Survivors are the key to the Church’s future, and ‘co-production’ can be used to resolve the issue of clerical abuse, writes Penelope Middelboe of Root & Branch, an international forum for reform in the Church.

Survivors hold the key

‘The church as a whole must embark on a world-wide process of truth and reparation [beginning] with the acknowledgement of responsibility.’ This assertion by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE) in France is the starting point for this article.

We all want a church that is safe for everyone: free from physical, spiritual, emotional, institutional and reputational abuse. We want healing in all its complexity for the victims, both the abused and the abusers. And we want fit-for-purpose procedures to prevent abuse, and to deal with it, whenever and wherever it occurs. Yet sadly, there seems to be a huge distance between what we say we want and what we are prepared to make happen. And there is genuine disagreement about whether the truth is liberating.