Survivor-led ‘National Healing Garden’ seeks to acknowledge wounds of abuse

"We have to meet the survivors where they’re at."

Mike Hoffman was married with children and active in his Chicago parish when a 2006 news article caught his attention: A priest of the archdiocese was facing a lawsuit for alleged sexual abuse decades earlier.

Credit: Shutterstock / Life Collection Photography.

While other Catholics may have seen it as just one more distressing clergy abuse story, to Hoffman, the news was deeply personal. The priest named in the article was the same one who had also abused him when he was a child, he said, and the individuals who had come forward had been his contemporaries at his childhood parish.

Resurfacing old and painful memories, the article spurred Hoffman to begin sharing his own story and to seek healing.

Today, he and a group of other clergy abuse victim-survivors, academics, psychologists, restorative justice advocates, clergy and others — collectively calling themselves the National Catholic Restorative Justice Initiative, or NCRJI — are working on the development of a National Healing Garden.

The purpose of the garden, according to the vision statement written by Hoffman and the other participating survivors, will be to “offer empathy and acknowledgement” to survivors of any kind of abuse, as well as to “invite the entire Body of Christ into the journey of accompaniment and reconciliation.”

“Some survivors may not wish to enter a church, but they would go to a healing garden,” said Hoffman, who was also involved in the 2011 construction of a healing garden in Chicago.

“So we have to meet the survivors where they’re at, and providing a safe space seems to be a reasonable thing to do, but also an attempt to restore what was lost.”

At this stage, the details remain “very fluid,” said Deacon Bernard Nojadera, executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection and NCRJI participant.

The group is currently targeting a 2027 opening, which would mark the 25th anniversary of the Dallas Charter, a set of procedures adopted by the Catholic Church in the U.S. to prevent abuse and address allegations.

And while the garden’s precise location has yet to be confirmed, Nojadera told The Pillar that representatives of both the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and The Catholic University of America have participated in planning meetings.

Hoffman and his colleagues hope the garden will be a beautiful and peaceful space for prayer and reflection. Central to their vision is a prayer labyrinth - a maze-like path intended to aid in meditation.

“A prayer labyrinth symbolizes to us the non-linear pathway of healing traversed by survivors and all those in the abuse crisis,” Hoffman explained.

Hoffman’s own pathway of healing has taken many turns. After telling his wife about his abuse — his “primary act of recovery,” he said — he approached the priest at their parish. Encouraged by his pastor’s empathetic response, Hoffman brought his story to officials at the Archdiocese of Chicago, who responded with “professionalism, decency and compassion.”

“In short, they believed me,” he said.

As part of the archdiocesan review process, Hoffman met with then-Chicago archbishop Cardinal Francis George. Particularly moving, he said, was when Cardinal George, after listening attentively to his story, apologized.

Though Hoffman had never left the Church, he said the apology was a moment of profound reconciliation.

“He’s my shepherd, and I’m in his flock,” said Hoffman. “That’s the right relationship, and that’s what I was looking for, and I believe that’s what he was looking for, and, together, we found it.”

Restorative justice as a medium of healing

Hoffman described his experience with Cardinal George as an example of restorative justice – an approach that focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships.

While legal justice and preventative protections are of course essential, they “leave a great many wounds unhealed,” explained Daniel Philpott, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame whose expertise includes political reconciliation. He is also a member of NCRJI.

Restorative justice, however, “brings a holistic restoration of right relationship to the people who have been wounded by violence and injustice,” Philpott told The Pillar.

In the case of clergy abuse, many relationships are ruptured, including those between the survivor and the perpetrator, the Church and, often, God.

“Most victims of sex abuse do not want to meet with their perpetrator, quite understandably, and there are legal barriers, too,” said Philpott, though he noted that we can still pray “that they would come to a place of repentance and to be healed by God’s forgiveness” without compromising accountability and a zero-tolerance approach to abuse.

But, as in Hoffman’s experience, restorative justice can still take place between the survivor and the Church. And while it would ideally happen on an individual level — Philpott cited the practice of “restorative circles,” wherein a survivor meets with a representative of the Church and other supportive parties — the National Healing Garden may offer a collective entry point.

“Our proposal for a national healing garden obviously does not explicitly address each survivor,” Philpott said. “But it does communicate a message that the Church cares about each survivor and calls all Catholics to join in this care.”

“It takes two. It isn’t just a survivor wanting to be healed,” echoed Hoffman. “The Church has to want to welcome them.”

Joe Montanez, the survivor behind the healing gardens dedicated last year in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, emphasized that the most important relationship to repair is that of the individual and God.

“I always go back to Luke 15: the shepherd, the lost sheep,” he told The Pillar.

“The meaning is for those that are sinners or those that have turned away from God to come back. But I look at it differently. I look at it as God’s unconditional love and his desire to seek out and bring back those who feel lost or abandoned.”

Montanez continues to hear from survivors who have been deeply affected by visiting the healing gardens in Los Angeles. One woman he met was 75 years old. Before coming to one of the gardens, she had never been able to talk about her story.

“[Are the gardens] bringing people back into the Church?” reflected Montanez. “I don’t know, but that's not my main goal. My main goal is to bring them back to Christ.”

A collective responsibility

Yet, too often, survivors’ experiences of approaching the Church with an allegation is further disillusioning.

Such was the case for Esther Harber, survivor care coordinator at Awake and a participant in the National Healing Garden planning, who has said that she felt like “a problem [Church officials] wanted to go away.”

Harber admitted she was initially skeptical about the national garden, though Hoffman’s sincerity won her over. But she emphasized the importance of the survivor-driven nature of the initiative. If the garden had emerged as a purely clerical effort, she said, she would not have had any interest in it.

“I don’t think I would have been able to engage in that project, because I would want [priests] doing more meaningful self-work and work within the institution versus this kind of initiative,” she told The Pillar. “Whereas when a survivor is doing it for another survivor, it’s a way to reach others outside of the institutional Church.”

Indeed, there are priests continuing to work within the institutional Church. Fr. Thomas Berg, who has been engaged in seminary formation for over a decade, is an advocate for trauma training for seminarians. Among his hopes are a better understanding of trauma-informed pastoral care, power dynamics and the legal definitions and implications of sexual abuse.

Berg, who is also a member of NCRJI, urges priests not to “succumb to the attitude that ‘the crisis is behind us, let’s move on.’”

“The crisis is not over for survivors,” he told The Pillar. “Enormous wounds remain, and the work of healing will be incumbent on us for years and years to come.”

Furthermore, Berg wrote, “We seem amazingly to forget or to just want to ignore the reality that, beyond the immediate harm to survivors of clergy sexual abuse, the entire Body of Christ has been profoundly wounded by this scourge.”

The National Healing Garden, he said, will invite all Catholics to remember those wounds and to pray for healing.

Montanez hopes it will also spur the creation of more local gardens, even by Catholics not directly affected by clerical abuse.

“What’s to stop a local church from saying, ‘You know what, why don’t we do one here too?’” said Montanez. “And my attitude is: Let the parishioners get shovels and make these gardens. They all want to help. They all want to do something. Let them build the gardens and the Church.”

While a handful of Catholics have responded with cynicism to the Chicago healing garden, Hoffman said he received “outrageous support” from nearly all others. The garden also raised the profile of the other resources available to survivors.

So he is “very hopeful” about the National Healing Garden.

“The abuse happened, but the healing is happening too,” said Hoffman. “Both realities can be true.”