My Book Say Sorry:... Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk
Dear Ann
Your Letter to the
Pope is very, very moving. It brought a very emotional reaction in me. I don't believe I have seen a letter yet that captured the horror of what you and others have gone through.
Would
you mind if I edited the letter a little bit and then shared it with
some of the websites here that
get very wide readership. I am also in constant contact with the
media and would like to share it with them as well. If you agree I
could write up a little biographical sketch to include with
it. One of the web pages I want to send it to have a wide
readership in the Vatican because they think they will find out what we
are up to. That way your letter would be seen by some of the
people there... and they really need to hear directly from
people like you.
God bless
you. You are a true hero and whether you know it or not you are an inspiration for me and I know for others. Tom Doyle
6 April 2010
Tom Doyle brought this letter to my attention. Here is what Tom wrote in his covering note.
Attached is a letter from Ann Thompson, addressed to the pope. Ann lives in New Zealand. As an infant she was placed in Nazareth House Orphanage in Christchurch, New Zealand. During her time at the orphanage she was physically and sexually abused by the nuns and the priests. After 2002 she gathered the courage to reveal her abuse and since has become a courageous advocate for victims and a warrior for justice. Last year her story was published in New Zealand. Her book, Say Sorry, is one of the most vivid and disturbing accounts I have yet to read. In January she wrote a letter to Pope Benedict. This letter reveals the anguish of Ann and the other victims with whom she shared the horror of her youth.
She has given me permission to edit her letter for format and to find ways to have it published in the U.S. Consequently I am sending it to you in hopes that you can add it to your respective web pages.
Thanks.
Tom
Warning: The graphic descriptions of physical and sexual abuse may be triggering to victims of abuse.
* * *
January 2010
To Pope Benedict,
I want you to know about the sexually abused men and women down south in New Zealand. Most of us were taken from our mothers’ arms after they gave birth to us. I was taken from my mother at two and half months old to live a life of physical abuse and sexual abuse by the Catholic Church workers, nuns and a priest, and I will tell you what it is like to live in hell for 24 years with them and also about the other men and women with me.
We were given numbers, not our names and if our names were used it was done so with hate for us and for our mothers. To set a child against her parents is against God’s wishes, but we did have the best teachers, the Catholic Church herself. She took every ounce of love and faith from our Hearts and Souls and we were left but a shadow of a person who had no mind. Without Love a child’s soul does not grow and the Catholic Church made sure that we were never to know love or have a family.
Physical abuse and sexual abuse tears at the very core of your being, leaving you empty as your words of apology are to us today. We have never had any one stand beside us as we were growing up, never a smile, a kiss on the cheek, a thank you or a plaster for the sores and cuts on our bodies. We never had someone to take our hand, and ask how we were feeling. We never had a sick day because all we did was work from dawn to dark, without time off or a day off, to rest. School for me was a big NO, as work was all that was set out for me from the age of five years until I left 24years later.
We cannot go into a Catholic church any more, because to see the priest at the altar is to feel the pain of what he did to you. I was not a virgin when I got married and this so cut me up because I wanted to be pure of soul for my husband. Because of what the priest did to me I believed I had sinned against God and my husband. That killed my spirit and I went into this dark hole which I cannot seem to get out of, thinking that God is displeased with me.
I have written a book about my childhood abuse and the ongoing abuse which I and the others are still going through. Since then I have had countless men and women phone me and email me to tell me their stories and if I can give them a little help and the most important thing is to believe them.
The stories coming out now sound worse because people are now listening to us and know that we are telling the truth as God knows we are. We will stand before God and He will take us to His heart and bless us, not like the blessing I thought that the priest was going to bestow upon me the day he took me into the bedroom and sexually abused me. That day remained with me for the rest of my life and was the day I started to fear priests and the Catholic Church. You see until then it was the workers and the nuns I feared, and then the priest took away the last little bit hope I had that there was someone I could go to but that was never to be. I was raped by the priest, by the Catholic Church and by God and I was left in this world to always be what they told me I was, the devil’s child.
How can I grow up to be a woman when the little child in me is always in the forefront, forever ready to take on anyone or anything she sees about child abuse?
Did you know that it is like this for us all?
We are forever locked up in our childhood with our little child who was physically abused and sexually abused because she does not know who to believe for she fears every one and she does not want to be hurt again. That little child was once asked by an official of the Catholic Church if it felt nice to be sexual abused. That child, me, cried and cried and called out in pain. I was a child and it was the grownups that did this to me. I am still that child and I still carry those terrible scars around with me. That child cannot grow, and nor can I. We are forever bound up by the physical abuse and sexual abuse of our childhood and by the way we are still treated by the Catholic Church.
A man of 69 years of age is still looking for his real father who was a priest. His mother was a 15 year old orphan. One day she was called away by a nun from the playroom where she was surrounded by other girls. She was sent to the priest. When she returned to the room she was so upset and told the other girls that she had been raped by the priest. Nine months later she had a son named Peter who, according to the nuns and the hospital where she was taken, was born at Nazareth House. The nuns and the priests covered it all up and it seems that Peter was born nowhere. His story is twisted so much that he can never know where he really was born.
His mother was then sent to Mount Madgala laundries where her name was changed and where she stayed to work for her keep for 5 years. During that time she was not allowed to see her son. He was adopted by a family named White. Peter’s mother was robbed of her son. She never had the chance to tell him who his father was, the priest who had raped her.
In the 1930s there were four sisters who went to Nazareth House Orphanage and who were not allowed to talk to each other. They were in the same orphanage but all they could do was look at each other as they ate at different tables and lived apart. They longed to have each others’ hand to hold. They may as well have been put in separate orphanages, far apart from each other.
Two of these young girls were sexually abused in the confessional by the same priest but they did not tell anyone until 2002. One of them wrote her story of abuse so that her children would know why she was so distant towards them as they were growing up. She also told in her book the story about young Peter’s mother, not knowing that one day she would actually meet him (in 2003) and be able to tell him about his mother who gave birth to him at Nazareth House and was then sent to the hospital. She told Peter about his mother being raped by a priest.
There is another lady who was just four and a half years of age at the time Peter’s mother was raped by the priest. She remembers so vividly the day this 15year old girl was called away by the nuns and when she came back, how she was crying outside the locked door. She remembers how upset she was when she came back how that girl’s words stayed with her for the rest of her life: “I have just being raped by a priest!”
She tells how she never knew what the word “rape” meant. But the anguish and pain this young girl was going through and the word “raped” was to stay with her to this day. She cries as she tells me about it. She also told another story that shocked me to the core. It is about the two girls who were pushed down a staircase. An ambulance was called and we were sent into the classrooms and not allowed to look out the windows. We saw these two girls taken away and we never saw them again.
There are stories about the way the nuns abused us which we now know was sexual abuse. They would strip off our clothes and put over the beds naked and then thrash us in the private parts of our bodies. We could not talk about this about to any one for fear that we would not be believed. We could not talk about it because we feared if we did we would be put over the beds and it would happen again the next night. As I lay over the bed tied like Jesus on His Cross I tried to think only of Jesus while the belts came down across my back and then my front as I screamed and called out for help. Today we are still calling out for help and we are still we are not being heard by anyone who will show us some mercy. Back then we were at the mercy of the nuns and the priests who used our bodies for their few minutes of sexual pleasure and left us with the scars of our childhood which are still with us today.
Pope Benedict, during the war you were in the army. If you had heard the screams of the men, the women and the little children as they were taken to their deaths would you have walked away then as you and the Catholic Church still walk away from us now? Where is Jesus in your life today where we, the lost children of the Catholic Church, are concerned? We were left to the wolves in the dark who were your priests and nuns who physically and sexually abused us. They were supposed to serve God and look after His children. They didn’t then and they don’t now.
If
only you had taken heed of our cries in the 1980s these crimes of the
Catholic Church would not have gone un-noticed. But you took the easy
way out, or so you thought. You did not realize that we, the abused boys
and girls of yesterday, had the strength from God and Jesus to survive
through these many years. You turned your backs on us but we all told
you that we will not go away. We are still here and not just a few but
many like the sands upon the shores.
Please,
Please, I beg you to set us free from our pain and become like Jesus
and go out around the world to see just what we are still going through.
We do not want to call on deaf ears any more, like we did when we were
children. We want you to see our pain and hear our voice so that we can
have some peace and by doing this you and the Catholic Church will also
be free.
Ann Free Spirit = Ann Thompson