CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: GENDER, POWER, AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE By Marie Keenan
Published by Oxford University Press, $62.50
If we want to understand sexual violence, we have to get to know its
perpetrators and the worlds in which they were formed. In the particular
context in which Marie Keenan is interested -- clerical sexual abuse
and its cover-up in the U.S. and Ireland since the middle of the 20th
century -- such an adage goes from truism to nonstarter. Pressure not
to get to know clerical abusers and the institutional, educational and
social worlds of their formation comes from many angles of varying
validity.
A posture of attentiveness to abusers may strike some abuse victims
and their advocates as excusing the abuse and losing sight of the harm
it may have inflicted. For their part, media outlets have helped uncover
abuse, but they have also contributed to the vilification of clerical
offenders, fixating on the category of pedophilia (at the expense of
other abusive scenarios), and fomenting moral panic.
Church officials, on the other hand, want to isolate abusers and
officials complicit in cover-up. They would have us pay attention to
abusers only as aberrant pathological individuals. The theological or
institutional context for their production as clergy is more or less
off-limits.
Keenan, a researcher and lecturer in applied social science at
University College Dublin and a registered psychotherapist, plunges into
these taboo waters, taking her readers into the theological, moral and
institutional contexts for abuse and cover-up.
Working with the
ever-present caution that to “understand all is never to forgive it
all,” Keenan makes this journey in part through analysis of extensive
conversations with nine Catholic men -- all retired or laicized Irish
priests and brothers -- who admitted to having sexually abused minors in
the past.
The premise for such a move is simple: Vilification of abusers
prohibits thick understandings of their lives. Content to turn “them”
into monsters, we avoid their (and our) implication in wider contexts
that helped produce the abuse. Humanizing abusers offers significant new
angles on the problem. Listening to these men’s stories allows Keenan
to see that they “were not in themselves ‘bad’ men, rather, they were
trying to be ‘perfect’ priests.”
Description of what it meant to be
“perfect” -- to practice the priesthood in the officially celebrated
manner — goes a long way toward explaining how these men could
“rationalize” their behavior and the secrecy that surrounded it.
Keenan does not rush into a presentation of the perpetrators’
stories, as if they alone were enough. Instead, the first half of the
book includes a review of the existing literature on clerical sexual
abuse, the culture of seminaries, and psychologies of abusive behavior.
This first half of the book also includes an insightful reading of the
complexities of “power” as theorized by contemporary scholars of gender.
She interprets these sources clearly and cautiously. These chapters
alone make Keenan’s work immensely useful. But the book’s real
contribution comes from its exploration of the stories of nine abusive
clergymen in Ireland.
This latter section of the book develops several themes relevant to
the rise of abuse in Roman Catholic settings. Her focus is on seminary
culture and education (in the period before the 1990s) and the kind of
living it enabled and disabled. In these spaces priests learned to fear
sexuality, disavow their bodies and emotions, bury non-priestly
components of themselves, and adapt to emotionally isolated and lonely
lives.
Two additional themes enhance her critique of clerical formation. The
first is a paradox of clerical life, a condition she describes as
simultaneously powerful and powerless. Valorized as special beings with
unique ritual powers and heightened virtue, priests and brothers were
also demeaned and devalued by expectations of humility and deference to
their clerical superiors. Often unsupported and unsupervised and yet
conditioned toward obedience to those above, many clerics experienced
frustration in a church that demanded so much of them.
These conditions, along with sexual immaturity fostered by lifelong
silence surrounding sexuality, helped produce priests who had an
“emotional congruence” with children. Keenan sees perpetrators of abuse
tragically seeking to navigate their emotional tempests in the presence
and with the bodies of young people, whom abusers saw as equal, if
easily silenced, partners.
The other most compelling theme concerns moral education. The church,
Keenan argues, has offered poor tools for making judgments. Instead of
judging out of a context of relationships with particular others and
dynamic processes of introspection and empathy, seminarians were
instructed in the technical and intellectual application of fixed,
universal and external rules. Impersonal and abstract, this moral
theology enabled abusers to treat their behavior as a matter of sin
against God and purity and not as a matter of harm for others.
Moreover,
the confessional, with its seal of secrecy, further enabled the abuse
by providing a context for expiation of this sin. Regular confession
helped convince the priests that they were at least trying to meet God’s
standards. All of the nine priests confessed their abuse in confession
-- according to their reports, only once did a confessor alert the
abuser to the criminal nature of the offense. The system advanced a
purity ethic at the expense of a relational ethic.
If all or most priests and brothers were trained amid these
conditions until very recently, why did some abuse while others did not?
Keenan argues that abusers were more likely to be those inclined to be
rule followers rather than rule breakers. Many clergy had the ability or
cunning to know which rules they needed to bend or break in order to
make seminary and clerical life humane.
Others, those aspiring to the
most strict and idealized version of the priesthood (what Keenan calls
“Perfect Celibate Clerical Masculinity”) were essentially harmed by the
church in the process. Buying into the impossible standards of this
idealized clerical identity stifled opportunity for these men to openly
explore their humanity and sexuality, develop intimate and satisfying
adult relationships, account morally for their impact on others, and see
themselves outside their duties to powerful superiors.
The stunning conclusion of this work is that for those who embraced
the idealized model of perfect celibate clerical masculinity, seminary
and priestly life were in themselves abusive contexts. Overly credulous
or unsavvy, they accepted standards that led to “soul death.”
Eventually, children were the “sacrificial lambs” on the altar of this
image of clerical perfection. Until recently, victims’ silence allowed
Catholics to ignore their complicity in the institutional secrecy and
hypocrisy that helped these sacrifices continue.
For Keenan, it remains a question whether these voices speaking up
will result in real change. Vilification or dismissal of abusers won’t
contribute to the solution.
Apologies, shame and even strict “zero
tolerance” policies will not constitute the kind of structural reform
that will begin to solve the problem in the Roman Catholic church.
Only a
“new model of the church” will do. Keenan’s hard-nosed and
sophisticated book is a step in that direction.