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. DID forms to survive overwhelming
trauma. Different identity states hold different memories. Some actions occur
without full awareness or unified consent. Moral agency can be fragmented in
childhood. DID does not automatically erase responsibility but it dramatically
affects culpability especially for acts committed as a minor under coercion,
grooming, terror or dissociation. From a clinical standpoint, silence about the
abuse he endured while spotlighting his sin is re-victimization. Catechism
states that psychological disturbance, trauma, fear and force diminish or even
remove culpability. Theologically, serious act may have occurred but moral
guilt is not automatically present. God judges interior freedom and not public
optics. A child cannot spiritually consent the way an adult can, especially
under abuse. Church authorities exposing this man’s sin, demanding public
accountability, while discouraging and silencing his testimony of abuse and
politicising the situation is consistent with institutional self-protection and
not gospel justice. This contradicts christ’s defence of the wounded and the
church’s own teaching on conscience and culpability. Silencing abuse while
amplifying sin is morally backwards. Catholic theology can hold both of these
true at the same time. A real, serious sin occurred and the person is also a
victim of profound evil. He still deserves pastoral care and not public shaming
as his culpability will have been greatly reduced. Repentance does not require
lying by omission. Healing does not require institutional silence and justice
does not mean sacrificing the wounded to protect authority. Spiritually
speaking, if this man converted sincerely, sought reconciliation resisted being
forced into silence and tried to speak truth despite public pressure, he is not
rebelling against God. He may in fact be simply wrestling with unjust men. It
is not how the Church determines guilt or truth by forcing confrontation. The
Church does not teach that provoking anger, retraumatizing someone, exposing
them to their abusers or triggering psychological wounds is a legitimate way to
prove wrong doing or lack of virtue. This is not discernment. It is
provocation. Anger triggered by trauma is not evidence of moral guilt. Even
Christ showed anger when confronted with injustice. Forcing contact with
abusers is a serious pastoral violation. Forcing a trauma survivor to confront
abusers and doing so without consent and to illicit an emotional reaction is
harmful and unethical. For someone with DID, this could trigger dissociation,
cause psychological destabilization, retraumatize child parts and increase
shame and blame. This is the opposite of healing. It is spiritual abuse.
Triggering anger proves nothing morally. Deliberately trying to make someone
angry is morally questionable and using someone’s trauma response against them
is unjust. This is coercion and not accountability. Accountability involves
truth, pastoral responsibility, pastoral care and respect for conscience/ This
is coercive pressure, power imbalance, an attempt to control the narrative and
silencing of abuse by reframing the survivor as unstable or defiant. It is
institutional sin and not repentance. If this is truly what is happening, I
have the right to resist such a confrontation, I am not sinning by setting
boundaries. Obedience does not mean submitting to psychological harm and
silence under coercion is not virtue. This actually distorts what redemptive
suffering looks like. In catholic theology, redemptive suffering is accepted
freely and not coerced. It is ordered toward love and healing, not control or
humiliation. Redemptive suffering is something a person may offer. It is never
something others are allowed to impose on someone especially through
manipulation, retraumatization or abuse of authority. Forcing a trauma victim
to confront abusers and relive wound and be provoked to anger to prove
obedience and guilt through emotional collapse is not sanctification. It is
coercion, spiritual abuse and a misuse of power. For someone with trauma and
DID, this matters even more. A person with dissociative trauma does not
experience suffering as unified and free offering. The cross is not obedience
to abuse. God can bring grace out of evil. This does not make the evil
righteous. The catholic church should not humble or humiliate a man who has
been abused by his parents and who now suffers from toxic shame and DID. It is
morally wrong, spiritually abusive and psychologically harmful. It is not
penance, not humility and not catholic in any sense. Penance is never intended
to deepen wounds. For someone who was abuser by their parents and now lives
with toxic shame, humiliation does the opposite of penance. It reinforces the
false belief that they are bad, replays the original abuse and pushes this
person further from God. Not closer. Humiliation is not humility. Humility is
rooted in truth and dignity. Humiliation is imposed shame. The church does not teach
that broken people are healed by being broken again. Neither does it teach that
shame produces virtue. Especially in those already traumatized.. Someone
suffering from toxic shame does not need to be humbled. They need to be lifted
out of a lie that was planted in them by abuse. Weaponizing shame on an abuse
survivor is spiritual abuse. When religious authority label resistance or pain
as pride, uses religious language to justify shaming or imposes suffering on
someone already wounded, this is spiritual abuse. End of debate. When authority
harms, it loses moral legitimacy. Reenacting patterns of domination and
humiliation on an abuse survivor is not obedience to God. It’s a failure of
pastoral responsibility. A man abused by his parents who now suffers from toxic
shame should never be humiliated as penance. Should never be broken down by
authority and should never be told this is God’s will or a path to holiness.
This would reopen the wound originally created. Safety would be violated and
meaning would be corrupted. (love becoming tied to pain and authority to
danger). Public humiliation later in life does not register as new event. The body
and psyche experience it as the original trauma. It is not imagination. It is
trauma memory being reactivated. Toxic shame lives in the body and not only the
mind. When authority humiliates them, it confirms the abuse-instilled lie that
they deserved the abuse done to them. It collapses the sense of self, not only
their confidence, triggering dissociation or intense self-loathing. Instead of
producing repentance, it erases agency. It weaponizes what you needed to
survive and it corrupts the image of God. When spiritual authority humiliates
you, the nervous system does not separate God, authority, punishment or shame.
Instead of God being a source of refuge, God feels disappointed, watching,
pleased by suffering or aligned with abusers. It attacks the one thing you were
trying to build. That is dignity. Survivors spend years slowly and painfully
reforming sense of worth, boundaries, a voice and the ability to say no.
Humiliation justified for your own good does not just hurt. It undoes progress.
Systems that rely on control can interpret self-protection as pride, because
calling it pride neutralizes your truth. A core childhood lie is being reinforced
by people who claim to speak for God. Even if that child commits a sin. My
message is not only not heresy but compassionate orthodoxy. Saying a child is
not culpable for a sin when they are abused, is not heresy. If a man is told to
stay quiet about spiritual or sexual abuse by parents, this instruction did not
come from catholic doctrine or from God. It came from someone within the Church.
Scandal means leading others to sin. Exposing abuse is not scandal. Covering it
up is. Silencing victims to protect reputations is a grave moral failure and
not obedience. The concept that speaking out is resentment or pride is simply
bad theology. There is a confusion between forgiveness and silence. Forgiveness
does not require silence, suppressing truth. When someone says, don’t talk about
politics, this really means, don’t criticize systems of power or don’t make us
uncomfortable. Speaking about injustice is part of the Christian vocation. Sometimes
survivors are silenced because their story exposes hypocrisy, threatens
authority or forces accountability. When the church acts this way, it betrays
its own gospel. Authentic catholic teaching supports the right of survivors to
speak truthfully, to seek justice and healing.
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