The abuse that knows no gender

The woman called with a tale of abuse by a member of the church, and my mind raced through the reams of horror stories I have read in recent weeks: Priest befriends parish family, grooms the child, then abuses him or her. Silence is kept until years pass and memories surge up — and our collective faith is rattled like a loose door in a hurricane.

The woman telling the story is almost 70 now and lives outside Seattle. And as the sex-abuse scandal sweeping the Roman Catholic clergy intensifies, the years, miles and memories have caught up to her with a vengeance.

Now she wants it understood that the scandal reaches beyond the priesthood to nuns, and beyond individuals to an institutional culture.

"Males are not only what the Catholic Church is made of," the woman told me. "Women are the last to speak out, especially good Catholic women."

When the abuse started, the woman was 14 and a ward of the state who had been taken from her mother, then her father, and eventually sent to the former Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls' boarding school in Colton, Whitman County.

Three nuns made advances over a period of three years. She was a vulnerable, needy and confused adolescent, she said, and they knew it.

At the start of her junior year, a new nun joined the school staff. The nun, 37 at the time, was in charge of the dorms. One night, the nun approached the girl and kissed her. Another night, the nun invited her into a classroom and undressed in front of her, inviting sex.

"She used me," the woman said. "And in my own childish way, I had a crush on her."

Looking back, she believes school officials had to know. The nun and the student were often missing from roll call, overheard in the halls and seen together in empty rooms.

The sexual relationship continued for a year. The girl felt guilty "all the time," unable to resolve her actions with her desire to be decent. She finally confessed to a priest, who told her she was doubly guilty of mortal sin: Once for participating and once for aiding the nun in violating her vow of chastity.

"It's like being an incest victim," the woman told me. "It's the same marriage in the church — one parent won't rat out the other. And I felt like the whole world had come down on my shoulders."

The nun tried to ease her worries, promising that they would somehow be together, that she would leave the order once the girl graduated from high school. But when that time came, the nun merely tucked a packet of love letters in the girl's suitcase.

The girl — by then young woman — got a job with General Electric in Richland, but suffered attacks of vertigo. She entered the convent, hoping it might lead her back to the nun.

Instead, she found her faith — at least in the institutional church — shattered: "I felt like I was going to scream every time I was in the chapel."

She went back to GE and started seeing a psychiatrist, something she still does.

She became a social worker recognized for her kindness to clients — especially to abused children — but whose career climb was limited by phobias: She has to sit near doors and can't cross bridges.

She has lived alone most of her life. She has friends, but her "closest associates" are her two dogs. She is interested in Eastern religions "because they are not patriarchal or matriarchal."

And at 70, she sees her life as broken shards that all trace back to the girl she was in boarding school. Even now, she is unable to trust, to feel love, to return to the Catholic Church.

Then, as accusations against priest after priest broke recently, friends urged the woman to confront her past. So she called the Most Rev. William Skylstad, bishop of the Spokane Diocese. He was in Rome at the time, one of the U.S. bishops meeting with Pope John Paul II about the crisis.

But when Skylstad got back to Spokane, he called the woman and listened to her story. He drew his breath in when she told him about the priest-confessor who blamed her for the sins of the nun.

"I told her I was very sorry that it happened," Skylstad told me in an interview. "And I told her, 'In the name of the church, I apologize to you.' "

The nuns accused of the abuse are likely dead, Skylstad said. But he gave the woman the number of the order's motherhouse. When she called, she said, a woman there "listened, told me she would get back to me, but I have yet to hear from them."

She feels a sense of relief and empowerment after speaking out. "But it is almost too late," she said.

Too late, because there is so much about the church that must change and there has already been so much damage — to victims of sex abuse, and to the reputation of the clergy.

"You trap the nuns and priests in an institution, so they're victims," she said. "And then I became a worse victim. I think (the nun) was very predatory and I think the hierarchy, the way the church is set up, doesn't help."

As she watched news of the meetings in Rome, she was appalled that there were no experts on child abuse included.

"They stole my life and they can't ever give it back to me. When you're talking about the soul. ... "

She can't get that life back. But she wants to use what life she has left to heal, and to seal the past in the past.

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or at nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. More columns can be found at www.seattletimes.com/columnists. Mother, where art thou?

"The abuse that knows no gender" I think not. Fag hag Nichole is trying to take the heat off homosexuals but it will only work if people turn a blind eye to the situation, like the nuns did to this woman's sexual abuse.

Homosexual priests definetly trump lesbian nuns when it comes to molesting children.

"You trap the nuns and preists in an institution, so they're victims".How does a nun or preist get "trapped" in an institution they freely go into and could leave at any time?

I love it when people go to see modern witchdoctors, the head shrinkers, and then get even more wacko as a result.

The biggest scam and tragedy of my lifetime has been the blossoming of the head shrinkers and the unfortunate acceptance thereof in addition to the massive amounts of my tax dollars now lining their pockets!

I wish someone would do a study showing how bad the batting average of the head shrinking business is.

Interesting comment.
For years, the "therapy" for sexual "offenders", i.e.: child molesters, was to attach electrodes to their penis (plesthmogrph [spelling unsure]) and have them sit and watch child pornography and register their responses. When they would become "aroused", an ammonia vial was broken and the foul odor was supposed to un-arouse them. A sort of reverse Pavlovian response. After a few years of this "therapy", the offenders would get early release back into the commmunity with a supply of ammonia capsules. Whenever a "treated" offender would find himself in a potentially "offensive" situation (in a room with little children, for instance), he was supposed to break open an ammonia cap, take a sniff, and he would be okay.

You may say this sounds like baloney, but I assure you it is the truth.

I always wondered how it was that the state-sponsored therapists were able to obtain child porno?
And, it was obvious the "therapists" were watching the stuff as well.
Very sick, sick, sick.

She finally confessed to a priest, who told her she was doubly guilty of mortal sin: Once for participating and once for aiding the nun in violating her vow of chastity.

This priest was an idiot.

Good for Bishop Sjkylstad that he renounced this nonsense.

How much damage have priests done in the confessional? More than we know.

When I was active in the anti-porn movement I came at it from a different perspective than most of the feminazis I was working with. I understood the harm to women but viewed pornographers primarily as child molesters of male children. The pornographers were cruelly violating the normal sexual developement of millions of young men as if they had their own hand down the childs pants.

During this time I did a lot of public speaking and a woman called me to ask if I would talk with her husband who was in a sexual offenders treatment program in prison, a program he was very troubled by.

I talked with the man (he was not a pedophile but had been convicted of some peeping tom/public masturbating stuff). He related that they forced him to look at tons of pronography and would shock him if he responded to the "wrong" kind of porn. Problem was they wanted him to masturbate to the "right" kind of porn and what they considered to be O.K was the stuff that drove him mad.

Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler etc. He tried to tell them that showing him that stuff was like throwing gasoline on a fire but they could not understand how pornography could degrade women in the minds of men or why any "normal" male would not want to masturbate to the stuff.

I noticed you are from Washington.
The aroma therapy "treatment" I mentioned above was standard fare at Western State Hospital's Sexual Offender Treatment Program.
A convicetd molester could opt out of a prison sentence by agreeing to "treatment" at the hospital's program.
I don't know if they are still using that method.
Lord only knows how many dangerous perverts they've let loose on the streets.

Lord only knows how many dangerous perverts they've let loose on the streets.

Agree. I'd also like to know how many they made worse by forcing them to engage in behavior that played a critical role in their perversion in the first place.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.