TY - JOUR
T1 - Pursuing the Long Shadow over the “Domestic Church”
T2 - Toward a Global History of Abuse in Catholic Settings
AU - Faggioli, Massimo
AU - Harris, Alana
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Catholic University of America. All rights reserved.
PY - 2024/5/24
Y1 - 2024/5/24
N2 - This article makes the case for a new phase of research on the abuse crisis and calls for a collaborative endeavor aiming at an interdisciplinary, historically contextualized account of the global history of abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the Catholic Church. This requires a redefinition of the scope of enquiry from the national to the global, and a refocusing of the analytical optic beyond a perpetrator-focused, pathologizing approach to clergy sexual abuse to situate sexual and spiritual abuse in the Catholic Church in its wider enabling ecosystem. We propose a scaled and spatial approach, focused on delineating understandings of the “domestic church” in a given context. This broader focus on interactions between the “three-legged stool” of the family-parish-school, particularly as contextualized in their ecclesial and socio-economic dynamics, extends the analysis beyond media-framed narratives and judicial approaches and allows for comparability across national settings. The article sets out the urgent need for a multi-disciplinary, mixed-method, and coordinated approach, given the many facets of the crisis (legal, political, cultural, financial, psychological, but also theological and spiritual), and the transnational dimensions of this epidemic within (and beyond) the Church that are yet to be fully discerned and historicized.
AB - This article makes the case for a new phase of research on the abuse crisis and calls for a collaborative endeavor aiming at an interdisciplinary, historically contextualized account of the global history of abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the Catholic Church. This requires a redefinition of the scope of enquiry from the national to the global, and a refocusing of the analytical optic beyond a perpetrator-focused, pathologizing approach to clergy sexual abuse to situate sexual and spiritual abuse in the Catholic Church in its wider enabling ecosystem. We propose a scaled and spatial approach, focused on delineating understandings of the “domestic church” in a given context. This broader focus on interactions between the “three-legged stool” of the family-parish-school, particularly as contextualized in their ecclesial and socio-economic dynamics, extends the analysis beyond media-framed narratives and judicial approaches and allows for comparability across national settings. The article sets out the urgent need for a multi-disciplinary, mixed-method, and coordinated approach, given the many facets of the crisis (legal, political, cultural, financial, psychological, but also theological and spiritual), and the transnational dimensions of this epidemic within (and beyond) the Church that are yet to be fully discerned and historicized.
KW - child sexual abuse
KW - clerical abuse crisis
KW - global history
KW - religious childhoods
KW - victim-survivor sources
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85194417869&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/cat.2024.a927998
DO - 10.1353/cat.2024.a927998
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85194417869
SN - 0008-8080
VL - 110
SP - 339
EP - 368
JO - Catholic Historical Review
JF - Catholic Historical Review
IS - 2
ER -
