Teresa Pitt Green

Meet

Co-Founder, Spirit Fire

Teresa Pitt Green is an international speaker, writer, and advocate for trauma-informed pastoral care, which integrates faith with other recovery programs for abuse, trauma, and self-destructive behaviors.

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.

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 Teresa Pitt Green social justice in the practicum for clergy abuse. Her first book (Restoring Sanctuary, 2010) 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 began to collect video interviews with leaders in the area of child protection and safeguarding across the globe, with special focus on faith renewal and pastoral care. In 2014, Teresa was one of several clergy-abuse survivors who founded The Healing Voices Magazine.

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.

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.

Human Trafficking

From 2017 until 2021, Teresa worked 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.

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, 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. Education Teresa graduated Summa Cum Laude from Nazareth College with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and History. She pursued Master’s work in World War I poets at Oxford University in England. In 2024, The Catholic University of America recognized Teresa’s twenty years of ministry by bestowing an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Humanities.