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Reviewed by:
  • When Values Collide: The Catholic Church, Sexual Abuse, and the Challenges of Leadership
  • Rodger Van Allen, David O’Brien, and William L. Portier
Joseph P. Chinnici, When Values Collide: The Catholic Church, Sexual Abuse, and the Challenges of Leadership (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2010)

Summary Review

There is now a vast but necessarily continuing body of writing on the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal. Joseph Chinnici makes a distinctive contribution to this literature because of his perspective, because of his skills as an historian, because of the depth of his analysis and because of his reflections on a theology and spirituality of hope and grace. The book does not evade the immediate institutional challenge of the sexual abuse of minors, but seeks ultimately to convey a story of faith seeking understanding by considering how God might be present in and to the Church even through the appalling history of these times.

Chinnici’s special perspective derives from his election in 1988 at age forty-three, as the provincial minister of the Santa Barbara Province of the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans). He and his colleagues in provincial leadership soon found themselves engulfed by the clergy sex abuse issue, most strikingly in 1992, in the province’s minor seminary, St. Anthony’s in Santa Barbara, where over a forty-year period it was found that eleven of the forty-four Franciscans who had served there were abusers. Chinnici’s statement of personal anguish in this situation is so articulate that it must be shared:

How could it be that people who were seen as partners in ministry, brothers in profession, priests who had performed many good deeds and were popular and well loved by many good people, in fact, good persons producing good fruit, how could they have performed such acts of betrayal? And where could one place one’s confidence? The hierarchy appeared frightened; the moral integrity of one’s brothers seemed compromised; the help of experts, vague; the ordinary mechanisms of the civil and social order working for justice, inadequate. Could a person trust himself, when his knowledge had proven to be ignorance, his heart’s affinities misplaced, his central identity judged by others complicit in a class of malefactors?

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Chinnici’s narrative in this chapter, entitled “Confessions,” presents an evolving, unfolding story of initiatives and reflections that have simply not been shared by others in church leadership. He does this candidly and humbly, acknowledging the various junctures where he “had more to learn.” (30) He is not, however, fundamentally displeased with the action his leadership team took: the establishment of a separate and independent review board composed of five lay persons and one Franciscan from another province. Among the laity was an attorney, three psychotherapists, and a father whose son had attended St. Anthony’s. Chinnici believes that his efforts and those of some others in positions of ecclesial authority and leadership in the period from 1988 to 1994, collaborative efforts with victims and professional laity, to develop strategies that attempted both to purify the church of abuse and to bridge the differences between “the colliding systems and values in clerical and lay worlds” (9) were historically significant. He regrets the overwhelmingly adversarial atmosphere that emerged and took over after the events with Cardinal Law in Boston in 2002.

Chinnici’s personal experience and perspective in chapters two and three follow an historical overview of the clergy abuse matter that is simply the best treatment anyone has yet written. It is massively researched and periodized as follows: 1950–1982, Public Invisibility; 1982–1988, Initial Recognition and Institutional Response; 1988–1994, Mobilizing Alternative Institutional Approaches; 1994–2001, Percolation and Institutional Splitting; and 2002-Present, the Economics of a National Explosion.

Chapter four treats the scandal as the symbolic center point of larger battles over power between the hierarchical and communal dimensions of the church, and argues that “a fundamental consequence of the abuse crisis has been the loss of a shared ethical space of reciprocal exchange between people.” (13) One way to a recovery of a space of trust between people is described in chapters five and six, through key Franciscan themes...

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