A Thomas Doyle Cyber-Anthology

By F. Ray Mouton
Ruth Krall
November 30, 2015

http://ruthkrall.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2015/11/A-Thomas-Doyle-Cyber-Anthology-%C2%A9Ruth-Krall-2015.pdf

The church cannot credibly exert moral authority in any area where the public perceives it is incapable of maintaining moral authority internally.

Introductory Comment

In late November, 2015, Roman Catholic theologian, William Lindsey s ugges ted on hi s N ov ember 24, 2015 bl og Bilgrimage [http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2015/11/father-tom-doyle-on-catholicbishops.html] that someone needed to collect Father Thomas Doyle’s published writings in one place. Dr. Lindsey suggested that Doyle needed his own webpage. Because many of Doyle’s books, book chapters, and professional periodical chapters are already in print, I personally doubt that this will happen in the near future. What needs to happen for their use in an academic market is for them to be collected into a series of anthologies.

Thus, this cyber-anthology came about. It is a very small contribution toward making Dr. Lindsey’s hopes for a comprehensive bibliography a reality.

Eventually, someone will need to create an anthology, or more likely a series of anthologies, of Father Doyle’s work in much the same manner that the executors of Father Thomas Merton’s literary estate have done with Merton’s journals. This work is needed so that the Catholic Church, as the people of God, will not need to reinvent the wheels represented by Thomas Doyle’s years of work in the twentieth-century and twenty-first-century. Instead, future scholars and activists will be able to build upon a significant body of intellectual and advocacy work in the field of clergy sexual abuse inside the Roman Catholic Church by an ordained priest who, as a whistleblower for more than thirty years, has straddled the border between insider and outsider.

Because the world-wide-web is such a transient place, I hope that this cyber-anthology will spur one of Father Doyle’s Roman Catholic academic colleagues to begin the negotiations with him to bring his work into an orderly printed academic format.

Personal Interest

Since my retirement I’ve been keeping a computerized, cumulative bibliography of all books and journal articles I read. Thus, pulling together this cyber-anthology was simply a matter of collecting this information and ordering it in some manner.

As I worked, I literally re-opened every file in order to ascertain that each URL address was functional.