Interview with Dr. Robert Orsi (Northwestern University)

Abstract

Interview with Dr. Robert Orsi (Northwestern University) Samuel B. Davis and Pamela D. Winfield What is the working title of your next book? How are you approaching this sensitive topic, and why is this an important contribution to the field? The title of the book I'm working on right now is Give Us Boys, which is the first half of a phrase attributed by Voltaire to Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. The rest of the phrase is alleged to have been something like, “and we give them back to you as men.” But it is likely that Voltaire himself coined the phrase as a comment on what he had come to see as the Jesuits’ pedagogical pretensions (Voltaire himself was a product of Jesuit education). The Jesuits are famous, of course, for their educational institutions, at which some of the most powerful and influential men in modern history have been trained—three members of the current US Supreme Court, for instance, and 16% of the Congress. Look at the leadership both of South American fascism and of the resistance to it (including Fidel Castro) and you will find men trained by Jesuits. Give Us Boys examines the formation—the Catholic word for the deep and transformative care of mind, body, and soul—of a class of young men at a Jesuit prep school in the Bronx in 1967–1971. The boys came to the school from different ethnic and class backgrounds, from city neighborhoods and from the wealthy northern suburbs. It was an exciting time in Catholicism, just after the Second Vatican Council, following the terrible betrayal that Humanae Vitae was to the hopes generated by the meetings in Rome, and the first stirrings of reaction. It was also a convulsive time in the city and nation, when a racist discourse of fear was deployed to dismiss progressive initiatives in favor of police solutions in a neoliberal context. So, the book looks at formation as it is intersected by these diverse realities. But what may make the book somewhat unusual is its insistence on the centrality of sexuality to this history, and more broadly to modern Catholicism, and therefore, more broadly, to the modern world. The history of modernity, and in particular the history of sexual modernity, cannot be told apart from Catholicism, although this may strike many as counterintuitive. Give Us Boys aims to be a new kind of Catholic history, one in which sexuality is not peripheral, nor set apart in a sphere of its own, but central, as I argue sexuality was to Catholicism throughout modernity. Historians of Catholicism seem to have succumbed to what I am thinking of these days as the celibacy fallacy, meaning that the men and women they are studying were actually living in faithfulness to their vows. Don't get me wrong: many were. But very many weren't, at different times and in various places. It's time that we put sexuality fully into the study of the history of Catholicism (as Foucault, who grew up Catholic, would agree). And I don't mean in the sense of prohibitions, but of the dynamic between prohibition and permission, of the interplay of denial and desire and what comes of it. Catholicism was the sexual closet of the modern world. Think of global modernity along the lines of a metaphor of a house. You have different rooms, with different functions, arranged differently in various contexts…We know, for instance, that democracy looks different in say, Iran, then it does in Italy, or in Argentina. So, too, freedom of religion. Still, imagine this big and various house called “modernity” and then be aware that in it, at its center, is a great sexual closet. That is Catholicism. From Rimbaud to Mapplethorpe and beyond. Out of this closet came perversities and pleasures, prohibitions and permissions; out of the closet came beauty and horror. From Quebec to Ireland to the Catholic missions in Africa, across South America, the Catholic closet made sexuality horribly dangerous for women, for children, for the vulnerable, even as it put into place immense institutions to care for the victims it helped create. As the clergy sexual...