In their 8-episode podcast Descent into Light, religious sisters Theresa Aletheia Noble and Danielle Victoria Lussier explore the spiritual abuse they experienced from a trusted priest. Their story highlights not only clerical abuse, but also the culture that allows this abuse to happen.
As Catholic laywomen, we may feel we have little in common with women who choose a life of chastity behind convent walls. However, there are numerous similarities in our vocations and in our relationships with others within those vocations. These sisters’ story has parallels to the abuse that many women have experienced in their marriages.
An Overview of the Podcast
Sister Theresa Aletheia and Sister Danielle Victoria belonged to the same religious community and both received spiritual direction from Father Dave. A charismatic, popular priest, Father Dave was the head of his community and also led retreats for the sisters. He had been a big part of Sister Theresa Alethia’s journey to entering the convent.
Learning that he had attempted to sexually assault another sister in their order was a huge shock to both of them. However, that news also gave them a different perspective to look back on their own relationships with Father Dave and realize he had also been grooming them.
“When the leader of our community told me what had happened, I just… I was just staring at the ceiling. I think I was in shock… I just thought, huh. And then I thought of all these other times that I had thought, huh, in my relationship with Father Dave. And it was like, it hadn’t made sense before, but once I had this information, I realized, oh, I need to rethink everything. I need to rethink my relationship with Father Dave. And the moment I shifted my perspective, it was really obvious to me that what had happened with this other sister was not a mistake. This wasn’t just a, oops, I got carried away kind of moment. I knew that based on how he had interacted with me. I could see that it was calculated and that it had been building.”
Over the next episodes of the podcast, the sisters dive deeper into this grooming and how it happened. Using the eight stages of grief–shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, the upward turn, acceptance, and hope–they explore “the nuances and complexity of adult abuse in spiritual settings.” Both sisters are real and honest about their own story and pain, but they also draw upon experts to better understand what happened to them and how it affects not only their community, but the Catholic Church as a whole.
What Is Grooming?
Many of us, when we hear stories of sexual abuse, blame the victims and wonder how they allowed this to happen to them. We see the end of the story, the big moment, the climax, and fail to see all the little signs that led there. In Descent Into Light, the sisters explore what grooming looked like for them in their life at the convent.
“What’s really hard to think about even now is that I really did have a lot of alarm bells going off in my relationship with Father Dave. And I just ignored them. And I wonder about that. I wonder why I did that. I look back to those moments and I think, how could I have missed that? I think it makes me feel stupid when I think about it. Um… And I know I’m not stupid, but I think that’s what grooming does. It just clouds your instincts.”
Those of us who have escaped abusive relationships will recognize what Sister Theresa Aletheia is describing. After we’ve left our abuser, we can look back and clearly see those uncomfortable moments, those red flags, the times we ignored our instincts. Women who are still in abusive relationships have a less clear perspective not only on their own abuse, but also on abuse others are experiencing. Hearing stories like Sister Theresa Aletheia’s can help open our eyes to grooming and abuse around us.
One of our greatest struggles with recognizing abusers is that we expect them to look evil. We’ve all been warned about “stranger danger” and may have a picture of an abuser as ugly and mean, like the parents in Roald Dahl’s novel Matilda or the ugly witches in every fairy tale. The truth is that many abusers are handsome, charismatic, outgoing, kind, and generous, especially during the grooming stage. This can cause victims to question their own experience and cause others to fail to see the darkness under the bright facade.
“The warmth, the enthusiasm, the personal attention she described in Father Dave, that wasn’t unusual. It was his signature—I can’t count how many times I found myself thinking, he’s too good to be true. He was so generous, so affirming, so seemingly selfless, and I wanted to believe it. When something felt off or he said something that seemed a little too personal or too familiar, I brushed it aside. I told myself, he’s different. He’s operating on some deeper spiritual level I can’t quite understand. And slowly without realizing it, I began to trust him more than I trusted my own instincts. More than I trusted myself. Because he was a priest.”
Power Enables Abuse
Many relationships have a power dynamic–one person in the relationship who has an advantage over the other person. This is obvious in some relationships, such as employer/employee or parent/child, but less obvious in other relationships. However, it is often this power dynamic that allows or enables the grooming and abuse. In their relationship with Father Dave, the sisters point out the power difference:
“You might think, well, if two people are adults, then the power between them must be equal. But that’s simply not true. Power creates different dynamics in very obvious ways in society. Wealth can be a factor. Gender. Race. Within church settings, all these things are factors, along with other spiritual factors. So let’s examine the power at play for Father Dave. Father Dave was a priest, and priests in general are given a certain deference and respect in Catholic culture. … And then on top of that, he had just been elected to the most important role in his worldwide community as what they call Father General. For all of these reasons, Father Dave held a lot of power within his own community, and that power translated to the kind of access and power he had in our own community of sisters.”
In marriages, these power dynamics can also be at play. For example, many Christian leaders teach that the husband is the spiritual head of the household, giving him spiritual power over his wife. The man may have more financial power within the relationship because he works outside the home while the wife works within the home. In our society, men are often afforded more respect and consideration than women. There may also be racial differences between the couple.
Josie remembers that her abusive husband was seven years older than her. He’d joined the Catholic Church before she did, and had spent time at Bible school, on ministry, and in seminary before their marriage. His age, his spiritual experience, and even his worldly experience combined to make him seem “older and wiser” than she was, as Rolf tells Liesl in The Sound of Music:
“Totally unprepared are you / to face a world of men. / Timid and shy and scared are you / Of things beyond your ken. / You need someone older and wiser, / telling you what to do… / I am seventeen going on eighteen, / I’ll take care of you.”
Consent Matters Within Relationships
Consent is another factor that comes up when we hear about abuse. In the stories these sisters share, we may think, “Well, they consented to this relationship with Father Dave. They consented to his advice.” However, consenting to receive spiritual advice from Father Dave is not the same as consenting to his advances, and numerous little consents do not add up to one large consent. Nor is consent quite that black and white.
“Abuse hinges on consent, and consent is never as simple as the absence of a no, especially not when a powerful authority figure like a priest, pastor, or spiritual leader is involved. In cases of clergy abuse involving adults in all Christian faiths, the argument often goes something like this. But they were both adults. It was consensual. This logic is devastatingly common and deeply flawed. It assumes that age alone determines whether someone can freely choose to engage in a sexual relationship. It erases the profound influence that power, trust, and spiritual authority exert on a person’s ability to say yes, or to even know they can say no.”
If one party is not completely free to say no, then that party is also not completely free to say yes. This matters in every relationship, including marriage. Lack of consent is one of the reasons that an annulment may be granted. Many of us may scoff at this, thinking that in our modern day, nobody can be forced into marriage.
However, lack of consent can be more subtle than that. For example, Josie considered breaking off her engagement to her abusive husband, but because they were already sleeping together, she felt obligated to marry him. Their physical intimacy took away her ability to freely consent; it clouded her judgement, making her feel she could not say no, which means her yes was not honest.
Consent is also important within the marriage relationship, when one partner feels forced by another partner to do something. For example, there is a lot of Christian marriage advice that focuses on the husband’s sexual needs and urges the wife to meet those needs, no matter how she feels. Abusive husbands may use this advice, as well as moodiness or physical threats, to get the “intimacy” they desire. However, if the wife is not free to say no to his overtures without facing other consequences, then she is also not free to say yes, and this is abuse.
Why This Podcast?
Stories of sexual abuse and scandal are not new within the Catholic Church. For many of us, these are old stories which have given the Church a bad name. Those who have left the Church because of stories like this may add the new story to their reasons for no longer trusting the Church. Those of us who stay within the Church despite these stories may not want to hear them, because we don’t want something we love to be attacked this way.
Descent Into Light is not about either justifying or vilifying the Church. It’s about exploring why and how abuse happens so we can help victims heal and also prevent abuse from happening again. Sisters Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Victoria are not telling their story merely to seek attention; in fact, they are careful to share as honestly as possible while also protecting the privacy of their community and the other victims.
“…entering the convent and encountering darkness inside the heart of the church shook the foundations of everything we thought we had found. Many of you listening might know something of what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve lost trust. Maybe as a result, you’ve lost faith. Some of you carry unspeakable pain just beneath a smile. Maybe you still go to church and sit in the pews, but you’re holding on by a thread. Or maybe after seeing too much, you’ve walked away. Whoever you are, all of us in one way or another have felt the ache of unbelonging. In this series, we ask, why is there so much darkness in a place that’s supposed to bear the light? Why did I have to live this? Where does my own darkness belong?”
Descent Into Light is an open, honest, well-researched, carefully told, and much-needed examination of a topic that the Church is still reluctant to look at. However, in this era when 1 in 4 women face abuse in their homes, and the secular media happily trumpets out every scandal, Catholics must face what abuse is, how it can be prevented, and how victims find healing.
“The thing that people need to understand is that adults can be groomed, adults can be abused, and when spiritual power is involved, the harm is not just emotional or physical, it’s soul deep.”
The truth is that abuse happens everywhere–within our parishes, within our convents, within our marriages. It is devastating. It is also preventable. Like Sisters of the LIttle Way of Beauty Truth and Goodness, we here at MaggieYouville want to build a safer church together by raising awareness of these issues and helping to confront abuse within the Church.
For more about their mission or to listen to their podcast, please drop by their website.
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