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The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis and the Mourning of American Catholic Innocence

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Abstract

The passionate response of many American Catholics to the clergy sex abuse crisis is an expression not only of legitimate anger over the sexual abuse of children and young people by Roman Catholic priests but also of resistance to mourning the significant losses post-immigrant American Catholics sustained in the last third of the twentieth century.

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Notes

  1. American Catholic resistance to Vatican teaching on contraception after the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae might seem to contradict this assertion (cf. Tentler 2005). Yet the intensity of the American Catholic conversation about sexuality since 1968 suggests that the long-standing preoccupation with sexual infraction has shifted to different kinds of infraction but has not diminished.

  2. For a discussion of the place of the Catholics discourse of suffering in Italian-American immigrant experience, see Robert A. Orsi, “‘Mildred, is it fun to be a cripple?’ The culture of suffering in mid-twentieth century American Catholicism” (Orsi 1997).

  3. Diane Batts Morrow argues, however, that for members of the first black order of Roman Catholic sisters in the USA, the possibility of living a celibate lifestyle symbolized just the opposite (Morrow 2002).

  4. For an examination of the ways in which blacks were excluded from Federal programs that catapulted many white-ethnic Catholics into the middle class—Social Security, unemployment, the minimum wage, the “GI Bill,” and others—see Katznelson (2005).

  5. For a discussion of the Vatican emphasis on the innocence of the fetus, see Dombrowski and Deltete (2000).

  6. As its name suggests, SNAP is concerned primarily with the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, whereas Linkup/Healing Alliance, while forming initially in response to clergy sex abuse, has attempted to broaden its scope. In its latest incarnation, Linkup/Healing Alliance describes itself as “a group that offers positive options to those whose lives have been impacted by trauma” (The Healing Alliance; Jenkins 1996, p. 43).

  7. In August 2005, a judge of the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Washington in Spokane ruled that Roman Catholic parishes should be included in the estate of the bankrupt Spokane diocese, a judgment that could force dioceses all over the country to sell parishes that are not involved in clergy sex abuse to settle bankruptcies related to sex abuse cases in other parishes (Miller 2005).

  8. The author of this article has been involved in the movement for Catholic women’s ordination since 1975 and served as president of the board of directors of the Women’s Ordination Conference from 2000 to 2002.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Diane Jonte-Pace, David Harrington Watt, Laura Levitt, and Tracy Fessenden for helpful suggestions regarding earlier versions of this article.

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  1. American Baptist Seminary of the West and Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, 94704, USA

    Marian Ronan

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Ronan, M. The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis and the Mourning of American Catholic Innocence. Pastoral Psychol 56, 321–339 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-007-0099-5

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