In the Public Interest by Child Abuse Survivors and their Advocates in their Pursuit of Justice, Recognition, Recovery and Redress.
Survivor Support - Ireland
Description: Survivor Support
Article originally prepared on : 04 April 2008
Survivor Support
VOTF IRELAND
Already our membership includes survivors of clerical child sexual abuse in Ireland.
Two of these are Marie Collins and Pat Jackman, survivors of serious abuse in Dublin and Ferns respectively. Survivors need above all to know that the church whose clergy abused them, and whose bishops then so often then let them down, will never be the same again.
They need to feel part of a vital movement for radical change of our Catholic church that will make it impossible for it to be said ever again: "Bishops placed the interest of the church ahead of children ... Incredibly, this is what the Ferns report says of two former bishops of Ferns, but the same could be said of literally hundreds of Catholic bishops across the Catholic world.
So far, there has been no adequate explanation for this - because no bishop is allowed to admit that the church's governing system is inherently dangerous and in need of radical change.
This is why survivors need to be part of a global movement to change our church.
Resistance to changes that would make bishops fully accountable to their people is very strong, especially at the heart of the church, in Rome.
Survivors also need to feel valued and esteemed by their own local communities, so that any lingering memory of the self-blame that was so often placed upon them by their abusers can be finally removed.
Voice of the Faithful exists to meet this need also. Our aim is that in every parish there will be a VOTF affiliate group ready to give prayerful support and sympathy to survivors.
Healing demands that all survivors should have an opportunity to tell their stories in a safe environment, and it is our aim to create this environment in the church at local level. We will also establish an online forum for survivors, enabling them to share experiences with one another and learn from one another. Our membership also already includes people skilled and experienced in counselling the abused.
We aim to make the basic principles of counselling part of the expertise of every member, so that these skills can become part of the constructive friendship that VOTF can offer to all victims of abuse.
As our membership grows we aim to bring on board people whose other skills will be of vital importance - for example in civil and canon law, in remedial education, psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, spiritual direction, etc. Our ultimate objective is a truly wise and caring church, capable of deploying all of the resources for healing that were called for by the Catholic bishops' document '
Towards Healing' of 2005.
Having already benefited from the wisdom of some survivors, we expect to learn a lot more from others as we grow. Our church has so far undervalued the wisdom that many lay people gain from their experiences of the pain of life, and undervalued also those lay people who have been harmed by its servants.
VOTF aims to change this, forever, and to bring the wisdom of lay people fully into the life of the church. So awful has been the devastation wrought by sexual abuse and subsequent administrative abuse by servants of the church that there can be no future for it if it continues in denial about the need for radical change. We in Voice of the Faithful are determined to end that denial by continuing to monitor the church leadership, pointing out the deficiencies of an approach that too often amounts to no more than window-dressing and 'spin'. Our intended memorial to survivors will be that future generations will say of them: From
http://www.votfi.com/survivor_support.htmThey changed their church forever!
