Writing Catholic History After the Sex Abuse Crisis: Introduction

I remember hearing a few years back that 99 percent of scholarly research now starts at google.com. I believe it; if I come across a name or place of interest in my work on twentieth century Catholicism, opening a search window to see what comes up is an easy first step. These searches don’t always pan out; sometimes when seeking out a person, the best I can do is a short obituary. Sometimes they are tremendously useful, turning up scanned newspaper clippings or archival finding aids. And occasionally, they are deeply troubling. The roundtable discussion reprinted here today, held at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association, had its genesis in such a search.² I was writing up a dissertation section about a modernist church, and looked up the priest who had it built, only to discover that he had been removed as pastor after a credible allegation of sexual abuse.

What to do with this information? It seemed irrelevant to my discussion of the priest’s (brief) career as an architectural patron. And yet, if there is one thing the wave of revelations collectively known as “the sexual abuse crisis” has made clear, it’s that this kind of event, and the church’s treatment of them, are anything but irrelevant to our understanding of mid-twentieth-century Catholicism. Judging by the large attendance at our panel, many historians of Catholicism feel similarly; in light of emerging information, we must re-evaluate the events of recent decades and the actions and characters of historical figures ranging from well-known bishops to obscure laymen and women. As we seek to write histories of the recent past that are not directly about sexual abuse, but that seek to describe the actions and thoughts of people who were involved, in ways small and large, in a web of events that appears to have touched nearly every corner of Catholic life, how can we integrate this knowledge? What does it mean to be an ethical and responsible post crisis historian? When the spotlight (or Spotlight) was turned on sexual abuse, what else did the light from its edges illuminate?

Spoiler alert: these are exceptionally difficult questions, to which none of the contributors here (or respondent James T. Fisher, who was unable to join us in person but graciously agreed to comment on the papers for this journal) offer easy answers. We did not conceptualize the panel as a conclusion to this discussion, but as an opening, a forum to give voice to some of our own questions about our role as a profession and to suggest some particular topics of interest moving forward.

By way of introduction, I would like to note several themes which emerged from both these essays and the discussion which followed the panelists’ contributions. The first of these is that this topic represents a reckoning with our own soft spots. While Catholic history is no longer as insular as it once was, many of the attendees at the ACHA still identify as Catholic. As such, we have an emotional investment in historical narratives. Speaking only for myself, I am strongly aware that the period from the 1960s through the 1980s remains a very touchy subject within the church. My desire, as a historian and human being, to speak the truth about who committed acts of sexual abuse and who participated in the ongoing cover-up, is sometimes at odds with a reluctance to bring any more “scandal” to a period already so contested. For example, it’s easy for me to condemn coverups, especially of egregious cases where offenders were transferred multiple times. But I ask myself, am I reluctant to pursue the suggestion that the rhetoric and practices of the sexual revolution may have empowered, even encouraged, priests to pursue sexual encounters with teenagers, ignoring their victims’ discomfort – relationships that a more sophisticated understanding of power dynamics now reveals as inherently abusive.

In the contributions reprinted here and in our ACHA conversation, while the individual dilemmas differ, it is clear that historians and archivists...