Courageous Conversation: Panelists Describe Pain, Loneliness, and Healing After Clergy Sexual Abuse in Adulthood
Editor’s note 1/13/26: This piece has been updated to remove references to panelist David Pooler after we learned he is under investigation for alleged misconduct and abuse of adults.
Awake Milwaukee’s latest Courageous Conversation was an emotionally intense discussion of the wounds suffered by people sexually abused as adults in the Catholic Church. A recording of the event is available below.
The March 18 event began with Esther Harber, a 38-year-old wife, mother, and committed Catholic, recounting her rape by a priest in October 2010 while she was serving as a lay missionary in New York City. She said that when she summoned the courage to tell her pastor what happened to her, he helped her contact archdiocesan officials, “and from there the reporting process was hell,” she said. “It was more traumatic in some ways than the rape itself.”
Harber and the two other speakers revealed ways that Catholic dioceses and parishes often overlook and even exacerbate the pain suffered by adult victims of sexual abuse in the Church.
“When you’re an adult and you’ve been sexually abused by clergy, there is a different level of shame involved, simply because people are always saying, ‘She could have stopped it,’ or ‘She led him on,’ or ‘Why did he let it continue for so long?” explained panelist Paula Kaempffer, Outreach Coordinator for Restorative Justice and Abuse Prevention for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, who is also a survivor of clerical sexual abuse as a young adult.
Abusers often manipulate victims with grooming techniques that set the stage for abuse, break down boundaries, and cloud victims’ thinking. People who have not endured abuse “don’t realize the psychological hold that the abuser has on a victim,” Kaempffer said.
She stressed that relationships between clergy and lay Catholics cannot be consensual because of the power differential between them.
The Term “Vulnerable Adult”
When the Catholic Church does acknowledge adult victim-survivors of sexual abuse, it often uses the narrow term “vulnerable adults” to describe them. Kaempffer took issue with that language: “I can’t tell you how the hair on the back of my neck stands up,” she said. “Just by saying that … it puts all the blame on the victim.”
She said that in her work with victim-survivors, she aims to reshape that concept. “We are adults created by God with many, many beautiful gifts: compassion, sensitivity, gentleness, strength, courage, and understanding, and the list can go on,” Kaempffer says. “Instead of vulnerable adults, we are gifted adults who entered into a vulnerable situation in which someone took those gifts of ours and manipulated them to serve their own purpose.”
Messages for Survivors
The audience of the Courageous Conversation included multiple victim-survivors of abuse as adults, and Kaempffer and other panelists spoke directly to them throughout the event.
“If you are or were an adult when you were sexually victimized by a priest, it was not your fault,” Kaempffer said in one particularly powerful moment. “I want you to hear me say that. I’m going to say that several times. It was not your fault.”
During the question-and-answer period, a survivor in the audience submitted a question about how survivors can go on to trust others and form healthy relationships after abuse. Both Harber and Kaempffer talked about the importance of psychotherapy in their own healing, as well as the support of good friends and loved ones. Both joined support groups of fellow survivors of clergy sexual abuse. “That was very affirming to me to hear similar stories,” Harber said. “Survivors build each other up a lot.” Both also spoke about how their faith and belief in God has also been a source of strength in the healing processes.
How Can We Respond?
The panelists offered multiple ideas for addressing the sexual abuse of adults in the Church. “The reporting process for minors needs to be duplicated for adults,” Harber said, adding that any action by the Church would likely be an improvement. “Start doing something, because this has been a long-ignored problem,” she said.
Kaempffer ended the evening by stressing that despite what some Catholics and church leaders might wish, victim-survivors cannot simply “get over” the abuse they experienced. “We can get through it,” she said, “but we can never get over it.”
—Erin O’Donnell, Editor, Awake Blog
