Courageous Conversation: How Immigrant Voices are Silenced in Church Abuse
Awake’s latest Courageous Conversation explored important questions of how the abuse crisis has affected immigrant communities. A recording of the event is available below.
“Hidden at the Margins: Church Abuse and Silenced Voices in Minority and Immigrant Communities,” featured Aimee Torres of Los Angeles, a Filipino American documentary filmmaker who was harmed as a child by a priest, and Eduardo Lopez de Casas of Houston, vice president of the board of directors for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), who experienced abuse by several teachers, a scout master, and his parish priest. The third panelist was Susan Bigelow Reynolds, assistant professor of Catholic studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, who recently wrote an article in the journal Religion and American Culture, called “I Will Surely Have You Deported,” which describes cases of clergy sexual abuse of undocumented teenage boys from families that had recently immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico.
All three speakers described the ways families new to the United States are particularly vulnerable to abuse by predatory priests and ministers—and how Church leaders have often failed to protect the vulnerable.
Parishes that served minority and immigrant Catholics often became “dumping grounds” where abusive priests could operate without scrutiny, Reynolds explained. Reports from victim-survivors could be ignored, in part because parishioners feared deportation and lacked access to resources including expert legal help.
Victim-survivors from immigrant communities often face additional discrimination and harm, she added. “That’s why I think that this panel is so important, and that’s what I think is missing from our larger consciousness around clergy sexual abuse in this country.”
POWER WIELDED IN THE CHURCH
Torres and Lopez de Casas both spoke about how much their parents valued the Catholic Church and how priests held honored status in their families and broader communities. Torres said that in her community priests were seen as “little kings,” and for a long time she stayed silent, doubting that her family would believe her if she disclosed her abuse.
Her family trusted that a priest would not abuse a child, Torres said. And she suspects that her mother felt trapped by her financial situation. “My mom was working full time and she lacked resources for childcare,” she recalled. So she relied on a respected elderly aunt for help. The aunt was close friends with a diocesan priest, originally from the Philippines, who often spent the night in her home. Torres and her sister were often there when the priest was, which allowed the abuse to take place. Although there were stories swirling about the priest, Torres said, her mother continued to send the girls to the aunt’s house, especially after Torres’ father died, because she lacked alternatives.
Lopez de Casas described how his mother, who was born in Mexico City, sent him to the parish priest for help with the trauma caused by his abusive teachers. But when that priest also abused Lopez de Casas, he felt that he could not tell her. “I could not bring myself to ruin my mother’s faith in the Church,” he says. Until his mother’s death in 2021, he tried never to speak ill of a priest or other Church officials in her presence.
The Conversation Continues. Please Join Us!
Don’t miss Part 2 of this Courageous Conversation, 7 pm Central on Thursday, January 18. Attendees will break into small groups to discuss the ideas shared by the panelists in Part 1. To join us, please complete the registration for Part 2 and watch the video recording before you attend. See you on Thursday!
Reynolds shared details about Peter Garcia, an abusive priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles from the 1960s through the 1980s, who took advantage of families with “precarious legal status, to manipulate victims and their families,” she said. “He served for a time as the head of Hispanic outreach in the archdiocese, which gave him a really unique, trusted status, particularly for recently arrived families.”
Garcia helped families obtain housing and enroll their children in Catholic schools, gaining parents’ loyalty and trust. When he then abused their children and teens, he “used families’ undocumented status to threaten these children,” she said, scaring them into staying silent.
Equally disturbing, diocesan documents suggest that officials “also used families’ precarious legal status to cast doubt on the reliability of their claims,” Reynolds added, “and used bureaucracy to slow track their claims and played on stereotypes around immigrant families, around Latinos, to cast all kinds of implicit and explicit doubt on the claims.”
BARRIERS TO REPORTING
The discussion touched on the ways that the abuse reporting process has been especially hard for people in immigrant communities. For example, hotlines that collect abuse reports may be answered by people who only speak English. Lopez de Casas’ parents did not speak English, and he said that when he reported his first instances of abuse in school, he realized that the translators were not describing the details of his case accurately. It took time and effort to find reliable translators with the help of a family friend.
Torres spoke movingly about the difficulties of getting support as a 17-year-old when she reported her abuse. Adults at her school expressed concern because she seemed depressed, which led Torres to disclose the abuse to a school minister. The minister called police and her abuser was arrested, but Torres said she was treated as if she was at fault.
She remembered being questioned for hours at the police station without a parent present. “I felt like I did the right thing [by] reporting, but I wasn’t treated like I did the right thing. And so it broke me,” she said. Without understanding what was happening, she was involuntarily admitted to a hospital for in-patient psychiatric care. Her aunt came to the hospital to verbally abuse her. Even after the priest served a short jail sentence, he continued to be invited to family functions.
Despite the pain that this process caused, Torres said she would report her abuser again “in a heartbeat … because I know that what I did, at least for that moment, prevented [sexual abuse] from happening to someone else.”
“As Aimee’s story makes really clear, we need to strengthen the social safety nets for youth in immigrant communities, both within parishes and beyond,” Reynolds said. “It can be very risky for young people in particular cultures to report abuse to their family.” She noted that parishes and other organizations should aim to establish “a greater variety of safe adults within those communities that are aware of the reality of clergy abuse and violence,” so that young people have trusted people they can talk to.
STEPS TOWARD CHANGE
The panelists offered ideas of ways that Catholic communities can increase safety for people in immigrant and minority communities. Torres talked about the need for education and open conversations about sexual abuse, and Lopez de Casas called for strengthening safeguarding efforts worldwide.
Reynolds noted that true safety requires systemic change. “I think what my own research has shown … is that we need to reform our immigration system. We need to reform our mental health system. We need to reform our criminal justice system because structures exist in a way that dominates minoritized communities, immigrant communities [and] … re-victimize them. It further exacerbates the effect of clergy abuse, silencing victims and their families.”
She also addressed any scholars or journalists in the audience, asking them to “look for the stories.” Given the barriers that prevent immigrant communities from reporting abuse, “these stories aren’t going to show up in the archives … the same way that other stories show up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there. They’re always there. We do the Church a great disservice, we do the academy a great disservice, we do the public [and] survivors, especially, a great disservice when we take those silences that we find in the archives and take them at face value. We need to look harder for the stories and bring them to light.”
—Erin O’Donnell, Editor, Awake Blog
