A Hidden People: Young Women Victims/Survivors of Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church and Eucharistic Implications.

Drawing on my embodied experience as a young woman survivor of clerical abuse, this paper critiques the limited embodied scope of victims of the clerical abuse crisis in the Catholic church as children, highlighting young adult women among the victims/survivors of clerical abuse. In this paper, I argue that the almost exclusive focus on abuse victims as children has prevented young women from seeing themselves in such dialogue, and that theologically reimagining the Eucharist can offer victims/survivors of clerical abuse a critical approach to a relationship with the Catholic tradition once more. In this sacrament, both trauma/abuse and healing/reconciliation are present, representing the need to denounce and critique unjust ecclesial structures and the need to find ecclesial space to open victims to God’s healing and reconciling love. This engagement is essential for the discourse to be expanded, for without this bodies will continue to be harmed and marginalized.