I also have a number of questions about what we are, or should be, looking at—the proper boundaries of the object of our inquiry.

Is this a particularly American phenomenon? After all, clerical sexual abuse has been reported in many parts of the world, even if nation-wide inquiries have been instituted in just a few places, such as the U.S. and Ireland. And is this an exclusively Christian (or even Catholic) phenomenon? In fact, a Chicago Tribune story from 2011 reported the laxity of control over Buddhist monks who engage in sexual abuse in the U.S., though interestingly the tenor of the story implies that the problem was the lack of central control of such priests, whereas in the cases we’re looking at here there are clear problems with the center itself.

But can we even say that this is an exclusively or an especially religious phenomenon and be sure that the levels of abuse we’ve witnessed in the archive greatly exceed those in society at large? That last question has to be asked, even if the answer seems likely to be in the affirmative.

A more historical question relates to the framing and trajectory of the issue in the archive itself and whether, for instance, we can discern a shift away from an exclusively spiritual framing of behavior by church officials towards one where both legal and psychiatric languages are being brought in, if sometimes also conspicuously ignored.

Thinking about the archive in terms of the history of Christianity prompts another question for me. I wonder about the extent to which invoking history suggests both causality and context. In other words, does locating these sexual acts in the context of the history of Christianity or Catholicism either explain them or explain them away? The answer to both of these questions should, I think, be “no,” but we still need to look for patterns and shifts in the trajectories of opinion or activity that we might deem to be significant. In what follows, I use different histories to show how they inflect my readings of the archives, though I do not attempt to connect these four historical fragments in a systematic way.

1.

My first fragment is one that I’ve derived both from my reading of the BishopAccountability.org materials and from a posting I remember from Katherine Ewing to The Immanent Frame on the subject of religion, spirituality, and sexual scandal. Ewing refers to the scandals around the Catholic Church but also to those relating to Independent Baptists and Muslims, noting that we are currently seeing a number of different religious institutions being rocked by such sexual episodes of accusation and outrage. This focus on the current situation invokes the need for historical consciousness: we need to be aware of how the scandals of today might, as Ewing implies, “articulate the sexual ‘orthodoxies’ of modern secularism and its discursive operations by locating specific structures of sexual desire, activity, and prohibition (such as the religious functionary who has sex with underage members of the church)….beyond the secular pale,” in other words highlighting acts that are considered “unthinkable for the liberal, secular subject.” Perhaps the scandalous, so defined, is dependent on certain definitions of childhood, of the legitimacy of the nuclear family, and of a modern sexual politics where spirituality marks an interior terrain parallel to and linked with sexuality—with both being seen as immanent sources of self within the liberal agentive subject. This is not for one instance to deny that Catholic conservatives might themselves be outraged by what has happened, but it is to point to wider and, to some degree, more historically specific dimensions of the character of current outrage and scandal.

2.

My second fragment is also recent but is more specific. As an anthropologist of evangelical Christianity as well as of varieties of Catholicism, I find it difficult to avoid reading these accusations and counter-accusations through the frame of the scandals amongst U.S. televangelicals of the 1980s and 1990s. To some degree, there are parallels—homosexuality features prominently in both forms of embodied submission and exchange, as do understandings of the power of sacred touch. In both cases, unsurprisingly, we see initial institutional attempts at concealment. But there are also some significant differences. Pedophilia does not feature particularly in televangelical discourses of the scandalous, for instance. Also significant is the way in which respective institutional discursive resources redefine and refine the scandal in the longer term. The Catholic archives tell a story of chronic, serial concealment and neutralization of morally reprehensible behavior through the creation of discursive disconnections, legal blockages, and so on. The rhetorical apparatus remains precisely private and in-house—or intra ecclesiam—as far as possible. But evangelical scandals often develop along a very different rhetorical and moral trajectory, eventually becoming grist to an evangelical mill of publicity and redemption for the perpetrator. Susan Harding remarks insightfully that scandals became part of the cultural instability that is an integral and productive force in American Protestant evangelical preaching, whereby preachers narrate and act out strategic indeterminacies—gaps, excesses, anomalies, breaches—that their followers harmonize and critics intensify. Such publicization and democratization of sin seems utterly different to that which we see in these archives.

3.

My third fragment is one I find harder to use as a frame in reading the archival material, and yet it’s surely relevant. It emerges out of my ethnographic and archival work on the Marian pilgrimage site of Walsingham in England. Walsingham is hardly alone in the Roman or Anglo-Catholic world in being a site where, from the medieval period to the present, we see morally and politically charged action carried out in relation to changing geographical and political landscapes but also—at the same time—to shifting ideas of the body, sexuality, gender, and family. Throughout the last century in particular Walsingham has encompassed battles between sites of celibacy, sexual repression, and explicit forms of mostly, but not exclusively, homosexual identity that, according to Dominic Janes, have combined to allow Walsingham to be imagined precisely as a space of queer desire—where the notion of queerness both includes and exceeds its sexual connotation. Of course, queerness must not be conflated with pedophilia, even as it mediates at Walsingham between the potent and the “merely” picturesque. There’s also the problem of how to avoid anachronisms in looking at the serial sexualization of such a Catholic site over the longue durée. But perhaps more relevant here is the fragile boundary between orthodoxy and transgression that we see at a site such as Walsingham and in the BishopAccountability.org archives. The question becomes: Does a religious context combining touch, co-presence, incarnation, hierarchical authority, and compartmentalization of spaces of action lend itself to catalyzing certain forms of sexual activity? Again, causalities cannot be asserted, but we should at least ask whether the kinds of sexual contacts we see in these archives form an unofficial and yet patterned form of what Webb Keane sees as a semiotic ideology, a coming together of words, objects, and bodies—in particular configurations that constitute and define different religious groups and their worlds. Sexual actions in this sense are both transgressive and somehow resonant of a religious world, constituting its semiotic make-up in patterned though not determined ways.

In a roughly similar semiotic vein, I would also invoke a historian of Walsingham, Susan Signe Morrison, who has written fascinatingly of how the figure of Ophelia in Hamlet, created not so many decades after the Reformation and the destruction of much of Walsingham, can be shown to exist as a trace of the Virgin of the pre-Reformation shrine: profaned, laid waste, destroyed. Ophelia becomes detritus through rhetorical and dramatic idioms of trash and sexualization. In turn, thinking of how some priests engage with and then drop their sexual prey, I confess that images of the making of waste, the creation and then discarding of matter and memories seen as out of place in relation to the institution of the church, kept coming to my mind as I perused the archive.

4.

My final fragment is both historical and ethnographic, and it’s one that is, I suppose, a typical knee-jerk reaction from an anthropologist to this kind of material. The history of anthropology and Christianity is riven with questions of how to deal with witchcraft but also with witchcraft accusations—with the epistemologies as well as the social and institutional arrangements behind episodes, moral dramas of allegation, accountability, and resolution. Much could be said about this, but I’ll confine myself to just two points, leaping off from how the material we’re looking at compares with the type of witchcraft accusations described by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

Evans-Pritchard stresses that accusations among the Azande, if they are to become socially and culturally salient, should take place among broad equals, often rivals. The cases we’ve been looking at raise complex questions concerning the very lack of equality—in relation to the respective ages of victim and accused, status within the church, perhaps also class. But we also see two institutional systems of determining status combining and clashing: that of the church and its sense of spiritual hierarchy and that of secular human rights, where equality before the law is more likely to be asserted. Secondly, Evans-Pritchard makes an epistemological point: the Azande do not allow individual cases where their system of explanation and accountability seems to fail to actually challenge their assumption that the system itself is to be relied upon. What strikes me about the archives is the way we see episodes of abuse leading us in two rather different moral, religious, and perhaps epistemological directions. On the one hand, episodes of abuse find lay victims losing faith in both the church and its system of accountability; on the other hand, following episodes of abuse many of the priests involved seem to gain in their faith in the system.

What these four fragments have in common are not only worries over how we make comparisons but also the conviction that a focus on the Catholic Church alone is not enough; not if we want to understand both the particularities and the banalities of its construction and response to abuse.

—Sister Mary Ignatius, in Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You

*   *   *

A bad joke such as this title expresses a great deal of nervousness. Ever since I was first asked to offer reflections on the study of religion and the Catholic sex abuse crisis, it has not been apparent to me that one could treat these events in a scholarly manner without cheapening them. How could one give a paper on this issue and not commit another violent act, by depersonalizing an act of abuse and transforming it into an abstract concept? One of the participants in the conference at Yale from which these posts to The Immanent Frame arise began by claiming “a scholarly response does not preclude a human one.” The force of this sentence comes from the scholarly audience’s wry knowledge that all too frequently a humanist scholar can be inhuman, as a result of giving a frame to complexity and flattening it so that life fits neatly into a conceptual scheme. In one of my favorite texts in the Jewish philosophical tradition, Moses Mendelssohn’s 1783 Jerusalem, Mendelssohn complained about the university professor who simply declaims “dead letter” from a podium. I am nervous that I am—that I cannot but be—that professor.

Nevertheless, there are words on this page following the period at the close of this sentence. Part of the reason is being a scholar of religion contains its own imperatives. Those of us who regularly profit from and teach the work of Jonathan Z. Smith know the persuasive power of that paragraph in the opening pages of his famous article about the 1978 Jonestown massacre, “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” in which Smith summarizes the study of religion as an Enlightenment discourse by stating, “as students of religion, we must accept the burden of the long, hard road of understanding. To do less is to forfeit our license to practice in the academy, to leave the study of religion open to the charge of incivility and intolerance.” Smith went on to compare the Jonestown massacre to Dionysiac cults and cargo cults in order to “reduce” Jonestown to something familiar. Nothing that humans do or have done can be foreign to any humanist inquiry.

Yet why should acts of abuse be transformed into papers that inevitably are about scholars’ own intellectual identity? How can I retain a commitment to the abused when my scholarship is the expression of a commitment to my tribe that takes it as a categorical imperative to analyze them? In adding my voice, the flesh is made word; people—suffering people—become dead letter.

Both as a way of defending this worry and coping with it, I want to turn to some documents from the Catholic sex abuse crisis; these are the ones that I am least able to understand. They pertain to one case from the extensive abuse of Midwestern boys by Fr. James Janssen and others in the 1950s and 1960s. (At the Bishop Accountability website, these documents can be found in the extensive archive of documents pertaining to sex abuse in the diocese of Davenport, Iowa.) In 1957, Janssen had left the diocese of Davenport, Iowa, for a brief period of time, and was ministering in a church in Hinsdale, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. In 1958, Janssen returned to the Davenport diocese, serving at a church in Holbrook, an exurb of Iowa City. There is sexually explicit correspondence with a fourteen-year-old boy he had been abusing in Hinsdale. On one occasion, the boy’s mother found both a letter from Janssen to her son, as well as a sexually explicit reply. The boy’s parents gave them to the pastor of her parish, who forwarded them to the bishop of Davenport.

As best as I can make out—I am grateful to Kathryn Lofton for clearing up some of my difficulties transcribing the letter—Fr. Janssen’s letter to the boy reads as follows:

Hello J.O. King:

Hi ya man. Getting much? I am sure you are. It was nice visiting you at Proco that day.

Glad you like high school. I sure hope to be there next year this time.

You were giving old Ogan a hard time that noon hour.

We are having a hay ride this Wed. Too bad you can’t be here for the big event.

Going to Dav[enport] tomorrow. Fr Bass [Francis E. Bass, made the director of vocations in Davenport the day after the Davenport bishop received a copy of this letter; Bass was also an accused priest] got a new car with air conditioning. We should drive up + see you soon hot dog man.

You are still the champ. You got the most. Keep up the good work.

Be sure + type up one of your good letters. Take it easy. Say hello to Jon [?]. Are [?] you Shell [?] informed on the facts of life.

Solong L.S. P.L. J.O.

C.S.

Your pal

Tear up ==                             F.J.

The boy’s response was typed, as promised. It therefore does not need transcribing. But even though the hyperlink appears above, it might be more convenient for the reader to see the text of the letter here.

HI BIG DICK HOWS YOUR PRICK MINES GRATE

I HAVE JACKED OFF 3 TIMES SOFAR.

THAY SPLIT THE TRROP THERE IS 30 GUYS

IN MY DAD’S TROOP AND 20 IN BELCHERS

TROOP.I CAN’T WATE UNTIL WE JACK OFF

AGUN IT’S SO MUCH FUNN .REMBER KEEP IT

SLIDING YOUR DICK THAT IS.   IF YOU

GET MOVED BE SURE AND TELL ME YOUR NEW

ADRESS. [Name redacted] DIED ALL THE SCOUTS

WERE AT THE WACK.KEEP A JO RAGE ON Y OU

A T ALL TIMES YOU MAY NEAD IT.

DON’T SHOUT TO MUCH YOU MIT RUN OUT.

O.K. NOW WUUS LOST IT

DON’T GET TO MUCH

SAVE SOME FORE ME

I have one thing, and perhaps only one thing, to say about the boy’s letter. Its meaning, and its motivating forces, are opaque. The letter requires commentary; such commentary only became publicly available almost fifty years later, in 2004, when this man filed an affidavit detailing his abuse by Janssen, including being passed around by Janssen to other priests on trips to Davenport as a boy. He stated: “When he [Janssen] left Hinsdale, I would write him sexually explicit letters and he would write them back. One of the letters I wrote him was not addressed well and my mother, who was sending him a letter, decided to put my letter in with hers and she opened my letter.”

Perhaps one’s instinct, when looking at this letter, is to invoke a certain kind of language of altered consciousness to describe this dynamic between Janssen and this boy in the late 1950s; “Stockholm syndrome” comes to mind. (Indeed, this is the language that a graduate student in my department, John Crow, used when I showed him the letter.) Another boy abused by Janssen almost a decade later uses the language of being “emotionally dependent” upon Janssen in his affidavit. I certainly know what these words mean. The affidavit of the boy who authored the typed letter perhaps allows the scholar to spin out a brief narrative articulating how those words might be appropriate in this case, starting from the statement that Janssen “was popular with the kids in school and my association with him made me feel accepted.” Yet this only occludes a void from my understanding; it does not provide any understanding to fill that void. The affidavit implies, from its “I would write…he would write back” syntax, that the boy initiated the correspondence. It never says that Janssen demanded sexually explicit letters after he left Hinsdale. (Janssen’s request to the boy to “be sure to type up one of your good letters” may have been understood as a demand. But why was it taken as such?) And it never says that Janssen demanded correspondence that, at least from the basis of these two letters, may have been far more sexually explicit on the boy’s side than on Janssen’s.

There is something occurring, signaled by these documents, that the documents themselves do not and cannot show. There is no boundary-crossing to be made, from our world to this boy’s world in 1958, unless we go outside the text to “culture,” to theory, to dead letter, which authorizes one to generate some hypothesis as to why the boy wrote numerous letters of this nature, why the boy felt such a need to keep Janssen in his life after Janssen’s return to Iowa, for why Janssen continued to hold authority over the boy after Janssen left Hinsdale.

This hermeneutical poverty is at the core of why these letters are so disturbing. They are extraordinary documents, and yet I worry that they are not extraordinarily teachable. The language of “Stockholm syndrome” (including the one scholarly article I found that hypothesizes that Stockholm syndrome can explain why victims of child sexual abuse do not report abuse to authorities) is something that identifies a pattern of behavior of empathy with a captor or an abuser. It does not identify a cause of that behavior. The words are nothing more than signals to the reader that what is on the table is radically foreign.

Yet one cannot remain in this position that would assert, in effect, that the desires and acts that are signaled by the words in this letter cannot be conceptualized. If those acts cannot be conceptualized, then it becomes impossible to develop an account of those acts as deserving of blame. Moral language—language of praise or blame—requires a full understanding of the nature and mechanism of an act, in order to give reasons why the act deserves the normative vocabulary associated with it. Our judgments, if they are to be just, should be justified. However, they can only be justified with recourse to the data at hand. When we use the language of “Stockholm syndrome” or “emotional dependence” to describe the lack of autonomy in the authorship of a letter (in other words, as a signal of abuse), and in so doing depart from any claim found in that letter or in the letter to which it responds, we are no longer talking about an act of abuse. We scholars are talking about us. And the dead letter returns. One may want to blame Janssen himself, but as long as the subject of discourse remains mired in discoursers’ desires, the “Janssen” being blamed is a Janssen who exists only in the mind.

Smith may show a way past the two unsatisfactory options of silence or narcissism. In “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” Smith “reduced” Jonestown to something familiar through acts of comparison of that massacre to Euripides’s The Bacchae and cargo cults. This reduction served to open up a normative language about the massacre that did not rest on hysterical judgment about Jones and his community; the comparison to The Bacchae grounds Smith’s judgment that “the most proximate responsibility” for the Jonestown massacre was borne by Congressman Leo Ryan, who violated Jonestown’s utopia when he arrived in Guyana to investigate charges of fraud and abuse against Jones. If comparison was a path to normative evaluation in that case—to being able to blame someone and give a reason as to why that person acted in a blameworthy manner—perhaps it can be of help here also.

And so I would like to turn to another example of same-sex eroticism for comparison to the correspondence between Janssen and the unnamed boy. In the early months of 1982, Michel Foucault gave a course at the Collège de France that has been published under the title Hermeneutics of the Subject. There, as in other works written in this time period, Foucault attended to the Alcibiades (improperly credited to Plato) and its language of “care of the self” or self-cultivation. In the dialogue, Socrates persuades Alcibiades that such care for the self is necessary for him to be able eventually to govern himself and govern over others. Self-care is part of becoming a subject, of expressing oneself. Socrates teaches Alcibiades this because he is in love with him. However, readers know from the very first lines of the dialogue that Socrates’ love for Alcibiades is a love that, so Socrates says, differs from that of other men: “I was not the first man to fall in love with you, son of Clinias, and now that the others have stopped pursuing you I suppose you’re wondering why I’m the only one who hasn’t given up.” I find Foucault’s gloss on this—and I regret that I do not have the time to reconstruct Foucault’s analysis of the dialogue at greater length—to be incredibly helpful.

Can we say that Alcibiades’ suitors take care of Alcibiades himself [as the directive of Socrates at 127e would require]? Actually, their behavior and conduct proves that they do not care for Alcibiades but merely for his body and its beauty, since they abandon him as soon as he is no longer absolutely desirable. To take care of Alcibiades himself, in the strict sense, would mean therefore attending to his soul rather than his body, to his soul inasmuch as it is a subject of action and makes more or less good use of his body and its aptitudes and capabilities, etc. You see, then, that the fact that Socrates waits until Alcibiades has come of age and has lost his most dazzling youth before speaking to him shows that, unlike Alcibiades’ other suitors and lovers, Socrates cares for Alcibiades himself. More precisely, Socrates cares about the way in which Alcibiades will be concerned about himself.

From this passage, I only want to make the simple point that it is this kind of attending to someone whom one desires—to care for the other’s self-care—that is absent in the correspondence between Janssen and the boy from Hinsdale. It is not there in Janssen’s horrible pun on “joking” with which he opens his letter to the boy. It is not there in the request to type a sexually explicit letter. It is not there in the promise to come up and see the boy soon in Fr. Bass’s new air-conditioned car. Indeed, a desire for such care might be justifiably inferred from the boy’s curious decision to intersperse news of someone’s death (and the scouts’ presence at the wake) among the various sentences in his letter about masturbation.

Now this act of comparison between Foucault’s account of Alcibiades and Janssen does not make it possible to understand what is actually occurring underneath these documents; it does not make them as familiar as The Bacchae might make Jonestown. Nevertheless, it does become possible to move past the inability to blame Janssen for some action that the documents cannot narrate. An act of comparison can make it possible to blame Janssen for not performing an action that is missing from this correspondence, for not caring for the boy who, decades later, testifies that this correspondence is abusive correspondence. Through this comparison we are able to say it is abuse because Janssen does not show the boy how to govern himself. (The affidavit closes [par. 10] with the man describing a photo taken two years after the abuse had begun, when he was in the eighth grade, in which he is giving the finger, “something Janssen encouraged me to do,” to the photographer.)

Indeed, one could take the Foucauldian analysis further and analyze abusers’ language and adult survivors’ language about abusers to show how the way in which abusers rule over their victims might have elements in common with Foucault’s analysis of the confessor in sixteenth-century practical manuals in the 1975 Collège de France course published in English as Abnormal, in which governing always properly belongs to the confessor, because a penitent’s subjectivity is always mediated through him. This is not to say that confession is a form of abuse. But it is to say that when selfhood only has meaning when it passes through what Foucault described as the “domain of confession,” in which “the priest’s empirical powers of the eye, the gaze, the ear, and hearing are developed in support of his sacramental power of the keys,” there is an alienation produced that makes self-government impossible because all the power of governing the penitent’s soul belongs to the priest. (Analogously, the power of governing the priest’s soul belongs to his spiritual director.) These manuals about confession are manuals about the production of “emotional dependence,” to use the phrase that the boy abused by Janssen in the 1960s used in his affidavit. They may be helpful in producing a narrative of causation that makes these affidavits clearer, and from which one might blame a priest for those practices that may have produced what is attested as “emotional dependence” because one has shown how such practices could have produced it. But I use the optative and the conditional purposively. Documents such as these will forever retain secrets that no scholar can force into the open.

In conclusion, when looking at documents relating to the sex abuse crisis, there is a temptation to want to reconstruct the mental states of the abuser or the victim. That can only lead to dead ends, and to dead letter spoken about those dead ends. The language of an affidavit to sexual abuse, or of a letter that might signify such abuse, is eternally in flight from the acts it narrates or signals. The enterprise of the historian is therefore exceptionally fragile when the documents in play are those found at the Bishop Accountability website. Yet scholars can point to what this language is like and unlike in the history of religious and philosophical thought. In that process, we can perhaps unveil how sex abuse ends a victim’s sense that his or her life could ever become self-directed and thereby falsify Sister Mary Ignatius’s claim that the passage into adulthood is not a worthwhile one. Comparison is therefore the most formidable technique of those who practice an ethical art of speaking with the victim of abuse, and not about him or her.

I begin with this observation about our contemporary moment’s deep commitment to the child as an essential identity position. I note that this commitment exists despite the dramatic, really unprecedented, variability in those individuals who are categorized as children—and despite the way that aging is always already inflecting, transforming, and finally eroding the child such that someone can never be a child in the way that they can be male or female, black or white. I do so because the corpus of material related to sex abuse and the Catholic Church uniformly relies on this cultural commitment to the child. Cardinal Bernard Francis Law apologizes for his failure to see that the protection of children must be the church’s single focus and top priority, and his admission that he has only recently come to understand this fact—to see that the child’s need for protection trumps the church’s need to avoid scandal—points to the extent of the problem and of the church’s perceived gross negligence. Therefore despite the church’s historical emphasis on the child as a privileged vehicle of faith (in other words, having the faith of a child) and the significant place that childhood sexual innocence has in Catholic tradition (immaculate conception, for example), real children, as the documents compiled by BishopAccountability.org tell us time and again, bear the violent brunt of the lived distance between Catholic theory and practice—between the mandate that priests remain celibate and the stark reality of sexual need.

It is therefore specifically the sexual abuse of children that is the thrust of current social critique and moral outrage directed against the Catholic Church—a moral outrage so intense as to even motivate recent efforts to bring charges against the Vatican for crimes against humanity. While I do not want to minimize the magnitude of these crimes, I would, for a moment, like to bracket single-focused attention on them in order to add a few salient observations that might help us make sense not so much of the events but of what can appear in some of these documents to be an outraged and increasingly shrill response to them. I do so in the spirit of one trained as a literary and cultural theorist not as a religious studies scholar, and it would be my hope that the questions someone with my training might ask would shed productive light on the issues, precisely because of my discipline’s critical distance from the core fracture lines and questions that have tended to shape popular debate.

First, it is useful to remind ourselves of something that we all know—that the child has long been the privileged occasion and overwrought site for scientific, social, and personal narratives of sexual development and deterioration. We need look no further than psychoanalytic theory itself to be reminded of the child’s longstanding and foundational importance to our contemporary understanding of sexuality and to the burgeoning fields of sexuality studies. From Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, to recent queer theorists and cultural studies scholars like James Kincaid, Lee Edelman, and Chris Nealon, the child has long been the point of origin from which to think and rethink narratives of individual sexual identity and development. The child is the scaffolding on which we tend to build our stories of sexual identity, replete with its minor chords of transgression and regression, as well as progression. In The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, Kincaid explores the social implications of this tendency to infuse the child with sexual content and meaning. The practice he terms “child-loving” has, from the nineteenth century forward, carried a latent erotic dimension for adults in ways that both belie and inform the heavy, overwrought artifice of innocence that we have constructed supposedly to protect children from the contaminating forces of the adult world.

It is provocative, of course, to insist that our love for children is not always nonsexual in nature and motive, that there is a continuum rather than a binary opposition between sex abuse and platonic child love. On the one hand, psychoanalytic theory encourages us to turn to the child to find traces and to see the origins of a ubiquitous, inchoate sexuality of which we attempt to make sense throughout our lives; on the other hand, we insist that children are sexually innocent and hermetically sealed from these very enduring, at times chaotic, sexual forces. Even as we commit to the idea that the child is innocent, sexually passionless, and in need of protection, we increasingly weigh this child down with fraught sexual meanings and content.

The large-scale social, cultural, and political implications of this fact are fleshed out nowhere more provocatively than in the work of Ian Hacking. His foundational 1991 essay “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse” summarizes the current situation in which we find ourselves as follows:

Some evil actions are public. Others are private. Child abuse is the worst of private evils. We know we want to put a stop to it. We know we can’t, but we must protect as many children as we can, and help those who have been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster.

And yet, even as we believe that child abuse means something definite, the behaviors that fall under the rubric of child abuse have changed dramatically over the last hundred years, such that many of the things that we currently identify as abusive were standard practice in the recent past. In other words, we’ve unwittingly and gradually been changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our moral codes accordingly.

The reason I bring Hacking up in detail here is that he reminds us of an important aspect of our urgent and visceral impulse to protect children from abusive behavior, in this case, from the abuse of priests and the church they call home. We can see that this impulse, powerful as it is, is itself indicative of our particular historical moment, and socially constructed to effect particular social transformations at the current time. It isn’t that the abuse that the children suffered in the various Catholic dioceses is warranted or acceptable or that we should overlook or minimize it as church authorities have tended to do. But how we respond to and understand these events—the outrage we feel and the emotions we let loose—are inevitably part of larger social and political processes of which we need to be aware. And, whether or not we would agree with Hacking’s conclusion that the historically unprecedented number of behaviors that now ‘count’ as child abuse are part and parcel of a larger reallocation of social responsibility from the state onto the individual (in this case the abusive adult priest and an institution that stands in uneasy relation to the state), his assertion that child abuse is one avenue through which the state negotiates and reallocates social responsibility is useful for thinking about how the child that is the centerpiece of these cases of church abuse might be operating, in this case, in the larger push and pull between church and state.

As the documents compiled at BishopAccountability.org make clear, children are the rope in the ongoing tug of war between church and state. The conflict would have an inherently different feel if the sexual abuse of power were between adults. Popular antebellum narratives in the form of the escaped nun’s memoir (I think here of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures or Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent) claimed to document women’s sexual abuse within convent walls. However subsequently disproven they were, these accounts were so effective as to result in riots—in angry mobs, for example, literally burning down the Ursuline convent that Reed wrote about. At the particular time in which Monk, Reed, and others told their sensationalized stories of sexual abuse at the hands of nefarious priests, the public felt great dis-ease with the pressures that the influx of new Catholic immigrants were exerting on civic resources. Outraged readers who stormed convents looking for proof of nuns’ sexual abuse at the hands of corrupt priests were animated by a desire to regulate and bring under public control what was going on within the privacy of the convent or confessional, in an effort to manage and control a perceived threat to the sanctity and very durability of the state.

If these accounts of women’s sexual abuse at the hands of priests were the subject of violent social outrage in the nineteenth century, children seem to be functioning narratively in a similar way in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In addition to their truth value and the accuracy of their content, these contemporary accounts of sexual abuse of power have a secondary and collateral effect of vilifying a church that stands in uneasy relation to the hegemony of the nation-state. By contextualizing the current narratives within a longer history of popular depictions of the Vatican’s complicity in priests’ abuses of power, we can begin to see how these contemporary allegations and abuses of power might inadvertently work to further a state agenda of bringing Catholic church practices and those individuals who implement church authority under state control, surveillance, and regulation.

This effort to exert state authority over church life—and church resistance to the encroaching state control—shapes the very language that both constituencies use to narrate recent history. When victims say that they don’t accuse abusive priests of sin, but rather of crime, they are drawing a crucial distinction between spheres of influence to insist that priests, like all citizens, are subject to state authority. Conversely, when Bishop Thomas Daily says he is not a policeman but a shepherd, he is insisting on the church’s distance from such authority. And when the 2002 grand jury report on the Rockville Centre describes the abusers as “predatory, serial, child molesters working as priests” rather than “priests troubled with the human frailty and sinfulness in need of succor and protection,” they are insisting that state definitions and the law that upholds them precede and preempt the logic of the church.

Children’s significance to this negotiation and struggle for control extends beyond their role as victim of abuse, and the child—as metaphor, imaginative construct, and developmental stage of life—is a powerful referent that molds how those on all sides of the conflict conceptualize, describe, and understand the current situation. Church leaders often narrate the course of events surrounding their response to abuse reports in ways that associate themselves with childlike qualities—as ingénues who didn’t have the knowledge, the experience, or the wisdom that they needed in order to contend with issues of such magnitude. If these leaders self-describe as being developmentally immature, inexperienced, and innocent at the time the abuse surfaced, offending priests are often described as being like the children they abuse. John Geoghan, for example, is described by the rector of St John’s Seminary in 1954 as having “a very pronounced immaturity,” with psychological testing showing an “immature and impulsive nature.” The Grand Jury Report of the Rockville Centre includes a facility report that observes that Priest C “was still attracted to adolescents and indeed strongly considered himself to be one.” Even congregants who welcome priests into their homes explain their misplaced trust by describing the priest as being like one of their children. Perpetrator as well as victim reach for the cultural category of the child in order to explain and mitigate their culpability and to lay claim to the position of innocent victim rather than pernicious perpetrator.

And so it is not simply that children were systematically abused under church authority, but that the idea of the child as a vulnerable subject in need of special protection and succor has seeped into every aspect of the narratives we are generating around these events. In other words, the child’s privileged status as a person in need of special protections and advocacy is being utilized by every constituency at the table—from the adult priests’ and bishops’ claims that they are child-like to adult victims’ ongoing self-identification as children—and is the unacknowledged driver in the tense struggle over authority that is ensuing between church and state. A scan of the powerful materials compiled by BishopAccountability.org reveals how much of the current debate about sex abuse and the Catholic Church depends on a sharp opposition between child and adult. Not only do victims and their families emphasize victims’ minority (even when victims exceed the child’s legal age limit) but priests repeatedly liken themselves to children, as part of an effort to self-understand as victim rather than perpetrator. It is this dimension of the debate—so often unrecognized—that gives accusations and refutations of abuse such emotional force and power.

As you can see, the questions that literary and cultural studies might productively bring to the child abuse and study of religion analytic field are ones concerned with relations between individuals, institutions, and the state and the way that the complex meaning-making that the child occasions as an identity category is integral to that process. Further, focus on the child as a powerfully constituting dimension of this analytic field helps to tease out the delicate dance in which church and state are both involved about authority, privacy, financial resources, and ultimately the legislation of bodies as well as selves. Literary and cultural studies scholars have paid all too little attention to religion in textual analysis. We, and I include myself in this, have tended to conceptualize the child’s significance to cultural formations in secular terms—to see the child as a complex identity category interfacing with a state pried loose from spiritual concerns. The intellectual challenge that this archive offers is one that asks us to revisit this assumption and to see the child as embedded in the crosshairs of spiritual, sexual, and secular concerns. Doing so offers us the possibility of seeing the full implications of our current abiding commitment to the child as our last essential identity category. It also offers us the possibility of seeing the way that church as well as state turn to this last bastion of pre-postmodern humanism in efforts to shore up their constituencies. And, finally, it offers us the opportunity to perceive how the child for whom we urgently advocate operates in the struggle for authority, power, market share, and resources between the two.

Born in 1931 to a working-class family in Dorchester, Shanley is one of the most notorious abusive priests from the Boston archdiocese. His case garnered national media attention. In February 2005, after being summarily laicized, he was found guilty of raping a member of his parish, beginning when the boy was six and ending when the boy was eleven. Shanley appealed, challenging the prosecution’s reliance on “recovered” memories; the state supreme court affirmed his 12-15 year sentence. Roderick MacLeish, a civil attorney, claims that at least 30 people contacted him claiming abuse by Shanley. The archdiocese settled several of these claims, some in excess of one million dollars. According to affidavits and news accounts, Shanley’s abusive behavior began in 1961, the year after he was ordained, and continued until the early 1990s. His victims ranged in age from 6 to 21, with most being 14 or older. With one exception, they were male. Accounts contain allegations of oral and anal sex; many include claims of physical coercion or spiritual manipulation. There is substantial evidence that church officials and local police knew about these allegations. In 1994, Shanley admitted to having had sex with four adolescent males.

Ordained in 1960, the year Kennedy was elected, Shanley’s first decade of parish ministry coincided with the heady, turbulent time of Vatican II, the civil-rights movement and school-busing controversies, the anti-War movement, and the sexual revolution. By the late 60s, Shanley had developed a well-regarded ministry to Boston’s massive homeless youth population. In 1970, Cardinal Cushing affirmed this ministry as Shanley’s primary assignment. By 1972, Shanley operated the city’s first mobile VD clinic. And by the end of the decade, he had helped build a residential facility for gay youth and their families and a retreat center for others engaged in urban ministry.

As Shanley’s ministry shifted to focus on sexually alienated young people, he also began to challenge the church’s teachings on homosexuality and birth control. He did this through popular live and taped lectures, as well as a widely circulated newsletter. He traveled to Wichita, Kansas, to fight the repeal of a gay-rights ordinance at the height of Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaigns. In both the mainstream and gay press, Shanley was celebrated as a charismatic, hardworking, radical priest. Although Cardinal Humberto Sousa Medeiros, Archbishop of Boston, initially approved this work, after complaints from members of the diocese and pressure from the Vatican, he assigned Shanley to a pastorate in St. John’s parish in Newton, where the events that led to Shanley’s conviction transpired.

Shanley’s previous celebrity would likely have been sufficient to generate notoriety when accusations surfaced, but the sensationalism was magnified by the fact that many of the allegations were leveled by men who had participated in his ministry to homeless and gay youth. They claimed that Shanley made them recount their sexual exploits, look at pornography, strip naked, masturbate, perform oral sex, or be anally penetrated. Some accounts leave open the question of whether a teenager can meaningfully consent in such circumstances; others explicitly state that Shanley physically coerced or spiritually threatened his charges.

One incident from Shanley’s advocacy days received enormous attention in later news stories. In December 1978, Shanley was one of three clergy members who attended a meeting of approximately 150 men and boys, held in a church basement, to consider the legal, psychological, moral, and social issues related to man-boy love. A separate caucus, which did not include Shanley, met the following day to found the National Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA. Many commentators collapsed these events and identified Shanley as a co-founder of NAMBLA, an organization dedicated to repealing all age-of-consent laws. According to a contemporaneous press account, Shanley told those gathered about “a boy…rejected by his family.”

When his parents found out about [his] relationship [with an older man], [they had] the man…arrested…. “It was only a brief and passing thing, as far as the sex was concerned, but the love was deep and the gratitude to the man was deep, and when [the boy] realized that the indiscretion…had cost this man perhaps 20 years…[he fell] apart.” Shanley concluded, “We have our convictions upside down if we are truly concerned with boys…the ‘cure’ does far more damage.”

It would, of course, be equally plausible to describe this relationship as exploitative rather than edifying, and to characterize the boy’s “love” as identification with an abuser. At the same time, we must remember that Shanley’s mutual interrogation of the condemnation of homosexuality and man-boy love was fully consonant with gay liberationist discourse in 1978. This gathering, in fact, had been organized in response to a massive police sting, in which 24 men were indicted for their sexual involvement with teenage boys. Understood as Boston’s Stonewall, these arrests galvanized the city’s gay community. The protests eventually cost the Revere district attorney his job. Efforts to end police harassment and brutality were endorsed by the local homophile chapter, the Libertarian Party, the ACLU, Dignity, and the Metropolitan Community Church. Two organizations came into being as a result: NAMBLA and the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, which recently secured same-sex marriage rights in Massachusetts.

This dual genesis, and its Ishmael-Isaac legacy, must be part of any adequate account of American gay politics. Although contemporary LGBT activists are quick to distinguish homosexuality and pedophilia, in the years immediately after Stonewall, broad and general challenges to state involvement in citizens’ sexual lives were more common. Given the number of sexually active young people in urban areas who were coming out, these challenges were raised by many who had not achieved the age of majority. The press account quoted above includes statements by two teenage boys; 2002 coverage of Shanley’s case includes statements by adult gay men who had sex with older men as teenagers without overt coercion or subsequent regret.

This admixture is also evinced by criticism of Shanley. Summarizing a talk by Shanley that “disturbed [her] greatly,” Wilma Higgs reported the following “outlandish statements”: homosexuality is not a sin or illness, but a gift from God; it is immoral to try and change a person’s sexual orientation; “homosexuality,” as we understand it, was not known until about 100 years ago, and, therefore, the Bible has nothing to say about it; when adults and children have sex, children are the seducers; children may regret causing an adult to go to jail, knowing they are the responsible ones.

Since Higgs considered these statements to be “so blatantly untrue…[and] misleading,” she challenged Shanley during the lecture and wrote to Cardinal Law after. According to Dolores Stevens, after making similar statements about homosexuality, and claiming that gay people were not angry enough about their treatment by society, Shanley then “spoke of pedophilia (which [he characterized as] a non-coerced…manipulation of sex organs…between an adult and child). He stated that the adult is not the seducer—…and…the kid is not traumatized by the act per se…, [but by] the police…‘drag[ging]’ the kid in for questioning.” When confronted with Stevens’s letter, Shanley stated that she had misunderstood him, which is certainly possible—and plausible.

Let me be clear: sexual relationships between adults and teenagers, especially between those with institutional authority (teachers, therapists, priests) and those over whom they have authority, are rife with the possibility of subtle—and egregious—forms of coercion, abuses of power, and violations of trust. They may be so fraught with damaging possibilities that we must insist on bright-line rules, even though we know such prohibitions are, in the final analysis, over-broad. But when assessing what transpired between Shanley and his accusers, when telling the tale of a closeted priest who went to seminary at the height of the McCarthy era and then developed a successful youth ministry at the height of the sexual revolution in a social and religious context where homosexuality was being both celebrated and vilified, we must exercise a finely tuned sensitivity to contextual detail.

Accounts of Shanley’s abuse include reports that he told young men that homosexuality was not a sin and that having sex with either men or women was okay. While these statements are usually presented as a sexual predator’s sinister machinations, some auditors surely experienced a sense of relief and hope hearing these pronouncements. Given that press accounts claim Shanley had a reputation for cavorting with a different young man every night, mustn’t we pause over the relatively small number who came forward to complain? Given that Shanley is routinely characterized as “perverted” and “disgusting,” that the hotel he purchased with another priest in Palm Springs was described as “Sodom and Gomorrah,” that accounts of Shanley’s—and the church’s—degeneracy appear on blogs entitled “The Rise of Sodom” and “Book of Gomorrah 2,” shouldn’t we consider the possibility that he might have received strong moral condemnation from some quarters even if he had never touched an under-age boy?

A July 2002 cover story on Shanley from The Advocate—a glossy, mainstream gay magazine with a national circulation—bears the headline “Paul Shanley’s compassion was just part of a scheme to abuse vulnerable boys and young men.” The story tells of William McLean, who met Shanley in 1973, when he was a 20-year-old college junior, by responding to an ad in the Boston Phoenix that read, “Gay? Bi? Confused? Need someone to talk to?” Although McLean found Shanley’s willingness to have sex confusing, given the priestly vow of celibacy, he found his time with Shanley “incredibly helpful,” and observed that Shanley was the first person to tell him it was okay to be gay. While he found the sex enjoyable, McLean expresses regret that his first experience was with an older man who was a priest. Although McLean makes no allegation of physical coercion, was of age when he met Shanley, and was not a member of Shanley’s parish, I wonder whether a similar kind of retrospective regret might not color victims recollections of, and claims against, Shanley. For example, John Harris, who currently characterizes Shanley’s acts as rape, met Shanley when he was 21, quite confused about what it might mean to be gay. Harris’s tale of confusion, pain, shame—and even physical pain accompanying the sex act—is similar to many coming-out stories. Like many of Shanley’s accusers, McLean and Harris maintained contact with Shanley over several years, often reinitiating the relationship. In her Vanity Fair piece, Maureen Orth reports that “Harris is on permanent disability and has undergone shock treatments.” She fails to note, however, that electroshock therapy was a common “treatment” for homosexuality throughout the 70s. She implies that Harris’s debilitation rests solely on Shanley’s shoulders, not at the doorstep of larger institutions. In Orth’s gothic tale, the church is negligent and uncaring, but never homophobic.

I am not suggesting that Harris was not raped or that he misremembers what happened to him. I am also not suggesting that Shanley’s actions did not cause Harris—and many other men—psychological damage. But I am suggesting that coming to grips with a gay identity is an incredibly difficult process. In fact, coming to grips with one’s sexuality, regardless of its content and character, is a difficult process. And this process was undoubtedly even more difficult during the period in which most of Shanley’s “abusive” actions allegedly took place, given the kind of discourses—and silences—that encircled (homo)sexuality in the 1970s. I am also suggesting that the editors and authors of national magazines, especially those that cater to gay audiences, in the 2000s should understand such matters.

I would like to find a way to speak about Shanley as both a sexually abusive priest worthy of disdain and a pioneering voice for gay rights worthy of admiration. I would also like to develop a sufficiently broad understanding of social context and an adequately nuanced account of individual motivation to explain the Catholic sex abuse cases, their causes, their meaning, their effects, their remedy. Most importantly, however, I want a history of homosexuality and Christianity in America that can place Shanley—and the Catholic sex abuse cases generally—squarely in the center. Because, in the final analysis, to understand these cases—or homosexuality, or Christianity—we must keep in mind the complex embroilment of Christianity, homosexuality, power, desire, and human frailty, as well as the on-going contest between radical queer voices and palatable gay visions.

I find mangled lives among those we now call the abused, but also among the abusers. I don’t say that lightly, abstractly. There are, in the identified abusers, some men who seem so far beyond our ordinary talk about ethics that they are “monsters” according to one old sense of the word. But there are other men—perfectly familiar, much sadder—who now get swept up into the same category of abuser.

I remember a former student. Once ordained a new priest, he began in his mid-20s what he viewed as a consensual sexual relationship with a 17-year-old.

Is it wrong for a Catholic priest to begin a sexual relationship with anyone committed to his pastoral care? Yes, it is, and for a number of reasons—including, in my view, because it violates a public vow of celibacy that underwrites claims to holy authority.

Is it worse when the person under care is below the legal age of consent? Yes, though I am less concerned with the legal age of consent than with the age of ethical agency. Both of these ages vary astonishingly by time, place, and person.

Is the sexual relationship in such a case always monstrous? Must the offending priest be treated for the rest of his life on the assumption that he is violently insane and irredeemably corrupt? Here I stop, not least because I remember that the rhetoric of monstrosity has regularly been deployed in church campaigns against sodomites—and in medico-legal judgments against a whole array of perverts that includes homosexuals. The current stigmatization of sex abusers in the Roman Catholic clergy is sometimes uncannily like old ecclesiastical or civil campaigns that most of us would deplore—campaigns against sodomites, witches, heretics, against child masturbators or hysterical mothers or congenital homosexuals.

Am I suggesting that we should tolerate or even affirm those who commit sexual abuse? No. I am suggesting that we should listen to the rhetoric of our condemnations, because whatever their justice, they often echo condemnations that would have been applied to many of us fifty years ago—that still are applied to many of us by the Catholic magisterium.

Let me raise three sorts of questions about the rhetoric in some appalling documents from the dossier of Robert Meffan—in regard to pathology, mysticism, and authority.

I begin with the wholesale incorporation into these documents of psychiatric or psychological categories and models, especially with regard to sex or sexuality. You can see this in the Review Board finding on Meffan, which not only cites as decisive a “personality profile,” but which deploys various psychological categories to describe him. You can also see, as in so many cases, an abuser being handed off to the therapeutic system. Indeed, the review board overrules the recommendation that Meffan be allowed to live with his cousin in order to enroll him in a “structured aftercare program.”

You discover here, as in other dossiers, the models and the mechanisms of various psychiatric theories. The models entered Catholic discourses in the last century without much reflection. There is a first wave shortly after 1900, when late nineteenth-century sexology is incorporated into some advanced confessors’ manuals. Then, from the 1940s on, pathological categories like “homosexuality” begin to appear in essays of moral theology, especially those written under the influence of psychoanalysis. Beginning in the 1950s, “homosexuality” and related categories figure in canonical documents—e.g., in the expert opinions submitted to diocesan tribunals or to the Roman Rota. From 1960 on, there is also a growing reliance on psychological testing of applicants to seminaries and religious orders, especially when it comes to sexuality. Increasingly, the clinician, not the spiritual director, is asked to render an expert judgment on a candidate’s suitability.

You are reading, then, a historically recent and variously motivated incorporation of clinical languages. I’m not suggesting that these languages have no place in talking about abuse or that church authorities should never rely on them. I do note that the institutional authority of the clinician functions incoherently beside older theological categories and traditional claims about church authority. In Scholastic theories, there was supposed to be a clear delegation of responsibility: the clinician could investigate natural pathologies empirically, but the spiritual director reserved for himself supernatural knowledge of the soul’s true condition and destiny. In hurried practice, church officials often deferred to prevailing psychiatric authority—especially when it came to sexual disorders. But how exactly was a pathological model of sexual abuse supposed to cohere with Scholastic theologies of sins against the sixth commandment?

To address this question well, a reader would need other documents not in Meffan’s dossier. For example, there should be samples from the history of the category “pedophilia” in other institutions, both the short history (say, the influence of the work of David Finkelhor) and the longer history (say, the 1867 case of Jouy described by Foucault in Abnormal and History of Sexuality Vol. 1).

A reader would also need to ask about the contrast between the ecclesiastical bureaucracy’s acceptance of clinical conclusions about pedophilia and its rejection of clinical conclusions about homosexuality—or masturbation. According to the letter on the “problem of homosexuality” published by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986, “the Church can not only convert scientific discoveries to its use, but also transcend their perspective,” since its perspective is so much larger than the scientific. By what reasoning does “the Church” transcend the scientific perspective so completely on homosexuality as to reverse basic conclusions, while remaining within the perspective so completely in the case of pedophilia? Is this difference a matter of theological reasoning—or rather of the realities of legal liability and popular opinion? Would “the Church” prefer to “transcend” psychiatric accounts of pedophilia too if it could get away with doing so?

Maybe not. Church officials sometimes want to transcend psychiatry, but sometimes they want to use it. They have deployed various strategies to deflect blame for failing to restrain clerical abusers, not least by pinning abuse on the admission of gay candidates to seminary and the religious life. This deflection can be crude (as when it was floated at a Vatican news conference in February 2002) or indirect (as in the recently released second Jay College report). Either way, the strategy relies on the assumption of an immutable pathology: Homosexual men snuck into the priesthood. They suffer from a pathology that makes them commit sexual crimes. Everyone knows that we can’t be blamed for their pathology. We can’t do anything except kick them out—while we establish strict screening procedures to prevent any more of the sick perverts from sneaking in. In plainer English: We reject 1990s science about the natural origin of healthy homosexuality in favor of 1890s science about homosexuality as a fixed, criminal pathology. Is reverting to discredited scientific theories “transcending” science?

From questions raised by pathological language, I turn to more traditional theological rhetoric. In Meffan’s dossier, there are reports that he relied on the rhetoric of mystical theology. You can read his language for yourself in the startling statement signed “Prisoner of Love.” The use of theological or liturgical language to cover prohibited sex is nothing new. There are hints of it in the accusations Peter Damian makes against sodomitic priests in his Gomorran Book (from 1050 CE), and there is a surprising parallel to Meffan in the inquisitorial records from a convent in Pescia in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The Theatine abbess, Benedetta Carlini, not only channeled Jesus’ commands that she should marry a younger nun in an elaborate wedding, but took on the person of a handsome angel, Splenditello, to conduct an erotic relationship with her (for all of which see Judith Brown, Immodest Acts).

I wish it were so simple as saying that Meffan abuses religious language to procure sexual gratification. That is what Peter Damian, patron saint of the theology of sodomy, wants us to believe, and it is suggested again by some of the testimony against Meffan. But I find the plea from the Prisoner of Love more troubling than that. Some parts of the text seem all too sincere: “I could still say Mass privately each morning, becoming one with my loving Christ. I could still tell Him over and over again that I loved Him.”

The possibility of authorizing abuse theologically follows too easily from the always exceptional status claimed for modern church power. In modern Catholic contexts, official languages often pretend to be exempt from qualification, questioning, or appeal. They are absolute languages. They function in a state of exception. When that rhetorical character is extended to traditional images of a masculinized God or angel who ravishes—rapes—souls that are gendered as feminine, then erotic domination seems to receive divine blessing. I’m not objecting to mystical writing. I’m pointing to a consequence of moving older mystical or liturgical languages into a modern system that endows some church speech with an incontestable and literal authority. Under a regime that claims divine exemption for its decrees, mustn’t erotic metaphors of divine domination sometimes seem to authorize sexual demands by priests? Turn the question around: imagine what you would have to change in present claims for church language to prevent the violent misapplication of old metaphors for God’s love.

Which brings me to the last rhetoric I want to mention: the homoerotic undertone of ecclesiastical obedience. The documents from the Meffan case are not homoerotic in the obvious sense—they are not about male-male or female-female abuse. They concern sexual acts between a man and girls or young women. But the male and female bodies here allow us to notice another level at which the homoerotic can appear in church speech. Take as an example Meffan’s letter to Cardinal Law, with its touches of studied obsequiousness, its acts of enticing submission. Those rhetorical gestures reveal desires sedimented in now standard forms of clerical power.

Whenever I was asked to contribute a sound-bite to the news coverage of the Boston cases in 2002, I tried to insist that the real scandal was not that there were abusers in the priesthood, but that they had been protected by church authority—not out of concern for their well-being or, God knows, for the safety of parishioners, but because of the hierarchical system’s imperative to protect itself. The scandal, I used to repeat, is the system.

Even that sound-bite has two meanings. It means that there is a large institution with all sorts of urgent motives for wanting to insure its authority, to keep its secrets, to protect its accumulated treasure. But the sound-bite also means that sexual abuse is coded into the system itself. It is expressed within the system before it is inflicted on those outside. We must listen to those who are abused by priests, but we should listen then for the cries of the abuse by which many priests are formed as priests. Abuse—not infrequently sexual, typically erotic—is required for this late-modern system of clerical power. It operates on the bodies of many children and adolescents, some of whom are being groomed for priesthood and religious life. Father says, “You have a vocation.” What appalling words those can be.

One of the clearest memories I have from the time when these matters were breaking in the news is of an encounter I had in the hall of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The air was thick with the subject of clerical sex abuse. Passing me in the hall, my interlocutor said, simply, “Call the police.” That was the entire conversation. I have not talked about it with him since. I am not even entirely sure what he intended, but I will take him to have been invoking a very American separationist model of church-state governance. Sexual abuse of minors, he implied, was police business, not church business. The entire matter could be resolved if everyone simply agreed to acknowledge the state’s jurisdiction over such situations and called the police.

Various historical, sociological, and psychological reasons can be offered for why the police were not initially called. Yet it is not just that almost no one called the police at the time. Even now, even after the police have been called, to read the documents in the BishopAccountability.org archive with the eye of a lawyer is immensely dispiriting. While some awards have now been made, law has mostly been used to obfuscate and protect the church from harm. The church has attempted to manage these events without the secular authorities—through invocations of canon law, private negotiations, and confidentiality agreements—while the secular authorities seem to have been paralyzed by a stilted respect for the clergy, an imagined constitutional prohibition, the he said/she said quality of old memories, statutes of limitations, and a lack of clarity as to under what legal theory bishops might be held accountable for the actions of their priests.

I have come to think that the impulse to see the police as the solution masks a more fundamental problem. We live, after all, in the wake of the police having been called, and many priests having gone to jail. Many in the church remain deeply unsatisfied. Why is that?

As we explored during the intense couple of days of the Yale conference, what is now termed “the sex abuse scandal” can be seen as a point of convergence for a particular set of contemporary practices that grew up over the course of the twentieth century in American law and American religion. While this crisis is related historically and structurally to other times and places in human history, the scandal of this situation reveals a number of well-documented weaknesses in very specific institutional and interpretive contexts, including that of American law (selective prosecution, misuse of discovery, insufficient protection for children, exclusionary evidentiary rules), the U.S. Catholic Church (sexual and political naïveté, poor seminary training, administrative secrecy, and authoritarianism), and the corrosive effect of social scientific discourse. Finally, this crisis also highlights the ongoing inability of the U.S. to find a satisfactory arrangement for the legal regulation of religion and of religious freedom. (I will speak here of the U.S.; other related but distinct religio-legal stories can be told about the other countries in which clerical sex abuse has been documented.)

The received story is that the U.S. achieved religious freedom through the disestablishment of the churches. We nailed this one. Churches would attend to training virtuous citizens, and the state would attend to politics. Citizens would be free to worship as they chose. The state would protect private property. From the beginning there was friction about how Europe’s established churches, imported into the Americas, would function legally and politically in a democratic country without their accustomed formal relationship with government. But that, too, is now told as a success story. One triumphalist version is that the American Catholic Church, after having been sneered at in the nineteenth century by the Vatican for its questioning of the doctrine that salvation was only to be found in the church, traveled to Rome during Vatican II—in the person of John Courtenay Murray—and taught the church that religious freedom could be Catholic and that the church could flourish in a democratic society. It was a proud moment for the American bishops.

There remained unfinished business back home, however. The meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment was not nearly as clear as had been intimated by Murray. At the time of Vatican II, the U.S. was in the middle of what turned out to be a fifty-year experiment with tidying up church-state separation. During this time, the Supreme Court insisted that religion be separated and that, at least in some cases, religious exercise not be burdened by law. Religious freedom meant secular public institutions and a limited legal space for voluntary religious affiliation. But it now turns out that the Court didn’t really mean it. And perhaps the church didn’t really mean it either.

The Supreme Court has now apparently abandoned its effort at thoroughgoing separation. Today, the patchwork of regulatory privileges and silences that have, over two hundred years, largely enabled religious institutions to govern their own without secular intervention—to have a little piece of sovereignty, as it were—to get a legal pass from the authorities—to limp along with the tatters of their former hierarchical glory wrapped around them—remains largely intact. Whether it is Mormons, haredi Jews, Catholics, or even plain vanilla Protestants, religious folk in the U.S. benefit from a range of laws that make a special legal place for religion: tax laws, labor laws, zoning laws, etc. These privileges are numerous and they exist at many levels of government—municipal, state, and federal; there are thousands of protective laws. While there are challenges to this regime—and other private zones like the family, the university, and the hospital, which have also been penetrated by law—there is wide public support for the continuation of such privileges. At the same time, public support for and funding of religious ways of life and institutions have become plausible.

Having firmly rejected as impracticable the dominant European solutions of either single or multiple religious establishments, in which the division of public labor was expressed through jurisdictional arrangements, the U.S. embarked on an arrangement in which the churches would be formally as free of government support and oversight as possible. The “separation of church and state” is now supposed to have solved the problems of both government corruption of religion and of religious corruption of politics. Religious folks are supposed to take care of religious business and government folks are supposed to mind government business. On this model, the sex abuse scandal was a failure of practice, not a failure of theory.

The as yet incomplete archive we reflected on at the Yale conference is a cache of documents from the ongoing litigation, mostly brought by victims of abuse against their abusers, as well as from grand jury investigations, prosecutions by public authorities, and internal church investigations. Some documents concern abusive encounters that occurred many decades ago; some concern recent abuse.

If our proposed purpose is to focus on the specifically religious, what do we make of the fact that we are reading mostly legal documents in which the words of both victim and abuser are profoundly framed and shaped by legal reasons, at times, actually drafted by lawyers? Even the internal church documents are profoundly shaped by law, both U.S. law and canon law. Why can’t we speak the words of religion? The answer is complicated; partly it is because litigation, especially tort litigation, is the lingua franca of American faultfinding. But, more importantly, it is because there is no purely religious language. The church and the state grew up together, embraced Roman law, and developed bureaucracies and discourses about human motivation and causation that are deeply and mutually implicated.

There are two strong interpretive positions in the contemporary U.S. with respect to the future of the religion clauses. They suggest different responses to the sex abuse scandal, as they do to other current moral and political debates. Neither offers a legal model for taking religion seriously in a diverse society.

One position holds that all privileges and special treatment for religion should end. Religion is not special. Every person should be equal before the law, and the churches should be no different. For proponents of this position, religious freedom is defensible only insomuch as it is about individual religious freedom and is continuous with freedom of expression and association. Religious communities should simply exist in a legal sense as voluntary groups of like-minded individuals who can enter or exit at will. They should be subject to all laws, including the tax laws, as everyone else is. They should not be protected in their perpetuation of patriarchy and secrecy. Separation, on this model, means individualization and neutralization of religious reasons.

The other position holds that protection for religious liberty should focus on the church, not the individual. Churches, it is said, need more, rather than less, institutional integrity. They need autonomy. Religious liberty is, on this reading of the Constitution, about the freedom of religious institutions to define and govern themselves and their members. The newest Supreme Court decision, Hosanna-Tabor v EEOC, gives some support for this position, affirming, as it does, the constitutionality of the ministerial exemption—which exempts churches from laws against discrimination in employment. Adopting the critique of the Enlightenment subject as an affirmation of their authority, church autonomy will enable the churches to take on responsibility for policing their own. Confident that religious business can be separated from law business, as sin from crime, religious liberty can, on this theory, largely be reduced to a question of jurisdiction.

Let us now go back to the archive with these two positions in mind. The first position understands the sex abuse scandal to be a failure of law and of state oversight. The relationship of lay Catholics to the church should be regulated in the same way as in all other private institutions. Children should be taught to be wary of the adults in the church as they should be of all other adults, and there should be transparency and openness about their interactions with them. Priests should not be recognized by the state as sacramentally ordained within an alternative normative order, but as workers subject to law. Sex abuse in the church would be seen to be of a piece with such abuse in other institutions.

The second position understands the sex abuse scandal to have resulted from contamination of the church by secular culture and values, and it should be addressed by a redoubling of church discipline. This regime acknowledges, perhaps under duress, the need for the reporting to the police of any harm to children, but it is the church that should recognize (and it alone decide) when its clerical employees have broken a law and forfeited priestly privileges. At that point, the priest would be turned over to the secular arm. (This legal arrangement has a long tortured history, of course, and is a history strewn with martyrs.)

Surely each of these positions is, in its own way, a profoundly inadequate response to the massive pain evident in these events and, more generally, to the gaps left by the modern church-state settlement. In each position, authority is misrecognized and mislocated. The first, overly confident of the possibilities of progressive law reform simply refuses religious authority of any kind; the second, founded in a narrow Christian sectarianism, abdicates any responsibility for participation in a serious dialogue about the larger common good.

As we heard at the conference, the church that the priests and kids in these cases inhabited was not just a voluntary organization like the Boy Scouts. It claimed to sacralize and ritually encompass everything, including sexuality. Being Catholic was “awesome,” one speaker said, and by that he meant to invoke the power and ambivalence of the sacred. For canon lawyers, this church administered a higher “universal law.” These are strong religious claims indeed, grounded in a complex mythological imagination—claims that are also highly contestable; but analogous claims can, of course, be made in all of the many religious cultural idioms of the world. How can the powerful majesty of the universal church—or of any other mystical reality—fit into the cramped spaces of multi-faith religious freedom as delineated by the international instruments? What kind of church would that be? And what kind of state? What kind of legal personality can the church have under these laws? And what kind of religious personality can individuals have? Must all religions trim their sails and reinvent themselves as subjects in the secular state? Would such religions offer any real models of life to contemporary society?

One of the difficulties with the stale debate about the meaning of the First Amendment religion clauses is that both sides see sovereignty as a zero-sum game. Liberals seek to protect human rights through a strong evocation of state sovereignty on behalf of the individual. Church autonomy advocates want a piece of that sovereignty. They want to carve up the available authority between church and state, preserving their peculiar customs from public scrutiny.

One cannot help but think of Wendy Brown’s recent claim that walls are a feature of the waning, not the waxing, of sovereignty. What we see in these files are the clunky remnant of church sovereignty from a bygone age bumping up against the clunky sovereignty of a state, also from a bygone age. Both are the product of the same modern legal history that began with the re-discovery of Justinian’s Institutes in the twelfth century and ends with the building of walls. The so-called secular law contains embedded and outdated religious anthropologies and cosmologies, while the religious law is strangely similar to the secular law in its reliance on process and indirection and the primacy of the protection of property. Each strives to exclude the other. It is not surprising that they worked so well together to further obscure the abused children.

Legal regulation of religion is a pressing issue today, as new constitutions are being drafted following the Arab spring and other revolutions. They—and we—are being challenged to think differently about religion and law. Tolerance may be in our DNA, as Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell argue, but we have not really absorbed the profound losses that this genetic program entails. We need, together, to re-imagine governance in a space that Julian Rivers describes as being “between establishment and secularism.”

Serious crimes have been committed, yet there is more than a whiff of a witch hunt to some of these proceedings. That is a product of a particular American religious history but it is also a product of the American style of tort litigation and its partnership with the media—and of the increasing penetration of law and psychiatric treatment into the intimate relationships of our lives. Calling the police will not compensate for the poverty of our will and imagination when it comes to reforming our capacity for shared governance in a world of highly plural and fragmented religious identities and activities. Bringing the pope before the ICC will not repair our loss of faith or our loss of participation in the sacred mysteries and the tight logic of salvation. All the psychiatrists in the world cannot restore the unity of the universal church or of law. We need to stop thinking in terms of separationist dichotomies. It will not be easy.

Special thanks to Nancy Levene and Barry Sullivan for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece.

Sexual abuse of children is far from new. Historians of the family have discovered that adults in elite households in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe sometimes treated young children as sexual playthings. A striking example involves the future King of France, Louis XIII. According to a diary kept by the royal physician, members of the French royal court fondled his genitals and ladies in waiting played sexual games with his tiny fists.

But if the sexual abuse of minors is anything but a recent phenomenon, only intermittently has this country focused on the problem. Three conclusions grow out of the historical study of the sexual abuse of minors. The first is how slowly and unevenly American society has come to recognize the simple fact that the sexual abuse of minors is wrong and inflicts lasting trauma. The second is that in attempting to understand the sexual abuse of minors, expert opinion has often shown more understanding for the perpetrators than the victims, overemphasizing victims’ resilience and minimizing the abusers’ responsibility and the corporate cultures and institutional arrangements that facilitate abuse. The third key finding is that bureaucratic institutions that operate outside public scrutiny have dealt consistently with the sexual abuse by denying its reality, ignoring its existence, claiming that it is an anomaly and aberration, castigating accusers, and failing to hold perpetrators to account.

That the young were sexually abused was well known to nineteenth-century Americans. In New York City, between 1790 and 1876, between a third and a half of rape victims were under the age of 19; during the 1820s, the figure was 76 percent. The historian Lynn Sacco found more than 500 published newspaper reports of father-daughter incest between 1817 and 1899. An 1894 textbook, A System of Legal Medicine, reported that the “rape of children is the most frequent form of sexual crime.”

In his landmark study of female sexual behavior, published in 1953, Alfred Kinsey reported that fully a quarter of all girls under the age of 14 reported that they had experienced some form of sexual abuse, including exhibitionism, fondling, or incest (at rates roughly similar to those reported today). Yet when these findings were reported, they evoked virtually no public interest, although Kinsey’s statistics about pre-marital sexual activity and adultery provoked a huge public outcry.

Public attention to the sexual abuse of minors has waxed and waned repeatedly over time. Concern was greatest following the Civil War, during the Progressive era, during and immediately after World War II, and in our own time (see Elizabeth Pleck and Linda Gordon). Public concern does not appear to reflect increases in the incidence of abuse, but rather broader social anxieties, especially over the entry of women into the workforce, and the influence of groups willing to bring a pressing problem to public light. Following the Civil War, the rapid growth of cities, a massive influx of immigrants, and a sharp rise in the divorce rate provoked fears for the future of the family and alarm over the supposed impact of the breakdown of the family upon children. During the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, anxieties over mass immigration, divorce, child labor, and juvenile delinquency helped stimulate public concern over the abuse of children. During World War II, concerns about working mothers, latchkey children, and absent fathers sparked public anxiety. During the 1970s, a sharp increase in divorce, single parenthood, and working mothers contributed to a heightened sensitivity to childhood sexual abuse.

At first, public concern focused on the very young, those ten or younger. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, philanthropists and reformers brought attention to a somewhat older group of those aged eleven to seventeen. Reformers fought to raise the age of consent to sixteen and to enact laws to prevent those younger than sixteen from entering any place that sold intoxicants, pool halls, and dance halls. It comes as a surprise to contemporaries to discover that raising the age of consent required concerted political battles.

In courthouses, the treatment of sexual abuse was colored by a young person’s age, gender, and willingness to conform to cultural stereotypes. For a long time, jurors treated young girls very differently from boys and older girls. Sexual activity with young girls was clearly regarded as pathological by the late nineteenth century, but proving cases of abuse proved very difficult. Jurors expected a young girl to reveal her innocence by using vague, simple, euphemistic language, while expecting older girls to put up resistance or demonstrate immaturity and a lack of sexual understanding. Interestingly, men charged with sodomizing pubescent boys were convicted in the same proportions as those whose victims were young boys, but this was not the case with girls.

At first, the focus was on physical harm to the young person or the ruin to their reputation; nothing was said about the psychological scars caused by abuse until the 1930s. 30 percent of statutory rape cases from 1896 to 1926 sought to resolve the case by marriage or financial payment.

For much of the twentieth century, sexual abuse of children was treated as an anomaly and aberration perpetrated by moral monsters who were increasingly understood in psychological terms: as dirty old men, sexual fiends, perverts, predators, pedophiles, or sexual psychopaths. Evidence—such as venereal infections in children—indicating that sexual abuse of children was not confined to a small number of sex predators was dismissed and blamed on such non-sexual causes as unhygienic toilet seats.

The twentieth century witnessed a number of attempts to understand the sexual abuse of minors. The emergence of theories of young peoples’ psychosexual development and especially the embrace of the Freudian notion of the sexual child had ambiguous consequences for understanding of sexual abuse. Among some experts, there was a tendency to deny that sexual abuse had lasting consequences. But among others, there was a growing sense that abuse, even abuse short of genital penetration, caused long-term psychological damage. It is important to stress the contestation that surrounded the impact of abuse. Race and class colored expert opinion on the sexual abuse of minors. By mid-century, expert opinion tended to regard working-class, and especially black, children as more prematurely sexualized and more endowed with sexual instincts and desire than their middle-class white counterparts. Meanwhile, offenders were regarded mentally ill and treatable through psychotherapy. Their problem, purportedly, was that they lacked emotional and sexual maturity. Within the courts, there was a tendency to substitute prosecution of sexual molestation for prosecution for rape. On the one hand, this meant that adults could be prosecuted for crimes of touching. On the other hand, punishments tended to be less severe than the law suggested. During the 1990s, there was a backlash against the trend toward vigorous prosecution of sexual abuse cases. A panic over allegations of sexual abuse in day care centers, in which over a hundred day care workers were convicted of abuse only to have the prosecution claims overturned in virtually every instance, raised questions about repressed memories, the suggestibility of young witnesses, and issues of consent.

The problem with the “psychologizing” of the sexual abuse of minors was the failure to understand the cultures of sexual abuse—including the clerical culture of the Church—which allow abuse to take place. Sexual abuse flourishes in environments with unequal power relationships. Factors that allow sexual abuse to flourish include isolation and social disconnection, both of the abused and the abuser; emotionally needy and disempowered young people; a self-validating ideology that rationalizes abuse; institutional settings that shield individuals from public scrutiny; and institutions intent on protecting their reputation and safeguarding themselves from liability—and that do so in part by decentralizing decision-making about crucial issues.

Defenders of the church’s handling of the sexual abuse scandals often insist that the church’s problems were no greater than those found in other institutions; that only a tiny proportion of priests were ever accused of abuse; and that the church hierarchy dealt with abuse in line with the received wisdom of the time. These defenders also maintain that the abuse was a historical problem linked to a specific era, which has now past, and that the church was especially vulnerable because it maintained detailed records. There is some truth to each of these claims. Yet none of them in any way mitigate the abuse that took place. The church is held to a higher standard precisely because it has a moral obligation to meet the highest moral standards. Because the Catholic Church recognizes that all human beings are sinful, it should have recognized that even its clerics can sin and that only strict supervision and accountability can minimize it.

Physicians, psychologists, and criminal codes (e.g., Texas state law) largely agree on what constitutes the sexual abuse of children by an adult. It includes, but is not limited to, the sexual touching of any part of the body, clothed or unclothed; penetrative sex, including penetration of the mouth; encouraging a child to engage in sexual activity, including masturbation; intentionally engaging in sexual activity in front of a child; showing children pornography, or using children to create pornography; and encouraging a child to engage in prostitution.

What I want to tackle, immediately, is the fraught relationship between effect and affect in this subject for those of us who seek to interpret it. It is difficult to write or think about sex abuse without being affected by its circulating effects, without feeling that the very practices of academic analysis do something suffocating to its experience. To think about sex abuse in an academic context could suggest that we might wish to think away its awfulness; to write about sex abuse could suggest that we seek to argue away its visceral trauma.

Scholarly practice replies to such worry with bravado, assuming that our studied neutrality will offer fair view to every contributing party. Yet this is the very neutrality that so troubles subjects of our analysis, since it suggests that everyone deserves understanding, regardless of their actions. This is a perspective to which few victims of such violence can accede.

Even if we bracket the voice of such victims in our academic work, we cannot imagine that we have bracketed their call for judgment upon their perpetrators. To be sure, scholars sometimes imagine that a responsible account is an account that withholds judgment. “I just try to explain what happened,” one historian tells me. “I don’t judge what they did.” This is an evasion of responsibility; interpretation is judgment. We cannot imagine that our default to historicism will spare us our job as arbiters. We are always in the story, no matter our attempt to abstract ourselves from it through various modes of scientism, humanist and otherwise. “For even a world equation that contained everything, so that the observer of the system would also be included in the equations, would still assume the existence of a physicist who, as the calculator, would not be an object calculated,” Hans Georg Gadamer writes, concluding, “Each science, as a science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.” To know them is to govern them. This is the struggling work of all scholarship: to acknowledge that its very free enactment by a solo thinker is also a practice of governance with others. How do we do this? How do we do this especially in cases where our subjects have already been governed in abusive ways?

This is not a new challenge in the history of scholarship. Those researchers who spend their time in the archives of genocide, slavery, or war have often offered observations on the strange role they, as scholars, play in their hermeneutics of those events. The decision to pursue sex abuse as a subject for the study of religion is a decision to enter into this murky methodological terrain. To ask, again: How do we do our work?

As a general criminological problem, psychological trauma, and sociological data point, sex abuse has received significant treatment within the social sciences. Yet within the humanities its study has been comparatively anemic. Perhaps because criminal actions seem to emerge from a pathological inhumanity, the humanist is less quick to grapple with the murderer than the murdered. Or perhaps it is that in the realm of the humanities, categories like murderer and perpetrator do not survive our interpretive imperative to understand our subjects in their particularity, to discern the human within and beyond classification. To fail to do so is, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel suggested, “abstract thinking: to see nothing in a murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.” Humanists work against such abstract thinking, and thereby produce short bibliographies on criminal categories. But this cannot mean that humanists refuse to acknowledge criminality. Indeed, the vast literatures on the subaltern and the oppressed suggest that there is an implicit adjudication at work within the humanities that privileges certain parties through the attention of interpretation. That there is no significant humanistic analysis of sex abusers is its own form of passive chastisement.

Over the next several weeks, The Immanent Frame will post remarks from a conference held on the campus of Yale University, “Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion.” That event sought to connect leading scholars in the humanities with the emerging documentary record of the Catholic sex abuse crisis. Although other religious groups have struggled with patterned sexual abuse, and although headlines report abuse in any number of educational and recreational organizations, it is the Roman Catholic Church that has experienced the greatest public scrutiny for this crime. Government investigations and tort litigation have extracted hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from diocesan and religious order archives describing abuse and its covert management within the Church. This conference, and these posts, seek to begin an interpretation of sex abuse as a subject for students of religion.

In 2004, John Jay College released a study of priest molestation that was commissioned and funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to which all the U.S. bishops belong. According to the resulting report, 4,392 priests have been accused of molestation in the four decades covered by the study. In the last ten years (except 2003), annual USCCB updates through the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) have brought the U.S. bishops’ total number of priests to 6,115, or 5.6% of the priests who worked during that time between 1950 and 2011. The same studies have counted 16,324 victims and have acknowledged that actual priest and victim counts are higher. The final tally of victims can only ever be a guess, although activist groups point out that sexual abuse is rarely a singular crime; most abusers repeated their behavior with multiple victims, often in multiple parish locations. Sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley estimated in 1993 that the victim population might be “well in excess of 100,000.”

Our goal was to explore the specifically Catholic cultural, theological, moral, even ontological, contexts within which this abuse took place, and then to consider the questions and issues this raises more broadly for the study of religion. To do this, we turned to an online archive developed by BishopAccountability.org, an organization that seeks to gather and preserve the archives emerging as a result of the sex abuse revelations in the Roman Catholic Church. Those archives pertain to sexual abuse and to many other topics of interest, from episcopal relations with Vatican congregations, to the implementation of Vatican II reforms and work with ethnic minorities in urban dioceses. Founded by Terence McKiernan, BishopAccountability.org is a Massachusetts non-profit corporation with approximately 125,000 pages of material posted online (and an archive of over 500,000 pages of material in their hardcopy library). BishopAccountability.org aims to facilitate the accountability of the U.S. bishops for their role in the abuse crisis, as they kept accused priests in ministry, failed to report abuse allegations to the authorities, and transferred accused priests to new parishes. To that end, BishopAccountability.org collects every conceivable document pertaining to sexual abuse in the Catholic church, including diocesan, religious order, and investigative files, grand jury reports, survivors’ accounts, and a wide variety of ecclesiastical documents, reports on church settlements, and journalistic accounts of the crisis. (Those interested in a survey of the kinds of materials available will profit from this introduction to their archives.) As their web site explains: “We document the debates about root causes and remedies, because important information has surfaced during those debates. We take no position on the root causes, and we do not advocate particular remedies. If the facts are fully known, the causes and remedies will become clear.”

If BishopAccountability.org defers the question of root causes, we begin with such interest foremost in our minds. Why did sex abuse occur? How did it occur? Why was it managed as it was by ecclesiastical authorities? What sacramental thinking and theological rhetoric has circulated during its duration? For example, how did Catholic understandings of the child and of the priest, or the distinctive Catholic construction of human sexuality—in particular the requirement of celibacy for leadership and prohibition of masturbation—contribute to the perpetuation of abuse? What sort of sexual politics, gender norms, cultural logic, and social facts contributed to the unmitigated persistence and slow diagnosis of abuse? And how does the very way we interpret and define abuse relate to its experience and practice?

Focused on bringing bishops to account and survivors to justice, BishopAccountability.org supplies an archive in service to the democratic, judicial, and therapeutic imperatives of the modern West. But archives do not interpret themselves. And this archive documents the very challenges facing the fulfillment of its activist ambition; BishopAccountability.org articulates democratic possibility while also recording in its files the various strategies and symptoms of democratic perversion.

Approaching the situation for this story requires acknowledging that certain interpretive shibboleths will be more problematic than assistive in our attempt to read it. Rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as documents of the clash between tradition and modernity; rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as profiles in criminality; and rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as tragedies from which individuals need justice, healing, and redemption, we also ask how the sex abuse cases are also cases of religion.

While it seems reasonable to imagine the celebration of the Mass or the substance of seminary education as subjects of analysis for the academic study of religion, turning to sexual abuse is a more awkward maneuver to make. However, scholarship pursuing popular religious experience offers some vocabulary to begin such a venture. “The study of lived religion focuses most intensely on places where people are wounded or broken, amid disruptions in relationships, because it is in these broken places that religious media become most exigent,” Robert Orsi has written. “It is in such hot cultural moments—at the edges of life, in times of social upheaval, confusion, or transition, when old orders give way and what is ahead remains unclear—that we see what matters most in a religious world.” Orsi invites us to observe the simultaneity of religious life and religious studies, how the scholar’s role to interpret what matters becomes especially important precisely when it seems that the system collapses in its effort to maintain what matters.

These “hot cultural moments” are rarely the ones accompanied by photographers’ flashbulbs or press releases. After reviewing the documentary record, the story of Catholic sex abuse that emerges is one of stunning intensity and intimacy. This was a series of crimes committed in quiet auspices, in recreational and domestic spaces, in vestries, campgrounds, and children’s bedrooms. This was a series of relationships that were, simultaneously, abusive and interdependent, public and private, possessive and devotional. Sexual abuse between priest and parishioner is, therefore, a form of lived religion. This is not only because religious contexts offer hierarchical social situations conducive to abuse, but also because abuse is, in this documentary record, shown to be an articulation of Catholic ecclesiastical authority, Catholic theological investment, and Catholic sociological change.

The religious aspect of this Catholic crisis only amplifies the ritual ecology of sexual abuse as a generalizable configuration. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry offers this description of the web of emotions that occurs in sexually abusive relationships:

The child of five or older who knows and cares for the abuser becomes trapped between affection or loyalty for the person, and the sense that the sexual activities are terribly wrong. If the child tries to break away from the sexual relationship, the abuser may threaten the child with violence or loss of love. When sexual abuse occurs within the family, the child may fear the anger, jealousy or shame of other family members, or be afraid the family will break up if the secret is told.

Within the documentary materials available, this standardized profile of abuse is rendered relentlessly specific to Catholicism. Sexual abuse is a practice within an existent relational dynamic, one that simultaneously transforms and calcifies the hierarchies and codes that determined the original affiliation. The psychiatric vocabulary above cannot begin to access the social economy and moral stakes of abuse within communities determined by parishes and families determined in part by ecclesiastical law. “Religion” as a category has no meaning if it is merely saved to designate ideal practice; it is a term that summarizes failure and fulfillment of prescribed relations. The essays in this series begin to access these peculiar relational enclaves of religious ideation and transgressing ritual.

No one is an expert yet on these materials. The scholars who will contribute to this series offer a wide range of perspectives to begin the necessarily long analysis of this phenomenon. To talk about sex abuse requires possessing as much hermeneutic nuance as humanly possible, since there is no escape hatch from its traumas for its survivors and the accused; for the perpetrators and the witnesses; for the children and their parents, their church and their broader communities. This is slow work. None of it will translate easily to a CNN crawl or abbreviated op-ed. But the answers supplied possess no less urgency because they are the result of careful close reading or hesitant hypothesis. Indeed, as I hope you’ll find, perhaps they are even more urgent, because they are more bracingly true, including as they do the ambiguity, contradiction, and self-deception inevitable in human action, yet often absent from our sloganeering about justice and consumption of scandal. While our conclusions are preliminary, our clamor for more work in this vein is absolute. There will be no true healing, no true reconciliation, and no true justice, absent the practice of humane interpretation.

The expectation that Islamic studies scholars were prepared to “cover” the Islamic tradition and speak to its beliefs and practices on a normative, global basis was stressful for many of us. The idea that we could speak with authority about the practices of 1.4 billion people who speak dozens of languages and have inhabited the planet for the last 1400 years is absurd, of course. Like other academics, Islamic studies scholars are trained in certain fields of knowledge; in the best of programs, they are trained to be exceedingly careful about claiming too much. The pressures to become the academic voice of Islam both on campus and in the media frequently led scholars to abandon caution. We reached for our copies of the Encyclopedia of Islam and sent out queries, sometimes quite urgently, to the AAR Study of Islam listserv. “What does Islam say about x?” was the way questions were often framed. We were not allowed to answer, “It depends.” What was generally desired, it seems, was a fatwa, an authoritative ruling on what the Qur’an, the Sunna, and the ulama say about “x,” not a lecture on how the historical practices of real people refuse easy generalization.

The pressure to come up with one-liners and sound-bites was particularly acute when Islamic studies scholars were asked or permitted to participate in media outlets. Here the line between professor of Islamic studies and practitioner of Islam was often blurred, as Muslim professors offered answers that reflected, not only their considerable knowledge of the topic, but also their personal opinion or practice of Islam. Not all of them did so, of course, but autobiography was one strategy for dealing with questions about Islam’s position on x or y. At the least, these scholars could answer questions about what Islam says about love, war, life, and death by giving their own views as Muslims. It was as good as any other way of trying to answer impossible questions. But explaining one’s personal beliefs and practices was not a viable strategy for non-Muslims. In both cases, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars were forced to develop strategies, or simply to improvise, to deal with questions about veils, terrorism, churches in Saudi Arabia, Ibn Taymiyya, and a whole host of topics that were bubbling up, especially among anti-Muslim hate groups and in online forums.

My opportunity to participate in national debates over these questions came with the Ground Zero mosque controversy in the summer and fall of 2010. This controversy took the spotlight away from Islam abroad and shone it on Muslim Americans. Like many other Americans, I was angered by the intolerant tone of the debate.  I was especially maddened by the idea that building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero would be insensitive to the hallowed ground of the 9/11 attacks. I didn’t like the conflation of the 9/11 hijackers with the Muslims of lower Manhattan and one of their leaders, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who happened to be the single most prominent proponent of interfaith dialogue in New York City. I decided I had to do something.

So, I wrote an op-ed.

Rather than discuss issues of freedom of religion or the politics of contemporary Islamophobia, I wanted to stress the idea that Muslims have lived and worshiped in Lower Manhattan since the Dutch first arrived in the New World. I don’t know, in the end, if shedding light on Muslim contributions to the history of the United States helps to reduce contemporary prejudice against Muslim Americans or Muslims more generally; but if I am to participate in public scholarship, this is one area in which I can do so with intellectual integrity. Even if history is boring to a lot of folks—as some people have gingerly admitted in response to my speeches about Muslim-American history—I also know that this is a novel approach to Islam in America, and I still get a lot of “I didn’t know thats,” “wows,” and “goshes” when I outline the imprint of Muslims on the thirteen colonies and the United States in both public and academic forums.

The editorial that I penned included descriptions of the Muslim slaves who lived and worked either on or just blocks away from the Ground Zero site when New York was still New Amsterdam. It mentioned the escape of Muslim slave Mahommah Baquaqua from a Brazilian ship on Manhattan’s docks. It reminded New Yorkers of the Arab-American Muslims who lived in the very neighborhood where the twin towers were eventually built. I sent it to a few papers and heard back from The New York Daily News—to be sure, not The New York Times, but still, a New York daily with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. The editor didn’t think he could run it, but he did ask if I had references for all of my claims. Yes, I told him, I did, and I sent him a very long list of peer-reviewed references. The take-home line of the piece was, “It may be a strange, even perverse fact of history, but Islam in New York began on or near Ground Zero.”

The first draft that I sent to the Daily News was informational. It largely avoided direct criticism of the anti-Muslim activists who opposed the building of the community center. My goal was to make it impossible to talk about Muslims as new or foreign, thinking, perhaps, that if Americans thought of Muslims as part of their shared past, they would be less inclined to perceive them as threatening. But my editor encouraged me to take a stronger stand and to criticize the Islamophobia that animated much of the opposition to the community center.

Thus, my third draft used the word “troubling” to describe how politicians had exploited the pain of 9/11 victims to advance their own anti-Muslim agendas. I even used the word “lie” to label the argument that the community center would be a “9/11 victory mosque.” But this still was not enough for the editor, who added the following lines himself: “Comments by [Gubernatorial candidate Rick] Lazio and [Sarah] Palin are mere drops in an ocean of right-wing vitriol over this issue.” And: “Rhetoric that treats Muslim Americans like hostile foreigners fundamentally—and intentionally—skews the story of New York and its Muslim community.”

My reaction to these edits was, “Yes, exactly! But . . . I didn’t know that I was allowed to write that way.” My first draft, which attempted to relate the long history of Muslims in Manhattan as an antidote to Islamophobia, assumed that the reader would understand my larger purpose. I was writing history without explaining why I thought that history was so urgent to expose, and I had forgotten that I was writing for an editorial page. It was a form of self-censorship. In order to find a publisher, I had unconsciously written in the dispassionate tone of the so-called objective academic, trying to avoid the expression of my own feelings. I never expected that an editor for The New York Daily News would help me find my voice, but he did, and he made the op-ed better as a result.

But if working with the Daily News helped me to find my voice, my next experience with a major media outlet, The Washington Post, was a different story. In this case, I lost my voice, or at least a part of it. The Post contacted me to become a one-time contributor to a regular feature of the “Sunday Outlook” section called “Five Myths.” They wanted me to identify and then correct five myths about mosques in the United States. I pointed out that religious studies scholars use the word myth to mean more than misconception, but that was just the name of the feature, they said. I accepted their offer and submitted the five myths that I wanted to correct.

One was that “all Muslims pray in mosques.” I hoped to point out that Muslims also pray in private homes, Sufi lodges, Shi‘a imambargahs, Isma‘ili jamatkhanas, and Nation of Islam temples. There was too much focus on mosques, I thought, and not enough on other Muslim-American sacred spaces. But this suggestion was rejected on the grounds that it was “interesting, but maybe not worth devoting a full myth to.” In its place, a new myth was suggested by the editors: “Mosques seek to spread shari‘a law in the United States.” One editor wrote that “this one has been coming up so much in conversation . . . in particular, people have been raising the status of women under shari‘a law.” I went to work correcting the five myths—in 1200 words or less.

Following the scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl, I responded to the myth about shari‘a by writing that shari‘a is an ideal, that it is not codified, and that the human attempt to realize this ideal is called “fiqh,” or jurisprudence. I said that most contemporary mosques don’t actually teach the shari‘a because it is too dry, too pedantic, too arcane. I stressed that mosques devote their weekend classes instead to discussions of the Qur’an and the Sunna and how they apply to everyday life.

But my answer had sidestepped the question. In retrospect I realized that I was trying to respond to the negative feelings of Americans toward shari‘a by downplaying its importance in American mosques. I didn’t want to leave people with the idea that lots of Muslims were busy learning when and how to take the law into their own hands and apply hudud penalties, such as the stoning of adulterers. Working on a deadline and with space for two paragraphs or so, perhaps this was the best I could come up with. I was much more pleased with the other parts of the piece, but I had to move on.

In any case, it did not seem to hurt the piece’s reception. Whereas the Daily News op-ed about the history of Muslims in Manhattan received about 500 likes on Facebook and a few dozen comments, this piece received 4000 likes on Facebook and 523 comments. It was syndicated in papers around the world, and more people read this short piece than anything else I have ever written. It led to two subsequent interviews on NPR’s Weekend Edition and Tell Me More with Michel Martin; a harrowing call-in to a show on a Pittsburg Fox radio affiliate (during which my wife almost took the phone away from me to tell off some callers); several speaking engagements; some severe criticism by Stop Islamization of America leader and professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer; and some very angry emails. I got a lot of compliments, too. All of this attention and feedback made me nervous, excited, and scared.

I also received an email from a colleague who wanted to quibble about my claims regarding the teaching of shari‘a in American mosques. Yes, he said, I was technically right that the whole shari‘a is not taught in mosques. That would be impossible. But some of it is, he said. That’s how Muslims know when and how to pray, how to observe Muslim holidays, how much money to give to charity, etc.

He was right. My answer hadn’t exactly been wrong, but my response to the question was not sufficient. In addition, it did not respond explicitly to the public’s biggest fears, for instance, about the cutting off of hands and stoning. When a Middle East studies newsletter asked for permission to reprint the piece, I kept some of my original answer but added the following: “most mosques in the United States teach only those parts of the shari‘a having to do with religious rituals and obligations. They do not teach the part of the shari‘a having to do with criminal law.” And further: “Few Muslim Americans advocate a shari‘a-based theocracy. Instead, most Muslim Americans insist that democracy is the most Islamic system of governance in the world today.”

During the brief course of my five minutes of high-profile public scholarship I came to realize just how difficult such work is. Many of the topics on which I was queried and the ways that I could write about them were already determined in such a way that I felt like I was making an appearance in a largely pre-written script. Responding to the public’s misconceptions about Islam is part of what we do.  But if we cannot question the assumptions on which questions are posed, we cease to be critics. We must retain the ability to ask questions as well as to answer them. The problem with my Washington Post piece was that I did not explicitly name the prejudice that was animating the question about the shari‘a in the first place. As recent legislation passed in Oklahoma demonstrates, there is a special animus on the part of millions of Americans toward shari‘a, which is viewed, like Islam more generally, as particularly dangerous.

As I reflect on my moment of high-profile public scholarship, and on teaching religion more generally, I want to conclude with two further responses to the “myth” that “mosques seek to spread shari‘a law.” First, perhaps my response to the myth should have been: Yeah, but so what? Most American religious organizations seek to educate others about their ethics and rituals, and that is exactly what most of the shari‘a taught in American mosques is all about. Second, most Muslim Americans are not “spreading” shari‘a; they are trying to figure out how to apply it to their own lives.

The final point I should have made is that public discussions about shari‘a and other aspects of Islam are inevitably influenced by and reflect anxieties about the nation’s war-making in Muslim lands. A supermajority of the American public thinks that Islam is more violent than any other religion. As I wrote the original version of this piece, which I delivered as a talk at a recent meeting of the Midwest AAR, Congressman Peter King was holding hearings on what he calls the “radicalization” of the Muslim-American community, demonstrating that it is far easier to project blame onto either the Muslim foreigner abroad or the Muslim other in our midst than it is to acknowledge and reflect on American culpability for the deaths of thousands.

To be sure, foreign Muslims who resist U.S. dominance in their own countries utilize their religious traditions in so doing. But analyzing this religious violence in isolation from U.S. foreign policy, economic dominance, and military interventionism renders us mute as critics of our own societies and serves—however inadvertently—to normalize the secular nation-state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. There is a clash of interests between the U.S. and those whose lives it seeks to shape, often in its own image. But this story does not begin in Mecca; it begins in Washington. Middle Easterners, including Osama bin Laden, were not fantasizing when they saw the U.S. establish military bases in the Gulf region nor when it restored the Kuwaiti amirate to power in 1991, when it intervened on behalf of both the Iraqis and Iranians in the Iraq-Iran war, when it shelled Lebanon in the 1980s, and the list goes on. This is not primarily a story about religious fanaticism but a story about secular, imperial power.

It may be tempting for religious studies scholars to take advantage of this historical moment by deploying one-dimensional explanations of religion to justify our own usefulness to the academy and to the nation. But even if we have to admit our ignorance, or just say that it’s complicated, it is better to resist further propagating or reinforcing simplistic conceptions of Islam, or of religion in general. Instead, we should spend more time exposing the political contexts in which popular understandings of Islam and religion more broadly are generated, disseminated, and used. And if we must produce a sound-bite about Islam’s role in making violence for the media, then let it be this: “Islam is not the cause of violence, but it does offer one means of resistance to U.S. political, military, and economic domination in Muslim lands.”

Undoubtedly there is, as Bryan Turner suggested, a code that gives the idea of a “strong program” a positive normative charge. Let’s take pause to understand what this is about. What we call the “strong program” in the sociology of religion refers to a perspective that focuses on religion as an autonomous phenomenon that has causal impact, rather than something that is determined by non-religious factors. Apart from the clearly normative binary of strong/weak, what is the attraction of this image?

First, for people of faith, the autonomy of at least some religion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reality of the supernatural, and thus is a logical analytic goal. Indeed, as Asad and others have argued, the carving off of a domain of social reality as “religious,” autonomous, and separate from other, “secular” domains was precisely a mechanism by which the early modern Church was able to maintain a space for religious authority vis-à-vis encroaching secular authority. Likewise, Courtney Bender has recently argued that the residual categorization of religious experience as ineffable, pre-cultural, and inexplicable extends from attempts of early twentieth-century scholars to carve off a domain of human experience that would not be susceptible to scientific analysis. We should not be surprised that this is an enduring motivating interest in the scientific study of religion.

Second, at least since Kant, the idea that human beings give form to the world, rather than simply being determined by it, has been one enduring basis of the idea of human freedom. And for scholars who, regardless of whether they have faith, see the concept of human freedom as a cornerstone of human dignity and morality, the irreducibility of religion is an important image. Christian Smith’s work on “moral, believing animals,” for example, clearly works in this direction, as do Charles Taylor’s writings on the self and religion.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the idea of a phenomenon’s autonomous reality provides a time-honored foundation of legitimacy for a discipline’s professional activity. If there is a domain of knowledge dealing with X, it is most obviously in the interests of specialists in that domain to underline and drive home the reality and importance of X. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics has become the seminal text in linguistics precisely because it succeeds in portraying language as an irreducible formal system of signs beneath the messy details and disorder of actual speech. Emile Durkheim sought to create a foundation for sociology in turn-of-the-century France by arguing that society was a reality sui generis that needed a new discipline to study it. Talcott Parsons sought to do the same in the U.S. context through his thesis that scholars from different disciplines and countries had simultaneously and independently converged on the “voluntaristic theory of action,” in which values and norms were irreducible. And most recently, Jeff Alexander has largely succeeded (if we judge by the burgeoning numbers in the ASA Culture Section) in creating a foundation for cultural sociology by arguing that culture is an autonomous phenomenon that has causal power.

But I would like to suggest that the “strong program” is actually a weak model for where we should be going in the sociology of religion, for one negative and one positive reason. First, while a healthy sub-discipline probably does depend on studying a phenomenon that actually exists, the politics of representation also needs to be taken into account. In his description of the religious inclinations (or disinclinations) of various social classes and strata, Max Weber argued that there was an elective affinity between the position of intellectuals (such as priests, theologians, and scholars) and the rationalization of religion. Of course, in sedentary societies there will always be “religiously musical” individuals who become specialists in thinking through and logically organizing ideas regarding the supernatural. But they also thereby create a role for themselves as theological interpreters, and thus have a rational self-interest in emphasizing the importance of logically coherent religious thought. This rational self-interest becomes a political interest insofar as it simultaneously dis-empowers people who do not engage in rationalized religious practices. When having a “moral order” is considered a fundamental component of human nature, then those whose religious practices (or lack of them) appear eclectic and inconsistent become less-than-human “others.” When “true” religion is considered autonomous and disinterested, then people whose religion is oriented towards practical interests and engaged in everyday life are portrayed as insincere and vacillating, and their religious practice as inauthentic and unsustainable. We sociologists of religion need to soberly realize that our structural position is going to lead us time and again to emphasize the sui generis reality, coherence, and irreducibility of our subject matter; and need to have enough self-reflexivity to realize that this may unduly impact our analysis, and in ways that in turn may unduly impact people.

Second, arguments about the autonomy of religion should not dominate our research, even though they legitimately remain of interest for some, including those who feel their faith threatened by science, or for those interested in neo-Kantian arguments that underline humans’ freedom by pointing to their form-giving capacity. Beyond these topics, the “autonomy of religion” issue remains of limited interest in the larger debates of the discipline. Indeed, while the main point picked up in discussion of the working paper was the assertion of vitality in the sub-discipline, I think John Evans is right to suggest that the trend line depicting articles on religion in major journals should be read as flat. At a minimum, given the growing public interest in religion over the past two decades, I think we need to ask why this upward trend is not more impressive.

Instead of trying to continually prove that religion matters, we should take the “stronger” starting point that “of course religion matters,” and simply concentrate on what it is and how it is involved in contemporary social and political issues. Not “why does it still exist?” but “how does it exist?” “how does it relate to its ‘others’?” “how does it affects people’s lives?” and, of course, “who creates it?” “who has the control of its means of production?” “who has an interest in its moving in this direction or that?” In such an approach, religion can plausibly be either cause or effect (or non-causal), and either good or bad (or neutral). Such a robust engagement of the problems of modernity is what will make the sociology of religion a vital subfield and contribution to our social world.