Courageous Conversation: Sharing Faith with Children in the Wake of the Abuse Crisis
Last week Awake welcomed three panelists who shared both professional and personal insights into the hopes, concerns, and challenges for parents and others aiming to share the Catholic faith with children while building a compassionate Church that is safe for all.
Entitled “Raising Children in Our Wounded Church: The Challenge of Sharing the Light of Faith in the Shadow of Abuse,” the conversation included Mike Hoffman, a clergy abuse survivor, father of two young adult children, chair of the Hope and Healing Committee of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and member of Awake’s Survivor Advisory Panel; Regina Boyd, a Florida-based marriage and family therapist and parent who has worked with people who have experienced sexual abuse in the Catholic Church; and Marcus Mescher, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Xavier University in Cincinnati who writes on the topic of moral injury and sexual abuse and is parent of three kids. A recording of this important conversation is available below. Here are four main ideas shared by the panelists.
1. PASSING ON THE FAITH WITH AWARENESS AND INTENTION
Hoffman and his wife are active members of their Catholic parish and sent their children to Catholic school. “The values and the faith expressed in Catholic education … [were] important to us and we wanted to pass that along to our children,” he said.
Hoffman’s own abuse began when he was a 12-year-old altar server. Fast forward a generation, and Hoffman said he found it meaningful to see his own children become altar servers within the context of a Church with increased awareness of the need to keep children safe. Hoffman’s own diocese uses Virtus: Protecting God’s Children, a training program designed to educate all people who work with children in some capacity, and he agreed to be interviewed for the video, sharing his perspective as a survivor. He was also moved that his daughter recently completed the Virtus training for her role as a softball coach at a Catholic school. “My parents didn’t have resources to protect children. Clearly, they needed them,” Hoffman said. “I find hope in the fact that my daughter has now participated in this training.”
Later, in response to a question from an audience member, Hoffman added that diocesan training programs are “obviously only as good as implemented, and consistently implemented, over time. In certain parishes it may be really, really wonderful and in certain other parishes or other dioceses, it is not wonderful,” he said.
Mescher spoke about the need to boost current training. “How do we raise the bar so that we’re not just aiming for the minimum standard?” he asked. How do we as Church “actually look for … gaps in people’s awareness or in what’s impeding people to speak up or to act as an advocate or as an ally for anyone who might be vulnerable?”
2. SPEAKING OPENLY
Hoffman made an effort to discuss his history as an abuse survivor with his wife and children. When the children were very young, they observed him assembling pinwheels to be planted on the parish lawn for child abuse prevention awareness. “The kids would see these pinwheels on our dining room table and ask, ‘What is this for? Why are we doing this?’ And that was a moment for me to say, ‘I was hurt by a very bad man when I was your age, and now we’re raising awareness that all children deserve to be protected at our local school.’” Although the conversation started there, Hoffman said that it took age-appropriate turns as his children grew older. He and his wife also developed a dinner-table practice called “explicit permission to say what’s on your mind,” assuring their children that no matter what they said, “their mom and dad can handle it.”
In Mescher’s research on sexual abuse in Catholic settings, he and his collaborators heard from multiple abuse survivors who felt they needed to protect their parents and never shared that they were being abused.
“I feel [that] as a parent now, it is my duty to show up every day and prove to my children that I am a safe person,” Mescher said, “that whatever they’re dealing with, that I am here to walk with them, that I might not have all the answers, but that we will figure it out together and that they don’t have to be alone in anything that they’re wrestling with.”
In Boyd’s home, the conversations touch on empowering her daughter to develop “her own sense of autonomy, awareness, safety as preventative measures.” And she added that it’s very important to have open, direct conversations with a child from an early age, “talking about what a healthy, respectful relationship looks like,” Boyd said.
3. CONSIDERING CLERICALISM
Panelists spoke several times about the need to recognize power and privilege in the Catholic Church in an effort to create safe spaces. Boyd offered a two-fold caution that clergy are often unaware of both how much power they wield, and about the relationship dynamics that result. At the same time, adult laity and children may be unaware of how they relate to people in positions of authority.
Mescher said that early in his career, when he worked as a youth minister, he noticed that lay people often adopted “a very deferential position of ‘Father knows best.’” Among the survivors he has accompanied, “I heard over and over again that one of the reasons why they trusted priests and let priests cross boundaries or that they didn’t recognize the grooming behavior was because they thought that priests couldn’t sin or that the priest was the closest thing that they would ever encounter to God,” he explained.
People of all ages can be taught to feel their own comfort levels in interactions, and to learn how to interact in healthy ways. This includes speaking up, Boyd offered: “if you see something, say something; hold other people accountable.”
4. CULTIVATING CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP
Mescher spoke similarly about the importance of teaching children and young adults to speak up. He described talking with students as well as with his own children about “trying to be like Jesus in the world as an expression of Christian discipleship [including] talking about the ways they should lift their voice if there’s something they’re uncomfortable with.”
“We live in a toxic culture, feeding our insecurities… which makes it harder and harder for us to see that we are created in the image and likeness of God,” he explained. He later expanded on this further, acknowledging that the harm perpetrated against victims by abusers and Church leaders is a difficult topic for all to address, including parents, priests, and parish ministers.
“But I think we’ve got to do what we can to normalize … that you are good, that your body is good, that your sexuality is good, that you don’t deserve to be mistreated or made to feel uncomfortable and neither does anyone else,” Mescher said. “I think if we can reaffirm that goodness and integrate it into the whole of the human person and the whole of the human community, then we can better recognize why we have to … call [abuse] out.”
-Anselma Dolcich-Ashley, Guest Writer
