Warning / Disclaimer

This blog is a personal memoir. I’m sharing the truth / what I experienced in a nightmare situation from 2015 to the present.

Warning: On some posts, I give vent to raw emotions. Better here than on social media, which I now realize acts like push notifications bringing posts to the eyeballs of readers who might not want to see it. I’m seeing lots of Trad Catholics (the men in chain mail armor like medieval knights) as suggested contacts. That’s not good.

On my blog, readers have chosen to be here.

The telling is made more difficult because:

(1) there have been anonymous digital actors ~ for years,
(2) life-altering, unjust decisions were taken about me without my being informed or consulted,
(3) threats of violence jacked up the emotional tenor for me, and I constantly feel in danger of retaliation while at the same not being able to exist or get ambulatory again without reclaiming my voice.

AUDIENCE
My audience is sympathetic Catholics, who might care to know why I have had to be assertively self-protective and vocal almost from Day One on my path to becoming Catholic. I’ve connected with a handful of Catholics e.g. survivors, those who have listened to survivors, therapists, professionals who understand institutional betrayal, coercive control, clericalism. What has been missing are interlocutors who understand digital crime, while also being sympathetic Catholics. I have to dismiss a lot of people’s first reactions to my story because they either completely disregard the digital stuff, or aren’t Catholic. Additionally, those with doubts about the digital stuff are quick to insist I have some mental illness, and this is triggering. I can no longer speak about it to people with whom I haven’t built up some trust. Finally, the Peterborough Crown, police and Diocese are trusted and respected authorities, and yet
(1) they have mislead Catholics and the public on important points,
(2) there has been coordination to build up a body of documents that make those lies official,
(3) and aren’t likely to backtrack or edit the narrative in my favor anytime soon.

TONE
On some days I can be charitable, and frame events as ‘they didn’t know any better’. On other days, I’m protective of my dignity and truth. I speak from the reality that the Diocese staff saw me as an enemy despite all my efforts to disclose my intentions, and they, as a group of employees with lawyers at their disposal and cradle Catholics, acted from that adversarial stance against me, an individual lay person and a convert. People in the Church (Bishop Robert Bourgon, Fr David Roche) tried to intervene but things went off the rails. I feel like part of me was amputated. Jordan Peterson says that CPTSD isn’t really about being hurt as much as knowing that someone wanted to hurt you. It’s that confrontation with malignancy that traumatizes.

RAGE OF FORCED SELF-BETRAYAL
I was forced to apologize under the threat of violence. I had to take on the persona of someone I’m not to make my way through a legal nightmare. After five years of being ostracized and self-isolating (not because I was “abused as a child” but because of the pitch contest in 2013 and how no one understood viral shaming until years later), Dierdre Thomas decided to impose a new level of hell that brought me so close to self-annihilation that I still can’t go back to that time without a physical reaction. And then ~ in Sudbury ~ all the places where I should have been able to be normal e.g. the Sudbury District Nurse Practitioner Clinic, in the Church, various community groups ~ these places were poisoned by the lies of the Peterborough Diocese Communications Department doing damage control. Accusations and mischaracterizations and demonization and condemnation and judgement just kept going and going and going and going and going and going and going.
But the thing that I haven’t been able to talk about is the part that is spiritual abuse. Since Canadian Catholics are convinced they are “good people”, accountability is far off, if not impossible. And, reader, part of my conversion was understanding sin, depravity, vices, darkness, ego in the depth of my soul. I know myself. And I think the people I was interacting with also know themselves. I think initiation is so badly done in some places that a thirst for connection with the Body of Christ ~ and learning ~ is confused by professional religious as loneliness or neediness or spiritual pathology or mental illness.

CONFIDENTIALITY
It’s dangerous to share personal stories online. Forced isolation and being silenced and threatened is also dangerous. I would prefer that screenshots are not taken of my posts but I can’t prevent it.

EVOLVING UNDERSTANDING
As of today, January 1 2025, I am starting to think my italki students complained about me, or that italki complained about me. I originally made a profile on the italki platform to do market research on how online ELT was developing. I was looking for like-minded people in the industry. As a teacher, I didn’t disclose to students until much later that I was an IELTS Examiner. As it turns out, the IELTS opportunity was bigger than the Learn English Through Big Ideas (content-based language learning, through speech and listening to transcripts rather than written discourse and reading texts) opportunity.

Someone ~ using Facebook ~ was probing me about vile and deeply personal topics. That developed into a phone call with someone who DMed me, ostensibly a fellow female feminist-minded Catholic who wanted to have some actual spoken conversation instead of just writing messages to each other or posting publicly. There were few people at the time who, like me, thought trying to have a conversation ~ in a public forum, with strangers, when we had no control over who would see what we wrote ~ that this was not optimal and even harmful.

Hindsight is 202o. Now it’s widely understood what Cambridge Analytica was, that mobile phones and social media can be harmful, that communicating publicly with strangers on marketing platforms is dangerous. I will share a story of trying to reach out to media-savvy Catholic clergy and religious about this in 2020 but with no success.

VARIETY
Some of my posts are historical and factual, meant to inform.
Some of my posts on my spiritual topics are speculative, self-deprecating. My take on Christian spirituality isn’t always orthodox. I didn’t have a typical adult initiation into the Catholic faith, if such a thing even exists.
Some posts are subjective i.e. about the campaign of terror (sign ups, impersonations, texts, phone calls) in 2021, things said (and my interpretation) by students that were intended to manipulate, things said (and my interpretation) by Catholics like Arthur Henry or Marilyn Cicutini that were intended to manipulate. Since I’m a language teacher and hyper-cognizant of how meaning in negotiated, the differences between written discourse (an asynchronous) email) and speech (interactive, full of socio-pragmatic features), direct communication styles vs indirect communication styles, cross-cultural barriers to communication and how to overcome them … it is painful that no matter how I tried, I could not be heard or seen in any way by the Catholics in Peterborough who authored the destruction of my life.

I get lots of criticism from other Catholics, * H O W E V E R *; there is a huge power differential in (conservative) Catholic contexts between lay people and Vicars or older priests who have a high opinion of themselves and/or are surrounded by clerical lay people who are deferential and have bystander/obedient peasant disease. That’s Peterborough. I was the wrong person in the wrong Diocese at the wrong time.

I am starting to see God’s hand in some of this. “But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” Romans 5:20 (Is this what redemption means? Is this the only Scripture quote on this theme?)

I know that’s a fallacy or meaning-making move on my part.

Patricia Robinson, the creepy Brooklyn caller, wanted to talk about what it means to be very meta.

(Do you understand why Facebook changed its name to Meta?)

Catholics who think everyone “has an agenda”, or who engage in conspiracy thinking (See DW Lafferty’s talk on this) are just Catholics who know there is meaning and purpose in our lives. This is projection, and it would be great if Catholic catechists taught doctrine alongside theories of human development, psychology, spiritual development.