Clergy Abuse Survivor, National Review Board Member Calls for ‘Paradigm Shift’ in Healing

(OSV News) — Scott Surette, a devout Catholic and longtime home inspection business owner, is on a mission to help renew the Church.

Yet despite his four decades of experience in construction and code compliance, he isn’t looking to renovate buildings. Instead, Surette seeks to repair what Scripture calls the “living stones” that make up the spiritual house of Jesus Christ.

And now, as one of several recently appointed members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ National Review Board, a lay-led advisory group on child and youth protection, Surette is “contracted,” so to speak, to make it happen.

The committee is mandated by the USCCB’s “Charter for the Protection of Children and Youth,” established in 2002 amid a spate of clergy sex abuse scandals. Commonly referred to as the Dallas Charter, the document establishes a comprehensive set of procedures for addressing allegations of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, and includes guidelines for reconciliation, healing, accountability and abuse prevention.

Surette, 55, an Indiana native and husband and father of five, would be the first to admit that being part of a national corporate governance organization is a little outside his comfort zone.

“I’m more comfortable with a hammer than a committee,” he told OSV News. “Give me something to do, it’s in my nature.”

But as a survivor of clerical sexual abuse, Surette has a powerful message to share.

“I want to bring a paradigm shift to the Church, to the whole of America, to the world, if they will hear me — to bring a paradigm shift where we can move from a place of anger and vengeance to real healing,” he said.

Surette knows well the magnitude and cost of this project. After being sexually abused at age 15 by a priest, he spent 40 years battling what he described as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” inner dynamic that ultimately led him to break up his first marriage.

“I was a really nice guy, but the minute someone pushed a button, I got angry,” he said. “I sabotaged my relationships. If someone was interested in me, if someone liked me, a friend, a girlfriend — if someone really thought I was a great guy, they were a threat.”

The abuse he suffered took place during a weekend youth retreat, when a visiting priest “attacked me twice,” said Surette, whose brother, also a retreatant, witnessed the incidents.

Surette and her family immediately reported the abuse, and the school even brought the visiting priest back to Indiana a week later for questioning.

“We were sitting in a room in the basement of my church, and he denied the whole story to my face and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Scott. I was nice to you. I was kind to you. I was affectionate with you. I admired who you were as a young person.’ And he denied everything,” Surette said.

“In 1979, nothing happened” at the diocesan level to address the abuse, Surette said, but in 2019, “we launched a process and the diocese decided to pay for therapy.”

At that point, he said, “I began to pray very sincerely about this abuse, and through that prayer process, Jesus gave me the grace to look at my abuser through his eyes, through the eyes of Christ.”

The result was “mind-blowing,” Surette said.

“All I had in my mind and in my heart was anger and revenge,” he said. “I was like, ‘You know what, man? You ruined me for 40 years and I’m angry about it. … I mean, you ruined my first marriage and how many relationships, and in ways I don’t know.’”

And then, Surette told OSV News: “Jesus said, ‘Scott, would you like to see (this man) through my eyes?'”

“Jesus saw him as a wounded, lost soul who had made a choice to sin, and it really saddened him,” Surette said. “And the most important thing that came out of that grace (of prayer) was (the realization that) Jesus was not full of anger and vengeance. Jesus didn’t want him to burn in hell forever. Scott wanted him to burn in hell forever, but Jesus didn’t want that.”

Surette said the experience allowed her to see her attacker in “a different light” — one that fully exposed the evil perpetrated by the priest, while illuminating the hope of redemption and healing through Christ for both Surette and her attacker.

“(The perpetrator) chose of his own free will to sin and to pursue me and to pursue his own pleasures and passions,” Surette said. “Truly, he sinned. But he did it because he was hurt. And I was able to reflect on it. I was able to think about it and say, ‘If he’s hurt, I can forgive him.’ And if Jesus is sad and crying because he may not be in heaven for eternity, then I’m sad because he may not be in heaven for eternity. And that’s when everything changed.”

Referring to St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, Surette said he felt “the peace that surpasses all understanding,” a sensation that was “simply overwhelming” and “permeated everything” in his life, including his relationships and his work.

Surette now prays regularly for the soul of her attacker, who was eventually removed from his clerical duties and, as Surette’s wife learned, died around 2018.

He also met with Bishop Timothy L. Doherty of the Diocese of Lafayette, Indiana, who Surette said “reached out to me” and gave him about two hours of his free time, a meeting that “really solidified the healing.”

Referring to Christ’s parable of the lost sheep (Mt 18:10-14; Lk 15:1-7), Surette said that Bishop Doherty, as a shepherd, “came for me because he knew that my soul mattered.”

Surette began serving on the diocesan review board and, at Bishop Doherty’s initiative, now serves on the national review board, with a message for the American Catholic bishops.

“We have to go get that injured guy,” Surette said.

Fresh off the 10th National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis — where organizers urged attendees to evangelize their communities by committing to “walk with them” to spread the Gospel — Surette is already putting that mission into practice by reaching out to family members who left the Catholic Church following the abuse he suffered and the church’s lack of response at the time.

“There are victims (beyond) the (direct) victims” of clergy abuse, Surette said. “Families have been separated from the Church, they’re wounded on the battlefield, and their souls deserve to be saved as well. So this idea of ​​‘going after one of them’ is a message that I’m going to proclaim as loudly and as strongly as I can, for as long as I can.”

Surette said the paradigm shift he seeks regarding the clergy abuse crisis is ultimately rooted in the death and resurrection of Christ.

“I see the Church as the disciples in the upper room after the crucifixion. They’re sitting around looking at each other and saying, ‘What just happened? We’re destroyed. This is so horrible. How do we move forward? We have to make sure this Judas thing doesn’t happen again,’” Surette said.

Similarly, he said that “25 years of the Dallas Charter has been like making sure that the Judas case doesn’t happen again — we have to prevent that, we have to fix that.”

To fully implement the charter and address clergy abuse, the fullness of Christ’s salvation must be proclaimed, Surette said.

“Satan failed at the crucifixion, and he’s failed throughout the history of the church … (through) different battles and heresies, and when it comes to clergy sexual abuse, Satan has failed again,” Surette said, admitting that while “it’s certainly not perfect … the number of cases is a fraction of what it used to be.”

“Satan failed to bring down Christ. Satan failed to bring down me. And I believe Satan failed to bring down my abuser,” Surette said. “Ultimately, when you look at it from an eternal perspective, Christ won at the crucifixion and the resurrection. Christ won in the clergy sex abuse scandal. Christ won in my personal story. Christ won in my abuser’s story. And that’s where we’re going to claim our victory.”

Gina Christian is a multimedia journalist for OSV News. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @GinaJesseReina.