I mentioned earlier, thinking perhaps they had been materially complicit or failed in some way to protect their own.
There are those others in the world whose cosmologies are sufficiently theological that loving the sinner makes sense to them. They too can grasp the theology of empathy and compassion and mercy even if they miss the theology of Incarnation.
The Pain Stream Media grasps none of it, and in fact rejects it, save as a curiosity, and that I believe is purposeful, calculated and in fact does grave and criminal harm to the survivors and victims of sexual predation.
To a survivor of sexual exploitation, any kind of lie or separation from reality is a kind of rape. It is an appropriation of the experience of the one who suffers, for material and political gain. It is hate speech that has direct impact on the abused.
Where do we begin a counter-measure that will be heard by more than a few friends and family, I wonder?
EM
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