To do so, I first introduce the redacted account that recently circulated on social media and that generated outrage. Second, I add the omitted sections from this account and show how they produce a more complex narrative, dependent on the values and perspectives of the people involved. This version leads us into the muddy waters of real human interactions, ones that are fraught and complex, contradictory and unclear. In this particular case, the devotee recounting the story is anonymous and the guru in question is dead. What can we know of their actions and intentions, or how coercion and consent overlapped and intertwined? This is all the more important when the narrative is located within the social context of the Hindu guru-disciple relationship, a relationship entirely dependent on unequal power relations, wherein the guru is respected as a spiritual master and it is the disciple’s duty to submit to his authority.

Here is the recently circulated version that appeared on social media and that was previously published in the exposé volume, Stripping the Gurus:

The first time he [Guru Neem Karoli Baba] took me in the room alone I sat up on the tucket [low wooden bed] with him, and he was like a seventeen-year-old jock who was a little fast! I felt as if I were fifteen and innocent. He started making out with me, and it was so cute, so pure. I was swept into it for a few moments—then grew alarmed: “Wait! This is my guru. One doesn’t do this with one’s guru!” So I pulled away from him. Then Maharajji [Neem Karoli Baba] tilted his head sideways and wrinkled up his eyebrows in a tender, endearing, quizzical look. He didn’t say anything, but his whole being was saying to me, “Don’t you like me?”

But as soon as I walked out of that particular darshan [the ritual act of seeing and being seen by the divine], I started getting so sick that by the end of the day I felt I had vomited and shit out everything that was ever inside me. I had to be carried out of the ashram [religious hermitage]. On the way, we stopped by Maharajji’s [Neem Karoli Baba’s] room so I could pranam [prostrate] to him. I kneeled by the tucket and put my head down by his feet—and he kicked me in the head, saying, “Get her out of here!” . . .

That was the first time, and I was to be there for two years. During my last month there, I was alone with him every day in the room . . . Sometimes he would just touch me on the breasts and between my legs, saying, “This is mine, this is mine, this is mine. All is mine. You are mine.” You can interpret it as you want, but near the end in these darshans, it was as though he were my child. Sometimes I felt as though I were suckling a tiny baby.

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In many ways, Neem Karoli Baba was a humble guru with simple teachings, but he became internationally renowned because of his disciples’ fame. He cultivated a cherished devotional space in the late 1960s and 1970s at his ashram in the Himalayan foothill town of Nanital, India, which Parvati Markus chronicled in her book Love Everyone. Neem Karoli Baba’s story often begins with the litany of Western devotees who became highly influential people after their encounters with him. Bhagavan Das and Ram Dass became his disciples and, later, gurus in their own right; Ram Dass inspired a generation with his pathbreaking publication Be Here Now.

Neem Karoli Baba

In 1973, Robert Friedland met Neem Karoli Baba and was so impressed with the simple, giggling guru that he told his friend Steve Jobs to go to India to meet him. Jobs went to see the guru and, as recounted in his biography, said, “For me it was a serious search. I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.” Forty years later, when Jobs met another tech-entrepreneur experiencing difficult times, he suggested that he, too, should travel to the ashram in Nanital. Mark Zuckerberg followed his advice. At a town hall with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Menlo Park, Zuckerberg explained, “He [Jobs] told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be.” He explains that his month-long trip to India “reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing.” Google’s founder Larry Page visited Neem Karoli Baba, as did Ebay’s founder Jeffrey Skoll, Daniel Goleman, Larry Brilliant, Lama Surya Das, and the list goes on and on. Ma Jaya, the guru and AIDS activist, revered Neem Karoli Baba, and leading kīrtan musicians Jai Uttal and Krishna Dass have been publicly vocal about their devotion to him. After seeing a photo of Neem Karoli Baba, actress Julia Roberts began to practice Hinduism and has expressed reverence for the smiling guru of the Himalayan foothills.

The devotee’s account that opened this discussion was not hidden from these celebrants of the guru. In fact, it was published back in 1979 in Ram Dass’s widely read devotional book Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba. On the cover, the guru, clad in his signature plaid woolen blanket, holds a tulip, his eyes cast to the side in peaceful reflection. When the book was published, the passage did not spark any significant critique of Neem Karoli Baba’s treatment of this female devotee. It also included several key sections that add to the complexity and ambiguity of the account. The deleted sections that did not appear in the recent story on social media are as follows:

…I was unable to move for the next three days, but after that I felt perfectly well again. And I had worked through a lot of my reactions to that darshan: revulsion, confusion, and so forth…

…There was a progression of comprehension. He seemed in one way to be turning me into a mother, helping me to understand that sex is okay…

…Although he didn’t change size physically, he seemed to become very small in my arms. It was a beautiful transformation…

While the narrative of sexual fondling and physical violence remains, it is buttressed by the devotee’s account that she soon felt “perfectly well again” and had processed her negative reactions. She realized that the guru was shaping her into a new identity as “a mother” with him as her child; she reports their sexual relationship felt “as though I was suckling a tiny baby” and suggests that through these sexual encounters Neem Karoli Baba was teaching her that “sex is ok.” The devotee diminishes the potential interpretation of the guru’s persona as that of an overpowering and violent male abuser by redefining his physical presence as that of a small child. She explains that “he seemed to become very small in my arms” and concludes that “it was a beautiful transformation.”

The addition of these sections draws a more complex picture. They tell of a devotee who finds spiritual lessons in her sexual encounter with her guru and willingly develops a relationship with him that is both maternal and sexual. Although at first she regards the sexual encounter as “so cute, so pure,” she simultaneously rejects his advances as inappropriate and unwanted. Thereafter, she feels revulsion to the extent that she becomes physically ill, but then ultimately continues the sexual relationship (presumably intermittently) for two years. These are the thickets that represent the complexity and ambiguity of gray rape.

By contemporary conventions, it is striking that Ram Dass chose to include this passage in his celebratory book about the guru. He likely did so because his devotion to the guru was so complete that he did not find the guru’s motivations troubling. In the traditional Indic context of the guru-disciple relationship, the devotee does not question the guru, irrespective of the guru’s actions. As written in the Saurapurāṇa 15.33, “The guru remains as the authority to his pupil, regardless of how ignorant and immoral he might be.” Such strictures are so complete that devotees are not even to be in the presence of a critique of the guru. Manusṃṛti 2.200 reads, “When one hears of censure (parivāda, nindā) against his guru by others, he is supposed to either shut his ears with his hands, or leave the place.” If we recognize that the goal of the guru-disciple relationship is eradication of the devotee’s ego through submission to the guru’s will, then it makes sense why the devotee’s initial vocalization that the guru’s sexual touch was unwanted directly challenged the power dynamic of their relationship. It is this challenge to the structure of the relationship that elicited a disciplinary response from the guru (regardless of whether we believe that response was legitimate or not).

Even in the 1960s and 1970s there were rumors about Neem Karoli Baba’s distinctive and sometimes sexual relationships with women. Ram Dass introduces the special favor his guru showed to women by positioning Neem Karoli Baba as emblematic of Krishna, who in Hindu myths approached the gopīs (cowherdesses) as a child, playmate, and lover. Although many modern Krishna devotees portray Krishna’s sexuality as merely metaphorical, the texts are explicit in their detailed descriptions of Krishna’s amorous love play with the gopīs. The Rasa Lila recounted in the Bhagavata Purāṇa reads, “Certainly, he [Krishna] is the supreme Soul, though they [the gopis] knew him intimately as their lover. They relinquished their bodies composed of material elements, and any worldly bondage was instantly destroyed.” In Dass’s view, Neem Karoli Baba’s sexual relationships with women modeled these mythical encounters. Sexual relations with the guru were to be read as a part of their spiritual practice, “catalyst[s] to catapult them to God.”

Certainly, it is shocking for our modern and non-devotional sensibilities to hear of a guru “making out” with a devotee like a “seventeen-year-old jock” and then kicking that prostrating devotee in the head, presumably to punish her for rejecting his sexual advances. But this easy condemnation is an expression of our ethics, not those of the devotee, guru, or the devotional community. Positioning ourselves as external moral critics effectively silences this devotee and superimposes our worldview upon hers. We can only then understand her as deluded, “brainwashed,” a victim of “false consciousness,” and blinded by her devotion. In so doing, we position ourselves as moral authorities, enacting a theological imperialism based on our values of secular humanism, universal human rights, and appropriate behavior.

But we must unfurl a more complex story, one that takes into account the worldviews, perspectives, and social embeddedness of the various people involved. Centering victims’ experiences and perspectives is crucial even when they do not align with our moral values. In this case, doing so complicates the conventional reliance on consent as the barometer to determine whether a sexual violation has occurred. Though this devotee gave her consent, under what conditions and power relations was she able to assert her agency? What were the potential consequences of rejecting the guru’s sexual advances? And what sexual subjectivity did she have access to? In Rape and Resistance, philosopher Linda Alcoff writes, “Unwanted touch produces the sense of first-person subjectivity, it poses the question of my desire, it prompts a formation of will, or a reassertion of it.” Is a devotee who has promised to serve the guru–unconditionally–actually able to assert her will in defiance of the guru’s wishes? And if not, is there meaning in her consent?

Sexual violation is an interpretive process. Our experience of an encounter is conditioned by our socially embedded and embodied positionality. Even the language available to describe the experience is informed by our discursive context. Approaching this event in this light helps us to see clear distinctions between our interpretive framework and many devotees’ interpretive framework. For contemporary audiences (especially secular humanist critics), it is a clear case of sexual abuse. For devotees (or at least these particular devotees), it is the guru’s līlā (divine play) that affects positive spiritual transformation in ways beyond human comprehension. Of course, outsiders can choose to argue that this claim is merely a theological veneer for the nefarious aim of the guru’s sexual gratification, but we should not ignore these perspectives. Neither should we supplant them with our own moral standards. That which is deemed offensive and immoral is generated through discourse and shaped by our historical, social, and cultural context. Superimposing our own revulsions onto others, we lose vital explanatory components that would aid in understanding alternative worldviews. We also falsely presume that our own contemporary discourses of morality are universal.

Amanda Lucia is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside. Her current research focuses on sexual abuse in guru-led religious communities, with emphasis on celebrity and the circulation of scandal in media. Her publications include White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals (forthcoming 2020), Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014), and numerous articles.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Guru-Disciple Relationship and the Complications of Consent appeared first on The Revealer.

Judaism may not have celibate priests or associate sex with original sin the way some Christian denominations do, but the lack of these prohibitions has not created a sexual utopia. In fact, the assumption that Judaism frames sex positively has made it difficult to see when sexual abuse happens in Jewish contexts.

The sex-positive sentiment spans the spectrum of Jewish observance. In his book Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy, the celebrity Chabad rabbi Shmuley Boteach would have his readers believe that “unlike other religious traditions, Judaism has never had a prudish or conservative sexual ethic. On the contrary, Judaism has always celebrated the commitment that exists between a loving man and woman.” Likewise, Maggie Anton, who grew up secular and became interested in the Talmud as an adult, writes gleefully in her Fifty Shades of Talmud, “I bet Judaism would attract a lot more converts if the commandment to have sex were better publicized.”

These proclamations come from one interpretation of the tradition, but in order to make this argument you must read certain passages selectively and ignore others entirely. Some Talmudic passages compare a man’s wife to purchased meat and suggest a husband can do whatever he likes sexually with his wife. Others imply that disabled children are the result of looking at a woman’s vagina, euphemized in the text as “that place.” Nevertheless, most practitioners of Judaism continue to see their religious tradition as supporting healthy sex—whether they see healthy sex as exclusively between a married man and woman or any monogamous couple, regardless of gender.

Religious Jews also find contemporary values like consent in Jewish texts. Recently a Jewish sex educator wrote in the popular online Jewish magazine Tablet: “What I learned was that the Talmudists, a cisgender male group of rabbis who sat around and discussed Torah in all its nooks and crannies, predicted the same problems of sexual violence and coercion in the fifth century that consume our culture in 2018. They gave the tools a long time ago, embedded in the Jewish textual canon, to establish a sexual culture of consent.” Likewise, Maggie Anton celebrated the Talmud’s authors as (mostly) good guides for sexual ethics today: “Considering how long ago the Talmud promulgated these ideas, it is remarkable that most people today would agree that the very practices … the Rabbis condemned are truly reprehensible.”

Why should these stories matter if we’re talking about sexual abuse? One reason is the prominent assumption that sexual abuse is about bad sexuality, and that bad sexuality is a product of the norms and laws with which a person is raised. Too often this line of reasoning says: Maybe bad sexuality and abuse are because of repression, restriction, or prohibition. If only we had the right rules, then we would have good sexuality and less abuse. Bad rules create bad sexuality and, in turn, sexual misconduct and violence. Ideas like this are behind interpretations of the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church that blame abuse on the mandatory celibacy of priests. Such assumptions circulate throughout the media and among scholars. An Australian report, for example, claimed that “mandatory celibacy and a culture of secrecy created by popes and bishops are major factors” in sexual abuse. Even an academic article claims that “mandatory celibacy” helps “create the problem.”

Judaism, in this view, should have spaces where sexual abuse is far less common than in other communities. It does not promote celibacy, it does not see sex as a necessary evil, and it does not attach shame to sexuality. The idea that repressive rules about sex make sexual abuse more commons is appealing because it implies that if we created a space with the right norms and laws—whether religious or secular—we could create a community that minimized sexual abuse. But however appealing these ideas are, they are misguided.

Perhaps it should go without saying, but Judaism and Jewish communities can also be places of sexual abuse. In fact, statistically, Jews across the spectrum of observance report numbers that are similar to other populations. Yet the stories of Judaism’s sex positivity can get in the way of seeing and understanding that abuse. In this way, it is similar to domestic violence, which went long unacknowledged in Jewish communities because of prominent ideas of Jewish families and homes as peaceful (an ideal known as shalom bayit), religious ideals of Jewish men as gentle and kind, and textually-based stereotypes about non-Jews as unrestrained, particularly in matters of drinking, violence, and sex. Because the Jewish tradition told a story about domestic abuse as though it were not a problem for Jews, it was easier for Jewish communities to overlook it or assume it was an anomaly when it happened. Because of these stories and the religious values they impart, it can be difficult for Jewish communities to see sexual abuse.

Although the statistics about sexual abuse are similar within and outside of Jewish communities, this does not mean that Judaism bears no responsibility for the sexual abuse that happens in Jewish spaces. Two examples, both painfully relevant for today as well as stretching back many years, demonstrate why looking at Judaism matters when thinking about religion and sexual abuse.

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Haredi communities, often called “ultraorthodox,” have struggled with how to deal with sexual assault for years. These communities, mostly based in New York and Israel, see themselves as rejecting the secular world around them in many ways: they eschew secular media including much of the internet, they adhere to strict gender-based dress codes and norms of behavior, and they have few mixed-gender spaces outside of the home. They see non-Jewish (and non-observant Jewish) cultures as both inferior and threatening to their way of life.

Because of gender segregation in Haredi communities, when sexual abuse happens it tends to occur either in the home or in single-gender spaces. When Haredi boys or young men have come forward telling of sexual abuse, the communal leaders—mostly rabbis—have often doubted their accounts. Worse, some leaders have asked the victims to keep quiet or have blamed them for seducing the men who abused them. In the vast majority of cases, communal leaders have told victims they must deal with the issue entirely within the community and not involve law enforcement or secular courts.

The move to insularity is not distinctly Jewish, but in this case Jewishness matters. These Haredi Jews are a minority community—in fact, a minority within a minority—and they are concerned about antisemitism. Involving outsiders in such private and terrible matters could incite others to turn against them. Because of a history of persecution, Haredim also have what amounts to a “no snitching” practice; they prohibit mesirah, a Jew turning over another Jew to non-Jewish authorities, at least under most circumstances. This has become a matter of significant friction: should Haredi Jews turn over adults who sexually abuse children to secular authorities? And if so, when?

Agudath Israel, the largest leadership and policy organization representing Haredi Jews, recently declared that a member of the community who experienced abuse should first go to a rabbi within the community, and only then would that rabbi make the decision about what to do next: “The individual should not rely exclusively on his own judgment to determine” whether to go to the authorities. “Rather, he should present the facts of the case to a rabbi who is an expert in halacha [Jewish law] and who also has experience in the area of abuse and molestation” because the rabbi understands “the gravity of halacha.” Others worry that this approach will continue to silence victims. They advocate, instead, calling the police whenever someone reports abuse. Although the possibility of calling the police, or even a highly contested hotline run by a Haredi man, has grown in recent years, the default is still to keep reports of sexual abuse exclusively within the community.

The disagreement is fundamentally about the boundaries between the religious community and those outside it—who should have the power to punish and shame, and, more fundamentally, whether the misdeeds of one person should be handled within the community or submitted to an authority beyond it.

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Sexual abuse, of course, is not just the provenance of the ultraorthodox. Perhaps the most widely known case of inappropriate sexual behavior, including sexual abuse, involves the countercultural rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Although Carlebach died in 1994, many Jewish communities are still coming to terms with his actions (unwanted sexual touching, inappropriate late-night phone calls, and worse) as well as the testimonies of the women he harmed . However, countless synagogues across the United States still use his melodies as part of their services, and so his presence continues.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach

Judaism should be a religion of love, Carlebach preached. His synagogue’s name—The House of Love and Prayer—declared that same message for how Jews across the religious spectrum should see Judaism. Part of Carlebach’s appeal as a religious leader was his charisma, and part of the appeal of his movement was a utopian vision of intimate connections with God and other people. These aspects of his appeal also helped him push the idea that Judaism should not have sexual regulation at the forefront of its religious ideology. The strict rules around menstruation in Jewish law and the practices prohibiting touching between men and women didn’t fit with the lives of most of Carlebach’s followers, nor did they seem to matter to his conception of Judaism. Carlebach sought to break down boundaries between people, rather than to build them up. But that very worldview also facilitated abuse. It also made it difficult for others to hear or believe the women who experienced abuse because of how deeply people loved Carlebach and the community he created.

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In many ways, these two examples could not be more different: an ultraorthodox community and a more liberal one; an insular community that seeks to keep all stories of abuse under wraps, and women who bravely went public with their stories of abuse at the hands of an internationally beloved rabbi; one about the boundaries between a religious community and the society around it, and the other about the interpersonal and social boundaries of sex and sexuality.

Yet the abuse in both Haredi communities and Carlebach’s community were facilitated by the stories that Jews told themselves about Judaism. One story says, “Our Judaism is traditional and moral when it comes to sexuality.” The other says, “Our Judaism is enlightened and progressive about intimacy and sexuality.” Both of these stories get in the way of recognizing sexual abuse as a systemic problem — and a Jewish one.

Sarah Imhoff is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University.  She writes about religion and the body with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, race, and American religion. She is the author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017). Her current projects include A Queer Crippled Zionism: The Lives of Jessie Sampter and an exploration of gender-based inclusions and exclusions in Jewish Studies, co-authored with Susannah Heschel.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Jews, Sex Positivity, and Abuse appeared first on The Revealer.

Addressing the legacy of sex abuse in Catholicism, historian Robert Orsi suggests that we reject the label of “crisis” and call it “the Catholic normal” instead. Of course, Catholicism is not exceptional in requiring such nomenclature. Abuse has, for a long time, been “normal” in non-Catholic religious communities as well.

Just last year, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a devastating report of sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. In the last two decades, more than 700 victims have come forward with accusations against Southern Baptist ministers, church leaders, and volunteers.

Academic investigations confirm just how normal the “crisis” appears to be. A 2004 John Jay College study of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy found allegations against 4,392 priests recorded between 1950 and 2002. That number makes up 4% of the entire U.S. priesthood. Likewise, a 2018 study of child sexual abuse in Protestant congregations analyzed 326 cases that led to the arrests of purported offenders between 1999 and 2014—a small fraction of the total sample of 2,240 allegations of abuse in Protestant congregations made between 1982 and 2014.

The figures are staggering. The stories are disturbing. And while there is nothing new about abuse in religious contexts, a look at its longer history suggests that Americans have only recently begun to think of the problem in their midst as abuse. As Megan Goodwin has shown in her series for the Revealer, the language of sexual abuse in the United States has most often been reserved for what she calls “American minority religions.” Protestantism in particular has largely escaped cultural associations with structural abuse. In fact, the words “sex abuse”—and any explicit mention of sexuality in general—rarely appeared in the press until well into the twentieth century. Before then, there had been other ways to mark certain religions as fraught with sexual danger. What language was used, by whom, and with regard to what religious communities had much to do with who had cultural power.

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For a long time, U.S. Protestantism enjoyed the unspoken protections from accusations of sexual impropriety through its status as the religion of the majority. Whereas today’s media has become the public’s first point of contact in breaking stories of sexual abuse, the fledgling press of the 1830s (the decade that saw the birth of modern journalism) agonized about the limits of their craft’s subject matter. Their mandate was the preservation of public morals. To that end, most newspapers refused to publish material of morally questionable nature. Any story that happened to be about sex fell into that category and was often only alluded to in euphemistic tones and without genuine engagement—particularly when the stories involved Protestant pastors.

The one exception in the 1830s was Methodism. Its charismatic preachers, mixed-gender revival meetings, and anti-democratic English origins troubled the more established Protestant denominations of New England. Anglo-Protestants worried in particular about interracial mixing at the loosely supervised and highly emotional revivals as well as about what sexual behavior such close proximity could inspire. A contemporary critic warned that these revivals “produced more souls than they saved,” while Catholic missionaries noted that the meetings—with their dancing and twitching—constituted a scandal.

1833 print by Henry Robinson titled “A Very Bad Man” depicts Ephraim Avery and Sarah Cornell

So when the married Methodist minister Ephraim K. Avery was accused of seducing, impregnating, and murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, an unwed factory worker, in the winter of 1832, the media used the case as a kind of referendum on the morality of the Methodist establishment. Mainstream Protestant newspapers accused the New England Methodists of blatantly covering up the crime to protect the preacher.

When it came to Catholics, the press was more hostile still. In addition to the general spirit of nativism that characterized most newspapers at the time, several explicitly anti-Catholic publications sprung up to attack the “foreign religion.” The first of these weeklies, The Protestant, appeared in 1830. Its mission statement cut straight to the chase: “The sole objects of this publication are, to inculcate Gospel doctrines against Romish corruptions—to maintain the purity and sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures against Monkish traditions.”

Why would an entire publication need to besmirch the reputation of the Catholic Church? Americans were deeply concerned with the preservation of their young democracy. Having explicitly separated religion from the affairs of the state in the Constitution, Protestants were suspicious of Catholic allegiance to the foreign Pope. Anglo-Americans refused to believe that the despotic influence, which they perceived in Catholicism, would not spread to their fragile national politics and poison the minds of young people.

For outlets like The Protestant, prohibitions against deviant sexuality became a priority. To aid nativist propaganda and public denunciations of the Catholic Church, fictionalized first-person accounts and pamphlet exposés saturated the print market. Stories about sexual abuse and exploitation sold best.

The most sensational of these stories was Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a purportedly autobiographical narrative of a formerly Protestant woman who joined the Hotel Dieu convent in Montreal. Written like a gothic novel, Awful Disclosures is the tale of Maria Monk’s dramatic encounters with the abusive power of Catholicism. In the book, Monk first joins a Catholic school and later, as a young woman, becomes a nun herself.

Cover of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, 1836

In Monk’s retelling, upon joining the convent she gave up the right to her bodily autonomy. “I must be informed that one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things,” Monk writes, “and this I soon learnt, to my astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.” The euphemism “criminal intercourse” stood for coerced sex between nuns and priests. If nuns disobeyed, they would be locked in a cellar.

The most incriminating evidence of sexual exploitation were the babies born in the convent, who, according to Monk, were baptized and then immediately murdered—to conceal the evidence of the sexual encounters that produced them. Tying forbidden sex with infanticide helped Monk sell books and propagate the idea of Catholic moral perversion among Protestants who were already eager to believe such horrors.

In reality, Maria Monk likely never stepped foot in the Hotel Dieu convent. According to Monk’s mother, the bestselling author was a troubled young woman who had suffered a grave brain injury as a child. Escaping her troubles in Canada, she came to New York, where anti-Catholic Protestant pastors came to her aid, listened to her invented tale, and spiced it up in print—all in an effort to spread an alarmist story that would undermine the Catholic establishment.

Truth mattered little. Catholic convents were to be feared precisely because of their isolation from the world. Who could say what actually happened inside their walls?

The problem Protestants soon discovered in their own midst was that, walls or no walls, religion was fraught with sexual danger. Protestant ministers, it turned out, could be predators as well. They had seen this with Ephraim Avery in the 1830s. And by the 1870s, even the most mainstream ministers were showing signs of decay with regard to their sexual morality.

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Henry Ward Beecher was the nineteenth century’s biggest celebrity pastor. Son of Lyman Beecher and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beecher had an almost genetic predisposition for fame. Eloquent, charming, and charismatic, Beecher preached “the gospel of love”—a theology rooted in grace and forgiveness, a milder version of the Calvinist Christianity of his forebearers.

It turned out that Beecher may have been a little too loving with some of his female congregants. A contemporary rumor had it that Beecher preached to “seven or eight of his mistresses every Sunday.” In 1872, when rabble-rousing Victoria Woodhull—freethinker, radical, and the first woman to run for President in the U.S.—published an exposé of one of Beecher’s extra-marital affairs, Brooklyn’s favorite pastor fell into trouble.

Woodhull accused Beecher of sexual immorality with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Beecher’s long-time associate and friend Theodore Tilton. The pair had been awfully friendly—with pastoral home visits allegedly culminating in inappropriate touching. Theodore Tilton himself questioned whether the child Elizabeth was carrying was his. Was it fathered by Rev. Beecher—the very man who officiated the Tiltons’ wedding fifteen years earlier?

Letters of support for Beecher poured in, just as accusations against the minister spread in newspapers and on street corners. America was divided. Many Christians hinged their own salvation on the truth or falsehood of the accusations against their favorite pastor’s sexual morality. As one Protestant newspaper put it, “the Name which is above every name suffers by being dragged into the dust in the person of its representatives.” Through Beecher, God was implicated in scandal.

Worse, the Christian home—that sacred place that had been revered in the Protestant imagination—no longer seemed safe from the pernicious influence of seductive ministers. It did not matter that the Beecher-Tilton affair may have been entirely consensual; as a minister of the gospel, Beecher was entrusted with cultivating purity among his parishioners, not seducing them into adultery. As one reader of the Chicago Tribune put it, Beecher’s trial would ultimately establish whether “the minister of the Gospel, welcomed in utmost confidence to our families and firesides, and to the sick-chambers of our wives and daughters, be a scoundrel and a hypocrite, or not.”

“Testimony in the Great Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case Illustrated” by James E. Cook,1875

Beecher was ultimately found not guilty—both by his home congregation and by a hung jury in a civil suit—but the implications of Beecher’s potential adulterous appetites superseded the verdict. The first explosion of media scandals involving Protestant ministers coincided with Beecher’s 1875 trial, and these stories continued to escalate in volume and intensity through the last quarter of the century. Americans now wondered: Could female parishioners seeking spiritual counsel be subjected to their ministers’ impure desires? In learning the details of Beecher’s legal case, Americans discovered that even the most beloved of their ministers were susceptible to sexual sin.

After Beecher, preachers from all denominations were subject to allegations of sexual immorality—not yet called “sexual abuse,” but something approaching its contours. After the trial, the New York Times, bemoaning the hung jury, reviewed the Beecher affair and expressed hope that the case “may lead people in Brooklyn and elsewhere to distrust the new Gospel of Love, and to allow no priests or ministers to come between husband and wife, or to interfere with family ties or sully family honor.”

What troubled the Times was not Beecher’s apparent guilt, but the idea that religion might destroy the most sacred institution in American society: the family. This was a revolutionary assertion. Whereas nativist American writers had always depicted Catholic priests and polygamous Mormons as destroyers of families, it was not common to accuse Protestant ministers of such a corrupting influence. In 1875, Victorian family values were the norm; the figure of the Protestant minister was the de facto protector of the family. Henry Ward Beecher changed that. Protestant pastors’ morality was now suspect.

It is worth noting that even after Beecher’s sexual misbehavior, Protestant pastors’ misdeeds were rarely labeled “abuse.” A century after Beecher, Americans were still slow to identify the patterns of abuse that took place in religious contexts. It wasn’t until the 1980s that scientific studies and journalistic investigations of sexual abuse—and child abuse in particular—began to describe the problem in terms now legible to twenty-first century observers. Psychologists, criminologists, and journalists suggested that most abusers did not fit the stereotype of strangers with candy, but were instead most often people trusted by families—like male relatives. Or pastors.

Still, even in the 1980s, Protestant sex abuse had not yet reached the status of an epidemic; it remained episodic and context-specific, at least in the eyes of denominational leadership and the press. When Newsweek’s Kenneth Woodward and Patricia King put together a profile of clergy sexual abusers in 1989, they focused on clerical seduction that took place during pastoral counseling—not on other kinds of abuse. “Pastoral adultery is not the principal issue,” Woodward and King wrote, “Denominational officials are more concerned with local pastors who seduce congregants who rely on them for spiritual guidance and, in times of trouble, pastoral counsel.” Just as in the nineteenth century, “seduction” seemed to be the problem—not systematic abuse emboldened by unchallenged pastoral power.

All of which is to say that what we are dealing with today in discussions of religious sex abuse is both an old problem and a new phenomenon. The language of sexual danger has been used to decry certain religious expressions, to reproach the dangers of foreign ideas on account of alleged sexual immorality. It was not until the 1870s that Protestants began to recognize that their own religious communities—mainstream, established, and seemingly innocuous—contained within them the same dangers as the religious communities that seemed to them more foreign and fraught. And it wasn’t until the last three decades that we began to label the sex problem in our churches as “sex abuse” or understand the extent of the issue.

For a long time, Protestants took for granted the cultural protections afforded them by their brand of Christianity’s status as the de facto American religion. The time to reckon with the kinds of abuse this privileged position has enabled appears to have finally arrived. Inspired by #MeToo, the #ChurchToo movement has created spaces for survivors to speak out against the hierarchies that forced their silences and shielded their offenders. Even Billy Graham’s grandson, Basyle “Boz” Tchividjian, now believes that much of what Protestant churches teach (or refuse to mention) about sexuality enables abuse. “It’s sort of a perfect storm,” he said in 2017, “You have an ignorance about anything concerning sex, you have a view that men are in charge and have a higher degree of value, and you have a leadership structure that gives authority often to one person.”

Whatever we call it—crisis, abuse, or the religious “normal”—this moment is different from past instances in that, perhaps for the first time, we are learning to listen to survivors. In the past, victims of pastoral abuse appeared in the press and in trial transcripts as secondary characters in the dramas of the important men whose reputations they challenged. Today, they are the protagonists of their own stories of resilience and grace. They do not always get the justice they deserve, but they are speaking out regardless. Perhaps the best way to understand the sex problem in our churches is not by debating its labels, but by listening to those it has affected.

It appears that there is nothing inherently safe about any denomination or culturally dominant religious tradition when it comes to sex abuse in religious communities. There are no neat correlations between safe theology and sound sexual practices, no assurances that those entrusted with the spiritual well-being of others will be good guardians of their bodies as well. If anything, the long history of protections afforded to Protestantism shows that even the most seemingly benign expressions of religious authority are laden with possibilities for tremendous damage.

Suzanna Krivulskaya is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in U.S. religion, sexuality, gender, and digital history. Her work has been published in the Journal of American Studies, Current Research in Digital History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has also written for popular outlets like Religion Dispatches and Religion in American History. She is currently writing a book about the history of Protestant sex scandals and their coverage in the popular press in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post A History of Sex Abuse in the Protestant Imagination appeared first on The Revealer.

What follows is an excerpt from one such scholarly conversation, which began as an “emergency session” at the American Academy of Religion in November 2018 and published as a special forum in the Summer 2019 issue of American Catholic Studies. In it, six scholars reflect on the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis. The forum opens with Brian Clites (Case Western Reserve) offering ten theses on why scholars must center survivors in their accounts of Catholic sex abuse. Susan Ridgely (University of Wisconsin) describes how children abuse victims have been marginalized in scholarship and how we can remedy that. Jeremy Cruz (St. John’s University) focuses on educators’ obligation to challenge institutional structures of violence. Jack Downey (University of Rochester) reveals how the racism and colonialism endemic to the U.S. Catholic Church has prevented scholars from seeing, let alone understanding, sexual abuse in indigenous communities. Kathryn Lofton (Yale University) asks what the Catholic sex abuse crisis can teach us about abuse in other contexts, particularly within the hierarchical spaces of the academy.

In the following excerpt from the forum, Julie Byrne (Hofstra University) argues that we should think about Catholic abuse as part and parcel of the sexual abuse pervasive in our society writ large. In contrast to other contributors to the forum, she warns against overemphasizing the Roman Catholic (or religious) dimensions of abuse.

The forum as a whole grapples with difficult questions about how we understand sexual abuse in Catholic contexts and the imperatives that arise from that understanding. Not everyone agreed on the answers. And so I encourage you to engage the full forum, free and accessible to the public for the month of March 2020, courtesy of American Catholic Studies and Project Muse. — Matthew Cressler, editor of the “Forum on Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion”

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“The Distortions of Exceptionalism, Again”
by Julie Byrne

My highest hope for discussion of the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis is that it would take context and comparison into account with regard to the larger phenomenon of sex abuse.

Pennsylvania Grand Jury Announcement

Before I explain, I beg in advance that readers not mistake my brief words for excusing or minimizing. I grew up Catholic in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. When the latest Pennsylvania grand jury report came out, my four siblings and I realized that over the course of thirty years we had personally interacted in parish and school contexts with four priests on the list, which is at least 20 percent of the total number of priests we knew. My sister was a student at Lebanon Catholic High School when one of those priests was her principal, who one day called her and spoke a lot of sex talk into the phone. My brother was a young man considering a vocation when another of those priests invited him into his office, closed the door, and lowered the shades. For some reason it did not go further, as we read it had with other boys—our classmates—in similar scenarios with that same priest. We have vivid memories of cover-up standards as mass announcements, such as, “Please pray for Father so-and-so, he had a nervous breakdown.”[1]

It is precisely because of the personal experience of me and so many others that I am very invested in knowledge-based activism for change. To me that starts with letting go of exceptionalizing the Roman church situation.

This is the context: child sex abuse is not particular to Roman Catholicism, because Roman Catholicism is not exceptional.

In the study of Catholicism, exceptionalism has been a huge problem. Historically it posited that the Roman church was exceptionally better than most, or that it was exceptionally worse than most. But in the case of the sex abuse crisis, I see a more subtle exceptionalism, including by scholars usually careful about assuming religion is inherently good, which basically suggests “the Roman church should be better than most.” Should be better?, than thousands of rapes of children and cover up of cases? Sure, it should be better. But it’s not, because it’s not exceptional and never has been. Roman Catholicism is just part of culture, as are all religious institutions.

And culture in patriarchy features the sexual abuse of children at atrocious rates. From what experts can tell, it happens at generally the same rate proportionate to how many children are accessible in that institution, including the institution of the family. One out of every ten children experience sex abuse of some kind before they are eighteen years old, with the highest rates for girls and trans/nonbinary kids. Statistics on the prevalence of perpetrators (both men and women) in the general population are very hard to come by, but I would point to expert estimates that ten to twenty percent of males across the board have sexually abused a minor at some point in their lives.[2]

Also cover-up is utterly endemic. No institution in which child sex abuse is committed is not guilty of denying it for the sake of its reputation, often for years or decades. This includes families, prep schools, and universities as well as churches. Though child sex abuse is illegal in the United States, we are all complicit in a patriarchal culture that ignores, excuses, or covers it up almost all the time. My best friend Michelle Morgan is a true exception. I met her at Lebanon Catholic in 1983. Now the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Michelle is leading the investigation for possible federal charges stemming from the latest grand jury report. But her everyday cases involve the day-in, day-out sex trafficking of American black and brown girls that is literally endless, that media outlets do not cover, about which we are not writing pieces to contribute to a scholarly journal. We all let child sex abuse go on, simply by refusing to comprehend how normal it is.[3]

Rachael Denhollander victim statement at Nassar trial

To keep activism knowledge-based, I call for not only context but also comparativism. No institution is exceptional, but each site has its own time, place, and historical particularities. At least thirty percent of child sex abuse is “child-on-child”—that of a younger child by an older child. This is obviously much different than, say, Dr. Larry Nassar of Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics, who was recently convicted of abusing hundreds of girls to whom he had access as sports team physician. This is in turn much different than a priest abusing an altar boy, where specifically “Catholic” sex abuse happens, for example, when abusers deploy the symbols and vocabulary of Catholicism to justify abuse.[4]

Yet comparative work can track parallels, too. Another temptation to exceptionalize the Roman situation is to imagine that when priests do use the toolbox of Catholicism for abuse, it is automatically especially damaging because it affects children cosmically, killing their very souls.

I would be hesitant to universalize the experience of survivors in that way, or to say “soul death” happens only with the Catholic toolbox of abuse. Dr. Larry Nassar, for example, deployed the symbols and vocabulary of sports and medicine to justify abuse in a context where he knew his victim-patients and covering-up bosses worshipped the same gods of athletic excellence and Olympic immortality. Survivors of Nassar’s abuse described it as “soul-crushing” and “soul-shattering devastation,” said Rachael Denhollander. Nicole Reeb said her “soul has been scarred.” “All I wanted to do as a kid was go to the Olympics,” Mattie Larson testified. “I was at the height of my career and the Olympics were just one year away. Larry turned the sport I loved into my living hell.” In other words, as we already know, religion doesn’t only happen in religious institutions per se. Other institutions are capable of dealing joys as cosmic and blows as crushing.[5]

Comparativism also involves recognizing different situations within the same context. A “lived religion” approach would suggest that potentially sexually abusive interactions within Catholic contexts do not always end in perpetrator-victim relationships. Many were victimized, but some Catholic schoolchildren solicited by abusive priests actually rebuffed them or told their parents who rebuffed them. Some children and adults heard rumors and spread them, warning others to stay away from creepy priests, who became semipublic laughingstocks as well as private predators. While some victims were traumatized forever, indeed suffering “soul death” and finding Catholicism permanently toxic, others experienced abuse as a glancing event in their lives that they had the resources to handle; God was still somehow always separable or they unproblematically remained Roman Catholic. Some Catholic survivors of child sex abuse were abused not by priests, but by their Catholic fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, or neighbors. This is “Catholic” sex abuse, too. My current research involves suburban Catholic white-ethnic upper-middle-class men. While I am attuned that some of them could have been survivors of clerical sex abuse, I’m also attuned that (chances are) some of them were abusers, mostly of young adult women at parties, in intimate relationships, and in #MeToo scenarios at work. This is “Catholic” sex abuse, too.

So, to sum up: priests don’t sexually abuse children more, Catholic kids don’t suffer it more, bishops don’t cover it up more, and religious tools of abuse don’t automatically make it especially searing. Onto the trash heap of unfounded assumptions let’s heave explanations of Catholic sex abuse based on exceptionalism. Instead, let’s keep researching and advocating based on unflinching acknowledgment of the pervasion of child sex abuse and on finely honed studies of comparative situations.

There is some hope, because while astonishingly prevalent, child sex abuse seems not to be a timeless constant. Studies show the number of child sex abuse cases in the United States peaked in 1992 and declined annually by between two to eleven percent through the turn of the millennium. Why? “Professional opinion is divided about why this drop occurred and how much of the drop is real as opposed to reflection of factors such as changes in definitions, reporting and investigation by states,” writes Alan Kemp in Abuse in Society: An Introduction. But at least part of the decline seems to indicate a real drop. During the same time period, incarceration rates for sex offenders multiplied, while overall crime rates and measures of family problems such as domestic violence and teen pregnancy dropped, all of which suggest “a general improvement in the well-being of children,” Kemp writes. In addition, millions of public schools implemented sex ed curricula that included “safe bodies” lessons teaching children to recognize others’ attempts at inappropriate physical contact.[6]

Study of Roman Catholic sex abuse, then, should investigate the specifics of Catholic contexts and structures, but mostly with an eye toward illuminating and cooperating with public education, policy, and law that continue to improve the well-being of children overall. One could imagine this running the gamut from revamping the sex ed curricula of Catholic schools to advocating for (mostly Catholic) migrant children held in camps along the U.S. border. Only then can concern about Catholic sex abuse coalesce with the disclosure of sex abuse across religious and nonreligious institutions, sync with the #MeToo movement, and complement related pro-women-and-children justice reform initiatives. Only then will discussion of Catholic sex abuse help yield data-based modes of prevention, reveal the vulnerabilities of specific populations, generate tailored treatments for trauma, and encourage broad legal prioritization. Only then will the “Catholic sex abuse crisis” have been properly addressed as a crisis not just of the Roman church, but of society in general.[7]

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You can read the entire American Catholic Studies “Forum: Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion” for free through March 31, 2020, courtesy of American Catholic Studies and Project Muse.

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Matthew J. Cressler is assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston and the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017). 

Julie Byrne holds the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair in Catholic Studies and serves as Professor of Religion at Hofstra University. Her second book, The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion, was published by Columbia University Press in 2016. 

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[1]. Kristina Papa, “Two Accused Priests Served as School Principals,” WNEP-16, August 2, 2018, https://wnep.com/2018/08/02/two-accused-priests-served-as-school-principals/; Brandie Kessler, “‘Suddenly I Don’t Feel Like I am Going to Hell’: Priest Abuse Victim Reacts to Diocese Report,” York Daily Record, August 2, 2018.

[2]. Darkness to Light, “Prevalence of Child Sex Abuse,” https://www.d2l.org/the-issue/prevalence/. Pat Wingert, “Priests Commit No More Abuse than Other Males,” Newsweek, April 7, 2010, https://www.newsweek.com/priests-commit-no-more-abuse-other-males-70625.

[3]. William McSwain, “The Feds are Focused on Ending Modern-Day Slavery in the U.S.,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 2, 2019.

[4]. Emily M. Douglas and David Finkelhor, “Child Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet,” http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/factsheet/pdf/CSA-FS20.pdf; Defend Innocence, “Five Facts About Child On Child Sexual Abuse,” https://defendinnocence.org/5-facts-child-child-sexual-abuse/; Eric Levenson, “Larry Nassar Sentenced to Up to 175 Years in Prison for Decades of Sexual Abuse,” CNN.com, January 18, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/24/us/larry-nassar-sentencing/index.html; Robert Orsi, “What is Catholic About the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis?” in The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, eds. Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Maya Mayblin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 282–292.

[5]. James Terence Fisher used the phrase “soul death” to describe the effect of clergy sex abuse in discussion of my Facebook post on this topic on August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/julie.byrne.3388/posts/2097864687092104; Rachael Denhollander with Morgan Lee, “My Larry Nassar Testimony Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than Forgiveness,” Christianity Today, January 18, 2018, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/january-web-only/rachael-denhollander-

larry-nassar-forgiveness-gospel.html; Laura Mazade, “ ‘By the Way, Enjoy Hell’: Read the Words of the Many Women Who Confronted Larry Nassar,” Lansing State Journal, January 16, 2018, https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2018/01/16/larry-nassar-sentencing-victim-statements/1037631001/.

[6]. Alan R. Kemp, Abuse in Society: An Introduction (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2017), 156–157.

[7]. Kaya Oakes, “In Search of Spiritual Healing,” America (October 2, 2017), 28–33.

The post American Catholic Studies: Forum on Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion appeared first on The Revealer.

For decades, Catholic dioceses throughout the country have had to embark on what can only be described as apology tours, during which clergy have again and again asked abuse victims for forgiveness. Nick Ingala, from the lay activist group Voice of the Faithful, told the New York Times that Archbishop Blair’s Reparations Mass was not going to be enough for many victims. “Apologies,” Ingala said, “will only go so far. Where is the responsibility? The accountability? You can’t say ‘I’m sorry’ over and over and over again.” Among the reader comments on the New York Times article, one of the most upvoted was from “Janet,” who stated that “apologies are fine,” but that “nothing, absolutely nothing, ever compensates enough for the heart-heavy, dirty-soul feeling that remains with [victims] until we die.”

While clergy abuse is not my primary focus as a journalist who writes about the Catholic Church, it is one that my colleagues and I have been forced to return to many times as continued revelations of abuse surface. In fact, every person who writes about the Catholic Church is a de facto reporter on abuse. Journalists often become victim advocates simply because we are the first people victims think to contact, especially when distrust of diocesan offices and the Church hierarchy is at an all-time high.

Mass of Reparation in St. Louis

But in spite of the many cases of abuse coming to light around the world, the clerical impulse to plead for forgiveness, and what that does to victims, has rarely been discussed. In 2018, I pitched a story on the role of forgiveness in clergy abuse to a Catholic magazine for which I occasionally write. My hunch was that, like many of the women who were being asked to forgive abusive men as #MeToo revelations unfolded, many victims of clergy abuse might be hesitant to grant forgiveness to those who had violated them because of the corrosive nature of trauma.

Assuming that Catholics had written widely on clergy forgiveness, I spent a month researching the article. Yet I struggled to find any Catholic sources that specifically addressed what clergy abuse victims should do when the Church asks them for forgiveness. In fact, I found nothing. When my primary sources turned out to be mostly female Protestant clergy and Jewish rabbis who proposed that victims do not owe their abusers forgiveness, I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised when the Catholic magazine I wrote this article for decided not to publish it. Their concern was that the article would be perceived as anti-Catholic because, they insisted, Jesus tells his followers they need to forgive anyone who has wronged them. Although I later published the article in an interfaith magazine, the experience left me wondering why Catholics talk so much about forgiveness without a deeper conversation about what forgiveness actually means for victims of clergy sexual abuse.

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There’s no statistical information available to show how many victims forgive their abusers, nor do we really know how many abusers ask for it. Given the layers of secrecy and shame around abuse, those statistics may never emerge. But it seems appropriate to ask the question: What do we mean when we talk about forgiveness?

A little more than a year ago, I was a guest with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a prominent feminist rabbi, on an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Company religion radio show Tapestry to discuss forgiveness. Rabbi Ruttenberg said that missing from most discussions of forgiveness are conversations about atonement and making amends. In the context of clergy sexual abuse, atonement can range from financial reparations to abusers entering therapy. Before discussions of forgiveness can begin, according to Rabbi Ruttenberg, the abuser and the institution they belong to both need to demonstrate that there is no chance they will abuse again. This process is neither quick nor easy. And it is the opposite of how the Catholic Church has typically handled abusive priests and bishops.

Atonement is the first step toward understanding that survivors do not, in fact, owe abusers anything. Abusers owe their victims much. The idea that clergy abusers should be able to ask for forgiveness and then jump back into a clerical office is one that could further damage victims. Yet most of the clerics in the Catholic Church were allowed right back into situations where they continued their abuse. Victims, re-traumatized after learning that their abusers also abused others, cannot in fact do enough healing to be capable of forgiveness because atonement never happened. Expecting people to grant forgiveness to an institution that hasn’t made legitimate amends does not suggest that institution is capable of real change.

Some of the most helpful discussions about forgiveness for abuse victims come from women scholars who are also Protestant clergy. While these women are not specifically addressing clergy abuse victims, they are writing and thinking about the nature of forgiveness in the Christian tradition. Particularly when it comes to sexual abuse, cultural pressures for victims to forgive their abusers in order to be “good” Christians can become a form of spiritual abuse. In her essay “Love Your Enemy,” Karen Lebacqz writes that the work of forgiveness is a justice issue where the rights of the abused need to be seen as more important than those of the abuser. And Marie Fortune writes that in order to understand what forgiveness is, we first need to understand what it is not. Forgiveness is not, she says, “condoning or pardoning harmful behavior, which is a sin.” Forgiveness, she adds, is not “always possible.”

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As with too many others, this is a personal story. I’m not simply a journalist who covers the Catholic Church. I’m also a survivor of sexual abuse. Although I was never abused by clergy, an abusive incident took place at the Catholic elementary school I attended. The religious order that ran the school covered it up, and it’s likely that the person responsible went on to abuse more children. For me, this issue is so important because I have experienced it first-hand and know what kind of consequences are involved for victims.

I often think of Jesus’s crucifixion scene as the root of our incomplete understanding of forgiveness. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ looks down on his killers and says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But for the cardinals and bishops and the popes who knew – who heard and saw what abusers were doing and relocated them or covered things up – and for the priests and nuns who knew – who knew about their colleagues’ abuses and did not tell, or who were abusers themselves – forced forgiveness would be a form of spiritual abuse.

The Church can write checks to its heart’s content, bankrupt dioceses, stage Reparation Masses, build “healing gardens,” and beg for forgiveness. But until it owns up to the fact that it has not allowed adequate space for victims to express themselves, confront their abusers, and thus begin to heal, no true acts of atonement have been performed. As of today, there is still no evidence that victims owe the Church any forgiveness. The Catholic Church has chosen to protect the institution at the victims’ expense over and over again. Asking victims to forgive an institution so deeply corrupted also asks them to relive horrific and painful experiences not for their own sake, but for the sake of their abusers who need to “move on.”

Many of us who write about abuse do so because we are Catholics ourselves, and for us this is an issue of justice. As the journalist Isabel Wilkerson has said, we strive to do this work not with pity, which is looking down on someone, but with empathy, which is moving into another person’s pain. This is the same understanding that helps us to know, according to the Catholic tradition, that only a God who suffers with victims can be capable of offering any kind of forgiveness, because God takes on the burden and does the work of forgiving on our behalf. In a theology that centers victims’ experiences, forgiveness is in the hands of a God who suffers, not a responsibility resting on the shoulders of those who have been abused.

Kaya Oakes is the author of four books, most recently including The Nones Are Alright and Radical Reinvention. She teaches nonfiction writing at U.C. Berkeley. This essay was adapted from a talk given at the American Academy of Religion conference in November 2019.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. 

The post On Forgiveness, Clergy Abuse, and the Need for New Understandings appeared first on The Revealer.

I carry around a rage I didn’t think was possible. Yet the source of that rage is my greatest comfort.

For more than a decade, I have felt a betrayal that runs so deep that in all these years I have not reached the end and don’t know if I ever will. Yet the one who betrayed me is also the one in whom I have tremendous faith – including faith that my betrayer’s better self will someday emerge.

These contradictions are how I feel as a Black Catholic woman and scholar of Catholicism at the end of the second decade of the 21^st century. These contradictions are why it was so difficult to write this essay, but they are also why I had to write this essay. While I do not yet know the full depth of my pain, I am acutely aware that mine is only one among numerous types of hurt caused by the same betrayer.

I’ve spent my professional life studying systemic racism within the U.S. Catholic Church and how that racism impacts African-American Catholic identity. For the last four years, I have been researching and writing a book on this subject. Spending so much time and energy on something so difficult has tested my resolve and my faith. Studying the repeated and abject failings of an institution I love, talking with people about how it has failed them, processing their stories, and working through how the institution has failed me takes its toll. Nevertheless, I am still a member of this Church—as of now.

I come to this essay not as an expert on the sex abuse crisis, but as a scholar of race and racism in Roman Catholicism. I needed to write this essay because there has been woefully little engagement with race in both academic and public discourse about the sex abuse crisis. Until recently, I have avoided writing about the sex abuse crisis. The work I do is hard enough; it poses a threat to my continued participation in an institution I love, but which continues to disappoint me. But that’s not the only reason I’ve avoided writing about the sex abuse crisis. I’ve avoided it for selfish reasons. You see, I come from Philadelphia – a city and archdiocese that has been profoundly impacted by this crisis, the consequences of which are deep and widespread. So, for me, this is personal.

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It was personal as I sat in a Starbucks in September 2005, having just purchased a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I bought the newspaper that day because it not only listed the names of the priests identified in the first Philadelphia grand jury report, it also published their photographs. It was personal as I cried in that Starbucks, looking at the faces of men who possessed deep and abiding trust they had not earned but that came with the Roman collar they wore. It was personal when I realized just how many of them had lived, worked, or both at my home parish. This included a former pastor who was one of the most egregious offenders and came to my parish after archdiocesan leaders had known about his crimes for DECADES. I won’t give him the dignity he denied to so many others by writing his name. That would be a betrayal to those who survived his crimes. That’s the last thing I would ever want to do.

Reading that newspaper in 2005 made clear what had been murky in my parish during the early 1990s: A former pastor’s hasty departure without explanation in 1991 – mere months after his arrival – finally made sense. The subsequent years with a parish administrator instead of a pastor made sense as well. Because our priest refused to resign as pastor (it would be six years before the archdiocese forced him to do so), another priest was appointed parish administrator to run the day-to-day operations. Ultimately, after his resignation, the priest was allowed to leave the area with a certificate saying he was a retired priest in good standing from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. That certificate allowed him to perform priestly functions while in retirement in Florida until he was finally defrocked in 2005. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia – my archdiocese – knowingly put more children in danger.

From that moment in Starbucks fifteen years ago, I also knew that what we were seeing in Boston and Philadelphia was just the tip of the iceberg. My sociological training coupled with my professional and personal knowledge of the Catholic Church told me the sex abuse crisis was far more widespread than we were initially led to believe.

First, I knew these heinous crimes against children were more than a U.S. problem; this was a global injustice and widespread sex scandal that involved abuse of power and position, appropriations of funds that were questionable at best, and a massive cover-up. Time has borne that out as we have seen numerous countries confronting decades of betrayal and a reckoning with the truth.

Second, I knew that white Catholics were not the only ones impacted by this scandal, a reality that is only now coming to light. My research, and that of my colleagues who focus on racism within Catholicism, shows how time and again Black Catholics are marginalized, ostracized, or just plain erased from the Catholic Church. The same is true in the sex abuse crisis. It is only now, eighteen years after the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team broke open the sex abuse scandal, that we are starting to see the impact on people of color. This is yet another instance of systemic racism targeting African-American Catholics, a community that has already endured so much and about which I have written for twenty years.

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What we are beginning to see is that Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Catholics’ already marginalized statuses left them vulnerable to an additional layer of discrimination. It has taken nearly two decades to center people of color in discussions about the broader crisis. To understand why it has taken so long, we have to acknowledge just how intricately systemic racism is woven into the fabric of the Church. We see it in a myriad of ways. We see it in the miniscule number of bishops, priests, and members of religious orders who are people of color, particularly from African-American and Indigenous communities. We see it in the ways all communities of color are disproportionately targeted by church, school, and social services closings. We see it in how racism factors into a child’s isolation at majority-white schools and makes that child more susceptible to predatory behavior. We see it in the actions of diocesan leaders and religious superiors who sent priests – with credible allegations against them – to areas where they would interact almost exclusively with poor African-American and Native Catholics. Such priests had access to Catholics who were already marginalized because of their race and socio-economic status and who were less likely to be heard or believed if they came forward with abuse allegations.

La Jarvis D. Love

In an ongoing series called “The Reckoning,” the Associated Press has started taking on the issue of race and the sex abuse crisis. In a story from 2019, the AP profiled members of the Love family from the Mississippi Delta. Two brothers and their cousin have accused two members of the Wisconsin-based Franciscan Friars of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary of years of physical and sexual abuse beginning when they were young boys. The AP details how Father James Gannon, in his role as provincial minister, reached a settlement with the Loves. Fr. Gannon, on behalf of his community, settled the lawsuit “on the cheap” and required the three men to sign non-disclosure agreements as a prerequisite for their miniscule financial settlement. Gannon did this knowing that the non-disclosure agreement was in violation of directives from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and, therefore, unenforceable. When the three men asked for more money, Gannon told them that they would need to hire a lawyer who would have to communicate with his legal team. He implied that the process would take years with no guarantee of results. With bills to pay and limited resources, two members of the Love family signed the agreement. Joshua K. Love described the settlements he and his cousin, La Jarvis D. Love, received by saying, “They felt they could treat us that way because we’re poor and we’re black.” The third member of the family, Raphael Love, rejected the settlement.

Joshua K. Love

In the AP article, Father Gannon justifies his actions by saying, “We’ve hurt them tremendously and no amount of money would ever account for what happened to them.” Since a financial settlement cannot make up for what happened, Fr. Gannon believes the three Black men should take the small sum he offered and be grateful they’re getting anything at all. The $15,000 that the Loves each received is a fraction of typical settlements. For example, the Jackson, Mississippi diocese settled lawsuits with nineteen survivors – including seventeen white survivors – for $5 million, resulting in an average payout of more than a quarter-million dollars per survivor, or seventeen times as much as the Loves received.

Black survivors are further victimized by outcomes such as this. These settlements exacerbate the racism people of color already endure in the Church. White survivors wouldn’t be expected to accept such disrespect on top of the trauma they have endured. But Black survivors are expected to be grateful they received any settlement at all.

This shouldn’t need to be said, but clearly it does: African-Americans, or any people of color for that matter, are not going to be grateful for meager recompense and stay silent after bearing the burden of years, decades, and centuries of trauma. Nor will a paltry sum serve as a first step toward atonement to those who have endured so much. The Loves are evidence of this by going public with their story.

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In the fall of 2019, I wrote about how the Catholic Church can do right by its African-American members if it has the will. The sex abuse crisis is yet another instance where the Church has not shown it legitimately supports people of color. Supporting survivors of color can take a number of forms, such as no longer using unapproved and unenforceable non-disclosure agreements, and keeping records of survivors’ race to ensure survivors of color receive settlement amounts equal to white survivors.

I began this essay by saying I had to write it. I had to write about race, racism, and the sex abuse crisis. The gravity of the situation demands attention from all who have expertise and a platform to share it. Yet I know this is the point where I have reached my own “Come to Jesus Moment” as a Black Catholic scholar who studies the experiences of Black Catholics. The anger, betrayal, and contradictions I opened this essay with mean I’ve drawn the proverbial line in the sand when it comes to depth of filth I’m willing to wade through in doing what a colleague recently described to me as “the difficult work of truth telling.” So, I plan for this to be the first and last time I write about the intersection of race, racism, and the sex abuse crisis. I will continue to fight for racial justice in the Catholic Church. Because I need to know and respect my own limitations, I just can’t see the sex abuse crisis as the front where I will engage that fight. For my own peace of mind and any hope I have of retaining my faith and my religion, this needs to be where I start and where I stop.

To survivors both known and unknown, I am awed by your courage. I am deeply sorry I cannot accompany you on this road in the way I wish I could. I don’t want to be yet another person who has let you down in your struggle. My wish, my hope, and my prayer is that being a professional agitator on systemic racism in the Church will move the needle in all areas where racism impacts members of the Church and that, in some small way, will help.

Tia Noelle Pratt, Ph.D. is a sociologist and the President and Director of Research at TNPratt & Associates, an Inclusion and Diversity Consulting Firm in Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Pratt has researched systemic racism in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and its impact on African-American Catholic identity for more than 20 years. She is currently working on her first book, Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African-American Catholic Experience.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Black Catholics, Racism, and the Sex Abuse Crisis: A Personal Reflection appeared first on The Revealer.

The Diocese of Gallup introduced an infrastructure for spiritual care aimed at the region’s mainly Native and Latino inhabitants. Within a year the diocese had its own bishop, Bernard Espelage, and a modest cathedral in the coal- and railroad-fueled bordertown of Gallup, adjacent to the Navajo reservation. In the months and years that followed, the diocese gained its own stable of priests who arrived from as near as Santa Fe and as far as Ireland to work at Bishop Espelage’s direction, in both parishes and outlying mission churches and schools. The new diocesan clergy complimented and sometimes competed with other priests from the Franciscan religious order who were already established at Native-serving missions in the region.

In 2003, just short of its sixty-fifth anniversary, the Diocese of Gallup released six names of priests credibly alleged to have sexually abused minors within its boundaries. Two years later, Bishop Donald Pelotte—the first Native American Catholic bishop in the United States—issued a public apology for the past behavior of priests in his diocese and acknowledged the need for a “search and rescue mission” to find victims, especially within Native communities. In 2013, facing the cost of mounting claims from survivors of clergy sexual abuse, the Diocese of Gallup filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Today, in a tally of names reported by the diocese, cross-checked against those reported by Bishop Accountability, the number of Catholic leaders publicly accused of sexual abuse in the Diocese of Gallup stands at thirty-seven. Thirty-two of these men were priests, three were religious brothers, and the remaining two were a lay teacher and a former seminarian. In addition, thirteen more priests who lived in the diocese have faced sexual abuse accusations elsewhere.

These numbers are dire: The historical rate (per capita) of alleged sexual predators in the Diocese of Gallup is several times higher than the Archdiocese of Boston and the Diocese of Pittsburgh, both of which have received attention as hotbeds of Catholic abuse in the United States. The statistics are typical, though, of Catholic dioceses that reach across Indian Country. The U.S. dioceses that do have rates comparable to Gallup—including in Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota—are dioceses that contain and oversee the Catholic spiritual care of colonized peoples. From this we must conclude: Catholic sex abuse is both its own crisis and part of a legacy of sexual and gender-based violence faced by colonized people in the U.S. Southwest and across North America.

***

Today, conversations about clerical sex abuse typically feature questions about whether and how Catholic theology, doctrine, and institutional structures produced abusive actors and abusive acts—in other words, about whether and how this problem is a plainly Catholic one. Stories from Gallup and places like it don’t make these questions irrelevant, but they do require us to follow up with questions about how Catholicism produced an uneven geographic distribution of this problem and the pattern by which clerical abuse happened with special frequency to Latino and especially Native children. Why did Catholic religious leaders disproportionately abuse these populations? How do we talk about sex abuse as something that happened amid Catholic attempts at spiritual care and as colonial and racial violence?

2020 map showing the boundaries of the Diocese of Gallup

In the Diocese of Gallup, one cause of abuse was priests who spent careers moving: into its jurisdiction from other places in the United States, and from point to point through parishes and mission churches in its territory. The forces that moved these priests were Catholic ones. “Good” and “bad” priests alike were drawn to Gallup by the concern—articulated by Cardinal Pacelli during his fly-over, and later by the bishop he installed—that the Native and Latino inhabitants of the U.S. Southwest required greater spiritual care. This went hand-in-hand with the Catholic idea that men ordained to the priesthood, whether they had records of bad behavior or not, had the exclusive ability, and responsibility, to provide lay people with care necessary for their salvation, especially through administering the sacraments. The twentieth-century clerical exercise of cura animarum, or “care of souls,” drew priests along trajectories from east to west, from urban to rural, and into the Diocese of Gallup.

If care for souls who required it (or who were imagined to require it) pulled priests toward Gallup, a second force was also pushing the troubled among them—away from old haunts often located in the East, and into routes that set them on course for the Southwest. This second force came from a theology of scandal. First elaborated by Thomas Aquinas, later included in the Catholic catechism, and named as a reason for relocating priests guilty of “solicitation” of laity in Vatican-issued (but never promulgated) instructions in 1922 and 1962, scandal set the bodies of these priests into motion.

According to scandal theology, a priest’s bad acts become more sinful—additionally sinful—if faithful Catholics learn about them. In such cases, the bad acts of one man might double as “stumbling blocks” or sin-causing obstacles to proper faith for an entire community. After a priest raped a child, a well-timed relocation to a distant place could avoid scandal, and avoiding scandal could save souls.

Together these forces, the pull toward cura animarum and the push of scandal, produced a Catholic variation on a colonial theme. Gallup and places like it historically have been marked and marred by white transit. Rendered peripheral to the United States, places where colonized people continue to live become fields for resource extraction and waste disposal, sites for man camps and other assemblies of temporary labor, and simply vacant space that white bodies pass over or through. Communities there suffer the effects. Of the men accused of abuse in the Diocese of Gallup, more than three-quarters had Anglo surnames, and more than half were diocesan priests (rather than members of orders like the Franciscans or Jesuits). While it is hard to tell how many came to Gallup from elsewhere, the diocese had between six and nine of its own priests during its first year, and transit clearly built its roster of men during the middle of the century. The stories of two priests who landed in Gallup during these years, Clement Hageman and John Sullivan, demonstrate the Catholic push and pull that propelled such men into and through these places.

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In 1940, Father Clement Hageman arrived at the Smith Lake Indian Mission on the checkerboard of tribal and allotted lands that make up the eastern edge of the Navajo reservation. Expelled from his home diocese of Corpus Christi for abusing boys, Hageman first drifted to Connecticut. Maybe he committed abuse there too; a local pastor soon wrote to Corpus Christi Bishop Emmanuel Ledvina to inform him “it gives serious scandal to many to have [Hageman] living as he is.” He urged Ledvina to (again) relocate his wayward cleric away from Connecticut and to find him “some place of refuge.”

Three months later, Hageman landed in Smith Lake, prompting the Bishop of Gallup, Bishop Espelage, to contact Ledvina. Espelage had heard that Hageman was “guilty of playing with boys,” but he desperately needed priests to work in his diocese. Should he allow Hageman to stay? The Texas bishop replied by telegram:

BELIEVE MAN MIGHT BE GIVEN A CHANCE WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE AROUND HERE CASE TOO WELL KNOWN AROUND HERE TRY HIM OUT MAYBE MIGHT PROVE TRUSTWORTHY AT LAST.

Thus began Hageman’s career in the Southwest that spanned four decades, during which he allegedly abused dozens of minors. He became known as “the Route 66 priest” for his travel along that east-west thoroughfare. Within the Diocese of Gallup, Hageman continued to move by the same force that had pushed him out of Corpus Christi, and again Connecticut: the Catholic aversion to scandal. In 1952, Bishop Espelage relocated Hageman from Holbrook, Arizona, following reports of sexual abuse. “It is not you who is to be considered,” the bishop told the priest, “but all the Church as a whole. We cannot afford to have any kind of scandal whatever take place.” A decade later, Espelage moved Hageman again, to “prevent any further scandal.” Hageman went briefly to Utah, but soon returned to the diocese and remained there until his death in 1975. Hageman’s movements are recorded in his personnel file.

***

Father John Sullivan arrived in Gallup twenty years after Hageman. Sullivan was ordained in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, where his behavior with young people caused a scandal. The bishop of Manchester, Matthew Frances Brady, suspended Sullivan from ministry in 1956. One year later, Brady wrote to the Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic order dedicated in ministry to troubled priests. The bishop asked its founder, Father Gerald Fitzgerald, if he would accept Sullivan at the Via Coeli monastery and “renewal center” in the Jemez Mountains east of Gallup. “His problem is not drink, but a series of scandal-causing escapades with young girls,” Brady explained.

Fitzgerald refused to receive Sullivan at Via Coeli unless the priest promised to remain in its confines for life. “A new diocese means only green pastures,” Fitzgerald cautioned. “I do not dare recommend such men for the cura animarum.” For five years, Sullivan refused Fitzgerald’s precondition. During that time he tried, without success, to find his own greener pastures: seventeen dioceses would deny Sullivan’s request for reassignment. He also continued to abuse minors.

In 1961, Sullivan relented and agreed to go to New Mexico, and by the time he relocated, something at Via Coeli had changed. Within months Sullivan was permitted to move from the facility into Gallup to substitute for a sick pastor on an “emergency” basis. Bishop Espelage “hoped to keep [Sullivan],” Fitzgerald soon reported, “as he was [..] very much liked by the poor Mexican people among who he was working.” Sullivan remained in Arizona until the early 1980s and allegedly abused multiple victims there. A portion of Sullivan’s personnel file is available here.

***

Via Coeli

Via Coeli was a site where scandalous priests gathered and relocated through the Southwest. At least a half dozen priests (and likely more) later accused of abuse in Gallup made their way into its churches and missions via the monastery. Within the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, which encompassed the Jemez region and Via Coeli, that number is higher. Whether priests passed through Via Coeli as Sullivan did, or whether they traveled directly to ministry in Gallup as Hageman did, the dislocation caused by the threat of scandal, coupled with the pull created by the Church’s determination that rural Native and Latino communities needed greater spiritual care, brought predators to the Southwest. This push-and-pull is clear in John Sullivan’s own search for new work during the 1950s. “I know [..] that there are not too many Bishops who desire saddling their dioceses with problems such as my many weaknesses unfortunately tend to present,” he wrote to Bishop Brady. But some dioceses badly required help, and so Sullivan saw his chance to return to cura animarum. “It appears to me that there are some Western Dioceses that are in need of priests,” he assured his superior. “This decision [..] will first of all please God, and at the same time enable me to piece together my broken priesthood.”

To talk about priests moving across a U.S. “Indian diocese” as a way of explaining Catholic sex abuse in colonial geographies is to identify one theme in a complex historical problem. Diocesan priests were not the only men who abused; in other places with Indian missions, members of religious orders comprise most of the accused. Even in the Diocese of Gallup, more than a dozen of those accused of sexual abuse were Franciscan priests or brothers.

Nor is abuse in these places solely the result of priests moving from far away. There is a second explanation, for example, embedded in the way of life dictated by Catholic Indian missions. Although in Gallup the men accused of abuse usually (though not always) staffed churches, elsewhere across Indian Country abuse claims cluster around schools, and boarding schools especially. Inside such institutions, the regimen Catholic adults imposed on Native students—routines that enforced intimacy of sleeping and bathing, and claustrophobic relationships between teachers and pupils—became a cause for abuse by priests (and in significant numbers, also Catholic sisters) who arrived to work in missions with no prior evidence of bad behavior. Like the Catholic forces that moved men, these Catholic regimens were one cause of abuse that also replicated colonial and racial patterns of violence.

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My purpose here has not been to prove that Catholic leaders moved predator priests to places like Gallup, with large Native and Latino populations, because they believed young people in such places were less harmed by sexual violence, or because their parents would be less likely to successfully protest to religious or secular authorities—though to be clear, beliefs like these were shared among, and informed decisions of, the midcentury Church hierarchy and priests themselves. My concern is instead with how Catholic theology, doctrine, and institutional structures—working in tandem with these racially structured assumptions—aggravated the problem of sex abuse in colonized places. The restless drift of priests, amid the push and pull of Catholic sensibilities about sin, on one hand, and spiritual care, on the other, exposes interlocking systems of religion, race, and colonialism that produced Catholic abuse in places where it was the worst. As a site made by this motion, the Diocese of Gallup is at the crux of the problem of religion and sex abuse in the United States.

Kathleen Holscher is associate professor of religious studies and American studies, and holds the endowed chair in Roman Catholic studies, at the University of New Mexico.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Priests That Moved: Catholicism, Colonized Peoples, and Sex Abuse in the U.S. Southwest appeared first on The Revealer.

We repeat this cycle every few years, most recently in the wake of the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report. In the opening sentences of the report, the grand jurors lamented the consequences of their own amnesia:

We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.

As the jurors recognized, we tend to imagine the sexual abuse of children as other people’s pain, as something that only happens in other parishes, other families, other communities. But child rape is exceedingly common. Pretending otherwise diminishes the visibility of survivors, while also rendering the specifically religious elements of Catholic abuse even more opaque.

Our willful ignorance about child sexual abuse also raises two problems for Catholic survivors in particular. The first problem is that, historically, clergy sex abuse is not a new phenomenon; it has plagued the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. What is relatively new is the widespread knowledge that the Church aggressively and systematically covered up rapes perpetrated by its own priests. I say “relatively new” because American Catholic survivors have been trying to bring attention to this problem for more than 35 years.

Survivor activist Barbara Blaine

The most intense periods of survivor activism have followed new revelations of abuse, especially in the wake of Jason Berry’s reporting on clergy abuse in Louisiana in 1985; early survivor-leader Jeanne Miller’s advocacy tour in 1988; survivor Frank Fitzpatrick’s emotional prime-time television appearances in 1992; the award-winning reporting of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team in 2002; the separate criminal convictions, in 2012, of Missouri Bishop Robert Finn and Philadelphia’s Monsignor William Lynn; and the recent 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report.

The second problem is less obvious but more important. By acting scandalized, again and again, at each new wave of clergy sex abuse revelations, we collectively re-harm survivors.

A Voyeurism That Re-Victimizes

In the interviews I have conducted with Catholic victims since 2011, I have seen firsthand how devastating this cycle can be, including in my most recent work with survivors from the Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Erie dioceses in Pennsylvania.

Last winter, some of these Pennsylvania survivors were flown to New York and Los Angeles to appear on morning- and afternoon-television talk shows. Media networks wooed them with promises of documentaries and exclusive interviews. Prominent Catholic groups also vowed their support – even sending one of these victims to Rome for Pope Francis’s February summit on clergy sexual abuse. And high-profile attorneys swooped in to recruit these survivors as new clients, reassuring them that their proven track record of suing other dioceses would pave a swift path to justice.

In short, winter 2019 was a season of hope for these survivors, replete with anticipation that not only the Catholic Church but the entire country might finally come to terms with child sexual assault. In this #MeToo era, it seemed we might at last remember that there are actually victims all around us — in all of our families, parishes, and neighborhoods — who need our support.

Survivors after the PA Grand Jury Report

But winter 2020 has been dire for the Pennsylvania survivors I’ve met. Eighteen months after the grand jury report, the journalists have moved on. Newspaper editors stopped taking survivors’ calls. Media producers haven’t followed through on the contracts they had promised. Even survivors’ new attorneys are less responsive, having shifted their focus away from Pennsylvania and towards New York and New Jersey, where recent judicial and legislative shifts meant to help Catholic survivors in those states have also, inadvertently, made their markets more profitable for victims’ lawyers.

Many Pennsylvania survivors will receive some financial compensation, but that is not the case for survivors who long ago reported their abuse to the state. Although today’s media coverage is saturated with reports of multi-million dollar lawsuits, survivors who settled out-of-court with Church attorneys in the 1980s and 1990s routinely received as little as $5,000 to $10,000. When these more seasoned survivors travel to support others who are coming forward for the first time, it is usually at their own expense.

In addition to these social and financial costs, the shift out of the spotlight has also taken an intense emotional toll on the Pennsylvania survivors with whom I’ve worked. They no longer smile and laugh, and several have been clinically diagnosed – for the first time in their lives – with anxiety and depression. Last year, they felt seen and heard. This year, they feel abandoned and silenced. When we turn our interest to a new scandal, we essentially discard the prior survivors who came forward, leaving them isolated and newly-vulnerable.

After the spotlight moves on, survivors face an unstable future. Their most painful and intimate secret is now public. Their family and friends cannot un-know what they have now learned. Frequently, lifelong friendships disintegrate after a survivor publicly reveals that a priest whom their neighbors loved and adored was actually, also, a pedophile.

Multiple survivors have told me that the last time they felt this forsaken and betrayed was in the immediate aftermath of their childhood sexual abuse. This is why survivors, when speaking to each other and their loved ones, often refer to the spotlight’s shift as a form of “re-victimization.”

This term, re-victimization, gives shape to the pain that survivors feel when we perpetually abandon them. The other context in which survivors talk about being re-victimized is when, after reporting their abuse to their local parish or diocese, the bishop failed to remove the abusive priest from contact with other children.

We should note the similarities between the patterns of our cultural amnesia, on the one hand, and the Catholic Church’s empty promises of reform, on the other. In both contexts, the survivors who come forward to share their intimate suffering are ultimately ignored.

The Church silences victims and denies the truth of their pain. But our cultural voyeurism is also harmful. Instead of permanently empowering survivors, our cycles of spotlight create temporary exhibitions of their pain. We leverage survivors’ suffering to fuel our self-righteous rage, and then we move on. These are stories and experiences that most of us don’t have to live, and we can forget about their horrors just as quickly as we can re-visit them.

In short, we have all reduced survivors into entertainment by selectively consuming their pain.

Rethinking Our Affection for Spotlight

Americans were scandalized by the Pennsylvania report because we forgot, apparently, that there are real victims of clergy sexual abuse. To the extent that we have “remembered” prior waves of Catholic abuse at all, it is through the tropes of heroes and villains. This moral binary is what drives the plot of the 2015 blockbuster film Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Spotlight enshrines the heroism of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” special investigation team, which in 2002 published more than 600 news articles exposing how the Archdiocese of Boston, under the administration of Cardinal Bernard Law, systematically covered up thousands of abuse cases that were reported to the church.

From a historian’s viewpoint, Spotlight gets many things right. During the first half-hour of the movie, there are shout-outs to Richard Sipe, a Catholic psychiatrist-turned-whistleblower, and to one of the first survivor organizations, the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). More importantly, the movie acknowledges the relentless courage of Phil Saviano, a survivor who had for years been sending the newspaper evidence of his abuse and its cover-up.

But as Spotlight unfolds, survivors quickly fade into the background.

Whether we assess the film’s priorities by the celebrity of its casting or by each character’s time on-screen, the result is clear: the heroes in Spotlight are the journalists and, to a lesser extent, the lawyers. The movie villainizes Church officials, Catholic donors, and Catholic parochial school leaders, yet their characters also receive significant screen time. Least visible of all are the survivors themselves.

By celebrating journalists, Spotlight leverages survivors’ suffering in order to create a much happier narrative – a heartwarming story, which, at its base, draws upon the myth that America is a land of virtue and hard work. From this perspective, the Church’s wealth and corruption were outdone by the dedication, honesty, and determination of middle-class journalists.

Spotlight is emblematic of the broader challenge of how to make sense of sexual assault survivors, whose unifying trait is a profound tragedy that defies the predominant media tropes of triumph and failure. Survivors’ feat is that they are still here; unlike many clergy victims, they have persevered through the temptations of self-medication and suicide. Survivors don’t see themselves as heroic. Many Catholic victims don’t even see their abusers as evil, understanding them instead as fellow humans who were suffering from tragically common social and psychiatric disorders.

Nor are survivors, as our amnesia suggests, merely passive or infantile. Every survivor who I have met has thought through the broader religious and cultural dynamics of clergy sexual abuse. Most of them also have a rigorous, critical, and historical understanding of how and why they were targeted as victims. What survivors don’t have is our sustained attention.

Survivors’ actual experiences of clergy abuse are betwixt and between our dominant media tropes. By framing clergy sexual abuse as a battle between heroic journalists and villainous bishops, we are ignoring the much more conflicted and complex experiences of survivors themselves.

Our limited knowledge of clergy sexual abuse has been built on the backs of survivors’ suffering. It is time for us to transform our transient outrage into more sustained support of survivors and their families. This will mean moving away from happier, triumphalist narratives of change and reform, and instead asking survivors how we can help them after the spotlight has moved on.

Brian Clites is an expert in clergy sexual abuse and has spent the last nine years interviewing Catholic survivors in the United States. In his upcoming book, Surviving Soul Murder, Clites explains how American survivors have transformed their suffering into legal and political reforms. Clites teaches religious studies at Case Western Reserve University, where he is also the Associate Director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Problem with Spotlights: Rethinking Our Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse appeared first on The Revealer.

One summer in college, while I was working at a Jewish camp in the north Georgia mountains, my mom called to tell me that a beloved teacher at the Jesuit high school I had attended had been arrested for having sex with a minor. While I am not a survivor of sexual abuse, hearing about what he did upset me greatly. That teacher taught the required World Religions course for first-year students and was the person who first ignited my interest in the study of religion. A few years later, I learned that a former president of my high school, a priest, had abused multiple students before becoming president of a Jesuit university. More than a decade after that, my high school released the names of all the priests and religious leaders who had been accused of sexual abuse within the school’s history. By that year, 2018, stories about abusive priests had become both routine and shocking—routine in that Americans were accustomed to such reports, and shocking in that there seemed no end to new revelations about abusive clergy and the institutions that protected them.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Although clergy sexual abuse is not a new issue, conversations about the topic remain difficult. Our discomfort with this subject, though, should not silence us. If we are going to understand this pervasive problem and change our culture, we must address this issue directly, hence the reason for the Revealer’s first themed special issue: “Religion and Sex Abuse Within and Beyond the Catholic Church.”

Our special issue addresses the Catholic Church first because the abuse crisis remains a profound problem within this particular institution. Even after countless victim testimonies, grand jury reports, and lawsuits, the Church has still not sufficiently dealt with the crisis. And as some of the articles in this issue highlight, we are only now beginning to understand how the sex abuse crisis played out differently in communities of color than it did in predominantly white parishes.

The special issue also explores religion and sex abuse “beyond” Roman Catholicism because the Catholic Church is far from the only religious institution that has protected abusive religious leaders instead of the people who put their trust in them. Too often, exclusive focus on the Catholic Church has led us to overlook problems of sexual abuse elsewhere and, worse, to assume other religious communities are inherently safer than Catholic ones. While the Catholic Church deserves scrutiny, we need to expand our understanding of how sex abuse has taken place within diverse religious communities.

Our special issue opens with Brian Clites’s “The Problem with Spotlights: Rethinking Our Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse,” where he writes about what happens to survivors when the media showers them with attention and then moves on when the news cycle shifts to a different topic. His article asks everyone to consider how we can better support survivors of abuse. Next, in “Priests that Moved: Catholicism, Colonized Peoples, and Sex Abuse in the U.S. Southwest,” Kathleen Holscher reports on the higher rates of clergy sexual abuse in parishes populated with Native Americans and Latinos. She also explains Catholic theological ideas that allowed the sex abuse crisis to proliferate. Likewise, in “Black Catholics, Racism, and the Sex Abuse Crisis: A Personal Reflection,” Tia Noelle Pratt explores how Black survivors of clergy sexual abuse have been treated differently than whites, and she shares her own struggles as a Black Catholic who studies the Church’s racist practices. Kaya Oakes similarly reflects on her relationship with Catholicism in “On Forgiveness, Clergy Abuse, and the Need for New Understandings,” where she writes about the harm done to survivors when the Church asks them for forgiveness without first taking steps towards legitimate atonement. And we are publishing an excerpt from the “Forum on Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion” first published in the American Catholic Studies journal where Julie Byrne argues in “The Distortions of Exceptionalism, Again” that sex abuse is not unique to Roman Catholicism but common throughout patriarchal cultures. Stopping sex abuse, Byrne argues, means we must examine other institutions like universities and the military with the same scrutiny we bring to the Catholic Church.

Although clergy sexual abuse has received substantial attention in the twenty-first century, sex abuse within religious communities is neither new nor an exclusively Catholic phenomenon. In “A History of Sex Abuse in the Protestant Imagination,” Suzanna Krivulskaya explores how journalists handled allegations of sexual misconduct differently when Protestant pastors were accused rather than Catholic priests. In “Jews, Sex Positivity, and Abuse,” Sarah Imhoff considers the dangerous assumption that sex abuse does not happen within Jewish communities because of the common idea that Judaism is a more sex-positive religion than Christianity. And, in “The Guru-Disciple Relationship and the Complications of Consent” Amanda Lucia questions how we are to make sense of sexual relationships between a Hindu guru and their disciples when disciples are expected to cede all authority to the guru.

Given the insidiousness of sexual abuse throughout our culture, I hope this special issue encourages more people to discuss this widespread problem. Silence keeps the status quo in place. May these articles embolden more people to demand action, support survivors, and make ending sexual abuse an urgent priority.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Special Issue Editor’s Letter: Religion & Sex Abuse Within and Beyond the Catholic Church appeared first on The Revealer.