Feathers in the Wind

 

In their defense video about the abuse allegations covered by the Texas Observer and WFAA, Homestead talks about the story of St. Philip Neri's penance given to someone for gossiping: 

The story is told of St. Philip Neri (1515–1595) that he gave a most unusual penance to a novice who was guilty of spreading malicious gossip. He told him to take a feather pillow to the top of a church tower on a blustery day and there release all the feathers to the wind. Then he was to come down from the tower, collect all the feathers dispersed over the far countryside, and put them back into the pillow. Of course the poor novice couldn’t do it, and that was precisely Philip’s point about the great evil of tale bearing. Slander and calumny have a way of spreading to the four winds and, once released, can never be completely recalled. Even when accusations are firmly nailed as false, the reputations of those falsely accused bear a lingering taint. “Oh yes,” it is vaguely said, “wasn’t he once accused of . . . ”

 This story is also known in other traditions as Feathers in the Wind. All of the versions follow the same concept of spreading gossip being equal to scattering feathers in the wind. In other words, as Homestead Heritage asserts, telling your experiences with them, or reporting the facts about sexual abusers within the community, is gossip or slander. 

Jonathan Hollingsworth writes in What Not to Say to Someone Who's Been Hurt by the Church:

If a pastor or staff member is mistreating someone in the congregation, it's not gossip for that person to talk about it. In fact, it's not even gossip for you to talk about it.

Imagine if you found out your brother-in-law was beating your sister. Would your first response be, "That's none of my business"? The same way domestic abuse involves a whole family, spiritual abuse involves a whole church family. The abuse may have taken place in private, but that doesn't make it a private matter. 

As Christians, if we're going to start taking spiritual abuse seriously, we need to stop comparing it to gossip. (Emphasis added) 

And as The Wartburg Watch so aptly stated:

Unfortunately, this accusation of slander is used to squelch very serious concerns within the church. In fact I would contend that, in many situations in which a pastor cries "slander", he is really saying "I don't want to hear that. It means I have to deal with it and I don't want to. It will screw up all sorts of things." Slander, in many instances, is simply an "inconvenient truth."

Used in this way, you could say that referring to discussions of abuse as gossip or slander functions as a sort of thought-terminating cliché. 

Another reason I find Homestead's use of "gossip" and "slander" hypocritical when referring to people sharing their experiences, is because they themselves have published responses on their website and in books in response to such criticisms. Perhaps they have a few feathers to gather themselves. 

But this kind of retaliation is to be expected. After all, they spelled out these terms in their non-disparagement agreement.