Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Matthew J. Cressler1 On August 14, 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a 900-page report that named credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors by over three hundred Catholic clergy across six dioceses in the state. The report is the largest of its kind to date in the United States, both in terms of the number of accused priests and identified victims, and in the excruciating and comprehensive account of violence it presents. This report led to a cascade of responses, beginning with the outrage and disgust of ordinary Catholics and followed by attorneys general in ten states announcing investigations into Catholic clerical sex abuse; religious orders, most notably U.S. Jesuit provinces, making public lists of clergy with credible accusations of sexual abuse of minors; and Pope Francis convening a summit of bishops from around the world. While in one sense the Pennsylvania report offered nothing new—Catholics and the scholars who study them have long known of the breadth of clerical sex abuse in the church and the depth of the institutional coverup of that abuse—the report renewed a sense that sexual abuse must be reckoned with in scholarly conversations about U.S. Catholicism in particular and about U.S. religion, more broadly. The essays collected here emerged out of these sorts of scholarly conversations in the months that followed the release of the report. I recall speaking with Brian Clites, who reflects in this forum on “Our Accountability to Survivors,” about the ways U.S. Catholic studies needs to change. I confessed how, as a scholar of religion and race, I had insisted that we understand race and white supremacy as constitutive of Catholicism in the United States,2 but had failed to conceptualize sex [End Page 1] abuse as something similarly systemic and not anomalous in the past and present live of Catholics. If one set of discussions revolved around how Catholic studies must change to account for clerical abuse, another centered on how studies of sex abuse needed to shift to include indigenous and other non-white populations often erased in these narratives. This is something Kathleen Holscher insists on in her essay “Colonialism and the Crisis Inside the Crisis of Catholic Sex Abuse,”3 an intervention Jack Lee Downey builds on in his contribution to this forum. These exchanges and others like them online led to an “emergency session” on Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion in 2018 hosted at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver, Colorado. The session gathered religious studies scholars with different areas of specialization and different methodological approaches who shared a commitment to thinking substantively and critically about the implications sex abuse holds for the study of religion. Each scholar was invited to reflect on how the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis appears from his or her own particular vantage point, and on how they think the historical and contemporary contours of the crisis should change the ways we research, write, and teach. How should scholars approach the study of Catholic sex abuse, conceptually and methodologically? What impact should the study of Catholic sex abuse have on the study of Catholics and Catholicism more broadly? What, if anything, is distinctively Catholic about Catholic sex abuse? How is Catholic sex abuse related to sex abuse in other settings, religious and otherwise? These were among the many questions raised by the session and, as you will find, not everyone agreed on the answers. These essays collected in this forum represent the revised remarks of the scholars who participated in that AAR emergency session and are, we hope, just a few of the first signs of a shifting field. The first three contributions to this forum insist that we shift the ways scholars study Catholic clerical sex abuse by centering people who have been marginalized and erased from the preeminent narratives. First, Brian Clites calls on scholars to hold themselves accountable to survivors of clerical sex abuse. He offers ten theses that illuminate the implications this accountability has not just for how we understand Catholic sex abuse, but even for how we understand the moral imperatives of scholarship itself. Next, Susan Ridgely...