One of my sisters has recently returned from a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, and her accounts of the nightly torchlight processions before the shrine’s Lower Basilica have reminded me of what was, to my mind, one of the more unexpectedly significant events in ecclesial news this summer.

Lourdes’s Lower Basilica is covered with mosaics designed and constructed by the Aletti Center, and thus now inextricably linked in the minds of the faithful with the Center’s founder, Fr. Marko Rupnik: a former Jesuit who currently stands accused of multiple counts of spiritual and sexual abuse of religious sisters. Over the summer the Bishop of Tarbes-et-Lourdes, Mgr. Jean-Marc Micas, announced his decision to leave the mosaics unilluminated during the sanctuary’s torchlight processions.

In a press release dated July 2, the bishop explained that he does not see it as his place to pass judgment on the morality of artwork, but recognizes as a pastor that the presence of the Aletti Center mosaics is now an impediment to Lourdes’s mission of healing for the sick and wounded. Thus, the decision to cease illuminating these mosaics during processions will be the first step to eventually removing them entirely. Bishop Micas makes clear that this decision, though difficult, is the one most in keeping with the mission of the sanctuary. “Lourdes,” he said in a subsequent English-language interview with La Croix International, “is a place of mercy and reconstruction,” where “those harmed by life and the church must be given the first place.” But the “omnipresence” of the Aletti Center mosaics is, for survivors, like “the two arms of an abuser encircling them, rekindling an unbearable trauma.”

When we learn of another person’s abuse, a small, quiet apocalypse takes place. A veil lifts, and we begin to understand that this person’s present is interwoven with a dark and unspeakable past. Yet to these people themselves, it is not really the past at all: their overwhelming fears were never resolved, their memories of it never properly stored, and thus they continue—in the words of the priest who helped me through my own apocalypse in this matter—to live within a scared organism, in a body that simply cannot understand that the danger has passed. Those metaphorical arms of suffering will continue to reach out and encircle them, and the trauma will be rekindled, over and over again, until it is finally healed. This work of healing is a work of mercy: the Christian virtue which is at the heart of the mission of Lourdes, and which also provides us with the key to understanding both what is good, and what is lacking, in Bishop Micas’ response to the question of the Centro Aletti mosaics.

Mercy, in the Catholic understanding, is the impulse to alleviate the misery of another. It begins with an inner affect—our ability to feel that misery as if it were our own—and resolves in outward, practical action. It is this mercy we see at work in Bishop Micas’s response to the question of the Centro Aletti mosaics in the Lourdes sanctuary. But we also see that his response is marked by a presumably unintended but still significant defect. When Bishop Micas speaks of victim-survivors, he does so in an almost entirely passive mode. The impression we receive is that these survivors have received abuse, and now will receive mercy; they have had evil done unto them by members of the Church, and will now have good done unto them by other members. But a full account of the role of mercy in the ecclesial abuse crisis needs to go further than this. It must acknowledge that victim-survivors are not, and cannot be, simply mercy’s passive recipients. They are, in fact, its agents.

Thomas Aquinas says that our ability to show mercy is rooted in our own potential to feel misery. We grieve at another’s suffering because we first recognize such suffering in our own lives. It follows, then, that the people best qualified to alleviate misery are those who know first-hand that misery is never the last word in the story of the human soul.

This is why I find Bishop Micas’s description of the Centro Aletti mosaics as “rekindling an unbearable trauma” so significant. It is true, but it is only half the truth, and that other half of the truth needs to be heard too. Because something strange and unexpected—mysterious, even—takes place when we find ourselves confronted once more with our own unbearable trauma. We discover that the unbearable does not have to destroy or disempower us. We find instead that it reveals something within us of which we were hitherto unaware: a strength and a wisdom that can only be known when wounds are laid open to the light of grace. And later, when we come face-to-face with another person deep in his own misery, attempting to bear his own unbearable, that hidden part of us opens up once again, and that strength and wisdom re-emerges—but this time it is not for our own benefit, but for his. What God first gave us for our own healing we are now called to give to others, for His glory and in His name. Perhaps this is precisely the mission of victim-survivors within the Body of Christ: to bear the unbearable in God’s grace, in order to help bear the pain of others.

Bishop Micas’s response to survivors is praiseworthy, but also incomplete. It reminds us that the Church runs the risk of focusing so intently on the fact of post-traumatic wounding that the equally true, equally important fact of post-traumatic wisdom is forgotten. The bishop is right to put his decision in the context of Christian mercy, but a fully merciful response to the suffering of abuse survivors will see them as they are: not perpetual, hopelessly passive victims, but a hidden treasury of compassion, insight, and Christian witness, invaluable to the mission of the Church.