Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D.
I have read over 30 books dealing with the sexual abuse of children, the books are heart wrenching and thoughtfully done. This book takes us deeper into our relationship with the God who created and loves us.As the author invites us into his story, he starts right away ...”the many people harmed by abuse, there is no greater pain then the feeling of shame.” And in many instances the shame we carry isn’t even ours to carry, instead created by those who exploited and used us. This is something he knew when the author was a child he was sexually abused, first by a teacher and then by a Catholic priest. Carrying that kind of trauma is the devil. It satays in the core of your being. For many victims of abuse, they go to their graves never revealing what they endured. For fear. For shame. Some like the friend of the author, was also abused by a Catholic priest, took their own lives because he could not live with that unbearable pain.
In the author’s own life torment of shame took many faces: addiction, depression. suicidal thoughts bankruptcy, job loss, and home loss. The author felt his childhood was lost. His development was stunted. He was afraid. He did not know how to break away. When his trust in another was broken, brokenness took root. His life became so fragile and grew into severe isolation. He was young when his father died at only forty. His mother responded by falling into rage, loneliness and drink. In his early life she was largely absent. By her late thirties she was a widow and would live only to sixty, dying not long after He married. The kind of pain he endured and the shame he carried weren’t as he later discovered rare. The Church’s crisis today stems from large-scale, ongoing sexual violation and abuse at the hands of priests, and it is a crisis that threatens the heart of the Church and its sacredness.
As the author points out, the depth of this crisis is unfathomable: priests have sexually violated children minors, and vulnerable adults, including seminarians. For far too long the Church ha tolerated this harm. Truth didn’t seem to matter. Secrets abounded. Files were concealed. Priests covered for other priests. Abusers were moved to other parishes who weren’t informed, and then the cycle of abuse began again. But those who were victimized never forgot. For the author, the saving grace was my healing journey in grace itself. God’s loving grace somehow reached the author, and in that grace he found his ultimate spiritual direction in the person of the Holy Spirit. His story of grace also includes religious women, family friends and the surprise of some good flawed and holy priests, humans like all of us bonded together by a loving Christ all who were people who heard Mark’s story and never failed to love.
To truly imagine a different Church under Pope Francis during and beyond the Synod on Synodality process concluding in October 2024 requires what Fr. Rolheiser calls “paschal imagination.” For those hurt sexually by the Church, for the journey from victim to survivor where a real theology of healing is found in the lived experience of those, like the author who have touched a living death on earth and discovered the resurrection. It’s a resurrection in the loving grace of Jesus. Before he was the Risen one, Jesus was the Suffering One who wept for his friend Lazarus, and who then me his own agony on the cross.
In and out of the pews, abuse occurs everywhere. Secondly violated children, minors and adult men and women, regardless of race, sexuality, economic status, ethnic background—all must discern how God brings comfort. When we the abused, we accompanied by God and others in love, we more fully discern interior peace. We are all pilgrims and living authentically depends on our ability, however broken we may feel, to rise again and again, not only for ourselves but also for others who need those abused. In finishing this book and knowing what the plea of our Pope is, I think we need to read the book and follow the words of our Pope to be Pilgrims of Hope.