We began this series “Safe From Abuse” as a presentation and exploration of a talk given in January 2026 by Fr. Hans Zollner about safeguarding. We have studied Fr. Zollner’s understanding of safeguarding and his insistence that safekeeping is a spiritual matter, going beyond any legal and psychological guidelines that can be established. We have explored what he calls “the spirituality of power” and we have found that to make power one’s guiding principle of action strengthens its adherents to the point where they possess more power than any practical efforts at safeguarding can block. We have seen an example of this in our last article where we studied the murder of St. Maria Goretti by Alessandro Serenelli and its effects.
Safeguarding, which is an attempt to protect people in their whole being, physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual, faces one insuperable problem: we never know all the threats that endanger possible victims. Abusers are not always recognizable before they become dangerous. There are often indications that a person may cause abuse, but too often these indications are not clear enough to take timely action to protect the victim. Also, the signs of abuse are not always recognizable as being actual abuse. Even when every step for protection is taken, abuse can still happen and its effects can already be devastating before protection can step in.
Ultimately, this is the problem of evil at work in people’s lives. There are two possible ways to prevent all abuse, both of which are impractical. We can put every human being in straitjackets and gag them, or shut them up in padded cells, but then no one would be available to feed those so bound, and those who do take care of the others, being in a position of power, would quite possibly succumb to the spirituality of power and end up abusing their “patients.”
The other alternative is to brainwash everyone in order to reduce them to a state of mind where they are incapable of abusing anyone. (One thinks of A Clockwork Orange as an illustration.) This would reduce humanity to those who are brainwashed and those who do the brainwashing, with a result similar to the previous “solution.”
The only person who could resolve this dilemma is God because He created human beings and He continues to hold us in existence. In creating us, He chose to give us free will, as He did with the angels, with the result that we are free to choose to do evil and we are free to choose to do good. But this explanation also poses a dilemma: God, by definition, is all-powerful, and this automatically puts Him in the position of one who, in His actions, exercises power. A question that we need to ask is: does God act out of the spirituality of power? Is God an abuser?
The spirituality of power, as we have seen, is a life centered on the exercise of power in which power is the guiding principle of one’s actions. Is power the essence of God? Is power the guiding principle of His actions? God is certainly presented throughout the Bible as being all-powerful. His Word accomplishes all it wills. Nothing can withstand Him, and what He wills is fulfilled in its totality.
Does this emphasis on power make God an abuser? Early in the Bible, in the account of the life of Abraham, God “tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’”[1] Even though the incident ended with a sudden reprieve, on the human level this would certainly qualify as an act of abuse. It is hard to imagine a more traumatic experience for a child. And, in fact, the Bible shows us what trauma Isaac carried with him for the rest of his life. The phrase “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” frequently occurs through both the Old and the New Testament. This expression establishes God as the deity adored and served by the Patriarchs. But there is one place where another phrase is used in referring to the God of Isaac. In the account of Jacob’s service under his uncle, Laban, Jacob exclaims, “These twenty years I have been in your house; I served you fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your flock, and you have changed my wages ten times. If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been on my side, surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed.”[2] This phrase, “the Fear of Isaac,” is repeated by Jacob when, after some discussion, he and Laban come to an agreement. “So Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac, and Jacob offered a sacrifice on the height.”[3]
The word translated here as Fear is not the common Hebrew word for fear, yirah, but the much stronger word pachad, terror, or dread. Jacob swore by the Dread of Isaac. That Isaac should carry a terror associated with God is not at all surprising. After all, God had ordered him to be sacrificed! What is very surprising is that Isaac should continue peacefully to worship and serve the God who caused this lifelong dread. Abraham and Jacob were both notable men, each in his own way, worthy of the title of Patriarch, but Isaac comes across as a very different kind of person. It has been asked why Isaac is included along with his father and his son in the list of Patriarchs. Isaac apparently did nothing notable that would merit calling him a Patriarch, a foundation stone of the Chosen People. However, when we see that Isaac bore throughout his whole life the terrifying effects of being offered in sacrifice, we see him in a very different light. To serve a terrifying deity out of fear was common in ancient times, but to serve a fearful deity with peaceful trust was unheard of. Perhaps Isaac was a weakling who adored and trusted his abuser, but that Jacob should trust the God who had abused his father makes no sense. Jacob was no weakling. He was very determined and very cunning. For Jacob to trust himself to the God who caused his father, Isaac, such terror is so incomprehensible that we need to go into this more deeply.
On the human level, the sacrifice of Isaac constituted serious abuse. But there is a nearly invisible detail that shows that more than human understanding was at work here. When God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham set out for the place indicated, taking with him Isaac, two servants, and everything necessary for the sacrifice except the ram. “On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’”[4] I am deeply indebted to the writer who pointed out the inconsistency in Abraham’s statement. He said, “We will worship,” which makes sense, but then he continues, “and then we will come back to you.” Knowing that he was to kill Isaac, it makes no sense to say that “we will come back to you.” Assuming that Abraham was not deliberately lying for some reason, how can we explain this inconsistency?
Abraham is our father in faith. He lived by faith, and “by faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, ‘It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.’ He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead — and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”[5] Abraham saw the human reality of sacrifice and at the same time he also saw, in the light of faith, that God was trustworthy and would fulfill His promises. Isaac and Jacob are the heirs of Abraham both physically and spiritually: they inherited his vision of faith. They both served God with peaceful trust, no matter what happened to them.
The Church has always taught that the sacrifice of Isaac is a type of the sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. The death of Jesus has been condemned as an instance of abuse, but that condemnation leaves out too much; it especially leaves out Jesus’ insistence that “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.”[6] He acted in absolute freedom in choosing to die, and He proved the freedom of His choice by His resurrection.
Not only was Jesus’ sacrifice a free choice, its effects also extend to all human beings. Jesus’ suffering and death gave meaning to all suffering and death, for it offered to all beings the opportunity to be united to His transforming death and resurrection.
From the moment of the Fall, we have been subject to death, suffering, abuse, manipulation, and every kind of evil. God could have left us in this state, but He chose to do otherwise. God created us in the image and likeness of His Trinitarian communion. What is done by one Person of the Trinity is done by all Three. In a similar way, what is done by one human being affects all human beings, and, in fact, affects all creation. God chose to become one of us, and by the incarnation of the Son, took on all human actions. He entered into our choices so totally that “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”[7]
Abraham foresaw that God would fulfill His promises, and he accepted to sacrifice Isaac. Isaac and Jacob understood somehow that the God who inspired dread was worthy of trust, and they trusted Him. For Isaac to continue peacefully to trust one who had caused such trauma shows a very deep faith. Isaac was not just the hyphen between Abraham and Jacob but was himself a very strong person committed to the One in whom he believed. He can well be a patron saint for those who are abused, for he can say to them, “I know how you feel!”
Those who follow the spirituality of power do not serve the God who died on Calvary and was raised from the dead. They do not accept to be weak. No matter how much they may quote the Bible and speak of God’s power as the source of their own actions, they are not following in the footsteps of His Son.
Jesus Himself can say “I know how you feel” to each of those who suffer. Far from power being the foundation of His actions, He identifies with the victims. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”[8] He not only knows from His own experience how we feel in our suffering, He gives meaning to our suffering and makes it life-giving. That is the ultimate act of empathy, and it is our heritage as members of His body. He is truly God-with-us, and since He shares in our weakness, we also share in His power. “For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but … we will live with him by the power of God.”[9] This is the weakness that vanquishes the spirituality and the culture of power.
Notes
[1] Gn 22:1-2
[2] Gn 31:41-42
[3] Gn 31:53-54
[4] Gn 22:4-5
[5] Heb 11:17-19
[6] Jn 10:17-18
[7] 2 Cor 5:21
[8] Mt 25:40
[9] 2 Cor 13:4
Image: By Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, Link
Sr. Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. (Sr. Gabriela Hicks) was born in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Gold Rush country of California, which she remembers as heaven on earth for a child! She lived a number of years in Europe, and then entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Flemington, New Jersey, where she has been a member for forty years. www.flemingtoncarmel.org.
