Healing

From Georgia, a unique healing moment for some abuse victims:

They are women in their 50s, but they cried for the little girls within who were abused by a priest they trusted.

At a home in Norcross on Friday, eight women forgave the priest from the Marist order who molested them and absolved the Catholic Church that failed to protect them 40 years ago.

The Rev. Dennis Steik, head of the Atlanta province of the Marist order, presented each woman with a $25,000 check along with a tiny gold cross decorated with a red rose -- a symbol, he said, of sacrifice, pain and resurrection. He also gave each woman a ceramic statue of Jesus with children at his knee.

"They're little things," he told them, "but a lot of love comes with them."

As settlements go, theirs was small. But they are convinced their spiritual healing dwarfs most others.

Some of the women hugged or kissed Steik as they received their gifts. Some wept into the shoulder of his black clerical shirt.

Steik himself choked with tears during the ceremony as he apologized to the women -- some there with family.

"That was one of our own that abused you as little girls," he said.

The women and two others covered by the agreement were molested by the Rev. Clarence Biggers, who was a Marist priest when they were students at St. Joseph's Catholic School in Marietta. As a nationwide scandal of sex abuse rocked the Catholic Church last year, some of the women acknowledged to their families and one another for the first time that they had been victims of Biggers. He now lives at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, where he is in ill health and has not been available for interviews.

Comments

[Trish J]

As someone who was a member of another Marist parish for 13 years, and who has met Fr. Steik, I am so glad to read of this meeting. His healing words and actions should be a lesson to Catholic leaders and their lawyers if they think that victims are only after money and lots of it.

[Paul Pfaffenberger]

This approach would have worked in my sister's case and for probably 90% of the hundreds of victims I've spoken with. A sincere and heartfelt apology with some restitution, offered freely, graciously and expiditiously, is the right way to go.

If a victim has already been to the church and been shunned, its too late. Turning away victims, rejecting and discrediting them in their time of greatest need is, IMHO, the greatest failure of the church in this mess. Thank God for those who respond first with compassion, and pray for more of them.