2023-09-20 04:28:01
SANTIAGO (AP) — When the horror reached her ears, Helmut Kramer’s mother took a pair of scissors and cut out the priest from photographs of her son’s baptism.
“Later, my mother saved the photos,” says the 53-year-old Chilean.
Abuse is like that, isn’t it? It occurs in environments of asymmetrical power—say, when a priest becomes the authority of a child—and leaves a mark. It happens and there is nothing—not the bitter silence of guilt, nor the scissors in the desperate hands of a mother—that erases the trace of it.
What happens, then, to the victims?
“What this survival has is that you carry it in your body because the site of the crime is yourself,” says Eneas Espinoza, another survivor of ecclesiastical abuse in Chile.
The body is the one that remains silent for fear of reprisals. The one who suffers the ferocity of discredit. The one who can succumb to pain.
“Several people died along the way,” says Aeneas, 50 years old. —Due to substance abuse, due to suicide, there were people we lost.
Accompanying oneself, for some, makes the pain bearable; heading towards building something new. The Chilean Survivors Network was born like this.
When Helmut made his case public, Eneas—who did not know him at the time—wrote to him: I am also a survivor of abuse and I want to tell you that you are not alone, that we are not going to remain silent once more.
They have never met in person and yet they are brothers. Together they speak on behalf of the organization they founded in 2018 and brings together victims of institutional abuse in the nation that most forcefully denounced violations in the ecclesiastical environment in Latin America.
The scandal that changed Chile broke out in 2010, when three accusers of Fernando Karadima caused a catastrophe in the community that believed that the priest deserved to be a saint. The situation worsened when allegations of abuse increased and Pope Francis was met with empty chairs and angry voices during his 2018 visit.
What has happened to the survivors in these years? His media presence has been intermittent but the work does not rest. In the country that has just remembered the 50 years since the beginning of a dictatorship that violated human rights, there are victims who continue to wait for justice and reparation.
—-
JAIME CONCHA, 60 YEARS OLD
At the age of ten I arrived at a Marist Brothers school in Santiago. I saw just beautiful things and said: I want to study here.
My parents told me: behave well, listen to them. And I, as a child, trusted.
By the end of the month they were already abusing me. What was going to be paradise for me turned into hell until the day I left. It was eight years. There were several people.
As a child I was not able to process those events. Your body is the only thing that can defend you.
—- JAVIER MOLINA, 35 YEARS OLD
I know the priest who abuses me in a district of Santiago. I change parish, I say that I want to be a priest and he says that he is going to be my spiritual guide.
One Sunday he comes to my house and tells my mother: I’m going to take Javier to the beach. My mother worked in the parish; She was his secretary. I did not want to go. I was 14 years old. He was 48.
I don’t know how long I was crying, but I remember that I fell asleep. I woke up when he knocked on the bathroom door. We eat breakfast in silence. He celebrated mass. He made me feel guilty. He said that the devil placed ways to tempt the faithfulness of God.
When we were coming back, he said that if I said anything, he was going to say that I was homosexual. She said: I’m going to make sure your mom never finds a job once more.
—-
JOSÉ ANDRÉS MURILLO, 48 YEARS OLD
The victims are not silent. Victims are silenced by abuse, by trauma, by context, by the institution, by the abuser, by guilt, by shame, by traumatic amnesia, by distrust in justice, in institutions, by a kind of accommodation to the abusive situation.
——
Each one, in their own loneliness, thought they had been the only one.
Upon discovering each other as victims, several grouped together. Survivors of the Marists, the Jesuits, the Salesians. In 2018, along with Eneas Espinoza and Helmut Kramer, some became intertwined in the Chilean Survivors Network.
That same year they gave a final vote of confidence to the Catholic Church. When Pope Francis sent two collaborators to investigate the crimes, more than 60 victims shared their testimonies with Charles Scicluna and Jordi Bertomeu and then watched them board a plane with a 2,300-page report that never left the Vatican once more.
What has happened since then? It depends who you ask.
For the victims whose cases fell into the hands of a justice system that washed its hands of it—your case has prescribed, it is old—, nothing. Or little.
It happened that a pontiff recognized for the first time that in Chile there is a culture of abuse and cover-up. It happened that the 31 Chilean bishops presented their resignation but many remained in office. It happened that some priests involved in high-impact cases stopped saying masses.
It happened that the only prosecutor who summoned a cardinal to testify and raided a diocese was removed from the operation under accusations of corruption of which he was later acquitted.
And then something happened. The survivors rolled up their sleeves to stop fighting once morest the Church and began to demand reparation from the State. In 2019, their efforts managed to get a right-wing government to enact the law making sexual crimes once morest minors imprescriptible.
They did it for themselves, for others, for everyone.
—-
JOSE ANDRES
With the Karadima case a world opened up. She had the feeling that we were hitting the ceiling and suddenly she fell and had to be taken over.
Traumatic experiences open a space towards destruction or the search for a way to fight. I don’t want others to live what I lived.
They let us all go to church because it was a healthy, protected, cared for place. How do you fight abuse? The most important thing is to strengthen the rights of children.
Fundación para la Confianza was born in 2010, when there was no talk of child sexual abuse. We made the decision to be a civil society organization to prevent, intervene and always accompany violence once morest children, where the Church has played an important role.
The foundation follows the same energy that I felt when I wanted to be a priest, but it is not religious. It is spiritual in the broadest sense of the word. Spiritual because we believe in a better world, in justice. We believe that pain can be transformed into resilience.
—-
JAIME
Regarding the complaints once morest Karadima, a mysterious process took place: each one, in their own privacy, broke the silence.
I reported it in 2017. A report of abuse at my school came out and I was able to put the unspeakable into words.
Breaking the silence relieves, but you begin to feel responsible for the suffering you share. When I told my partner, it was unbearable for her. The first thing she thought was: so you’re gay and you’ve hidden it from me. I felt abandoned.
Nothing happened to me; They did it to me. The day I arrived at that damn school they chose me, marked me and raped me once more and once more.
And then why am I still alive? Because despite everything there is a God who loves me. I still believe in God, but not in the Catholic Church. I continue to believe in a God who has always taken care of me, who has allowed him to be on the edge and has never thrown me off the cliff.
——
JAVIER
I asked myself: why, if they told me that God was going to protect me, does he allow this? All these priests have messianic delusions. They form their groups and tell you: I am going to be your father.
I dont believe in God. I do not believe in anything. I believe in an energy. Now I can tell you what I experienced, but before it was hours of crying. It was a whole process to have the confidence of knowing someone, of being able to enjoy with another person. Before it was the distrust that everyone is going to betray you.
It was shocking to realize that people my age questioned my story because they saw me very close to him. It’s so hard to explain that you have no choice.
—-
There are common points in these voices. Eneas Espinoza also studied with the Marists. José Andrés Murillo thought that his abuser would guide him to become a priest. Helmut Kramer attended supposed catechism sessions that masked violence.
How did we get to this? For the expert in the Catholic Church and doctor in History, Marcial Sánchez, the first thing is the context: Chile is a country of 18 million inhabitants at the end of the world and, when places are small and power is not exercised properly, there are abuse.
—It is a problem because the Catholic Church is part of the DNA of being Chilean. Culturally it is in the way of thinking, feeling and acting —explains the historian.
This is no coincidence: during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) the church defended victims of human rights violations and many consider that it was the only counterweight to authoritarianism, but over time Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez left his position and a new generation of bishops moved away from the people.
—The hierarchy acquires a more closed-door spirituality, with less political and social prominence and an important conservative turn —says historian María Soledad del Villar. —He opposes any change in terms of sexual and family morality.
In other words, while the Church leadership beat its chest when talking regarding homosexuality, abortion or divorce, there were priests who committed and covered up child sexual abuse.
At least 35% of the current Chilean population does not identify with any religion and only half of believers call themselves Catholic, cites the most recent report from the polling firm Latinobarómetro. Some have a certain spirituality but the majority distrust the institution.
It is the generation that saw fathers and mothers entrust their children to a Church that, instead of protecting them, destroyed them.
—-
AENEAS
As a Survivors Network we say that the crimes of the Church created us, but survivors of Sename began to appear, girls and boys raped in their family environment who came to the protection of the State, to mostly outsourced homes. Then a group of boys appeared, abused in a club by the coach. That is why the network changed to abuse in every institutional environment.
The State is the one who must respond to these crimes. We ask for a Truth, Justice and Reparation Commission, a solution that overcomes what the courts have not done. There is a commitment to do it, but until it happens, we cannot celebrate.
Despite the absence in the media, people continue writing to us. The calls do not stop and they are not just old cases, people 40-50 years old. People aged 20-21 write.
I would like no one to forget this. Among the Commission’s measures is to establish sites of memory and historical truth.
This is not a battle and we are not soldiers. The Catholic Church is not our enemy. Abusers are not our enemies, they are people who committed crimes and there is an institution that guarantees impunity.
If it were a fight, I would want revenge and I don’t want revenge. I want justice and a change in the way the Church behaves with impunity in our countries in Latin America.
—-
When Helmut decided to report, the priest that his mother cut out of his baptism photos was over 90 and a friend told him: if you don’t speak up now, he is going to die and no one will know what he did.
A few days later he appeared on the front page of a newspaper. Unknown people hugged him in the middle of the street. Some disbelievers criticized him for damaging the prestige of his school. He never backed down because — like Javier, José Andrés, Jaime and Eneas — he saw in his complaint the potential for something more.
—We began to work on the first map of abusers in an ecclesiastical context and a very political discourse: the problem of abuse is a human rights problem and must be treated as such.
These and all the steps that an abuse survivor takes are ways to rebuild, strategies to heal. Helmut says that it helps him to laugh and so, smiling, he narrates how she broke with God forever.
One followingnoon in 2019, he presented his baptism certificate at the Archbishopric of Santiago and when the employee asked him why he was renouncing his faith, he responded:
—Do you see the priest’s name? He raped me.
Coming down from the third floor, he shouted: I am an apostate! I am an apostate! —She remembers as laughter shakes her gray beard.
Then he went to celebrate. He bought himself a lunch. She took a selfie. He uploaded it to networks and everyone congratulated him.
-It was a party.
____
The Associated Press’ religion news coverage is supported through a partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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