June 2019 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

Pilgrimage to Rome

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

In snowy February, I packed for Rome. I was off to join six Catholic Worker women (Johanna Berrigan, Mary Beth Appel, Maria Bergh, Mary Rider, Alice McGary, and Kim Williams) on a trip timed to coincide with the Vatican’s global summit on clergy sex abuse scheduled for the 21st through the 24th of the month. One hundred and ninety Church leaders, most of them bishops, were expected to attend the historic meeting. We would be in Rome, as well, for pilgrimage and protest. We were going to pray for the summit and to stand in solidarity with survivors of priestly abuse. We were going, we said, “to speak truth to power.”

Our adventure had precedent. During the Second Vatican Council, Dorothy Day joined a Rome delegation of women who fasted and prayed for the Church to recognize conscientious objection and condemn nuclear warfare. Years earlier, a young Thérèse of Lisieux, who dreamed of becoming a priest, made her own trip to ask an ageing Pope Leo XIII to let her become a Carmelite nun at 15, six years ahead of the usual age of entry.

In both instances, the women realized their missions. Their example, along with words from Pope Francis, inspired our travel. “The only way we have to respond to the evil that has darkened so many lives,” he wrote in a letter to the faithful, “is to experience it as a task regarding all of us as a People of God.” So how were “all the People of God” represented in this February meeting of male prelates, asked Johanna, co-founder of the House of Grace Catholic Worker in Philadelphia, during a conference call with several of us in early December. Where were the survivors? The women? How could reform

happen without them? (A few survivors, we later learned, spoke at the synod. Twelve women participated, ten of whom were superior generals of religious orders.) Our group wrote a letter to the US bishops, and one to Pope Francis requesting a broader representation of the Church at the summit, then planned our trip.

Even by Catholic Worker standards, this operation was hastily conceived. We departed for Rome without a well-planned schedule, or formal statement of purpose, our messaging displayed on yellow T-shirts that a harried Mr. Nguyen of HD Graphix hastily printed for us one overcast February afternoon in Worcester. Our requests were ambitious. We wanted the People of God to work for: an end to the violence of clericalism and clergy sex abuse, justice for survivors, and healing within the Church. None of this could happen without more women at the table. We said as much in our letter to beloved Pope Francis whose theology of mercy and whose care for the poor and environment we deeply appreciate. ...As you know well, women the excluded ones, were the first to recognize the Risen Christ in the Gospel. They saw the reality of Resurrection when the male disciples were still mired in fear and despair. If a ‘resurrection’ is to follow this crucifixion of the ‘clergy sex abuse crisis’ – and we believe it will – then the perspective of women will be needed....

Our days in Rome were rich in heartfelt exchanges about the clergy sex abuse crisis and the state of the Church. Wearing the yellow T-shirts over our winter jackets, we stood each morning on the piazza outside the meeting hall of the synod to wave at the incoming cardinals. The piazza became its own place of informal summit. Here, we conversed with a few of the prelates, listened to survivors and their advocates, and fielded interviews with journalists who were curious about the yellow- shirted women. The afternoon of the synod’s first day found us in earnest conversation with Callista Gingrich, US Ambassador to the Holy See. “I am with you,” she said as we exited her elegant office for an evening vigil organized by Ending Clergy Abuse, a global network for survivors. As the last scraps of light flickered off the Tiber River, survivors from around the world recounted their brutal histories, then danced and danced, “for release,” an organizer said, to the rhythm of two drummers. In charming Trastevere, we attended evening prayer and Mass with members of the Saint Egidio community at a church Saint Francis frequented. We joined survivors for the March to Zero, walking with them on that blustery Saturday

from the sweeping Piazza del Popolo to the Castel Sant Angelo. The twelve female participants at the February meeting represented the highest number of women at any Vatican synod (astonishing for 2019!). On Monday, we met with some of them.

All this transpired in an ancient city that was once the hub of empire and extraordinary artistic achievement, much of it inspired by Catholic world view. To walk its streets surrounded by an abundance of beauty and immense architecture humbles one’s perspective. The Church’s present day trouble appear as merely one of many the city has witnessed throughout the millennia.

Friends in the US regard the clergy sex abuse scandal as another symptom of a Church that is ossifying, doomed to dwindle into herself, if She does not evolve. The Rome pilgrimage gave me a different view. I made the journey not to observe Church Magnificent but Church Exposed and in a terrible mess. And yet, like any good pilgrimage, this one encouraged faith. I return feeling a deep tenderness and gratitude for Catholicism’s incarnational theology, so preposterous and splendid. Christ present in the dirt and glory of living.

Our mornings on the piazza provided an opportunity to personally observe believers reckoning with intimate violence, betrayal, and abuse of power. Yes, there were horrible exposés and many tears. Amid the raw vulnerability I also saw life- giving revelations and hearty faith. Finding their own voice and each other, the survivors are ensuring shame and secrecy do not contaminate how we resolve the harm of sexual abuse. In his call for communal reckoning, Pope Francis is doing this as well.

“What do you want the Church to do?” journalists in Rome repeatedly asked us. “What can we do?’ is the question we are asking ourselves as we resume our busy lives. It’s a question that would make Pope Francis proud. While in Rome, we were surprised to discover we were the only group accompanying the survivors. More solidarity is clearly in order here. Sexual abuse is not uniquely Catholic. What we learn in confronting it can benefit others. I pray the Church’s efforts —the efforts of all the People of God— to rectify this harm will lead to a deeper reverence for the miracle of the body, the only physical container we humans have for our precious souls. Ω

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

Article Originally printed “The Catholic Radical”, April/May 2019, SS. Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker, Worcester, MA,