IRELAND
National Catholic Reporter
by John C Seitz | Nov. 21, 2012
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.
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