BRAINTREE -- A few years ago, Kathleen did something that she hadn't done for over 45 years: go to Mass alone at her home parish.

She went during a weekend when the Archdiocese of Boston recommended that parishes offer Masses for the intentions of survivors of clergy sexual abuse like herself. Every parish in the archdiocese was asked to do something to commemorate survivors, but when she went to church, "not one word was mentioned for survivors."

Secrecy, the kind that allowed the clergy sexual abuse crisis to happen in Boston and dioceses around the world, is traumatizing to her. As a member of the Archdiocese of Boston Survivor Advisory Council, she wants clergy to know that she and other survivors are still in the Church, and that their existence should not be a secret.

"We want to be remembered," she said. "We want to be prayed for."

Since 2024, as part of the Safe Environment Clergy Retraining program instituted by Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley, Kathleen and four other survivors have been meeting with all priests actively serving in the archdiocese's parishes. The survivors also spoke to seminarians at St. John's Seminary in Brighton and Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary in Weston.

Kathleen got to speak with the priests of her home parish about how hurt she was by them ignoring survivors that weekend. All through this April, she was pleased to see them commemorating Child Abuse Prevention Month in the parish bulletins. She called the pastor to tell him how grateful she was.

"I feel like that's a huge success story for me," she said.

The survivors have spoken to hundreds of priests. As of May 5, when Kathleen and three other survivors met over pizza in the office of Vivian Soper, director of the archdiocese's Office of Pastoral Support and Child Protection, they only had about 20 priests left to meet. They will also be speaking to all active deacons in the archdiocese over the next 18 months. The sessions have increased both the survivors' and the priests' empathy for one another.

"The goal of the training was to help remind the clergy that the survivors are still out there," Soper said. "Those people who were abused by Boston clergy, some of them are still in the pews. Some of their families are still in the pews."

Kathleen was nervous going into the conversations. She knew it was a subject many priests did not want to talk about.

"They didn't know what to think," she said. "They thought that maybe this was going to be a place where we were going to do a lot of blame, that we were going to point fingers, that it was going to be volatile in some way."

Paul, a survivor, said that the conversations were the opposite. The survivors didn't focus on what they had endured, but how the archdiocese helped them heal. At every session, there were two empty chairs next to the survivors. Paul explained that one chair was for those who "did not survive their experience of abuse." The other was for those who left the Church and never came back.

When survivor Joe decided to return to the Church, everyone thought he was crazy.

"After much reflection, my love for my faith became greater than my feelings of anger and betrayal toward those who facilitated my abuse," he said.

Faith was the missing piece in his life. He didn't feel whole without it. When he talks to clergy, he mentions the two priests who brought him back to the Church. Remembering them makes him emotional.

"I want the priests also to see how impactful that can be," he said.

The survivors all encountered good and bad priests throughout their lives. When Kathleen was a young girl, there was one priest who made a tremendous difference in her life. She got reacquainted with him, and the two remain close.

"If it wasn't for him and those positive experiences which I write about when I talk to the priests, I don't think that I would be here today," she said.

Bob, another survivor who spoke to priests, said that the Catholic school he grew up in saved his life. As a child, he "wasn't able to really count on anything." The priests and sisters at school gave him "something to hold onto," and helped him forgive. He now sees similarities between the survivors and those priests who did not commit crimes but were caught up in the scandal. Both groups were "all over the place," wounded, and needed support from the Church.

Bob and his fellow survivors want priests to have hope.

"It's very difficult for a survivor to go to a priest and talk to a priest after what's happened to them," he said. "So, if we can give the priest a little bit of groundwork that they can work off of to help them in their ministry, I think that's the most important thing."

The priests tell the survivors what they experienced after the scandal -- the dirty looks and torrents of verbal abuse they received as stories of clergy abuse were printed in The Boston Globe each day.

"I think they're surprised that we think of them, but we do," Kathleen said.

Joe said that for the youngest priests, who were children themselves when the scandal first roiled the archdiocese, clergy abuse was a "forbidden topic." He mentioned one recently ordained priest who, during a First Communion class, had a mother come up to him and say, "I do not want my child alone in an enclosed space with a priest."

Bob said that priests are afraid to talk about abuse because they're worried about saying the wrong thing.

"We need the secrecy to end, because if the secrecy doesn't end, this will continue and will happen again," he said.

The reverberations of the abuse scandal are nothing new to Father Chris Snyder, a Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions priest who currently serves as a parochial vicar for the Brazilian community of Holy Family Parish in Rockland. He first got to speak with survivors while serving as a pastor in Michigan.

"Luckily, these people understood that it was not all priests or all clergy or all people working in the Church," he said.

The survivors saw that "the Church that they love, the Jesus Christ that they love, was willing to be with them and understand them." When he came to Boston four years ago, he was excited to shepherd those who had suffered from abuse and neglect. Talking to the survivors in Boston, he felt his heart open up. The stories of abuse he had read about in newspapers now had faces and voices. It inspired him to want to help the archdiocese's Office of Pastoral Support and Child Protection however he could.

"This does need to be a reality that we're willing to bring into the open, to help anyone who has been a victim and feels like perhaps they're forgotten," he said.

Father Paul Ritt, pastor of Ave Maria Parish in Lynnfield, can recall when the scandal broke in Boston. He remembers the stares and the rude comments.

"It was very difficult," he said. "I'm sure for the victims' families even more so, but it was not an easy time to serve as a priest."

He said that meeting survivors in person was far different than the abuse prevention training videos that priests had to watch in the past. To him, the survivors are heroes for continuing to support the Church.

"The stories were painful to listen to, how a priest abused these three people, and the damage that it caused them, and their family members, for that matter," he said. "But we had a chance to dialogue with them, and all three are now in a very generous gesture helping us priests to realize that sexual abuse is still a threat."

In Father Ritt's previous parish, he knew a woman whose son was "terribly abused" by a priest. He listened to her speak for three hours about what happened to her son, then brought her to Cardinal O'Malley and Barbara Thorp, founder and former director of the Office of Pastoral Support and Child Protection.

"She is reconciled with the Church and her family, as well," he said. "So there is hope, beyond the horror of what happened over these many years."

Bishop Robert Reed remembered the scandal as "a very confusing and difficult time," not just for victims of abuse and their families, but for clergy and the parishes they served. Bishop Reed was pastor of Holy Ghost Parish in Whitman at the time. The community stuck together and supported him through the scandal.

"It affected our ministry in a very profound way," he said.

During archdiocesan discussions for Pope Francis's Synod on Synodality, he spoke at length with survivors.

"I understood that not only were they willing to be very frank about the crimes committed against them," he said, "but were also very willing to be frank about their continued commitment to the Church, and their desire to help us make sure that a situation like this never happens again."

When he talks to survivors, he hears that "they're Catholics just like us."

"I think being with the particular survivors that I met with, along with a group of my brother priests, it was a very uplifting moment," he said, "because we can see that, despite the terrible crimes of the past, that we remain connected by our bonds in the faith, our bonds as Catholics, and we can in fact continue to move forward together."