Teresa Pitt Green

Teresa Pitt Green is the Vice President of Healing and Recovery Ministries at St Edmund’s Retreat. For over 20 years, she has been an international speaker, writer, and advocate for trauma-informed pastoral care, promoting ways to integrate faith with other recovery programs for abuse, trauma, and self-destructive behaviors. She is now living in residence on Enders Island, offering spiritual direction and both private and group retreat and spiritual formation programs.

Teresa is best known as founder, along with fellow survivor Luis A. Torres, Jr., of Spirit Fire, which is a Christian restorative justice initiative dedicated to promoting healing and reconciliation for individuals, families, parishes, and communities wounded by the betrayal of abuse. Spirit Fire events, consultation and free resources are available broadly. The group works in friendship with all levels of the Catholic Church and other Christian groups.

Grassroots Dialogue

Spirit Fire is dedicated to helping the Church heal person to person, heart to heart. Despite her organizational service as described below, Teresa focuses on grassroots dialogue and healing. She works with Catholic parishes and lay groups developing grassroot pastoral care programs, with university conferences promoting dialogue among laity, and with survivors and families seeking to find or to advance safe pastoral care. She participates in listening sessions and sensitized dialogue with ethnic Catholics and indigenous Catholic populations to learn how best to promote child safety and trauma recovery in culturally respectful ways in all areas of the North American continent.

Global Church

Teresa has offered information and resources to international fact-finding groups for years, most recently to the Polish Bishops Conference as it developed a guide to pastoral care following trauma. Her collaboration with the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors began some years ago when she first hosted private meetings between survivors and their families with members of the Commission. She was invited in 2018 to deliver opening remarks for the first Vatican summit, which presented best practices in trauma-informed pastoral care to a world forum of child protection professionals and survivor ministers. Teresa currently serves on a North American Working Group offering feedback to organizers planning the first International Safeguarding Conference in 2023.

National Service

Teresa has spoken several times before the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Review Board, and other committees and working groups including those with the Conference of Major Superiors of Men. She has led retreats and training programs for dioceses across the United States, and she serves on religious and diocesan review boards, advisory groups and panels, and task forces advancing child protection and survivor ministries. She has spoken to and written for many Catholic organizations and conferences, including Virtus and Praesidium.

Publications

Teresa’s opus includes books, articles, webinars, radio programming, workshops, and retreats. Her second book (Veronica’s Veil) has been awarded the Mother Cabrini Cors Jesu award for its role in promoting social justice in the practicum for clergy abuse. Her first book (Restoring Sanctuary) was recommended reading by Francis Cardinal George of the Archdiocese of Chicago. All Teresa’s works are now included in the Pontifical Commission’s Tutela Minorum as models for care throughout the Church Universal.

In 2020, Spirit Fire launched a comprehensive broadcast series on clergy abuse, faith renewal, and pastoral care. The weekly broadcast featured interviews with leaders in and beyond the Church and many free resources. On hiatus since the pandemic lockdowns, broadcasts will resume sometime in 2023.

Teresa was one of several clergy-abuse survivors who founded The Healing Voices Magazine in 2014. As its editor, Teresa wrote and edited hundreds of articles until the magazine closed in 2020 due to the pandemic. During its publication, The Healing Voices was read weekly through North America, Europe, and English-speaking regions around the world.

Human Trafficking

Teresa works also in human trafficking awareness and prevention, especially where digital forums and social media are involved. Some of her work has included survivors of human trafficking and components about human-trafficking. She completed her five-year tenure as chair of the Northern Virginia Human Trafficking Task Force in July 2021 before relocating to Enders Island.

Other Background

Before beginning full-time ministry, Teresa spent thirty years in publishing and digital media, first as a New York publishing executive and, later, as owner of a boutique consulting business in northern Virginia. Much of that time, her ministry was evolving as a part-time avocation, including work with therapy pets. Teresa’s background in creative industries inspires her inclusion of creativity, writing, and arts in spiritual development and recovery. Teresa is a practicing Catholic and a survivor of clergy abuse.