What Did I Know, and When Did I Know It?

What did I know, and when did I know it? For those of us of a certain age, the original form of those questions is burned into memory. We know where we were when we first heard them. For me, it was my first summer in graduate school, and my colleagues and I organized a floating Watergate-hearings party: we’ll watch at your apartment today, we’ll be at mine tomorrow, and so on. None of us got any work done. Now, here we are, a distressing number of years later, applying the questions to an entirely different set of historical circumstances and – an even more difficult task – to ourselves. We now know the extent of the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests in the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century. How much did we know then, as the pattern emerged in the 1990s and especially after the flood of revelations starting in 2002? And now that we do know, how does that knowledge affect our work as scholars, not just in accounting for this particular aspect of the American Catholic historical story but for others as well?

In my case, the approach to the subject comes from two directions: my previous life as an archivist and my current one as a historian. A word or two about each. For nine years, from the late 1970s through the middle 1980s, I served as the archivist for the archdiocese of Boston, later the epicenter of the crisis. In that capacity, I had responsibility for organizing and making accessible the historical records of Catholicism in New England, from the time of the American Revolution onward, and I also had a role in managing the current records of the archdiocese in the interest of administrative usefulness and efficiency. For that reason, I took it somewhat personally when Cardinal Bernard Law, defending his failure to act more decisively with offending priests, blamed it all on what he called “inadequate record-keeping.” However that may be, amid all the rich and extensive historical records that the archives held, I saw evidence of only a single instance of clergy sexual abuse, dating from the 1890s. The documentation for it consisted of one short sentence, written in the hand of John Williams (archbishop, 1866–1907) in a small notebook in which he kept track of the parish assignments of his priests. As I recall, the sentence said something like this: “on the complaint of several young men and boys of St. N parish, removed Father X as pastor.” (The parish and the priest were both named, though I have obviously omitted them here.) The priest in question was sent to a monastery in England, where he remained for the rest of his life, periodically receiving bank drafts from Archbishop Williams to cover his living expenses there. That was it. By no means had I looked at every record pertaining to every priest – there were about nine hundred in Boston by 1900; more subsequently – but if there was evidence of similar cases I’m confident that I would have encountered it at some point. On the basis of the records that were preserved in the archives, this one instance of abuse clearly seemed exception rather than rule.

But there were other records for the more recent period, and these ultimately told a different story. I distinctly recall the point at which it became apparent to me that, for more recent and current priests of Boston, there were two parallel sets of personnel records: the routine files, filled with the kind of thing that shows up in any such file in any human resources office, and the files of what might be considered “problem priests.” The former were in the archives; the latter were not. I became aware of those problematic files when my boss, the archdiocesan chancellor (an auxiliary bishop and the man who, more than anyone else, had been responsible for establishing the archives program and hiring me to run it) gave me one of them and asked me to summarize it...