How to teach a university course on the abuse crisis?

By Massimo Faggioli
a Croix International
January 14, 2019

https://bit.ly/2CmhZK5

The clergy sex abuse crisis is redefining the role and position of many people in the “locus” of the faith that is the Church — hierarchical leaders, clergy and laity, activists, journalists, the police, lawyers, judges and politicians.

Also included are theologians and all those who work on behalf of the Church as professional intellectuals, even those who are not technically on its payroll.

So, after the terrible summer of 2018 (from revelations in June about former cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the release in August of the Pennsylvania grand jury report) I decided to begin 2019 with a new theology course for university undergraduates titled, “History and ecclesiology of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.”

The easy part was putting together the reading list and course assignments. Thanks to the individual and collective efforts of scholars, a “canon” of texts is starting to emerge, such as one published in Daily Theology.

The more difficult task was to prepare for all the expected and unexpected questions that are likely to be raised by a course that deals with a developing and disturbing story — or stories — such as the abuse crisis in the Church.

I have come up with ten questions or issues that are characteristics of the present crisis. Surely there are more, but this is a start. I hope they help provide some perspective on what it means to do scholarship on this phenomenon.

The first question concerns methodology: what kind of sources are to be used in this course?