Editor’s note: The following letters are in response to Jersey Journal Faith Matters columnist the Rev. Alexander Santora’s recent piece “Time for a Reckoning: Church must confront, change old boy’s network exposed in Vatican’s McCarrick report.”
Church disregards women
I am one of the lucky women educated by the church from kindergarten to graduate school without ever encountering an instance of abuse.
I did encounter constant and omnipresent prescriptions on how to live and think, with the underlying message that the most valuable female virtues in the eyes of the church are obedience, service and respect.
As a professional woman in Manhattan, however, over the years I came to view the church as out of touch, with no messages truly applicable to the experiences and demands of my life. There were no relevant views from the church to consider in ever greater areas of my life.
I continued to attend Mass mostly to accompany my husband and because I found the messages of the Gospels inspiring and valuable.
So, now, after the brutally exposed decades-long systematic betrayal by the church of fundamental moral values toward children, and the persistence of pronouncements by a male hierarchy exclusively for an audience of men, I have freed myself from any remaining ties that could bind me emotionally to it.
The church did not care for me as a woman, or for my children, and it still doesn’t care, so I no longer truly belong there. We, women, are not even spectators for the church, because our opinions and views are irrelevant.
As to the money trail, I would suggest to look into the late Florida Rev. Marcial Maciel’s monetary contributions and the Vatican’s willful blindness to his innumerable sins in order to find a pattern of corruption in the Curia.
Stella Lavin, Jersey City
You speak the truth
As Sisters of Saint Dominic we strive to model the words of Saint Catherine of Siena, “Cry out as if you have a thousand voices, it’s silence that kills the world.”
You live her words by always speaking the truth. Sometimes it must cost you.
The Sisters of Saint Dominic at Our Lady of Sorrows, Jersey City
Child sex abuse devastates
As a 40-year veteran social worker of child protective services, I have witnessed the devastating lifelong effects of child sexual abuse, most especially profound when perpetrated by clergy, and which include years later -- after a lifetime of suffering -- death from alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide.
I remain appalled by my church’s overall lack of accountability, or compassion for victims, and especially angered by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ continued vilifying women with the “one-note drumbeat” of abortion and using the same as political cache and as a distraction from clericalism and sexual abuse/coercion.
All I want for Christmas is that the pat clergy statement: “pedophilia never killed anyone,” in response to challenging these hardliners on their erroneous “pro-life” prater, cease immediately! (They must be teaching this response at the seminary across the country based on the number of priests I have heard declare such dribble.)
M. Catherine Danatos, West Orange
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