My childhood encounter with a sexually abusive priest changed me, for the better. It’s driven me to self-reflection and efforts to stamp out a view of others that I believe is at the root of not just clerics’ sins, but also social practices many see as acceptable. The lessons of priestly sexual abuse should inform all our lives and—I propose—decisions about what we eat, wear, and more.

My story began one day in the late 1980s when the priest who baptized me forced me into a shower with him in central New York. I kept what happened that day to myself for around 20 years before reporting it to the Diocese of Syracuse.

In 2018, the Pennsylvania grand jury report on clerics’ abuse and a simultaneous chorus of calls on Catholics to disavow our Church prompted me to sit in my apartment before a crucifix, night after night, to reflect seriously on what my priest did. Meditating on Christ’s embrace of the cross led me to seize my experience as an opportunity to bring about good. In the years since I’ve been granted chances to help others struggling with clerical abuse’s aftermath. Providence has brought me friendships with victims, their families, church leaders, and more.

God also led me to examine myself for the disordered view of His creation that is behind some, if not all, sexual abuse.

To sexually abuse someone is to reduce God’s creature to a mere object to use. My priest saw me, at least in part, as a means to satisfying his desire—a desire that was selfish and unhealthy. Others said that he abused them, too, suggesting that he was trying to feed an addiction.

The splinter of sin in a sexually abusive priest’s eye is obvious to us. But it’s worth examining our own eyes for a wooden beam of similarly motivated sins. Looking back on my life, I have certainly lost sight that other individuals have God-given, inherent value. And I have failed to prioritize that value ahead of whatever role I think another should play in contributing to my perceived happiness.

That view of others can be easy to fall into. It’s also at the root of actions besides sexual abuse.

It’s strikingly common in our use of animals. As you read this, countless creatures in the U.S. are being treated as objects and mere means to satisfy our desires.

We are, at this very moment, caging and crating millions of hens and female pigs in dark sheds stretching longer than a football field because we want to eat their ova, their young torn away as infants, and, ultimately, their bodies too. We have condemned marine mammals who can travel more than 100 miles each day to tanks half as long as a football field, simply so we can gawk at them. We have had lambs as innocent and docile as the Suffering Servant in Isaiah bred and violently shorn just so we can wear their fleece.

Unlike Noah and his family, you and I are blessed with an abundance of resources and choices besides raising and killing animals to eat and wear and taking them from their habitats. Yet we persist in supporting industries that treat God’s animals as things and systematically deny and frustrate their very natures.

Are we bowing to selfish, unhealthy desires and feeding addictions of our own, a bit like my priest did? Are we ignoring individual animals’ God-given value, which must precede whatever we want from them, as my abuser ignored mine?

Our rising awareness of sexual abuse—in the Church or elsewhere—is a good thing. Victims must be heard, respected, and healed to the extent possible. Abuse must be stopped.

But more must be done. What we learn from clerical sexual abuse must impact the rest of our lives. I believe the lesson should affect our decisions about our food, our clothing, what we do for entertainment, and so much more.

The mindset that made sexual abuse seem acceptable to the priest who cornered me decades ago also makes many think today that abusing animals for a meal, an outfit, or a laugh is acceptable. It’s not. We are—and must be—much better than that.

Please, heed others’ pain to ensure you’re causing less of it. May we each make this world a kinder place for all of God’s creatures—regardless of species—lest we perpetuate the attitude we so easily and rightly condemn when it sparks priests’ abuse.

Article written by Daniel Paden. Daniel is a parishioner of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Norfolk, VA and a vice president at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.