55: My faith has been forged in a fire

Episode 55: Antonia speaks frankly about her faith being 'forged in a fire'  - as she came to terms with abuse scandals in the church and elsewhere. Convinced that, 'You don't have to choose between the practice of your faith and your care for people who've suffered abuse,' Antonia shares her understanding of restorative justice in this context and invites us to recognise our common vocation for safeguarding.

Find out more:

LoudFence 

Vatican News on covering mosaics at Lourdes shrine

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Transcript

You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we're living our faith today. Pope Francis used the image of a caravan for our travelling together, on a sometimes chaotic journey. And Pope Leo, quoting Saint Augustine, reminds us, 'Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times.' I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged now and then. I am too in these conversations. And if you're enjoying them, it helps if you rate and review on the platform where you're listening. Thank you. 

Just to prepare you for today's conversation listeners, some of it is hard to hear. My guest and I are talking about sexual abuse in the church and in other settings. For whatever reason, this might be a really difficult topic for you and if that's the case I encourage you to find someone you can talk to. For example that might be your parish safeguarding officer. Let's get into the conversation now. Listeners, thank you for joining today. This is going to be a really interesting and probably hard- hitting conversation. I'm joined today by Antonia. Thanks for spending some time with me, Antonia. 

It's an absolute pleasure. 

I wonder if, before we get into your work which I think listeners will really want to hear more about, I wonder if we could talk about your life as a Catholic. Were you brought up in a Catholic family? 

Yes, I was. And the irony of it is that my experiences of the Catholic Church as a child were absolutely golden. I didn't really have a dad growing up so my parish priest, Father Damien Walne, was my friend and my mentor, my art teacher, and in many ways, for me and so many other kids in our parish, a replacement dad as well. So, yeah, he was really important to us.

Some of your experience then as a child was wonderful, it sounds like, and your faith was important to you and nurtured you in a way.

Absolutely. 

Through that friendship with Father Damien. 

I think that's one of the things that made the catalyst to my work so painful, really, because it was so good. 

And then your faith through your teenage years and into adulthood, has that been something, that you've wobbled a bit at times, or has that been something to lean on all of those years? 

Well, I suppose my granny in Spain - so as with most Spanish grannies, she was very Catholic. She would say to me growing up that the institutions and people will let you down. But no matter what, the church is the last line of moral defence for humanity. So the church will not let you down. And that's a wonderful vision, but again, it hurts when you find out that the vision, the aspiration of my grandmother didn't really match up to reality. So my grandmother, in retrospect, taught me what we should be, but perhaps didn't warn me about what we are. 

That introduces well - what actually was the catalyst then for you beginning the Loudfence work that you do? 

Well, briefly, I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse, familial sexual abuse, at the age of seven. And I think that anyone who survives anything like this does so because they have at least one person in their life who loves them and makes them feel valued and worthy. And for me, that was Father Damien. He was the air gap, the oxygen gap that stops you from capsizing and going under. Although I had a traumatic childhood and there were so many things I couldn't talk about, he was my sanctuary really. The church was my sanctuary and I loved the church for it. And I don't know how I got to my early thirties and didn't know about this. Maybe I lived in some privileged bubble. I don't know. But the catalyst for all of that background was, I remember coming home from helping out at Brownies one evening, and it's one of those moments you kind of remember. You know, like, remember where you are when Lady Diana died? It was one of those moments where I came home and I switched on the telly. It was the 10:00 news. And at 10:00 in the evening, I was a practising Catholic. By twelve minutes past ten, everything had fallen apart. Because it was a BBC news report about the Pennsylvania grand jury investigation. I can still see Josh Shapiro's face. I can still see the expressions and the emotions of all the people who stood around him. I was just in shock. That's the only way I can describe it. I couldn't articulate anything and I just couldn't. It's inconceivable that I had this one lived reality of the church and then what I was seeing on the other side, it was just - it was not possible to reconcile that reality. So that was really the starting point for it. 

I can really hear that in what you're saying. And I suppose having had an experience yourself that you had survived, maybe the horror of it may have been more real for you even than for other people, seeing that news report and beginning to hear these scandals coming out. 

Yes. It hurt more, I think, because it's one thing to find out that somebody's an abuser, but there's another level of pain, I think, for someone who has sought comfort in someone because they're suffering abuse to only then find out that the very person they've gone to for comfort is themselves an abuser. That hurts beyond measure. It was the level of betrayal. Even now, actually, I think years later, I can feel myself kind of choking up a bit over that. It's just it hurts so much. And the work that we do wasn't an act of defiance or anger or rejection, but simply because we were absolutely convicted by the reality that that just couldn't be the status quo, that we couldn't continue like that. 

Okay. And this is a moment when I can share with listeners that I came to the Loudfence event in Luton at the weekend and I met you there and spent some time at that event. For listeners who don't know about it, we'll talk about it in a minute, but I would say if you see anything nearby that Loudfence is doing, I would recommend being there. What I appreciated was - it's better if you talk about the event - but I would say just for me, what was so good was to be able to, as a member of the church who is faced with this, like you say, this discomfort of the church, what I want the church to be and what it turns out for some people it has been and is, but an opportunity to go to something and be there for people who have been harmed and show some concern and hear more about it and be with that discomfort and look for some healing, not demanding it but trying to be part of it in some way, I think was a really important experience for me and for others that were there. So please do tell us a bit about what Loudfence is then for listeners who don't know.

So if I go back to that night that I saw that news report, I tried to talk to the parish priest where I was living in Scotland. And this is in no way intended to be condemnatory because this is a conversation that could have occurred in any parish, in any diocese in the world and frequently does. And hindsight's a wonderful thing, but when I did speak to my parish priest, he was very defensive, and he basically said to me, So what are you trying to say then? That we're all abusers? So it would be very easy to condemn, but I wasn't stood in his shoes, and I don't know about what his day had been like or the week before or how it was for him. But that was the response that I got from him. And then I went and spoke to, after I recovered from that reaction, to the parish safeguarding officer who was a GP. And when I spoke to her about it, she was actually very blase and dismissive. And she said, Well, the thing is, the church has always been like that. And besides, it wasn't your kids. So what's your problem? That was the response that I had. And for me, that was kind of the final straw that broke the camel's back, and I just didn't feel safe anymore. It left me feeling like the church I'd been raised in growing up wasn't real, that I just lived in an illusion my whole life. Therefore I had to stop going simply because I didn't feel safe. So again, it wasn't out of vengeance at all. It was just out of emotional necessity because of how upset I felt. At the time, on the television, there were lots of people in response to the grand jury investigation saying you don't have to be part of a church to be Catholic. You can be Catholic without the Church, which I now know is not possible. But at the time when you're grieving and you don't want to let go of your faith, but you do want to feel safe, you hang on to that with both hands because the last thing you want is yet something else which is a core part of you, to be taken away. So I went on this journey looking for other people who could tell me how to be Catholic without the Catholic Church. What I found was astonishing. I found people baptising their own children on the beach with a baptismal rite from the Catholic Church. I found young people, both confirmed Catholics, getting married in a hotel with a secular celebrant using a Catholic marriage missal. I met a lady who had a brother who was a victim of clerical abuse, who had spent the last forty years praying alone in her sitting room and volunteering at a food bank as a way of manifesting her faith. And all of these people were in the same situation where they absolutely retained their faith, they are Catholic and would say that they are Catholic, but they are unable to enter the church. I stumbled across what I would describe as the invisible church that exists at the peripheries. And you wouldn't know they existed if you walked into a church, but they are baptised Catholics. They are very much us, and yet they are not there. And all of them felt that they had to choose between the practice of their faith and solidarity and care for people who'd been impacted by abuse. So when I - basically the fates aligned and I ended up having to move to Cumbria, I moved to a small village in Cumbria where I thought I could just basically move to forget, which didn't work out exactly as I planned. In six months after I moved there, the parishioners in this lovely little church, they went through the same thing. The now previous Bishop of Carlisle, James Newcome, he wrote a character reference as part of a pre-sentencing report for a cathedral Canon  - who's not based there now, I hasten to add. And he was convicted of abusing two little eight year old girls. The bishop, here again I stress this, would be very easy to condemn this bishop, but he simply didn't see these children. And because he didn't see them, because he couldn't comprehend what had happened, he wrote this character reference for this paedophile. It caused terrible damage. He withdrew the character reference at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, so to speak. But by then, the damage was done, and this all came into the public domain in the same week as the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse, IICSA, into their report on the Church of England. And so this had the effect of the spiritual equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on these lovely little old ladies in this village in quiet rural England. I saw the grief and the devastation and the fallout that they experienced, in the way that I experienced it. So Elizabeth, the church warden said to me, I'm just not having that. That's not the Church of England. That's not who we are. This person has done this, but the Church of England as a whole, we are not this, and we need to do something about it. She said, Antonia, what are you gonna do about it? And I said, Well, what do you want me to do about it? I'm a statue restorer for crying out loud. People like me don't do things like this. And she said, Well, you're here, so it'll have to be you, won't it? She sent me off to my shed to come up with a solution to the global crisis in the church within 48 hours. I'd always been really interested in clootie trees, which were just over the border in Scotland. And that was a tradition where they tie strips of cloth or 'clootie' to trees to memorialise loss. It's a really ancient tradition that exists. It predates mass literacy, so it was a way for people who hadn't had the privilege of education to be able to memorialise some significant loss in their life. And in Australia, they had adopted this practice, and they called it a loud fence. Well, I actually thought it was verb, loud fencing, and that was the practice of tying ribbons to railings of institutions to send a message to someone on the inside. I said, Well, what if we completely flip that around and we repurpose it and say, Well, we'll loud fence from the inside out. And so that's what we did. So I remember on that morning, it felt a bit rebellious, a bit bad, But there I was with Elizabeth and the others, and we tied all our ribbons to the railings. My teenage daughter said to me, Mum, if you wanna get as far as Penrith with your message, you're gonna have to put some pictures on social media. And I'm a notorious Luddite who didn't know anything about this sort of thing. My daughter took some pictures and we posted them on social media with a really simple message, really: This is what's hurting us. And is there anybody out there? Is there anyone who feels like us? Couple of days later, when I checked for replies, there were messages from Australia, from the United States, from Germany and Poland and Portugal. All over the UK, there were people saying, This was me. This was my nan. This was my dad, my brother. This was the boy I went to boarding school with, This was the girl who I went to guides with. The boy I was in care with. And it was from everywhere. There were people in every institution and especially in their families, and all of them were saying the same thing. Please could you just could you tie a ribbon for me? Could you write this message and put it on your fence? Because doing this will literally be the only justice I will ever have, the only acknowledgement of the pain that I've suffered. That's how the Loudfence began. It was a plea for mercy and for help, which has just grown legs and galloped off, really.

That's so moving, Antonia. I, you know, I can't put into words. I think Elizabeth saw something in you. You know, the Lord put you there. I'm not sure who else would have been able to respond to the time in such a beautiful way. I'm very moved that you've mentioned your parish priest being your art teacher, and somehow art has become part of your response to this crisis, you know, that you've harnessed that. And I really thought at the event I was privileged to be at in Luton, I could see how the way you are with people, accepts people where they are, however they are feeling, and able to honour people being in different places on this journey. So I think it's a beautiful thing you're doing, and I'm struggling to hold in my emotions. And so now you seem to be popping up in different places, holding Loudfence events. How can people keep in touch? I certainly will put a link to the website in episode notes, and people can have a little look there and see where things are happening. And how does that happen? Is it organically that people get in touch with you and you build a relationship and you end up going there? 

Yes. Absolutely. So we are on Twitter and Facebook. People can also contact us through our website. And that's really how the Loud Fence has grown and become what it is. I know that social media gets a good slating, and a lot of the time, it's completely justified. But on this one particular issue, this is where the very well disguised halo begins to shine of social media because it's a way that people can begin to build a relationship with you. So normally people might send me a message just saying, Hi. I just thought you should know that really meant something to me. It gives you an opportunity to begin very gently to talk to that person, to a person, and I think that's what's crucial here. It's a human being behind that message. You're there to look after them, to offer pastoral support, and we've actually got to the point where survivors have now joined us. They found that through doing the work, it's aided their healing. It's enabled them to open up and to talk. They're not kept prisoner by their demons anymore. I also think there's something incredibly powerful about sitting with other people who've experienced the same thing. Suddenly hearing someone else say I went through that too. Don't allow yourself to believe that lie. Don't allow that person to gaslight you. You're not the problem. I think there is no medicine that could possibly offer that ability to talk that way with another person who can empathise. Sympathy's great, empathy's priceless. 

Yes, absolutely. Now speaking of social media, I saw recently on social media that you mentioned Our Lady as the Senior Safeguarding Officer of the Church, which I thought was just beautiful. Explain to us a little bit about how safeguarding fits into this. I feel safeguarding is a different process. I was interested to see how what you're doing is responding, it seems to be responding from the heart to this situation, whereas safeguarding is a process, but it's also something that we all need to take some responsibility for. Explain to listeners how you view safeguarding in the church.

Absolutely. So human nature is such that no matter how ironclad a policy or a contract is, somebody who doesn't want to adhere to it will always find a loophole or a caveat or a way of sidestepping something. So if you want it to work, if you really want it to be embedded in the church, you have to want it. You have to do it because you genuinely believe it's the right thing to do. That requires something more profound than a really well written safeguarding policy. That requires us to have a complete cultural shift in the way that we view safeguarding. We can't permit this myth to continue that safeguarding is some kind of bureaucratic, dry, soulless exercise that's there to kill everyone's fun, something that we do in spite of being Catholic because otherwise the insurers will make our lives miserable. That's not safeguarding. Safeguarding is actually a vocation, a common vocation that we all have. Our Lady is the personification of safeguarding. Any woman out there who's ever had a child will be able to tell you about that moment in the maternity ward when you're given your baby for the first time and you hold them. And that rush of love and that fierce desire to protect, that's the nearest I have ever got to comprehending what God's love is like for us. And that is through becoming a mother. Our Lady, as mother to all of us, is the person who I think best personifies what it is to love and protect. 

And I would say that's your great gift there, again, in framing safeguarding within the church in a way that makes sense to people, that can help us all get on board and understand our responsibility. You mentioned to me when we were in Luton that you're going to Lourdes shortly for an important role, and I wonder if you'd like to share with listeners what that's about. 

There is a priest, very well known. His name is Father Marko Rupnik. He is under a canonical investigation for sexually abusing religious sisters.

Listeners, I'm going to spare you the terrible details of the serious allegations made by many religious sisters against Father Marko Rupnik, which Antonia is referring to here. 

He produces mosaic art. 

It's probably helpful to know that the religious sisters have reported some of that abuse took place in the context of making these mosaics. 

Which is particularly horrifying because this work is very large and it's plastered around sanctuaries and on the front of very prominent churches and chapels and basilicas all over the world. And one of the places, unfortunately, is Lourdes, and it's particularly incongruous because when you think about Lourdes, it was a place where Our Lady, a woman, appeared to Bernadette, a young girl, and spoke to her about mercy and love and redemption and compassion. There has been naturally a lot of demands for Rupnik's work to come down in churches and chapels all over the world, but especially Lourdes. It's a wound that won't heal. We have a brilliant bishop there, Bishop Jean-Marc Micas. He took the courageous decision to cover up the mosaics. He can't take them down, I don't think, until the trial, the canonical trial, is over because it would look like he's prejudicing proceedings. He has covered them up and he has done it as an act of mercy because there are so many survivors. Not just the Rupnik survivors, as crucial as they are, but millions of other people just like me who see those mosaics and just think, I feel like I'm running the gauntlet. If I get into this church, I'm doing it in spite of those mosaics and certainly not because of them. They are an active barrier to faith. Like, it hurts me to look at them. It hurts me to walk up to the building and see them. Can't enter the building without looking at them. He's covered them up. And this is what restorative justice looks like because Bishop Jean-Marc has prioritised the wounded. He has cared for the injured. He has safeguarded. But he is still experiencing a lot of pushback from people who simply have the opinion that, 'It's not hurting me. I like the mosaics so I don't want them to be covered up.' So if you think back to what I said about that safeguarding officer in that parish in Scotland who said, The church has always been like that. And besides, it wasn't your kids. Isn't that exactly the same mentality? If our Christianity is the kind of Christianity that we don't feel able to give even a little bit for our neighbour. What kind of Christianity is that? How deep does it go if we can't even bring ourselves to support somebody who is injured by covering up a mosaic? We, as survivors of abuse, are going to Lourdes to meet with Bishop Jean-Marc and to tell him just how much it means to us, that he has prioritised us and seen us. 

Listeners, a day or two after this conversation, amazingly, Antonio was in Lourdes and found time to send us this message: 

Today has been really quite emotional. I wasn't prepared for the impact that being here in person and seeing the covered doors of the basilica would have on me. Going up to the doors and touching them It felt like actually touching justice. It made me feel really emotional. It felt very affirming and compassionate. I think this is the start of a process. I can't begin to commend Bishop Jean-Marc enough for doing this. I met with Bishop Jean-Marc this afternoon, a wonderful meeting. I did meet with a bishop but I also met with an ordinary Catholic man just like like we're ordinary Catholics. We had a very open, honest and earnest conversation which is actually what we should all be able to have. You know he was very frank. He spoke about the pushback that he's experienced from Catholics who don't want to even have to make the sacrifice of not looking at Marko Rupnik's mosaics, in order to care or show compassion for a religious sister. But what he is doing is being the Bishop of Lourdes. That means he's there to show that God is merciful, especially to the marginalised, to the people on the very peripheries that can't draw near. He wants Lourdes to be a place of hope, a place of sanctuary for those people that might not necessarily go to any other church. He wants them to, if they can, begin their journey here. So I'm incredibly hopeful, very encouraged that dialogue is gonna continue, and it's been a wonderful experience. So this is just a quick update to let you know what's been going on in Lourdes. 

Now let's get back to today's conversation. This is what we talked about next. I wonder whether you can give us a flavour of how is your faith now? Are you comfortable in church?

 Actually, it's odd that it's actually far stronger. It's been forged in a fire. I don't suppose I would have wanted to go through it, but there's some place that you arrive at after such a terrible tragedy where your faith is far far far stronger than it was. You've been tested and now you know that although you've been hurt, you're not leaving. I think if I was really to reflect on it, it would be this. My work with the LoudFence has brought me in contact with people who have suffered abuse in every single institution and setting, social and institutional. There's nowhere else I could go where abuse doesn't happen. That's a myth. There is no place that's completely safe. And also, if you love something, fight for it. Don't abandon it. I think it was Saint Cyprian who said, One cannot have God for one's Father, who does not have the Church for one's Mother. I'm just telling everyone now who feels deeply affected by this issue. You don't have to choose between the practice of your faith and your care for people who've suffered abuse. If the Church is your mum and you're going through a bad patch with her, then don’t stop talking to her. Go to her and tell her what the problem is and fight for her a bit. Please do not think that you have to be a bishop, a cardinal, or a safeguarding expert to have something to say about this or to get involved. This is a common vocation for absolutely everybody, and there is something everyone can do. So if you think that this might be something that you would like to be involved in, maybe you're an artist, maybe you're a great listener, maybe you're someone who just wants to talk about how you feel? Please get in contact with us. We'd really love to know what you think.

Thank you, Antonia. That's been a great privilege to speak to you today. I have been looking at LoudFence on social media over the last year or so, but coming to the event cemented for me that I think the church's response to all of these scandals coming out has been down this process-driven, safeguarding route and judicial processes. Those things are important, but I think you've given people a way to respond and to feel comfortable in the church, and like you say, to stand up for what they think the church can be, to be there rather than to abandon the church at this time. I found it so useful to feel like I can feel comfortable in the church despite these terrible things, because there is a way for me to respond to these things, to respond to people who've been harmed. It's a great blessing for the church to have you doing this work, Antonia, and the people who are supporting you.

Thank you. And I'm so glad that it helped. Let's get everyone talking. Everybody has something to say, so please get involved. 

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X/Twitter, and Facebook accounts, @kindsofCatholic. 

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