Harm, Healing and Hope, and the work that lies ahead

Three weeks ago we produced an event at Our Lady of Lourdes Church titled, Harm, Healing and Hope, and the highlight of the morning was the premier of a video that chronicled a period of reckoning the local Catholic Church faced in the past decade.

The video was titled, Restorative Justice in the Catholic Church and Beyond. Father Daniel Griffith was instrumental in the direction and vision for this video, which was created by videographer Hunter Johnson and was the definition of a passion project. The video was dedicated to Tom Johnson, his father, who passed away a few months ago. Tom served as volunteer ombudsperson for Clerical Sexual Abuse for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, a critical role during a critical time for Twin Cities Catholics who had been harmed. It’s a tribute to incredibly courageous victim survivors, and an obligation to “teach the crisis” in the hope that lessons are, indeed, learned.

Sometimes, one of the best measures of a program is not immediately after it’s a wrap, it’s the days and weeks that follow when you can sit back and measure and feel the response. That has definitely been the case in this example. I was pleased to see an email from David Karp, a Restorative Justice colleague at the University of San Diego, who shared a link to the video with the nationwide Restorative Justice Catholic Campuses Network. As is sometimes the case, one of the first reactions came from a colleague I had not yet met, but is right in our own backyard, with kind words about the video and hope, that as a Catholic and a Restorative Justice practitioner, that healing and hope lie ahead.