A Little Bit of Lying and a Lot of Brown-nosing: A Pro-Bono Franciscan Fixer

See here and here for background…

My “Friend”, The Pro-Bono Fixer

We are friends, she said after bullying me.

I had never met Chrishirl Campos before. She knew details about me, details my confessor knew.

We are friends, she was sure to add at the end. My face was swollen from crying.

We are friends, she said, after she demanded I forgive transgressions I could not remember.

I desperately tried to grasp at what she was saying. But any desire for clarification was a sign I wasn’t forgiving on demand.

Of course she wasn’t talking about forgiveness. She was talking about silence. She was talking about the silence every good Catholic girl owes her confessor, her abuser.

I should be grateful he “opened up to me”, she had said before adding:

“Did he touch you!?!”

It is crazy how much bullying had led up to this point.

She knew everything, she told me. Chrishirl Campos told me this. She knew loads of sensitive details about me. She assured me she even knew about my miscarriage. During this miscarriage I was alone, drugged up, in a non-English speaking hospital.

The entire exercise of this new “friend” was damage control. Seeing what kind of legal liability they were looking at.

The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. The cognitive dissonance IS the abuse. I was dealing with a lot. That is exactly why I was targeted.

The superior was God’s representative. The Franciscans were practically heavenly beings. I could be on their good side, if I was a good Catholic girl, if I maintained silence.

We are friends, she said. I didn’t know anything about her, had never met her.

We are friends.

It was the same phrase the PSSO in Sydney used later with respect to Chrishirl. It was a phrase carefully planted for legal purposes.

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August 18, 2022: Chrishirl Campos- Chua to me: “Whatever was exchanged between you and [the friar] (all of which both his superiors and I know of) have been reported and he has apologized…”

August 30, 2022: My husband to Chrishirl: “We are sensitive to instructions to move on when you have limited context…” Chrishirl: “[Your wife] may not have shared in details but friar did.”

Note, the superiors include Friars Derrick Yap and Philip Miscamble. From the report from the PSSO received January 31, 2023: “[the independent investigator] says Mrs Campos-Chua denied ever being shown, or informed of, any sensitive personal communications between you and [the friar].”