Why the Church Must Learn to Listen

In his article, Fr Hugh Lagan SMA argues that the Church can do harm to the survivors of abuse even with good intentions. Above all, the Church—and all who are confronted with situations of abuse — must learn to listen better to the survivors of abuse.

Much has been done in the Catholic Church to make children safe since the clergy abuse scandal broke — but the Church must still learn to listen.

The Catholic Church worldwide is still only in its infancy in understanding the critical role listening and hearing play in the healing and empowerment of sexual abuse survivors by Catholic clergy and religious.

While the steep learning curve which many Church leaders have been obliged to engage with over the past three decades is bearing fruit, there still remains a disturbing disconnect between well-crafted child-safeguarding policy documents and their field application as experienced by victims, survivors, their loved ones and advocates.

At the heart of this disconnect is the struggle by Church authorities and congregants to accurately hear and fully understand the devastating and pervasive impact of sexual abuse on victims and survivors in the absence of defensive posturing, stereotyping and paternalism.

The ambivalence of Church leadership to build a respectful and trusting working alliance with survivors and their advocates has and continues to be the single greatest obstacle to continued progress in safeguarding intervention and prevention, as well as healing and reconciliation.

Independent best-practice reviews of faith-based child safeguarding structures clearly demonstrate that healing comes more through opportunities for survivors and Church leaders to encounter one another than eloquent public statements communicating the commitment of the Catholic Church to protect the most vulnerable.

Too much reliance has been placed on professionals by Church leadership to provide a window into how survivors see and experience their world, rather than to welcome the voice of survivors to tell their own stories, to articulate their own needs and to share their own wisdom.

Paradoxically, some survivor advocacy groups argue that the Catholic Church in the global north has now become so skilled at languaging and managing the “child abuse crisis” that it has lost the ability to listen to and hear those who have been most harmed.

The voices of survivors and their loved ones have been silenced further by attempts by some Church authorities

• to sanitise the abuse perpetuated by clergy;
• to contextualise the higher prevalence of child sexual abuse within society as a distractive ploy; • to depict survivors singularly as individuals damaged for life and emotionally unpredictable;
• to theologise clerical sexual abuse as a source of institutional purification; and
• to justify the continued resilience of the Catholic Church in spite of abuse disclosures.

Furthermore, a common theme in the collective historical narratives of survivors who have disclosed abuse by clerics identifies a pattern in which the immediate urgency by most Church authorities has been to become more active in resisting or responding rather than firstly, to become more present in seeking to understand the very personal pain and injury of abuse.

Perpetual ‘victim’, ‘abuser’

The listening process must pre-empt the intervention process and the needs of vulnerable persons must always trump the interests of institutions.

The transposition of these subtle distinctions are why in many instances, Church leadership and survivors continue to re-enact many of the dysfunctional dynamics which facilitated and perpetuated the initial abuse.

The outcome can become a traumatic script in which the survivor as “perpetual victim” and the Church authority as “perpetual abuser” lose their unique identities and with that, the ability to listen to and hear one another.

The tragedy is that this script entraps the key protagonists and undermines even the most effective safeguarding structures and best intentions.

This perpetuation of the dominant abuse narrative can lead to a survivor becoming so enmeshed in feelings of anger and rage that it becomes counter-healing.

Additionally, it can contribute to some Church leaders feeling that their best efforts to listen to the survivor are not being reciprocated and so they turn in frustration towards self-preservation.

The result is that the advice of lawyers or senior clerics is permitted to rigidly define future communications as well as feed a growing paranoia and misperception that the sole motivation of adult survivors in bringing forward allegations at this point in their lives is financial retribution and the public humiliation of the Catholic Church.

In writing about her work with clergy abuse survivors, Diane Knight, former chair of the National Review Board of the US bishops’ conference, stated that “survivors have much to teach us; about deep and lasting pain, justified anger, the capacity to heal, courage and the resiliency of the human spirit. They have taught me that we still have much to learn.”

Other commentators have echoed this sentiment and urged bishops, clergy and congregants to welcome survivors with humility and allow them to teach the Church how to become a better healer and an agent for positive change.

There resides within the resilience and courage of survivors a hard-won wisdom which needs to be welcomed by the Church as an asset rather than viewed as a threat.

Uncomfortably, the painful truth and deep hurt which survivors embody challenge the Church to move beyond rhetoric and proactively witness to its founding values of healing, restorative justice, renewal and reconciliation.

Believe first

Resilience studies with survivors identify the experience of being believed in first disclosing a history of childhood sexual abuse to be the singular best predictor of life-long recovery and healing.

Sadly, disclosures of childhood sexual abuse can trigger often unconscious self-preserving reactions in those who hear them; all the more so when the perpetrator is a trusted family member, a respected educator or an esteemed religious figure.

Sexual abuse unravels so much of what society takes for granted. As the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rightly remarked: “Most people really do not want to hear the truth as they do not want their illusions destroyed.”

Professionals caution against defensive behaviours such as “victim blaming”, “abuse fatigue” and “Church-bashing” in response to disclosures of abuse.

The result — intentional or otherwise — places a distance between the survivor and the listener and functions to protect society from the discomfort and responsibility that the acknowledgement of childhood sexual abuse within their midst would bring.

This distance is further exaggerated within an institutional Church which has traditionally been more at home assuming a speaker-oriented perspective than a hearer-oriented perspective.

Let survivors speak

Survivors have shared experiences of meeting with a Church leader who monopolised the conversation and whose primary intention in listening was to reply.

Others reported intrusive and at times voyeuristic questioning of the details of their abuse by under-skilled Church personnel carrying out preliminary investigations, or meeting with Church bodies whose sole concern was image management, damage control and monetary compensation.

What was initially hoped to be the opening up of a respectful space quickly collapses as the survivor’s self-protective mechanisms become activated in the presence of another “abusive” cleric or Church representative who is perceived to be manipulating, dominating, disengaging and silencing.

While one would wish to believe that such instances are now confined to historical cases, anecdotal evidence from various parts of the world provided by survivors, clinicians and advocacy groups would suggest otherwise.

Of greatest concern is that many of these survivors do not re-engage following such encounters, even when a follow-up is initiated by Church support services. Nor do they pursue civil action.

Tragically, they perceive their only choice is to withdraw back into the shadows of silence and isolation.

Truth recovery begins when a Church leader chooses personal vulnerability over group defensiveness and risks internal transformation over institutional loyalty.

The restoration of credibility and integrity within the Catholic Church will depend on how well the entire global Church community can work with survivors and their advocates as collaborators rather than antagonists.

In walking this healing journey, Church leaders, congregants, victims, survivors, their loved ones and advocates are invited to incarnate the words of the poet TS Eliot: “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know that place for the first time.”

Fr Hugh Lagan is a priest with the Society of African Missions and a clinical psychologist.