Addressing clergy-perpetrated abuse in the Orthodox Church with Maximus the Confessor’s practical advice as a tool for healing

Challenging topics often lead to important discussions revealing God’s alternative reality calling for beneficial change. For example, the Arian controversy led to one of the most important theological concepts resulting in issuing a creed that clearly confessed the divinity of the Son. Today we take serious this truth that our identity as persons made in God’s image provides us the opportunity for theosis – divinization, to become ‘god’. But what happens to the possibility of theosis when we deface the image of God by preying on the vulnerable in our churches? Clergy sexual abuse and misconduct in ungodly, deeply wrong, and extremely harmful not only to the victims but entire communities and diocese. The Catholic Church does not have a monopoly on clergy abuse; it is just farther down the track in terms of addressing it than the Orthodox Church. Clergy sexual abuse happens in the Orthodox Church and it is hardly a rare occurrence. According to some reports, 20% of pastors (of all Christian groups) have misused their power and position to sexual abuse or sexually harass victims in their congregations. It is estimated that 90-95% of victims of clergy sexual abuse are adult women congregants, although most media stories report child victims of clergy sexual abuse. Women are abused 3-4 times more than children by clergy, making women the “silent” majority used as prey for abusive shepherds. I propose to address this issue in a multi-step process that includes, telling the truth, naming the harm, and accepting the suffering in order to be propelled toward appropriate accountability. In my presentation, I will present clergy abuse data in the Orthodox Church. Secondly, by focusing on the needs of the victims, I will propose some practical advice from Maximus the Confessor and modern knowledge from trauma treatment. In his Four-Hundred Chapters on Love and throughout his writing Maximus’ discourse on love parallel what we know today about the brain and behavioral responses. Namely, that humans have a central nervous system which is designed to minimize deviations from affective neutrality (i.e., a baseline equilibrium). Maximos emphasizes the importance of reducing extreme emotions through love and self-control. I will show evidence for how Maximus’ advice advocates for the reduction of both positive and negative reinforcement. Maximus’ terminology uses the term “passions” to describe various emotional peaks, while modern behavioral neuroscience uses terms such as “valence” or “hedonic” processing referring to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of emotional stimuli that support human behavior. Despite these terminological differences between the 7th century writer and modern neuroscience, the underlying concept is the same: the need for a human being to be at resting equilibrium as opposed to functioning at the extreme peaks, which is not sustainable for life or oneself. Clergy-abuse induces betrayal trauma, an injury that is greatly unpleasant to the whole person calling for a need to restore the person to equilibrium.   

Since data for clergy sexual abuse is not available for the Orthodox Church, we employed ChatGPT to aid us in generating key search terms in order to facilitate finding online media news stories concerning clergy sexual abuse in the Orthodox Church. Our preliminary search resulted in a total of 50 news articles between 2002 – 2023 with the Greek Orthodox Church of America showing up in 18 news stories followed by the Russian Orthodox Church in 11 articles, the OCA, Antiochian, Romanian, etc. Preliminary data reveals a total of nearly 300 victims of clergy sexual abuse across different jurisdictions; however, this number is greatly underestimated since our data analysis is limited to only media stories found online. In fact, most victims do not report clergy sexual abuse let alone take legal action to result in a media story.

In my talk, I will further propose to first acknowledge the existence of the problem of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse within the Orthodox Church across all jurisdictions. I will highlight the need to (1) develop a centralized clergy misconduct policy and (2) to ensure the right system and trained personnel are in place to implement the policy while providing pastoral care for the traumatized victims, communities, and the abusers.

The topic of clergy-perpetrated abuse is a challenging topic to discuss, but also an opportunity to unite by facing the truth, which is sometimes ugly much like Christ’s wounds.