Sex abuse survivor says her love of Eucharist helped restore her faith
By Katie Collins
Catholic News Service
ARLINGTON, Virginia – Teresa Pitt Green sat in her car in the church parking lot. She watched parishioners walk up the steps to Mass. It was so easy for them, she thought.
Unable to follow in their footsteps, she sat in the car and longed for the Eucharist. Men who consecrate the bread had betrayed her. Authorities in the Church, who had entrusted the sacrament to the men, had failed her. From age seven to 19, Green was sexually abused by multiple priests in her north-east diocese. Her abusers worked at her school and visited her family in the evenings.
In an interview with The Arlington Catholic Herald diocesan newspaper, Green recently recounted how, though she “left the Catholic Church forever many times,” her love of the Eucharist endured and, with the support of Arlington diocesan priests, Office of Victim Assistance programmes and Arlington Bishop Paul S Loverde, she was able, eventually, to enter a church without fear and receive the body of Christ.
Earlier this year, Green published Restoring Sanctuary (Dog Ear Publishing), a book part memoir, part spiritual reflection and part impetus for healing.
The book immerses the reader in the Church’s painful wound through the eyes of a victim,although Green does not give explicit details of abuse. But she is explicit when she defines the nature of the crime: “Sexual abuse of children is violence by sexual means by predators who seek to dominate another person by destroying their spirit.”
For “predator priests,” there is “a meticulous grooming of the mind to prepare it to be broken,” she said. “They make themselves a false idol, the dominant power. As a sapling, it cuts to your core.”
The physiological, spiritual and physical costs of Green’s sexual abuse were great. In her book, she recounts her many health problems and an abusive relationship – all, she believes, with roots in the abuse.
Yet, Green does not linger on the costs. In the chapter “Story,” she writes that she reached a point where “suffering was about to be redemptive.” After years of therapy, self-help books, support groups – often either rejecting the healing potential of Catholicism or highly suspicious of it – and struggles with faith, Green recognised there was an “imprint of Catholic on me, an imprint of Christ on me that went deeper than any wound.”
Even though she understood the imprint, and therapy had led her toward healing, she had yet to integrate her “wounded faith into the process.”
“Everything seemed different” when she first spoke with Pat Mudd, coordinator of the Office of Victim Assistance in the Diocese of Arlington, and Oblate Father Mark Mealey, vicar general. Both offered two things: They recognised evil and they heard her pain, not with pity but with charity.
Fr Mealey encouraged Green to share her story on paper. “I think he was imagining a two-page article maybe, and he got a full book,” she said.
As she began to weave fragments of her life into a cohesive whole, she became involved in diocesan victim assistance programmes which helped her further along a path that would restore her wounded faith.
“Despite my age, I was carrying memories jumbled still by the pain they carried, and I babbled like a child,” said Green, as she recalled talking with Bishop Loverde the first time. “That is when my memories became a story, and the story revealed to me my own undying faith.”
It was a powerful healing moment to have a Bishop “just sit and listen,” she said.
Green is quick to express her sympathy for the priests and Bishops who were betrayed by the sins of their brother priests – and who often are chastised for those sins. Priests and Bishops have been “betrayed by those they trusted, as well,” she said. “They need to be cared for, too.”
In Restoring Sanctuary, she refutes arguments that to curb clergy sexual abuse, the Church should prohibit gay priests or allow priests to marry. She also said it’s “not a liberal or conservative thing.” It’s a matter of evil, she said.
Her book – along with the diocesan outreach Green embraces gratefully – is a testament to Christ’s love, present in the sacrament that kept calling her back to the faith.
“The world is full of conflict,” she said. “The Eucharist has something beyond the conflict of the world.”