My HS principal at the Assumption, then a nun, was a rape victim
‘One never forgets’
Never, never, in my wildest dreams did I think that the principal when I was in high school at the Assumption Convent, San Lorenzo, the nun in the purple habit who would strum the guitar during Mass and give the most compelling of talks — and the most engaging of jokes — was not just a rape victim but also a victim of incest! To me, Carmen “Pinky” Valdes, then known to us as “Sister Jude,” looked like Princess Diana. She still does. She always held me in thrall whenever she spoke, and especially when she sang. She was always news. When she left the convent, she was news. When she became the first lay person to become president of Assumption College, she, again, was news.
But this woman who always blazes trails and shocks and awes people, then dropped the biggest of all her bombshells when she launched a book last week that detailed her deepest secret without shame. In her newest book, Educating Women Leaders: Transformation in Women’s Colleges (available in National Book Store Glorietta 1), she bared her past in a chapter titled, “What was Missing?” In that chapter, she detailed the points that are either missing or inadequately considered in the education of young women. The fifth point there was “What nobody wants to talk about — incest, sexual, abuse and domestic violence.”
Then in a sub-chapter titled “I know from experience,” she told her story.
*** “It was the year of my first communion. We lived in a compound in Metro Manila. I was in second grade. My cousin was a teenager. This is what I clearly remember. He took me up the staircase to his room in the big house…As he led me to his house, my heart started beating faster. Somehow, I knew things were not right. He opened the door to his room. I remember the bed and the words he said. He made me lie down. I need not spell out the rest.”
Pinky recalls that when it was over, he looked at the sheets. She remembers the word, “blood.”
Now, she knows why. Unfortunately, her experience wasn’t a one-afternoon stand for her abuser. “Once or maybe twice, he brought another cousin about his age. I can still smell them. Just the memory of the scent turns my stomach. One never forgets.”
Pinky also experienced abuse in the hands of a babysitter, her “Tita Sally” who burned her bottom with a burning match stick when she wet her parents’ bed. But the abuse did not end there. After second grade, Pinky’s family left Manila for California. One day, her father, a La Salle boy through and through (“the type who carried a rosary in his pocket to his dying day”), invited one of his teachers, an American Brother, to their home.
“The Brother won me over with his magic tricks,” says Pinky. But what was to follow wasn’t magic at all. During one of the Brother’s frequent visits to the Valdes home, he would let Pinky sit on his lap, and “then he would begin to touch me.”
One day, her mother chanced upon a scene that shocked her. When she asked Pinky if the Brother indeed touched her, the little girl, typical of an abused child, lied and said, “No.”
It was only when her mother asked her a second time, and assured Pinky that what transpired was not her fault, that she tearfully admitted that yes, she was touched.
But then her mother told Pinky something that was just as jolting: “You know, Pinky, priests and brothers get very lonely, so sometimes they do things they should not do.”
To this day, Pinky, who holds two master’s degrees in educational management from La Salle and another in Theology from the University of San Francisco, and a doctorate in Philosophy from UC Berkeley, is not sure whether her mother was being compassionate or was simply in denial.
“Between my cousin, Tita Sally and the Brother, my childhood was lost and left me with unbearable wounds. It has taken many, many years for the wounds to heal.”
Perhaps, the reason Pinky delves into the issue of the inner scars of a woman is to posit the fact that our wounds can save others — just like Jesus Christ’s wounds have.
When Pinky was working on her master’s in Theology, a professor, Sister Mary Neil, talked to the class about healing a child who is a victim of abusive adults. One woman in the class suddenly cried, “I was a victim of incest. I am sure none of you know what this is like.”
Pinky looked at her and said, “I do.” The woman stopped crying.
There was a man in the group and tearfully, he held both Pinky’s hands and said, “Pinky, I am a priest. In the name of the Catholic Church and of priests and brothers everywhere, I apologize to you. The Church owes you a profound apology…I am deeply sorry.”
For Pinky, who was also awarded the Loyola Professorial Chair in Theology by the Ateneo de Manila University, her childhood trauma has given her an experiential understanding of how “broken many of us are and how badly we need healing.”
“I am not talking here about just the victim, but the abuser as well because he or she, too, is a broken person.”
Pinky, who in fact went to La Salle for her master’s, has forgiven her abusers. “I forgave them, a long time ago, and that is why I have been able to move on.”