An Orthodox Spiritual Abuse Victim Tells Her Story
[This account was written for me by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. I am sharing it with her permission, as a reminder to all of us in the Apostolic Churches of how painful and traumatic spiritual abuse by a confessor can be to a soul, and how important it is to speak out and believe survivors.– Mary Pezzulo]
“I hate silence when it is time to speak.”
That was my patron saint’s only recorded reply when she was beaten for her iconodule beliefs on the orders of Emperor Theophilos, a man who years before she’d publicly spurned for a history-making literary and monastic career. Now, centuries later and under her protection, it’s my time to speak. But I have plenty more than her to say. It is as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.
Before we begin, to save everyone some time, note that I’m not interested in being anyone’s idea of a perfect victim—if a victim is what I am; I don’t particularly feel like one. I am angry, and I rarely handle it conveniently or nicely. I have every bit of ill-will toward the guilty party as you assume I do. I don’t particularly care if I ruin someone’s “career” or “position” (which isn’t likely to happen anyway)—the anonymity in my story has nothing to do with protecting anyone but myself. I am neither particularly polite, nor kind, nor innocent. None of this makes what I have to say any less true, and I don’t have the energy or inclination to try to further convince anyone on this point. So. Shall we begin?
I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church at the age of 19. My boyfriend at the time soon followed after me. Two years later I left my hometown for college and quickly found a very nice local parish for myself—the only parish around for quite nearly a hundred miles. However, as occasionally happens in the Orthodox Church, the priest at the parish was not a confessor yet and so my usual habit of frequent confession was interrupted. As a fairly new and fervent convert, this caused me no small amount of spiritual distress.
Sometime during 2012, most likely during Lent, though it’s difficult for me to remember, a solution presented itself when I learned that the monastery a few towns over offered confession. I’d been there once before and was impressed by my short visit—the timeless flow of time, vespers in the near-dark, the silence you could taste in the antidoron and trapeza lentils as well as hear beneath the gray-barked trees. I looked forward to going back, and made an appointment as soon as I could, full of joy at the prospect of being absolved after a long stretch without the sacrament. I didn’t tell anyone I was going, spontaneous as my decision was. And so there was no one to warn me what I was getting myself into.
Unbeknownst to me, this monastery was and is one of 20 or so satellites of St. Anthony’s Monastery hundreds of miles away in Florence, Arizona, under the guidance of one Elder Ephraim. That June, St. Anthony’s would become even more notorious than it already was after a troubled young novice—a convert—who had left the previous year returned and killed himself on the monastery grounds. After his death, his parents sketched a deeply troubling picture of his novitiate. He was not permitted to see his parents or to leave, not even when his grandmother was terminally ill. His personal correspondence was opened and read by the Elder, and redacted to hide information about the seriousness of his grandmother’s condition. Already tall and slender, he dropped 150 pounds and images from the time show him appearing unhealthily gaunt. His limited correspondence with his family increasingly revealed signs of a dire and untreated mental illness. Before leaving, he claimed that he had been threatened by other monks and the Elder, and that the Elder was a “charlatan.” The monastery has denied these claims, and the claims of his parents that he was brainwashed.
I made my way to the church, a marble and dark-wood dream of a sanctuary built in the old style with no pews and Christ Pantokrator in His dome, looking sternly down on the whole incense-laden microcosm. I assumed my confession would take place there as it had always done in the various parishes I’d belonged to: the confessor and us both sitting face to face before the iconostasis icon of Christ, not in the dreaded “box” as I smugly referred to the dour Roman confessional. To my confusion, there were still people milling about the sanctuary. And where was the confessor?
As if an answer, a volunteer showed me over to a door in the narthex that I had assumed went to a bathroom.
“Father will be with you shortly,” she said in a soft, kind voice. “He usually does confession in a question-answer format, but if you don’t want to, that’s okay. I’ll let him know.” Not wanting to impose on his usual routine or cause difficulties, I told her that the usual way would be fine with me. Better, even. It sounded much more thorough. After a few minutes, the door opened and I stepped inside.
I found myself in a tiny room no bigger than a closet, with a tiny bench in front of a monk seated on a stool. As I took my seat, I saw that he was surprisingly young with almost no trace of gray in his beard. I also noticed we were so close our knees almost touched. Unconsciously, I sat with my back pressed as hard as I could to the wall behind me. After preliminary introductions, we began. Entirely from memory, he went through a long list of sins which were more or less easy to answer. No thievery, murder, or apostasy to report this time around. From what I can remember the categories were more or less general. Until they weren’t.
At this point my blurry memory snaps sharply into focus. When we came to fornication, I said yes. I was in college, I had a boyfriend, and as a scrupulous little convert, very fuzzy on what exactly constituted fornication. I just wanted to be sure. I just wanted to be clean.
I remember vividly everything about his voice and the way his mouth moved when he began probing the details of my sex life, when he didn’t move on as I assumed he would. How his jaw went soft and slack on the “x” in “anal sex?” and “oral sex?” How his mouth never seemed to quite close. His eyes were bright, and the room was hot, so hot and small, and nothing seemed to exist outside of it. No one I loved knew I was here. There was cold sweat on my temples and his knee almost touched mine. “Did you spit or did you…” he leaned forward and seemed to want me to say “swallow” for him.
When the interview was done, he abruptly told me I was under interdict to avoid Communion for a year. I was to read a chapter of the Gospels every day, and set up another appointment with him very soon, and oh by the way, he was my spiritual father now. He gave me an icon card of Christ with the Jesus Prayer in Greek on the back. I clutched it so tight when I knelt beneath his stole for his blessing I thought my palm would bleed. He gave me his number and urged me to call him soon. I never did.
On the drive home, the gray day turned to rain. I did not realize I was shaking and crying until I was well outside of the monastery gates. I didn’t even quite know why. Never in my time in Orthodoxy had I felt so terrified, alone, and disgusting. I thought of calling my boyfriend, but thought better of it. What would I say? What could he say? And how would I explain to him that I couldn’t join him in the Communion line for a year? I hadn’t even known anyone of any rank in the Church could do that, shut you out from receiving the Lord with a word. I’d come to the monastery looking for an easy yoke and a light burden, and got a millstone instead.
In despair, I called the priest who had chrismated me years prior. I didn’t give him very many details—he was angry enough when I only told him the gist of what had happened. Angry at the monastery, at the monks, at the Ephraimites. H assured me that Elder Ephraim’s brand of monasticism was not the standard and that I didn’t have to do a damn thing that monk said. It was comforting at the time, and made me feel marginally better. But I hadn’t told him the whole truth. I still didn’t feel clean, and wouldn’t for a very long time afterward.
Living with PTSD makes it very easy for my mind to travel back and forth in time, especially to traumatic events. I go back to that afternoon often, as vivid as the day I lived it, and I sit in the passenger seat as my younger self drives home in the rain. I tell her what she didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate then, that her salvation did not and never would hinge upon a strange man in a robe leering at her in a cramped room, asking her if she spit or swallowed. That it was extraordinarily inappropriate behavior, that it doesn’t matter that other people have been abused in much worse ways in the Church—every victim of abuse says that as a way to minimize their experience, from the verbally abused down to the most brutally beaten and violated.
No matter how I go back and alter that memory, no matter what I say to my younger self, it doesn’t change the fact of what happened. I was a young, impressionable, vulnerable girl sitting alone in a tiny room in the middle of nowhere with a man who had blithely assumed total control over my salvation, grilling me in needless detail about my sex life. There was no valid theological reason for it. None at all. My good and honest confession was not predicated on whether or not this oily-bearded man knew the intimate details of what had been where, on or in my body. I know that now. But it’s taken me years to know it.
The veracity of the accounts coming out of Elder Ephraim’s monasteries is hotly contested on the Orthodox internet. But looking back on my experiences that afternoon, I believe them all. The two common threads reportedly running throughout the teachings of the Elder’s disciples are an obsession with sex (especially woman’s “sinful” role in an already inherently “sinful” act) and an insistence on blind obedience that, in many accounts, reaches the level of clear gaslighting and psychological abuse. Both of these without a doubt colored my experience. And it makes me gravely concerned about the accounts we don’t hear, and maybe never will.
My own experience, among other things, ultimately cost me my faith. I do not consider myself Orthodox any longer, and have no ill will towards the Church in general. But I am deeply disappointed and angry that nothing has been done by the hierarchy to curb the twisted, abusive advance of the Ephraimites in the US. I don’t expect anything will be done. Change comes slow within Orthodoxy, when it comes at all. And even now there are men with beards who have read a lot of Patristic books typing furiously in a comment section somewhere about how my confessor that day really did nothing wrong. But change is coming from the outside, whether the Church likes it or not. Victims of abuse within and without the Church have no time left to wait. The Church must be ready to respond with compassion and justice, and hate silence when it is time to speak. In the post-Weinstein world the old order of silence, complicity, and hiding is quickly burning down; that which isn’t flint is tinder.
The Church must choose which one it is and will be.