Sundays After: Survivor makes use of pain through activism
Mark Belenchia didn’t stay quiet.
He told his mother and his uncle, in the mid-1970s. He told a parish priest, then the vicar general, in 1985. Still, the clergyman Belenchia said sexually abused him when he was a child in Shelby, Mississippi, remained in collar and cassock.
“It showed me that the system says you’re insignificant. It doesn’t matter what you said, or what happened to you,” Belenchia said.
The abuse began when Belenchia was 12 and lasted three years, he said, maybe four. But the events of his youth cast a shadow over his life for decades after.
He felt shame and guilt for allowing himself to get close the priest, who’d decorated the church rectory like a clubhouse and plied young boys from the neighborhood with liquor.He felt anguish and panic when, at 43, Belenchia plunged into a depressive episode that resulted in hospitalization, intensive psychiatric treatment and an extended leave from his systems engineer position at IBM that eventually tur...
