Opportunity Knocking

The Catholic sex abuse “crisis” does not properly belong to “history”; it is far from past. Whenever yet another diocese and communities within it blows up, a local bishop – most recently one Mark L. Bartchak of Altoona-Johnstown, Pennsylvania, March 2016 – emerges from a bunker to reassure his constituents: “We will pass through this darkness.”²¹

Perhaps. Decades or centuries from now historians will assess the accuracy of that statement and an abundance of ritual lamentations just like it. The scholars gathered at a January 2016 ACHA panel on “Writing Catholic History After the Sex Abuse Crisis” shared a mood more contemplative than prophetic, exemplified by historian John Seitz’s sage reflection: “It is crucial to respond to crisis with introspection rather than reaction. If we are to be or become ‘responsible post-crisis historians’ we need to ask ourselves not just about the methods and topics of our research, but also about our own entanglements with the Catholic past.”

“We mourn here as historians do,” Seitz explained, invoking a practice (adapted from a different context found in theologian Marian Ronan’s 2009 study, Tracing the Sign of the Cross) that “includes unflinching melancholic attentiveness to the scandals themselves” in addition to “scrutiny of the dreams embedded in our own methods.”

Seitz is currently engaged in a study of the “lives of priests” in the United States, particularly the “formation” experience of mid-twentieth century seminarians. While a toxic brand of “clericalism” is widely cited as an enabling factor in sex abuse, Seitz argues that the lives of priests (“a celibate caste of elevated divine intermediaries”), apprised in their totality, constitute “an irrefutable marker of Catholic difference.” Deep exploration of the sources of that difference, Seitz believes, might yield insights on the history of sex abuse and much more, in time.

Leslie Tentler and James O’Toole share Seitz’s conviction that we know remarkably little about the social history of the U.S. priesthood, and need to explore it in all dimensions; a provocative theme that yielded rare scholarly consensus on a subject so contentious many historians would rather eschew it entirely. Far from re-fetishizing the priesthood, Seitz, Tentler, and O’Toole discern how the mediating dimension of a priestly vocation opens up a historical dialogue; with hierarchs on the one hand, the rank and file on the other, while suspending the historical priesthood in a just slightly liminal space of its own. A focus on the history of priesthood becomes then a vehicle to fulfill the mandate articulated by O’Toole: “We also need to understand the larger setting in which sexual abuse was possible.”

Tentler and O’Toole discussed their experiences researching and writing on the priesthood in Detroit and Boston, respectively. Long before there was any sex abuse “scandal,” they both discerned anomalies in diocesan recordkeeping practices for clerical personnel: O’Toole in his role as director of Boston’s Archdiocesan archives and later as the leading historian of Catholicism in that city, Tentler while writing several chapters on Detroit priests for her acclaimed 1990 archdiocesan history. But the ensuing national avalanche of priestly sex abuse revelations left Tentler’s “confidence as a historian” so shaken she “simply abandoned” a separate planned history of the diocesan priesthood.

Leslie Tentler’s powerful witness to the unnerving, dispiriting impact of sex abuse on Catholic historians will not go unnoticed. Though she hopes to incorporate research on the priesthood into a survey of U.S. Catholic history, Tentler continues to lament the “evidentiary darkness” that shrouds the history of Catholic sex abuse.

Historians do look instinctively to archives and archivists for sources of light. Appearing on the Atlanta panel was Emilie Gagnet Leumas, director of Archives and Records for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Leumas reaffirmed the universal church’s avowed commitment to “disinterested openness, kind welcome, and competent service” in its archival practices: “So how does the recent crisis affect the openness of the records?” Leumas answered her own question by asserting: “In my opinion, it doesn’t, or let me rephrase that, it shouldn’t,” so long, as Leumas went on to explain, as diocesan archives are...