Clerical Sexual Abuse Research Articles

A Priest, a Ranch, and los Muchachos: A Study of Race and Clerical Abuse from New Mexico

Father Ed Donelan came to New Mexico from Massachusetts. The priest worked as a chaplain at a facility for “juvenile delinquents,” and later ran a home for boys he called the Hacienda de los Muchachos. Donelan sexually abused youth at both facilities. This essay considers how Donelan leveraged New Mexico’s juvenile justice and habilitation systems, and racial inequities baked into them, to abuse young people. Within those systems, a Catholic culture of clericalism granted Donelan unlimited access to youth, and enabled him to move unchecked between spiritual and quasi-parental forms of authority. Donelan’s story shows that clericalism is not a one-size-fits-all problem; it manifests differently in relation to different communities. Here clericalism intersects with place-based power structures of race and colonialism to damage in locally specific ways. Donelan’s case demonstrates that scholars who study clerical sexual abuse need to pay attention not only to priests, but also to church and state institutions that rendered certain populations of children especially vulnerable to their bad actions.

Clerical Child Sexual Abuse and the Culture Wars in France, 1891–1913

AbstractThis article investigates clerical child sexual abuse in the first decades of the French Third Republic. Thanks in large part to the difficulty of accessing relevant archival records, we know very little about this crime or how it was investigated by judicial officials. This study addresses this gap by drawing on a rich and untapped collection of correspondence between local prosecutors and the Ministry of Justice in Paris. The files reveal the process for investigating and prosecuting abusive priests, as well as the reverberations within local communities. Though generated by the state rather than the church, they offer an insight as well into the response of ecclesiastical authorities. Finally, they shed light on the relationship between clerical crime and the culture wars pitting French republicans against Catholics, a conflict that was reaching a peak of intensity in this period. What emerges from this study is an appreciation of the personal toll and political impact of clerical sexual abuse, as well as a new perspective on the recent scandals which have engulfed the Catholic church in a range of nations.

On the Impracticality of Lists

Lists of Roman Catholic priests form the documentary infrastructure of clerical sexual abuse. Based on an ethnography of one such list—a document compiled deep inside a Central American prison by a convicted cleric—this essay argues that such lists are, formally speaking, impractical. Impracticality names the way in which some lists may appear to be flat and referential but in fact are more concerned with evoking affects. It is an ambiguity that Church leaders manipulate to conjure the feeling (but not the fact) of transparency.

Principles for Managing Burnout among Catholic Church Professionals.

While a large body of research literature has explored the assessment, treatment, and prevention of worker burnout, much less research has focused on the unique issues associated with burnout in religious organizations, especially within the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic Church employees, whether clerics or laypersons, are embedded within a 2,000-year-old global hierarchical structure and organization that is unique in that it includes clerics with vows of chastity, obedience, and often poverty as well as ongoing crises related to clerical sexual abuse scandals, significant financial stressors, and a faith tradition that often overvalues sacrifice and suffering. The purpose of this brief article is to highlight burnout issues among Roman Catholic Church employees and offer principles and strategies for recognizing, treating, and avoiding burnout among these professionals. Five key principles for burnout management as well as several case examples are also presented.

Judging the Church: legal systems and accountability for clerical sexual abuse of children

Judging the Church: legal systems and accountability for clerical sexual abuse of children

Obituary

It is with great sadness that I report that one of the contributors to this volume, Marc Steinberg, died of pancreatic cancer before this volume was published. His essay that appears here, “Coercion in the Cradle,” was the last thing he wrote before he passed.Marc Steinberg was a distinguished and incredibly creative historical sociologist at Smith College. He was a student of Charles Tilly at the University of Michigan. His early work was at Clark College. In his career, he received no fewer than four prizes from the American Sociological Association for his work. Most remarkably, these prizes came from three different sections of the ASA: Culture, Economic, and Comparative-Historical. His final essay was published in Development. It is unusual for a sociologist to achieve distinction in this many subspecialties, especially specialties as different as Culture and Economic. This speaks to the range and power of his work.With the exception of his last book, on the Catholic sexual-abuse scandal, all of his work was on labor and social conflict in Victorian Britain. Some of the dullest books in the library are on nineteenth-century English class conflict. Steinberg brought a fierce originality to this well-worn material. His book on rhetoric in strikes created a bold new theory of conflictual discourse. Instead of treating ideas as “cultural resources” which can be used as motivational tools, he treated worker and manager speech as chaotic, ambiguous expressions in a world of dozens of potential interpretations. Changing seas of meaning open up unique opportunities for a critical word or idea to carry the day in popular debate. No one had ever treated conflict speech like this. But once he made his point, it was clear he was right.His work on forced labor, represented by his essay in this volume, was a breakthrough in the understanding of labor and development. Development sociologists always thought that industrial/factory regimes had free labor markets. Steinberg found that bound labor, and legal coercion to serve particular employers, were widespread in Victorian Britain. There was no slave periphery and free core. Forced labor was common everywhere.He was a beloved and dedicated teacher. He was even a popular administrator. He was invited to serve no fewer than three non-consecutive terms as chair of his department. For many chairs, once the department gets rid of them, everyone else is glad they are gone.Honored by his peers. Loved by his friends. Trusted by his department. Idolized by students. His mentor, Charles Tilly, was much the same way. Most of Tilly’s students struggled to follow in the footsteps of the great man. Marc Steinberg epitomized all that Charles Tilly valued as a historical sociologist.He will be much missed.

Challenges of Clerical Sexual Abuse

Though the heroic strides, accomplishments and sacrifices of many clerics who have led exemplary lives in the Catholic priesthood remain indelible, we are faced today with a preponderance of allegations and claims of clerical sexual abuse suggesting that both the Catholic Church and priesthood are experiencing crises of different kinds. Clerical sexual abuse is a contradiction of the life of chastity, one of the evangelical virtues which are corollaries of responding to the call to the Roman Catholic priesthood. How those evangelical virtues concern us and the needed critical family roles for addressing the challenges of clergy sexual abuse are often overlooked; but our lives are inter-connected. This article has been prompted by the need to see the other side of the problem, which is general huge family failures, and to awaken our consciences to assume our own responsibilities that would, by collective action, help to bring about positive and peaceful change.

Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History

Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History Mary McGlynn (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Promotional still, The 8th documentary film, 2021, directed and produced by Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy, Maeve O'Boyle, and Alan Maher. [End Page 130] Crowds dominate the publicity stills used to promote the 2020 documentary The 8th about the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution (1983), which had essentially outlawed all abortions in Ireland.1 One vivid image from the celebration after the vote features a woman—Lysette Golden—elevated above the rest of those gathered; she sits on a man's shoulders, smiling and holding a banner from the "Together for Yes" movement. Golden wears a snug white crop top that has two rainbow-hued alien heads at roughly the level of her breasts, the iconic inverted-egg shape of the head repeated in the blank eyes. Although there is no evidence to suspect that this activist chose her shirt to link aliens to reproductive politics, the imagery is nevertheless fortuitous, educing a familiar trope of baby-as-alien-invader. In her essay collection Making Babies Anne Enright links pregnancy and abuse by priests with alien abduction to discuss reproductive rights in Ireland. Her elliptical chapter "Breeding" registers how clerical sexual abuse has often been dismissed as imagined—a fanciful idea on par with impregnation by a spaceman—as though aliens and priests were both races of "higher beings" who "gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will" (15). Remarking that pregnancy is often an unwanted surprise ("We do not choose, sometimes, to be occupied by this other creature"), Enright juxtaposes this sense of invasive violation with the recovered memories of alien abductees: "What they remember, eventually, is a hidden reproductive history," a concept that she in [End Page 131] turn links to the suppressed or ignored narratives of sexual abuse at the hands of priests (21, 18). She also gestures toward the lack of access to contraceptives, an aspect of how the institution of the Catholic church forces Irish women to have babies. We might ask why Enright bothers with the aliens at all, given that the Irish sexual histories that she discusses already conjoin neatly, with priests and babies both imposing themselves, secretive and unasked. The answer would seem to lie in the ways that the figure of the alien activates the uncanny, something at once like us and unlike us, part of us and utterly different. Enright's analogy juxtaposes popular conceptions of aliens with photographs of a gestating fetus, with both rendered floating in space with nonreflective eyes: It drifts free, like an astronaut on his umbilical cable; glowing; weightless; with pads for fingers, and plum-like, radioactive eyes. The foetus sees nothing, knows everything. … It is a different life form. The foetus has no capacity for wonder. There is something blank and mean-spirited about it, perhaps. It lurks. It is all potential. (21) This description corresponds to Julie Roberts's observation that technologies for creating images of a fetus in utero frequently generate depictions that exclude the maternal body.2 Both Roberts and Enright recognize the power of the image of the fetus as isolated, different, and indifferent. In Enright's description we can see echoes of Donna Haraway's "god trick" as well as Yeats's rough beast, "its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" (line 15).3 More than mere animal, however, this creature is otherworldly, outside of human systems of knowing and of marking time. The collapse of time via Enright's reference to "potential" in the above passage is central to long-standing efforts to control female reproductive rights by patriarchal and religious authorities. These efforts transform a woman from a person with agency into a vehicle for a larger will, an imperative from God, [End Page 132] nature, or even the state to bring to fulfillment a new life. A pregnant woman becomes important primarily for her body's futurity.4 Judy Rohrer references this sort of potentiality in a U.S. context when she traces a history of concerns about "reproductive futurity—the way the iconic fetus or...

The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship by Derek Scally

Review articles Derek Scally, The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship (Dublin: Penguin-Sandycove, 2021), 336 pages The author of this important book has been writing for the Irish Times for some twenty years. From his long experience of working as a journalist in Germany, he has become familiar with the concept of die Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process of coming to terms with the past, so vital for Germans in the light of all that has happened in their country in the 20th century. His book is a pilgrimage, literal and metaphorical, in aid of making the case for something like this process in relation to Ireland – on his own behalf, in the first instance, and, if he can help to promote it, on that of the country and its culture as a whole as well. He writes as the accomplished journalist he has shown himself to be over the years and with considerable research behind his enquiry. He depicts characters and situations with what can sometimes seem like a novelist’s touch, and he has an eye for the telling phrase. Irish seminaries in the past are, for example, described as having been ‘hothouses of theology and freezers for emotion and sexuality’ (104). The result of his skill as a writer is that, despite its length, The Best Catholics in the World is, for the most part, an easy – if often rather depressing – read. His exploration begins in Edenmore, the parish in north Dublin where he grew up in the 1980s, and ranges as far as the Stasi (secret police) museum in Berlin, the city where he has been living for many years – a certain German frame of reference, often quite illuminating, recurs throughout the book. The journey takes him by way of an instructive, if eclectic, itinerary of places in between, associated in one way or another with the often cataclysmic changes in Irish Christian and Catholic history over the centuries since St Patrick arrived on these shores, not least those in the last several decades. And so, beginning somewhat at the beginning, he finds himself in Trinity College, examining the Book of Kells – ‘even the Book of Kells has a shadowy side’, the author informs us (37), the comment a harbinger of not a little debunking of familiar myths in the pages to come. Later he is in Dingle, en route to Skellig Michael, and later again in Glendalough, iconic sites of Review Articles: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 480 early Irish monasticism and what we think of as Celtic Christianity – although that concept will be questioned in due course too – ‘no such thing as Celtic Christianity … the Church was always utterly subservient to Rome’, one academic historian is quoted as declaring (45). He attends Mass at a Massrock in Hollywood, Co. Wicklow, relic of penal days. He goes to consult the Central Catholic Library in Merrion Square, Dublin. In Baggot St, at one end he visits the office of Judge Yvonne Murphy, who presided over several recent investigations into clerical sexual abuse, and, further along, Mercy International, headquarters of the Sisters of Mercy, a significant Irish religious order, more recently embroiled in other abuse scandals. He goes to several Dublin art galleries, to view the artwork of Patrick Bolger (an abuse survivor) and Alison Lowry (inspired by the mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries). He travels to St Patrick’s College, Thurles, location of the 1850 Synod and ‘symbolic starting-point of modern Irish Catholicism’(205).We find him in Galway Cathedral, where a traditional novena to Our Lady is being conducted by a Redemptorist priest. He goes to Áras an Uachtaráin in the Phoenix Park to attend the President’s garden party for Magdalene survivors. He visits the offices of One in Four, an organisation founded by a prominent survivor of clerical sexual abuse in 2003 to help other childhood victims, in Holles St. He goes to Belmullet in Co. Mayo to meet Fr Kevin Hegarty, whose progressive editing of Intercom in the 1990s, including an article that would touch ‘on every issue that would convulse Ireland for the next...

Trauma, Motive and the Post-Troubles Psychopath in The Fall

This article discusses the depiction of the serial killer, Paul Spector, in the BBC/RTÉ television series The Fall (2013–2016). It complements existing scholarship on the series’ female detective by considering how Spector’s construction as a Gothic villain and victim of institutional abuse inflects The Fall’s positioning as a transnational genre production. It focuses on the use of Belfast as a setting, taking into account its historical positioning as a “Noir” city, and discusses the series’ spatial politics in the context of the city’s more recent history of sectarian divisions. It places the “explanation” for Spector’s criminal activities in the context of the narrativization of clerical sexual abuse as specifically associated with the Irish Catholic church, and outlines the narrative turns the series is forced to take to reach its generically inflected conclusion. The discussion focuses on seasons one and two of The Fall as the most significant in terms of meaning-making.

The Unmaking of a Pedophilic Priest: Transnational Clerical Sexual Abuse in Guatemala

AbstractThroughout the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America became something of a dumping ground for U.S. priests suspected of sexual abuse, with north-to-south clerical transfers sending predatory priests to countries where pedophilia did not exist in any kind of ontological sense. This article, in response, engages the case of Father David Roney of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a career of accusations and payouts, with Roney entering and exiting Church-mandated therapy programs, Bishop Raymond Lucker retired this notoriously predatory priest to rural Guatemala in 1994. By placing Roney beyond the reach of psychiatrists, psychologists, and spiritual directors, the Roman Catholic Church leveraged a psychological and juridical difference between two geographical settings in order to render the pedophilia of this priest effectively non-existent, thereby insulating itself from further reputational damage and additional litigation. Given that the Roman Catholic Church has long been an empirical point of reference for studies of subject formation—from pastoralism and mysticism to ritual and the confession—this article adds that the Church also provides ample evidence of an opposite process: of unmaking people.

Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States

Abstract From Eusebio Kino to Daniel Berrigan, and from colonial New England to contemporary Seattle, Jesuits have built and disrupted institutions in ways that have fundamentally shaped the Catholic Church and American society. As Catherine O’Donnell demonstrates, Jesuits in French, Spanish, and British colonies were both evangelists and agents of empire. John Carroll envisioned an American church integrated with Protestant neighbors during the early years of the republic; nineteenth-century Jesuits, many of them immigrants, rejected Carroll’s ethos and created a distinct Catholic infrastructure of schools, colleges, and allegiances. The twentieth century involved Jesuits first in American war efforts and papal critiques of modernity, and then (in accord with the leadership of John Courtney Murray and Pedro Arrupe) in a rethinking of their relationship to modernity, to other faiths, and to earthly injustice. O’Donnell’s narrative concludes with a brief discussion of Jesuits’ declining numbers, as well as their response to their slaveholding past and involvement in clerical sexual abuse.

Clerical Sexual Abuse in an Illiberal State: The Case of Poland

Clerical Sexual Abuse in an Illiberal State: The Case of Poland

The Catholic laity, clerical sexual abuse, and married priesthood: A sociological analysis of Vatican II’s lay empowerment

This article argues that the renewed teaching on lay empowerment of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) only involved an enlargement of lay apostolic task in the Church,...

Clerical Sexual Abuse: Popes and the Policy of Sin

Clerical Sexual Abuse: Popes and the Policy of Sin

Holy Tradition: An Essay in Reparation by Robert F. Slesinski

Reviewed by: Holy Tradition: An Essay in Reparation by Robert F. Slesinski Thomas M. Kocik Robert F. Slesinski Holy Tradition: An Essay in Reparation Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2018 50 pages. Paperback. $10.00. As we pray, so we believe, and as we believe, so we live. The lex orandi, the lex credendi, and the lex vivendi are so closely interrelated that to compromise one of them is to compromise all. The clerical sexual abuse scandals of recent times are existential proof of this. Moral depravity, failure to preach the Catholic faith in its entirety (including its teachings, in all particulars, on sexual morality), and corruption of liturgical practice are all symptoms of the same malady: infidelity; one might even say, in many cases, apostasy. The antidote, as the late Father Richard John Neuhaus was fond of saying, is “Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity.” Enter Holy Tradition, the eighth (albeit unnumbered) volume in a series of mystagogical catecheses in the Byzantine tradition by Father Robert Slesinski, a priest of the Ruthenian Catholic Eparchy of Passaic who holds a doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and specializes in Russian religious philosophy (the series’ most recent volume, The Holy Decalogue, was published in 2020). Aware of the damage the scandals have caused to the faith of many Catholics, Slesinski wrote this “Essay in Reparation” (the book’s subtitle) to “reaffirm the verve of the faithful, their daring to love God and their fellow human beings” by recovering “our ‘inner self’ as it has been nourished, however subtly, however implicitly, by the Holy Tradition of the Church” (12). The first chapter presents an etymology of “tradition.” This enormously rich and complex word comes from the Latin traditio, and before that from the past participle of the verb tradere, “to deliver” or “to hand down” something. But it also means “to surrender” or “to betray.” Thus, while the word consistently refers to the act of transmitting, it can convey more than one sense of the concept: not only “hand down” but also “hand over.” Slesinski [End Page 305] explains in personalist terms that Christian Tradition is not simply a transmission or handing down of revealed truths from one generation to the next within the Church, but a living Person, the continuation of divine truth and life present in Jesus Christ. The traditum, the great heritage to be passed on, is the Son who reveals the Father and is ever present to us through the Holy Spirit. The author then takes up Tradition’s relation to Scripture (chapter 2) and the Church’s catechetical teaching (chapter 3). Since this is not dogmatic theology, there is no discussion of the formation of the biblical canon, the development of doctrine, or the debate (now overcome) over the “sources” of revelation. Instead, Slesinski highlights particular Pauline texts (e.g., 1 Cor 11:23–26) to illustrate that Tradition was being preached and lived before the New Testament writings came into existence. When St. Paul and the early Christian teachers referred to the receiving or transmitting of the gospel message, they did not have specifically in mind the books later known as the New Testament, but rather the apostolic testimony as expressed in the Church’s day-to-day preaching, sacramental life, catechetics, and ways of Christian living. While Paul often refers to traditions (plural) to signify the whole Christian revelation (2 Thes 2:15), he also acknowledges merely human traditions (Gal 1:14; Col 2:8) that can and, in his case, did prove deleterious. Slesinski recalls Christ’s reprimand of the Pharisees who used the “traditions of the ancients” as a device for nullifying the word of God (Mt 15:1–9; Mk 7:1–15)—or, we could say, for distorting the true Old Testament Tradition. The Catechism of the Catholic Church distinguishes Tradition, which together with Scripture carries the Word of God, the sole source of divine revelation, from traditions (small “t”), in the sense of ecclesiastical institutions, disciplines, theological formulations, devotional practices, and modes of living to be preserved, modified, or even abandoned. These individual traditions are all involved in the living transmission of the Tradition, though not all of them can be...

The Global Consequences of Catholic Clerical Sexual Abuse

The Global Consequences of Catholic Clerical Sexual Abuse

Religious Freedom and the Churches: Contemporary Challenges in the United States Today1

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches’ failure to respond to it.

Concerning Victims, Sexuality, and Power: A Reflection on Sexual Abuse from Latin America

This article offers theological reflection on the sexual abuse crisis in the Latin American church, focusing on the child victim. Beginning with a summary of the scandal as it has hit the Latin American church, the author shows how the clerical sexual abuse crisis engages with the particular sociopolitical contexts of children in Latin America. The article then contextualizes a theology of childhood in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s care for the young and vulnerable children. Finally, the author offers some fundamental theological reflections for an ecclesial response to the crisis, focusing on a theology of the child.

The Sexual Abuse Scandal and a New Ethical Horizon: A Perspective from India

Despite recent signs of change, the Indian church was rather reluctant to acknowledge the clerical sexual abuse scandal as its own problem. In the Indian context, the scandal entails not only the abuse of minors, but also the abuse of women and other vulnerable adults by church personnel. The hierarchical structure of Indian society, gender relations based on patriarchy, and postcolonial attitudes provide a fertile ground for abuse. Clericalism, centralization of power in the church, and continuing negative attitudes to sexuality are further contributing factors. The clerical sexual abuse scandal calls for developing new ethical horizons based on a theology of a participatory church, and a reconsideration of the church’s attitude to sexuality and gender relations.