Sex Abuse Victims Band Together : Therapy: Members of self-help group share stories and look for healing. Many cite fear, distrust of church.

CHESTERFIELD, Mo. —  Once a month, Pam Payne speaks out about the secret and shame that have scarred her soul. It’s her way of purging a painful past.

For more than 25 years, she kept silent, never telling her parents, her friends, not even the man to whom she was married for 12 years. Now, she talks openly about the trauma of being sexually abused by a Catholic priest as a young girl.

“I’d gotten so good at saying, ‘This didn’t hurt, it didn’t happen, it’s not that big a deal,’ ” she says, her deep green eyes flashing. “I made it my life’s work to bury this stuff. I can’t do that while I’m here.”

As she speaks, she sits in a condominium clubhouse in suburban St. Louis, surrounded by 20 men and women. They listen to her raptly. Then, one by one, they tell their stories. They too have indelible memories. They too are prisoners of the past.

Each story told this night is different. Each is similar too: A harrowing tale of sexual abuse by a clergy member, a trust betrayed, a life changed.

Some are scared. Some are angry. But all are survivors.

These people baring their souls are members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a Chicago-based self-help group with chapters in cities across the nation.

They meet to heal one another and urge victims to seek help from therapists, family, law enforcement--anywhere but the church.

“You just get hurt more when you go to the church,” declares Barbara Blaine, the group’s founder.

“There have been instances where people have been victimized again, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not,” said David Clohessy, head of the St. Louis chapter. “I’ve seen cases where diocesan officials deliberately string survivors along until the statute of limitations . . . has expired.”

Clohessy, who says a priest sexually abused him for four years as a teen, guides the evening’s meeting gently.

No harsh questions are asked, no judgments are made, no one is asked for proof.

Most members--they range in age from their 20s to their 60s--have not gone public. But behind closed doors, they speak freely of families who question their memories and church officials who doubt their stability.

“One of the biggest things we learn is we’re not crazy,” counsels Blaine, who says a priest in Toledo, Ohio, molested her as a teen. “We learn that it wasn’t our fault and . . . that we can get through this because other people have.”

*

It hasn’t been easy for Kathy Woodard.

“I have so much trouble with fear,” she says quietly. “I just want so much to be able to put this behind me.”

A year ago, Woodard tells the group, she informed a St. Louis church official she had been abused by a priest as a child. He said he believed her, but wanted her to confront the cleric.

She couldn’t do it. Nothing happened.

“I don’t go to church,” she says, her slender frame slumped in a chair. “The last time I went, I sat and cried the whole time. It’s taken something away that should be comforting, and I don’t know how to get it back.”

Woodard says she was abused by a Catholic priest who was a family friend and by a second man who may have been a seminary student at her elementary school. She repressed it all, she says, until three years ago.

Now, she sleeps with a loaded gun in her room.

“It’s hard to tell people because you don’t believe it yourself,” she later says. “To tell someone and not have them believe it can put you over the edge. . . . I’d rather be crazy than have this be true.”

*

Ed is also haunted by memories.

His case is unusual: He was a Catholic priest in St. Louis for 17 years.

Now married and in his 60s, Ed says he was sexually abused by two priests when he was a young man. He says he’s ashamed that the church is paying for his therapy.

“I couldn’t survive without this group,” says the silver-haired former high school principal, who asks that his real name not be used.

Tonight, Ed passes around a self-portrait, a pencil sketch from 1955, a year after he was ordained. To the right of a glaring young man’s face is a small figure--a blushing angel.

“There’s a terrible look on my face,” he says. “There was a lot of guilt there. I knew there was something wrong. Here I was a priest and there was . . . something to make an angel blush.”

*

Pam Payne says her faith is shaken.

“I have a real sadness and sense of loss,” says the 39-year-old divorcee. “It’s hard for me to walk into a Catholic church and not know if a priest is a good guy or a bad guy.”

The priest who abused her for two years during her adolescence was a family friend in Springfield, Ill., where she grew up, she says.

This year, she told her parents and ex-husband. She says she threatened to go public, but instead reached an out-of-court settlement with the church in June.

“My family just wishes it would go away . . . so their guilt would go away,” she tells the group. “My dad says, ‘Why don’t you get over it?’ It’s not like it’s a cold.”

“My settlement with the church didn’t change anything,” she says. “It didn’t make me better. It didn’t heal me. I would give it all up for it to have never happened.”