Clergy Sexual Abuse: Social Science Perspectives ed. by Claire M. Renzetti, Sandra Yocum (review)

This book is a collection of essays by social scientists, adding insights from their areas of expertise – sociology, criminology, cultural anthropology, and psychology – to the rather saturated issue of clergy sexual abuse. While most of the essays deal with the sexual abuse of children by clergy, primarily Roman Catholic clergy, two of the essays deal with the sexual abuse of adults by clergy. It was those two essays that I found the most interesting because they provided the freshest insights.

In “Don’t Call it an Affair,” Diana Garland, writes a striking essay on the primarily female victims of sexually predatory pastors. Perhaps I found this piece so interesting because it did not deal with the ever-depressing topic of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. The pastors involved here are ecumenical abusers. They include both celibate Catholic priests and married Protestant pastors and Jewish rabbis. I was struck by how similar the response of adult women who had been sexually abused by their pastors was to those of the children who had been abused – from not understanding what was happening to not knowing how to tell people about it to the years of recovery required. The other piece on adult sexual abuse, “Clergy Sexual Misconduct with Congregants or Parishioners,” by Bradley Tobin and Kris Helge is primarily a brief on the need for state statutes criminalizing sexual activity between ministers and their adult congregants. Evidently thirteen states already have such laws, and evidently they pass constitutional muster.

The other articles are more specifically on clergy, primarily Catholic, abuse of youngsters. Karen Terry, whose work I admire, summarizes her John Jay data, but also repeats the canard that the infamous Mouton-Doyle-Peterson report was circulated to the American Catholic bishops at Collegeville in 1985. It was not. John C. Gonsiorek is justifiably angry with the Catholic hierarchy. His description of them as out of touch aristocrats gets more support everyday from dioceses across the country. But his solution to the problem requires rewriting the First Amendment in a way that is unlikely. I am sure that Paul Steele in “Contingent Crimes” was saying something insightful, but his retreat into jargon made his insights inaccessible to me. Sandra Yocum in her “The Priest and Catholic Culture as Symbolic System of Purity,” is on to something in the idea that when spiritual authority is built on sexual purity, the holders of that authority who act out sexually completely devastate their victims and destroy their authority. She seems to think, however, that the child victims of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the United States were more vulnerable because they were trained on the Baltimore Catechism’s exalted view of priesthood. This is truer of the priest abusers – trained in the 1950s and 1960s – than it is of their victims. Children abused in the 1970s and early 1980s – which is when most of the abuse occurred – never saw a Baltimore Catechism. It was long gone from the scene by then.

Like most collections, this one has its highs and lows. The editors did a fine job in choosing interesting topics and in making sure that there was no overlap in coverage, not an easy task in compiling such works.