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| http://www.snapnetwork.org/nun_abuse For at least eight years, victims of child molesting nuns and members of SNAP have repeatedly urged America's largest organization of nuns to expose the truth about child sex crimes and cover ups by women religious. But the LCWR (Leadership Conference of Women Religious) continues to essentially rebuff us and them.
Now more than ever, since they're being attacked by bishops like we have been (and are being), nuns should be sympathetic to our plight. It grieves us to have to keep prodding them to take long-overdue, simple steps to protect the vulnerable and heal the wounded. But how can we do otherwise?
Here is Mary in red, on right, in Rome at the Vatican representing we survivors of SNAN Survivors Network Abused Nuns
Contact: Mary Dispenza
Phone: (425) 644-2468
Email: mcdispenza@comcast.net
The painting below is by Tom Eminson, Jr., his self portrait, Tom is also a survivor from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. When Snap's Mary Dispenza asked me to give her my thoughts or comments as she packed for her sojourn to Rome. I thought long and hard after blogging in words for 15 years, but Tom's art spoke to me, art beats words into ideas and feelings. I met Tom at orphan reunion ten years ago, at a time he faced his abuser, where he bravely shared his soulful expression of how he and many of us felt so many years ago, and still feel today.
Abandoned, alone, sadden, who could we talk to. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania considered us chattel and in exchange overed St. John's Orphan Asylum, and St. Joseph's House for Homeless & Industrious Boys for silver, (the state funded our mean caregivers), to the Archdiocese for safe keeping! That was not a reality for me and others.
2002 - LCWR refuses to participate in USCCB’s “Policy for the Protection of Children”
April 5, 2002 - LCWR issues statement on clerical abuse
August 24, 2002 - LCWR National Board issues statement on sexual abuse
June 12, 2004 - Nun survivors meet for the first time in Denver at SNAP Conference
July 13, 2004 - Hand-delivered to LCWR and USCCB from nun survivors regarding Plan of Hope, Respect, and Open Healing. Also requested nun survivors be allowed to speak at LCWR-CMSM Joint Assembly in Ft. Worth. To date, we received no answer from USCCB.
August 5, 2004 - Letter to LCWR from SNAP expressing dismay over their decision not to let us speak
August 9, 2004 - E-mail to National Review Board to intervene on our behalf
August 13, 2004 - LCWR Press Release: Response of LCWR President Sister Constance Phelps, SCL saying we can’t speak in Ft. Worth
August 19 to 22, 2004 - Joint LCWR – CMSM Assembly in Ft. Worth, TX. Nun survivors attempt to attend event but are refused.
October 3, 2004 - Meeting with LCWR Leadership in Chicago
November 22, 2004 - LCWR letter to SNAP refusing to work with SNAP members who are survivors of sexual abuse committed by nuns and sisters
August 2, 2005 - Not allowed to speak at LCWR National Conference in Aneheim, CA; we are present – we delivered letter
August 17, 2006 - Not allowed to speak at LCWR National Conference in Atlanta, GA; we are present – we delivered letter
August 24, 2007 - LCWR contacts us to meet to talk but LCWR does not provide an agenda after numerous requests; Not allowed to speak at LCWR National Conference in Kansas City
September 19, 2007 - LCWR responds to SNAP, denying all five requests
August, 2008 - LCWR rebuffs us via letter; SNAP holds night-time vigil
October 9, 2008 - SNAP meets with Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious in St. Louis; requests are denied
February 23, 2009 - SNAP asks to speak at the LCWR conference in New Orleans
March 26, 2009 - LCWR denies all of SNAP's requests
August 11, 2009 - Not allowed to speak at LCWR Conference in New Orleans; we deliver letter
August 14, 2010 - Not allowed to speak at LCWR Conference in Dallas; we are present
August 16, 2011 - LCWR National Conference in Garden Grove, California
August 7, 2012 - LCWR National Conference in St Louis; SNAP members deliver letter and hold vigil
Letter sent to bishops:
Aug. 8, 2012
Dear Archbishop Sartain Bishop Blair, Bishop Paprocki
We write you with great sadness and reluctance. Each of you, like most of your colleagues, has done a poor job of dealing with child sex abuse and cover up. Still, each of you have a chance to prod US nuns to do a better job in this regard. For the sake of prevention, healing, openness and justice, we hope you seize this opportunity.
We have little faith in "internal" church "investigations" and reports on clergy sex crimes and cover ups. We have even less faith when they're conducted by bishops or “outside” firms hand-picked and hired by bishops.
Still, something is often better than nothing. That’s the case today with abuse and cover up by nuns. Right now, there's very little known about child sex crimes and cover ups by nuns. No one's apparently trying to learn more. And as best we can tell, no one inside or outside of the nuns’ community is trying to prod them to do a better job of protecting the vulnerable and healing the wounded.
So with considerable reluctance and distrust, we're asking you to expand your “oversight” of the LCWR into what the organization – and America’s religious orders of women- are doing and are not doing regarding child sex crimes and cover ups by nuns.
Why does this matter? Because we believe that many abusive nuns have never been exposed or disciplined.
many who have seen, suspected or hidden their crimes have similarly never been exposed or disciplined many who were abused by nuns have coped by essentially denying and mischaracterized the crimes they suffered, and minimizing the impact of those crimes, so they suffer in confusion, denial, isolation, shame and self-blame.
We suspect that fewer nuns molest than priests. (Research suggests that more men are sexual predators.) At the same time, however, that’s just speculation. And regardless of the rates or percentages of abuse, two other facts are important. First, there are more nuns than priests. (55,944 nuns in the US versus 41,406 priests) Second, many more nuns had more access to more kids, largely because they worked and work in schools.
Ultimately, however, the numbers or percentages are not especially relevant. If there are 400 or 4,000 or 40,000 adults who were victimized by nuns in this country, every single one of them deserves help. And if there are 4 or 40 or 400 children who may be victimized in the future by nuns in this country, they need protection.
Again, we take this step with great sadness and reluctance. Everyone knows most nuns don’t commit or conceal child sex crimes. Everyone knows that most nuns do wonderful, selfless work, often to help society’s marginalized.
But we see little or no evidence that nuns – either in or through the LCWR or their individual orders – are in any way, shape or form “trailblazers” in making the church or our society safer from clergy child predators or making substantial contributions to the healing of those who suffer because of clergy child predators.
It’s a painful truth to acknowledge. It’s unusual and unsettling for us to seek your help in dealing with it. But our concern – for the vulnerable and the wounded – and our inability to get the LCWR to be more proactive, leave us with few other options.
In the 1965 National Religious Directory:
Sisters 179,954
Diocesan Priests 35,925
Order Priests 22,707
Total Priests 58,632
Brothers 12,271
1950's pictures of Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia, (SSJ) from St. John's Orphan Asylum in this picture are 2 of my abusers! My quick story >>
1) 9th person to the right, Sister Alice Patricia Waters, SSJ,
circa 1953, my 1st grade teacher, Section "L"
2) (1st person on left) Helen Constance Clark, SSJ
circa 1957, my 5th grade teacher, Section "B"
View showing the Roman Catholic Church (cornerstone laid 1867, 4800-4814 Lancaster Avenue), and adjacent St. Johns Orphan Asylum (built circa 1852) at the east end of the Cathedral Cemetery. In the right of the image, the Gothic-style church stands next to the gated entrance with gatehouse to the cemetery. A small church outbuilding, trees and paths landscape the church grounds. On a hillside behind the church, the asylum is visible. Several children stroll and play under the presence of Sisters of St. Joseph on the tree-lined property. In the foreground, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages and buggies travel on Lancaster Avenue. Also includes printed annotations for the "Cemetery Gate" and "48th St." Our Mother, built after the designs of Edwin Forest Durang, replaced St. Gregory's Church built on the site soon after the purchase of the land in 1849 by Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick for the development of a cemetery and other Catholic institutions in West Philadelphia
This is an early 1920's picture, but later in the 1940's Grace Kelly's dad John B Kelly (Kelly for Brickwork from "bricktown" Germantown, PA) added a 3rd floor and that was were
the nuns individual rooms or cells as they were called. The teaching nuns would be upstairs in the main building! When my mother was a girl she babysat for the Kelly's. Grace's uncle was friends with my grandfather Edward J Leddy, who operated a saloon until Prohibition closed it down!   
50-70 little boys, with the supervision of 1 dormitory nun watching and sleeping in a nearby cell room with sliding glass window under her watchful eyes! We had what the nuns would shame call some boys "wet the beds"! But before we went to sleep, the dormitory sister would remind us if we left out beds at night the devil would pull us straight to hell! No wonder some wet, while others just snuck out to use the water closet, and if we did use the pull chain to flush she we awaken!
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Friday, February 22, 2019
BREAKING NEWS! SNAP & SNAN (Survivors Network of Abused Nuns) from Vatican City!
Tuesday, January 08, 2019
To contact Jim Brown from The Hut -1960-1964, Roman Catholic Class of 1964!
james_brown0152@comcast.net
To Register Click on the Link Below:
Individuals who wish to participate in the Program may immediately register with the Administrators on this Program website by providing their names, contact information and a summary description of the nature of the allegation, including the dates, time, location of the alleged abuse and name of the alleged perpetrator.
Such information will be maintained in strict confidence in conjunction with this Program except that it will be forwarded to the local office of the District Attorney by the registrant and the Archdiocese for initial review of the allegations.
The registrant should include the following language in their written notification to the DA as follows: “By sending this notification to the DA I agree that the DA’s office can inform the Archdiocese of the allegations reported to the DA.” In addition, the Archdiocese will have the matter investigated by its own independent investigators.
Please note: If the allegation is directed at clergy of another diocese or religious order, your information will be forwarded to that entity for response.
Click Here to register to receive Program information when it becomes available.
www.PhiladelphiaArchdioceseIRRP.comSunday, January 06, 2019
English Catholic Homes Exported Homey's to Australian RC Institutions run by the Christian Brothers!
Recently our growing Homey group on Facebook decided to organize an individual response to the film Oranges and Sunshine on Netflix, which has ripped opened the deep wounds hidden and not yet heard nor healed in most of us.
We were placed in these Catholic Institutions by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for our own moral development and put into the hands of God's caretakers.
I made a very difficult decision waiting for well over 50 years to come forward with every fiber in my body warning me to stay away from the "monsters in my head." Please see reverenced film Oranges and Sunshine
By Carol Midgley
My therapist suggested that I start with this first step in the completion of my childhood trauma; and for my PTSD healing to have an ear across the years! I tied that when calling the Philadelphia Archdiocese but no response not even voicemail box from the very professionals, set up by the Philadelphia Archdioceses to at least do an intake or hear our pained dark stories from faraway and long ago.
The Times on Oranges and Sunshine by Jim Loach
Margaret Humphreys, the real woman behind Oranges and Sunshine
A new film sheds light on a brutal child migrant scheme
On the walls of Margaret Humphreys’ office above a sandwich shop in Nottingham are hundreds of family photographs, the typical fare of happy smiles and embraces found on mantelpieces everywhere. The truth behind these snapshots, though, is far from happy. It is a wretched story that shames our country.
Many of the people pictured here were robbed of any chance of family life when they were children thanks to a government policy to ship thousands of minors in care to Australia for a “better life”. Without the consent or knowledge of their birth parents, children as young as 4 were often simply poured into boats and unloaded into religious institutions and children’s homes at the other end, then forced to work in punishing conditions.
Children have been exported from Britain since the 1600s. From the start of the last century thousands were sent to Canada and Rhodesia. The mass exportation to Australia took place mainly after the Second World War, with between 7,000 and 10,000 children sent. Incredibly, the practice didn’t officially end until 1970.
They were “white stock” sent to boost Australia’s postwar population, told falsely that their parents were dead and that they were lucky to get this chance. Hundreds grew up not even knowing their correct date of birth. Their sense of identity was often eroded by years of neglect and terrible abuse. Thanks to magnificent work by Humphreys, and her organisation the Child Migrant Trust, over the past 23 years some have finally been reunited with family members in Britain, discovering lost mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins — hence the poignant images on Humphreys’ walls. For others, however, it was all too late and by the time they traced their parents, they were dead. All they have left is a gravestone.
Now, a year after Gordon Brown formally apologised to the child migrants, their story is being told in film. Oranges and Sunshine, directed by Jim Loach (son of Ken), is a beautiful dramatisation of a monstrous truth. It is breathtakingly moving film (have tissues to hand) tracing the consequences of a social policy that was ill-thought out and often seemed to amount to little more than free child labour. Via the story of Margaret, a Nottingham social worker who exposed the full horror of the scheme in the 1980s after a woman in Adelaide made contact to try and trace her family, we meet some of the victims still living with the shame and emptiness of being a “non-person”. All are based on true stories.
Humphreys is played by Emily Watson who captures her mixture of determination, compassion and vulnerability. Humphreys isn’t comfortable talking about herself, batting away compliments about her achievements, for which this month she was appointed CBE. Neither was she directly involved in the making of the film, based on her book Empty Cradles. But she has seen it, just once, with her family and says it is “faithful” to the truth. “Let’s hope the film helps us to look [what happened] in the face,” she says. “We need people to understand the consequences of child migration because they are huge. There were times when I despaired that this terrible injustice would ever be acknowledged. That’s one of the factors that led me to agree to the film.”
Humphreys, 66, has heard countless appalling testimonies, such as the five-year-old boy tied to a tree and repeatedly raped by a Christian Brother; the little girl with golden curls held down by nuns and shorn until her scalp bled because she tried to run away; lonely, weeping children beaten and humiliated for wetting the bed, a choirboy sent to a dentist’s house to sing at a Christmas party and raped by several men. She was physically threatened herself in Australia by people desperate to protect some of the religious institutions involved (the Christian Brothers have since apologised). Eventually the stress made her ill and doctors found she was suffering from trauma.
Her own family made huge sacrifices as she worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often on the other side of the world. Her amazingly supportive husband Merv, also a social worker, and played in the film by Richard Dillane, held the fort at home. For seven years there was no family holiday and Margaret took no leave.
She, though, could go home — unlike the migrants. “Many obsessed over England, the greenery, the terraced houses and the wet weather that they could still remember,” she says. “Their children too have been deprived of grandparents; the losses continue down the generations.
“Identity is critical,” she says. “It’s all about connection, who we belong to, where we fit in in the world. These are fundamental questions for children.” Some of the migrants describe a deep longing to be touched — hugged maternally — as children. One, George, taken from a children’s home in Liverpool and sent to New South Wales, told Humphreys that as a boy he would sit in a gum tree every day praying that a car would knock him over. Not to kill him, just to break his legs and get him sent to hospital “because then somebody will pick me up ... then somebody will hold me”.
Humphreys says one of her migrant friends Harold Haig, who was sent to Australia at age 10, articulates it best. “He says you walk round with this lump of ice inside you that never melts, you feel cold inside.” Sandra Bennett, taken from Birmingham to Queensland, describes it thus: “Not having a family makes you feel as if you don’t belong to the human race.” This lack of sense of self, coupled with traumatic childhood, meant many found it hard to sustain adult relationships. Alcoholism is also common in child migrant communities.
I had assumed that the shipping of the children abroad was largely a class issue: the children were poor and their parents voiceless. But this was not always the case, says Humphreys. Many people found themselves in difficult circumstances after the Second World War and put their children into care, meaning to pick them up later. When they returned to the homes they were told their children had been “adopted”. This wasn’t true. Adoption was never part of Child Migrant Scheme plan. As the film shows, when Margaret traced the now elderly mothers, they were devastated to learn their children had never had loving homes. “People of all classes found themselves in situations — single parents where there was a stigma, parents separating.”
Children’s homes sometimes emptied overnight. “One man wrote to me saying he had got up one morning, gone to the breakfast table and there was no one there. He hadn’t gone because he had chicken pox.”
Tragically, the trauma of having to give up a child caused many mothers to decide they couldn’t go through it again. “To a lot of these women it was a grief without end,” Humphreys says.
“The film is about society; it challenges all of us,” she says. “It is about loss, separation, reconciliation, restitution and learning. That last word is crucial. What we learn from this will inform actions in the future. It is not something that happened over on the other side of the world, it is part of our history too.”
How did it feel to see Gordon Brown say sorry? “I saw the apology as a measure of where we are at as a society and for that alone — well, it was a pretty good moment,” she says. “The apology removed shame. It said [to the migrants], ‘It isn’t your shame, it is ours.’ ”
On the walls of Margaret Humphreys’ office above a sandwich shop in Nottingham are hundreds of family photographs, the typical fare of happy smiles and embraces found on mantelpieces everywhere. The truth behind these snapshots, though, is far from happy. It is a wretched story that shames our country.
Many of the people pictured here were robbed of any chance of family life when they were children thanks to a government policy to ship thousands of minors in care to Australia for a “better life”. Without the consent or knowledge of their birth parents, children as young as 4 were often simply poured into boats and unloaded into religious institutions and children’s homes at the other end, then forced to work in punishing conditions.
Children have been exported from Britain since the 1600s. From the start of the last century thousands were sent to Canada and Rhodesia. The mass exportation to Australia took place mainly after the Second World War, with between 7,000 and 10,000 children sent. Incredibly, the practice didn’t officially end until 1970.
They were “white stock” sent to boost Australia’s postwar population, told falsely that their parents were dead and that they were lucky to get this chance. Hundreds grew up not even knowing their correct date of birth. Their sense of identity was often eroded by years of neglect and terrible abuse. Thanks to magnificent work by Humphreys, and her organisation the Child Migrant Trust, over the past 23 years some have finally been reunited with family members in Britain, discovering lost mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins — hence the poignant images on Humphreys’ walls. For others, however, it was all too late and by the time they traced their parents, they were dead. All they have left is a gravestone.
Now, a year after Gordon Brown formally apologised to the child migrants, their story is being told in film. Oranges and Sunshine, directed by Jim Loach (son of Ken), is a beautiful dramatisation of a monstrous truth. It is breathtakingly moving film (have tissues to hand) tracing the consequences of a social policy that was ill-thought out and often seemed to amount to little more than free child labour. Via the story of Margaret, a Nottingham social worker who exposed the full horror of the scheme in the 1980s after a woman in Adelaide made contact to try and trace her family, we meet some of the victims still living with the shame and emptiness of being a “non-person”. All are based on true stories.
Humphreys is played by Emily Watson who captures her mixture of determination, compassion and vulnerability. Humphreys isn’t comfortable talking about herself, batting away compliments about her achievements, for which this month she was appointed CBE. Neither was she directly involved in the making of the film, based on her book Empty Cradles. But she has seen it, just once, with her family and says it is “faithful” to the truth. “Let’s hope the film helps us to look [what happened] in the face,” she says. “We need people to understand the consequences of child migration because they are huge. There were times when I despaired that this terrible injustice would ever be acknowledged. That’s one of the factors that led me to agree to the film.”
Humphreys, 66, has heard countless appalling testimonies, such as the five-year-old boy tied to a tree and repeatedly raped by a Christian Brother; the little girl with golden curls held down by nuns and shorn until her scalp bled because she tried to run away; lonely, weeping children beaten and humiliated for wetting the bed, a choirboy sent to a dentist’s house to sing at a Christmas party and raped by several men. She was physically threatened herself in Australia by people desperate to protect some of the religious institutions involved (the Christian Brothers have since apologised). Eventually the stress made her ill and doctors found she was suffering from trauma.
Her own family made huge sacrifices as she worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often on the other side of the world. Her amazingly supportive husband Merv, also a social worker, and played in the film by Richard Dillane, held the fort at home. For seven years there was no family holiday and Margaret took no leave.
She, though, could go home — unlike the migrants. “Many obsessed over England, the greenery, the terraced houses and the wet weather that they could still remember,” she says. “Their children too have been deprived of grandparents; the losses continue down the generations.
“Identity is critical,” she says. “It’s all about connection, who we belong to, where we fit in in the world. These are fundamental questions for children.” Some of the migrants describe a deep longing to be touched — hugged maternally — as children. One, George, taken from a children’s home in Liverpool and sent to New South Wales, told Humphreys that as a boy he would sit in a gum tree every day praying that a car would knock him over. Not to kill him, just to break his legs and get him sent to hospital “because then somebody will pick me up ... then somebody will hold me”.
Humphreys says one of her migrant friends Harold Haig, who was sent to Australia at age 10, articulates it best. “He says you walk round with this lump of ice inside you that never melts, you feel cold inside.” Sandra Bennett, taken from Birmingham to Queensland, describes it thus: “Not having a family makes you feel as if you don’t belong to the human race.” This lack of sense of self, coupled with traumatic childhood, meant many found it hard to sustain adult relationships. Alcoholism is also common in child migrant communities.
I had assumed that the shipping of the children abroad was largely a class issue: the children were poor and their parents voiceless. But this was not always the case, says Humphreys. Many people found themselves in difficult circumstances after the Second World War and put their children into care, meaning to pick them up later. When they returned to the homes they were told their children had been “adopted”. This wasn’t true. Adoption was never part of Child Migrant Scheme plan. As the film shows, when Margaret traced the now elderly mothers, they were devastated to learn their children had never had loving homes. “People of all classes found themselves in situations — single parents where there was a stigma, parents separating.”
Children’s homes sometimes emptied overnight. “One man wrote to me saying he had got up one morning, gone to the breakfast table and there was no one there. He hadn’t gone because he had chicken pox.”
Tragically, the trauma of having to give up a child caused many mothers to decide they couldn’t go through it again. “To a lot of these women it was a grief without end,” Humphreys says.
“The film is about society; it challenges all of us,” she says. “It is about loss, separation, reconciliation, restitution and learning. That last word is crucial. What we learn from this will inform actions in the future. It is not something that happened over on the other side of the world, it is part of our history too.”
How did it feel to see Gordon Brown say sorry? “I saw the apology as a measure of where we are at as a society and for that alone — well, it was a pretty good moment,” she says. “The apology removed shame. It said [to the migrants], ‘It isn’t your shame, it is ours.’ ”
"Don't bother with that hidden pain!"
My therapist suggested that I start with this first step in the completion of my childhood trauma; and for my PTSD healing to have an ear across the years! I tied that when calling the Philadelphia Archdiocese but no response not even voicemail box from the very professionals, set up by the Philadelphia Archdioceses to at least do an intake or hear our pained dark stories from faraway and long ago.
I called the office of Investigations 888-930-9010 and was greeted by voice mail message, but never a call back!
So I went on the the website with the ominous logo of the archdioceses cathedral http://archphila.org/delegate/
I then emailed you Anne.
- Anne Shenberger, MSS, LSW
I did get a connection to this kind person, who even offered me an apology. Thank you Al! Al suggested that I call the Victims 888-800-8780 and all 3 times I was disconnected this afternoon.
Albert J. Toczydlowski, Esq
Director of Investigations
Phone: 215-320-8003
E-mail: atoczydlowski@adphila.org
Director of Investigations
Phone: 215-320-8003
E-mail: atoczydlowski@adphila.org
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| http://childyouthprotection.org/index.php |
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| http://www.novabucks.org/index.html |
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