So here it is: For over two years I was stalked by a Catholic priest. I recognize that I am not a “typical victim” in the sense that I am (was) a girl and, in my case, I was not sexually assaulted.

But as with other victims I know what it is like to have my faith in the priesthood terribly violated, and for that violation to nearly destroy me….And, like other victims, when out of desperation I finally told on him, the Catholic officials’ response (or lack of one) to my begging and pleading to make his behavior stop was to prioritize only my silence. I know what it is like to sit in a room with powerful people who want nothing more than for you to disappear, to shut up, who could care less for your safety, your sanity, your well-being. I also know the fear of speaking up to my very core. I still feel that shame and fear. I feel it right now as I type these words. I know the exhaustion of living in the aftermath of this experience and trying to move forward from it without any place to put all that feeling, all that anger. I know what it is like to never have anyone say, “I’m sorry about what happened to you.”

And yet, she is still a practicing Roman Catholic. Why?

Freitas explains:

The reasons I love Catholicism–its priests and nuns, its rituals and culture–far outweigh this one hateful part of my past. My faith and place in this tradition is much bigger than one single priest and some terrible church officials. It transcends victimization and unspent anger.

My Catholic faith is so much more. It is my family, my friends, my professional life as a theologian and scholar of religion. It’s the way I mark time during the week and the year and the food I cook depending on the holiday. It is a childhood and a lifetime of experience. It is all over my writing.

I am more than this one scar, even though, like me, it is a stubborn scar. It simply won’t go away.

From this broader sense of Catholic identity I wish to discuss many things–yes, the scandal as it unfolds yet again, but eventually to move on from here to other topics. I will begin from my experience and from there hope to reach beyond my particular story and place in the Catholic tradition to that of others, too, who have stuck around like me. I look forward to the conversations. I hope you do, too.

…I will write this blog from a place of hope because I am hopeful–in the possibility of healing and moving forward on a personal level, but on a communal one, too. I have hope that my Church will some day begin to heal these gaping wounds, which will turn to scars and fade with the years, even though they will never disappear–nor should they. But the hope and healing starts from modest places–from telling the stories of ordinary Catholics who have suffered, who, like me, are still here, from shifting our attention from the clamor about the hierarchy, the pope, the Vatican, to the ordinary folk, the ordinary lay people, priests, and nuns, too, who make the Catholic Church what it really is. The Catholic Church is not all hierarchy. Thank God.

I hope she’s right about the healing and solace of people coming together. But Freitas is fooling herself if she thinks the Catholic Church is not all hierarchy. The Catholic Church is and has always been all about hierarchy; that is precisely what distinguishes it from other Christian denominations. The authoritarian abuses and corruption of the Catholic hierarchy have always existed; they sparked the Protestant Reformation almost 500 years ago. In that backlash, Reformers rejected the Papacy and democratized Christianity by doing away with the notion that priests were somehow closer to God than the people they served. Because of them, Freitas could easily reject the Church’s hierarchy and still be a practicing Christian; Catholicism is far from the only game in town.

I’ve always believed that if you belong to one of the Abrahamic religions, you automatically enter into a (sometimes dicey) bargain with the Patriarchy. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are patriarchial and—to varying degrees—authoritarian religions, with all the potential for disaster you’d expect. But the good news is that you can comparison-shop. The Jewish denomination I belong to is fully egalitarian and performs gay marriages. My sister’s Methodist congregation in Chicago has a giant banner outside their church proclaiming “Jesus Was Radically Inclusive.” Freitas, however, is reluctant to comparison-shop, and feels invested in the Church despite her experiences. I have several devoutly Catholic friends who are similarly entrenched, even as they abhor the institutional Church.

The “On Faith” commenters did not treat Freitas kindly. Even the less rant-y ones were sharp in their criticism. For example:

You have no influence on church policy. As long as you continue to sit in the pew and drop your money in the basket, it’s not that you don’t matter, it that you are actively condoning and enabling abusers to flourish.

What do y’all think? Does Freitas’s argument make sense to you? Does her unwillingness to quit the Church constitute some kind of Stockholm Syndrome? Or is she simply making her version of the bargain that most of us who practice organized religion make?

Brown Sugar
(The Rolling Stones)

gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields,
sold in a market down in New Orleans.
Scarred old slaver know he’s doin’ all right.
Hear him whip the women just around midnight.

brown sugar
how come you taste so good
brown sugar
just like a young girl should

drums beating cold
English blood runs hot
lady of the house wondrin
where its gonna stop.
house boy knows that he’s doin’ all right.
you shoulda heard him just around midnight.

brown sugar
how come you taste so good
mmm, brown sugar
just like a young girl should

aw, get down on your knees
brown sugar
how come you dance so good?
aw, get down on the ground
brown sugar
just like a young girl should

I bet your mama was a tent-show queen,
and all her girlfriends
were sweet sixteen.
I’m no schoolboy but I know what I like,
You shoulda heard me just around midnight.

brown sugar
how come you taste so good
aw get down
brown sugar
just like a young girl should.

I said yeah, yeah, yeah,
how come you taste so good?
yeah, yeah, yeah.
just like a young girl should.

Urrrghhhhh. The song is a glorification of slave rape, not a jolly tribute to a dark-skinned lover. I didn’t know that, as a high-schooler, when I hung my Rolling Stones tongue poster on my bedroom wall. “Some Girls” and “Under My Thumb” aren’t picnics either (just to name a couple). Classic rock is so fun to listen to; it’s what I grew up on. But in a lot of cases the lyrics are misogynist and/or racist, and the artists’ behavior may not have been admirable either. I feel dirty. Which lyrical discoveries have made you cringe?

Stepmother =/= Wicked. via cepatri55 @ flickr

The split happened a few weeks after I turned six. I was fairly calm when my parents sat me down to explain it. When they finished with their spiel, I simply asked Dad if we could go to Haagen-Dazs for chocolate ice cream.

And then things got more complicated than my young mind could process. Dad had a girlfriend. He had one immediately. It was a family friend and one of his coworkers, someone I truly adored. And it was obvious even to me that this was not really a new development. He had been with her before the end of the marriage.

Ruth (her middle name, for the sake of discretion) had worked with my father since I was six months old. She had visited me in the hospital when I had my open-heart surgery at 23 months. She had picked me up from nursery school and shuttled me to Dad’s office. She had given my parents the piano that I would eventually play for years after Dad moved out. She was warm, she was intelligent, she was someone I loved being with.

It could not have been more complicated.

Dad and Ruth maintained for years that they did not have an affair. They claimed it was only (to swipe a phrase from Alex Rodriguez’ wife) an affair of the heart. Finally, last year, they told the truth that had been so self-evident. And even though I had known all along, it hurt so deeply once again. The conflicting emotions came to the surface. Ruth was wonderful to me, but had been part of something that devastated my mother for countless years. My father was happier in his marriage to Ruth than he ever was with my mother, but he had betrayed the trust that I had put in him as a child.

For those of you who think that the immortal saga of Brad/Angelina/Jen is never-ending, I offer up my parents’ divorce. The wounds are still raw all around more than twenty years later. My mother and stepmother are mutual antagonists, with my little sister and me caught in the middle.

But whose fault was it? Ruth’s or Dad’s? Or was it neither? Why is the other woman always more stigmatized than the man who consciously chose to step outside his marriage and family? From my point of view, it was certainly easier to vilify this interloper than the father I still cannot help but worship.

When my father had a breakdown four years ago — really marking the onset of his early Alzheimer’s — he started cheating on my stepmother. He had not changed his behavior, and my stepmother was as hurt and angry as my mother had been. I was an adult, 23 years old, but felt almost vindicated when Dad told me that he and Ruth were going to separate. She had received her comeuppance, her punishment for what she had done! I was six years old all over again, and the other woman was at fault instead of my compulsively cheating father. Looking back on that, I feel deeply guilty and ashamed, and amazed that I am still struggling to move beyond that six-year-old frame of mind.

Over the past few years, as Dad has slid into Alzheimer’s and profound depression, I feel so grateful to have Ruth. I admit that there are still those times when I wish my father had been able to stay with my mother (and yes, I do understand that no divorce is ever that one-sided). But I realize that the split would have occurred with or without the other woman, the interloper, the stepmother, the other mother. Ruth did not end my parents’ marriage. My parents ended their marriage.

It is easy to blame the other woman. It is harder to assign equal responsibility to both parties, especially when the man is blood-related and, well, a man. Surely, Ruth must have been a scheming temptress, sharpening her claws for a catty catty catfight with Mom.

Or not.

No, definitely not. It was a speedbump in everyone’s life. It was not one woman’s grand plot to bring down a nuclear family that was in fact deeply dysfunctional. Ruth was not a siren steering the family into Scylla and Charybdis so that there would be a grand shipwreck. The whirlpool of anger has slowly subsided within me, and the only thing I can hold against Dad and Ruth is that they used extremely poor judgment. It hurt me, but that was not their intention. And, in the end, extremely poor judgment is a human trait. Parents are human, sometimes disappointingly so. Their children cannot change that, they can only move beyond it. I hope I have done so.