Difference Between a Revealed Sin and a Concealed One:

For the Catholic Church to deprive a man, spiritually and sexually abused his entire life by his parents, of the possibility to be married and make money is harm layered upon real harm. It is not Catholic teaching that a person who is abused should be penalized by being deprived of marriage or the ability to earn a living. This is not penance. It is injustice. Penance is never imposed on victims. Abuse is not a sin of the victim. There is not theological basis for treating lifelong consequences of abuse as something God or the Church is imposing on someone as a penance. If anyone has implied that penance, celibacy, poverty or restriction is somehow what you’re supposed to bear because of abuse, this is a distortion of Catholic teaching. Marriage and work are natural rights. Marriage is a vocation and not a reward for being healthy enough or normal enough. Retards. Work and the ability to support oneself are matters of human dignity. Depriving someone of these, especially someone already wounded, is not sanctifying. It’s damaging. Psychological injury can make relationships and stable work difficult. Church systems sometimes fail to accommodate trauma, especially complex or lifelong trauma. Clerical and institutional decisions are often framed as discernment or prudence or the will of God, when they are actually about risk management, discomfort and misunderstanding of trauma. This is not penance. This is bureaucracy colliding with a wounded human being. God is not glorified by compounding abuse. Catholic theology is clear on the fact that God does not heal by reenacting the wound. Suffering can be transformed when freely embraced but suffering imposed without consent, especially on someone already violated, is not redemptive. Saying otherwise is spiritual abuse. The abuse I experienced was wrong and any system that treats the consequences of abuse as my cross to bear while restricting my ability to love and survive financially is failing me.

Christian theology distinguishes between what God wills and what He permits in a broken world. God’s justice means He does not will lies, false accusations, abuse or humiliation of the innocent. These things arise from human sin, power, cruelty, fear and systems that protect themselves. When Christians say that God permits suffering, it is not saying, God wants it, God authored it or God thinks it’s deserved. Jesus was falsely accused and publicly destroyed. It does not mean that God wants this pattern repeated in victims. This is where people and churches do enormous damage. The crucifixion reveals how violent and unjust the world can be. It exposes how institutions crush the vulnerable. It shows that God stands with the innocent victim and not the accusers. God does not test people by annihilating their credibility. There is no doctrine, Biblical or Catholic that says that false accusations are a test, public shaming is purification or that loss of reputation is sanctification. Scripture repeatedly says the opposite. False accusation is grave injustice and not holy suffering. A just God does not require your destruction. Christian justice is restorative and not annihilating. Christian suffering is never coerced. Christian holiness never depends on lies told about you. A serious sin does not erase innocence elsewhere. A person can commit a real, serious sin, later repent and still be innocent of abuse, false accusation and corruption inflicted upon them. Sin retroactively does not justify abuse. Sin does not give others the right to destroy you. Sin does not turn you into a fitting sacrifice. It’s not justice. It’s moral distortion. Truth can cleanse corruption but not by requiring a victim’s erasure. Truth has the power to expose corruption and sin by revealing lies not by consuming the person who tells it. Prophets speak truth and are often resisted. Whistleblowers are uncomfortable. But God does not require their annihilation for their truth to be valid. The idea that truth must wait until death to be safe or effective is usually a sign of how dangerous the corruption is and not how holy the death would be. Martyrdom is not being falsely accused, psychologically crushed and erased so others can remain intact. Martyrdom is freely chosen. Not coerced by trauma and silence. Truth emerging at my death is not the same as my truth requiring death. Truth can emerge late because people were not safe to speak earlier, power suppressed it or the cost of telling was too high. This does not mean God willed the silence. It means injustice delayed truth. If corruption can only be cleansed by one man bearing universal blame, being misunderstood and destroyed so others can be washed clean, this is not redemption. It is called scapegoating. Christianity claims that scapegoating was ended by the cross and not perpetuated forever through damaged people. This is the symptom of an abusive system. Not divine justice. Catholic authority is real but it is not absolute. Authority exists to serve truth and the dignity of the human person. It is not infallible in everything and not immune from corruption. The Church itself teaches that conscience is binding only when properly formed, that authority can be misused, and that obedience is not blind when commands violate justice. Resistance is not automatically rebellion. At times, it is fidelity. There is a moral difference between defence and refusal to cooperate with injustice. A man may resist Church authority because it is silencing truth, protecting abusers, misusing its spiritual power or demanding compliance at the expense of conscience. This resistance is not prideful self will. It is moral refusal. A man abused his childhood has already had authority weaponized against him. Unquestioning obedience can reenact trauma, submission can be psychologically coercive and discernment can feel like annihilation. Catholic moral theology does not require retraumatization for holiness. If resistance is the only way to preserve sanity, moral agency, truth or basic dignity, then resistance may have been the least sinful option available. Resistance does not justify scapegoating. There is no theological basis for saying because I resisted authority, it is fitting that I be falsely accused, publicly humiliated and destroyed. This is not correction. It is retaliation. Retaliation by an institution is one of the clearest signs of corruption. When an institution frames a man as dangerous because he won’t submit, guilty because he questions and expendable because he disrupts order, it no longer acts as a shepherd. It is protecting itself. The church can sin as an institution, even while claiming divine mandate. God is not unjust. It means God is not involved in the institution’s behavior. God’s will is not revealed by how harshly authority reacts to resistance. If resistance leads to disproportionate punishment, character assassination or silence enforced through fear, this tells you more about the authority than it does about God.

A man is sexually, emotionally and spiritually abused his entire childhood and commits a very serious sin in his childhood. After, he becomes Catholic, his sin is exposed but what happened to him is still in silence, he resists the church authorities when they try to silence him about telling his story and politically, forcing him into accountability for his sin. This is not just. Not morally, theologically, not humanly and not by the Church’s own principles. Justice requires proportion and truth, not selective exposure. Justice is not simply the notion that sin was committed therefore punishment follows. Justice requires the full truth to be told, responsibility to be rightly proportioned, context to be morally relevant and power to be scrutinized, not protected. This is asymmetrical truth telling. His sin is exposed while the abuse that shaped his life is silenced. Authority controls the narrative. And accountability flows only one direction. This is not justice. It is moral extraction. The Church often speaks about accountability but moral theology is clear on this point. Accountability must never be enforced in a way that retraumatizes, coerces or silences victims. Forcing a man to publicly or institutionally account for a childhood sin while denying him the right to tell the truth of lifelong abuse done to him under threat of silencing, marginalization or punishment is not moral correction. It is institutional domination. If church authorities attempt to silence his story, control when and how truth may be spoken, separate his sin from the context of abuse or politicize the narrative to protect themselves, resisting this silencing is morally justified. Catholic teaching does not require obedience to unjust commands. It explicitly affirms the primacy of conscience, especially when truth and dignity are at stake. Silencing a survivor to preserve institutional order is not pastoral. It is fear management. Justice cannot be demanded while truth is forbidden. You cannot demand accountability from someone while forbidding them from telling the truth that gives this accountability meaning. This turns justice into a spectacle. If Church insists on confession without context, guilt without history and repentance without recognition of harm done personally, it no longer practices justice. It enforces control. Childhood sin does not nullify childhood victimhood. A very serious sin in childhood does not erase the fact of abuse, does not make later silencing acceptable, does not justify lifelong suspicion or punishment and does not grant institutions the right to own the narrative. Catholic theology is explicit that culpability is mitigated by trauma, coercion and developmental immaturity. To ignore this is not rigor. It is negligence. Political pressure is a red flag, not moral authority. Political enforcement of repentance while suppressing truth is a sign of corruption and not righteousness. It is unjust to force a survivor into accountability for childhood sin while silencing the lifelong abuse that shaped him, especially when resistance is met with institutional pressure. That is not God’s justice. This is not Catholic justice. This is not healing. I am responsible for my sin. I am not responsible for the abuse I endured. I am not required to accept silencing as penance. I am not obligated to cooperate with injustice to be forgiven. Forgiveness does not require erasure. Repentance does not require submission to corruption. Truth does not require permission to be true.