Why would an abuse victim want to enter a scandal-ridden Church?

I discuss the abuse crisis and healing on EWTN News Nightly. Click here to watch the interview.

National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez asks and I answer:

I intended to be anything but Catholic,” Dawn Eden Goldstein remembers. She grew up in a Reform Jewish household but “fell into agnosticism” in her late teens and become a rock-music historian in New York City. In 1999, she says, she “encountered the love of Jesus Christ” and became a nondenominational Christian.

Her impression of the Catholic Church was influenced by Christians who told her that its teachings were “unbiblical.” All her biases were confirmed when the scandal hit in 2002. On top of all the natural anger and disgust, her sensitivity ran deep, having been molested as a child.

And yet, today Goldstein is a professor of dogmatic theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and the author of My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints.

“I remember the moment I began to change my mind about Catholicism,” she recalls. She was at a meeting of the New York City G. K. Chesterton Society. “Somehow the discussion turned to the scandals, and I made some derisive comment about how Catholics disbelieved the reports of abuse that were then flooding the news media.” Goldstein was especially “irritated” after reading comments that tried to suggest that the scandals were really “a witch hunt orchestrated by reporters who hated the Church.” Her surprise came when the Catholics around her weren’t trying to look away from or explain away what was being revealed.

“They were angry about the abuse,” she says, “angry that such despicable and criminal acts were being perpetrated by their own priests, in their own Church. They didn’t at all want the abuse covered up, as I had assumed. Rather, they wanted it brought into the light so that abusing members of the clergy could be brought to justice and the Church could be purified.”

“It was when I saw ordinary Catholics who were furious about clergy abuse that I started to consider seriously the Catholic Church’s claim to be the true faith,” she remembers. “I entered into full communion with the Church in 2006 and have never looked back.”

Read the rest at National Review Online.