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.

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.

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 rhetoric of the bishops’ statement is familiar to anyone who has followed conservative Christian activism around the cause of religious freedom in the United States over the last two decades or so, though the recourse of Catholic officials to such language is a relatively recent innovation. Meanwhile, their definition of “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” remains both opaque and expansive—again, in imitation of conservative Christian activism tout court. The bishops note the priority of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the priority of (“our first…liberty”) religious freedom among the freedoms guaranteed by that amendment. Acknowledging that Americans are not alone in their claims concerning freedom (“freedom is not only for Americans”), they nevertheless see the United States as exceptional in its relationship to it (“we think of it as something of our special inheritance”), seeing Americans as the particular guardians of freedom (“we are stewards of this gift, not only for ourselves but for all nations and peoples who yearn to be free”).

The bishops go on to enumerate specific examples of “religious liberty under attack.” By the logic of priority, the mandate issued earlier in the year by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring health insurance coverage for contraception (which the document calls “HHS mandate for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs”), part of the administration’s efforts to assure compliance with the ACA (aka health care reform), holds pride of place in the list of instances of religious freedom under siege. But the bishops cite a number of other domains of constraint: the refusal by state and local authorities to use the foster care or adoption placement services of Catholic Charities because of the organization’s unwillingness to place children with cohabiting or same-sex couples; the state of Alabama’s punitive anti-immigrant legislation; the denial of official recognition of a Christian student group at the University of California Hastings College of Law (because of the group’s requirement that its leaders be Christian and abstain from extra-marital sexual activity); New York City’s discontinuation of the practice of renting public school buildings in New York City to churches for weekend services. Religion (a category represented in the statement exclusively by Christian examples) is under siege, the argument runs, on the federal, state, and local levels, and on many different fronts.

But if the document seeks to catalog the wide range of threats to religious liberty, it is nevertheless primarily concerned with undergirding the bishops’ campaign against the inclusion of contraceptive coverage under the ACA. The document sets the terms of the debate agonistically and dramatically. Although the ACA (along with subsequent regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services in the spring of 2012 to assure compliance with the law) is nowhere named explicitly, it certainly resides behind the characterization of “an unjust law [that] cannot be obeyed,” a law that imposes the will of the state upon religious institutions and individuals. Arguing by analogy, the bishops juxtapose the need to disobey such an unjust law—a duty Catholics “must discharge…as a duty of citizenship and an obligation of faith”—to the religiously inflected arguments and actions of the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as their prooftext. Strikingly, the bishops also take care to distinguish between “conscientious objection” to a societal requirement (unspecified, but one might think of conscientious objection to military service) from the requirement to resist an unjust law. One can imagine that the bishops are seeking to sidestep the question of all of the other ways in which tax dollars, for example, are used to support militarism, capital punishment, or other forms of state-sponsored violence to which religious individuals or institutions might object. Opposition to these kinds of institutionalized forms of state violence does not apparently rise to the status of opposition to “unjust law,” which “cannot be obeyed.”

Framing their opposition to the health care mandate in terms of religious freedom, it needs to be emphasized, is a strategic move that narrows the terrain significantly: to oppose the bishops’ opposition to the health care mandate requires one to take a position against religious freedom. Well played, bishops.

The problem, of course, is that while the bishops speak of religious freedom and seek to portray a consensus that aligns themselves with evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Jews, they conveniently exclude from the conversation other co-religionists who do not share their ethical assessments of the particular issues under debate (e.g., access to medical services, reproductive freedom, etc.) nor their political agenda. (Consider, as just one example, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which includes the Episcopal Church, most of the mainline Protestant denominations, the Unitarian Universalist church, virtually all of the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jewish governing bodies, and numerous Christian and Jewish national organizations.) Moreover, while advocating for a public square in which religious arguments and actors move freely, the bishops disingenuously frame the issue as one that sets in opposition a “naked public square” (“stripped of religious arguments and religious believers”) against a “civil public square” (“where all citizens can make their contribution to the common good”), carefully disavowing any claim that they desire a “sacred public square” (“which gives special privileges and benefits to religious citizens”). “At our best,” they write, “we might call this an American public square.” Framed in this way, the very presence of religious arguments and believers is precisely what makes the public square “American.” Their absence is, on its face, un-American. And yet, if the public square is a space of deliberation and debate, a space where arguments are evaluated and contested, it seems as though “religion” itself remains somehow immune to contestation and critique—in the public square, but not of it.

One could engage in an extended exploration of the way in which the bishops’ framing of these issues, clearly beholden to nearly two decades of evangelical Protestant activism around religious freedom, depend upon a theoretical incoherency (whereby institutions protecting religious freedom must inevitably define and thereby delimit what counts as “religion”) and revisit debates over the uneasy truce between religion and politics, church and state, that has been forged by recourse to the Protestant secular. But what I prefer to do here is to engage in an imaginative exercise: What would it mean for the bishops to put their money where their mouths are and to defend religious freedom in their own polity—that is, within the Catholic church itself?

Because, on another Catholic horizon, the Vatican has decided that the exercise of what one might well call religious freedom on the part of American women religious—the exercise of conscience—is a problem requiring episcopal oversight. In other words, the sisters are in need of some church-sponsored discipline and a reining-in of their faithful enactment of their own conscience. This action has been undertaken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Congregatio pro doctrina fidei), the modern incarnation of the Inquisition, which has issued a “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,” the culmination of a process of critical investigation initiated by the Vatican beginning in early 2009, focused on the LCRW, an organization that represents 80% of Catholic nuns in the United States. Accused of “a rejection of faith [that] is also a serious source of scandal and … incompatible with religious life,” objectionable “policies of corporate dissent” (on issues of women’s ordination and homosexuality), and “radical feminist themes,” the LCRW has become the target of disciplinary action.

This is not the place to parse all of the details of the Doctrinal Assessment, which seeks “to implement a process of review and conformity to the teachings and discipline of the Church, the Holy See, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” But in the context of the US bishops’ expression of a deep commitment to the notion of religious freedom, it might be a worthwhile imaginative exercise to ponder the following question: What would a defense of religious freedom look like, if the LCWR were considered “religion” in this case and the Vatican were considered “the state”?

Of course, the authors of the Doctrinal Assessment—all American cardinals, I have been told—would reject the question as I have framed it since they insist that faithful religious life can only be lived in “allegiance of mind and heart to the Magisterium of the Bishops,” as they put it in the opening paragraph of the Assessment, where they quote from John Paul II’s 1996 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita consecrata. In doing so, however, they rather show their hand. Religious freedom emerges as nothing more than a mode of shoring up the authority of the Magisterium of the Bishops, not a set of values that shelters and protects the acts of conscience undertaken by Catholic women religious in the United States. Yet ironically, recourse to a robust notion of personal conscience is an unambiguously orthodox position in Catholic theology and a fully justifiable exercise of religious freedom on the part of the nuns.

The widespread outrage among Catholics in the U.S. in response to the Doctrinal Assessment’s attack on the LCWR—outrage that has produced numerous thoughtful essays about the profound value and integrity of the actual work of Catholic nuns, vigils of support in cities across the country, and even the satirical Twitter hashtag #radicalfeministthemes—has made it clear that the actions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not pass a simple smell test.

In their statement on religious liberty, the Conference of Bishops writes, “The Christian church does not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all citizens.” To which the supporters of the Catholic sisters in the US might simply respond, “The Catholic women religious and their allies in the church do not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all members of the church.”