American Catholic Studies

The study of contemporary Catholicism often starts with the premise of a cultural divide between “conservative” and “liberal” Catholics. Popular discourse has trended towards the polarization of political perspectives; as an intellectual community, we are doing little better. Many of us seem to occupy a position of mild discontent vis-à-vis this paradigm. Recognizing these binaries as inept, but lacking more lucid alternatives, we continue to reference these ubiquitous divides – conservative/liberal, right/left, traditional/progressive – as they suit our individual labors. This rubric seems to have been solidified, if not manufactured, by scholars who came of age amidst debates over the changes of Vatican II.²² Recognizing this trend makes it less surprising that recent literature points, almost uniformly, to the Council as the advent of spiritual polarization.

Even scholars suspicious of the pre-/post-conciliar narrative have acquiesced to the notion that there is an irreconcilable split among U.S. laypersons, particularly concerning issues of sexuality and reproduction. For example, Joseph Chinnici warned “we tread on thin intellectual ice when we interpret developments in the conciliar era in terms of before/after, old/new, tradition/innovation, authority/freedom, obedience/dissent.”²³ Rather than abandoning these binaries, Chinnici [End Page 20] reattributes their causation to the “discernable polarization” produced by Roe v. Wade, after which “the middle would disappear.”²⁴ Following, among others, Andrew Greeley and John McGreevy, James O’Toole’s The Faithful argues that Humanae Vitae solidified the “growing polarization of factions, self-consciously identified as liberal or conservative.”²⁵ Indeed, O’Toole resisted binary taxa in nearly every other paragraph of his text, save his analysis of the priestly sexual abuse crisis. This is the paradox of the paradigm: although there is perhaps no subject more ill-suited for the right/left binary than the politics of Catholic gender and sexuality, it is precisely the issue at which even scholars who seek to avoid this dichotomy have capitulated.

In my fieldwork among Chicago survivors of clergy sexual abuse, I too have been tormented by the extant paradigm. Sometimes it is merely an issue of Catholic politics mapping askew, rather than parallel, to secular categories. For example, “Fred” supported Cardinal George’s public opposition to the Affordable Care Act, agreeing with George that Catholic organizations should not fund access to contraception and abortion.²⁶ But Fred was infuriated with George’s opposition to the legislative push in Springfield to legalize same-sex marriage. While Fred supports marriage equality as a civil right, he explained, he does not want the Vatican to welcome gay priests. Instead, Fred thinks that eliminating mandatory celibacy and introducing women’s ordination would better address the recent decline in priestly vocations. The ease with which Fred embodies these tensions is typical of the forty-two survivors I have interviewed, whose demographics reflect prior studies that have concluded that the movement includes many women and men who are, by historical and sociological criteria, exemplary Catholics.²⁷ As convenient as it would be, we cannot simply dismiss survivors as rogue Catholics. The leaders of the survivor movement include Eucharistic ministers, cantors, deacons, and priests, and the charisms of the Chicago survivor [End Page 21] movement were forged by their founders’ experiences in prior lay organizations – particularly the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Youth Organization, and the Christian Family Movement.

The liberal/conservative rubric is even less apt for analyzing the politics of the lay organizations to which Fred belongs. For example, when I began my research, I noticed that the Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) shared a broad set of emic terms. I presumed that this communal language derived from overlapping expectations. After two years of fieldwork, however, it became apparent that this shared language actually eclipsed significant differences in each group’s ecclesiological goals. “Voice” is one of the most affective terms among survivors. For members of SNAP, voice primarily means the ability to annunciate the details of their abuse, first in private support meetings, then to their families and loved ones, and ultimately to the public media. This understanding...