COMMENTARY: For Victims of Priestly Abuse, No Limitations on Pain

c. 2006 Religion News Service The statute of limitations is the legally established time period in which criminal charges can be brought against an accused person. This is a basic provision of the U.S. Constitution to protect the basic rights of all citizens. This rule says that time runs out for victims as it does […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

The statute of limitations is the legally established time period in which criminal charges can be brought against an accused person. This is a basic provision of the U.S. Constitution to protect the basic rights of all citizens.

This rule says that time runs out for victims as it does for a basketball team in a championship contest. If the ball swishes through the basket after the buzzer sounds, the contest is over and, despite the true arc of that last shot, it does not count. The team must leave the court and the outcome of the contest enters the record books and can never be played again.


More court time is exactly what many groups want to give to sex abuse victims to allow them to open up the record books closed by the statute of limitations.

Advocates for revising or extending the statute of limitations claim that many adults sexually violated as children or adolescents were denied justice by the cultural pressures and legal tactics applied to discourage them from complaining at the time to ecclesiastical, police or legal authorities.

Their supporters contend that church authorities coerced thousands of victims into silence about their abuse, enjoining them to return to the anonymous, uncomplaining crowd “for,” in the classic ecclesiastical rationalization, “the good of the church.” Many targets of priest sex abusers were made to feel that they seduced the clergyman rather than the other way around.

This multiplied the humiliation and shame that these people experienced. Like radiation, these feelings settled deeply inside and often interfered with their capacity to form healthy intimate relationships later in their lives. Not until the cargo of the sex abuse scandal broke free in the hold of the barque of Peter did many of them realize that they were not the only quarry of the clergy who had suffered for so long in such painful silence as the clock ran out on the time in which they could cry out legally.

Now many Catholic lay organizations are pressing state legislators to recognize what has happened and to revise their statute of limitations so that these people can have a chance to seek justice against those who wounded them in what, by the calendar and the clock, seems a long time ago.

Arguments against revising the statute of limitations include the danger that it exposes innocent priests to accusations elicited more by lawyers than by true memory and the possibility that so deep is the principle in our legal tradition that such revisions may ultimately be declared unconstitutional.

Perhaps the most compelling and powerful human argument for revising the statute of limitations has not yet, however, been expressed: No statute of limitations ever expires on the shame and humiliation borne by the victims of sexual abuse.


These victims bear the new stigmata, the wounds of being sexually harmed first by priests and then by church officials trying to silence them. The buzzer never sounds, the game goes on without even a time out. The calendar page turns but it is always the same day inside them, that one on which a sexual sacrilege was committed against them.

The damage done by a sexual offender may occur on a date certain in time but the trauma occurs deep inside the victim, in the unconscious region of personality in which the rules of time do not apply. Time does not pass in the unconscious. It is always now, and so the wounds suffered there are always as fresh as the moment in time when they were inflicted.

Most of us experience some feeling for the unconscious in our dream lives in which temporal barriers disappear and we effortlessly visit the dead and places and times gone by while the past is not the past at all. That, however, gives us only a hint about this extraordinary sphere in which our wounds are not relieved by any statute of limitations.

Legislators and others considering the revision of the statute of limitations should not forget the argument that flows from the nature of our humanity. If there is no statute of limitations running on the humiliation and pain of the sexually abused outside of time, there is good reason to revise the statute running out on those who seemed to abuse them on a specific date but actually harmed them eternally.

MO/PH RNS END

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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