Must Read

A detailed list with specific links to books, essays, articles, and authors that brave to TELL the unspeakable:

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.

I quote: “One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends and families, and our neighbors. Research by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”

“…traumatic experiences do leave their traces…with dark secrets being imperceptibly passed down through generations. They also leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems.”

My husband was abused as an adolescent while attending Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York. He was lured to the third floor (fourth if you count the basement/cafeteria level) by Father Donald Malone, victimized and abused on school premises as were many during the 1960’s, ’70’s, and ’80’s by Monsignor William White, Dean of Discipline and Principal “Father” Donald T. Malone, and by President “Father” John J. O’Keefe. Imagine all who knew and all who experienced trauma during those years, their bodies covered with traces of abuse, some traumatized to the point of suicide in the case of my late husband, Peter Fatovich.

And then there’s the trauma Peter’s suicide imposed on those he left behind: a wife and four children under the age of five, children now grown and living resilient lives but also facing and battling their inherited forms of trauma.

“Trauma affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them.”

My children grew up with the trauma I suffered from the day of their father’s sudden, tragic death.

“What Lies in Suicide’s Wake”

Along with everything else, I wasn’t prepared for the stigma of becoming a widow this way.

By Peggy Wehmeyer, September 12, 2019, The New York Times “Opinion”https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/suicide-prevention.html
Ms. Wehmeyer is a former correspondent for ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

Here, select passages from this opinion piece that render beautifully and accurately based on my own similar experience this specific kind of loss:

When I lost my husband in 2008, I learned that the shocking cause of his death wasn’t as rare as I had thought. More than 45,000 Americans died last year from suicide, in a staggering but seemingly silent epidemic. All this week mental health professionals are sounding the alarm about this crisis, drawing attention to the warning signs that someone you love may be at risk.

I missed those signs until it was too late. Once he was gone, my life was unimaginably altered, both by his deadly decision and the stigma it left in its wake.

How is it I could persuade the man I loved to apply sunscreen, get regular checkups and wear a bike helmet, all in an effort to prolong our life together, but I couldn’t keep him from killing himself? Wasn’t it my job as his wife to help him stay safe and happy — securely tethered to life?

This, exactly how I felt.

In the wake of a loved one’s suicide, irrational shame haunts those left behind. On the night Mark took his life, he had a dinner date scheduled with our younger daughter, Hannah, who was home from college. For days she wept, asking, “Wasn’t time with me enough to keep Dad from killing himself?” His closest friends condemned themselves for not following up when he didn’t return phone calls. His mother, who just turned 93, still wonders, “If only I could raise him all over again,” as if that could have saved him.

This, the impact on Peter’s children and parents.

Truth is, no one saw it coming. My husband was bright and sociable, an adoring father and husband. His humor made him the life of the party. His own battles with depression led him to help countless others find the assistance they needed to overcome it. But like many accomplished men, Mark was good at masking his feelings and powering through his bouts of despair. His fateful mistake was failing to reach for help when he needed it most.

The same remains true for my late husband, Peter.

Some nights, when I lie in bed still wondering why Mark left us like this, I find my greatest comfort in the paradoxical treasure he left behind. In a last letter to me, waiting on our kitchen counter, his final written words were, “I love you, Peggy, with all my broken heart.”

This, even all these years after Peter’s death by suicide, brought me to loud, hard tears.

The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
I never got any help, any kind of therapy. I never told anyone.
Personal History April 16, 2018 Issue of The New Yorker
By Junot Díaz
Here is an excerpt:

Yes, it happened to me.

I was raped when I was eight years old. By a grownup that I truly trusted.

After he raped me, he told me I had to return the next day or I would be “in trouble.”

And because I was terrified, and confused, I went back the next day and was raped again.

I never told anyone what happened, but today I’m telling you.

And anyone else who cares to listen.

That violación. Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible. I can say, truly, que casi me destruyó. Not only the rapes but all the sequelae: the agony, the bitterness, the self-recrimination, the asco, the desperate need to keep it hidden and silent. It fucked up my childhood. It fucked up my adolescence. It fucked up my whole life. More than being Dominican, more than being an immigrant, more, even, than being of African descent, my rape defined me. I spent more energy running from it than I did living. I was confused about why I didn’t fight, why I had an erection while I was being raped, what I did to deserve it. And always I was afraid—afraid that the rape had “ruined” me; afraid that I would be “found out”; afraid afraid afraid. “Real” Dominican men, after all, aren’t raped. And if I wasn’t a “real” Dominican man I wasn’t anything. The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything.

What Do the Church’s Victims Deserve?
The Catholic Church is turning to outside arbiters to reckon with its history of sexual abuse. But skeptics argue that its legacy of evasion continues.
Annals of Religion April 15, 2019 Issue The New Yorker
By Paul Elie
Here’s a section from the middle of the article, the scoop on the arbiters:

Nearly three years ago, Cardinal Dolan decided to hire Kenneth Feinberg, an arbitration and mediation expert who has led programs to compensate victims and relatives of victims from the 9/11 attacks, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Boston Marathon bombing, and other disasters. Under Feinberg, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund distributed more than seven billion dollars to fifty-five hundred claimants. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, in the Gulf of Mexico, Feinberg and his longtime associate Camille Biros distributed more than six billion dollars to two hundred and twenty-five thousand claimants. After the shootings at the Pulse night club, in Orlando, Florida, they worked, pro bono, to help distribute charitable donations to those affected.

An Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program, run by Feinberg and Biros, began hearing and processing claims of priestly sexual abuse for the Archdiocese of New York in the fall of 2016. Feinberg and Biros subsequently established compensation programs in the Dioceses of Brooklyn (which includes Queens) and Rockville Centre (Long Island), and upstate, in the Dioceses of Syracuse and Ogdensburg. Their portfolio is expanding dramatically: five dioceses in Pennsylvania and all five dioceses in New Jersey have signed on, and multiple dioceses in Colorado and California are expected to do so later this year. Other I.R.C.P.s, which are similar to Feinberg and Biros’s template but are not under their supervision, have been established elsewhere, including the Dioceses of Buffalo, in New York, and Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. Soon there will be Feinberg-branded I.R.C.P.s in the dioceses of two-fifths of American Catholics. His and Biros’s model for reconciliation and compensation is becoming the standard approach to priestly sexual abuse just as bishops worldwide are looking here for standard approaches.“It’s so nice to be stressed about work outside for a change.”

The Church has paid survivors for decades. What makes this strategy different? Part of the answer is that Feinberg and Biros do. Over many years, they have maintained a reputation for probity and independence while disbursing some twenty billion dollars in funds. And the Church’s use of external, worldly arbiters is meant to assuage suspicions of self-protection. Much rides on Feinberg and Biros’s independence, and yet this independence may define the limits of the I.R.C.P.s’ success. Critics of Catholicism from Martin Luther onward have faulted the Church for dealing with matters of sin and repentance through mechanical means: the system of indulgences, the confessional booth. Is the Church today essentially outsourcing a reckoning with its past?

“Ken and Camille,” as Feinberg calls the duo, have worked together since 1979, when Feinberg was serving as Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s chief of staff and hired Biros as an assistant. I met with them several times in recent months, at the Willard Office Building, in Washington, D.C., where their six-person law firm is based. Feinberg, who is seventy-three, grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, and he speaks in a chowdery accent unsoftened by fifty years among the power brokers of New York and Washington. He is bald, wears tortoise-shell eyeglasses, and leaves his shirts open at the neck. Biros, three years younger, has long, dark hair and favors loose blouses, slacks, and weapons-grade heels. Both are opera enthusiasts, and they (with their spouses) have followed many long days at their desks with long nights at the opera. The walls of their offices display framed newspaper articles in which Feinberg is referred to as the “Master of Disaster” and the “Compensation Czar.” Mediation runs deep for Feinberg; to spend time with him is to see him mediate continually between different aspects of his character—between a wish for humility and a taste for publicity, a commitment to produce agreeable outcomes and an instinct to tell the whole truth.

“The Cardinal called, and he wanted to brainstorm,” Feinberg told me. Pope Francis had spoken of a Year of Mercy, urging Catholics to undertake acts of reconciliation and forgiveness, and Cardinal Dolan saw this as an opportunity to address priestly sexual abuse, at a time when the Church was under great pressure concerning the issue. The 2015 film “Spotlight,” about a team of Boston Globe reporters who uncovered priestly sexual abuse in the Boston area, stirred public anger against the Church, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The watchdog group SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) characterized Cardinal Dolan as “among the most secretive” of the roughly three hundred U.S. bishops on matters of priestly abuse. New York state legislators nearly passed a bill loosening the strict statute of limitations on sex-abuse lawsuits. When he was the archbishop of Milwaukee, from 2002 to 2009, Dolan had instituted a settlement program of sorts, but it had gone awry. Engaging Kenneth Feinberg gave the Cardinal a chance at a dramatic, high-profile do-over.

Feinberg and Biros met with Cardinal Dolan at the archbishop’s residence, joined by the chief counsel for the archdiocese. “The Cardinal discussed with us his desire to create a program to promote reconciliation and healing between the victims and the Church, as well as his hopes that this will help bring back to the Church those who have been alienated due to the Church’s past conduct,” Biros recalled, choosing her words carefully. “Of course, not lost on us was the secular issue of the ongoing possibility of a change in the statute of limitations opening a window which would allow time-barred cases to move forward in the courts.”

The new program would offer compensation to survivors and would require them to sign releases forfeiting the right to sue the Church if the law changed later. It would take care of cases, Biros told me, “that were ‘in the drawer,’ as Ken likes to say, and were known to the archdiocese—going back, in some cases, as far as thirty-plus years.”

Abolish the Priesthood
To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy–and take the faith back into their own hands.
By James Carroll June 2019 Issue The Atlantic
Here are the opening paragraphs:

I. “The Murder of a Soul”

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.