A new report from the Jesuit-run Fordham University on the long-term impacts of clergy sexual abuse criticizes the global Jesuit religious order for placing importance on discretion when handling Catholic priests accused of abuse instead of on discipline or prevention of further cases.
Newsroom (27/01/2023 2:31 PM, Gaudium Press) — The report, released Jan. 26, summarizes the findings of 18 research projects that were part of a years long effort to better understand clergy abuse.
The text, which contains several case studies of Jesuit abusers and details a project examining how Jesuit norms have harmed the order’s response to abuse, comes as the church continues to reckon with how the Vatican and Jesuit superiors handled abuse allegations against a high-profile religious artist, Jesuit Fr. Marko Rupnik. The project is described as involving interviews with 13 Jesuits, “most of whom have held significant leadership positions” in the order.
“There is an emphasis on being patient and merciful that allows for inferior performance and outright misbehavior,” writes C. Colt Anderson, a professor of Christian spirituality at Fordham who was the principal investigator on that project. As a member of a religious order told us, there is confusion between what is simply sinful and what is criminal.
The Jan. 26 report is the capstone of Fordham’s “Taking Responsibility: Jesuit Educational Institutions Confront the Causes and Legacy of Clergy Sexual Abuse” project.
As part of the process for the project, researchers at ten different Jesuit universities applied for and received sub-grants to study specific aspects of clergy sexual abuse and the responses to it, including moral injury, litigation, intersections with colonization and racism, and the effects of telling survivors’ stories. Many of the teams were multidisciplinary.
The final report also includes short, practical guides on topics such as encouraging whistleblowing, communicating about the abuse scandal, and reforming Jesuit rules and norms.
Catherine Osborne, the program coordinator for Taking Responsibility, said that the project’s leaders decided “we were not going to try to say anything definitive about the abuse crisis,” but instead ask many researchers “to contribute a little bit to a mosaic picture.
“We know through forty years of work on clergy sexual abuse that this isn’t just a matter of some particularly bad people — ‘a few bad apples’ as one of our research projects put it — but there are structural problems,” wrote Osborne “What that means is that clergy sexual abuse is really everybody’s problem [for anyone who] is Catholic or works for a Catholic institution.”
Osborne said that while people involved in Catholic institutions have different roles to play in terms of preventing abuse, “there’s still a level at which we’re all part of the same system.”
In terms of Jesuit failings in sexual abuse, Anderson reports that Jesuit priests and brothers often face different disciplinary processes than lay faculty and staff at Jesuit schools and universities. Jesuit supervisors, he writes, have to balance the non-legalistic norms of the order with an institution’s rules when supervising another Jesuit.
“Jesuits emphasize the importance of charitable discretion and profess a desire to save people from embarrassment,” Anderson writes. “As a result, the theme of people ‘disappearing’ was a recurring motif.”
Fr. Bryan Massingale, a theological ethicist at Fordham, investigated clergy sexual abuse in African American communities. His findings highlighted that, while Black Catholics have experienced sexual abuse, only one diocese in Alexandria, Louisiana, keeps demographic information about abuse survivors. Massingale wrote, “The true scope of harm suffered by Black persons and other communities of color is unknown and unknowable.”
A multidisciplinary team from Loyola University Maryland, including a psychologist, theologians and counsellors, studied the spiritual damage done by clergy sexual abuse to Catholics and former Catholics in Baltimore, particularly focusing on Black Catholics and former Catholics.
Through surveys and interviews, they found that due to the abuse, Catholics and former Catholics tended to have spiritual struggles and crises that were interpersonal or with the institution, but not within themselves or with God.
Black Catholics said they had fewer struggles with the abuse crisis because they had already focused on their local parishes as a result of institutional racism. One participant said, “I think white Catholic churches were shaken in a way that at least my African American Catholic Church wasn’t because there was already an inherent distrust in the institution to look out for us.
In contextualizing the project, the team highlighted that priests who had been credibly accused of sexually abusing Indigenous communities were sent to retire in a house surrounded by Gonzaga’s campus up until 2016.
Franciscan Fr. Daniel Horan attended the Gonzaga conference and wrote that “the quality of scholarship, the level of discussion, and the seriousness and sincerity of all the participants was exceptional.
Among Taking Responsibility’s leaders, steering committee and advisory committee, there is one Jesuit. Similarly, one Jesuit, Fr. Gerard “Jerry” McGlone from the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, was among the investigators.
McGlone, a survivor of childhood clergy sexual abuse, investigated the impacts of hearing clergy abuse survivors’ stories.
“Religious coping, beliefs, spiritual practices did not change but stayed the same for those who saw a survivor’s story. Most importantly, the levels of spirituality increased, while levels of institutional betrayal and aspects of moral injury … actually went down,” McGlone wrote.
McGlone concludes that “the way forward might be to embrace difficult stories.”
Contrary to popular beliefs and common myths that engaging with survivor stories’ destroys faith,’ in our study, it actually does the opposite,” McGlone wrote.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from NCR Online
