BATH BEACH — Frank Tramontano, a survivor of clergy sexual abuse, doesn’t remember the name of the church where he attended his first Mass of Hope and Healing — the annual Mass the Diocese of Brooklyn holds for survivors. He does, however, remember how he felt.
“It was overwhelming,” Tramontano recalled. “I think I just sat in the pew and cried. It was very emotional for me.”
Tramontano, 71, who was abused by a priest at the Basilica of Regina Pacis in Dyker Heights when he was a 13-year-old altar server in the mid-1960s, said he hopes to see a lot of survivors come to this year’s Mass of Hope and Healing so that they can experience the same feeling he did — a sense of relief at being acknowledged and heard.
The Mass will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m. at St. Finbar Church in Bath Beach. The diocese has been celebrating the Mass since 2015, except in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another survivor, Father Jeffry Dillon, a retired priest in residence at St. Kevin Church in Auburndale, is encouraging other survivors to attend the Mass.
“My hope is that more and more survivors come to the Mass and experience the healing presence of God,” he said.
“I know a lot of survivors who would say, ‘I’m not stepping foot into church again. That’s the place where I was abused. That’s the place where I was hurt. That’s the place where my heart was broken, and so I don’t want to be there.’ And I understand that,” explained Father Dillon, 75, who suffered abuse at the hands of a priest at St. Gabriel Church in East New York when he was in the fifth grade and serving as an altar server in the early-1960s.
“But hopefully, it’s an opportunity for survivors to experience that healing,” he added.
Both Father Dillon and Tramontano are members of the diocese’s abuse survivors’ group, which meets regularly to listen, offer support, and give strength to each other. They sat down with The Tablet in the rectory of St. Finbar Church on Oct. 15.
The group offers suggestions for the Mass of Hope and Healing and how the diocese can better serve the survivor community.
The diocese, in addition to holding the Mass of Hope and Healing, offers free counseling to abuse survivors and has established a toll-free telephone hotline (1-888-634-4499) for people to report abuse allegations.
Tramontano said he would like to see more outreach from the diocese to survivors.
“We should be seeking out all of them,” he said. “You should be knocking on their doors, saying, ‘How can we help? We understand there may be issues that you have. What else can we ask the church to do for you?’ ”
Both Tramontano and Father Dillon spoke poignantly about their need to help others.
Tramontano, who said he has never lost his faith in God, added that serving others is important to him.
“I bought into the life of Christ early on. I wanted to live a Christian life, be a Christian, do as much as I can for others. That is something I always thought was a part of me,” said Tramontano, an accountant who is married with two children and does charity work like raising money to buy Christmas presents for children from underprivileged families.
Father Dillon became a police officer, then answered God’s call to join the priesthood and was ordained in 1981.
“I moved into the possibility of doing something good,” he said of his decision to become a priest in spite of the childhood abuse. “Yes, I had this experience. And yes, the natural response would be, ‘Let me get as far away from this type of ministry or this type of profession.’ But there’s a good way of doing this, and that’s what I strove to do.”
Father Dillon added that he refused to let the abuse define his life.
“I came to the realization that if I wanted to be healed, I have to choose that. And I have to choose to say this happened to me, but it doesn’t have to be the authorship of my life,” he said. “I am greater than this, and so I move forward and move beyond it.”
