The Catholic Woman Who Supported the Clergy Abuse Survivor in the Middle of the Night
Recently I was rifling through the overloaded files on my computer to see what I could delete as I have so many files, I sometimes have trouble finding the one I want to work on. I came across an article I wrote in 2008, about a Catholic parishioner who helped a survivor of clergy abuse cope with conflict with his family in the middle of the night. He was and remans a fragile survivors with a long history of addiction and outbursts of anger that periodically get him jailed. His mother called the police on him in the middle of the night, and he called me, and I referred him to the Catholic parishioner as I had young children and could not help him in the middle of the night. But this other Catholic parishioner could and did. She is a passionate Catholic unwilling to be uprooted from her church, but she is also the mother of girls sexually abused by a stepfather. When she found out about the abuse, she did whatever she could to protect her girls and keep a ro...