I am the co-founder of Ending Clergy Abuse and an attorney in Seattle, Washington, USA. I am a parishioner at Holy Rosary - Seattle, where I was baptized 75 years ago and attended grade school. My grandparents helped build the church in the 1930s.

For 25 years, I have coordinated our missions to Uganda, Kenya and the Philippines, traveling there multiple times; raising over $3 million dollars building hospitals, schools, churches, water projects, and providing money for school fees. I have introduced priests from Africa and nuns from the Philippines at Holy Rosary to assist and minister to our West Seattle community.

Since founding ECA, I played an important role in Rome at the 2019 Pope’s Summit on Clergy Abuse coordinating the voices of the international survivor/activists before the bishops and the world press promoting Zero Tolerance for abuse as an universal law of the Church.

I am a wife, mother, grandmother, and small business owner. I am active in my parish community in West Seattle, and for over ten years, I have run the parish soup kitchen serving the homeless at St. Martin de Pores in downtown Seattle.

Twenty-five years ago, I began working with the young sisters of the Daughters of Mary - Uganda who live in West Seattle and attend Seattle University. I welcome them as a mother, helping them to adapt to life in the US and obtain warm clothes, cell phones, computers, etc., and even teach them to drive!

I have worked jointly with my husband, Tim Law, on the issues of clergy sexual abuse locally, nationally, and internationally for many years. It is vital that we continue to engage the Catholic Church to ensure the safety of our children and to obtain justice for survivors.

As lifelong Catholics and members of our parish church, we cannot in good conscience stay Catholic unless we work for change when we see that bishops across our country continue to cover up clergy sex abuse.

Almost two dozen state attorneys general have initiated investigations of local dioceses, revealing generations of Catholic leaders who have abused children and vulnerable adults and/or protected sexual predators to the harm of children and the community. We want our Attorney General Bob Ferguson to do the same thing here.

I was born in a family of seven. Growing up, we attended mass regularly, and I received my First Holy Communion. Slowly, for different reasons, everyone drifted away from the Catholic Church. Later in life, my husband and I sent our children to Catholic school, and he decided to convert to Catholicism so that we could worship together as a family. I was overjoyed! Sadly, my joy faded as we all slowly became disillusioned with the Church.

I am now a grandmother, and I have been asked many times: why don’t you leave the Church? The most straightforward answer is because I love the Church. The Church is more than the building and clergy; it is the people and the faith that binds them together through God’s Word.

It is heartbreaking to hear the stories of innocent children and people of faith who have been betrayed by those who represent God. Victims are entitled to demand that the Church be held fully accountable. Accountability can lead to repentance. Repentance can lead to atonement. Atonement can lead to reconciliation, and with reconciliation there is the possibility of healing for both the victims and the Church.

I am a lifelong practicing Catholic who is deeply concerned about the state of our Church. It is shrinking.

The handling of the sex abuse scandal by the cover-up of criminal behavior of abusive priests has cost the Church billions of dollars. Sin of this magnitude does not go away. It corrodes the heart and soul of the Church. Many parishioners see the hypocrisy in the inability of the Church to practice what it preaches and are leaving the Church. The Church must do the right thing and live in the light of truth, transparency, and reconciliation, and away from the darkness of cover-up and sin.

We must do this to protect our children and vulnerable adults. The Church owes this to the many victims and to all of us who care about our Church. I believe the Holy Spirit is calling the Church to a Day of Atonement. We must ask for forgiveness of God and from those who have been hurt so that the Church can receive God’s mercy and be able to follow Him with more freedom, joy and peace than ever before.

As a survivor of abuse at the hands of a priest, I am on a mission to protect children from harm and end abuse within the Catholic Church. I am the Northwest district director for the national organization, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and have served on the SNAP national board of directors.

My memoir, SPLIT: A child, a priest and the Catholic Church, chronicles my abuse, my years as a nun, and my search for healing from trauma and shame. As popular speaker, I am a regular guest on KUOW and was interviewed for the anti-abuse feature, “The Gift of Secrecy.”

I am also a leader in Equal Rights Washington, which fights for the rights of LGBTQ citizens, a National Distinguished Principal, and a long time volunteer at the Lambert House for LGBTQ+ youth. A lifelong educator, I am the author of Out on the Streets and Our Families Our Children, published by the Safe Schools Coalition.