While the Presbyterian church commissioned the inquiry committee’s report, “in a very real sense it is our document, in that our truth constructed it,” one of the survivors, Ruth Reinhold — herself now a Presbyterian minister in California — said during a news conference at PC(USA) headquarters. “We did not need this report in order to know we were telling the truth. We have known that all along. But we know that it is our courage and persistence which brings this truth out into the open. It’s incredibly sad that little girls had to wait 30 years to grow up to do that — that which adults around them should have done on our behalf.”
Reinhold said the survivors of the abuse are generally satisfied with the inquiry committee’s report — “there is power and liberation in being heard and believed,” she said. But they would still like their stories to be heard and accepted at Highland Park church in Dallas, where the missionary who abused them later worked and where, the inquiry committee found, he continued his pattern of sexual abuse. “Up until this moment, they have been unwilling to talk with us or hear our stories,” perhaps because of fear of litigation, even though some of the victims came from the Highland Park congregation, Reinhold said.
“We know there are more there who’ve been abused,” she said, “and we haven’t felt like the congregation there has been open to the truth.”
Although the inquiry committee’s report does not name either the perpetrators or the victims of the sexual abuse, it does state that there is “overwhelming” evidence that a Presbyterian missionary who later went to work at Highland Park church sexually abused at least 22 people, many of them the children of missionaries who lived at boarding schools in the Congo. Eight women brought accusations of abuse in Grace Presbytery in Texas against William Pruitt, a missionary who served in the Congo and who later became an associate pastor at Highland Park, and who denied the accusations before he died in 1999.
The PC(USA) has begun to implement some of the 30 recommendations the inquiry committee has suggested and is setting up a work group to consider more. John Detterick, executive director of the denomination’s General Assembly Council, said a toll-free hotline has been set up that people can call to report the mistreatment of children connected with Presbyterian mission work. To report abuse, people can call the denomination’s toll-free number — 1-888-728-7228 — and ask for extension 5207. “It was important to immediately say to the world that we are ready to listen, and listen with open hearts,” Detterick said.
Other recommendations the survivors particularly support, Reinhold said, call for the PC(USA) to provide training at its international mission stations and schools regarding sexual abuse; and for the denomination to change its policies so ministers who committed sexual abuse could be stripped of their ordination posthumously if they had died, or could lose the title “honorably retired” if they were still alive.
Other recommendations would require those who work for the Worldwide Ministries Division, or any PC(USA) minister, elder or deacon, to report to legal authorities any information they have about harm or abuse involving children; and would change the Book of Order to require a mandatory leave of office for any church officer indicted on felony charges of sexual abuse or charged with sexual conduct that involves misuse of the person’s office or spiritual role.
Detterick described the courage of the women who reported the abuse as “a marvelous gift,” and — his voice breaking — said he was unable to read the inquiry committee’s 173-page report detailing the abuse in one sitting. It was so painful “I had to get up and leave it for awhile,” Detterick said. At the GAC’s executive committee meeting last week, when discussed the inquiry committee’s findings in closed session, one person who’d read the report said, “I felt my insides melt away,” Detterick recalled.
Detterick said the PC(USA) is committed “to doing all we can to prevent this from happening again.” And he said “today is a day of sadness, but also a day of hope, “because of the grace of God and the strength of these women.”
Asked about abuse by others who work for the church — for example, by pastors or staff members in local congregations — Detterick said each installed pastor is under the jurisdiction of a local presbytery, and that the denomination has “solid” policies regarding sexual abuse. Reinhold said what happened to her and the other women was not just a case of one sexual predator taking advantage of vulnerable children living far from their parents in boarding schools long ago. “I’d be a fool,” she said, “to think it was not a widespread problem” today.
The inquiry committee also recommends that the PC(USA) investigate reports from “very credible missionary sources” that children may also have been physically or sexually abused at two other boarding schools used by Presbyterian missionaries, in Alexandria, Egypt from the 1950s to the 1980s and in Elat, Cameroon in the 1960s.
Marian McClure, director of the PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division, said she has “no sense at all yet” of whether abuse did occur at those schools or, or, if it did, how extensive it might be. Some missionaries still do send their children to boarding schools, she said, adding, “It’s a lot less common than it was, but there are still boarding schools.”
The inquiry committee also urged PC(USA) officials to encourage the United Methodist denomination to conduct its own investigation into sexual abuse of missionary children in the Congo. Some of the victims lived at a Methodist-Presbyterian Hostel the two churches operated together in Kinshasa, but the United Methodist denomination was not willing to assist the inquiry committee, citing confidentiality considerations. But the Presbyterian missionary who sexually abused more than 20 people did have contact with both Methodist and Presbyterian children, Geoffrey Stearns, a lawyer from California who served as chairperson of the inquiry committee, said via a telephone link with the news conference. Asked if the women who’ve identified themselves as survivors included Methodists, Reinhold answered: “Yes.”
Several who spoke at the news conference stressed that the inquiry committee’s findings “should in no way taint or color” the significant contributions of other missionaries who worked in the Congo as everything from teachers to builders to medical doctors. Stearns acknowledged that some retired missionaries did not understand why a probe into sexual abuse was necessary, and McClure said “some former mission personnel have not felt adequately honored and appreciated for their work.”
The inquiry committee determined that, had some Presbyterian administrators and field personnel “acted more aggressively and decisively on information they had, further abuse might have been averted.” McClure said that some who worked for the Presbyterian denomination when the abuse took place are still alive — and some may be “stricken with remorse” for not detecting the abuse or doing more to stop it. If that’s true, she said, she encourages those people to “help us right these wrongs.” Reinhold spoke of an African proverb: “One who conceals disease cannot hope to find a cure.”
Copies of the inquiry committee’s report are available from Presbyterian Distribution Services by calling 1-800-524-2612, and asking for Item 5171002001.
