Out of this violence - in home and in Church - emerged a young woman who would later be ordained a Presbyterian minister, and who would focus "on the wounds that can be caused by organized religion and on the spiritual healing that must follow." (from "In Search of Spiritual Healing," by Kaya Oakes, in "America" magazine, October 2, 2017.) Her latest book, ""Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church"Feb 7, 2017 by Carol Howard Merritt, details her personal struggle with the spiritual fall-out of her sister's sexual abuse by a clergyman, and lovingly details the ways a victim can heal. She personally counsels many victims, providing guidance, listening, and often, as a representative of a Christian Church, apologizing for the sins of the Church.
Sexual abuse is not only a "Catholic Church problem." There are also recent accounts of abuse in the Anglican Church, as well as in fundamentalist and evangelical Churches. And the results of this peculiarly painful form of violence are the same, for both the abused person, the family, and the Church as a whole: deep feelings of anger and alienation. Kaya Oakes informs us,
"For Catholics, the topic of abuse remains a painful one. The recent charges of 'sexual offenses' faced by Cardinal George Pell have once agin stirred up the debate about the church's failure to rectify its abusive history, which has caused harm not only to the people abused and their families but to the church as a whole and has resulted in the attrition of many Catholics. A survey by the Public Research Institute in 2015 revealed that half of former Catholics point to the abuse crisis as a primary reason they left the church. Informal conversations with still practicing Catholics often reveal unresolved feelings of betrayal and anger about the abuse crisis."
Sexual abuse victims, and those who are victims because they are aware of the abuse, suffer from multiple kinds of damage: physical, psychological, and spiritual. Spiritual damage is the least discussed and least understood; it refers to damage to a person's faith and her relationship with God, especially for deeply religious victims. In spiritual abuse, the person has great difficulty loving God, and/or believing that he/she is loved by God.
An individual's misunderstanding of Scripture or theology can cause this terrible spiritual suffering and isolation. But the person's church itself can be complicit in this spiritual damage through its misguided interpretations of Christian teaching. "In many cases, spiritual abuse is rooted in a misunderstanding of God as 'vengeful, angry. or judgmental.' Spiritual abuse can also come from authoritarian churches in which the emphasis is on sin and depravity, which produces the feeling of not being able to love oneself or one's neighbor." (Oakes)
Rev. Merritt explains how damaging it is to people in the pews when a clergy person preaches about a vengeful God and relentlessly harps on personal sinfulness. "What happens when we have been taught to focus on our depravity so that we forget our own goodness? And what happens when we have been taught to judge our neighbors rather than love them? We can often end up with beliefs that damage us and keep us from abundant life."
Institutional cover-ups of sexual abusers compound spiritual damage. Sometimes the church leaders and members deny or cover up abuse to protect the organization because they fear the abused person will destroy the church. In other cases, it proceeds from authoritarianism, and a heavy emphasis on obedience and unquestioning, unthinking respect for the church leaders to protect the mission. In this oppressive atmosphere, the emphasis on obedience makes it that much harder for victims to speak up.
Kathryn Joyce recently wrote an article for "The New Republic" about large- scale cover-ups of abuse in evangelical missionary communities in which the patriarchal structure gave women and children little freedom or respect.
"According to Ms. Joyce, in communities like Quiverfull, the extreme focus on female modesty as a source of temptation to men results in situations like that of a young girl she encountered who was being abused by an older man, 'but people were talking about whether or not she was boy crazy and had brought that on.'"
Sarah Jones, raised in a fundamentalist...family, was taught from an early age that women are tempters. "You are told God designed you to be submissive, and that your body is a stumbling block to men. These doctrines are not particularly conducive to creating a culture that takes sexual abuse seriously. They instead encourage shame and silence." (Oakes)
Members of an institution can be insidious in protecting the Church by manipulating the victims. They tell them that they must have misunderstood the abuse, they question their story, they insinuate that the person is lying, or telling them that they have been complicit in sinful behavior. Rev. Merritt says,
"This becomes spiritual abuse because the church itself can be so closely associated with God that the person is beginning to believe that God doesn't believe them, and ultimately the victims may come to see themselves and their lived experience as untrustworthy. Our image of God is often based on God's role as protector and provider, which is sound theology, but, when abuse occurs, something breaks down in the victim's understanding of God."
The deepest spiritual pain for abusers is often the questions "How could God let this happen to me?" or "Is an angry God punishing me?" This is where the deepest questions about evil surface. Why does God allow so much evil and suffering in this world? Don't we often say that God is all-powerful? In control? But God allows EVERYTHING, and His power is not control. "God is not a cosmic regulator, giving or withholding permission for every temporal event, signing off on some and regulating others according to an eternal master plan...." (Bradley Jersak, "Towards A More Christ-Like God.")
How is God all-powerful then? In Jesus the Christ, Who, in his suffering on the cross, drank our cup of suffering - for all people for all time - and extends the power of his healing love to all people at all times. Christ enters into our suffering, understands it, and through his suffering love, moves, acts, and heals in our lives, often through the hands and words and acts of love of his Body.
God our Father, Who was with Christ through his suffering, and is also with us in ours, is also a Healing Force. Rev. Merritt says "that the image of a God who suffers with us can play a role in helping people recover from a broken understanding of God after abuse. The image of a God who 'suffers with us' can offer more consolation to the abused, because that parental God is present to our suffering. Devotions by women to Our Lady of Sorrows, for example, allow abused women to imagine a God who feels the same pain they do. This suffering God helps a victim of spiritual abuse to be 'more resilient,' because they now have a 'suffering parent walking with us and suffering with us.'" (Oakes) Only a God Who can enter into our suffering can heal our suffering.
One of the most horrible and pervasive effects of child sexual abuse is that it can lead a girl into a life of prostitution. That was the terrible reality for Brenda Myers-Powell (pictured below.)
When she was fourteen, her grandmother told her to go out and make money to help support the family. Brenda had seen the prostitutes walking up and down the streets of her neighborhood, and loved their glittery clothes. She decided to continue doing what she already knew how to do. She only remained a free-lancer for a few weeks - until two violent pimps beat her up, threatened her life, and made her work for them. She soon discovered how many of her customers were prone to violence: she was shot and stabbed multiple times. She began using crack cocaine to dull the pain and mindless violence of her existence.
Finally one night, a customer threw her out of his car, and her skirt caught in the door; she was dragged by the car until the skin was ripped off her face and down her one side. Brenda says,
"I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: 'Oh I know her. She's just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.' And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn't worth anything, as if I didn't deserve the services of the emergency room after all.
"And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas. I remember looking up and saying to God, 'These people don't care about me. Could you please help me?'
"God worked real fast. A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around.
"It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn't have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back.
"Through Edwina Gateley, I learned the value of that deep connection that can occur between women, the circle of trust and love and support that a group of women can give one another." (BBC News Magazine, June 30, 2015)
Today Brenda is married, and has seen her daughters grow up to be beautiful, fulfilled and talented young women. She works extensively to reach out to girls caught in the web of prostitution and human trafficking, enters prisons as a social worker to find young victims of the sex trade, and is co-founder of "The Dreamcatcher," a not-for-profit organization to help young girls get out of and stay out of the sex trade. She advocates for abused women and gives talks and conferences. Her spiritual healing has given her a new appreciation of women's self-worth as God's daughters, and a clear understanding of the ugly, soul-destroying reality of sexual abuse.
"When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn't come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that's more than 1,800 men she's having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no-one's bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They're using my body like a toilet.
"And the johns - the clients - are violent. I've been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don't know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or mental illness or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn't go to the police and if I did I wouldn't be taken seriously.
"I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets....
"People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalised. I think it's true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat.
"But let me ask you a question. How many people would you encourage to quit their jobs to become prostitutes? Would you say to any of your close friends or female relatives, "Hey, have you thought of this? I think this would be a really great move for you!"
"And let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that's not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn't work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that's when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you're beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.
"Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals." (BBC News)
The grim reality of sexual abuse, whether it happens in a family setting, a church setting, or within the jungle undergrowth of prostitution, is that it's a physically, psychologically, and spiritually damaging evil - and that, often enough, distorted images of God and of the God-ordained relationship between men and women are its basis. Abused women from an early age learn to say "yes" to sexual predators and "no" to their own self-worth and the spiritual reality that they are made in God's Image. Men who are abusers learn from an early age that women are given to men by God for their convenience and pleasure. The victims of abuse often have bitter, negative images of themselves and of a God Who allows this suffering to happen.
But, God is a God of Love and Mercy, a God Who, Father-like, is with us in all our suffering, and Who died on the cross in the Person of Jesus and so understands our suffering from the inside-out, in the flesh. God reaches out to us in healers like the Rev. Carol Howard Merritt and Brenda Myers-Powell, women who have been victims themselves but have risen up, been healed and made whole, and now reach out to their sisters (and often brothers) who have been sexually victimized. Eternal our merciful God. He is faithful from age to age.