"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing."
- Abraham Lincoln -


PUTTING AND END TO DIS - GRACE
Sharing my response to yesterday's "local" paper article.

Rob DeMone, Editor
The Peace Arch News
White Rock, BC

August 13, 2006

Re.: Victim’s victory

Dear Editor:
My own experiences were relived as I felt nauseous reading yet another account.
I could possibly match and perhaps surpass the length of your well written report on Joanne Morrison and the other many Chatham’s women’s case with my own; not only recounting my experience but, the witnessing of the boarding school’s old priest also do with the other young little girls, during daylight, on the veranda, as the nuns were walking by, not farther than 15 - 20 feet away…

Just like in Joanne’s case, we all took turns sitting on his lap – except for me, it was an honor – on the lap of “the representative of God on Earth” - and, to top it all off, just prior to our First Communion, such spiritually charged time!
Abuse, sexual and other, did not happen in residential schools only, my parents “actually paid for it” (unbeknownst to them). How ironic is that?

These are stories of sexual and/or physical and emotional abuse, abandonment, control, pedophilia, hypocrisy, lack of ethics and morals and an unrepentant, arrogant church. A system sick to the core, as those that remain inactive within it, are just as guilty for holding their silence - for taking part in the “greatest cover-up”.

However, my story did not take place in North but, South America instead. The Vatican has shamelessly claimed that this is almost an exclusive North American phenomenon… Well, it isn’t!
I am sure this type of conduct is rampant around the world. At this very moment, as I am writing to you, there are a number of priests and other church “associates” around the world, still sexually molesting and abusing/controlling children/human beings and being overlooked, hidden and protected by their respective dioceses and the Vatican.

I hope the priest from my former school is dead and buried and with him, his shames.
I have no known way of taking action on my own case from here – I greatly admire the “endurance”, thank and support the steps taken by Joanne Morrison and the other women. I also wish more man would come forward to further unmask the perpetrators hiding behind the cloth.

Without a doubt, those early experiences in boarding school shaped and influenced my entire life and keep on affecting it’s course, as what I am doing today www.AlmaPathAdventures.blogspot.com is a direct result of the journey that (abruptly – with innocence lost) started a number of decades ago.

Sincerely,
Alicia M. Ballard

PS.: I wish we could find a word other then survivor to substitute for “victim” … which in itself is as spell casting/binding as the perpetrated acts.
High time to revise our concepts, our vocabulary.

Link to newspaper article:
http://web.bcnewsgroup.com/portals-code/list.cgi?cat=23&paper=44&id=706859