Colonialism Is Abuse: Reconsidering Triumphalist Narratives in Catholic Studies

In recent years, scholars who have written about Catholic child abuse often remark upon the dearth of literature on the subject, as if it were an internal taboo within the discipline of Catholic studies.³² Certainly, that sentiment was part of the genesis of this roundtable, coupled with the feeling that continued silence rendered scholars complicit with covering up this violence against children and their families—against the body of the community that we study. There has been frequent speculation in the months since the Pennsylvania grand jury report that, perhaps this time, there will be real change in the way the church addresses abuse. This has been echoed by earnest penitential sentiments among scholars of U.S. Catholicism to do better, and acknowledge that abuse is a mainstream part of Catholic history, rather than something marginal.

When the most recent Pennsylvania grand jury report on clerical child abuse dropped this past August, I was at a retreat center, some forty-five minutes outside of Denver, at a training camp for Indigenous activists—as one of just a few “settler” participants. As I compulsively scrolled through social media on my phone during supper, I was bombarded by a deluge of posts, subtweets, and links to and about the report. Since I was still at camp for several more days, my engagement with the outside world was limited—maybe happily—to brief spurts of online communication and texting. I continued to be struck by the contrast between the palpable and sometimes explicit shock voiced by many (it should be noted, white) academic colleagues—several of whom are established experts in U.S. Catholic history, and the utter lack of surprise that I was met with whenever I mentioned the report to my Indigenous activist colleagues. Among the many other projects—mundane and supernatural, virtuous and duplicitous—that Catholicism has been enmeshed in throughout a half-millennium in the Americas, violence against Indigenous peoples has been one part of that history, as Pope Francis acknowledged during his 2015 visit to Bolivia.³³ This collective memory and lived religious experience of Catholic traditions of various forms of abuse informed Indigenous activists’ lack of surprise to news that nevertheless continued to shock me and other non-Indigenous scholars of Catholicism.

Peter Steinfels has written an extensive, and at times palpably disdainful, reflection on the outrage machine that followed the Pennsylvania grand jury report, based on what he sees as a common lack of critical reading of the document itself.³⁴ But at least some of the passionate response is tied to collective historical consciousness, and the concomitant horror and grim familiarity that the report elicited, imperfect exegesis or no. One of the most pernicious aspects, it seems, of the apparatus of clerical abuse has been its resilient capacity to present abuse as hyperlocal—particular to discrete times and places—rather than as endemic throughout Catholicland. So, after thirty years of revelations of diocesan conspiracies, there can still be a sense of novelty every time we are reminded that abusers find safe haven within the fold of clericalism. In a sense, the isolation that abusers use to control and silence their victims is replicated on a macro scale by the parochialism of the diocesan structure—encouraging a focus on individual priests, priest rings, bishops, and dioceses, rather than the church as a whole.

Centering Indigenous communities—the original inhabitants of the Americas—within American history, rather than as something peripheral to the conventional triumphalist narrative of European expansion, means becoming receptive to reckoning with Indigenous dispossession at the hands of Christian (Catholic and otherwise) settler colonialism.³⁵ For much of the evolution of the discipline, historians have cast Catholics as quintessentially American, as both outsiders to mainstream Protestant power who assimilate into the U.S. melting pot, and by virtue of their antiquity as the among the first wave of European settlers. The former narrative is a vessel for earnest American Dream immigrant fantasies, while the latter is more morally fraught with the overt implications of empire. But, of course, as David Treuer notes, settlers were not the only...