Healing the wounds OF CLERICAL ABUSE

Fr Dominic Allain reflects on how the Grief to Grace programme aims to provide survivors of abuse with a safe environment in which they can support one another in their healing.

Grief to Grace is a Catholic ministry which aims to offer healing to survivors of abuse, especially clergy abuse. At its heart is a residential retreat programme of intense psychological and spiritual exercises. These are centred in the Word of God, with sacraments integrated. There are lay psychotherapists and volunteers, and priests experienced in spiritual direction and/or counselling who comprise the team, many of whom are survivors themselves. It is a group process, which at first may seem counterintuitive, but the group helps restore social engagement, one of the things which becomes shameful and difficult after abuse trauma. The group functions as the wounded Body of Christ: participants show compassion, support and encouragement for one another in their healing.

In 2021, Grief to Grace was given a favourable lease on a former Jesuit house in south west London. A resident community of two diocesan priests and a brother live a common life there to ensure that the ministry is grounded in intercession for victims and survivors, for a renewal in the Church. There is daily Mass, Adoration and Eucharistic reparation. The house is the privileged setting for residential retreat programmes and support groups. Survivors appreciate the comfortable, secure and confidential environment; healing only happens in spaces which are physically and spiritually safe and boundaried. Outside of retreats, we see people for counselling, and host conferences and training for the teams we are establishing elsewhere in Europe. We call the centre ‘The Garden Enclosed’. As the only centre of its kind in England and Wales, it stands as a powerful sign that the Church is committed to concrete measures for the healing of survivors. People tell us that being welcomed into such an environment contributed to their healing because: ‘It seems like someone in the Church really does care about us.’

Not all retreatants are survivors of clerical abuse, but a significant number are. For them, the programme provides the opportunity to voice to a priest and an ecclesial community their anger, shame or sense of betrayal at what happened; to have this witnessed with compassion. The priest weeps with and for them, and can offer a heartfelt apology in the name of the Church. Anger is a stage of grief: if a retreatant starts voicing anger with the Church we don’t counter with arguments. Rather, we tell the person to go up to the priest, make eye contact and say: ‘A priest really hurt me’ or ‘a priest destroyed my faith’. This is, after all, the truth, and the truth will set you free. This is a very different experience from telling the story of their abuse in a therapy session. Henry Thoreau said it takes two to speak the truth: one to speak and one to witness. For this reason it is essential that priests are involved in the work of healing. It’s a fact that at the point where the retreat process invites the participants really to let go and grieve, without fail it is to the priest that the clerical abuse victims turn for comfort, because this is the unresolved attachment wound of their abuse: they really did desire and invest in goodness and holiness, it’s what drew them. This was not a dangerous deception, but a genuine movement of their spirit which can be recovered and yield peace when the face of the Good Shepherd is not obscured by a wolf in sheep’s clothing. As the programme invites them to enter deeply into the mystery of the Lord’s Passion, they reveal their own wounds before the crucifixion. Christ’s own suffering is superimposed over their own, and by this solidarity they enter into the hope of resurrection and a new vision of their dignity as the beloved child of God. One survivor of clerical abuse wrote simply in her final evaluation: ‘You have given me back my Jesus.’ In truth, He was always there, but perhaps, like Mary Magdalene, she could not see him through her tears.