by Catherine Woodiwiss

Catherine Woodiwiss is the Associate Web Editor of Sojourners. This article is the third post in a Sojourners series on sexualized violence in the church. Click here to see her full bio. Find Catherine on Twitter @chwoodiwiss.

This is the third in a Sojourners series on sexualized violence in Christian communities. Looking at Our Stories Untold, as well as other individuals and organizations creating an awareness about sexualized violence in Christian communities, this piece offers hope and joy in those taking this issue seriously.

 This piece has been re-posted to Our Stories Untold with permission. To see the article in full, please click over to Sojourners site.

IN 2002, Anne Barrett Doyle’s church involvement took a radical turn. The Boston Globe had just launched a series investigating rampant abuse among clergy in Boston’s Archdiocese, and the Catholic woman found herself protesting something for the first time in her life: her own Church.

“I was just pulled into this story, inextricably, with a force I didn’t understand,” Boston-based Barrett Doyle said.

This pull led her to help form Bishop Accountability, a clearinghouse that works to create and maintain a public record of clergy abuse in the Catholic Church. To date, the group maintains extensive paper trails (“over one million pages,” said Barrett Doyle), on reported sex abuse scandals around the country.

Nearly a decade would pass before Barrett Doyle realized her agitated response — an accusation against the church, in defense of the faith — was shared by many in leadership. The change came in 2012, when a priest sent her documents on a incident he’d brought to light in the 1990s.

“This man spoke out against abuse, and his career was altered forever by it,” Barrett Doyle said. “He’d done a wonderful thing, and his story was totally forgotten. He’d had no contact from other priests since. He was alone.”

Wondering whether other clergy were similarly isolated, Barrett Doyle began encouraging outspoken priests and nuns — some survivors themselves — to share their experiences with each other. The earliest conversations served as a makeshift support group, calling themselves the Catholic Whistleblowers — but as the group grew in size and courage, they began a bold effort to demand reform at the highest levels in the Church.

And last week the group took its message public, in hopes that exposure would draw more Catholics to the cause.

“I deal with stories of evil on a daily basis,” Barrett Doyle said of her work. “It’s demoralizing to traffic in these traumatizing stories. So it’s been a wonderful experience collecting stories of true bravery in the faith.”

For both Bishop Accountability and Catholic Whistleblowers, the simple act of speaking up is enough to cause rumbles in the Church. Bishop Accountability, while not advocating for sweeping change, is “inherently rocking the boat just by preserving the public record on these scandals,” Barrett Doyle said.

And among whistleblowers, she said, “There’s a real sense now of, ‘I want to report this — will you stand by my side?’”

A figure walks towards the light. Photo courtesy of Sojourners / BEELDPHOTO / shutterstock.com

ALTHOUGH the Christian church as a whole seemingly remains stuck in a culture of silence, advocates are steadily building the platforms for individual voices to change the narrative. The depth of reconciliation that plays out upon these platforms can be profound.

Rachel Halder, founder of Our Stories Untold — a blog that hosts stories from survivors of sexualized violence within the Mennonite church — has witnessed such moments happen in real time.

One of Halder’s first contributors was a woman who was prompted to break her silence after Todd Akin’s comments qualifying “legitimate rape.” After she posted her story, the woman’s former dorm-mate — who decades ago witnessed the immediate aftermath of this assault — recognized the story.

Halder sat in disbelief as this dorm-mate came clean with her own years of shame and regret, expressing sorrow over lessons learned too late.

“I just saw this play out on my site, this overwhelming moment of reconciliation and restoration,” Halder said, who later helped the two women reconnect by email. “It was completely unanticipated … they hadn’t seen each other in 20, 30 years. The healing process in these kinds of stories is really magical.”

One of Halder’s former classmates also suffered abuse and the subsequent sweeping-under-the-rug at her Mennonite college, but it wasn’t until years later, while sitting on a planning committee for women’s leadership in the church, that Halder started seeing the real need to speak into the silence around abuse.

“Women in the church didn’t disagree with me, but they were scared to upset [things],” Halder said. “I realized, if this isn’t the space for sharing stories, I’ll create space.”

She continued, “I’ve never gotten pushback for my work. Most people say ‘I hadn’t thought about this before, and I can’t get this kind of conversation anywhere else.’ And, ‘thank you.’”

This is the beautiful side of breaking the silence. And as more advocates plant signposts in the church’s swamp of sexual violence, the muddiest waters are beginning to recede.

MARIE Fortune can see this change happening, step by step. When she started her work in the 1970’s, there was “simply no conversation,” she said.

Fortune, founder of the Faith Trust Institute — a national multi-faith training network based in Seattle — was one of the earliest voices speaking out against sexual abuse in church. Trained in a rape crisis center, the young United Church of Christ seminarian saw a gap between faith communities and advocacy groups on conversations about sexual violence.

“Someone needed to put those two together. Christians in particular were really not prepared for the reality of the incredible number of survivors and victims,” Fortune said.

With the Faith Trust Institute, Fortune developed training curricula, policies, and protocol for clergy around two major blind spots in churches’ approaches to sexual violence: prevention of abuse, and responding to it.

In her 35 years of work across denominations and faiths, “the particular issue of sexual violence — rape, intimate partner violence — is the one that faith communities are least willing to tackle,” Fortune said.

… Piece continued on Sojourners site.

Please click here to read more about Rev. Victoria Ferguson, who founded Kindred Moxie —  a community leadership network — in Atlanta, that trains interfaith leaders to become spokespeople on ending sexual violence, as well as other great people doing work in the Christian church.