Discovering Records Beneath the Robes

Abstract

A Brief History of Clergy Sexual Abuse and Mandates of LawSex have been prevalent within Roman Catholic Church for centuries. It is a long-standing, recurring, and widespread existing throughout entire history of Catholic Church. As early as 305 A.D. Council of Elvira, official church records document an institution absorbed in regulating sexual conduct of its clergy-revealing not immoral behavior, but also criminal (Doyle, Sipe, & Wall, 2006, p. 295). Through early medieval period to today, Catholic Church has been regulating sexual behavior and thoroughly documenting clergy's sexual violations. Despite evidence of violations, there was no official system of law to address this within Church until early twentieth century (Doyle & Rubino, 2004, p. 562). At this point, sexual abuse continued, but new mandates of Law enforced an elaborate system of documentation to record allegations, investigations, and other related activities regarding sexual abuse.All cases concerning sexual violations in Church, recent and past, have been well documented within records of institutional church, described as single most powerful element in proving its pattern and practice of protecting abusers, concealing offenses from those who had a right to know, neglecting to warn and protect parishioners, and failing to report crimes (Doyle et al., 2006, p. 217). Not did church maintain thorough and detailed accounts of sexual misconduct, Code of Law enforced a veil of secrecy so great that these records were intentionally concealed to protect reputation of Church at risk of perpetuating patterns of abuse.Canon Law distinguishes between two record types: diocesan and secret archives. The diocesan are considered ordinary, secular, and public by nature. Specific record types include priests' files, containing seminary records, transfer indications, letters of commendation and complaint, and other related matters (Doyle et al., 2006, p. 134). Regarding access to these collections, Canon 487 states that bishop and may have keys to and permission for entry must be obtained from bishop, moderator of curia, or chancellor (Doyle et al., 2006, pp. 134-135). Despite these measures of security, is important to note that records held in diocesan are unrestricted due to their secular nature.A parallel set of restricted records is kept within secret archives, and these are mandated to be kept completely closed and locked, from which cannot be removed (Cafardi, 1993, p. 96). For as long as recordkeeping has existed within church, dioceses were expected to maintain these secret collections, with practice that documents placed in secret have no secular use or existence (Cafardi, 1993, p. 97). Furthermore, because they are restricted collections, only bishop is to have key to secret archives (Doyle et al., 2006, p. 135). The motivation for maintaining in secret may be influenced by power and authority of records themselves, and these secret collections reinforce hierarchical power structure of Church.The climate of secrecy surrounding these is so powerful that the canons do not describe in detail what is to be kept in secret archives (Doyle et al., 2006, p. 135). James O'Toole, former archivist of Boston Diocesan collections, notes that at worst, he thought secret records contained problem priest files, perhaps documenting alcohol abuse (O'Toole, 2007). It is often assumed that archivists have full access to their holdings, and that it is logical to assume that they will discover illegal activities, wrong-doing, and ethical lapses as soon as [or before] anyone else (Cox, 2008, p. 1132). …