The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

Virginia Jones, the co-founder of Compassionate Gathering, and Louise Bauschard, the founder of Voices Set Free, are announcing a joint venture, the Voices Set Free Outreach Project.  We will be filming stories of survivors and posting them to You Tube.  Our first goal is to provide each person a small measure of justice of by enabling him or her to share their stories to a wider audience in a supportive venue.  Our second goal is to educate the general public about the long lasting and traumatic nature of the wounds of the various forms of abuse.  Our third goal is to nurture among individuals and within the wider community, a sense of connection between survivors.  When officers are called to a domestic disturbance, they are required to investigate for child abuse because the two abuses often accompany each other.  When called to investigate child abuse, however, the police are not required to investigate for domestic violence.  Once we are abused, ...

I saw the blurb on Abuse Tracker from Bill Donohue about an opinion piece in the New York Times  criticizing the author, Paul Elie, as another Catholic malcontent. My first thought was, We are all Gods hands on this earth.  Maybe the malcontents are actually God speaking to Church leadership and telling them they need to shape up. My second reactions is that sometimes we don't recognize the help God sends to us. I am reminded of the story of a man who was stranded during a flood.  Before he was stranded, a policeman came to his door and told him to evacuate. The man said, "God will take care of me." The flood waters rose to his doorstep and then into his house. This was a Katrina like flood so eventually the flood waters rose up to the second floor of his house.  Finally he was forced to poke a hole in his roof and pull himself onto the roof. As he was standing on the roof, a policeman in a boat came by and offered him a ride to safety. "No thank you...