Clergy Sexual Abuse Research Articles

Amplifying Counterdiscourses: Feminist Narrative Perspectives in Addressing Clergy Sexual Abuse at Covenant Fellowship Church in Champaign-Urbana, IL

Amplifying Counterdiscourses: Feminist Narrative Perspectives in Addressing Clergy Sexual Abuse at Covenant Fellowship Church in Champaign-Urbana, IL

Catholic Diocesan and Religious Priests’ Perceptions of Social Support from Their Fellow Priests, Bishops, and Religious Superiors

In the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in 2002, the Catholic Church underwent a tectonic shift that affected the well-being of priests and the relationship between bishops and priests. The present study aims to understand how Catholic priests perceive social support from both their fellow priests and their episcopal leaders nearly 20 years after the crisis’ wake as it could potentially have significant implications for the well-being of priests. The data gathered for this article is from in-depth interviews with U.S. Catholic priests ( N = 104) including both diocesan ( n = 70) and religious priests ( n = 34). This article explores the question “How do Catholic diocesan and religious priests perceive support, or lack thereof, from their fellow priests and their bishop or superior?” Our analysis examines the presence as well as absence of vertical and horizontal support among diocesan and religious priests. By further understanding how priests experience social support from those in their organization, we can cultivate better avenues of support for Catholic priests that are specific to their needs and desires which could potentially improve their overall well-being. Some practical implications of this study are discussed which could help aid Catholic leaders and formators in nurturing these kinds of support structures.

Remembering the dead, reconciling the living:

Rituals advancing reconciliation often do so by recalling a shared history or proposing a shared future. Racial reconciliation in the United States and recovery from the clergy sexual abuse crisis must reckon with how the past can be justly remembered. The George Floyd Global Memorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota, occupies a space of remembrance, raising up a representative victim of police violence as a symbolic ancestor. The All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day monastic liturgies at St John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, remember the dead and a future that transcends contemporary divisions. This article will explore how gestures toward an eschatological future in both of these memorial rites frame the memory of the past and mediate the relationship between the living and the dead amid a fragile movement towards reconciliation.

Psychotherapy alone is insufficient: Treating clergy sexual abuse and sacred moral injury.

Psychotherapy alone is insufficient: Treating clergy sexual abuse and sacred moral injury.

Censorship, Silence, and the Voices of Catholic Feminist Theologians

Abstract: This article argues that theological dissent is not only censored by church institutions but also silenced by mechanisms of self-censoring. Calling for recognition of the intertwining of censorship and shame as analytical categories, the article explores the simultaneity of the silencing of feminist theologians about sexual morality and gender theories, and the silence around the clergy sexual abuse committed by priests as well as the abuse committed by Catholic nuns. It examines the systemic control of critique by the institution of the Catholic Church, which is itself immune to any institutional or theological critique, and calls for a renewal process that involves remembrance, recognition, and responsibility.

Censorship, Silence, and the Voices of Catholic Feminist Theologians

Abstract: This article argues that theological dissent is not only censored by church institutions but also silenced by mechanisms of self-censoring. Calling for recognition of the intertwining of censorship and shame as analytical categories, the article explores the simultaneity of the silencing of feminist theologians about sexual morality and gender theories, and the silence around the clergy sexual abuse committed by priests as well as the abuse committed by Catholic nuns. It examines the systemic control of critique by the institution of the Catholic Church, which is itself immune to any institutional or theological critique, and calls for a renewal process that involves remembrance, recognition, and responsibility.

Revelation, Reckoning and Recovery: Bearing Witness Proximally in Local Journalism

ABSTRACT At a time when local journalism is under threat, regional newsrooms can play a crucial role in working with communities to confront shameful truths and profound failures. The regional city of Ballarat emerged as an “epicentre” of clergy sexual abuse through Australia’s landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017). This article examines how the regional city’s newspaper, The Courier, bore witness to these crimes and their impacts within its local community. A content and thematic analysis of coverage of child sexual abuse from 2010 to 2019 documents how The Courier’s locally produced journalism revealed to its audience the extent of abuse, helping to acknowledge and face crimes that had occurred in Ballarat’s local institutions. The interlinked themes of revelation, reckoning and recovery demonstrate how local journalism can work with its community to address traumatic events that occur within its geosocial space. Local media bore witness on multiple levels, as both the amplifier of stories told by survivors and the facilitator of community processes of reckoning and recovery. We refer to this special form of local journalism as “proximal” media witnessing.

Clergy Sexual Abuse as Moral Injury: Confronting a Wounded and Wounding Church

This essay interprets the ripple effects of harm caused by clergy sexual abuse and its concealment by Catholic Church officials through the lens of moral injury, an enduring spiritual and moral anguish experienced as betrayal, shame, confusion, futility, and distrust. First, the author articulates the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal impact of moral injury in five dimensions: self-image, moral perception and reasoning, agency, relationships, and institutional credibility. Second, moral injury is examined ecclesially in light of moral conscience, which signifies “to know together,” by centering the experience of survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Third, several strategies are proposed for healing the spiritual and moral wounds that remain in the church.

Clergy Sexual Abuse, Trauma-Informed Theology and the Promotion of Resilience

The prevalence and harms of the sexual abuse of children and youth by family members and persons in positions of trust are staggering. When perpetrated by clergy there is also spiritual trauma and loss of belief in a loving God. Safeguarding minors and vulnerable persons requires policies and protocols and an understanding of deep systemic factors that foster harm. Vulnerability is a condition of the moral life. In the Incarnation Jesus Christ and takes on our human vulnerability. It is inherent in our embodied and embedded humanity, unique to our situation, and pathogenic in unjust structures. Responses to abuse must be rooted theologically and informed by trauma studies. These show the need to deal with tragedy fatigue and crises of faith. Protecting children and youth and promoting their moral agency and resilience are central to discipleship. Clergy sexual abuse calls for a theology of childhood following Jesus words and witness.

A Clergy Abuse Truth and Reconciliation Commission

This chapter proposes a Clergy Abuse Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that could serve as a global, ecclesial response to the harms of clergy sexual abuse. This Clergy Abuse TRC could offer a path for healing rooted in the hope of reconciliation and understood according to theological commitments to truth, justice, and forgiveness where survivors’ needs and stories are central and where accountability could be ensured through a visible process. The Clergy Abuse TRC would be distinct from political TRCs used in conflict regions because it would be used in an ecclesial context and with theological grounding. In sum, the Commission could provide: 1) much-needed accountability through a visible process of truth-telling, 2) an avenue for healing for survivors, 3) and a report that identifies patterns of sexual abuse and makes suggestions for structural changes to prevent future abuses.

In Search of a Historiography of Clergy Sexual Abuse

Clergy sexual abuse has become a key area of interest in the study of U.S. Catholic history. For decades, survivors and whistleblowers have written passionately about the pain and scandal of clerical abuse. Journalists and social scientists have described their suffering as a “crisis” caused by individual and organizational pathologies, while lawyers and criminologists have advocated for financial and carceral solutions. Questions of religion and history took a backseat to these framings of clerical abuse as deviant, clinical, and judicial. After a recent influx of new resources, American Catholic historians now have the opportunity to reshape the discourse by contextualizing clergy sexual abuse within Catholic history and culture. Although this work has just begun, emerging projects suggest that intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches might unlock new ways of understanding not just clergy abuse but also the related topics of Catholic childhood, gender, and sexuality.

“I Confided in My Mother and She Called the Archdiocese”: Parents and Clergy Sex Abuse

AbstractScholars have acknowledged that there is a systemic aspect to Catholic clerical sex abuse that acts as a type of grammar structuring behaviors and responses. Feminist critics in particular stress the patriarchal nature of the abuse that connects bishops, priests, and boys together. This essay argues that in addition to public systems dominated by men, there are also private structures that facilitate abuse. Using the extensive primary documentation assembled by BishopAccountability.org, I focus on the space of the home and the unique orientations of mothers and fathers to better understand the dynamics of clerical sex abuse in the American Catholic church. The essay begins with the abuse of a Milwaukee priest who tormented his parishioners from 1945 until his forced “retirement” in 1970. Drawing on themes found in this case, I examine other abuse narratives—focusing on how the Catholic understanding of alter Christus and mid-twentieth-century gender roles made the “good Catholic home” a particularly vulnerable place for abuse. Since public and private systems overlap, it is essential that the domestic aspects of clergy sex abuse also receive a full analysis.

Child Sexual Grooming of Catholic Clergy: A Comparison between Victims Allegedly Abused by Clergy with Single versus Multiple Victims

ABSTRACT There is evidence that clergy who commit child sexual abuse (CSA) may utilize sexual grooming behaviors in the offense process consistent with a content-validated model (Sexual Grooming Model; SGM). Although research has examined differences in characteristics between clergy with single versus multiple CSA victims, little is known about how sexual grooming behaviors may vary between these groups. The present study utilized a large sample of alleged clergy sexual abuse incidents (n = 10,667) to examine the differences in reported sexual grooming behaviors for victims who experienced abuse by an individual who had a single (V-SVOs) or multiple (V-MVOs) victims. As part of a larger study, files of victim reports of CSA were reviewed from 195 dioceses/eparchies and 140 religious institutes in the United States; these data were analyzed based on behaviors in the SGM for the present study. Overall, the findings showed that the two groups (V-SVOs and V-MVOs) experienced similar tactics throughout the sexual grooming process outlined by the SGM. However, there were some differences for certain tactics within the gaining access and isolation, trust development, and desensitization to sexual contact and physical touch stages of sexual grooming. The implications for prevention, policy, and treatment, as well as future directions of research, are discussed.

“I Will Surely Have You Deported:” Undocumenting Clergy Sexual Abuse in an Immigrant Community

ABSTRACTClergy sexual violence in immigrant communities is an understudied dimension of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic church. Yet records suggest that bishops regularly treated immigrant-serving parishes as dumping grounds for serially abusive clergy. There, evidence suggests, abusers targeted minors from poor, vulnerable, and undocumented families, silencing victims with threats of deportation and further violence. How did legal status intersect with structures of state and ecclesial power and with social hierarchies of visibility in situations of clergy abuse? Centering the case of Msgr. Peter E. Garcia, a priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who abused at least twenty boys between 1966 and 1987, this article examines archival evidence from unsealed clergy personnel files to interrogate the complex politics of documentation in the case. It attends to the relationship between three interwoven forms of (un)documentation: first, the precarious legal and social status of victims; second, the silences, redactions, and euphemisms that characterize church records containing these accounts; and third, the spatial undocumentation at work in the use of migrant parishes as clergy dumping grounds. It demonstrates how a post–Vatican II theological and pastoral imagination of intimacy with the poor, refracted through prisms of state, ecclesial, and clerical dominance, helped to create conditions for the production of invisible victims. The erasure accomplished through the overlapping forms of undocumentation in the Garcia case, it argues, can help to account for the absence of such stories from the broader narrative of Catholic clergy sexual abuse in the United States.

Toward a Taxonomy of Moral Injury

Moral injury signifies an enduring moral anguish experienced as betrayal, shame, confusion, futility, and distrust, entailing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal dimensions. This essay proposes a taxonomy of moral injury informed by the ripple effects of harm caused by clergy sexual abuse and its concealment in the Catholic Church. These five categories distinguish between the moral distress endured by perpetrators and victims as well as bystanders and other implicated subjects, the moral fallout caused by a specific event in comparison to exposure to a toxic environment, and as a spectrum that spans from acute to diffuse symptoms of moral violation. This typology illuminates how moral injury impacts conscience, which means “to know together,” indicating that healing moral injury is both a personal and communal endeavor.

Bill Donohue, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes

Bill Donohue, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes

Unchaste Celibates: Clergy Sexual Misconduct against Adults—Expressions, Definitions, and Harms

There is an ignored, misunderstood, and complex reality within the broader clergy sexual abuse scandal within the Roman Catholic Church (RCC)—that of clergy sexual misconduct against adults (CSMAA). Estimates and calculations of numbers of victims/survivors over the last half-century reach into the early millions. Furthermore, evidence reveals that CSMAA does produce many serious personal, relational, and practical harms. This article presents and discusses the many expressions of such harms. However, even with the evidence of such harms CSMAA events are, for the most part, still generally perceived as consensual affairs. Such a perception is challenged when CSMAA is contextualised within a professional misconduct framework, and even more so, when survivors thereof participate in the research. Furthermore, CSMAA is clearly not just one type of event. Accordingly, this article also presents a continuum of expressions of CSMAA to assist with perceptual accuracy of this issue along with an unambiguous definition of CSMAA.

Reproductive Abuse in the Context of Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

In a significant number of cases, clerical sex offenders impregnate their victims and force them into hiding, abortion, or adoption. This phenomenon is referred to in this paper as reproductive abuse. Clearly, most victims of reproductive abuse are adults, but even among minor victims of clerical child abuse, between 1 and 10 percent may have experienced reproductive abuse. On the basis of pertinent studies, this paper explores archival material on several dozen allegations of reproductive abuse in the context of clergy sexual abuse of minors in the US Catholic Church. Besides some tentative estimates of the general frequency of the phenomenon, this paper offers a distinction of three different types of reproductive abuse and an analysis of the interplay of clericalist and secular misogyny, which appears to be largely responsible for the silencing of victims as well as for the impunity of perpetrators and leads to the invisibility of this phenomenon, despite the high importance attributed to reproductive issues in the Catholic context.

RETRACTED - Clergy Sexual Abuse and an Ethics of Recognition: An Example of the #ChurchToo Movement in South Korea

RETRACTION NOTICE: This article has been retracted at the request of its author, David Kwon. The author acknowledges citation irregularities throughout the article as the reason for the retraction. The editors of the journal supports this retraction. The article will only be available with this retraction notice.

A Theology of Voice: VOCAL and the Catholic Clergy Abuse Survivor Movement

Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup (VOCAL/Linkup) was among the first and most prominent advocacy organizations for American survivors of childhood clergy sexual abuse. Linkup survivors recognized the spiritual dimensions of their abuse, which they called "soul murder," and they sought healing and justice through a systemic and distinctively Catholic discourse about the divine powers of "voice." This article names that discourse "a theology of voice" and analyzes VOCAL's history through its leaders' speeches and writings, including those preserved in its newsletter, The Missing Link. For survivors in VOCAL, "voice" was the foundation for transforming oneself from "victim" to "survivor," the first step toward justice and the moral lens through which ecclesiastical accountability could be judged. Although VOCAL/Linkup no longer exists, its theology of voice predominates American discourse about clergy sexual abuse. Linkup's theology of voice also provides a glimpse at an alternate configuration of the ongoing clergy abuse crisis, one in which victims and bishops might collaborate on spiritual repair and institutional reform.