The Mass, hosted by Catholic Family Services of Toronto, will take place Oct. 22 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church at 7 p.m.
“It’s important to bring it up in the Church because there are a lot of individuals and there are a lot of families in the Church and this is not a small issue. It’s in a lot of families,” said Sue Vanditelli.
Vanditelli has twice survived abuse — first as a child and then in her marriage. The 57-year-old consultant on workplace conflict hardly fits the stereotype of poor, badly educated, needy women lacking confidence and self-esteem who fall into abusive relationships. She’s university educated, highly successful and knows how to handle conflict. Early on in her marriage, she and her husband even had a mature, adult conversation about the issue.
“We didn’t want that in our marriage, but it still slipped in,” Vanditelli said. “We had to deal with it. Unfortunately, I woke up to that but he didn’t.”
When she recognized what was happening, Vanditelli went to her doctor — a woman she had known 15 years, whom she trusted completely.
“It’s a pretty difficult thing to talk about. It took me a long time to even admit it to myself. Forget about talking to anybody else,” she said.
It was only years later that she spoke to a priest. He seemed to understand.
Anne-Marie, a 33-year-old accounting professional who wants to keep her identity hidden, spoke to a priest about abuse in her marriage and didn’t get much of a reaction at all.
“All I know is, there wasn’t a lot of consoling,” she said.
Forty per cent of the cases that pass through Catholic Family Services of Toronto involve some level of spousal abuse. The Women Helping Women program deals with 370 cases per year.
Since 2011 the program has been expanded to include mentors, women who have survived abuse who are prepared to listen to and encourage women still struggling in abusive relationships. Vanditelli and Anne-Marie are two of the Catholic Family Services mentoring team.
Beyond the one-on-one relationship, the mentors also speak to parish and school groups. It’s particularly important to reach youth, both boys and girls, said Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie describes herself as young and naive when she began her marriage.
“I accepted what was going on in my relationship for the longest time. I went into it with my eyes closed and said, ‘All right, that’s just how it’s supposed to be.’ ”
For girls today the delicate balance of self-esteem and self-awareness is much harder to maintain under the peer pressure of social media, confronted constantly by Photoshopped bikini bodies in magazines and facing early and constant pressure to succeed, Anne-Marie said.
“You see a lot of kids going through so much depression now. There’s so many expectations on a child that a child can’t just be a child any more,” she said.
Knowing what she does now, Anne-Marie relishes the opportunity to speak to youth groups, both boys and girls.
If there’s anything that holding a Mass to end woman abuse can do, it is to raise the profile and begin a serious conversation about a widespread problem, said Vanditelli. Both for the abused women and for the community, everything starts with recognizing the problem.
“It’s like a silent music where you really don’t hear the words. You really don’t understand what’s going on until it gets really, really bad,” she said.