2025-8-23
You experience it.
You meet another victim who had remarkably similar treatment.
And another.
And another.
Priests get it the worst. If you don’t stay silent as a priest, you really are shunned.
Many ostrich Catholics with their head in the sand want to think that each case is individual. If only we could convince the church to implement better procedures for dealing with victims it would all be okay.
But being brutal to victims is the policy of the RC church. It is a strategy.
Destroy the victim, praise the fixers. See My Personal Lamentation.
The people who handled my case were brutal.
Afterwards, I found an old publication where the two men who handled my case, Stephen Crittenden and David Leary, OFM, had written an article together detailing how the exact techniques they used on me were to be avoided. Victims needed to feel safe. (See Confidential Policies: A Blatant Violation of the Stated Goals of Transparency and Accountability.)
The things I shared with David Leary during what was supposed to be pastoral counseling were shared with lawyers who then contacted me. He shamed me, of course, because he is a man within the clergy of the Roman Catholic fold.
He KNEW the way he treated me is the kind of treatment that damages victims.
He KNEW.