Women rebuilding faith and community in the aftermath of the sexual abuse crisis in the Chilean catholic Church.

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of women survivors of clerical sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Chile, exploring their struggles with faith and community in the aftermath of trauma. The first section addresses the survivors' crisis of belief, examining how sexual abuse shatters their trust in Church doctrines, symbols, and rituals. It investigates how survivors reconstruct their images of God, seek alternative spiritual sources, and develop new rituals aimed at healing and meaning-making of the wound of sexual violence. The second section shifts focus to the ecclesiological and communitarian dimensions of survival, critiquing clericalism and the Church's patriarchal structures. It explores how these women form new communities of solidarity within, in the margins, or outside the Church. The paper emphasizes the spiritual resilience of these women in creating spaces of belonging and communal support, in the aftermath of experiences of violence, exclusion, and marginalization within the Catholic community. Rather than a single path, survivor narratives open us to a spectrum of responses to abuse, that include deconversion, disaffiliation, and critical forms of belonging, and believing. Their narratives offer important insight into the ongoing process of religious disaffiliation happening in Chile as a result of the sexual abuse scandals that characterized the life of the Church in the past decade.